Cliff Notes have always been a useful study tool. While this book lacks the details that make Joseph Andrews humorous, it does give a brief background as to the events and characters interactions in each chapter. While I would not recommend this book as a replacement to reading the actual novel, it is an excellent study guide.

A global world is subject that is often pondered and disected at any given moment in time. Ideas and opinions aren't always out of vogue like some issues. In Mansbach/Rhodes 2nd Edition of this Reader, they present the ideas of what the world is, was and should/could be.

This Reader is almost like a history lesson juxtaposed with current affairs to present concepts in international politcs. And because it was printed in 2003 (but really in 2002) there are issues that most people are familiar with that are discussed (i.e. terrorism-9/11, UN, weapons of mass destruction, ethnic/cultural/social/economic changes, etc). Numerous and well known authors in each chapter give their own view. But most importantly, there are also counter arguments that give the reader a well rounded idea of the subject. It's very important to be able to see all sides and not one that is the most popular or the most radical.

Each chapter has a short introduction (in which for some subjects, gives a kind of brief history, and better understanding) as does each article. Lots of examples and references that are clear and concise. It's difficult not to understand.

The author's are w/o bias and are willing to give all sides of the same issue--which doesn't color the subject one way or the other; they leave it to the reader to decide.

I actually loved reading each chapter and all the varied opinions made me think more about my world and how it functions. There are things that most of us are completely unaware of and dont' take the time to read and understand. With this Reader, anyone can get a brief history that they can apply to real life issues. I am a better informed person and more aware of how the system came to be and why. It's a fountain of information that can be used for first time users, as myself, and it's not difficult to follow at all.

The story of Vancouver's voyage to the Pacific North West is one of much hardship, persistance and determination. John Naish tells the story of the voyage by cross referencing the journals and diaries of four of the key players in this expedition. Taken individualy the journals are a great read themselves but when used to collaborate or just to fill in blanks it results in a very pleasant read. It takes the reader into the world of 1791-1795 in such a way that we can forget, briefly, what we have today and imagine the world during the times of the French Revolution and the emergence of America as a nation.

This book is yet another fascinating study between Joseph Smith's words versus those finally printed in the Book of Mormon. A very interesting read.

"...worth owning and reading: the text is valuable, the illustrations are magnificent, and the production overall is excellent. The Mediterranean Diet will enrich the library of any educated person, not only those with medical backgrounds or Mediterranean roots...The book presents the health effects of diet with a simplicity that does not seriously compromise scientific accuracy, and it treats the various Mediterranean cultures with respect..." The New England Journal of Medicine

This could have been a much longer book, since there is an almost endless number of Native American stories dealing with animals. Bruchac made a good selection, though, and the stories of a wide variety of North American native peoples are represented here. All of them show the importance of animals to the Native Americans in that they are central to creation myths, as well as tales of friendship and those providing numerous survival instructions. Bruchac kept the prose simple, making this book ideal for children. Also useful is the glossary at the end, and the descriptions of tribal nations which provide a great deal of useful information on the major North American peoples.

This book is well-known in academic database circles as "The Red Book" (in fact, the editors maintain a useful web site at http://redbook.cs.berkeley.edu/) and is a canonical resource in those circles. It's primarily intended as a reader/textbook for a graduate course in database systems and has a heavy emphasis on implementation issues. It contains a fair number of classic papers that should be read by anybody who actually works on database engines as well as a number of more recent papers that should be read by anyone who does research in database systems. The usefulness for end-users of databases (i.e., application writers) is unclear.

The 3rd edition, in my opinion, improves upon the 2nd edition considerably. Of course, it freshens the paper selection in some areas. More importantly, it prunes the number of subject areas considerably, resulting in a more manageable collection (in more ways than one!). For example, a great deal of work was performed in the late 1980s and early 1990s in areas such as extensibility and active database management. By the late 1990s, the SQL3/SQL1999 train had already left the station - work still goes on in these areas, but at a greatly reduced rate. Conversely, data mining and decision analysis have become hugely important areas, and the new Red Book has a section on it.

If there's a place where this book "missed the boat," it would probably be in terms of applications. The editors cut the section on user interfaces and programming models and have always ignored unstructured/semistructured data models. In these days of the Web, this choice is questionable; on the other hand, a lot of the most reasonable work in these areas has in fact appeared since 1998, so it's a bit hard to criticize with any degree of fairness!

Having lived in a number of small towns, I am continually amazed at the relevance of this classic study to contemporary local politics and social relationships. Long before "investigative reporting", a grad student goes undercover for a year in a small town and reports his findings -- social groups, power, politics and tradition. This is not a dry scientific analysis, but a fascinating description of American life outside the city.

This books describes the history and evolution of residential streets in the US and Britain. It remains very objective, until the last chapter when the authors push for the shared streets concept. As a transportation planning professional, I found it very informative and compelling. It did the impossible: it changed my mind on the value of cul-de-sacs.

Subsampling is a form of data reuse similar to the bootstrap. However the idea of subsampling preceded the bootstrap. The original work is due to Hartigan in the 1970s and was motivation for some of Efron's ideas on bootstrap. The authors begin with a treatment of bootstrap theory. They then introduce subsampling under the assumption that the data are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d). They then provide the theoretical development of subsampling for i.i.d. data, stationary time series, non-stationary time series, random fields and marked point processes. The material is thorough and includes some of the authors' own original research. It is a highly advanced text that presupposes a first year graduate course in theoretical statistics.