This book serves as a good starting point for QFD topics. For instance, the topics relating to software QFD, management support of QFD and TRIZ are not found in something like Cohen's "Quality Function Deployment: How to Make QFD Work for You" (Cohen's book is a reasonably good tutorial). But Revelle's book serves as a resource for some initial ideas on how to apply QFD to strategic and daily tasks. As with all QFD books that I have seen, there are almost no real-life examples. In this book, you will find one semi-real example that the author applied to his service-related business (Japanese translating).

The chapters on management support of QFD are good, but not as helpful to someone trying to bootstrap QFD techniques into a organization. I don't believe that one must have much top management support in a larger organization in order to introduce QFD - a more realistic approach would be to use QFD on a succession of more tractable, smaller problems below senior management levels, then gain support from on high. I suspect that there may be some "axe grinding" in the book as the author apparently makes a living out of QFD consulting.

What would be really useful would be a resource on actual QFD case studies, even if the authors scrambled the importance weightings in order to protect any organizational secrets. In particular, I would like to see case studies as applied to more common services such as public education (imagine the utility of coming to agreement on that subject!) or company-level and department-level charters related to items such as Deming's 14 points, TRIZ, Taguchi robust design or DFSS. These subjects are fodder for true "design reuse". I would also like more discussion on cultural issues and QFD ... I find that these are issues for the determined and focused QFD student.

The QFD Handbook is a great surprise. A surprise for what it actually delivers compared to similar books. This book is not another mechanics "how to" book. Rather, it is an applications "how to" book. It does not tell you how to form and quantify QFD matrices. It tells you how and where to apply QFD and how to integrate it with other valuable tools of advanced quality. That approach creates enormous added value.

The QFD Handbook is also a surprise because its contributors are among some of the most respected practitioners in the world. These experts provide insight into the integration of many Quality Improvement tools into QFD. The result is an approach that provides guidance to the concurrent use of these tools which, when used in the proper context, produce an output far greater than QFD alone.

In addition to the text, facilitating software is included. QFD/Pathway provides exactly what it says, a pathway through the planning and performance of the QFD process. If one considers the knowledge base provided by the book's contributors alone, it is an excellent buy. When one adds in the software, it is invaluable.

This book is not for the faint of heart. But if you really want to understand the concept and benefits of Quality Function Deployment and learn how to effectively implement it in your business, this book will cover everything you will need to know. Your time and money investment will be returned to you tenfold when you discover what your customers are truly looking for from your company after following the guidelines outlined in this book.

This book gives an excellent overview of the topic, written in an easy understandable way. The authors have researched numerous articles and studies and compiled them into this work. The book also contains a lot of tables and graphs to illustrate the text. The foundations and the scope of target costing are well discussed and a small case study gives an idea how target costing is working in a practice. Moreover, there are a lot of references to literature and some examples from industry discussed. In the appendix there is a very useful collection of tools used in the target costing.

Definition and scope of target costing as explained in the book:

The target costing process is a system of profit planning and cost management that is price led, customer focused, design centred, and cross-functional. The target costing initiates cost management at the earliest stages of product development and applies it throughout the product life cycle by actively involving the entire value chain.

The difference between target costing and cost management is that the latter focuses on reducing the cost when they are already occurring, that means when the product design and the process are already defined. The target costing approach on the other hand helps to identify the allowable cost for a product in the design stage, the cost at the manufacturing stage are therefore known to be achievable and competitive. Further cost improvements are achieved by kaizen costing (continuous improvement).

this book is best for persons to understand the target costing indeeply with plain english. this book is also suitable for cost management in the globe.

This book provided more detail for target costings, more useful everyday, in both practical and theorical case. Moreover, this book use plain english for whoever in the world.

The high point of this book is an extensive collection of algorithms and an excellent set of references for further research. Each topic is dealt with in an orderly fashion so that the simple (and usually chronologically earlier) proposals in an area appear first, followed by more complex efficient algorithms.

I have been through the first six (of the total nine) chapters in good detail. The chapters on FFT (1 and 2) and Linear prediction (chapter 3) are well done and serve as an excellent platform to get into the subject. The material is easily implemented in MATLAB using the description in the chapters.

Chapter 4 presents a detailed introduction to least-squares algorithms with a pretty good theoretical treatment. The material presented motivates the merits of least-squares approaches and lays out the various numerical approaches to solving such problems in practice. Chapter 5 and 6 follow up on this introduction to present the specific algorithms for Recursive Least-squares, Lattice-ladder algorithms, stabilized fast RLS etc.

The book gets only 4-stars because of problems with presentation. In the chapters 4,5,6 there is an inconsistency in the symbols used. The symbols used are also not readily related to the quantities they are supposed to represent. Instead of repeating a simple equation, the book often refers to equation numbers in some other part of the chapter or sometimes in other chapters. In some sections algorithms and alternative strategies just appear one after another without a good "big-picture". A flow-chart or some kind of a schematic to help classify the various techniques would enhance the utility of this book manifold (e.g., see "Fundamentals of Statistical Signal Processing" by Steven M. Kay).

Overall, I recommend this book as a very useful starting point for anyone (with a basic DSP background) interested in implementing statistical signal processing algorithms. It is also an excellent survey of existing literature.

This book is a must for any one who wants to read about Advance topics in DSP. Very informative book. It is a book of Proakis.

As with all anthologies, you have to take the good stories with the bad. But in this year's Best New American Voices, I was glad to see that--for the most part--these new writers were more than holding their own. Charles Baxter did a wonderful job of judging this volume--no surprise there. The two highlights for me were Christina Milletti's "Villa of the Veiled Lady" and Roopa Bhattacharyya's "Loss." These two writers have a sure sense of rhythm and an appreciation of long sentences. Other stories that caught my eye were Jeb Livingood's "Oh, Albany, My Love," Kira Salak's "Beheadings" and Whitney Davis' "The Sharp Light of Trespassers" which opens boldly with a discourse on rivers. Hopefully, we'll soon see some of these writers with books of their own.

I read the 2000 Best New American Voices and was a bit disappointed. A friend highly recommended the 2001 BNAV, however, and I'm so glad she did. Like the first reviewer I was also very impressed with Roompa Bhattacharyya's "Loss"... after I was finished reading the entire anthology, I found myself turning back to "Loss" and re-reading it. She has a lovely writing style that is fluid and rhythmic within a moving, well-controlled narrative. It's a balance I wish I could achieve in my own attempts at fiction! Other excellent stories include Kira Salak's "Beheadings" and Julie Orringer's "Pilgrims", both of which were well-paced and absorbing. I also liked "Before Las Blancas", "Bats","The Mean", and "Home, James, and Don't Spare the Horses". The rest range from pretty good to all right, so for an anthology of new writers this one is overall tops. I'm sure we'll hear much more from these writers in coming years.

The 'Building of Castle Howard' is a sometimes amusing and consistently fluid account of the conception and construction of the Third Earl of Carlisle's estate in Yorkshire. The patron, from a 'high-handed' and cocky young Whig to a dour but sincere father of miscreant and ungrateful offspring [...] is addressed in the opening chapter, and the rationale behind the demolition of a provincial village to build an architectural showpiece is traced. The architects - Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor - are examined in similar contexts.

However, a descrition of Sir Thomas Robinson's incongrous alterations to the splendid mausoleum (1729 - 1745, though Summerson suggested 1742 as the date of completion) is not a sufficient account of his activities at the estate: the northern range of the house features several rooms completed under Robinson's supervision, but these are simply not mentioned.

The author combs out an icongraphical programme in Pelligrini's ceiling paintings in the domed hall (ie, the 'Fall of the Phaeton'), but a similar analysis with respect to the garden monuments draws different conclusions. Carlisle's changing position as a patron and politician accounts for this: the estate shifts, in Saumarez Smith's opinion, from being a an opulent panorama to an introverted retirement home for the earl, whom, in his dotage and increasingly unhappy free time, commenced autonomous study in matters of contemporary religious thought. This, therefore, effected his decision to build a grand mausoleum rather than allow his remains to fall into the hands of what his lengthy (and only) poem preserved at Castle Howard, described as corpulent and corrupt Anglican clergmen. As an explanation for the development of the garden buildings, this is not as simplistic as my description might phrase it: the book's account is entirely convincing. I do not imagine that 'The Building of Castle Howard' - an inexpensive but well-illustrated gem - will be in print much into the future. However, its interest is broader than simply an account of architectural patronage. Unlike other studies of 18th Century British art which read as prosaic 'case-studies' (especially in the case of portrait painting, all of which make the same point), Saumarez Smith's book is an autonomous and compelling analysis of specific buildings and their conception, not a dour treatise from which established generalities are laboriously combed out.

this book is soo good, (apart from its prise), it describes how were castles built and different types of castles. For the price, ive expected more, but the book is still good.

Glasgow is as far North as Moscow. In the time of Charles Rennie Mackintosh it was a tough, smokey, industrial city still living in the shadow of centuries of Scottish Puritanism. Not exactly the most promising environment you would think for an artistic movement that created the works of exquisite beauty presented in this book.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, with a tight-knit group of fellow artists known as the Glasgow School, ensured that Glasgow at the turn of the century was an integral part of the international Art Nouveau movement, that was also flourishing in Paris and Vienna. The Art Nouveau movement is now seen as a major watershed in global culture because it was the first major art movement that drew inspiration equally from East and West.

As art evolved away from representative art, spiritual aspects came more into play. As with the Secessionist in Vienna, the German Expressionist, and the French Symbolists, mystical ideas became increasingly prominent, turning much of this art into a kind of ouija-board farce. The ghostly and heavily-symbolic works of the other members of the Glasgow School earned them the nickname of the "Spook School" and saw them marginalized.

But while much of the painting of the time reflects the faux spirituality of misunderstood oriental mysticism and sham seances, Mackintosh's work was distinguished by his deep, instinctive understanding of Oriental aesthetics, expressed unpretentiously in beautiful lines. This gave him the Midas touch at whatever he turned his hand to.

In his painting, posters, stained glass windows, furniture, and architecture, we can see the masterly interplay of straight and curved lines. Although John McKean's rather pedantic text in the book doesn't really emphasise this point enough, what we in fact experience in the stimulating tension between Mackintosh's straight and curved lines, is no less than a fusion of yin and yang, the 'female' and 'male' components of the Universe.

Fighting an uphill struggle in a city that didnÕt really understand his unique aesthetic, Mackintosh still managed to do an impressive amount of work as Colin Baxter's excellent pictures reveal. The greatest fulfillment of his art is in 3-D work, especially his furniture designs, which are notoriously difficult to photograph well, although here Baxter does a good job.

It was with furniture, especially in his many chair designs, that he most fulfilled his aesthetic. While most furniture designers of the period gave into the yin or the 'feminine,' with over-elaborate curves and rich decoration, creating a heavy effect, Mackintosh played these 'feminine' aspects off against the yang or 'masculine' by emphasizing simplicity and straightness, creating an uplifting tension that was not only beautiful in itself but also interacted with the curvature of the human form.

While much of Art Nouveau art and design is forever anchored in the historical period that created it, the work of Mackintosh continues to float with us into the future.

In Charles Rinnie Macintosh: Architect, Artist, Icon, John McKean and Colin Baxter collaborate to showcase Charles Mackintosh's kaleidoscopic talents as an architect, painter, furniture designer, and graphic artist. They provide an insightful appraisal of Mackintosh's unique talents and offer an informative overview of both the man and his achievements within the context of his personal life and times -- and how his work is viewed today. Enhanced with often stunningly beautiful photographs, Charles Rinnie Macintosh is an outstanding contribution to personal and academic artbook reference and art history collections.

This book is a great book for teachers. I learned a lot through it. And I know you will too.

As an elementary teacher and college math methods instructor, I have found this book to be an excellent resource for teaching children math in an engaging, meaningful way. The author includes lots of examples of useful activities for all areas of mathematics. A book I'll use over and over in the years to come...

I've had this book for years, and I am constantly returning to it. Not only does it have a sound foundation of classic techniques, but it covers all aspects of dining, from how to plan a menu, to preparation of all kinds of ingredients, to setting the table, to basic sanitation and kitchen organization. It really is like a "Joy of Cooking" of cooking techniques.

Outstanding reference for beginners or experienced cooks. Covers everything about basic cooking techniques, sanitation and planning. Takes very basic "core" type recipes and offers suggestions for hundreds of variations. Out of print and hard to find, but well worth the effort. I recommend it highly.

Fishing Passion
by
James C. Chapralis

As a university administrator of long standing, I read hundreds of pages of articles, reports, and memoranda weekly, and, sometimes, even daily. I am also an avid novel reader and devour much non-fiction. In other words, reading is the linchpin of much of my work and leisure; therefore, I am always on the alert for the next "great read."
Not being either a fisherman or an angler, but always eager to stretch my knowledge base, I was intrigued by the title of a new book, Fishing Passion, and its tag, "a lifelong love affair with angling." Happily, my curiosity led me to read Mr. Chapralis' marvelous odyssey about his incredible life...one imbued with his love and virtuosity of fishing/angling, his daring immersion in several unique business ventures, and his genius for forging remarkable and enduring friendships, including some with the rich and famous.
This incredible Promethean journey, begun and centered in Chicago but encompassing every corner of the globe, is recounted by Mr. Chapralis in an engaging, humorous, and self-effacing style that is the hallmark of every accomplished raconteur. I found myself racing ahead to see what new, exciting, hilarious, and even life-threatening, adventure he would next expose to this delighted, and by now captive, reading audience. And he never disappoints--his is a career highlighted by a life-informing zest and decades of improbable encounters and feats that will not only fire your imagination but also blow your envy quotient through the roof.
We should all be so lucky if a passion of ours could feed our soul, earn our bread, and burnish our existence with the joy, grace, and success that Mr. Chapralis has attained and conveys so effortlessly and convincingly in Fishing Passion. Am I ever glad that my restless inquisitiveness strongarmed me to read Fishing Passion...and so will you!
Bob McFarland
Schenectady, New York

Fishing Passion: A Lifelong Love Affair With Angling by international fishing pioneer Jim C. Chapralis is a unique exploration that explores not so much the "how-to" of fishing, as the emotional aspects of angling. Comparing the attraction and act of fishing to the condition and experience romantic love, as well as deftly capturing the passions of the sport in anecdotes, dreams, memorable personal experiences and communions with nature, Fishing Passion was written by an angler, for anglers everywhere, as it vividly communicates the true joy of a beloved and life-long pastime.

I have already read the book and study many of the examples, my classmates and I have found many mistakes in the fourth edition, however the information contained and the subjects studied are very complete. I hope the next edition will have those examples solved in a correct way in order to clasify this book as an excellent text.

The book is a great textbook for students and practicing engineers. It covers pretty much all the steel topics. It has plenty of examples from ASD design to LRFD design. I think that out of all of the steel design books out there, this is the best.

This book provides both the theory and practical applications needed to understand both LRFD and ASD Steel Design. The problems provided at the end of each chapter can be worked using either method. The example problems within the chapters provide valuable insight to procedures and techniques in solving problems. Having read many different books by Mr. Solman I have never been disappointed, and have always gained great knowledge from his books.