worst than boring school text book
936846
This book is worst than school text book!!! Don't understand how others rated this book so highly.  It is full of principles and theories vs. practicle real life informations.  If you want to waste $$ or if your desire is to obtain dry, boring book to help you sleep, this is the one.
360492
I'm a student at Georgia Tech, and for some reason the professors there think that they know how to write textbooks.  I've seen a lot of bad textbooks, but this one takes the cake.  I can easily label this the worst textbook I've ever used.  The book is full of errors, and the homework problems are poorly designed as most of the times you have to consult third party sources to solve them (my entire class agrees).  Gary May, if you're reading this (and I hope you are), I want to thank you for writing the most disgusting textbook I've ever read.  You clearly know what you are talking about, but you clearly don't know how to talk about it or how to teach it.  I honestly don't understand how you expect students to learn from this garbage.  I understand most people looking to buy this don't have an option as it is class material, but if you do have any option in this purchase I highly recommend you look elsewhere.  I'd give this 0 stars if I could.
1153615
Required for class ... It's honestly just a dull book.
194179
in the begining this was an ok book. but then it just got really boring. i was forced to read this book in class and im telling u know everyone who read it comlained. please don't waste your mone on this book.
630579
This textbook takes about five sentences to say what can be said in one.
The pages are overwhelmed with text and flow far too slowly to learn anything in an efficient manner.
All in all I would never buy this book unless forced to.
3364731
.
I was looking forward to an Arts and Crafts treat but, alas, received a thoroughly boring textbook full of questionable design theories and rules that are largely the author's pontifications. I have a university degree in art and am no stranger to professors, textbooks, theories, and rules. A really good professor needs no text.  Thank God I didn't have Varnum as a professor!
Understand that Varnum wrote this text in 1916 and Hansen merely wrote the short preface to its reprint in 1995. This is an Industrial Arts Design textbook and not an art book, per se.
From start to finish this book is loaded with theoretical design minutia, formulae, and "rules," many of which have little obvious relevance to aesthetics. The text even includes test questions.
Aesthetics involves feelings and emotions, not cook-book formulae and rules. I am convinced that this book is the result of Varnum's inner need to organize the subject matter in his own mind rather than to impart knowledge and a "feel" for design to the reader or student.  As such, it is both tedious reading and boring.  I would rather suffer through another graduate statistics text than wade through Varnum's self-proclaimed rules, many of which are just Varnum's personal opinions and make no sense to me.
I give it a generous two stars because of the small pictures of furniture and fittings of the period scattered throughout the text. Save your money and buy one of the many good books on Stickley, Morris, Mackintosh, or the wonderful eras of Arts and Crafts, Craftsman, or Mission.
Al Thompson, Brady, Texas
2526604
This is such a horrible book. I have to take a business ethics class this semester to graduate and the class is ok but the textbook is worse than the biology book I had to read my first year. The author way over uses words and thinks putting in one's people can't even pronounce makes the book sound smart or something. It's boring, horribly outdated, and you don't really learn a whole lot from it. I feel bad for anyone who's required to read this like I have to. The way its written is appalling as well. One of the worst reads ever!
2176516
This text is excruciatingly boring - it's too wordy and on the whole, simply a weak product.  Not a teaching tool by any measure.  The homework is VERY POORLY tied back to the text. The text itself is dry, with zero visual aids (no real bolding or section headers).  Case examples are too short to really prove a point, which is a shame considering the value of case analysis in a subject such as auditing.  An online "help site" is available for students...just as bad as the text...the powerpoint slides are AWFUL, it makes me wonder who edited this author's material.  I am almost led to believe that this author is trying to keep the competition out of the auditing industry by boring potentially fresh blood from entering the marketplace.  Hopefully some other auditor/CPA out there has written a book that actually has some value.....IF YOU HAVE A CHOICE, SAVE YOUR MONEY AND DO NOT - REPEAT - DO NOT!! - BUY THIS BOOK.  I hope I can save at least one person some money out there.
2335960
The goal of any good textbook, for the purposes of the layman who is unfamiliar in the field, should be to present the ideas in a clear and fluid manner, without becoming too wordy or cryptic.
This book does anything but that.

The book is incredibly dense, arcane, and unnecessarily verbose. Trying to read and understand the material is like trying to dissect a frozen, rotting carcass of a bull with a butter knife: it is arduous, squalid, and of course, without utility. It simply never gives. There were times that I would labor through a confusing paragraph, barely managing to get through without getting lost in the words, and by the time I was done, I would step back and feel completely clueless as to what I had just read. Then, after scanning the rest of the chapter and discovering that the torture went on for another 50 pages, I wanted to die. And it wasn't long--maybe about an hour and 3 pages later--that I realized I was, indeed, dying.

I love psychology, and I find neurophysiology fascinating, but I hate this textbook. Since I had to rely on it for my test, this textbook is the sole reason I suffered this semester. Having never taken a psychology course that wasn't satisfying, I was surprised that this could ever happen to me. But it did. And it sucked. It sucked like hell.

Call this review extreme, but I haven't talked to another student in my class that *doesn't* agree with me in this opinion, at least to some degree.

Tell your professors to never make their students read this book. And if your professor insists, drop the course as soon as possible, and make it out alive while you can.

I'm not even kidding.
3572284
I wish "zero stars" was an option.  This is the most horribly written text book I have ever read....and I've read a ton during undergrad, law school, MBA program, and now in a Master's program for counseling.  It's repetitive, poorly organized, unclear, and unnecessarily elaborative in areas that I didn't even know could be elaborated upon.  Excessively belaboring.  I will learn more by googling the topics to be covered in this class than I will from this book.
200938
Reviews for this book were good so I thought it would make an interesting read. Although I am already 22, I thought that maybe there would be some great lessons I could gain from this book.

Boy was I wrong.

Reasons not to buy this book:

1) Boring Boring Boring. This book is incredibly dry, I found myself skimming through most of it.

2) General knowledge. This book contains A LOT of very general knowledge, I can honestly say I gained nothing from reading this book.

3) Self-promotion. 75% of this book is of the author self-promoting herself and the "interesting" challenges she puts on her students in her class at Stanford.

I knew all of this stuff upon graduation at high school. I think this book aims to inspire kids who do nothing with their lives, the ones who failed their classes in high school. If you graduated high school with a C+ or better average, skip this book. If you graduated with an A average, ask the author to compensate you for the time you wasted reading this book.

I want my 2 hours back, I could have read something useful.

If you want inspiration, read Richard Branson's 'Losing My Virginity'. I just read it and it was amazing and very interesting.
4253492
This is probalby one of the worst text book I have ever read. The concepts are extremely difficult to follow most of time there are no consistancy between the concept introduced in the chapter and the the problems presented to you. As one of my friend said: it won't make any difference if they just give us a book full with problems and not teaching us hard to do it. THAT is how bad this book is. Or another suggestion will be buy the book and MAKE SURE you buy the solution manual. Don't worry about reading the book since it won't help you at all, just do the problems with the solution manual and you'll be fine for the semester. At the end of the semester if you are rich enough....bring the book and burn it during one of your camping trip. In case anybody is thinking that I probably failed the class so i hate this book so much, Im actually getting an A and I never read a single page out of this book....again what a useless book.
128361
Seriously. This is such a terribly boring text.... But there is nothing exciting about law citation.

Pick a new career path if you're looking for excitement.  Paralegals are the grunts and get no glory. This book is proof.
2536359
I used to believe in customer reviews.  But after reading the reviews of this book.... This is one of the worst books on C in print and THE worst  text book I have ever come across.  It was selected by the curriculum  committee for use in our school's C programming classes.  Student  complaints have been universal - the book is poorly organized, the examples  confusing, and the use of Backus-Naur Form (originally developed in the  60's!) is worse than confusing.  To cite just a few examples of the  problems with this book: in Chapter 1, Paragraph 1.1, the book refers to  "Commonly available operations systems include MS-DOS and UNIX."  There is no mention of Windows in the entire book.  Now, I hate Microsoft  as much as the next guy, but to ignore Windows in a programming book  copyright 1998?
Another complaint about the book is its heavy use of  advanced mathematics in the examples.  Not everyone has completed calculus  before starting to learn programming.  Example: in discussing recursion, a  table shows "Number of function calls required to recursively compute  fibonacci(n)".  In the chapter on arrays and pointers, it develops the  example "Finding a root by bisection".  It is difficult to follow  the example if you have no idea of what the example is supposed to be  doing.  Which leads to the next complaint, which may or may not be  justified, depending on your reasons for choosing the  book.  It never  addresses the topic of program design: HOW you determine what steps to  perform.  It simply discusses "this is what the if (or switch, or  while, or whatever) statement is and what it does.
Even the writing style  has drawn complaints.  The authors are exceeding proud of their California  vocabularies.  From Chapter 2, Syntax Rules: "To the compiler, program  text is implicitly a single stream of characters, but to the human reader,  it is a two-dimensional tableau." a.k.a. the compiler ignores white  space.
For my fall classes, I have already replaced this text with  Problem Solving & Program Design in C by Hanly and Koffman.  It is  light years beyond A Book on C in both organization and content.  It covers  not only HOW to use a statement, but WHEN to use it.  There are other good  C books, especially those by Kernigan and Ritchie (the famous K & R you  see so often).
I hope this helps my "human readers" in making a  choice.
3675692
I'm forced to use this book for my CPT 242 Database class, and I'm tired of hearing my teacher disagree with the author on how certain things should be handled. But that is her issue, not mine.
The book a poor job at helping the reader truly understand what is going on. We are five chapters in, and I constantly keep flipping back through, trying to gain a bit more clarity, but nothing is well defined or described. The definitions for terms are brief and do not help grasp what the keywords mean. The text itself is very dry and bland, making it very tedious to get through.
This textbook, combined with a teacher who is coasting on by with tenure, makes for a very frustrating learning experience (though I don't believe a motivated teacher could make this book any easier to swallow.)
4936368
Honestly it's the worst book I've ever read. It sooo hard to follow, so boring, and does not look like its meant to teach someone. Very poorly written and very difficult to comprehend, very few examples and not enough to be able to do the exercise questions. On top of that, no solutions so you don't know the answers. Not recommended for a CS student. I've found much much better books that explains concepts better than this crap.
1666346
As a math tutor, I didn't think I could find a geometry textbook I disliked more than "Discovering Geometry" by Michael Serra.  Then I encountered this book.  (Specifically, I have seen the Michigan version, but in my experience, the state-by-state variation among different versions of the same textbook is relatively minimal.)

Geometry by Larson, Boswell, et al is disorganized and dizzying.  In short, it is simply horrendous. It is so replete with dazzling colors and uninformative pictures that I can hardly find the theorems. (It's like a "Where's Waldo?" of theorems and postulates.) By contrast, the Jurgensen book may look dry, but the authors conservatively reserve color to bring your attention to the most important information, such as theorems you should memorize. Larson, et al could really learn something from the more "boring" geometry books of years past.

Just do a chapter-by-chapter comparison with the Jurgensen book, and you'll realize how much material is omitted from this book that used to be taught in geometry classes 20 years ago. This book is poorly organized and doesn't even teach basic constructions. Also, the index, glossary, and other reference materials at the back of the book are not very well formatted. Anyone comparing this book with an older geometry book from 15 or 20 years ago will understand why many veteran math teachers bemoan such watered-down textbooks and why so many college freshmen have to take remedial high school mathematics to learn topics they should have covered before entering college.

Furthermore, it weighs a ton! I chalk that up to the number of useless photographs and graphics in it.  (I find the quality of a textbook is inversely proportional to the number of fancy pictures in it.)  The Jurgensen book packs far more information in it at a fraction of the weight or volume. The book is a prime example of a textbook with a lot of filler and very little meat.  In short, I would never recommend this book to a student.