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This book is easy to read (except for the fact that it makes you wonder why abortion is still legal). Furthermore, it is great evidence for that friend of yours that doesn't believe that the abortion industry is unethical.
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This book can enlighten a person on some aspects of the "market world," but this book contains no vital information on surviving the stock market, which is stated in the introduction. Wanger only presents the method he uses, and if someone could use one of his ideas to produce a profitable strategy, this book is worth reading.
I, personally, did not enjoy this book, but I did not dread reading it. The useful information contained in this book could have easily been displayed in maybe 15-20 pages. The rest of the book is examples of things to further induce his key points.
I would not recommend this book, but if a novice trader had absolutely no idea about what goes on in the stock market, this book may give some helpful ideas.
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Vincent Lopez
The story is told by a baby that is born a genius and is almost immediately set upon by forces trying to capture him. With incredible wit and tons of intellectual property, so to speak. The baby has a wicked sense of humor.
A bit heady, and not for the faint of intellect, but a great pay-off.
Impossibly, a "structuralist" dialogue is accomplished between Everett's obvious genius with what words can do and with what words are for. A new "parole" and "langue"? Ralph would easily make fun of me for that one.
Just read it. You don't need to know nothing about nothing. It's not erudite-- it's fun.
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Both author and publisher deserve 10 stars for this magnificent effort.
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A second warning: This book is dated, five year-old material.
1-The schools such as Temple University, Texas Christian University and Towson State University appeared under the "recommended" and "noteworthy" categories for dance. However, in the full description of each school the Author's Comment states all three as " recommended" for dance.
2- The University of Arizona, Tucson is listed in the "noteworthy" category for dance, but later in the full description the Author's Comment reads, "highly recommended" for dance.
I was very confused as to which to believe; the list of schools by category or the Author's Comment. Over all, for me these mistakes are misleading and detract from the credibility of the guide.
On the good side the guide provides you with a lot of information on what to expect from the auditions, and even show you examples of evaluation sheets the teachers use in schools such as Julliard.
It is mostly geared to High school students so if you are an adult seeking to study dance, most of the information will not be helpful.
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In fact, the gray-scale images are so poorly reproduced that it detracts from the message the author promotes. And, in many instances, the graphs are so mottled that you have to guess as to what is being shown. Unless, of course, the book's poor image quality is part of the lesson. In which case it's a brillant ploy to get the point across.
Reasonable book - really lousy pictures!
The author explains all of the various charts available, their characteristics and how people alter their graphic works of art to influence the audience to buy into whatever the presentor wishes.
Not only does the author talk about the graphs but he explores the area of our subconcious and how this strongly influence our positive or negative perception of a chart.
The book goes into great detail and is quite humorous. The only cirticism that I have about this book is located in chapter 10. The author talks about the importance of color and how it influences the audience but he explains all of this in black and white. If you are going to encourge people to use color presentations and graphs, stop being such a tight wad and use color in your own book. Explaining tones, shades, etc., in fuzzy gray color doesn't do the job. Practice what you preach. Use color to explain color.
Besides discussions of the charts themselves, the author discusses how to write and display captions, how to put charts into slides, how to make an effective slide, how to change fonts and background colors to make your chart stand out, and more.
Reading this book will also help you to discern when other people have fooled with their charts to distort them. Local newspapers, news magazines, etc. are often guilty of playing with the scale of charts, stretching things, leaving labels off of axes, and so on - you'll be able to spot these manipulations better.
I teach a college freshman course in "Quantitative Applications Software" using MS Excel; I already have a lecture I usually call "How to lie with charts and graphs" and this book will help me add more details to that lecture, which teaches students that not every graph that CAN be made, SHOULD be made. With a good graph, you should always be able to start a sentence with "This graph shows that..." and complete it with some kind of comparison.
I have but one complaint about this book: it was clearly intended to be in a smaller format; each page of writing and illustrations takes up less than half the full-size page of the book. This could have been a trade paperback, and have cost less than it does as a larger book, without losing anything except 3" of empty margin all the way around. I plan to write to the publisher, telling them I really don't like that sort of inflation. However, you may find those margins handy for scribbling notes in; uses of this book are many, so you may need the space.
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The problem with this type of book is that it skims the "core essentials" of gamemaking, and provides completed games for you to teach yourself... I could go to a dozen sites and teach myself games.
What I need is a book that holds your hand through building the essential widgets in game making. multiple hit tests, function completion, forking the same function with multiple instances, etc. Not something that says "see? here's a game that does all this stuff now look through it."
This book will only be frustrating to someone who loves the friends of ed series. . . but it acts as a great tool to sell the other books for sure, as I learned more about game making in Flash 5 Actionscript Studio & Flash 5 Dynamic Content studio than in this book.
Bottomline: this should have been entitled Flash Games Exhibition
Os probably the most complex book on flash games, but it' a must to have on your developer shelf!