While this book is one of the most extensive books on the subject is is not for beginners. This book should only be bought for people who have taken a stat/prob course before. Be wary of his proofs, not all are in the book. I recomend it for math majors as well as actuary students, but not for engineers and science majors.

To start off, the editors of this book must have been asleep when it crossed their desks: the numerous erros in spelling and grammar interrupt a generally lucid writing style. Being in the field, I know that economists are not the most skilled writers, but I place all the blame at the doorstep of the publishing house. And the errors extend even to charts and graphs.

That said, the book is fairly good at getting its point across. While the authors' stance on capitalism-vs-communism is clear, they generally let the facts speak for themselves and are evenhanded in their treatment of the opposing theories.

A good, introductory post-mortem of Soviet and early transitional Russian policy.

My daughter used this book last year, and I spent many an evening in it with her. The book uses multiple methods to introduce each concept, but, ends up confusing rather than helping. The problems provide a good review of all the material to master in each chapter. Unfortunately, the explanations don't get you ready to do the problems. By the end of the year, we both felt cheated.

The 1998 Middle School Math book, Course 1 just tries too hard, and ends up being a big mish mash of confusion.

I believe the authors tried so hard to make the math program relevant and interesting that they forgot their audience: children who don't know what the authors are talking about! The authors give detailed and confusing examples about basic math concepts without first clearly and SIMPLY explaining the concepts themselves.

Instead of presenting a concept and gradually working up to more complex problems, the authors present a concept, and then jump about 12 steps ahead and give confusing problems right off the bat. Perhaps the authors think this approach encourages thinking and excitement on the part of the student. From what I have seen, instead, the students end up confused and discouraged.

The basic structure of the book is great (i.e. chapter headings, and general flow), but the content is overwhelming, too detailed and confounding.

Simplify your terms if you expect the children to actually learn anything!

And do we really need pages about web sites and blood types in the middle of a confusing math book?

Jessica

Cobb is a process theologian trying to communicate to the reader how Wesley's theology can be relevent today. He's not in his area of specialization in this book and doesn't seem to really want to carry on. I expect that Cobb knows of what he speaks, but the book is burdened with academic language and, in my opinion, missed opportunities at connecting Wesleyen tradition to today. As a well-educated reader with a keen interest in Christianity's search for relevence in today's world, even I had trouble slogging through this one. Your experience may be better than mine, but I would recommend this one only reluctantly. Not an old book, but seems dated.

John Cobb notes that much of what John Wesley addressed in his writing was situational in nature, and that Wesley's theology needs to be 'made relevant' if it is to be useful today. From this starting point, Cobb writes an interesting theological commentary with a 'Wesleyanist' slant. His ideas are useful, and sometimes profound. But they are not essentially faithful to Wesley. Indeed, they are so far removed from Wesley as to make it appear that John Wesley simply provides a scarcely related background to Cobb's own theological discourse. In some ways, it is not unlike hearing a sermon that ignores the text that is being preached.

Ultimately, I think one's comfort or discomfort with Cobb's attempt will be shaped by whether or not the reader agrees with the claim that Wesley's theology is too particular to his own time to be relevant today. For my part, I think there is much in Wesley that is still relevant. I therefore disagree with Cobb's premise.

Nevertheless, this book IS worth reading, and no student of contemporary Methodism should be unfamiliar with it.

Cobb, John B., Jr. Grace & Responsibility: A Wesleyan Theology for Today. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995.

Cobb writes from the perspective that because our current situation is very different from the culture that John Wesley lived in, much of what Wesley taught is no longer useable for today's United Methodist. Cobb recognizes the lack of a unified sense of identity among United Methodists and suggests that a clarified role in the mission of the church must be preceded by a unified theology. He attempts to come to terms with the theological heritage from Wesley by reappraising his work and finding relevance of Wesleyan thought for the contemporary world.

This book was horrible. I was forced to use it in a mandatory brainwash...er, history course for school. The book essentially goes like this:

We settled Massachusetts, and the indians, blacks, gays and women were persecuted.

Then, we started a westward expansion which led to persecution for indians, blacks, gays, and women.

During the revolutionary war some white guys fought or something, but it is important to note that the indians, blacks, gays...

This book is a proselyting tool, a transparent piece of propaganda. I didn't convert.

This book tries to teach history without actually including any concrete information. It outlines general trends without emphasizing the historical facts on which the trends are based. While it's certainly important to recognize progressions in history, it's extremely difficult to learn about them based only on the text's vague, 50-page summaries, all of which fail to mention any form of historical evidence.

As a student, I found this book's approach to teaching history disastrous and mildly insulting. First of all, it fails to convey even the most cursory knowledge of history by shunning, at all costs, cruel Old Regime teaching methods that might require DATE memorization or familiarity with historical FACTS. With nothing to "Lock On" to, it's very hard to retain anything. Even worse, however, are the implications of the book's approach. I like History because I enjoy being able to look at a set of evidence and trying to figure out, based on otherwise stale information, what *actually* happened, what life was like. Somehow, I got the sense that by describing outright "what life was like," the book implies that to force students to learn INFORMATION is useless, that students are unable to think for themselves and interpret historical information with any accuracy.

I think I should comment, also, on one reviewer's dismissal of this book as "Nouveau History." I come close to BEING one of the "Tenured Radicals" this reviewer had so much disdain for, and I still hated this book. I would hate it if I were communist. There's so much wrong with it that to criticize it for its left-wing perspective is plain silly.

I would recommend "The American Promise," by James L. Rourke, Micheal P. Johnson, and a few others instead.

This book provides a balanced overview of U.S. History up to 1877. The treatment of social and cultural history is particularly stong. The prose is, for the most part, quite lively.

Well it is clear that this concept has long since run out of steam with this the fourth, and easily the weakest of the series. It boggles the mind that the garbage that is in this collection could be the best of the "hundreds" of submissions. In fact many of the stories in this collection are either pointless drivel or obvious plagarism from original scripts. (* I can't help wonder what the original writers of the shows must think when they see their ideas trashed by well meaning but misguided fans !) Of course much of the blame must be directed at the editors who choose the works that go into these books, as it was their job to assemble original, exciting and worthwhile contributions. Unfortunately this collection has few worthy efforts and as for a fifth book, well I think they should quit now, before they do any more damage to the Star Trek legend.

This is the fourth installment of the Strange New Worlds series highlighting new talent writing the the genre of TREK. Talented fans submit short stories written for a contest for publication.

In the past, we saw some exceptional talent and originality, storylines that took you to areas of TREK that only short stories could. This anthology was engaging but fell a tad short of the prevoius three. I'm sure the fans have not lost interest, but I'm wondering if the editor has or maybe his direction and view of the TREK universe has been skewed.

There are 22 short stories contained in the anthology that continue in the different genre of the TREK series. I found that these stories to be good and thoughtfully written. Entertaining to a degree but a spark missing.

I wouldn't pass this volume up though as it will show the maturing process of some very promissing writers... future of TREK is in these pages a little recondite, but emerging nonetheless.

If you ever wanted to grow up to write Star Trek books or movies-- get this book. I must disagree with most of the other reviews-- this book IS worth having for any Trek fan. (For non-fans you probably won't be interested.)

I will agree on the point that this book is not as strong as the first three, but that it is only off by a little. However, to say that the stories were not as strong, or somehow less than the other three is not true.

You will enjoy at least one story from each section, The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager for sure. For die hard fans you get to read stories by other fans! For would-be writers, actors or producers, the series shows you how 20+ people with no publishing experience can write a story and get it published.

Bottom Line: Its worth the paperback price and more.

This book didn't help me at all. It contains a number of sample sites, including all the necessary code to get there. Unfortunately, this code is almost never explained. This whole book is for "imitating monkeys" who just enter the described code in their computer without understanding any logic behind. I recommend everybody who is interested in quickly learning the logic behind to buy the Visual InterDev book from Microsoft Press.

The book has really good themes for web sites, but unfortunately it is not well put together. Missing lots of explanation in the examples given. The examples that I create do not match what is on CD. Things are missing.

Dan's book helps tackle some real world issues in the fast paced web application development field. His style is specific to the examples at hand but also general enought that you can use the techniques to solve other problems. This book deals with the practical issues that developers deal with every day and not the 'extras' that come with Interdev. (Image composer, music generator..etc).

I agree with the other bad review about this book. I had it for a junior/senior level undergraduate class and I found it very confusing. It seems like it already expects you to know how to do most of the stuff. A lot of the problem sets have problems that I swear aren't explained ANYWHERE in the text. Poorly written, hardly any examples (which hint hint, are very useful in a math book) Overall a very bad book I would say, unless you already have extensive calculus/economics knowledge, but then I ask WHY WOULD YOU NEED THE BOOK ANYWAY???

As an undergraduate economics major, I found this book to be written in a manner that presupposed that the reader was a mathematician. While I admit that my undergraduate focus was much more theory based versus quanititative, this book made my life in econometrics virtually unbearable. I sought out other books that were more helpful such as Calculus for Business and Economics by Robert Childress (old but still good!). Mathematical Methods may be a good source for those with great strength in calculus, but it is not for the mathematical novice.

The first year as a Ph.D. student in Economics is very hard, especially if you are coming directly from the undergraduate level. After reading very formal and pseudo-user friendly books such as Simon and Blume (1994) and Novshek (1993), when it comes to the practical stuff, you end up looking at Varian's (1992) appendix, using Silberberg (1990) and (of course!) Chiang's 1984 masterpiece. But, on the other hand, if you need a careful and very user-friendly explanation of topics such as continuous and discrete dynamic optimization as well as applications of the Envelope Theorem, I have not found a better book than Klein's Mathematical Methods.

I'm a 4th year undergraduate student in computer science and I just finished the Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms course that was based on this book.

I thought the book was horrible. It did little to help me understand anything but general ideas. Reading this book is like reading a volume of mathematical proofs. The authors speak in symbols.

What makes it much worse is that every page makes multiple references to other portions of the text that aren't on the facing pages. They might be one page turn away, but very often they are a few pages, or even chapters away!

The only reason I would keep this book is for the list of topics it covers.

This has to be the single worst textbook I have ever seen, in computer science or any other subject, and I don't even know where to begin with my complaints. First, the book is INCREDIBLY hard to follow since they constantly refere to earlier figures and algorithms simply by giving a number for it(not even a lousy page number), and you have to spend 75% of the time searching for it, only to find another one listed 2 sentences later. You would think they could have at least been courteous enough to provide a page number. Still it doesn't beat question 7.24 which states, "use the algorithm", the algorithm as it turns out is printed 20 pages earlier, but I suppose that they figured you have the ability to read their mind and should have known that. Seconly, they butcher the Java language. They just use sloppy code and static objects wherever possible, which is the polar opposite of what Java is supposed to be about, but then again, given the wretched state of the rest of the book, this comes as no surprise. Well, since I only have a limited space to fill, I'll bring it to a close. Do NOT under any circumstances consider purchasing this book, a dancing dog could teach you more about data structures and algorithms!

Note that the Preface starts with "This book is intended for an upper-division or graduate course..." and should be seen as such. In my School, we have more emphasis than average on algorithm analysis, so we are able to use this book at 3rd-year level (final year of our degree), but without a strong background, the book would fit a graduate course better. Some of the criticisms relate to use of pseudocode and inadequate diagrams. The latter is maybe a criticism of an introductory book, but is not applicable to an advanced book. Eye candy fools the reader into thinking they understand more than they do. Pseudocode as used in the book should not be a serious problem for more advanced courses. Detail is not left out to the extent that is sometimes the case in pseudocode. In any case, I worry about students who expect to be spoon fed. If you have to derive your own algorithm, the details aren't all provided for you -- you need to work them all out. I do however find it strange that in the 3rd edition, the authors changed to a Java-like pseudocode but didn't adjust array indexing to 0.
My only reason for not giving the book a 5 is that I have found a number of errors in the string matching algorithms. But even this is not unusual in algorithms texts; I would hope all readers would test (if not prove correct) any textbook algorithm before using it. Another thing I do not quite agree with is the relatively informal treatment of solving recurrences (using recursion trees) -- I would prefer that more formal approaches like the characteristic polynomial method were used.
On the whole, this book has a good balance between breadth and depth. Other than the bugs introduced in the string matching algorithms and the inadequate conversion to a Java-like notation, it is a significant improvement on the 2nd edition.
I recommend it strongly for courses where students already have a good algorithms background, and are ready for a more advanced course.
The last book I used, Fundamentals of Algorithmics by Brassard and Bratley, was much harder for my students. It developed a lot of mathematical material that was not used much in subsequent examples, and they found explanations hard to follow.