Good text book, even better reference guide
929445
While, living in China, I often find myself annoyed by the inescapable dichotomy of China/foreign countries which this title promotes, but oh well. This book really is a gem. The first part tells you everything a beginner needs to know about the language, including pinyin, phonetics (that includes all possible syllables), tones (that includes all the "tone sandhi" rules), and parts of speech  and sentence elements (along with their names in Chinese and common examples), word order, and rules for writing.

The second, and longest, part, is a collection of fairly authentic, every-day, situational dialogues, accompanied by sentence pattern references and examples: most sentence patterns in the dialogue are highlighted, used in 4 other example sentences, and linked to a more comprehensive index in the back of the book. There is also a list of 25-50 new words either featured in the dialogue or essential to that chapter's topic, and written exercises. The written exercises, usually involving rewriting the sentence with a particular sentence pattern or filling in blanks, are nothing too engaging, yet they certainly constitute good practice for reading and writing the words from the chapter, and answers are included at the very end.

Finally, the third part of the book consists of the grammar index I mentioned, with clear, helpful explanations in both Chinese and English, and a few short stories and riddles for further practice.

I am not a total beginner at Chinese. I've been focussing on oral language in an immersive setting so I've gotten to a decent conversational level, but there are plenty of gaps in my knowledge. This book is extremely useful for filling those gaps. I think for any high-beginning/low intermediate learner this book is great, although I wonder if perhaps the density of new words and grammatical patterns isn't too high for a total beginner. For someone at a slightly higher intermediate level, the book might be too easy, but it also might be a good review. After all, it's good to read at a slightly lower level than your own, and I think there will be some words that are unknown to someone with an elementary level of reading proficiency. All in all, though, while it's a pretty good text book, it's even more valuable as a reference, and the sentence patterns especially are something I'm sure I'll find myself going back to even after another year or two of studying Chinese.
2521012
This is a good reference textbook to have for elecs, comms, even comps. We used this book for two analog design courses in 2nd and 3rd year. It's very detailed and thorough and has lots of practice problems.

There are two problems, however.

1) The T-Model for the BJT can make things more confusing than they need to be. You can simply re-draw the T-Model to make it resemble the Pi-Model. In this case, the only difference between T and Pi is that the direction of Vpi is now reversed, and rPi is replaced with re (re=rpi/(beta+1)). And, of course, you swap the emitter and base. Then you can go about analyzing the amplifier the same exact way you would analyze a Pi-Model. You only need to use T for common-base, anyway. If you had a common-emitter with feedback resistance, just use the Pi-Model and treat Vpi as a voltage divider in terms of Vin (don't forget the emitter-to-base reflection, or vice versa!)

2) The included Spice software did not install on my Win7 64-bit machine. It's useless.

This book is not meant to teach you device physics; there's a whole course for that. But I think that it could help you become a good analog designer if you supplement it with good notes. These two courses have been the most fulfilling couple of courses I've taken during the first 3 years of the degree. You will work your butt off, but you will learn a LOT! In any case, good luck.
1214711
I am not an authority on Eastern Europe; I read this book as a (very successful) undergraduate in social sciences.  I enjoyed the thorough, methodically-organized text.  Crampton divides the text into time periods or event trends, and examines each country's experience in detail.  The organization is this text's strongest point.  Its other great asset is the degree of detail.  It combines a historian's "big-picture" view of trends with a nearly journalistic (I hope the word doesn't offend!) chronology of political events at crucial moments.  This pair of perspectives, together with the fact that headings make it easy to identify sections for quick reference, made this a really good book for me.
Now the downside:  all of this detail makes the book terribly long.  The prose, particularly in early sections, is unnecessarily verbose and not particularly well-constructed.  I am quite comfortable reading academic texts; this one could be better. Teachers using this text should include some sort of geography primer; I think that even if Americans were geographically compotent, we would need help with some of these references to non-political regional names.  I do not consider this a weakness, however, and generally endorse this text; my course used several of these chronologies, and this was easily the best.  If your students will read 500+ pages of rather obscure text, Crampton will serve you very well.
3866085
This text is a good reference for a broad range of topics in the analysis of multivariate time series. It covers not only proven mainstream methods (VARMA, cointegration, PCA) but also delves into some cutting-edge techniques such as those used in volatility modelling. The coverage across topics it not uniform, and the author freely admits the depth of coverage has been influenced by his own preferences and understanding of the various topics. Therefore it should come as no surprise that the text is heavily focused on VARMA modelling.

The order by which topics are presented is reasonable. I like that the author starts right off with the more general vector/matrix approach and does not waste time introducing the "special case" posed by univariate time series, since this book is going to be very difficult for a student who has not already been exposed to the univariate case. Indeed, a level of familiarity with advanced mathematical topics (such as infinite-order matrix polynomials) is presumed. I also liked that proofs occur mostly at the end of chapters, and that the author maintains a web page with a listing of errata.

While this is an excellent reference for a variety of techniques, like many of these kinds of books, it does not offer much on the subject of model selection -- that is, the process of choosing between competing techniques, nor much advice on how to determine whether a particular technique might be appropriate or inappropriate in a given setting.

Some reviewers have complained about being turned off by the heavy use of mathematical notation, some of which may seem foreign to some readers. However, I think this is unavoidable when covering advanced topics such as these. To his credit, the author mostly uses a consistent set of notation throughout the book, and is mostly willing to dispense with mathematical purity whenever it would hinder readability. For example, I was thankful that he uses the same symbol for a random variable and its realization, as using separate symbols would have been unnecessarily complicated in this setting.
4343107
I like this book! I am keeping this as a reference.
715617
This is a really good text book.  Much better than the previous version as it gives a clearer explaination of topics discussed.
561217
Nice reference book with plenty of information in it
926150
This is one of those books that you keep withing arm's length and to which you frequently refer when designing software.  It is not a tutorial book for learning JavaScript simply because it has too much detail.  That detail is the reason this is such a useful reference book -- it contains loads of detailed information on every topics, including implementation issues, behavioral nuances, better ways to use features, alternatives, etc.  After over 40 years of active professional software development and multi-year fluency in at least eight languages, I've found a reference book like this for each language.  It looks like this will be my "go to" reference for JavaScript.

One review complained that there was not coverage of DOM, but there are three chapters (122 pages) dedicated to DOM.  Another complained about no inclusion of object-oriented programming in JavaScript, but there is a 44-page chapter solely on Object-Oriented Programming, plus additional o-o material scattered throughout the book.  There was a complaint about the incompleteness of the index.  Admittedly, I don't yet have months of referencing material in this book, but I have yet to find a topic that wasn't well-covered in its index.

I highly recommend Kevin Stokes' November 3, 2012 five-star review -- "Coming from a real language? This book is your best bet.".
2485343
This book was recommended to me by my college chemistry professor, and I am very glad I got my own copy. It's a real delight, and how often can you say that about a textbook?

I had a chemistry major, and a math minor, but I often found it hard to connect the more abstract treatments, proofs, and derivations to their applications in chemistry. This book is the link between the two fields that I needed. It's also a great reference for those functions and concepts I use just often enough to remember they exist, but not so often that I recall the details.

Highly recommended!
4414568
I came across this text looking for ways to do steganography in text, instead of the more traditional images or sound. Not only this text covers them all, but it's also quite clear for the relatively newbies like me. A very enjoyable read.

Please note that there are many things hopelessly out of date (such as a good part of chapter 10, devoted to anonymous remailers, many of which disappeared a long time ago -- But if you keep reading past the historic part, the same chapter reaches anonymizing proxies and more current stuff)... I don't know if it's a "for the laughs" action from the author or just very out-of-date parts, but as far as I remember all of the screenshots in the book sport a *Windows 3.x* style! They date at least from the first edition of the book.
3014523
I'm glad I bought this book and I will continue to refer to it.  The remit of the Dummies series is to provide a guide to its subject matter without any great fuss.  The text focuses on practical techniques without unnecessary diversion into the detail of molecular biology or computer science.  In this respect it would have been a difficult book to author, readers having come from one discipline or the other.  I agree with previous reviewers that this is well worth reading before doing a bioinformatics course or degree.  Bioinformatics is a new field, and this book has delivered a useful introduction to it without recourse to expensive textbooks full of unreadable filler.
1623480
Happy to have this text, It is one of three and I like all of them and find them useful as I learn the method. One always need more than one reference book to obtain the best information.
3500206
This book was a requirement for one of my college classes. Usually I don't care much for my textbooks, but I thoroughly enjoyed this one. The book gave very helpful tips on writing techniques and how to communicate effectively. There was a lot what I thought was no-brainer material, but then again, what I feel was old info could be new to others. I ended up keeping this book for reference instead of selling it back at the end of the semester. Great reference material in this textbook!
107911
This is a good text book.  I am in a college course.
1809392
I had a previous edition of this book, maybe twenty years old, and decided that, because slang evolves rapidly, my reference books should evolve, if not rapidly, at least not slowly. Sometimes when I buy a new edition of a reference work, I'm disappointed because I sense, in looking through the book, that the update isn't very substantial. That's not true with this book. It contains many, many new slang words, with lucid explanations of their origins and areas of usage.

I also enjoy the two appendixes, A containing about six single-spaced pages of words for "drunk" or "intoxicated," and B being a guide to text messaging abbreviations. A very worthwhile book, one I'm glad I updated.
1539369
This is an AWESOME book as a reference for basic electronics. I'm just getting started with reading through it, but paging through it a while shows me that it has tremendous learning potential. For the $20 or so you pay for this book, it simply cannot be beat as a reference--and even as some what of a text book.

It really is a "must-have" for anyone serious about learning more about electronics.
2375417
Our humanities course "made" us purchase this book.
While on the pricey side in my opinion, this is a really good book to have for reference when writing any English paper whether it is for your humanities class or for an engineering report.
The most useful part of the book was the section on how to do citations. It offers extensive examples and different scenarios on how to cite anything from magazines, books, scholarly journals, to websites.
I'm sure you can find all this information online somewhere, but to have it all in such a compact, neat book is really good for when you don't want to do a search engine search and get hundreds of different answers.
This definitely beats those dictionary like English grammar books.