The world of manufacturing has changed greatly over the past several years. New materials and processes have been developed to create a multitude of products, but the most efficient techniques are not always used in machining certain products or compounds. The Advanced Machining Technology Handbook is designed to help in the selection of effective manufacturing processes. Each chapter discusses a process and explains its benefits. Brown does not attempt to give complete coverage of any of these processes. Rather, this book is meant to be a guide for the selection of which manufacturing process would be best for a given product.

Brown concentrates on describing what each process can do, but purposely omits equations and tables of data used in calculations. Some of the information is anecdotal in nature, explaining how a process can make manufacturing more efficient. Advance Machining Technology Handbook is a valuable reference for those who are involved with manufacturing as well as for students. It is recommended for all libraries supporting mechanical or manufacturing engineering programs.

This book is a useful introduction to APL2 -- IBM's modern dialect of the APL language. APL2 is available for many platforms, including Windows, OS2, RS6000 and IBM mainframes.

The first thing to keep in mind about the book is that IBM's bundling it with IBM APL2/Windows and IBM APL2/OS2, so if you're planning on buying these implementations, perhaps you want to wait and get the copy with your software. Otherwise, if you're using the free TryAPL2 or your site has a license for APL2 and you need the documentation, then this book is very useful and helpful.

Having said this, here is what the book WON'T teach you:

- Shared variables. How APL2 manages communication with other processors, with other APL2 systems, etc. This is a very important topic.

- The associated and auxiliary processors: How APL2 manages screen IO, how APL2 talks to REXX or to your operating system, how to manage files from APL2 (!!!), etc.

You should keep these in mind because when you'll be done with the APL2 at a Glance book, you might wonder, for example, how to do file IO in APL2 -- you'll need the APL2 user guide to help you with this and other topics.

"Audubon: American Birds" is a not only a wonderful introduction to Audubon's works but a portrait of the birds as seen through the eyes of a great American naturalist. The volume also serves as a good reference source though tempered with an romantic view giving the astute reader an additional insight into the times in which Audubon worked. I would definately recomment this book to both the birder and art lover.

This book written by some of the best authors known in the field comprises a quite extensive overall view of biogeography, its fundaments, beginnings, divisions, schools and relatively new applications and inner relations with other sciences.It contains also a copy of the original zoogeographic regions map created by Wallace. This book resembles the whole biogeography curse taught in the Faculty of Sciences of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, UNAM. which is quite exceptional and has the best scientists-profesors in Latin America. If you are looking for a "has it all" biogeography book this one is a must have for undergraduates and graduates students interested in comparative biology, systematics and distributions of taxa within time and space. The review has only four stars for strictly brand new additions of up to date biogeographical information are not included in this edition, yet, but for a three year old book it is a minor problem.

The Library Journal review of A Few Good Men incorrectly cites the lack of an index. There is, in fact, a twenty-eight page index that lists more than one thousand entries to include all names, units, and significant battle sites mentioned in the text. Aircraft,equipment,named operations, and weapons are also categorized.

This book, written by the world's foremost experts on Rhipicephalus taxonomy, will be invaluable to anyone who needs to identify brown ticks or come to grips with the many changes in their nomenclature. The high-quality SEM photos (several for each species, showing key morphological features) are a particularly useful addition. As a taxonomic work the book is great. Readers looking for ecological or phylogenetic details, however, will be disappointed. The limited quantitative data that are provided (host numbers, and measurements of tick body sizes) are spread throughout the book, with no summary tables provided; the distribution maps are coarse-grained; there is little discussion of tick population dynamics or disease relationships; and the comments on tick ecology reflect the state of knowledge in the 1960s. Despite these criticisms, the authors have achieved what they set out to do and should be commended for providing such a useful taxonomic reference.

Fifteen-year-old Jody Carpenter comes to town about 1950 to earn money to help his family. In a short time, he learns about shame, violence, and beauty in deep love, faces injustice and ignorance, and struggles with meanness and heroism. This is a Steinbeck-like tale about the drama of growing up in the rural backwaters of middle America when voices of reason and justice often struggled with ignorance. At the same time, Jody stumbles on possibilities for redemption and his own heroism in the fire that changes several lives at the climax of the story.

I just adore this book. It is so wonderfully obsessive, a sort of subtle comedy leaks out and consumes you. Beard was obviously part genius and part madman -- how else could you explain such tremendously narrow focus? -- and that is where a lot of his charm lies. He is a fantasic character, and this serves as an interesting study of one of the most important gastronomical figures in history. For any fan of Beard, this essential work gives more weight and background to his already substantial body of work.

In order to become more well-rounded in his studies of physics, Chadwick went to Germany before the outbreak of the first world war and was locked up as an enemy of the Germans when the war came. The total breakdown in the existing order of things might help explain why the British were so keen on finding the subatomic particle structure of matter. The previous discovery of the mass and charge of an electron and experiments with radium, which naturally decays, had indicated that atoms might be capable of being broken into smaller parts. The discovery of the neutron in 1932 paved the way for experiments in chain reactions in which neutrons, which were the products of splitting atoms, were used to split other atoms. The powers which have had uses for this knowledge have been so quick to put it to use that it is still considered a great secret from anyone that isn't a member in good standing of their club. This book may be read as a description of the life of a man who was a member of the club before anyone knew that there was a club. About the earliest sign in the book that some kind of club was being formed was when Chadwick obtained some German radioactive toothpaste, for people who need to have teeth that glow in the dark, and tried to figure out what was in it during World War One.

"Organic Gardening, Vegetable Growing in Simple Terms", by Dr. James Brown, is a short book that has a lot of information on vegetables, much of it in tables. Much of the information he includes is not presented in other general vegetable production books, such as the longevity of seeds, number of seeds per ounce, seed germination temperature, how to propagate herbs, plant growing temperature, transplanting tolerance, how to determine when to harvest a particular crop, how to store a particular crop. The book also contains standard information on crop production. Much of the text is in a question and answer format. His pest control section is the weakest part of the book. Overall, it is a valuable reference, although a bit costly.