Modeling

The good news is that this is probably the best book available on the materials of sculpture. The bad new is that it was written twenty years ago. (This paperback edition may have been published in 1988, but AFAIK, the text was unchanged from the original 1983 version.)

If you are interested in traditional forms, then this book probably covers everything you need. But if you want information on any materials and/or techniques that came into use post-1970's, you're out of luck. Plastics are a good example: urethane and silicone molding rubbers are given a cursory mention, even though they are quite common now. I don't think polyurethane casting resins (Por-a-kast, Poly 15, etc.) or polyurethane glues (Gorilla Glue, ProBond, etc.) are mentioned at all.

The wood section is surprisingly thin, with a bias toward subtractive methods (carving), even though wood construction is as common--if not more common--in contemporary work.

While there are plenty of photos (all black and white) of classic sculptures, there are a lot of unbelievably bad pieces illustrated--probably chosen for their materials rather than quality. Some are downright hideous.

This is a good resource, but be aware that it is no longer comprehensive.

This is a supurb reference book for a working sculptor. It covers stone and wood carving, as well as most major 20th century materials, from plastics to masonry to metal fabrication techniques. Nothing on fabrics or paper though. The illustrations are exciting and fairly thorough, with an emphasis is on innovative work. This is the one book I would want to take with me if shipwrecked on a desert island!

I used this as the text for a course in Mathematical Models and Applications, and I do not recommend that other teachers use it. I spent an average of somewhere between 5 and 10 hours per presentation (the class met three times per week) and that wasn't enough. The book's background information on groundwater, air quality, and hazardous materials was enough to get me started, but I found I had to spend a lot of time learning environmental information not covered in the book. I also spent an incredible amount of time constructing homework and exam problems. The book really isn't all that bad, and can serve well as an introduction to the subject for a college teacher who wants to learn something about this, but as a primary text it requires way too much preparation time on the part of the teacher, especially at an institution with a heavy teaching load. (I had an 11-hour teaching load.) By the way, the hazardous materials program used by the authors of the text, ARCHIE, is being phased out, and information about it is hard to obtain. (It doesn't even run on some modern computer systems.) Its replacement, CAMEO, currently has serious installation problems. It isn't all that hard to get around them on your own computer, but installation on computers in a lab may be a different story. Dave Trautman, The Citadel, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science

In the Spring of 2001, I used this book to teach a new course on mathematical modeling of environmental issues. I found this book to be a fascinating reading and wished to share it with students. The book's approach to environmental problems, and to their mathematical modeling, and the pedagogical suggestions given in the accompanying Instructor Manual, provided me with an excellent source for setting up an unusual and very successful mathematics course.
The book presents an in-depth introduction to several environmental issues of contemporary relevance, such as grounwater contamination, air pollution,and hazardous material handling.The students are exposed to most interdisciplinary aspects of the problems encountered. These aspects include social and ethical considerations,business, law and political implications, and the scientific side represented by chemistry, physics, geology and mathematics.Mathematical models are introduced as the natural machinery necessary for finding solutions to the quantitative aspects of the environmental problems. As such, even sophisticated models of air pollution, are accepted by students, with very little mathematical background,with a high degree of competence and enjoyment.Just as naturally, computers are being used to understand the implications of the mathematical modeling. That is, computers are used to carry out heavy computations and graph data (MS EXCEL), and to analyze case scenarios' danger zones in case of hazardous materials accidents. The later uses a risk analysis program which comes with the book, ARCHIE. ARCHIE is an interactive, user friendly DOS program which runs nicely once it is properly installed. It is a little tricky "fooling" the Windows environment into installing and running ARCHIE. I e-mailed Charles Hadlock, and he was very helpful talking me and the people at the Computer Lab through the installation.
The course requires a substantial amount of preparation to set it up initially, but this is to be expected for a course of such substantial interdisciplinary richeness.The instructor needs to become familiar with new software, read a little about environmental issues in an environmental science book, surf the Internet for relevant sites, and think how to teach the unfamiliar non-mathematical aspects of the course. All this work more them pays off in terms of what you end up offering the students, and their enthusiastic response. I am using this book again this semester. It is much easier and the students are just as enthusistic.
If you want to set up a course where mathematics is involved in solving some of the world's major problems in a natural and interesting way, I highly recommend that you use this book.
Sarah Glaz, Professor of Mathematics, University of Connecticut.

(Revised after reviewer took course in etiquette). "Mesoscale Meteorological Modeling" is the new second edition of the flagship text in the field. It is reasonably priced and seems to be well organized, addressing a lot of important problems. Aside from the discussion of thermodynamics, Professor Pielke's book is lucid and coherent.

To make a more specific criticism, consider section 2.2,entitled "Conservation of Heat." For a start I might complain that heat is not something conserved in atmospheric processes. In the usual thermodynamic usage, heat means energy transferred through thermal processes, is not an exact differential, and is not conserved. I think he means conservation of energy, but why not say so? It gets worse before it gets better. To quote from the first paragraph: "The first law of thermodynamics for the atmosphere states that differential changes in heat content, dQ, are equal to the sum of the work performed by an object, dW, and differential changes in internal energy, dI."

The first law of thermodynamics is universal - applying equally to steam engines (in which context it was first identified) and black holes. The phrase "differential changes in heat content" is nonsensical, since heat is energy transferred, not "contained" energy. The word differential is not only vague but also unnecessary. It would have been more accurate to say that the heat transferred into a system is equal to the sum of the work performed by the system and the increase in the internal energy of the system.

On page 8, he says that the virtual temperature is less than or equal to the sensible temperature, but the opposite is in fact true. On the same page, I found his attempt to discuss perfect differentials confused and confusing. There is both a mathematical and a physical point involved here. The (thermodynamically interesting) perfect differentials are the total differentials of state variables. dQ is not such an exact differential, and that is why it is meaningless to talk about conservation of heat.

Another unfortunate line is "Internal forces are required to account for the dissipation of momentum by molecular motions." (page 16). This is misleading. Momentum is conserved - absolutely - and unlike energy is not usually converted ("dissipated") to a more inconspicuous form, like internal energy. The atmosphere can transfer momentum to other parts of itself, by pressure or friction, to the ocean or the solid Earth (again by friction) or even (in microscopic amounts, by tidal forces) to the sun and moon, but these should be considered external forces. I infer from the succeeding sentences that conversion of energy from one form to another was the point.

I could quibble about the fact that he confuses centripetal and centrifugal acceleration (page 14) or the fact that he for some obscure reason refers to conservation of momentum as "Conservation of Motion," but that might be excessively picky.

Despite this type of flaw, I think the book is potentially useful. Perhaps one should just skip the thermodynamics (and read about it some good elementary physics book, like Sears) and just read the part he apparently cares about - the modeling. Apparently this is as good as it gets on the subject of mesoscale modeling. In any case, I don't begrudge the money I spent on it - I learned some useful things about modeling coordinates in Chapter 6.

I read the Reviewer's comments and appreciate his overall positive review. However, I feel it is necessary to clarify misconceptions regarding the basic physics material which is presented in the review.
The conservation equations that are presented do not mean a quantity such as heat is always conserved. As discussed in the text, there are sources and sinks of heat in the conservation of equation of heat that is presented. A conservation equation for motion is also just as appropriate as writing a conservation equation for momentum. We can write a conservation equation for any quantity, such as a trace gas (e.g. CO2). Source/sink terms can be accounted for in this mathematical framework.
The equations in the book are specifically written for the atmosphere, which is treated as an ideal gas. This is why the qualification is added in the text that the equations are for the atmosphere (and specifically the earth's atmosphere). The equations developed in the book from the first principle of thermodynamics are only appropriate for the earth's atmosphere, since the ideal gas equation for air is used.
The basic phyics text in Chapters 2 and 3 have been extensively reviewed by numerous students and others and has been found to be solidly based in fundamental concepts. The Reviewer did correctly find a typo in that the virtual temperature is greater than the actual temperature whenever water vapor is present. The inequality on page 8 was reversed but the text and the explanation in that paragraph are correct and should be clear to a reader.
Finally, I thank the reviewer for taking the time to complete the review. If there is a third Edition, I certainly will acknowledge that review.

I used this book in a graduate course on Stochastic processes. The book would rate as average or just above that as I found it to be insufficient for a start in the subject unless you were in a classroom course. It does assume some background in probabilty. Also, the explanations, while complete, are not as easy to understand as the Roos book. I also found that the examples were extremely easy as compared to the excersice problems. THis makes it tougher to 'extrapolate' and understand. It has one nice feature though- solutions to half the problems are there at the end of the book making it better for students while giving faculty leeway too. The excercises are quite comprehensive too. I'd say this is an excellent book for someone with some prior knowlede of Stochastic Processes. For a beginner, this may not be the best start.

The book arises from lectures at UNC-CH in a two-semester course on stochastic models. The author has exceptional precision and organization in the classroom, and this comes through in the book. Great book for teaching from, as well as learning from. This book also takes a step which more venerable texts, such as the Trivedi book or the Ross series could not -- it has computational excercises suitable for math packages like Mathematica. Thus, the student can be introduced to scientific computer literacy as well as stochastic processes. I recommend this book to anyone interested in teaching today's student, or for preparing themselves for challenges in Operations Research. The book would make an above-average reference as well. Mike Bailey Associate Professor, Naval Postgraduate School

This book is easy to read and contains clear examples of how to use stella software to model the environment. The marvel here is the software, not the book. For the software timid, it might suppliment the software users guide.

A highly readable introduction to environmental modeling. What distinguishes the book from other environmental science and environmental modeling works is its interdisciplinary treatment. In particular, the models integrate the physical world and the world of human behavior. Far too many environmental models fail to close the feedbacks between human behavior and the state of the environment, instead taking waste inputs or resource use as exogenous. This book helps students learn to model human behavior (social and economic) as an integral part of the ecological system. The models and software mean the book encourages active learning, and enable students to explore important issues on their own if they choose.

I recently discoverd this book by David Kracov and had to purchase it to see how close I could come to duplicating his sculpting technique. So far I am very happy with the results, and considering the fact that he uses a clay that I have not used in the past, I consider this a good selling point for his book. I would not recommend this book for someone just getting into clay sculpting as he leaves out some vital information (or so I believe) and some of his instructions are very vague. But if you've learned the basics of sculpting characters from another source or are a natural artist, I think you should be able to glean some very useful design concepts from this book. Mr. Kracov is very talented and I hope he publishes another book soon. I will be watching and waiting for one.

I first got this book out of the library and now that I've read it, I'm going to buy it. The book demonstrates a cartoonish but not cutesy style of sculpting. I've always wondered how to make that style of eyes and brows and it showed me exactly. Might not be the best book for someone who has never touched clay before but definitely worth reading for anyone with even a little experience.

After reading several books written by three Amigos, I find this book do the good job of teaching you how to develop OO systems using UML.

It distills the goodies of the OO Process chapter by chapter. Finally, two cases are used to illustrate the concepts and techniques presented.

Take this book if you want to equip yourself with OO technology

After reading several books written by three Amigos, I find this book do the good job of teaching you how to develop OO systems using UML.

It distills the goodies of the OO Process chapter by chapter. Finally, two cases are used to illustrate the concepts and techniques presented.

Take this book if you want to equip yourself with OO technology.

I mostly agreed with Eric Ma. There are some areas that Wrox needs to review the whole process of publishing Java-related books. Here are some drawbacks that I can draw from reading recent Java-related books:

(1) Repeated Contents: Materials about Servlet, JSP, EJB, JNDI, JDBC, XML, etc are repeated over and over many books. This could waste time, money, and papers for both Wrox and readers.

(2)Books or Articles?: I asked myself: is Wrox publishing books or articles? Each book is written by many authors and the book's flow is inconsistent. The assessment that it is not a book but a collection of articles may partially true. It is true that a book if written by a team of authors could speed up the process of releasing it, but if Wrox editors and coordinators have to do their better jobs.

I suggest that Wrox should review its strategy of publishing books to avoid the repeating of materials over and over and thus bring down the cost associated with publishing the books. The final result is: readers and publisher will both save time and money. Otherwise, readers will loose their belief with Wrox.

For the past 2 years Wrox has been publishing books dedicated to Windows-based data access (ADO etc.), but the same cannot be said about their Java/database collection. Although you find chapters on JDBC scattered all-over almost all server-side Java related books by Wrox, there was no single volume from them that teaches JDBC first, and then show how it is used by the newer dependent technologies, until this book arrived. After looking through this book, I must say the authors and editors have done a rather commendable job.

Why do I make the above conclusion? Let me give you my general impression of the book first. A theme repeated in several of my recent reviews on books from Wrox is about the problem in coherence associated with multi-author books. Well, having more than a dozen of authors for a single book seems to be a fact of life (for books from Wrox at least) now, as the publication cycle gets shorter. I was rather surprised to find out that the organization and coherence is very good in this book, i.e., there is very little overlap among chapters. Also, this books uses JDBC cleverly to tie other pieces of J2EE together, making smooth transitions from one chapter to another. If you want to know, this factor alone prompted me to add an extra star to the overall rating of the book.

Let's now run down the chapters of this book quickly. The first 115 pages deals object-oriented and database modeling, and can be skipped by any "Professional" developer. Then after your obligatory intro to JDBC API, the next chapter covers the JDBC 2.0 optional package. This is the best treatment of this topic I have seen. Then another chapter is all about SQLJ, another first. The effort of having a chapter on database performance should be lauded, where connection pooling, prepared statements and stored procedures usage are demoed. The reminder of the book is about applying JDBC in various J2EE components, such as JSP, servlets, EJB, JMS, and XML. For this part of the book, even though I accept the fact the proper stage has to be set for each one of them, I still don't believe the book found the right balance between focusing on JDBC and showing what these other technologies are about. A large number of pages are used to teach basic JNDI, servlets, JSP's, and EJB's stuff (remember there is already a book on J2EE from Wrox!). Therefore, it is up to the reader to discover the real nuggets of gold hidden in this pile, which are far and in between in places. I found that some critical issues are not highlighted or details are lacking, such as how to use connection pooling/data sources in servlets, JSP's, and EJB's, the threading issues related to sharing database connections, and good database practices in BMP EJB's. However, the one thing I cannot complain about is that the book did not forget to teach the transaction aspect of EJB with a good depth (there is a short ans sweet chapter on using JTA/JTS inside EJB). There is also a chapter on the brand-new JDO framework, even though the spec is still in a state of flux. Finally, there are 4 case study chapters in the book - although the design and implementation are limited in scope and as a whole those samples do not teach all you need to do know about enterprise scale J2EE system development, they do provide a flavor of how JDBC is used in real world, together with setting up Tomcat, JRun, Orion, and WebLogic to access MS SQL Server and Oracle databases.

Now my overall take of this book. For VB/SQL and pure back-end PL/SQL developers who are eager to jump on the Java express train and need a suitable platform (especially for the ones who learn best from playing with actual code), I recommend this book as one of several you should own. Compared to other JDBC books from say O'Reilly and Sun's JDBC Tutorial, this book is the most up-to-date, contains the most source code, and has the broadest coverage of related topics. But keep in mind some of the advanced topics such as EJB and JMS can be intimidating for new-comers. On the other side of the coin, people who are advanced in various server-side Java technologies are unlikely to benefit a great deal from this book and should look elsewhere for info (for example Wrox's J2EE and upcoming EJB titles).

This book offers a great variety of options for 3D projects with all the information to get your started, over what ever fear you might have and into the creative fun that can be had! The author starts with essentials, paper mache, styrofoam and brown paper that anyone can use and shows some wonderful projects for beginners. They include excellent masks, wonderful creapy creatures. Some of the urethane foam work is completely unexpected and not such a common starting point for most people. The author includes wire framing, puppets - just an incredible assortment. I purchased this book for myself and love it, but it would have been great to have when I had children around looking for things to do. Truly a book for all ages

I think it is a very good book for beginners like me and the author is a very nice guy. I grasped this complex software more quickly than I originally thought with the help of this book. I hope he will publish a deeper book on ACIS in the future.