This is a good general introduction to cryonic and nanotech life extension, but barely touches on a lot of the issues therein. Clearly written to be a popular piece instead of a "substantial" one. The Socratic question-and-answer format makes it seem more of a straw-man argument than one would hope. There are many better books on nanotech out there, and though I applaud the author for trying to raise public awareness of cryonics as legitimate science, he goes too far towards pop culture.

This is a very basic and easy to understand book that you can read in 1-4 sittings depending on how fast you read. It is a great introduction to immortality with nanotech and cryonics for any newcomers to the field.

For the 1950s, when this book was written, it had imaginative hypotheses. However, the psychoanalytic ideas on which it was based are rather discredited in this day and age. The methodology was also innovative for that time.

By the way, the authors are John Whiting and Irvin Child. Please make the necessary corrections.

I must disagree with the first reviewer. Yes, the psychoanalytic ideas are discredited, but a lot of the credit goes to this book. Whiting and Child tested Freud's notion of fixation at various psychosexual stages by looking at child-rearing practices in a wide range of cultures in relation to adult beliefs and behavior patterns. Only the oral fixation passed the test. Cultures with more difficult weaning procedures tend to have orally-based adult beliefs about sickness and health. The U.S. is a good example: we have very early weaning by world standards, and we also tend to think you get sick from ingesting something bad (germs, for example), and you get cured by taking pills. Supposed anal and genital fixations, however, seemed not to have implications for the adult. Whiting and Child's work remains a great example of an underused approach to cross-cultural research.

this book is unuseful for anything believe me
and it has no taps (listening) and no answers
buy everything and it may be useful 60%
i see that barron is better specially this book made in the 1995 but barron is update

I bought this book for an English school TOEFL class. This book explains not only the TOEFL grammer but also the test technics. I could improve the TOEFL score with this book very quickly. I highly recommend this book for every foregin students same as me.

I found the book a basic one for people new to the world of wireless PCS. It gives a clear concise description for most important concepts, includes AMPS, North America TDMA, CDMA, GSM, and Cordless Telephony standard. Special inclusion are short tutorials on special topics on wireless. Each chapter has some questions at the end...good for students.

The first 7 chapters of this book which cover the existing cellular telephony systems is an excellent introduction to these systems. Chapter 8 on "Low-Tier Personal Communication Systems" is unfortunately just a teaser, as it covers all of these types of systems in just one chapter and provides much much less material about these systems that the chapter per system coverage of the macrocellar systems. Thus the title of the book should really be "Cellular Telephony Systems: Case Studies".

After greatly anticipating a TOS mini series, I feel very let down. I found "Wagon Train to the Stars" the 1st book in the New Earth 6 book series to be almost totally non-interesting. While the story did have 2 or 3 good moments, including a very exciting and unique battle, overall it just didn't catch my interest.

I was looking forward to a grand sweeping adventure featuring TOS entire crew, plus hopefully some interesting characters among the colonists. What I feel I got was a big isn't Kirk the greatest saga. Don't get me wrong, I like Capt. Kirk as much as the next fan. But come on. Almost 2/3's of the text is Kirk talking to himself about how heroic he is forced to be. The other crew members are underutilized. In fact they are barely used at all. Chekov gets a good storyline for once, but it is much too brief and one of the books few highlights.

We are introduced to a few colonists in a cursory way. There are a couple of potentially interesting characters but they aren't used well. Too bad to. It had the makings of a grand adventure. I would pass on this one if I were you. I usually enjoy Diane Carey's Trek novels but this one sadly disappionts.

Wagon Train to the Stars is an interesting twist on the Star Trek concept. The story takes place between the first and second movies and tells the tale of Captain Kirk and his crew leading a band of colonists on their way to a new planet.

Throughout the novel, Kirk and his crew deal with a variety of situations which have been created out of tales of old west wagon trains but now with a sci fi twist. Kirk is essentially the trail boss dealing with dissension, food shortages, colonist fear and finally maurauders as the wagon train makes its way to its new planet.

I found the starship battles to be very interesting and the battle tactics reminiscent of the old Star Trek. The plot line is a good concept and the novel is a good start for a six book series but I found the characters to be a bit different from the characters which we all know and love. For instance, Kirk is a bit more authoritarian than usual. All together though a good, fun read.

Well, it's summer time and that can only mean one thing--the beginning of a new, multi-novel Star Trek saga, courtesy of Pocket Books. Last year's Double Helix series was a hit-or-miss affair that dealt with events in the TNG universe. This summer, Pocket treats us to the long-awaited classic Trek crossover series. And first up, is Diane Carey's "Wagon Train to the Stars."

All in all, I've got to say this is a good start to the series. What really works is that Carey plunks us down in the middle of the story and fills in details via flashbacks and the characters interacting. The series takes place between the events seen in The Motion Picture and Wrath of Khan and finds Kirk, having temporarily taken a reduction in rank to Captain, leading a fleet of colonists to a new world that is nine months away. The first novel sets up the secondary characters and establishes the mood and the scene. It also sets into place the fact that the planet our heroes are headed for isn't what it seems (frustratingly enough, one of the characters knows what is going on but refuses to tell any one or give any hints....oh well, I guess it is a six-part series and we'll find out soon enough). Before you know it, Kirk is up to his ears in squabbles, disputes and egos other than his. It's interesting look at Kirk as he tries to deal with leading a group of people that aren't in Starfleet and don't necessarily want or have to follow his orders. There's internal intrigue as well as an external threat or two (the planet the colonists are heading for is at the center of two, ancient warring races and the Orions aren't far behind--seeing the colonists as potential profit in the slave trade). Carey balances a lot of elements to make an entertaining novel and one that sets up events well. The stage is set for the next five books and there's enough mysteries involved to keep me curious as what's to come next.

My only fear is that we won't find out the planet's myterious secret until book six and the other four books will be a holding pattern of sorts. Also, minor characters are being set up to be in conflict and you can see some of Kirk's headahces that are ahead. I only hope Carey and the rest of the authors will take some chances and not give into a standard, cliched Trek storyline.

All that said, I will say that Wagon Train to the Stars is a good start. It's an enjoyable summer Trek read--not too heavy, but not too light. I'm definitely interested to see what happens next.

This book is a concise, tantalizingly understandable introduction to UML with Rose. But it falls short of its promise. I suspect it could've been made much better - through careful organization & better editing - without adding a great deal more material. After reading the Jan 98 version, I came to Amazon.com hoping to find a later, improved edition - in vain. The book illustrates basic aspects of Rose usage but frequently fails to tie these illustrations to the underlying "University Course Registration" system example in a consistent manner. It's not always easy to tell whether or how a Rose usage illustration relates to the system being developed. The presentation flow suffers as a result. For example, pg. 53 shows how to create a new package and relocate classes between packages. The figures show Browser views with a class under the Logical View called StudentInformation and a package called PeopleInfo. But 2 pages later, having returned to system development in the same Browser view, the StudentInformation class has disappeared and the name of the PeopleInfo package has changed to People. There are several places where new, important concepts are quickly introduced and glossed over. For example, Scenarios are an important idea related to Use Cases and interaction diagrams, but on pg. 53 the term "scenario" is introduced without definition in a manner that appears to equate scenarios with sub-flows of use cases; the transition in terminology occurs without explanation. In spite of shortcomings like these I still recommend this book as a valuable "primer" for newcomers to OO and UML / Rose.

This book is a much more readable than the on-line documentation. It is a good introduction to Rose and UML for people who have never used either, but doesn't give you a solid enough grounding in either to be truly effective. The tutorial that comes with Rose is more complete, but doesn't guide you through the building of an application the way this book does. This gives you some guidance, telling you how to start with Use Cases, move on to sequence diagrams, and finally object relationships. Following the Flow of Events template is probably the most useful thing in this book; that isn't good, considering the Flow of Events template is nothing more than a Word document.

This book can get you past that "Ok, I've installed Rose, now what do I do?" point. Unfortunately, it then leaves you saying "But how do I do THIS?" a lot. The book would be dramatically improved if it contained a COMPLETE example. Unfortunately, Ms. Quatrani gives you a bunch of Use Cases, then uses a different one in each part of the book. She doesn't follow a single thread, showing how to get from Use Case to code generation; instead, each part of the process uses a different scenario. There is no use case that has all diagrams (Use Case, Sequence, Collaboration, Class, State), so you can't easily see how one flows into the next. Also unfortunately, she seems to choose the simplest example in every case, leaving you wondering how to do a more complex one. The book desperately needs a complete model for the example program included with it, or at least a downloadable copy of the model on Rational's web site. In the book, she does gives you one (and only one) example of everything, but expects you to figure out how to generalize the example. And the sections on the Code Generation functions and Round-Trip Engineering are very perfunctory, seeming like an afterthought.

The book doesn't even come close to using the UML 1.1 specification, but neither does Rose, so that's no surprise. You'd expect the company developing UML would make a tool that supports it, but even Rose '98 fails there. If you're looking at the UML 1.1 spec, it'll confuse you.

This book is geared toward Rose 4.0. It won't help at all with Object-Relational mapping and the other features introduced in Rose '98.

This is a good introduction to the Rational Rose tool and the Rational method of developing software. A reader should have a prior introduction to UML even though nothing advanced is presented here. What the book does best is build your confidence for tackling a large scale project using UML and Rational Rose to develop the object model. While the book includes some step by step instructions and tracks a development project from beginning to end it is not a definitive guide. The review is very broad brush. Terry Quatrani writes very clearly and for the most part fulfills the objectives that she sets out. There were a couple of points that I could not follow even rereading multiple times and I found myself wanting just a little more explanation of illustrations.

Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within is a book based on the movie. While the book carries the storyline of the movie fairly well the writing is not as good as a full novel. The storyline is that earth was hit by a meteorite that carried the spirits of aliens to earth. On earth the aliens steal the spirits of the humans that they catch. As a result the human population is decimated. Aki is a scientist that is trying to find eight spirits that can create a wave that can force back the invaders. She is also infected by the alien threat which makes her task much more difficult. The movie looks awsome and the book give the storyline okay but this is not the greatest movie novelization that Ihave read but it is not horrible. If you want to find out what happens in the movie I would recommend reading it but if not see the movie when it comes out.

While some people say that the movie is nothing like the book, that could not be more the opposite for FF. This book and the movie follow the exact same words said, and everything. Of course, that also means that the ending of the book made no more sense than the ending of the movie did. All in all, the book showed us the movie perfectly, but it did it too well: it gave us the same ending as the movie, with no explanation of what really happened.

I don't know why do you people don't like the movie and the book?After all isn't it another one of Square's great Final Fantasies?Personaly I think that the movie was GREAT for many reasons. First of all it had great 3D animation which was the most life-like I've seen so far.Second I liked the main plot a lot ,yes it was not very complicated but it still was very good.About the ending : what I understood of it is that no matter how bad things look there is always hope and life will always flurish.At least that's what I understood of it but even if you don't understand it that still is no reason for you not to like the movie.That is what I and a lot of my friends think.Bye for now.

X-Men Unlimited is a semi-monthly comic from Marvel which details smaller stories that take place with the team. This book was like that. Fairly simple plot that heads to a somewhat predictable ending. Dean W. Smith has done somewhat better work with the Spider-Man novels instead.

This was the first X-men book that I read, and since I know them from books and have never read a comic, that's something. It's still one of my favourite. It doesn't have as much action as others I have read, but it is still an excellent read and a good, solid book. I do reccomend it.

An interesting piece of novel done by Dean Wesley Smith. Very imaginative and powerfully addictive. In just less than one day i spent a serene afternoon reading this wonderful novel amazed at the beautifully written comic literature. A joy to read, a story to be unforgettable, this book is a best by for me!

aka: Proteus

Like so many of Steinbeck's other novels, The Red Pony is full of vivid imagery, raw emotion, and touching themes. However, unlike many of Steinbeck's other works, I found the Red pony to be a very unsatisfying novel. It has wonderful character and plot development, but it dosn't take us anywhere. We are introduced to the Pony, but it dies. Nothing is accomplished by its death. Each chapter of the story finishes like this. The reader is given very little completion at the end of eachc hapter and less at the end of the book. over all, the style was good, the plot development was good, the themes were powerful, but there was nothing to bring it together in the end. Of Mice & Men and The Pearl are both much more enjoyable novellas by Steinbeck.

Even though the book "The Red Pony", by John Stienbeck, was one of the saddest books I have ever read I would recommend it because the plot has many interesting turns and the theme is very emotional. "The Red Pony" was about a young boy, Jody, and his family who live on a ranch. The book consists of four short stories, each of which involves Jody learning a lesson of life. It is so tragic because in every story, something dies. In "The Gift" and "The Promise", two horses die, in "The Great Mountains" it is implied that Gitano committed suicide, and in "The Leader of the People" a part of Grandfather dies when he realizes that Westering has passed. When he realizes this, his whole motivation is gone, so a part of him is missing, or dead. My favorite story in "The Red Pony" was "The Promise", because I enjoyed the way Jody would imagine things about what he was doing on the way home from school, and about what the new colt would be like. Over all, I found this book very enjoyable, even though it was so melancholy.

John Steinbeck's "The Red Pony" is a group of four interconnected stories: "The Gift," "The Great Mountains," "The Promise," and "The Leader of the People." Each story focuses on Jody Tiflin, a 10-year old boy growing up on a ranch on the west coast of the United States. The other main characters are Jody's parents and the ranch hand Billy Buck. Also frequently appearing are the ranch dogs, Doubletree Mutt and Smasher.

"The Red Pony" is not a novel, so readers expecting the cohesion and unity of a novel will be disappointed. The book should, in my opinion, be evaluated for what it is. And once you appreciate its own peculiar structure, you may, as I did, acknowledge "The Red Pony" as a powerful and beautiful work of art.

Steinbeck masterfully captures the cycles of life, death, and renewal in the lives of both his human and animal characters. He creates vivid, often visceral scenes, that are written in a quietly powerful language. There are moving moments of joy, horror, and heartbreak. "The Red Pony" is a significant achievement by one of America's enduring literary giants.

The problem with this book is it has a lot of content, tries to explain just about everything there is in controls and does not care to explain out the details ... its pretty tough if are do-it-yourself kind... But many of the things in this book are not in other books (or are better explained in advanced control books). It literally took out my interst in Controls. Certainly not a book for beginners.

The book is very good for individual study because of its step-by-step approach. However, it is difficult to use for classroom instruction. By teh way, there is an excellent Solutions Manual available from the publisher, which I would recommend for instructors.It uses MATLAB extensively. ISBN 0-201-59937-6,Addsion Wesley 1994.

We used this book for our undergrad course.. Having read other Control books by authors such as Ogata, Franklin & Ben Kuo, I think this is quite a well written book.

This book covers quite a bit of more advanced control theory (such as state-space concept)... It might not be suitable for an introductory course on control.