Comprehensive but dry
341145
Cozzen has produced the comprehensive tome on the battle of Chattanooga. All the information you need to understand the flow of battle as well as the political intriguing that helped to shape the results is here. What is mostly lacking is a spark of life, or a sense of being there. With a few exceptions, Cozzen's battle descriptions have more of the feel of a wargame played out on a map than the chaotic, life and death struggle that it surely was. For those who have an interest in the battle, you should have this book, for reference, if for nothing else. Be aware that it is dry, and more of a book that you must work at to get to its virtues than a thrilling read. I would only recommend this book to those with a serious interest in the battle of Chattanooga, but for them, it is a must have.

Theo Logos
2543741
This book is very comprehensive and has many excellent photographs, but if you are looking for a book with several pages of information about each breed, then keep looking. Some of the breeds have more information about them than others; most have little more than a handful of lines about them. I am particularly disappointed with the fact that the book does not give much information about the unusual way in which the Saarloos Wolfdog was developed, as well as the fact that it does not include the Dingo (despite the fact that it includes the New Guinea Singing Dog; another kind of dog that cannot be kept as a pet).
Put short, this is a good book for those who are interested in the diversity of dogs, but it is not for professionals.
4439677
This book has so much great information but it is presented in such a way that it can be difficult to get into.  The chapters could be much more concise.  Also, as an art therapy student I would appreciate a picture or a graph or any kind of visual to go along with what I am reading...but there are none!  The author writes well but the overall read and content of the book is dry.
3845585
THIS BOOK SUCK ASS OR AM JUST AN MORON ... the examples are so dry it gives you some basic overview of each topic then an example but in real life application of what they teach i find my self searching other books for a more in  depth and example rich books.. the book is full of content and yet feels some times dry so its a mix bag... i could recommend it partially but i can guarantee that you will also need some other source of information with more examples
396218
A lot of information, but a slow, ponderous reading experience.
1915081
This book explain almost every single detail of J2EE, but it was written in a very dry manner. After read through chapteres on JSP and Servlet, I was dryed up and eventually switch to "Mastering EJB" written by Ed Roman.
2558710
The book itself is full of information, but it goes into so much detail that I found it a little dry.  That's just my personal opinion.  It read it but only because it was required text in one of my innovations class.  The subject matter is interesting, but it's not largely my cup of tea.  Still, there's a lot of good information in here.
4147602
To be honest, I like this book well enough but find it dry. It's hard to keep paying attention to it as I read.
2392102
First of all I would congratulate the author for writing a book on such a new subject.  When I read the TOC of the book I thought that it covered everything I need to know about HDInsight.

however when the book arrived and I started to read it, I found that the chapters are really skimpy. then just address the topic in a very shallow way.

while a nice book on a great subject, this book needs a lot of substance in its chapters so that it comprehensively addresses the topics.

More examples are needed and the language needs to be a little more formal.
3524047
Comprehensive. Oh my God, its comprehensive.  Dictionary portion is very helpful, but for those with less than scholarly interest it could be condensed about four-fold.
2525616
This is, to the best of my knowledge, still the most comprehensive textbook in speech technology, 12 years after its publication. So if you're a student of the field, you probably want it. That is not to say it is all that good. I find the writing dull and the notation messy. Also, it is impossible to find in hardback, and the paperback is of pretty low quality. It doesn't look like it will get an update, so I'm hoping a new standard textbook will come along.

For newcomers to the field I would recommend starting with Jurafsky & Martin's excellent "Speech and Language Processing" instead. That book covers NLP as well, so it is more superficial, but it does a much better job of explaining the basics. If you need more detail on speech technology than that provides you, then consider this one.

For details, you might also want to have a look at "The Springer Handbook of Speech Processing", preferably at a library. And Holmes and Holmes's "Speech Synthesis and Recognition" gives a very good non-technical account of the speech technology field.
1478780
This book is a little dry. It has a lot of information in it, but very few pictures, which is a bummer, as I am a visual learner. It is also semi-tedious to read through. I find myself having to re-read the same sentences a couple of times because my eyes have started to glaze over.
1800845
This is written as a series of essays collected together, which provides an interesting array of viewpoints, but not a comprehensive overview.  All of the essays are excellent, and if that's what you're looking for, then this is the right book.  I would have preferred this topic be treated by a single author who could cover it in a more comprehensive manner, each chapter building on what came before.  This felt a little disjointed.  It's a good resource, but it shouldn't be your only book on the subject.
3215170
As a longtime Minnesotan, there was much here that I did not know about our state's history, and especially the dominant pre-European presence of the Dakota. I'm giving the book 4 stars for content and thoroughness, but unfortunately I often found the reading to be dry and laborious.
4357913
The book definitely is EVERYTHING you need to know about Perl.  But that's as much of a weakness as it is a strength.  Don't get me wrong, I think being comprehensive is a good thing.  However, by being comprehensive, sometimes the "basics" get lost in the shuffle.
Also, I believe one of the authors must have a PHD in Linguistics.  They go into painstaking detail to compare the perl programming language to the english language, which takes away from learning the programming language (the intent of the book).  They also use very uncommon (large) words that aren't known to the majority of the target audience which also complicates learning.
Another criticism is they don't explore the windows piece of programming perl enough.  I believe windows probably has 90% of the desktop OS market share so I would think they should include a little more info for that segment of the population.
One last criticism is that they introduce topics without explaining them.  For instance, they use code for some "sample" programs and in that code is reserved words that haven't been explained yet which makes understanding the sample code very difficult.
I'm not saying it's a bad book, I'm just saying it has some areas it could definitely improve.
Have I found a better book?  Not yet, but I'm still looking.
845567
kind of dry and needs to include full programs instead of snippits at least in the beginning so as to not confuse the new readers.
2175346
This is no doubt a thorough account of the history of ecology, but in so being, it is confusing to read in several ways. I was looking for a book that covered the development of ideas in ecology, and how the field advanced to what it is today. It does cover these ideas, but they are difficult to extract from the text. Most of the text goes back and forth on this person or that person, this habitat or that, and does little to synthesize the progress of ecological concepts. Instead of following a general trend of progress in ecology, the author takes the reader through a maze with no clear direction. It is divided into different levels of ecology (e.g., populations, communities, ecosystems) but with transending themes (e.g., dynamics, theoretical, application) and habitat and taxonomy(terrestrial plant ecology, terrestrial animal ecology, limnology, oceanography) discussed separately. So much for general principles that pervade all taxonomic groups and habitats. It would have been much more clear if it followed one pattern (e.g., time periods, major ecologists, conception and development of major ideas) instead of jumping back and forth on different methods of tracking history. In the end I have read a lot of text with very little learned about the history of ecology. I still don't understand how different concepts developed through empirical and theoretical support and refinement, in many cases who originally conceived the concept, and what impact these concepts had on the field of ecology in retrospect. Nor is it clear which of the older literature is still worth reading because of its continued relevance. I must say though, that I enjoyed hearing about concepts being credited to a particular author even though they were addressed in earlier texts. But this gave me the feeling that little has progressed in ecology, and old ideas are just being rediscovered and credited to someone else.  The field of ecology still needs a clear, logically organized history of ideas, scientists, literature, and progress because this book will fall short in accessibility for most.