I have made four trips to Australia using various versions of this guide. You have to remember that it started off as a backpacker's/ alternative travel guide and has kept the strengths (in depth coverage of offthe beaten track areas) as well as the weaknesses (concentrates on low end travellers) of that approach. It needs to be not just revised and updated but also completely rewritten from scratch. The book is also geared to the traveller who is already in Australia. For example, it is extremely sparing in giving out email addresses and, after all these editions, still does not give the Australian postcodes for places. In its attempt to cover the entire country, it has also gotten very bulky and inconvenient.

I like Lonely Planet and its guides, but I think that it is time for them to either abandon or change the focus of this country-wide guide. In the meantime, I am relying on their series of Australian State guides for my next trip.

CHECKED IN THE STAFF WERE AMAZING VERY HELPFULL POLITE AND READY TO SERVE YOU AND FULL OF HELPFULL KNOWLEDGE ON ALL THE LOCAL TOURS IN THE AREA AS WELL AS OTHER TOURS IN AUSTRALIA CLEAN AND VERY AFFORDABLE GAMES ROOM TV/CABLE SWIMMING POOL THE BEST THING ABOUT THE HOSTEL IS THAT IT WAS ONLY FIVE MINSTO THE CITY AND THEY GAVE YOU A FREE MEAL EVERY NIGHT AT A RESTURANT COME NIGHT CLUB VERY GOOD PLACE GO AND HAVE A LOOK OR JUST PHONE THEM ON (07)40410249 FROM TWO HAPPY POMMS BACKPACKING AROUND THE WORLD MY RATING FOR THE PLACE IS 5 STARS

Because Australia is so big.. and there is just so much to see no single book can possibly cover the whole country. That's why lonely planet has published so many titles pertaining to this country.

I think the intention of this book is to give insight into what is available where... then select the relevant lonely planet guide for the area that most interests you.

A lot of people don't know what is where in Aus, as an outline to learn... I think this book serves anyone very very well.

It's much cheaper to buy this book.. and choose where you want to find out more about... than buying the complete series of lonely planet guides in the Australia range.

My criticism can be boiled down to a single line, this one. I read this kind of books hoping to find useful ideas for my business. Here I can't find any.

Maybe I should look for the purely intellectual interest, I don't know. My best advice is this: if you read to find recipes, read something else. Read this only out of curiosity.

And yet again, I was just curious about the US Army chapter but got little out of it - gruelling experience, after-action review, and all that - we did it in volleyball and basket training twenty years ago ... what's the big deal?

Its funny. I was reading the review following this one and the person was saying how he could NOT find anything worthwhile to apply to his business. He must not have even picked up the book!

I think there are plenty of great lessons within the book. Its not only a book about strategy, but a new framework to think in terms of. The world has changed greatly in the last 20 years and a lot of the old management frameworks have less significance. Complexity science is the new way to think and this book does a fantastic job of relating the "complex" topic to business. And the rules apply to all areas of the organization: strategy, organizational design, etc. If you want to be prepared to lead the complex globlal organizations of tomorrow, then this is a must read.

Surfing the Edge of Chaos does a marvelous job of taking many of the ideas being developed in complexity theory and applying them to the business world. In contrast say to Garrett Ralls who tried to do much the same thing, this book succeeds. I found myself continually thinking about not only the examples they provide, but also on my own work experiences and other companies that I have analyzed.

The authors do an excellent job of contrasting their approach (adaptive leadership) with more traditional reorganization (operational leadership). But refreshingly, they also acknowledge that in some cases, the more traditional approach might be more appropriate. There are many interesting concepts being developed by complexity theorists and this book manages to capture many, if not most, of them.

They show repeatedly the need to increase the stress on an organization in order to break past patterns of behavior. Their use of fitness landscapes (the idea that a successful company rests on a peak, and that in order to reach a new higher peak, often you must go down into the valley) is very powerful and at least partially explains why so many successful companies subsequently struggle, or fail, to adapt. Importantly though, the authors also spend a great deal of time talking about the unintended (or second and third order) effects of change. The point is not that you will be able to predict all of them (which is what chaos theory explicity says you cannot do), but rather that you must be flexible enough to roll with those unanticipated consequences.

Does that mean that every idea in this book is new? Of course not, but to be successful, a new theory often must combine the old with the new. And this book does a masterful of applying the ideas of Chaos/Complexity theory to business, of providing a new framework to think about both old and new problems. You may not agree with everything that appears in this book, but you will certainly come away with much food for thought.

The first half of this text seems be be a bit simple. Many of the problems are confusing at best. The authors are not very clear on what they want. Many students in my class were frustrated by this time and time again. Still other times the questions were way to easy and never really chalanged the students. Basicly the first half does not provied a good solid base for Calculus. The second half is just flat out poorly written. It leaves the students constently scraching their heads wondering what the authors want. Questions are asked in such a way as to not make sence or not to follow the chapters very well. Chapt 7 is very much like this. Bad. The faculty agrees by having to put out an additional book of their own to help provide a better understanding of Trig.
Over all this book needs to be re-thought out. A poor choise for instructors wanting their students to get a solid base so as to takle more advaced math classes.

I like pictures of people on bikes. It makes me feel better because riding mountain bikes is fun. So when I work on functions, I feel happier.

Great book! It is especially good for understanding what different functions do, and how. This is very important for understanding calculus. Great examples, always linking functions with things in real life.

I was captivated by this book for the first 100 pages -- until it began to fizzle. O'Donnell certainly has a scintillating sense of humor and writes trenchantly about gay life in New York. The book's one set piece on Fire Island is hilarious, and I found myself reading bits of it to friends. Alas, the narrative seems to wane and lag after Homer exits, and what follows feels all too familiar and predictable. Don't get me wrong. There are original insights all the way through, particularly about being a twin. Indeed, that subject matter in and of itself might make for fascinating next-novel material. The other comment I want to make is that although much of the dialogue is delicious and bitchy and pointed, you have to suspend disbelief a bit because you know that people can't really be that witty en passant. Obviously in writing one has to tred the dangerous ground between banal and clever, but when characters are two clever they run the risk of sounding too much like the author.

Getting Over Homer is a sparsely written novel about Blue Monohan, yet ANOTHER character from Cleveland (I've been to Cleveland and it isn't nearly this interesting in real life, Mark). Blue has one foot in the Buckeye state and one in the big city life of New York. Unlike another Cleveland-born character, Mary Ann Singleton, of Tales of the City fame, Blue's life remains somewhat centered in his Catholic white bread family life in Cleveland and embraces his move to the city only half-heartedly. This is unfortunate. Ninety-percent of the interesting characters in the book are Blue's family members! Oh, Mark...how I wish you'd let us get to know some of them better. This book could have been twice as long and still have held my interest. Even the main characters are underdeveloped. I found over and over again that I wanted to know some of the characters more. Mark writes hauntingly, however, and on more than one occassion provides beautiful insight into the "normal" everyday life of a gay man. That is why I chose to read this book, as I am also a middle aged man grappling with the fact that love sometimes leaves inexplicably. Finishing the book has made me want to read more of O'Donnell's offerings. I would recommend this book as light hearted reading, perfect for the train or bus as the chapters are small. Maybe we should all date someone like Mark O'Donnell...

After I first read this book, I couldn't believe Mark O'Donnell wasn't a more famous writer. He is truly gifted. The characters are hilariously real and the writing is just amazing--the similes and metaphors are to die for. This book was a laugh riot from beginning to end. It's theme is universal--LOVE hurts but you survive it, even though you're dead sure you won't.

The puzzles in the book are of little practical value. If you have much previous reading in finance you would already be aware of these issues.

You may also find the tone of the book annoying - "look how clever I am".

Like most of finance, the math is not very interesting in itself, nor is it very accurate in describing the real world e.g. the Black-Scholes option pricing model.

If you are reasonably good at math and know little or nothing about finance you may enjoy the book. Otherwise a standard text on investment management would be better.

This small, entertaining monograph can be read superficially in a sitting and provides food for thought. It would be interesting and useful for econophysicists to try to find alternative solutions to several of the first five puzzles not based on either expected utility or 'equilibrium' arguments. Kritzman prefaces the book by stating that he will not address either the equity premium or dividend puzzle because these two problems depend on agents' psychology. He addresses instead 6 puzzles that he calls purely logical and mathematical. However, he contradicts himself in that several of the solutions depend on utility functions and therfore on agents' psychology. His background is that of money manager.

Siegel's Paradox is based on the fact that the average of a random variable differs from the inverse of the average of the same variable. He applies this to exchange rates with the question whether the difference is economically relevant.

In Liklihood of Loss the nonuniqueness of liklihood of loss is discussed. The result is used to criticize the idea of using social security funds to place bets in the stock market. Lognormal returns, which are incorrect especially for large returns, are assumed throughout the book.

In Time Diversification he addresses the interesting question whether agents should be more risk-tolerant with long rather than short time horizons. The conventional wisdom assumes the former, but he discusses a solution by Samuelson that contradicts this viewpoint. Samuelson's solution is, of course, based on an expected utility, which is arbitrary.

Why the Expected Return is Not to be Expected. Kritzman argues that the expected return has less than 50% probability of occuring.

Half the Stocks All the Time or All the Stocks Half the Time? Should an agent switch or balance? The balanced strategy has lower risk. Again, expected utility is referred to, but this time after the fact.

The Irrelevance of the Expected Return for Option Valuation. This chapter extols the use of the riskless return in the delta hedge strategy, an idea much beloved of theorists and ignored by traders. In this chapter, I am irritated that everyone under the sun (including Einstein and Wiener) gets credit for the background necessary for the Black-Scholes equation while Osborne, who introduced the lognormal distribution into finance in 1958, is completely ignored. The main point, however, is that the famous (anti-) arbitrage argument leading to a riskless hedge is wrong on two counts {1}, another example of how the economists' 'equilibrium' idea does not apply to reality. As we point out in our new stochastic theory of returns, volatility and option pricing, why would a trader go to the trouble to construct a complicated hedge that must be updated continually only to get the same return he'd get by letting his money rest in a CD or money market fund? Clearly, such a trader would not be intelligent.

Credit is given incorrectly to Einstein for his solution of a heat transfer problem whereas in reality all that was/is needed in order to solve the Black-Scholes equation (after a simple transformation) is the Green function for the diffusion equaion written down by Einstein, Bachelier and others. Also repeated is the irritating claim that CAPM is an 'equilibrium' model, which it patently is not {1}.

References

1. J. L. McCauley and Gemunu H. Gunaratne, An Empirical Model for Volatility of Returns and Option Pricing, submitted (2002).

Entertaining AND informative. This book presents 6 puzzles of finance and their solutions in a clear, concise, and interesting way. A very unique and engaging book that I'd recommend to anyone.

I found this book to be less of an account of a neurosurgeon's day to day life and more of a doctor's reflections on a few significant patients in his career. There are other books out there that discusses patients from a neurosurgical perspective and they are better reading too. For a more technical read that really brings you into the world of neurosurgery, try The Healing Blade by Edward Sylvester, Working in a Very Small Place by Mark Shelton, When Air Hits Your Brain by Frank Vertosick Jr MD, First Do No Harm by Kenyon Rainer MD. All of these books have accounts of triumph and loss from the point of view of doctor and patient. My two favorites are told from an outside observer (by Sylvester and Shelton, respectively) because as outsiders, both Sylvester and Shelton take the time to introduce the reader to the Barrow's Neurological Institute and Pitt's dept of Neurosurgery in their respective books. If you are interested in neurosurgery as a future career choice, or you just want to know what a neurosurgeon does, then check out my recommendations. If you want to read a heart wrenching tale of life and death entangled with neurosurgery, again, take my recommendations. Two books I've left out of this list are Frances Conley's Walking Out on the Boys (less about neurosurgery and more about her experiences with the social politics at Stanford's Dept of Neurosurgery) and Ben Carson's Gifted Hands (an inspirational autobiography that has some technical neurosurgical cases, but is mainly a recount of his own personal demons and ultimate triumphs) because these two books do not dive deeply enough into the nitty gritty heart of the day-in and day-out of being a neurosurgeon. They are, however, pretty good books in their own right.

As a surgeon who enjoys the writings of other physicians, I was disappointed with Judith's Pavilion. His metaphors and analogies are frequently a bit far fetched. The writing lacks coherence while his stream of consciousness makes the prose difficult to read. The author rarely points to anything profound or intriguing, though he does write with conviction. There are plenty of other reflective books about medicine that would be better to sample than Judith's Pavilion. If this genre interests you, try something by one of these physicians: Paul Brand (The Gift of Pain, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made), Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings), Lewis Thomas (The Lives of a Cell, The Youngest Science), Richard Selzer (Mortal Lessons, Letters to a Young Doctor), David Graham (Thoughts Along the Way), Harold Klawans (Toscanini's Fumble, Newton's Madness), or Sherwin Nuland (The Wisdom of the Body).

Combining science and humanities is a fascinating undertaking - I'm finding more and more examples of it; his is one of the best.

Although there is usable, valuable information in this book, overall it's just OK. There are a lot of errors that should have been caught. That lack of attention to detail in a listing or sales contract could land you in court.

There was also some padding to make the book bigger. When the author tells you to make a list to compare brokerages, he includes the list three times so you can compare three brokers!

My guess is, that in the future, the author will write a better, more in depth book about real estate. He knows the business and has been very successful. In the meantime, "Your First Year in Real Estate," by Dirk Zeller, is a better introduction to the profession.

This book is a very basic introduction to the real estate business. If you want a general idea of what it takes to begin in real estate, this is a good resource. One issue that existed throughout the book were the constant grammatical and typographical errors. It was distracting at times and dimminished the impact of what was written.

The sound practical advice this book gives makes it a real must have for salespeople new to the real estate industry. It is easy to follow and lays out the pitfalls and trimphs of the real estate industry.

The Game Programming Gems books are fat and full of good ideas. Unfortunately, these ideas are only really useful to beginning programmers; anyone who has programmed seriously for more than two years will know 90% of the material in the book series.
The remaining 10% of the book is remarkably good, with innovative ideas on how to approach problems. But Charles River Media decided to lengthen the book with such trivialities as how to use the C++ Standard Library and using Direct3D. Most of the material in the GPG series is covered better, and in more depth in other books which don't have the word "game" in their title.

I now have all three of them. OK, first two were borderline acceptable, meaning the ratio of anything exoteric to programming trivialities (like loading DLLs explicitly) was, in my view, not intolerable. Though I'm curious why such a DLL topic would be included in anything "game" and "guru", it's basic Windows programming.

But in this third installment they continued this ... practice and even worsened it. A game programmer is BY DEFINITION a more-or-less competent general-purpose programmer, and so a massive inclusion of programming banalities can have no explanation other than blatant, in your face attempts to fatten the book in order to jack up the price. And I'm not even a game programmer, I don't care for games and never written one, nor do I plan to, I buy these game books because they contain examples of PROBLEM-ORIENTED, applied programming, most of which is either directly applicable in a much larger than just games area, or, at least, is inspirational, skill-improving and mind-stimulating, which is better than your typical bland and closed-end language or technology tutorials; neither are they academic, all math and no code. I like these books because they offer this somewhat popperian approach to acquiring knowledge. With that in view, why do they stuff these thick tomes with absolute minutiae?

Not all is bad even in that volume, but! Buyer beware, definitely peruse this book before buying, these guys are just squeezing out of you whatever money you're still willing to pay for this kind of literature based on previously-built expectations or simply hype.

For anyone who actually works as a game programming professional, I'd highly recommend this book. Those of you looking for general-purpose interesting programming tidbits, try one of Scott Meyer's books instead, which I'd recommend to ANY C++ programmer, not game programmers.

One thing to note: I've heard claims (regarding this and previous books in the series) that these books are simply pre-existing articles pulled from the web and other sources and packed into a collection to be resold. This is nonsense - every article in the book was submitted by programmers, and was exclusively commissioned and paid for by the publisher for use in this series. You won't find these articles floating around on the net. Moreover, because these articles are commissioned, peer-reviewed, and professional edited, the overall quality is much higher than random articles found on the net.

Overall, this book, and the entire series for that matter, gets my highest recommendation. You're naturally not going to find every article or topic useful or relevant, but if you're actually in the trenches, the likelyhood of finding at least one article that really helps you out is likely high. In my experience, simply finding one really valuable article is worth the price of the book alone.

There is definitely a need for such books on poetic forms today, but this book does not fill that lacuna adequately. As has been noted, the editors are not poets of the first rank (despite the fact that Mark Strand was a poet laureate of the US) and are not unquestionable masters of form. So, while this book may serve a scant few beginners, there remain better other options.

I would suggest checking out John Hollander's excellent short work "Rhyme's Reason". He goes over more forms and in a better style than in this book. If you are a poet yourself, definitely you should choose Hollander's book over this one. However, if you want an easy and light read, maybe this book is better, since it provides longer "readings" of certain poems. But if that's what you're after, you'd be better served by Harold Bloom's "How to Read and Why", a very good book written by a top scholar and yet readable by virtually anyone interested in literature.

These two poets rarely write in poetic form themselves, and it shows. The book is sketchy and often superficial in its treatments of the forms. For a much more thorough look at a much wider range of forms, check out the new book AN EXALTATION OF FORMS: CONTEMPORARY POETS CELEBRATE THE DIVERSITY OF THEIR ART.

The choice of poems in this book is great, the design is beautiful and it can sure be very helpful for anyone who loves poetry. Just the best.

A worse textbook I have not seen. It's riddled with mistakes and misprints. The authors should be ashamed. The examples are virtually impossible to follow. Unfortunately, most students don't have a choice but if you do go with Statistical Techniques in Business and Economics (Mason, Lind & Marchal).

There is a newer edition out. However, the good thing about this one is the fact that they got a good Excel Section.

Don't let the title mislead you: Statistics for Managers Using Microsoft Excel (Student Solutions Manual) has almost nothing to do with Microsoft Excel. This book is useful IF and only if you are using it as a companion to the Statistics for Managers Using Microsoft Excel text book in a statistics class.

The book provides ANSWERS. It does not provide any how-to; it does not provide any Excel formulas/etc. But is does provide the answers to all of the even-numbers problems in the companion text book. That's the only reason it got as much as a "3 stars" rating from me -- it was helpful for feedback.