For an introduction to quantum optics, the author is to be highly commended for keeping the mathematics and derivations straightforward and easily followed by a senior or 1st year graduate student in experimental physics. Unfortunately, he does not go beyond the math to discuss the physics which the mathematics describe. The problems he includes for students to work out are all derivation of formula with absolutely no application of formula. By the time I got throught the book, I realized that I still had no real intuition of how a laser worked, or any understanding of how to apply the quantized radiation field to any real problems.

So if you're looking for a handbook to give you a simple tour of the mathematics in the quantum theory of light, this is the book for you. If you're looking for a more comprehensive treatment, look elsewhere. The selection of topics is very limited: too little math for a theorist, and too little physics for the experimentalist.

The rating says that this edition is perfect for babies and preschoolers. My wife and I have been reading a section to our five year-old child every night before bedtime. He didn't really care too much about blackbody radiation, but he appreciated the importance of the Einstein A and B coefficients. By working with that phenomonological theory you can obtain the inversion dependence of the gain coefficient much more easily than by solving the problem of a two level system subject to an oscillatory perturbation.

I highly recommend it! After we finish this we'll probably introduce our child to Coldren's book on semiconductor lasers!

Seriously, leaving aside my mockery of the inaccurate reading level rating, it is a decent book. I'd agree that it can be dry and focused on equations more than physics at times, but it offers a very balanced selection of topics, and clearer explanations than many physics books.

I particularly like the progression from old quantum theory to semiclassical theory to the fully quantized theory. It emphasizes the useful aspects of each theory, in particular the usefulness of the old theory in terms of simplicity and accuracy in many situations. History may not always be the best approach to science, but it works if you emphasize the usefulness of simple models and how they follow from more sophisticated models.

Besides, it's much better than Yariv (but what isn't?).

One major complaint: It deals almost exclusively with atomic systems. Those of us who work with molecules or semiconductors need a second reference book to learn more about transitions into a continuum of states (or at least numerous and closely-spaced states).

The title "Understanding Urban Unrest: From Reverend King to Rodney King" is indeed unfortunate. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther KingJr.received the Nobel Peace Prize and has a national holiday in his honor. Rodney King was a nobody until he found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time;then, a video camera made him an instant media hero. The author's placement of these two together in his title is an indication of his lack of sensitivity to the core issues facing America's urban underclass.

But the book goes downhill from there. The author spends too much time criticizing the civil rights leadership while minimizing the continuing impact of institutional racism.While acknowledging the lack of comprehensive social policy planning, this author gives no real clue as to why this absence of planning occured in the past and why it is still taking place now.While this is a passable work, there are much better books on urban underclass issues such as William Julius Wilson's "When Work Disappears"

R

i love this book and dennis. a ifg omg omggomgogmgomgomgogmogmogmogmg. i love himhimh

Stark's account of monotheism reads as if it could've been written in the 18th century, when the newly born Enlightenment mind was energetic and crowingly confident in its ability to demystify religion. It has an air of no-nonsense social science analysis about it. Unfortunately, it also has an air of extreme naivete.

Stark takes as his subject matter the social consequences of monotheistic religion, claiming that the issue of whether God actually exists is unimportant and undiscoverable. His basic conclusions are two: (1) people gravitate toward religion because it promises them something they want--one might call this a "consumer mentality," although Stark himself doesn't use such a label; and (2) monotheistic religions, insofar as each of them claims to be the exclusive sellers of what people want, necessarily breed intolerance.

The problem is that neither of these claims really stand up as straight as Stark wants them to. Surely, for example, there are many reasons why people accept religious beliefs. Some of them may be as crassly consumerist as Stark maintains, but others aren't. Many people gravitate toward religious belief out of a sheer sense of wonderment, or love, or joy. these motives don't fit nicely into Stark's gameplan, and had he even a passing acquaintance with spiritual autobiographies or the tradition of mystical literature in the three Abrahamic religions, he'd have known this. Moreover, if one questions his claim that the draw of monotheistic religions is primarily giving people what they want, then his claim that the traditions are necessarily intolerant because competing against one another likewise becomes problematic.

Stark, a self-styled agnostic, argues that his agnosticism allows him to look upon the phenomenon of religion objectively. One wonders, however. It's clear that the underlying text throughout *One True God* is the old Enlightenment assumption that religious monotheists are either incredibly irrational or selfish or frightened. And in an enlightened world in which everything is perfectly explicable in terms of social analysis, how can one take such religious worldviews seriously?

A sociologist who offers much more reflective accounts of religion is Peter Berger. Read Stark if you wish, but then turn to Berger.

Like most of Stark's contributions, this book is down-right fun to read: engaging, polemical, clear, provocative, etc..
But the flaws are there, as always. First off, the whole reduction of religious belief and involvement to some sort of abstract "economic man" theory is not only annoying, but more importantly, void of empirical data. Costs, benefits, exchange relations, limited supplies, compensators....please. Give it a rest. Sure, some people may choose gods in the same manner they choose laundry detergent -- but most people are religious because of good old fashion processes of socialization. They believe in God because grandma and grandpa do. They worship Buddha because everyone in their village does. They pray to Jesus because that's what mom said to do. For Stark to cling to this rational choice silliness is bizarre -- and strange, coming from someone supposedly affiliated with the discipline sociology. Oh well. I at least appreciate the alternative way of looking at and theorizing about people, flawed though it is.
Finally -- and this is nit-picky I know, but check out this quote in the introduction (p.5):
"It is entirely impossible for science to discover the existence or nonexistence of Gods."
Hm. Really? What if for "Gods" we substituted other possibilities:
"It is entirely impossible for science to discover the existence or nonexistence of Fairies....
of Thor...
of leprechauns....
of floating purple dragons in outer space..."

Those who assert there is a God out there shoulder the burden of proof. Baring convincing evidence, we must remain skeptical. I don't understand why Stark -- who hates "postmodernism and other opponents of reason" (p.14) -- becomes quite post-modern himself by allowing for the existence of Gods without empirical evidence.

The problem is that Stark seems to have begun with an assumption,'Religion thrives in a free-market, pluralistic society,' and then spent the rest of the book trying to support it, rather than letting the research take him to the its conclusion. Actually, I quite agree with him, and I say we should all thank God - literally - for two great oceans and forefathers of rather dicey faith. But there are no revelations here, like there were in "The Churching of America," and "The Early Christian Church." If there is anything you can take away with from this book, it is this: we as Americans really ARE different. I know that human nature is universally the same, but for whatever reason, we just don't see the world the way other poeples do. Whatever our warts are, and we sure do have them, they pale in comparison to Rhine residents roasting Jews alive, Crusaders reveling in infants impaled on their spears, Muslim warriors slaughtering whole towns of "infidels." There are a lot of pious people in Hell, wondering how they got there.

I have never been so disappointed in a book. I bought this book hoping to read an intelligent review of the role of wetlands throughout history. Instead I got a load of psychological babble that had nothing to do with wetlands and had everything to do with the author's apparent need to use all the big words he learned in college. If you want to read about wetland culture, history, and ecology I suggest you find another book.

I am at pains to distinguish two strands within the western tradition - that of the canon (only 2 n's in canon) such as Dante and Milton who theologise and demonise the wetland as a place of evil and that of the counter-tradition of Thoreau, indigenous Australians and contemporary writers like Graham Swift and Coraghessan Boyle who see the wetland as both life-giving and death-dealing.

The range and scope of the book is hardly narrow and stilted when it takes in medical, military and social history, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and literature and philosophy spanning 2000 years.

This book describes changing attitudes about wetlands over the centuries based on their cultural values. It explains how the world's wetlands got to the sad shape they are in today - and why. Giblett explores the cultural and literary mythology that tagged swamps and marshes as hideouts for the boogey-man and the "Creature from the Black Lagoon." (Remember the "Creature" sprang from the mind of man, not from a swamp.) I believe that understanding where we came from is cruicial to understanding - and changing - where we are going. This book demonstrates how and why humans of different ages and cultures assigned values to wetlands, and why destroying them was seen as a mark of civilization - a civic duty. Without dicussing the evirnomental issues specifically, it teaches the reader that wetlands have a value apart from that which western man assigns - this is their timeless value. This is scholarly writing that requires concentration and thought, but is well worth the effort. Anyone interested in environmental issues and fascinated at how our perception of "nature" has changed and is changing will appreciate this book.

This book is a collection of the "best" / most cited Brooks papers. Basically it covers what is considered the core of papers that got behaviour based robotics rolling. Almost all papers have appeared as journal papers earlier and this is merely a convenient collection of these.

For anyone working on mobile robotics these papers are a must. I.e. everyone ought to know these papers, both because they are thought provoking and widely referenced. For anyone with access to a library it might be an overkill to pay for this book. Go to the library and read the papers.

The real disappointment here is the lack of a historical perspective. These papers are all 5-15 years old. They strongly influenced the robotics world when they were published. The examples are interesting, but for REAL everyday robot systems the world is more complex than indicated by Brooks. It would have been interesting to see a final chapter that discussed lessons and limitations of the approach when seen in a historical perspective. Brooks is now building a humanoid system (Cog) and one wonders how many of the behaviour based ideas made it into Cog? Probably not as many as this book might indicate.

If you have a library, use you money on an upto date book! If not, you ought to acquire it for a view of the history.

While the title is a bit misleading (this is not a history per se, so much as a collection of papers of historical interest), this book contains a wealth of good material for those researching behavior-based robotics. As the book is a collection of Brooks' papers on the subject, it gives good insights into his approach -- although it does include a significant amount of redundant text (as you'd expect, many of the papers share "boilerplate" treatments of some subject matter).

Still, "Cambrian Intelligence" is both thought-provoking (to those primarily acquainted with "classical" AI approaches), and well worth the price tag -- if only for the convenience factor (vs. rounding up and printing out all the included papers).

This book presents a series of papers (technical and philosophical) on an approach to AI (specifically, robotics), that basically denies the need for the existence of a 'cognition' system. I like this approach because of it's simplicity, and it's philosophical implications. To the reader that was expecting a book on the history of AI: Yes, the title could be read like that, but I think the intent was to say "This is the history of a new way of looking at things", not "This is the early history of the entire field of AI"

This book is full of nonsense and distorts historic truth. I was told that the writer's relatives lives in Atlanta. If this is the case, a full investigation/background check needs to be administered. I wouldn't be surprised if the writer's relatives are connectioned with anti-American groups.

This book is ridiculous.

This is a well documented and logically presented African version, if you may, of the impact of slavery and colonialism on Africans at large. It is a must read for all Africans eager to know the history of the various empires, kingdoms and clans in that continent before contact with the Europeans.
As a leftist, Rodney often takes swipes at the capitalist system and given that he died in 1980 the rapid changes in the east west divide is lost on him. This in no way dilutes the core message, substantiated to a great degree, in the book. The evidence, and the logical manner of presentation, to show that Africa ended up in a lose/lose situation is quite compelling.
He did, in his astounding intellectual style, adduce evidence to seriously challenge some stereotypes about Africans prior to the arrival of the Europeans. From the book it is clear that Africans were engaged in a limited form of international trade with the Arabs; it is shown that there were forms of democratic practices commensurate with the level of development of the societies; it is revealed that African Kings and Chiefs are not the bloodhounds they are portrayed to be in the predominant accounts written by non-Africans.
Reading in between the lines in the book, it can be safely averred that the recurrent instability and wars ravaging the continent of Africa are after shocks of the blatant partition of Africa without giving any consideration to the cultural antecedents of the peoples being welded together. Events in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the iron curtain are pointers to the fact that fusing incompatibles is a recipe for chaos. This should be contrasted from individuals volunteering to form a new union.
Interestingly, Rodney also reveals that the question of reparation should not be treated like a pipedream. This is by way of evidence pointing to some big corporations of this age owing their foundation to profits from the abominable and shameful epoch called the slave trade.

A. K. O. ETUAZIM
MEXICO CITY

There just is not any other book that will tell you what Rodney does in this one. No European historian is willing to admit to all the outrages Europe has inflicted upon Africa over the past 500 years. No capitalist historian either. So here is Walter Rodney, a Guianese Marxist to tell this agonizing history while holding nothing back. He really makes you feel it, this is a very intense book, you don't want to read it before bedtime or you will not get to sleep. I think you need to buy it, because you can not read it fast straight through, not if you care about Africa and Africans, and if colonial exploitation and slavery get you mad. You're going to be gnashing your teeth with rage all the way through this infuriating recitation of rape, pillage, robbery, slavery and every kind of imaginable injustice. In the end you might want to say oh that Rodney what do you expect from a Marxist. OK try it. But now you have to tell us what he said that's not true. And you can't. It really was and is that bad. And everyone who is a part of European/ Western civilization needs to know it.

For 16 authors (programmers??) to make so many typos, mistakes, ommissions, is unacceptable. I even sent email to the authors who cared to provide addresses and none responded.

The authors must have been confused or took so much for granted. The problems I found with the book are too many. For example: Code snippets fail, poor steps (making the book a very tidious read.). The steps are embedded in lengthy theories, making them impossible to follow. Focus is lost and references are poor. For example, on page 88, they write "you can find this function [global_service_lib.asp] in the include directory". Wrong because, the global_service_lib.asp resides in the siteroot/service/include directory. These are minute errors that can frustrate many readers in the middle of the night.

Some diligence should be put into books that involve program codes. I generally do not tolerate such errors from programmers. We should be people akin to details!!

normally, the book should be rated with maximum stars, because it is the the one and only book which steps in detail into the commerce server 2000 dungeons. BUT, the codes and files downloadable from wrox site are full of errors and missing files. so, it is difficult to follow the authors in their expearince. also, you see from chapter to chapter there are different writes, having CS2K setups/retail installation. so, steping over the chapters, you have to take a look on your up to this retail solution done previously. also, some errors in the code samples inside the book (which are not part of the download) have some mistakes. but, at least. i think it is a good entry point for CS2K developer...

After waiting 6 months for a decent book on Commerce Server 2000, I finally got it! This book does a great job giving an overall view of the product before diving into the nitty gritty information. Unlike any other book currently on the market, this one gives a great architectural layout of each part of CS2K (user profiling, campaigning, catalogs, etc...) and then gives code examples. Great job WROX!

I read the previous review by Marty Roth and have to agree totally. I don't think the author has tried using his directions in Hawaii.

I have been all over the island hiking. The book was helpful in so much as mentioning where to hike but the directions were not much help at all.

A practical guide to the most scenic walks on the major Hawaiian islands of Maui, Molokai, Lanai, Hawaii, Kauai and Oahu. Walks range from easy strolls of a few hours to multi-day excursions where blankets and sleeping backs are de rigeur. Waikiki, the Koolaus, Honolulu, Lahaina, the Seven Pools of Kipahulu, Kaanapali, Iao Valley State Park, Waimea Canyon, Kalalau Valley, the Na Pali Cliffs, Kalaupapa, Kaiholena Gulch, Waipop Valley, and Kilauea all have designated trails covered here. Descriptive text gives you a feel for the area, whether its downtown Honolulu or the lush green slopes of Iao Needle on Kauai. Each hike is graded for its difficulty from "family" to "strenuous," although most are suitable for the entire family. A thoughtful interior design allows you to see the trail's rating, mileage and any permit requirements at a glance. Pocket-sized, this handy guide will fit easily into your money belt or backpack. Maps of almost every trail. 192 pages.

"This one's not for either the ultra-lazy pool potatoes or [those who] need step-by-step direction many pro-hiker guides provide. But if you'd like folksy-friendly insider tips to accessible Hawaiian adventures for the whole family, here's your guide." New York Daily News

I had to use this textbook for a class, which you probably do to. So you probably have to buy this one. It was okay, not hard to read, but I won't be keeping it as a reference work. The authors definitely have an agenda, promoting certain kinds of nutrition over others with very little reasoning, also seems to act like a lot of alternative medicine couldn't possible work even when there are studies to the contrary. I guess it handles the rudiments of biology okay. I will be selling this when I'm finished with this semester.

Oh, and there appears to be both a hardcover and a paperback. I bought the paperback used, and it seems to have matched perfectly with the hardcover. Never even used the CD.

This book was very easy to read, I read the whole thing in a little over a week. Highly reccommended.

When I first received this book, I had heard many good things about it. Then I read it. First off, what bugs me most about this book is that is has no footnotes, no giving credit where credit is due, much like other books such as West Country Wicca and any and all Edwin McCoy books, which read like they were just thought up by the author. It is an exercise in egoticism and neglect. No footnotes, no index, no credit, even for the Stele of Revealing. The grammar and sentence structure is way under average. It reads like a story. Conversational gibberish. He talks about wearing women's clothing to sense what it is like to be another sex. This is supposed to be amusing, yet, to me, a Brit who enjoys dressing up as a women is as normal as an American enjoying beer, so I didn't get his point! It goes from worse after that, like wearing a pyramid on your head and theories on how you can get your body to release "magickal" pheromones to attract girls and should I even go on? If you have small children, maybe, like McCoy's Ostara book, you could show the basics to them this way and make them understand it, such as his oversimplication of the LBRP, but this is no Thelema book for adults, even beginners. If you must, buy Lon Duquette's Magick of Thelema, but my advice is buy Liber ABA and go straight to the source!

Author doesn't give credit where credit is due to the many talents who came before him who said the same things better and with less ego. Try Lon DuQuette for meatier, less self-absorbed information.

I'm a biginner magickian, and I'd like to know about thelemic magick.That is all about that I want to get this book.
Love is the law,love under will