Frictions Books

so far i have seen no textbook on tribology as good as this.

As a senior Chemical Engineering Student, I have been exposed to some very dry and poorly written text books, this however, is not one of them. I bought this book simply for curiosity and to help prepare for a job interview. Very well written and easy to follow for readers of any background.

These comments apply to the set comprised of volume I and II of this excellent reference book.

The author has done an outstanding job of compiling a large amount of material on Tribology. There is an excellent combination of both qualitative narrative and quantitative examples. My primary interest areas concerned topics relevant to reciprocating, internal combustion engine design and analysis and to that end, I found the sections on journal bearings and on bearing failure modes to be very useful. There is an entire chapter devoted to the Tribology of diesel engines, which is a good starting place for conducing investigations into this area and the end of this chapter contains many references for those seeking information that is more detailed or additional quantitative or numerical methods.

Volume I, Chapter 11 contains an outstanding presentation on Hydrodynamic and Elasto-hydrodynamic Lubrication that contains a great many practical equations, including their development, for calculating the design and performance characteristics of most types of journal and thrust bearings found in modern machines.

I recommend this two-book set to mechanical and marine engineers and others working with tribological systems including friction and wear and machine elements such as plain (journal) bearings.

-John

I did my PhD in the Nanoindentation area and I find this book really helpful for reviewing basic concepts and gaining basic knowledge on the subject. For more in-depth approach see "Contact, Adhesion and Rupture of Elastic Solids" by Daniel Maugis

Dr. Cronin demonstrates how well he's assimilated Indiana culture by charging ahead and tipping some sacred cows in this slim but enlightening work. Highly reccomended for anyone interested in contemporary libraries, library education, library workers and units of scholarly measurment.

A very thorough and very carefully written book. Everything anyone ever knew about bearings is in here. Clear development of equations.

Outstanding works on this subject are hard to find. This work by LR Rudnick, and scores of expert contributors, is absolutely the best and most complete compilation on the subject of synthetic lubricants I've seen. Of course, you'd expect to find thorough treatments of the widely used polyalphaolefins, polyol esters, polybutenes, silicones, etc., but here you'll even find in-depth treatment of special purpose oils as rare as polyphenyl ethers. Completely first class. -F. David Doty, PhD.

lubrication plays a most vital role in our great and complex civilization .

I've been doing database design and social service program evaluation on a shoestring budget for almost a decade. I bought this book to get a broader understanding of the world of business intelligence and develop a definitional knowledge of the trade lexicon. This book served its purpose well. Though this reads like an encyclopedia, it's possible for someone with data management experience to get through this from cover to cover and come out with an improved ability to understand current best practices as well as devise and justify credible strategies for turning raw data into useful knowledge. Of course, it would take a lifetime to master the technical aspects of implementing a business intelligence system, but this book should facilitate dialogue between technical specialists and managers, with particular emphasis on the business value of technologies such as data warehousing, data mining, appropriate emphasis on data quality, etc.

Though budget limitations would prevent implementation of anything but a primitive business intelligence program at my organization, I found this book to be enlightening and relevant on many levels. Some insights include:
-The 80/20 rule for prioritizing IT projects- i.e., 80% of the functionality can be developed with 20% of the work
-Need to cultivate believability and avoid overpromising
-Business rules approach- abstracting and separating business logic from implementation
-Realistic emphasis on data quality
-70% of effort in data warehousing = data preparation (data integration, data quality)
-Useful overview of publicly available data sources (e.g. census records and other government info)
-Critical need for improved partnership between business and IT leaders; IT needs to learn business process modeling, business managers need to understand applications

Bought this book to review for our company as a suggested reading to other members of management. David wrote a very good book and kept the language to a level understandable to business people without technology experience. This is an excellent overview of BI and can also be used as a good refresher for those who have been out of the BI world for some time.

I would buy this book again and I do recommend this book to people who want more understanding of BI.

I have been in the BI world since 1994 and I have read lots of white papers, articles, and books on Business Intelligence; today, the Savvy Manager's Guide on BI is my reference.
I would certainly recommend it to every person in charge of a BI project, but, most importantly, to any executive who is not sure what BI really is and above all what BI can bring to their company.
BI is a serious matter, and today, although executives start becoming BI-aware, there still are too many of them for whom BI is "just another expensive IT project". David Loshin did such a great work at explaining the impact of supporting the implementation of a Business Intelligence Strategy at the corporate level!

This book is a great primer for BI. If you only plan to read one book on the subject, this would be a good choice.

I had the misfortune of getting the book from the author when I attended a BI session where he was the guest feature.

He was terrible; did not have one straight answer for even simple questions. The book does not have even one original thought and is re-hash of good books written earlier. Of-course it would have been a huge surprise if it did.

I had, happily, forgotten about that wasted afternoon and this crappy book till a search on 'analytics' revealed that this book has such high ratings from readers.

Then I was somewhat relieved to see that it was just 6 of the author's close friends who had sent in the reviews.

PLEASE save yourself the money and take a look at this book at a bookstore/library before you invest your time and money in it.

McComb explains a challenging idea of semantics and why this matters in business. He shows that it can be a vital way to efficiently encode your business's rules in a framework of Web Services and servers. This involves understanding different approaches to encoding these rules. Procedural, declarative (like SQL), model based and rule based.

The book goes into how XML is the base standard of representing data or rules in a Web Service context. It takes a lot of the mystery and hype out of what Web Services are or could be. A sober counterpoint to much speculation elsewhere. But one that still clearly shows its potential.

Highly recommended. I rather liked this book, learned from it, and even quoted it. Insightful & well organized. Best book I've read in this general subject area. Should replace most of the fluffy business strategy books I've been suckered into buying.

I bought this book based on the "5 star" reviews out here - unfortunately after seeing it, I am having to send it back. It covers some *very* basic stuff. Not at all useful.

This book does a tremendous job of covering some important issues -- rarely does a technical author provide comprehensive analysis of the role of semantics. McComb addresses high-level issues while also providing solid, hands-on, specific information.

Having myself been involved in complex integration projects, it's refreshing to see someone discussing the problem (and potential business value) of getting meaning out of unstructured information -- without promoting a particular technology. Even more impressive is that he does this using an extremely readable style.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I was skeptical that the book would be relevant to a small company's projects, but I got lots of good ideas that we can start implementing right away. Because the world of the semantic web is still so new, even our small company has a chance to contribute to a lot of the ontologies that will be used in our industry for years to come.