Modeling

After an introductory review of basic statistics, Professor Nelson does a superb job of leading the reader to a complete understanding of Markov chains, motivated by definition and discussion of Poisson processes. The difficult topic of stationarity is treated with exceptional clarity. Additionally, the author's care in categorizing the states of Markov chains (e.g., transient, recurrent, periodic, aperiodic, etc.) is commendably superb. Each chapter begins with a practical "workaday" problem illustrating the value of the material in that chapter. Carefully graded exercise sets augment the reader's understanding of the material. Extreme care has been taken to keep the necessary detailed notations and subscripts standard, clear, and free of typographical errors.

This is a book that takes you through the stochastic processes easy and step by step leading you to a greater knowledge of a complicated issue.

This book is perhaps the best proposal so far to overcome the shortcomings of traditional job analysis. I specially liked the procedure to link your human resources initiatives with the business vision and strategy. Well written, easy to follow.

The book blends practical advice about creating strategic models of work and workers, with decades of research in job analysis. It will be required reading in graduate programs in HRM and Industrial Psychology; and for persons seeking to go beyond today's fad-ish affection for pseudo-scientific forms of competency modeling.

This is a great book. In fact, it is the best book if like me, you don't have time to follow a teacher-led course. Stephen Chapra has authored/co-authored several engineering texts, and this one is just as well-written as the others. My need was for a text which had the right balance of theory and practical implementation details. Since I develop water-quality & hydrodynamics software, I also was concerned with numerical methods issues. This book met my needs. Chapra has a very enjoyable style. I like his sometimes 'anecdotal' style, whereby he gives you historical or background blurbs which help view things in their proper context.

** One of the rare qualities of Chapra's books is to provide both the mathematical modeling theory, and the practical sampling and statistical tools to implement them with real data. This is so often overlooked by other authors.

I look forward to his next book on numerical methods with Matlab & Excel.

I found this book to be extremely useful. It covers the necessary issues of surface water modeling, such as reaction kinetics, mixed vs non-mixed systems, a variety of possible contaminants and indicators, as well as a variety of surface water body types. Each part of the book is a series of lectures containing theory as well as practical modeling methods. The text is clear and flows well, with occasional comical examples and literary quotes.

This is one great book on networking. Unlike other books that include exclusively kiddie babbling about OSI etc., this one comprises a lot of material (actually, most of the book) on queueing and related low-level network issues.

As the other reviewer suggested, math (statistics, Markov chains, etc.) is profusely utilized throughout the text, so make sure you start with a good refresher of the above topics. If there's nothing to refresh, this is not a book for you, it's not another "certification" cram-blam-exam tutorial. Not any vendor oriented. It does talk about OSI, TCP/IP, SNA, and other environments, but mostly the book is more fundamental than just that. At the same time, this is not a textbook on statistics by any means, math here is of the purely applied kind, only what's relevant, it doesn't crush the reader -- which is a rare combination: it's not elementary, yet eminently practical. Also, the book contains a huge bibliography. Highly recommended for any technical individual working in the telecom industry.

This is the real engineering book to consider and understand Networks. You may need to find a key for all the solutions as they are very hard to understand. A upper level of statistics is taken for granted before you address this book.

.....Very impressed
.....Concise, to the point, no unnecessary words
.....Definite appeal to market audience
.....Good flow to writing
.....Easy to understand
.....Valuable information for market audience
.....Very polished and professional

This text is a softcover, even though at this time Amazon still lists it as a thin hardcover. It is written on the same level as Giordano, Wier and Fox's Mathematical Modelling, but focuses directly on the use of Microsoft's Excell. I am one of the many annoyed with Microsoft, but since Excell is ubiquitious, it makes a reasonable choice for a course. The book is very visual showing, for example, how to use Excell to draw Feigenbaum diagrams to illustrate chaos, how to illustrating Newton's method (drawing the tangent lines...), drawing Bezier curves for smoothing... It points out many of Excell's useful features (some have found just learning how to add scrollbars useful).

Another Zelterman classic. It's amazing what he can do in SAS.

Thank you for writing this book! It has been hard for me to find a good resource for plus size modeling. This book has been an excellent learning tool as well as an inspiration. I would recommend it to all plus size women who have an interest in learning the fundamentals of plus size modeling.

Dr. Tambe's exposition on artificial intelligence is the most insightful, fascinating literature on the subject. I highly recommend this title.

In a nutshell, this book is all about understanding XML schemas. As the use of XML transactions to exchange, share, and move data among enterprise systems grows, enforcing data standards and structural efficiency plays a critical role for ensuring overall flexibility, robustness and extensibility.

The author starts the book with a discussion about various XML application scenarios and attempts to classify the use of XML data containers into three forms viz., a document, transaction or a message. He argues that any form of cross platform exchange and sharing of enterprise data falls in to one of the three.

He then convinces how the use of highly reusable structures and custom data types affects data architecture. If you are wondering, data architecture is a term used to describe XML structures that plumb disparate enterprise systems. Here are two new buzzwords - Application to Consumer (A2C) and Application to application (A2A). Since XML also used to describe data extracts from, insertions into, and exchanges between application systems and databases, it is important to understand variation in database data type support.

In the chapters that follow, XML schema is introduced as the singular standard for achieving maximum reusability and enforcing data standards. For each of the three XML usages, he quotes XML snippets and critiques on various approaches. The focus remains on a designing an XML schema for maximum reuse and extensibility.

The book should have been named as "XML Schema primer". Most of the chapters are dedicated to discuss application of XML schemas. The amount of material covering actual process, challenges and strategy recommendations to achieve optimal data architecture does not do any justice to the title.

Ajith Kallambella [...]

This book is great! I bought it because other data architects at a conference recommended it. I'm a data architect and after reading it, I am recommending it to others. It is very easy reading and also an excellent reference guide. By showing others chapters in the book, it has helped me explain XML and how it affects our company. I recommend it highly for all those involved in information technologies.

As the manager of SW development staff, this easy to understand XML manual has shaped and fine tuned the thinking of my department ... more consistency, logical, etc. This author really nailed it. It's mandatory reading.