The 1884 edition -- the last one -- includes 60,000+ blazons of English, Scots, Welsh, and Irish arms. There are no illustrations except for the royal family and incidental examples in the glossary of heraldic terminology. A straight-forward reference work which assumes the reader's ability to convert text into a mental image, but this could not otherwise have been squeezed into 1,185 double-column pages! The perfect companion to _Burke's Peerage_ and _Burke's Landed Gentry._ Not cheap, but still a bargain.

At First glance Burkes offers a great insight into the lives of our British ancestors and as such has been most helpful in providing direction for further research.This would have been vastly improved had I received Vol I and Vol II of the set. I can only hope that vol I will show up at my doorstep in the near future.

The General Armory of England..,London, 1883 mentiones "Silvester, Yardley, Baronet.. and Sylvester or Silvester, Armor/Crest "a tree vert., crow..., together with Earl of Derby.. Please help with information: Where can I get a family tree of these Silvesters, or who may be addressed for exact information? Is there an official society which I possibly can involve? It supposedly should be my fathers line. My mother, Grace Thorpe, whom my father has married Aug. 26th. 1939 in New York City, was a descendend from Lord Pell of the Manor of Pelham. Same question, can I get a family tree? Who is to be contacted? Again, please do not be angry with me for making this anusual approach. Thank You very much indeed and in advance for any valuable information. P.S. My father, William G. von Sylvester, US-Citizen, was well known to Mr. Peter ffrench-Hodges, in the 70ies member of the British Tourist Authority in London. How can I find out wether he is still allive? Hans-Peter Wenzl-Sylvester, Freystr. 2 D.80802 Munich, Germany

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I personally own a first printing of this book. There are many errors both large and small in scope.

A friend of mine owns a copy of the second printing which I read from (sporadically) when I took Math 223/224 at Cornell. The second edition is much better than the first but not quite adaquate.

I have no first-hand experience with the third printing although I hear that it is very good.

...Know that there is an errata page which can be easily found by searching the internet...

With that aside, my personal opinion of both the material and presentation that Prof. Hubbard offers is very high.

When I compared this text to other texts that friends of mine have used in similar classes at various other universities, I found one of two things to be true. Either my friends owned a copy of Hubbard's text or they owned an rather dull, uninspired, possibly outdated text. In the latter case, I was then able to understand why I often hear complaints that math is a "cold," "esoteric," "dry," or "soulless" subject.

Finally, what is the verdict. If you enjoy reading math books or if you consider yourself a competent math student who needs to understand the material than I highly reccomend either the THIRD printing of this book or the second edition which is rumored to appear in the fall of 2001. If you like the color yellow than I would also recommend looking at "Differential Equations, A Dynamical Systems Approach Part I" and "Differential Equations, A Dynamical Systems Approach: Higher-Dimensional Systems" which are both authored by John H. Hubbard.

I plan to buy a second edition when it prints!

Although I am a graduate student in Mathematics, I found
Hubbard's "undergraduate" text to be extremely helpful.
Hubbard combines an intuitive heuristic approach appropriate
for undergraduates with a thoroughly rigorous set of proofs
appropriate for graduate students. I found his discussion of
differential forms particularly helpful. He provides an
excellent intuitive motivation for the definitions, and then
he follows this with a mathematically sound treatment of the
topic. This is a much nicer approach than one will find in
texts such as Rudin's Principals of Mathematical Analysis.
I highly recommend Hubbard's book to anyone wishing to learn
differential forms.

This book is unique in several ways: it covers an immense amount of material, much of which is never presented in books aimed at this level. The underlying idea of the authors is to present constructive proofs, which has the great benefit of providing the reader with the ability to actually compute quantities appearing in the theorems. As an example, the Inverse Function Theorem is proved using Newton's method, which relies on Kantorovich's Theorem, and thus actually gives an explicit size of the domain on which the inverse exists. The book also contains a very nice section on Lebesgue integrals, a topic which is usually reserved for graduate level courses. The construction is to my knowledge completely new, and does not rely on sigma-algebras, but utilizes only elementary mathematics. Another nice feature is that the book considers abstract spaces at an early stage. Thus the reader is presented with the idea of computing derivatives of functions acting on e.g. matrix-spaces, as opposed to the usual Euclidian spaces. The concluding treatment on differential forms brings a lot of the introduced ideas together and completes the picture by a thorough treatment on integration over manifolds.

This book can be studied at several levels. For a first year honours course, one may skip the trickiest proofs, which appear in the appendix. More advanced readers may choose to study constructions and details of selected theorems and proofs. Anyone who buys this book will have a solid companion for many years ahead.

I am not a fan of soap operas but the life of Baby Doe Tabor reads something like one and I found it fascinating. A rags to riches to rags true story that draws you in from start to finish. There is something about the person of Baby Doe that just draws you in and leaves you thinking about her long after the book is finished. I bought this book in 1993 on a trip to Colorado and I still pick it up from time to time and re-read it. The story of Horace and Baby Doe Tabor would make a great movie, and one was made in 1932 called Silver Dollar, sadly it is not available for home video. A good read.

The story of Baby Doe is worth reading. This well written account dramatically tells the story of her rise and fall in wealth and her personal and public lives. Anyone who appreciates stories of the American power mongers of the late 19th century will enjoy this insightful biography

This collection of essays on John Dewey's Logic is, on the whole, outstanding. The essays situate Dewey's work, make clear the negative consequences for philosophy that have flowed from the discipline's failure to follow Dewey, demonstrate the contemporary relevance of his work, and probe some problems and areas for further work. The technical essays by Thomas Burke are astonishing, if over-specialized, and the essays by Vincent Colapietro and John Stuhr are remarkably rich and thought-provoking high points--easily among the very best recent essays on pragmatism.

This was a nice companion for my 4th year I.D. clerkship. It included common infections as well as the zebras, and was well-written from true cases. Each case is brief, includes pertinent history, PE findings, labs, and studies followed by a question and a thorough answer with useful references. Not an essential, but a nice augmentation for the book-focuses learner.

All you ever wanted to know about this fascinating place and a little bit more can be found in this book. Good reading, great pictures, and fun to share with friends. Makes a great gift for those who enjoy learning and sharing!

I had mistakenly thought that Wrox books were held to a higher standard. First getting a taste for them going through both of Rob Vieira's two SQL Server Programming books and regarding them as the finest technical books I've ever seen. However this Professional SQL Server 2000 XML is a disappointment. Part of the problem lies with having 12 different authors because it seems a bit jumpy. I think I'll really try to limit my future purchases to single source efforts. Also, no care was taken with the code examples that you can download from the Wrox website. The book shows the source but there is really no way of really matching the example to the source other than guessing the name. Often I've needed to open up all 15 or so files in the directory to realize that the particular example is not included. I'm picking my way through but it is not pleasant.

It is a good book as far as explaning what SQL Server has to offer regarding XML capabilities but it should have covered the case studies fully with the .Net Framework. Also, it covers very good the IIS configuration, and how to manage XML Templates, XPath and Schemas. The book has a migration example from ASP to ASP.Net which does not cover ADO.Net. If you want a rich source on how to integrate SQLXML and the .Net Framework THIS IS NOT THE BOOK.

I looked at two other SQL Server 2000 XML books, but found this one to be the best - covering almost everything on SQL Server 2000 XML. Very well written, nice examples help understand the technology better. The chapter on Updategrams is very useful. I wanted to learn updategrams and this chapter covers it nicely to get started using them in production.

This is a poor choice for a lower division physics course. The authors' writing style is not particularly clear and often difficult to read, not to mention DRY. Nothing in this text inspired any interest in the subject matter. Come on! Physics should not be too difficult to make interesting! The authors sometimes use concepts that are not introduced and explained until later in the book. There must be better choices for an introductory physics class. (This text is the only physics text used at San Francisco State University. I have to assume that the primary (only?) reason it was chosen is that Lea & Burke teach there.)

I've been working with this book for three semesters now, and I feel it's strong, specifically in that:

1. The authors recognize that many beginning students need problem solving strategies; they supply a good method and are consistent with its use.

2. The book makes it abundantly clear what the big ideas are going into (and coming out of) each chapter. This was a very helpful study tool.

3. Their is surprisingly little "hand-waving" in this book, which I think is special for an introductory book on physics.

4. The problems have a _wide_ range of difficulty levels, and there are a lot of them.

5. The book covers a terrific amount of material, including basic mechanics, waves, optics, thermodynamics, and E&M. There's a short section on special relativity and other modern physics too, which is a nice appetite-whetter for students who will continue on.

This book can be very useful, but the organizational structure might at first seem a little opaque. After some getting used to, I have found the book a great resource. I would definitely recommend it for an introductory sequence at almost any school. I think the book might fit in best at more rigorous institutions, because it doesn't really pull many punches in the early chapters (though it does a good job making challenging material digestible). A good instructor could effectively use it at any institution, though--it's written to be understood.

One side comment regarding other reviews: The intro physics courses at SF State (where some of the reviewers used this book, including me) are unfortunately out of sequence, with students taking intro E&M with as little as one semester of calculus under their belts. This is obviously a big problem and I think some criticism has been leveled at the book (unfairly) because of it.

I've used this book for the 3-semester intro to physics sequence taught at San Francisco State and have been thoroughly pleased with it. Basic principles and key concepts are heavily emphasized. The authors tend to de-emphasize memorizing derived formulae (which leads to plug-and-chug problem solving) and focuses on breaking down a problem into its basic elements, which is in my opinion the best way to approach problems in physics. Some might find the math a bit rigorous for introductory physics but it's the same math as in Giancoli or Tipler which is just calculus (some differential equations is used later in the text but so does the others). This is not a "learn by example" text, since the examples tend to emphasize additional elements of the concepts (usually by showing some of the math techniques) but the text does show well thought out outlines to solving problems. It really has given me an excellent foundation in physics.

Terrorism by John Pynchon Holms and Tom Burke is useful to only two groups: readers who know absolutely nothing about the subject, and those familiar with the topic who need a quick index. The former group will get a shallow but broad introduction to terrorism, the latter a reader-friendly glossary of names, terms, and dates.

As an aside, this book originally was published in 1994. After September 11, 2001, in another egregious example of exploitation of the tragedy, the opening chapter was revised and dedicated to the terrorist attacks on Washington, New York and over the skies of Pennsylvania. The September 11th timeline, like the book as whole, is a comprehensive but contains nothing new.

Terrorism offers a glossary of countries, groups, people, and weapons used by terrorist groups today. As a reference book it comes in handy and some of the info is good, but check up on anything ya find, cause ALOT of the material is inaccurate. Much of the weapons info is totally off base. It even lists the G11 as a weapon in modern terrorism.
Nevertheless, it is a good source for a broad overview of terrorism in todays society. If ya dont know anything about the subject and want some basic info, get the book. But if ya want really accurate info, go somewhere else.

(...) I easily found an entry for Osama bin Laden on page110, al-Qaeda on page 126, and also noted that the 911 attacks were covered in detail in the beginning of the book on pages 8-16. If you're looking for a straight forward introduction to terrorism and terrorists give this one a try.

This book can be read only by academic philosophers. Unfortunately it is not an exposition for the general public of the important and relevant ideas of Dewey. It is a book filled by "isms"; it assumes that the reader already knows not only Dewey's philosophy but also that he is an expert on most other philosophers also. Really quite unreadable. Here are a few typical sentences from the book: "Dewey is challenging both Venn's account of experience as divisible into perception and conception and the analytic-synthetic distinction presupposed in both empirical logic after Hume and the transcendental logic of neo-Kantians and objective idealists." Or: "For, once it is accepted that the true subject-matter of Dewey's metaphysics is experience itself, which allows Dewey's project to be assimilated to Kant's in the Critique of Pure Reason, it becomes almost impossible not to agree with Santayana's accusation that Dewey is half-hearted in his naturalism". Or: "Generic traits are expressed as the terms of the conclusions drawn, in propositions that have projectibility, but in practice they have both extensional and intentional meaning: the are the temporal and existential evidence of valid inference." I think that philosophical books written in a language that only other philosophers understand are meaningless. Philosophy has meaning only as far as it is relevant to peoples' lives. This book only demonstrates how barren philosophy can become when it creates its own artificial code of communication, in a way that is completely detached from the need for understanding of people in general. I am sure that Dewey's ideas can be discussed quite clearly in a more accessible language, focusing more on the ideas themselves and less on the discord between philosophers.

This is rigorous, tightly argued book that explores pragmatism (especially Dewey and the relation of his thought to that of C.S. Peirce), the relation between a pragmatic theory of experience and a pragmatic theory or logic of inquiry, and the meaning of intelligence. An earlier reviewer is right to point out that this is a book that assumes substantial knowledge of pragmatism. If you have not read big chunks of Peirce, James, and Dewey, and if you do not know your way around philosophy a bit, this book will be too advanced. It is not, for all that, barren or irrelevant. Indeed, the practical implications of this book--at least for persons with sufficient background to grasp them--are large and important. Sleeper's account of pragmatism and its conception of philosophy is challenging and effectively argued. Persons who have been getting their pragmatism through the works of thinkers like Rorty or Putnam or Cavell or McDowell would do well to redirect themselves to, and through this book. After reading this book, it is not hard to see why experts in the field--for instance scholars associated with the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy--consider it a classic. This re-issue will insure that new readers have access to it. An absolutely key book in the contemporary study and forward direction of pragmatism