Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: Great place to start your Islamic History

If you ever wish to kick start your understanding of the vast corpus which is called Islamic history, this is the book to do it. Written by a preeminent scholar of Islamic studies this book is a gem. It's basic premise is to weed out the useless from useful texts; it informs you about the relevant texts for the fields within Islamic history which you will need to build up your results (for instance, this book tells you if you want to understand Muslims and Islam you need to study major Hadith books - and among them Bukhari should be the first place to start with). Such specific references alongwith publisher name and publishing year are really helpful. A scholar of the class of Bernard Lewis often cites this work as the first place to start with.I personally found the text very readable and not cumbersome at all, which is generally the case with reference books on historical studies.