Extension Books

Most of us make lousy patients. I'm told that physicians are the worst. We think the worst. We miss what we can't do. We take it out on everyone around us. In short, we need to lighten up.

Maeve Binchy and Wendy Shaw ended up having hip replacement surgery around the same time, and compared notes. They realized the patients needed something to cheer them up. This little, light-hearted, warm book is just the ticket! I think it is the best book gift I have seen for those going through normal illnesses.

I wouldn't recommend it for people with serious, life-threatening situations. An inspiring book about miracle recoveries would work better there. Lance Armstrong's new book, It's Not About the Bike, fits the bill for many cancer patients, for example.

Here's what's in this book. It begins with an explanation about Ms. Binchy's hip replacement that includes having to face up to the need to lose weight, stop smoking, and cut way back on the alcohol. In a witty fashion, she makes great good fun out of her own fears and foibles. You can't help but like her for it, and begin to laugh at yourself a little in your own past experiences with doctors, nurses and hospitals.

From there, she goes on to provide witty lists that would cheer anyone up. One of my favorites was full of put-downs (that everyone has thought, but never said) to one's roommate in the hospital. No, you won't say these either, but you'll probably break up laughing as you think about this list every time you look at the other patient.

There are lists for what gifts to ask for, things to do when you get home, what tasks to give visitors, and every other imaginable circumstance.

The book is enjoyable both for its humor, and its good humor -- showing you how to look on the bright side. One of my favorite sections was the story about the woman who thought she was having a heart attack, and ended up getting a lecture from a third year medical student (serving as a waitress) about all of the other things it could be that are not so serious.

Smile! You'll feel better when you do!

An easy to read, entertainig, compilation of short vinettes and advice from one of my favorite writers. Some of the chapters originally appeared in Maeve's column in the Irish Times, which she used to chronicle her recent hip replacement. It is filled with humorous and matter of fact ways to deal with illness head on. Not a novel or short story....so regular readers may be a bit disappointed, but a delightful tidbit for to share with someone who is sick, or to read yourself.

Having had hip replacement surgery myself recently, this book was sent to me by a friend, both of us familiar with Maeve Binchy's books. I can't begin to tell you how each page brought tears to my eyes from laughter as I related to her stories of elastic stockings, "invalid" gadgets from walkers to commodes, the unfailing compassion of overworked nurses, and the embarassment of those wonderful hospital gowns! Wendy Shea's illustrations were hysterical reminders of hospitals and then the long awaited recovery period. You both deserve 10 Stars!

Many years ago, the writer Norman Cousins, wrote a now classic book about the part laughter and humor played in his recovery from a life threatening illness. And today, its as if Maeve Binchy continued this premise when she wrote her newest book, Aches and Pains.

Maeve Binchy is primarily known as the best selling Irish author who writes wonderful tales filled with memorable characters. Some also know her from her meaningful columns which appear in the Irish Times. But now readers everywhere will be introduced to a very different Maeve Binchy as learn about Binchy as a patient when she first had surgery to replace her hip and then during her recuperation. And readers will have an extra bonus from the illustrations done by Wendy Shaw who had the same operation as Ms. Binchy. The book is really funny, filled with all sorts of advice on how to survive a stay in any hospital and some anecdotal dopctor and nurse stories. And strange as it may seem, Binchy and Shaw make it a pleasure to read about their confinements.

Consider reading this book to see how it is possible to make light of your aches and pains or think about giving this as a gift to somebody who is also recuperating.

And an extra benefit is that all of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be contributed to the Arthritis Foundation.

At their best, Maeve's books contain wonderful warmth and humour. This one, sadly, falls far short of that promise.

For example, various sections (such as the one on how uncomfortabless with being undressed means self-obsession), rather than being witty or understanding of a patient's pain and fear, seem instructions on how to be a "good patient," to cause doctors or nurses maximum convenience. Many of those who are ill have found that doctors are not the nicest of people with whom to deal, and there is nothing to make a patient feel comfort or empathy in this book. The little "poem" about telling about eating, smoking, and drinking is far from funny.

I would not dream of giving this to anyone who was ill. The copy I'd intended to present ended up in my recycling bin.

Couldn't put it down. This is definitely a book that is different from the norm, consistently suspenseful, and full of truly interesting characters. I enjoyed the writing, too - great flow and form. I'd highly recommend it.

This is an okay read. The characters are of some intrerest but not particularly well developed or realistic. The plot would probably work better if it were more deftly handled. The writing is functional but in no way clever or inspiring. It just gets the job done. On the other hand, there are not a lot of typos or grammatical goofs to distract. So this is about an average novel, maybe toward the high end of average. If you just can't find anything better, give it a read.

I found the book interesting and it kept my attention however, it's not one of those books that you'll want to read again or that is memorable. The character development was weak and the ending was predictable.

Anyone who has taken the coastal route in or out of Maine is familiar with the unusual setting of the crucial elements in Kimball's latest noir thriller - the big I-95 bridge. The Maine author's steamy, riveting page-turner takes place in Kittery, ME, and Portsmouth, NH, and the primary action takes place on, or in the shadow of, that dominating bridge.

The book opens with a brief prologue: the protagonist, Jacob Winter, plummets from the top of the bridge, experiencing an untimely burst of insight, "seeing how things came to be." Part One drops back to find Jacob in jail for assaulting his former psychiatrist, Price Ashworth, after returning home early with his young son from a Red Sox game, to find his wife and the good doctor enjoying the aftermath of a romantic dinner. Though Jacob has only a blurred memory of the assault, there's no doubt he not only delivered the concussing blow, but destroyed much of the beautiful furniture he had made for the house over his 12-year marriage.

His wife has sent some significant belongings to the jail - a sleeping bag and his laptop computer among them - but has not bailed him out. That favor has fallen mysteriously to Alix Callahan, a woman Jacob has never spoken to, though he remembers her as a committed lesbian and powerful personality from his undergraduate days at the University of New Hampshire.

A struggling non-fiction writer with an "overactive" imagination, Jacob habitually organizes his life with scheduled lists and makes precision straight-lined, square-cornered furniture to keep himself anchored. His wife's infidelity - totally unexpected - (it's actually somewhat difficult to square Jacob's idyllic memories with the calculating harpy the reader sees)leaves him shaky and bewildered and terrified of losing 9-year-old Max. Despite the restraining order barring him from his home, he touches base with Max, downplaying the upheaval in their lives and delivering the advice Jacob himself struggles to live by, "Your head, not your heart."

Then he takes out the card Alix has left him: "GREEN GIRLS, the business card read. EXOTIC GROWERS." The address is on the Portsmouth side of the Piscataqua, on the banks of the river, under the span of the bridge. A huge greenhouse is attached to the back of the house. The greenhouse nurtures a pungent, humid jungle of South American rainforest plants and small poisonous frogs. As Alix leads Jacob in, a dark, beautiful woman, radiating intense sexuality, appears from the greenhouse. Alix introduces July and explains that she helped Jacob because she admires his writing.

" `I do have to admit,' Alix went on, `even though there are never any people in his books, something about his writing is extremely sensual. The fire in Baltimore? The commotion in the next berth? I'm not sure if he treats violence sexually or sex violently.' She gave July a pointed look. `Either way, I know you'd appreciate it.' " Jacob's books, we learn, are about things, like the train berth he occupied on the way home from his mother's funeral. Or the I-95 bridge he now chooses as the center of his first novel.

The friction between Alix and July (hiding from an abusive, murderous husband) is palpable, and Jacob wants nothing to do with them. But after another visit with his son, he finds July waiting for him, agitated over a fight with Alix. Moments later his cell phone summons him to the big bridge from which Alix, after a short, cryptic exchange, jumps. Jake keeps saying he can't get involved, but it's too late. Alix's body is not recovered and July's Columbian shaman husband - the one who tried to kill her - has broken out of prison and is on his way.

The erotic tension runs high as the action heats up from all sides, entangling Jacob deeper in a web of deceit, suspicion, mysticism and murder. There's a strong James M. Cain feel to the edgy mix of steamy eroticism and dark double dealing in which Jacob's judgment is fatefully faulty and erratic and absolutely no one can be trusted - except Max.

Kimball ("Undone," "Mouth to Mouth") puts the bridge at the center of the story as an object of grace and beauty, magnificence and deadly danger, and invests it with a powerful character that is not in the least anthropomorphic. Though plot and atmosphere drive the book as much as character, Jacob draws the reader with his earnest grit and hapless inability to live by his mantra: "head not heart."

A friend who is a reviewer recommended "Green Girls" as a book that I might find interesting. I didn't think I would like it from reading the blurb, but I was wrong. This is a compelling read that held my attention throughout. The obsessive and quite mad July is a pretty unnerving character. I got a little tired of the protagonist making stupid mistakes, but he eventually tries to redeem himself. The Colombian shaman is a great character and Kimball did a great job with him. If you like books that are a little out there and not so "in the box" this is a good book for you.

If your like me and find scanty has place inregions other than education or information this book alomg with the Red Book should be in your library for graphics program know how.It lists and siscusses the various extensin and uses for individual OS and graphic cards process.A graphics application is only good if it works.

This was a good reference book, but unfortunatelly it got outdated very fast... I wish it had more indepth explanations in some cases but it does the job.

I've often been frustrated by the fact that it's often hard to find good documentation for OpenGL extensions. The information in the extension registry, as well as in the latest OpenGL spec (for extensions that have been promoted to the core) is generally intended for OpenGL implementers, not OpenGL developers, so there usually isn't much about how or why you would use the extension. Sometimes, you can find papers and demos from one of the hardware vendors, such as Nvidia or ATI, but more often than not, you're left figuring it out on your own.

So when I heard about this book, I was really looking forward to it. Given the high quality of the author's other works, I expected it to immediately take a place on my desk.

This book is essentially an expansion of the information contained in the extension registry. It's considerably more user-friendly, the explanations are more detailed, and it conveniently groups the extensions by their functional area. However, it really doesn't discuss how or why you would use each extension in a game or graphics application. Nor does it include any demos, or even sample code. These factors keep the book from being as useful as it could have been.

Overall, this is a good book, and it provides a great reference for the extensions it covers, but it could have gone farther with showing you how to use them.

Finally! this book is a long overdue alternative to reading the raw extension specs on opengl.org. It covers all of the extensions I've ever needed, and a few more that I didn't even know existed. The only thing I can complain about is that is doesn't have anything on pbuffers, but don't get me wrong, this book is nice and meaty and is a great resource for opengl programmers. Definitely recommended!

The OpenGL Extensions Guide provides a comprehensive reference for the main OpenGL extensions in use circa 2003. The extensions covered enable OpenGL support for features like new blending modes, texture environments, a variety of texture formats, fragment shading, pixel formats, point parameters, and assembly language vertex and fragment programs. The book devotes a chapter to each extension covered, and discusses the new functions, enums, constants, and general functionality provided by each extension. For several extensions, usage scenarios and example code are provides. By far the most useful chapters are the ones covering vertex and fragment programs, as the book provides a complete reference for the assembly languages and the OpenGL mechanisms for loading programs, setting attributes and parameters, etc. The program dialects covered are ARB vertex and fragment programs, as well as some proprietary NVIDIA versions.

For all its strengths, this book does have some flaws. First, the book is useful only if you already know, in general terms, what a particular extension does and you have a specific need for that functionality in your program. The book does not really give a general overview of the extensions, nor does it provide typical usage scenarios and sample code in all cases. In other words, the book is strictly a reference, since it provides very little introductory or tutorial material.

Second, the book is already getting out-of-date. There are a number of extensions that, in early 2005, are becoming widely used. These include:

Multiple Render Targets: The GL_ARB_draw_buffers and GL_ATI_draw_buffers extensions provide the ability to write color output to multiple buffers in a single rendering pass from a fragment program.

Non-power-of-two textures: The GL_ARB_non_power_of_two extension relaxes the requirement that OpenGL textures have power-of-two dimensions. It also provides more reasonable behavior in terms of texture coordinates and coordinate wrap modes than the GL_NV_texture_rectangle extension, which is discussed. Also, GL_NV_texture_rectangle has been supplanted by GL_EXT_texture_rectangle, which is not discussed.

OpenGL shading language: This is the wave of the future. OpenGL 2.0 provides a high-level programming language for writing vertex and fragment programs, and its functionality is exposed through several extensions. Of course, this wasn't available in 2003.

Vertex and pixel buffer objects: The GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object and GL_ARB_pixel_buffer_object extensions allow the programmer to create vertex and pixel buffers in high-performance video memory (managed by the driver) and do things like copy a pixel buffer into a vertex buffer. This allows you to do things like render new vertex positions into a pixel buffer, and then use the pixel values as the vertex input in a subsequent rendering pass.

The verdict: The OpenGL Extensions Guide provides comprehensive material about a wide range of extensions in use in 2003. It has virtually no tutorial material and several of the extension covered in this book are becoming obsolete. Also, several important new extensions are not covered. Hopefully a new edition will cover more relevant material, although this is obviously a moving target.

Marty Hawkins, on his way to being a gifted scholar at Dublin's Trinity College, seems to be suffering a delayed reaction to his parents' tragic death. Giving up his fast track career in the history department, Marty returns home to the family farm in Fasha, County Tipperary, run by his brother, Pierce, and sister-in-law, Etti. Marty's desire for a simple rural life puts him at a loss on how to fill his days besides occasional farm chores and the weekly night out at the local pub. Pinning for his sister-in-law, Etti, and a good-natured rivalry with Young Delaney, a boyhood friend, seems to be the only things keeping him going until he comes in possession of a genetically altered sheep he names Missy.
This was a most unusual book and very enjoyable. The author gives us a wonderful portrayal of rural Ireland and its vanishing breed of small farmers. We are treated to an assortment of characters in the village of Fansha, from the sister-in-law from the wrong side of the tracks and almost too perfect brother, to the hard working Young Delaney, who is the envy of the countryside for his skill with livestock. Other families seem less industrious than Pierce, settling for modern homes and satellite dishes, in lieu of the traditional country values.
Marty's emotional decline is sad and pathetic, risking everything for a chance with his sister-in-law. A delightful story of obsession and the consequences, but perhaps most memorable for the wonderful portrayal of a tiny corner of modern Ireland, which still retains the rural charm that we think of, and a whole array of unforgettable characters.

A sheep? The novel is about a sheep? If someone had told me this novel is by an Irish writer and it features a sheep, I probably would have dismissed the book. I think myself relatively free of prejudice, yet "Irish writer" says to me folk story, featuring salt-of-the-earth characters and a warm, triumphant ending. How wrong I would have been to suspect Haverty of writing such a book, and how glad I am that I did not take the time to discover her heritage before buying and reading this amazing book.

The novel follows Marty Hawkins as he leaves his promising career at Trinity College in Dublin to go home to the country, to live for a time with his brother Pierce, who tends the family acres with an understanding and closeness to the land that Marty knows he will never have. Marty is perhaps driven to this desperate move away from intellectual pursuits by a kind of rivalry with this brother, or by the death of his parents, or, by his own admission, because he missed the look of the land. It was never quite clear to me why he left Trinity, except that he felt something was wrong. And in the end it doesn't particularly matter. We all do things that we cannot fully explain. I like that about this book.

Followed everywhere by the specter of this larger-than-life relative, the brother who can do no wrong, Marty seeks peace by doing nothing. He makes himself a home in an abandoned house on the land, makes half-hearted efforts at helping Pierce, finally accepts his hermit-like existence. But he has an obsession with Pierce's wife Etti. And an equal fascination with a sheep.

Marty finds the sheep when accompanying his progressive farmer brother to a sale of genetically-engineered livestock. The sheep carry human genes. The sheep Marty picks out has a kind of human frailty that calls out to him, that he cannot resist. Pierce humors his non-farmer brother by acquiring the sheep for him for half-price.

And so Missy enters Marty's life. And changes it forever. Missy seems to represent the unformed, unclear direction of Marty's life, its demands on him and his inadequacy at satisfying his own needs, or even defining them. Marty struggles with keeping her alive, with alternately loving and hating her, as he seems to do with his own soul. He expresses - and sometimes fights - the too-human traits of envy, lust, and desire, and is ultimately undone by his need to have what he wants on his own terms. The novel is too real to be put down easily, too human to dismiss.

What makes this book at all interesting is the way the author uses Missy, the genetically engineered lamb, who functions essentially as another character; despite that, the story is pretty conventional. The plot is straightforward, and Ms Haverty deals with themes we've all seen before. It's an easy read, but not particularly exciting or thought provoking; my biggest objection, though, is that as the story moved forward, I found it quite predictable.

What a wonderful book! Once I started reading it, every moment spent away from it was a trial! All I wanted to do was get back to it and find out what happened next! While this may not be a book that ends "happily ever after", it does make us painfully aware of the poignant and tenuous nature of life and how unspeakably sad it can sometimes be. We identify with Martin at the same time that we abhor his sometimes thoughtlessly cruel behavior towards Missy. Etti's limited intelligence, and the fact that she is aware of it, makes us feel protective towards her and we are also moved by Pierce's love for his brother and for Etti. But finally it is Missy who moves us unbearably - we are left with an image of this totally helpless being, dependent on the whims of whoever deigns to look after her, however imperfectly. We may well ask the question, "Why was she born?" This story is a real tragedy, complete with catharsis. As for the writing, Anne Haverty is a wonder - her descriptions of nature are marvellous and the wry Celtic humor to be found in the story makes us smile but it is, above all, her ability to move us that makes her stand out from the crowd. The only writer I can compare her with is Patrick McGinley, a favorite of mine whose books are, unfortunately, mostly out of print these days. The reader who asks what the title means must have missed the quotation at the beginning of the book.

Okay, I just don't get it. If any other readers can explain the title of this book to me, I'd appreciate it. Still, it kept my attention to look at this buccolic Ireland. The love story is... well, it's a love story. The question is, who loves whom???

I bought this book thinking it will show my daughter about colors. I do prefer hardcover over paperback. The quality of the pull tabs get stuck and my 2 year old daughter has trouble putting them back in. There is no color learning in this book. For a beter book, I recomend Dora's Book of Words / Libro de Palabras de Dora : A Bilingual Pull-Tab Adventure! This book is a better learning book and better contructed Than Dora's Rainbow Surprise.

THis is a nice storybook for fans of Dora, but it is not a book that my 2 year old daughter wants to read every day. The story is OK, but I think my daughter misses some of the things from the TV show that can not be replicated in a book (such as, Swiper's expressions or comments, the little jingle- tree, bridge, tall mountain) I try to add these touches but it's not the same.

Other than that, it is well constructed with hard pages, and the pullouts are easy, but not all that exciting when you slide them open. Before opened, the panels blend into the background, with just a dark shape highlighted. When you slide open the area, the shape correlates with the picture below (circle and Tico's car wheel) Also as a parent, I would like the the shapes on the
plastic sleeves to be more basic- if a book is going to touch on shapes, let them all be pretty basic.

If your child is a Dora fiend they will probably get some enjoyment from this book, but I think there are better books out there. I gave it 4 stars because it is cute and well constructed.

I love my Dora's Rainbow book. Every page has a window in it with a sliding page that pulls out to see what is there. (Very sturdy.)

Dora's Rainbow Surprise is an activity book that is surprisingly sturdy and fun to read. As with the popular TV show, Dora directly involves your child by asking questions, such as "How can we get to Crocodile Lake?" Next your child identifies the shape outlined on a clear plastic window. Then s/he slides out a sturdy cardboard insert to reveal the answer behind it. My preschooler even learned the "crescent" shape, which forms the bridge across the Icky-Sticky Sand. My 2-year-old had some trouble sliding the tabs with her smaller fingers. Yet she insisted on exploring with her older sister. Boots the Monkey, Tico the Squirrel and Benny the Bull make an appearance during this bilingual adventure. The only disappointment was we didn't get a chance to say "Swiper no swiping!"

This is not a book from which to learn linear programming. Nor is it a stretch that the author and a profesor(sic) of linear programming (I assume not of spelling) may give this title 5 stars -- they are not attempting to learn the subject that this book fails miserably at teaching. i.e. Note to author: If you use a term, make sure you at least define it somewhere. Except to find the problems that were assigned in my class, my only use for this book was as an object to fling in frustration before finding a decent explanation elsewhere.

That book is excelent from class and practice. Very important in undergraduate and postgraduate. Thanks you.

This is a much more detailed one as compared to the other two and was penned by MIT ORC Professor Robert Freund.

Summary. This book presents a thoroughly modern treatment of linear programming that achieves a healthy balance between theory, implementation, computation, and between the simplex method and interior-point methods. It's most novel feature is that it is written in a delightful and refreshing conversational style, that bespeaks the author's teaching style and relaxed wit. It is a pleasure to read: students will find the book to be friendly and engaging, while professors will find in the book a wealth of teaching material, nicely organized and packaged for classroom use. The book is also meant to be used in conjunction with a public-available website that contains software for various algorithms, additional exercises, and demos of algorithms.
The need for new linear programming textbooks. The world of linear programming has changed dramatically in the last ten years. For one thing, the incredible changes in computer technology have made it easy to solve truly huge LPs, and routine LP problems solve in fractions of a second even on a personal computer. As a result, the study of linear programming algorithms is of less interest to the casual student. (In a similar vein, we usually do not teach students how to efficiently compute square roots; we simply presume they can press the right buttons on their calculator.) On the other hand, because we can now solve truly gigantic linear programs, issues of computer implementation, numerical stability, and software architecture, etc., are as important for the serious optimizer as is, say, duality theory. Furthermore, the development and recognition of the importance of interior point methods has changed the landscape of linear programming significantly, so that linear programming is no longer synonymous with the simplex method, and a modern treatment of LP must also present an in-depth treatment of the most important interior point methods.

Vanderbei's book is thoroughly modern. Vanderbei's book is completely up-to-date. Aside from a nice treatment of the simplex method, it also contains a very up-to-date treatment of interior point methods, including the homogeneous self-dual formulation and algorithm (which might soon become the dominant algorithm in practice and theory). It contains extensive material on issues of implementation of both the simplex algorithm and interior point algorithms. A politician might call it a book for the 21st century.

Vanderbei's book has many novel features. This book is quite different from most other textbooks on LP in a number of important ways. For starters, the standard form of a linear program in the book is the symmetric form of the problem (max c^T x | Ax <= b, x >= 0), as opposed to the usual form (min c^T x | Ax=b, x >= 0). This difference allows for an easier treatment of duality, and allows one to see the geometry of linear programming more easily as well. The symmetric form also makes it easier to set up the homogeneous self-dual interior point algorithm. However, this form has the drawback that discussions of bases, basic feasible solutions, and some of the mechanics of the simplex method are all a bit more awkward. (The book uses the language of dictionaries to describe the essential information in a simplex method iteration.) The book has more of a focus on engineering applications than does the more typcial LP textbook (which tend to rely on business problems). For example, there is a nice chapter on optimization of engineering structures such as trusses. The book gives a very broad treatment of interior point methods, including several topics that are not usually found in textbooks such as the homogeneous self-dual formulation and algorithm, quadratic programming via interior point methods, and general convex optimization via interior point methods.

These novel features are good in that the author has clearly tried to be innovative and to build an LP text from the ground up, without regard for past texts.

Some Nice Features. There are some particularly nice features in the book. The book contains a much-simplified variant of the Klee-Minty polytope that allows for a more straightforward proof that the simplex method can visit exponentially many extreme points. In addition to proving strong duality, the book also presents Tucker's strict complementarity theorem, which has become important in the new view of sensitivity analysis, optimal partitions, and interior point methods. The book also contains a nice treatment of the steepest edge pivot rule, which has recently emerged as an important component in speeding up the performance of the simplex algorithm. In the treatment of interior point methods, the author spends very little time on polynomial time bounds and guarantees (as a theorist, I like to see this material), instead adding value by discussing important computational and implemention issues, including ordering heuristics, strategies for solving the KKT system by Newton's method, etc. The book sometimes has an engineer's feel for the proofs, which is good for students but is a bit frustrating to hard-core math types such as myself. There are many instances where the proof is just a proof via an example. This is consistent with the conversational and informal style of the text, and this informality spills over into the mathematics on occasion.

This book has style. As mentioned earlier, the book has a wonderfully appealing conversational style. While the author does not purposely go out of his way to be cute and corny, he succeeds in leaving the reader grinning with his humor. There are some passages that are downright funny, but the style succeeds mostly by default. One section on the issue of modeling the anchoring of truss design problems is called Anchors Away, the subsection on updating factorizations to reduce fill-in is aptly called Shrinking the Bump. And there is the hint of a racy discussion of an application of Konig's Theorem involving boys and girls that the curious reader might enjoy.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed reviewing this book, and I highly recommend the book as a textbook for an advanced undergraduate or master's level course in linear programming, particularly for courses in an engineering environment. In addition, the book also is a good reference book for interior point methods as well as for implementation and computational aspects of linear programming. This is an excellent new book.

Very clearly written. Unlike most math books, the notation is easy to understand for engineers and programmers. I found the free online version first, and then decided to buy the hard copy.

In this second book, George Ritzer pushes his general thesis to extremes that become nearly absurd. To pretend that credit cards are a simulacra of money is true, but money is a simulacra of bartering. To reject credit cards because they are a simulacra is like rejecting the market place and that would make us go back to what ? When were commercial exchanges between people not using some tokens, some simulacra of the value of the exchanged goods ? But he even goes further : organized tourism or cruises are a simulacra of the discovery of a new territory. We can discuss the simplification such organized tourism brings, but should we go back to the old « tourism » of previous centuries and reintroduce colonialization, the genocide of encumbering populations, slavery, and some other side-effects (that were rather the direct objectives) of such adventures ? Same thing with Disneylands and other entertainment parks. They are only the development of the old fairs and festivals of previous centuries that took place on market day or on some special occasions, like carnivals and pilgrimages and some others. The only difference is that we can visit such parks all year around, and if some are intellectually limited, the number of those who go deeply into some topics are numerous, and, would I say, more and more numerous, presenting sciences, technology, history, geography, and many other topics. And the mass-basis of these make them cheap, a lot cheaper when we take into account the amount of subject matter. And we can have in a short period of time and in the same locale a tremendous amount of information that we could only have through long and tiresome research before. This leads us to the Internet. A simulacra of communication or research ? Certainly not. A new dimension of communication and research. It might be used in an underdeveloped way. But it does not have to be that and people are learning, provided schools, universities and social institutions lead them into it, incite them to do it. An interesting point of view but we must remain very alert not to be thrown into some kind of retrograde ideology. Would anyone ever think of rejecting the telephone as a simulacra of communication ? Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Paris Universities II and IX.

Ritzer has taken his popular McDonaldization theory and applied it to a host of specific topics, such as the university (and sociology in particular), the work force, leisure and other areas of life. He builds not just on his work but also on those who have taken his theory and built on it, as well as some of the masters in the social theory realm. For those who are interested in this theory, this is an invaluable addition to the body of work.

As a student in Norway, going on the course sociology, this was a great book to read. I`m going to have a review of this book at my course, in front of my professor , and the rest of my class. And i will only say good things about that book. The book contains good things about Max Weber, Karl Mannheim.

A another thing whit this book, is that Georg Ritzer is using easy words, good langue and its easy to understand.

I requment this book to all, either you are a student in sociology, or regular student. Even so if you arent a student, it is a good book to read,for to understand what is the McDonaldization thesis.

Gaute Aadnesen

This book contains a set of very nice ideas of the recent trends in the consumption of the American society. Very good study was done on the subject. I understand that this is not the first book on the subject by the authors, which makes it hard to comprehend a large number of references to the previous works. Also, the language of the book is way too "scientified".

This will become a "must have" book for C++ programmers. It is both easy to understand and authoritative at the same time. It will be useful for a long, long time, first as a learning tool and then as a reference.

Implementations of TR1 are now available from Boost (free) and Dinkumware (reasonably priced), so these library components are something that a C++ programmer can start using right away. Most or all of them will also be part of the next standard, so they are sure to become ever more widely used.

I like the fact the book is hard-cover, since it is likely to get a lot of use. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I still think a book like this is the easiest way to study something new, and really learn about it.

I already posted one review, but Amazon seems to have lost it. I'm surprised there haven't been more reviews posted - the book deserves more.

There are many, perhaps too many, books on C++. But Becker breaks new ground. He presents what is coming down the road towards the current C++ programmer. The existing C++ standard library is good but limited. The widespread use of C++ led to recognition of useful classes that should be in this library but are not. After some years of dilly dallying, Technical Report 1 was produced. Work started in 2001. Six years!

This book explains the classes in TR1. While it is not guaranteed that all of TR1 will make it into the next official standard library, most certainly will. The only real question is when that revision will be released. Given the way C++ changes so slowly, don't hold your breath.

In the interim, you can make good professional use of your time by studying TR1 via this book. It's not a simple rendition of the classes. Becker devotes considerable space to explaining the usages of the new classes. Giving you the gist of what they are about. Just as importantly, each chapter has a set of exercises involving its classes. Tackling these is probably the best way to gain experience.

Of the new classes, what interests you most will vary with the reader. Personally, I was most impressed with the Numerics. Huge improvements in dealing with floats and overflows (NaNs). And for physicists or engineers, there are specialised functions that will save some coding. Laguerre polynomials, Legendre functions, gamma functions, Bessel functions and Hermite polynomials, amongst others. A far richer set than what you currently get in the standard library.

The subtitle of this book is "A Tutorial and Reference". As a tutorial, I found this book to be lacking. The explanations are terse, quite unlike the more user-friendly tutorial style of Nicolai Josuttis in "C++ Standard Library".

Second, as a reference, this book is also lacking on two counts. The index is incomplete! In the first month of use, I discovered major omissions in the index! Also, the formatting of the function listings makes it difficult to find a particular function by browsing through the section. Sometimes it takes minutes.

The author knows his material, and the information is accurate. I have not encountered any errors in the text, and it seems to be complete. But this book does not live up to the quality of its predecessor text, mentioned above. And it does not live up to its subtitle.

No doubt this review will be voted down by people trying to sell the book, but there you have it -- details and specifics.

Barnes wasn't joking when he entitled this book with the word 'pedant' in it to describe his obsession with things culinary. This text is littered with illustrations of just how particular he is, not just about cooking, but also about accuracy, both in the details of recipes and what impressions he draws from other's works or opinions and how they affect him.

"Of course, this still leaves you faced with preparing 'an excellent dinner' for 'those one is fond of'. Again, listen to Pomaine: `For successful dinner there should never be more than eight people. One should prepare only one good dish.' These are his italics, not mine. Don't they make the heart lift?" (p117)

Barnes injects humour into his preoccupation with food preparation and consumption: its ingredients, how they are sourced, their preparation, their origins and any quirky historical fact associated that might add piquancy.

In this book Julian Barnes excels at two things:

1. Unearthing interesting and slightly obscure facts about people, vegetables and the mundane experiences of maintaining a kitchen.

"But then there is the other drawer - the one where items of sporadic usefulness live, the one where everything is tangled up and furtive, into which you insert a tentative hand, not knowing where sharp edges lurk. When did I last empty it? Ten years ago?" (p121-122)

2. Analysing ideas and reflecting wittily on things other than food.

"We might as well suggest that current American military zeal is a consequence of that nation's love of fast food - in which case, an infantryman's widow would probably have a lawsuit against the nearest burger outlet. And if anyone is tempted to believe in an automatic link between protein and aggression, don't forget that Hitler was a vegetarian." (p133-134)

Barnes is an idealist and experiences angst in his desire to reach perfection in the kitchen. Gladly he recognises this and employs self-deprecation, along with sprinkles of culinary history to make this a small but satisfying dish to digest. One small quibble, there are no references to the texts he refers to. It seemed rather ironic after all Barnes' plaints about cooks not revealing all the tricks of their trade in their cookbooks, that he should leave the detail of the sources he refers to out.

Julian Barnes, most well known for his elegant novels dissecting the core human issues: love, death, the role of memory, the perils of desire has a parallel alternative career as a fine essayist. He started out as a journalist, before turning to fiction full time, but still keeps up the shorter form and does it very well. His Letters From London excellently investigate a number of issues roiling around in the early 1990s period in Britain, and this collection takes a wry look at a narrower theme: the travails of the amateur cook.

Barnes turned to cooking relatively late the day. The kitchen only became a location of tense pleasure in his 30s. He is a cook very much in the strict adherence to the recipe line, worrying exactly how large is a 'medium' onion, and what is a 'glug' of olive oil? So not the Jamie Oliver throw it all in and mash it about heartily school. In many respects, this sharp precision parallels his writing style. Neat, light and elegantly balanced. He refuses to cook a squirrel 'you're just a rat with PR' on the grounds that it, well, looks rather like a dead squirrel and indulges in a minor diatribe against Nigel Slater for a recipe of pork chop that doesn't seem to fit in the frying pan. (This essay earned Barnes more letters of complaint than his polemic against the Iraq war, such are the priorities of the British middle classes).

His erstwhile love of France is also there, with an interesting disquisition on the French distaste for root vegetables and a mention of long time food goddess Elizabeth David. The writing, while always witty and stylish, never quite reaches the high essayistic heights Barnes is capable of. The format - popular column in the Guardian newspaper - probably shoehorned each piece into a fairly predictable audience remit. Nevertheless, a fine book to be enjoyed by Barnesophiles and foodies alike.

Originally written as columns for the Guardian, this collection of foodie essays is by turns hilarious and instructive, as in how many hangman's nooses (one to five) to ascribe to a meal that is going bad fast while hungry guests are whooping it up in the living room, and how the relationship between professional and domestic cook is similar to a first-time sexual encounter ("No, I won't do that"). On every page I found something that made me holler "Comrade!" I have so been everywhere this guy has been in the kitchen.

Someone got this as a gift for my 2 1/2 year old. She will not go to sleep until we read this with her. I like that around every letter there are other cleaver items with the same letter. She loves the "horse in the house" for H. And the "upsidedown Umbrella".

My only concern is that this is a popup book, so little ones can easily rip/destroy it, but it comes with the territory!

We love this book! We have the other Snappy books as well but our 17 month old will "read" this one over and over. I just have one problem. Each letter is shown with items representing that letter all around it. The letter "y" is not shown on its page - why?

I can't wait to get the new 123 book due out in April!

This book is much busier than most of the other books in the series. The pages are crowded with images, and if your child has specific names for some of the items (like plane, instead of airplane) it is a little bit difficult to teach the letter associations.

Also, the two-page spreads usually feature more than one letter, intermixed. This is distracting. I'd rather have paid more money for a larger book that differentiates the letters more.

Usually these books feature a bold pop up at the page fold. This book uses a variety of lift the flap and pop-up techniques. Because of this, the alphabet book is less durable than others in the line. I have had to make repairs to several well-loved figures with glue and tape.

I really like the Snappy line of books, but don't feel that this is the best representation of their line.