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I began to read this book out of duty: I am a pastor and a massage therapist, I have an interest in the spirituality of healing, and I try to keep up with what's written on the subject. Much of it is dreadful. Twenty pages into this book, and I was hooked. It has wonderfully icky medical stories. It has spiritual insights (from a style of spirituality very different from my own). It has a flavor of humble honesty. It has very funny moments. I was surprised: I love it. I'm buying a stack for presents.

I am a physician in training and purchased this book recently. It was exactly what I needed. With the long hours and constant stress that a resident physician is under, it was refreshing to see that The Great Physician also underwent that stress and knows what I am facing.

Dr. Stephens does an excellent job comparing Christ to the modern day physician. While, this book is written for mass appeal, it will be most relevant and understood by the medical community. Jesus, MD should be required reading for all Christian physicians.

"Performance by Design" provides both a conceptual and a practical framework for experienced software developers that want to get started building quality applications using performance engineering techniques.

Performance engineering is a discipline that attempts to integrate concerns about the responsiveness of computer applications and their capacity requirements into standard application development practices, which otherwise focus almost exclusively on meeting functional requirements. Just like not getting the functional spec right in the early stages of the application development lifecycle can lead to a cascading series of design and implementation decisions that are difficult to reverse in later stages of the development process, neglecting performance considerations until after the applications has met its functional requirements is often too late to tackle them effectively.

The first part of the book surveys a wide range of performance modeling and capacity planning techniques, served up in clear, concise language with a minimum of mathematics. It is a gentle introduction to analytic queuing networks written at the level that any advanced undergraduate Computer Science student ought to be able to master. The heart of the book, representing Chapters 5 through 9, is a series of Case Studies that rounds out and concludes Part 1. Each of the case studies deftly illustrates another analytic technique that a performance engineer needs to understand how to apply. Chapter 5, for instance, steps through descriptive statistics and cluster analysis as it discusses what is involved in deriving model parameters for a simple database transaction workload. Chapter 6 builds upon this discussion by solving a simple multi-class model, delving into confidence limits and the use of a factorial design to limit the number of trials of a benchmark experiment. Finally, Chapter 9 illustrates using software performance engineering techniques to model a new application during its initial development phases, beginning with the database design.

The first half of the book is designed to stand alone if the Reader doesn't have the stomach for the rigorous mathematical treatment of analytic queuing models that characterizes Part 2. The second half of the book should be familiar territory to readers of Menasce's other books on performance modeling, beginning with Markov chains and proceeding through Mean Value Analysis. The final two chapters describe approaches to modeling serialization delays and servers that have load-dependent performance characteristics, two topics that are essential to accurate models of application-level performance.

The great challenge of the performance engineering approach is how to persuade experienced applications developers to adopt these techniques. "Performance by Design" is aimed at getting software developers to pay closer attention to performance concerns throughout the application development life cycle. Compared to other books on the subject, this may be the best attempt yet to promote the practice of performance engineering as a discipline that deserves to be integrated into the wider context of application development.

This team of authors has produced yet another invaluable book for practitioners who perform capacity and performance planning, as well as students who are introduced to this topic for the first time. Unlike earlier works by the authors, which addressed performance in specific systems environments such as client/server, e-business and web services, this book is more general. Therein lies the true value - it teaches the fundamentals and will not be soon outdated.

The book is structured into two parts - Part I consists of four chapters that lay the foundation. Chapter 1 covers system life cycles, Chapter 2 moves the reader from systems to descriptive models of the systems, and Chapters 3 and 4 delve into the essence of performance - quantifying performance models and giving a performance engineering methodology. This material is reinforced with five chapters, each of which is a case study of a specific performance problem. These include database services, web servers, data center, e-business services and help-desk services.

Part II, The Theory of Performance Engineering, addresses the underlying knowledge that performance and capacity planners will need in order to approach their tasks using true quantitative methods. The six chapters in this part of the book cover the following topics in detail, and are clearly and succinctly written: Markov models, single queue systems, single class MVA (Mean Value Analysis), queuing models with multiple classes, queuing models with load dependent devices, and non product-form queuing models. Armed with a knowledge of these fundamentals you should be able to tackle complex performance and capacity problems, both in the software engineering domain when a system is being designed, and in the operational support domain when service level management and availability are the goals. In addition to the way the authors step you through complex math in a clear, easy-to-understand manner, this material is augmented by Microsoft Excel workbooks that bring the material to life. Nearly every chapter has associated workbooks and spreadsheets that can be downloaded from the web site that supports this book, adding considerably to the value of the material.

If you are new to performance planning as a discipline this should be the first book you read on the subject. If you teach performance planning, this is an ideal text around which you can base a curriculum that will prepare your students for real world challenges.

If you use JCL (as a novice or an experienced developer) then the following 3 books (published by Wiley) should cover the bulk of your needs;

1. Gary DeWard Brown's "System 370/390 JCL"

2. James Janossy's "Practical MVS JCL Examples"

3. James Janossy's "Advanced MVS JCL Examples"

All solidly blend theory with practise, with "1" slanted toward theory, "2" slanted toward practical examples and "3" picking up where "2" leaves off.

All are independent treaures in their own right yet are also complementary. They get straight to the core of the issue - making JCL productive for you.

These three sit on my desk in work and rarely a day goes by without someone borrowing them.

The only comment I would add is that these books do not delve deeply into the use of utilities. They do show you how to call them and occasionally explain the many parameters that the utilities offer. However, if you need an in depth explanation of utilities, you may need to look elsewhere (and Lowe's "OS Utilities" is usually too lightweight to help).

The two other books by Lowe and Zamir purchased prior to buying this book by Janossy were a waste of my time and money. This book explains using JCL in very simple terms. I have looked at and used JCL for the past ten months as a newcomer to the mainframe and still did not know the purpose for some of the simpler items in a JCL statement, such as the uses for SYSIN, SYSUT1, SYSUT2, and the DUMMY designation. I learned more in the first three chapters than I learned in ten months on the job. Any diagrams discussed are actually on the same page or adjoining to the page under discussion! This is a real treat compared to other books. I am looking for other books by this author, including his COBOL book.

I am new to SAS, and I want to learn quickly. I am not a computer programmer, and syntax is not the fastest way for me to learn (and I do not think it is effective). This book works well: I learn from looking at code examples paired with clear narrative and brief output. I give the authors great credit for the ingenuity of their style (which saves me time and money). Although the books is perhaps a far from comprehensive, it is the SAS book I value most right now.

If you are learning SAS, you will probably find this book to be very helpful. The manuals that come with SAS are very diffuse, and furthermore, don't have enough examples, giving you mainly syntax. On the other hand, this book extracts a useful subset of the SAS system that is spread over many of the SAS manuals, and illustrates it with numerous simple, well-chosen examples.

One thing that sets this book apart from many of the other after-market SAS books for beginners is that it gives some nice hints as to how to write efficient SAS code, which quickly becomes important when you are dealing with large data sets.

Overall, the book is nicely organized, and well-suited to being used as a reference after you read it. It belongs on the desk of every beginning to intermediate SAS programmer. (If you are a true beginner, you might want to start with Delwiche and Slaughter's "The Little SAS Book: A Primer" for a completely painless introduction to the SAS system.)

I have been in elementary education for over 4 years and find this book to be indispensable in creating, choosing and evaluating assessment tools for my classroom. This book is expertly written in an easy-to-read format and the authors present the information with hands-on activities and examples. It goes through the basic types of test questions and helps the reader analyze the effectiveness of those items. It made me take a good, hard look at the assessments I use - I recommend this book to parents, test preparers, teachers, and administrators. Definitely a book that won't sit on the shelf!

"Test Development" is an great book for teachers who want to develop tests to accurately measure their student's achievement. Even as a teacher with over 30 years of experience, I picked up a number of good tips. The authors have done a terrific job presenting information in easy-to-understand language complimented by dozens of illustrations and examples.

Each chapter ends with review questions and exercises to reinforce learning. I found the section at the back of the book especially helpful. The authors provided many different examples of test items from several curriculum areas.

I would recommend this book for pre-service teachers, those new to the field and veterans who have made teaching their career, who would like to learn the ways to preparing the best possible exam for their students. It's a perfect addition to any teacher's resource bookshelf.

This book is necessary for anyone who is interested in knowing what makes a true "rebel". If you still think a tattoo or nosering make you a "threat" to society, read and learn from these real pioneers. They were punk before Hot TOpic and MTV made that cool.

Martin put together a powerful collection of rebels with far-reaching impact. The only way to improve this book would be to update it with new entries on a regular basis or perhaps a "where are they now" review. The photos are great, especially the ones of Peter Plate and Ian MacKaye.

The culture in Eilgayaq has a foundation with a Yugtun language. Majority of the population are fluent speakers in Yugtun. A school should be established with Yugtun langauge in the location where the language is strongly spoken. The elders of Eilgayaq have a unique ability to keep the language strong. Dr. Jerry Lipka deserves to have his name titled for the schools in Eilgayaq. Eilgayaq is in the Southwest region of Alaska.

Lipka, Mohatt, and The Ciulistet Group's book is an important contribution for educators interested in educational equity, access, and school/curriculum reform. The authors underscore cultural issues in education that are authentic, multifaceted, and critical. These are the very issues that must be considered if we are to meet the educational needs of all children. The heart of the book squarely challenges simplistic answers to complex educational "problems" by providing a a refreshing format to voices we rarely hear.

What a great read. You will love the insight into the Christian's soul. I'm buying many copies for my friends! You should too!

A very good book for any Christian. Very, very true and moving. Everybody should get it.

I had the pleasure of taking Professor Seamon's Administrative Law course at the University of South Carolina School of Law. He really knows the material in and out and this book reflects that.

Administrative law is probably one of the more complex areas of law, and this book provides a solid framework for understanding the material. I reviewed some commercial outlines, but this material is much better suited for the E&E format. I've used the E&E Series for all of the first year courses and found this to be one of the better books. I highly recomend getting this book and going through it both before and during class.

This is the book you need to understand OS/390 JCL today, including advanced material your data center and it's manager will not even know. Drop the DCB parameter, specify space parameters with record counts using AVGREC, learn the new class structures of SMS. Learn why being too clever will only hurt those less clever and how to protect them in the way you write your JCL. Cover programs and see exacting programs in COBOL, C, and Assembler all on an OS/390. The most read book I have.