Modeling

I am a software engineer with a goal of learning more about designing trading software. I bought this book with the hope that it would give me some insight into how trading software is designed and implemented. However 90% of this book focuses on general programming concepts. The book covers broad topics such as creating variables, classes, methods, overloading methods, inheritance, polymorphism, UML, SQL, ADO.NET. It also sprinkles in a few complex formulas for calculating values of various contracts. I have spent years and a lot of money learning and mastering these programming concepts. I think the target audience for this book (financial analysts) might be a bit overwhelmed with some of these concepts.
For a financial analyst who just wants to get a feel for what programmers actually do, the book is satisfactory. Although, there are plenty of programming for beginners books out there. After reading this book, I haven't gained any insight as to how financial professionals design and build trading software.

I have been a Professor of Finance for many years, and am always searching for a good book to use in my classroom. This is one of the best I have come across in a long time. It will be part of my required reading from now on.

This book is the first I've found after an exhaustive search for instruction on how to automate my trading strategies using VB.Net. I have not been dissapointed and hope that the authors plan to produce more work that will allow me to further my knowledge of automated trading systems. The knowledge I have gained from Modeling Financial Markets is allowing me to implement automated trading systems on a person level. The book will pay for itself many times over on my first day of trading.

This is a good beginner's guide to SEM and LISREL. The author explains the concepts in a very understandable manner. Although I bought this book two years back, I still refer back to it occasionally. I would highly recommend this to someone who is just starting out with SEM. But more advanced users will be a little disappointed because it stops at the basics. Two notes of warning are in order: (1) this book does NOT discuss the visual interface that LISREL now has, and (2) SPSS now supports AMOS and has dropped LISREL support.

In teaching structural equation modeling in a doctoral-level graduate class, I found Kelloway's book one of the most useful resources. Despite its title, the book is not only about LISREL. The initial chapters provide an excellent overview of the science (and art) of structural equation modeling. Kelloway provides probably a better summary than most other books on the topic.

If your goal is to use LISREL and apply structural equation modeling to your own work, this is the book for you. Goes over the model and the software in enough detail to handle most of the problems my stats students see, and is clearly written and easy to follow.

Ever since i read this book first in a library in Atlanta, I coudlnt hold myself but buy this book immediately the following week.

Excellent description on data modelling, and has clear diagrams that are easy to understand.

a must have for all serious sql data modelling guys and programmers..

I got a chance to read this book from an library in atlanta, and guess what? The next week I went and bought this book.

Has a very systematic approach, with good diagrams.

A must for all serious data modellers and SQL programmers

I found this book to be an excellent source for engineering students and practitioners. The distinguishing feature of the book is the way in which it introduces reader to complex modelling concepts in an easy to understand manner, covering both ordinary and partial differential equations. The book is rich in practical examples, and useful tables and graphs. Earlier prints suffer from typographical errors that are found to be corrected in the latest print of the book.

The book presents the disturbed state concept, or the concept of correction functions, as it applies to the modeling of engineering materials. The book is well written, simple to understand, and full of new ideas.

I take great pride in stating that my thesis under the author, Professor C.S. Desai, at Virginia Tech in 1979 was the beginning of what the author has named "The Disturbed State Concept." The thesis was subsequently published as a book:

"Fundamental Aspects of the Normality Rule and Their Role in Deriving Constitutive Laws of Soils," EP, 1980.

At that time a flier for the book read, "This book which establishes a link between theoretical mechanics and engineering is the only one available of its kind." The same can be said of the book by Professor Desai.

In essence, the Disturbed State Concept (DSC) says that for some materials, well founded equations of theoretical mechanics apply only when a material has attained some characteristic state called the fully adjusted state (FA) by the author. For other states, we must incorporate suitably chosen correction functions in order to model the OBSERVED material behavior. The correction functions attain a value of unity at the the characteristic state.

A typical example of the characteristic state is the critical state attained by a class of geomaterials at some unique combination of stress, strain, and internal structure.

The author asserts that with the help of DSC, we are able to apply some standard concepts of theoretical mechanics, e.g. the Drucker-Prager associative plasticity to a nonstandard material behavior such as nonassociative plasticity.

The beauty of the concept lies in its simplicity -- to an extent that the concept appears childish at times -- yet the concept gives us a powerful tool for making some abstract notions of mechanics work for engineering.

In the beginning chapter on introduction, the author sounds like a professor of Budhists Philosophy. Here is an excerpt.

"For a given material, the fully adjusted state can be described as the critical state at which the material approaches the state of invariant properties......The critical state is like the state Buddhist call NIRVANA, in which all biases, pushes, and pulls, due to KARMIC action (like nonsymmetric forces on materials, say, causing shear stresses), disappear, leading to the equilibrium or isotropic state."

An interesting chapter on DSC has recently appeared in the following book.

"Modeling in Geomechanics," Eds. M. Zaman, G. Gioda and J. Booker, Wiley, 2000.

The analysis is very detailed on a conceptual basis, not a technical one. Its promise to use Wal Marts modeling as a primary example is only partially met and that is very disappointing.

If you ever are going to be involved in a data warehouse project, this book will bring you a lot, either your a techie or a end-user

In 250 pages, mr. Westerman provide a complete analysis- an a good one - of a real data warehouse project (simply, the most famous DW in town !)

I believe that this book brings a lot wathever is your backgound and job. To me, as an experienced Data Warehouse consultant, it confirms some knowledge I had of such project and brings me a good backgroung in retail end -user report templates.

You may agree - or not - with Mr. westerman architectural ambitious scheme - Enterprise DW, ODS, UDS, ... - but if he still believe they are possible after such a big project experience ! You must take his word seriously !

Overall excellent book whatever is your skill and a key reading for retail business people

What I don't like:

There is no errata for this book, so when example it does not work - you will loose time until you find out what is wrong, your code or if there is a typo in the book.

Very short explanations for the examples. The Author should make a bigger effort to explain what he is doing.

He uses some techniques in examples - but he does not elaborate them. Example: He uses in one example (page 109) "GetTickCount" but there is no explanations for what GetTickCount does. There are many situations like this in the book where the Author does something (uses some methods or properties) - with no explanations.

What I like:

Subject! This is the only book that I found on this subject.

This book is an essential addition to every beginning and/or intermediate Delphi programmer's arsenal.

After a long struggle to fully understand the power of the TClientDataSet, this reader experienced what could loosely be referred to as a religious experience after reading chapters 3, 4 and 7. These chapters alone make the book worth many multiples of its price.

It's a difficult book to read. It assumes you are at graduate or post-graduate level and already know a lot about the topic. I am working on my Master's in Interaction Design and I found myself being forced to re-read paragraphs because I had no idea what I just read! On the other hand, the book goes deep into HCI issues and methods and often leaves you with good research questions. If you're looking for a book to help you with real issues related to interface design or product usability, this isn't it. This book is all about theory. It's boring at best.

It all comes down to this: If you're all about theory, this book is for you. If you want to be able to apply what you read to real-world situations - get something else.

Working through this book, I am constantly amazed at the number of topics covered and the depth and clarity of the authors (and in some cases, the entertaining story they tell). There is much important theory that exists in HCI and I have not found a book that does such a wonderful job bringing it, and the proper author to explain it, all together. Previously, it was a chore to track down the important theoretical works, not so now.

This book is NOT going to help you build better webpages or for that matter, teach you to build a better GUI. Do not expect it to as HCI is only marginally about this. HCI is more importantly about the work and activity people perform on a computer and through a computer with others. If you do not have this concept in mind, do not read this book as you will waste your time (and possibly write a bad review for it). If you are intrigued, read "The Design of Everyday Things" to give you the basic philosophy of HCI and this book to give you the theory of it.

Unfortunately, some chapters are not as strong as others and the binding of them all together is not as strong as it could be to give a complete picture of the field. That said, this is an important milestone for HCI and should be readable (and read) by all who have taken a basic HCI course.

This book is the best intro to the subject that I've seen. The authors minimize the use of notation, mathematics and the like, and invoke the reader's intuition by developing some good, concrete examples. They present those examples as datasets (accessible on the web), as "run" regressions (i.e. with parameter estimates and standard errors), and graphically.

They also demo how to "run" each of the examples on a PC, using the program MLn. If you don't use MLn (and I had never heard of it); this part of the book is less helpful. It would be great if, in an accompanying website perhaps, they were to demo the same analyses using other packages (e.g. SYSTAT, SAS and the like). But this book is really quite good, and a terrific addition to any applied social scientist's library.

When analysing data, the relationships between people that belong in the same classroom, live in the same street or suburb, are part of the same family or therapy group,etc., are often ignored. Multilevel or hierarchical linear modelling is a statistical technique for taking into account such dependencies, arranged in hierarchies (e.g., correlations between students within classrooms, correlations between classrooms within schools, correlations between schools within school districts). In other words, multilevel modeling techniques attempt to model the hierarchical relationships that are found in the real world. In the last 10 years or so there has been a growing number of books and software packages concerned with multilevel analyses. Introducing Multilevel Modeling is shorter and slightly less 'mathematical' than most and gives quite a good introduction to the subject. The book makes reference to the British MLn (MLWiN) computer program in its examples, whereas an introductory text arguably should have used the HLM program, for which a cutdown student version is available free. Taking group dependencies into account is extremely important, but unfortunately many researchers will be discouraged by the dry and heavy-going feel of these texts, which is so often the case with anything involving statistical theory. A highly approachable and readable book remains to be written, but Introducing Multilevel Modeling is probably the best of the current crop.

Being a veritable Kiki virgin before I read this book, I found Kiki's Memoirs more than helpful in showing the atmosphere of 1920's Paris. I did, however, agree with Ernest Hemingway's sentiments from his introdution-it is impossible to translate Kiki's words very well. It seems like Samuel Putnam was unable to get more than four sentences out without putting in an exclamation mark. This breaks the narrative up considerably. I would have given this book three stars, but I loved the Man Ray photos in it. The real strength of this book lies in the artwork.

This is Kiki in Kiki's own voice, no one could say it better.This is a wonderful book for those who love Bohemian Paris, and even those who don't.

This ambitious book attempts to model belief dynamics. It is largely formal in character and includes sections devoted to applying the modeling to specific kinds of beliefs and is thus quite complete in that sense. However, the modelling is at best a (to speak metaphorically) a 'zero-order' approximation. In particular, the notions of minimality discussed seem to suffer from vagueness.

This book provides a simple, self-contained and coherent framework for belief revision. The ability to model how an intelligent entity should revise its beliefs as it learns more about its environment is a fundamental goal of Artifical Intelligence.