A good non-technical introduction
357681
I thought this was a very well written and approachable introduction to using analytics to predict human behavior. It touches on some interesting areas such as ethics and covers a wide range of applications of predictive analytics, with lots of examples and case studies that illustrate how predictive analytics is impacting daily lives already, and some predictions :) for the future.
1946474
A well written introduction, if too short. There is very little detail here so the amount of technical material one needs to absorb is small. But, the book does an excellent job of creating a framework under which to hang further chemistry knowledge if the reader decides to learn more.
I understand little of chemistry, limited as I am to the mandatory high school chemistry course and one course in college, some 50 years ago, having learned chemistry mechanics without any chemistry concepts. The book gave me several ahah moments, and concepts. Enthalpy vs entropy vs energy. That if a chemical formula begins with H, it's an acid. An acid transfers protons. Where the terms oxidation and reduction come from. The framework of only four kinds of chemical reactions: acid-base, redox, radical reactions, and Lewis acids. When an electron cloud is pulled to another atom it may bring along the rest of its atom. The other framework is the few basic techniques that go on in the chemical laboratory.
The book is certainly worth more than the few dollars being asked for. The silliness of the first review can be safely ignored.
109743
I thought the book was structured in a way that was not too technical - a good introduction to the conditions and trials of the early church.
2859128
I liked this book a lot. It's non-technical, meant to help an average person gain understanding of what systems are and how they work. It's clear and well-written with a lot of real-world examples, ranging from simple examples like a bathtub to complex examples like countries' population policies.
The ideas in this book can help you look at problems in a different way, which can sometimes be really helpful in solving them.
2185908
It is a good book for beginners without electronic background.
4948782
If you are new to programming, this is good place to start.  Mr. Smiley has quite a knack of being able to explain complex concepts in a way that regular people can grasp.  Through the book, you get to "sit in" on a computer class and program a kiosk-style price display project ("The China Project").  While the class motif does have disadvantages (most notably extra text and a reduction in the book's value as a reference work), it does offer compelling advantages in a introductory level book:
1.  There is a plot to keep one interested as one goes through the book
2.  The class motif provides a unifying theme and style to the text as a whole.
3.  Most importantly, the classroom setting allows Smiley to bring up possible errors that one might make along the way (e.g., typos) in a very natural and friendly way.  The classroom setting also allows for Q&A (kind of like a FAQ for each topic).
The full title of this book is "Learn to Program Using VB.NET", with the "Learn to Program" portion of the title is in smaller print in the upper-right corner, while the VB.NET is in large print in the center.  This is rather unfortunate because it miscommunicates the purpose of the book.  The book is very much for beginners; it is not for those who want to learn the intricacies of the .NET framework.  It would have been much better if the "Learn to Program" were in larger print while the "VB.NET" wasn't quite so prominent.  That, it itself, may very well be the source of many misunderstandings regarding this book.
That, be as it may, the book's strengths, as I see them, are:
1.  It is one of the very few books that I have seen that keeps alive the original spirit of Visual Basic as a programming language for hobbyists (as opposed to the "VB is a powerful language that won't make C programmers bust out laughing at you" marketing that Microsoft uses for the new version).
2.  Smiley emphasizes important concepts that are not specific to a specific programming language.  These concepts include software lifecycle as well as how to think through how to construct algorithms (i.e., how to construct solutions for the task at hand).  Also, he explains how computer programs actually work.
3.  Smiley's approach to VB's debugging tools is rather novel.  Instead of being merely tools to find out what went wrong with your code, the debugging tools become a microscope to your code to help it become alive and understandable.
4.  An entire chapter is devoted to beginner's mistakes.
Beware, though, that if you are not at the beginner level, this book is not for you.  Some of the difficulties that an experienced programmer will encounter include:
1.  No mention is made of more advanced concepts, such as connecting to databases or object-based programming.  They are addressed in other books in the series.
2.  If you know basic programming concepts, you will find yourself wanting to get to the code.
3.  Smiley teaches/emphasizes classic VB-style syntax whenever possible.  While this is certainly valid, and a great way to teach the language to beginners (remember that Basic was a beginner's language while C was not), it is not so great if you want to get the most out of the new VB.
As I mentioned before, this book is a great place to start if you are new to programming.  But is hardly the place to finish.  Rather, use this book to get your feet wet, and then you can move on to other books to further explore all the possibilities of the VB.NET.
3009138
In an intermediate course, this book was assigned along with K & R. It certainly provides a very accessible and clear introduction to data structures. The chapters are well-organized, and do a very good job building up from simpler solutions to more sophisticated solutions. The authors also have what I regard as a healthy, critical attitude to abstraction: They recognize that abstraction and information hiding is valuable, but also only useful to a point. They also do a good job pointing the reader to possible optimizations. For example, they pointed out that quicksort can be sped up by doing an insertion sort once the arrays get smaller, which I don't believe is always pointed out in introductions to these topics.

(This is, incidentally, the way that glibc implements qsort. The glibc code includes the following funny comment about choosing 4 as the threshold at which you switch to insertion sort:  "This particular magic number was chosen to work best on a Sun 4/260." That's probably appropriate, since that comment is probably about as old as this book!)

The main problem with this book is the "C Programs" side. The C examples in this book are simply quite dated from the perspective of modern style and implementation. Global variables are shamelessly used in most examples. Functions with parameters are declared as fun(). Return types of main are not stated and returns are omitted, in favor of using calls to exit(). Lower-case function macros are used. For someone with background in C, this is not an issue. When used to accompany an introductory text, I think it can build bad habits and confuse the reader.

There are also a few oddities about the book. For example, the chapter on stacks and queues precedes the chapter on linked lists, so they give real examples of array stacks, but pseudocode examples of linked list stacks.

All in all, I definitely learned from this book, and it was worth 1 cent. But I probably wouldn't pay that much more for it.
713613
This is the first introductory book I'd read on literary or cultural theory, and at the time I had very little idea of what "theory" could mean, although I had a brief exposure to some cultural theory from anthropological readings. The great reviews of this work (and its availability at the library) made it my first choice.

Barry does a good job of concisely explaining the principles, key figures, and key concepts of some popular theoretical perspectives. He also does an excellent job of working examples of applying their insights to literature. Each chapter has a list of 'what  critics do,' a handy step-by-step that would doubtlessly be very useful for anyone needing to apply such theory to a reading with a less than stellar command.

The title, however, is misleading: in my opinion, there is very little about culture, directly, in this book. I would've liked at least some tie to culture, if only in terms of what particular theorists' work means for those concerned with culture, or the concept of culture in general. There was no solid discussion or example of theory in a cultural context.

The second beef I have with the book is its lack of depth in some important areas. First, the reader is left to imagine a purpose or historical context for any given theoretical perspctive. Although we're given a set of rules for application, and a quick introduction to precepts, Barry completely avoids the questions of 'What does this mean?,' whether politically, culturally, or simply in terms of practical use. I frequently found myself wondering why anyone bothered with some of these viewpoints at all. Perhaps, in retrospect, this is a symptom of such theorizing in general, rather than a problem with Barry's book, but I would have liked an introduction that tackled these issues.

Secondly, and I suppose necessarily in an introduction, I found many of the chapters lacking in detail. In the chapter on psychoanalytical criticism, for instance, Barry's discussion of Lacan and Lacanian criticism left me wondering why Lacan did and thought as he did: clearly he wasn't just a literary critic, and clearly he must have had some point and objective outside of simply allowing critics to adopt a particular perspective. There is no inkling of his motivations or historical situation, just a trite guide to applying a few handy precepts to your reading of literature. Obviously a full discussion or understanding of such issues would be a lifetime's work, but even in an introduction I felt more was required.

In summary: this feels like a completely practical (as in: get the paper written, now) guide to theory, which seems to me paradoxical. If you're looking for an introduction focusing on literary criticism, particularly on its step-by-step application to readings, this will prepare you quickly and accurately. If you're interested in anything more than a step-by-step distillation, or anything at all related to culture: so was I. My plan is to keep looking.
442507
Atkins has written an alternative approach to revealing quantum physics, using no math, pictorial representations, and concise explanations, while still containing the common equations and formulas (in easy referenced  boxed figures); he has offered a fresh text, in the style of a dictioanry,  which is a good reference for a student and a practical handbook for the  practitioner or teacher.  This is a good (and much needed) addition to the  pedagogy in the field.  But, it could have been even better if; it had more  material on Nuclear and Solid State physics, substituted the questions  (found after each definition) for examples and/or worked out problems, and  included a quick refernce by catagory.
809036
This book has a few key conceptual ideas that are succinct and well-agreed upon by the photography community.  They are expressed in a personal style, explained by the author with anecdotes and his personal history and evolution.  Ideas are well-illustrated with the author's photography.  The book is an easy read, not technical, and mostly conceptual in terms of what he is trying to say.  He presents his voice his way.  Neither revolutionary, nor controversial, Matiash's book will appeal to users who are trying to find the own visual style and voice, as he has done.
1692448
An easy to read introduction to security. Even if it is full of tables, it's not a reference book. It is a guide plenty of hands-on examples.
The first three parts of the book are Introduction, Standalone Systems, and  Network-Connected Systems. They focus on each Unix feature, explain it  within the Solaris frame of reference, highlight security implications, and  mention the resulting administrative tasks. If you lack a course in Unix  administration you'll appreciate that. The author also shows how to  integrate and update Solaris with Public Domain software that is usually  installed with Linux.
Part 4 is an over-simplified story about disaster  and recovery. Part 5, the appendices, is a bag of useful information,  pointers to interesting web sites, glossary and the like.
3148533
I took Ted Sider's class at NYU, for which we used this book as the text. It is really an excellent intro to logic -- accessible without scrimping on technical details. It is also very comprehensive for a single-volume logic intro, covering many of the varieties of logic that are found in contemporary analytic philosophy.

Some caveats: firstly, this book is indeed an "intro" to some less-than-standard logics, but it is not an "intro" generally, and it really falls more squarely in the category of "intermediate" difficulty (filling a rather gaping hole in the available literature, between bare introduction and technical jungle). Readers looking for a purely beginning introduction to formal logic should look elsewhere (there is an abundance of good material at that level). Secondly, the purpose of the book is quite clearly to provide the technical equipment required for a working knowledge of certain logic-heavy areas of philosophy, and this book is not aimed particularly toward, say, mathematicians. That said, as an overview aimed at providing a solid groundwork for understanding the many flavors of logic one encounters in philosophical writing, it is probably the best book you can get, in my humble opinion. A solid second-place goes to that two-volume series by LTF Gamut, which is also quite widely available, and shares many of the same merits as this.
2434126
This book is an excellent introduction, which is what it is meant to be. For the record, I have a degree in physics and have worked on a number of robotics projects, but my background in mechanical pursuits is pieced together from various places - so, I picked this up at the library because it looked interesting and I wanted to see what I had missed along the way.

The overview is good, and I feel like the book gives you just enough knowledge to start experimenting (which is where you will really learn, anyway). There are some good example projects to get your mental gears turning (sorry for the pun) and the various resources referenced are invaluable.

The one thing I would've liked to see: A chapter or book level summary that presents a snapshot of the information you're likely to reference. There are a couple of tables (the one comparing CAD packages, for instance) but I think the book could benefit from more - on the covers, or in an appendix for instance. I'm thinking specifically of a list (maybe comparison?) of all the numerous resources mentioned, or a collection of the basic equations that were used. What I'd really love is something that could be photocopied and put up in the workshop for quick reference.

That said, useful book, it does what it sets out to do and is aimed well at the target audience. Even if you've been in the biz for a while, there might be a couple of resources in there that you haven't used before, or maybe an idea that makes you think about something in a new way.
2184681
Stephen Hawking is hardly a man who needs an introduction. His reputation as a scientist specializing in physics, astronomy and mathematics speaks for itself. The Earth (five billion years old) and the universe (multiply by three) need not an introduction either.
In A Brief History of Time Hawking attempts to offer the reader a synopsis of the topics needed to help the novice understand the relationship between time, space, earth and the universe and to do so without the use of formulae - he cheats once. His attempt at simplicity does not necessarily ensure a simple read, however, and topics like The General Theory Of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Event Horizon, Black Holes and The String Theory come fast and furious at one like a super particle at CERN. The cover of the book gives Hawking's main trajectory away hastily, although it discusses them and everything in-between as succinctly as possible.

Ironically describing not only the 'history', but also the future the book reaches into science, fact and theorem to illustrate its knowledge, which is incidentally a good time to note the existence of a subsequent version featuring pictures and graphics to better illuminate its contents. Several pages are allotted to characters like Einstein, Newton and others as a means of introduction in addition to Hawking's discussion of god and theology and his refutation of common beliefs in this regard. Otherwise, having noted Hawking's not-so-subtle allusions to himself and his achievements one is reminded of the depth and vastness of the scientist's knowledge and the probable justification for the self-referencing.

A Brief History of Time is twenty years old at the time of this writing and several books by different authors have followed it. Such is the nature of technology today that mankind has since augmented its knowledge, although whether in the context of several billion years that is truly a concern is up to the reader's discretion. Not an easy read; not a simple matter, but a topic anyone with thirst for knowledge needs to delve deeper into. This book would be a good beginning.
2664585
If you know nothing about G&S before you purchase this book, this book is a good introduction. It will take you about 30 minutes to complete. The graphics and photos are well done. However, if you are a musician and want more than merely an introduction, this is not the book for you.
256516
This is an interesting introduction to various weeds and plants (not mushrooms) that you can forage for anywhere from common suburbia to the backcountry trails. I enjoyed it, and Wiltens' illustrations are clear black-and-white field sketches. The book has no photographs, but in plant identification, photographs only tell part of the story and don't let you highlight or emphasize a particular feature of a plant, like the "tiny hairs" that the observer must identify to know the difference between an edible tasty plant and hemlock. It's not comprehensive-- Wiltens even says as much in the introduction, insisting that readers should positively ID against three different field guides (though without recommending any reputable ones), and being a slim volume means it's good for carrying in a backpack, but can't provide all the details. I think a section on common preparations would have made the volume more concise, instead of breaking it down and repeating instructions for leaching for each plant needing it (for instance).
567156
Sorry for the double post here.  (I'll try to get this one removed.)
Still, I can say a bit more about this book.  This isn't a technical book, and I think it should be accessible to anyone interested in general philosophical issues.  It's not an easy read--it's subtle and Nagel is sometimes a bit obscure--but it's not forbiddingly difficult and it doesn't presume that the reader is as knowledgeable about contemporary philosopohy as its author is.  However, that's not to say that this is a book that fails to engage with the literature on these topics.  It's clear that Nagel is familiar with the relevant contemporary work on these topics, and the book is accessible enough that it might server as a high-level introdution to the more technical literature in these areas.  And it certainly provides you with a way to see the technical literature as concerned with fundamental human concerns.
Also, it's somewhat inspiring to see someone take on a grand project of this sort.  Philosophy is becoming an increasingly specialized discipline, and it's nice to see someone trying to fit a lot of what is going on into a general picture of the origins and nature of genuine philosophical problems.