Formula-investing

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The Four Elements of Financial Alchemy is a unique and comprehensive introduction to the field of personal financial planning. Lucid and insightful - it should be required reading for all first-time investors.

I am currently an EE student at the University of Houston (Go Coogs!) and this is the textbook used for intro to signals and systems. This is honestly one of the worst textbooks I have ever bought. Our professor continually points out errors in the authors proofs that I must correct by writing in the book so I don't follow incorrect steps. The author assumes you have completely mastered all aspects of differential equations. He often skips steps in the proofs and ends up with very simplistic algebraic answers. This is a professor's textbook, not a student's textbook.

I had the extreme displeasure of having to use this book in an undergraduate course called Linear Signals and Systems. It is poorly written and laid out first off. The ideas and concepts are half formed and the proofs are all well over any student's head who has only had one class in differential equations (rendering them pointless, for it is intend for just such people). I would actually sit down sometimes, tell myself that the book couldn't be as bad as I had it pegged, and try to read over the material that had been covered in class to learn it. I always ended up flipping pages, frustrated, sure that I had missed a page or paragraph somewhere, but I never had. It's that bad. Don't buy this. I wound up selling it before the class was over and relying on my notes and my old Ciruits text book, which was quite good (it was also written incidentally by J. David Irwin, the head of our department).

I was really surprised by some of the negative comments written on this book, and that is why I decided to write this comment. This book was the one assigned to the undergraduate course I took entitled Signals and Systems. In fact, this book made me like communications and signal processing, and I believe that it motivated me a lot (beside the other book by Ziemer & Tranter entitled Principles of Communication Systems: Modulation, Noise, Systems, 4th edition) to go for the graduate studies in communications and signal processing. What I liked about the two books was that they assume NO prior knowledge of the topics covered and they move on smoothly from one subject to another so that the student will have a better understanding of the "big picture" as he/she moves on. Well, I guess that the other "negative" comments about this book were written by students who expected to understand the topics covered in this book from one skim read. Let me say that that is NOT the case here. In order to understand the topics covered very well, you should read them more than once and try to solve as many problems as possible. But trust me on this: once you do so, you will grasp the material very well and will have a "feel" of what is going on.