. . . then you must attract people to it.

Many classic proven marketing techniques can be employed faster, easier and cheaper today using new (electronic) tools. The web site replaces the brochure and the media kit while email replaces Postal mail.

Peter Kent and Tara Calishain build a foundation and then cover registering your web site, getting the word out and promoting the inexpensive way-with email. You will learn about affiliate programs, tracking results, electronic news releases and more. For coverage, click on Table of Contents in the left-hand column of this page.

As the author of 113 books (including revisions and foreign-language editions) and over 500 magazine articles, I highly recommend this book to anyone who is in business. DanPoynter@ParaPublishing.com.

It's about time! Peter Kent and Tara Calishain have managed to avoid the tremendous hype surrounding internet promotion, by providing a well-organized volume of solid information. They cover not only search engines and adverting, but lesser-known areas, such as awards, newsletters, discussion groups, press releases, and e-mail, among others. This book provides not only information, but a basis for developing your electronic marketing strategy. Buying this book is a must for anyone with a web site because it will pay for itself very quickly. Highly recommended!

I'm dismayed by the negative review posted earlier. It's obviously not true!

Anyone who has read the book can testify to the great knowledge and expertise covered in the book. I have read almost every book on marketing, and this is the best so far. For example, it is the first one to cover Truste (which is becoming a very popular registration for many Web portals). Its section on affiliate program is particularly refreshing. It also warns against the use of cybermalls by offering several compelling reasons. Now, you don't even hear about cybermalls anymore.

The coauthor, Peter Kent, has also co-written the Story on CDNow. It's an insider look that has earned rave reviews.

Don't let the negative review affects your learning experience. Amazon.com gives you 30 days to review the book. You have nothing to lose.

I purchased this book with the idea a boat cradle would be a unique gift from boat crazy Uncle Bill for my soon to be niece or nephew. Although not extensive, I do have some experience building strip built sea kayaks; very similar to the method used for the Bahama dinghy cradle discussed in the book.

Overall, the instructions are fairly clear and easy to follow. There are, however, a few pitfalls to avoid before construction starts. If you plan to enlarge the plans and patterns included in the back of the book with an architectural reprographics firm (as I did), be cautioned. The 600% enlargement specified by the book proved inaccurate. 548% brought them to scale without distortion and this was expensive (over $50). Once the plans were to scale, any stated measurements on the plans were not necessarily accurate so again, beware. Some measurements had to be coaxed from the plans and the exact placement of the transom mold still eludes me. Also a little confusing is that all the patterns are not square on the graph and, in fact, some patterns are not symmetrical. In particular the transom and rocker patterns. Purchasing the available full size plans may be the way to go.

Again the book is fairly well written as an instructional guide, even for someone like me with little boat building or woodcrafting experience. I'd have rated it much higher had the supporting plans and patterns better lent themselves to more rapid and better construction and less head scatching.

I've built the pram twice. Lots of fun! To build this boat you may have to learn a little about epoxy. Although it can be built without epoxy. I highly recommend buying the plans. If you already have the plans, then the book will help greatly in building the boat.

This book is a wonderful inspiration, and even the expectant moms can make the boat taking into account modifications to eliminate ANY exposure to the various toxins in epoxy etc. The boats are beautiful especially the historic examples. The instructions are excellent and diagrams clear. But be warned you may have trouble enlarging the plans. I went to all the blue print copying firms in a major metropolitan area and none of them had printing capabilities above 36" and I had no reply to the answer-phone messages left on the number to order plans. Time and time again. Otherwise it's got the be the best thing to focus on before baby arrives and nothing else can tell the baby(or mother) that you love them more!

I was very disapointed when I read this book. I am a professional graphic designer and very interested in information design. This book is a paradox. A book about information design wrapped in ugly design. It is too big, too selfabsorbed and seems to be oldfashioned too. A group og designerfriend padding eathother on the shoulders. It is not woth buying, however the book: "Information Anxiety by the same author is great, but has ugly confusing design too, -I dont understand why!

Saul Wurman is one of these artistic types who use closely spaced white on black text. The book is therefore an example of bad design and extremely difficult to read. His examples might be good, but it is hard work to read about them. The book is therefore NOT a design guide for information. However, the pictures look nice, so you may want to leave the book around if you have no other means of impressing visitors.

Well, what can you expect of a book? And what can be expected of this book? In it I found a collection of some good responses (from press, to brochures, websites, interactive CDs, etc) to complex communicational problems, even when not all of them satisfy my aesthetic expectations, each work must be understood as "for who is it made", "in what media it will reproduce" and "what wishes to communicate". This book isn't a hip catalogue of what's cool, trendy or fashionable. The only short come of the book is that the comments are "just that" in most of the examples.

Finally a way to get MET info w/o spending $12 a pop for games I may never play (Oblivion comes to mind). The opportunity to write in offers an excelent sounding board to tell your stories to people outside your group (and like all good tubists, I love tellin' stories). I look forward to future issues with hopes of a subscription possibillity.

I picked this book up and was skeptical at first, of course, because of the connotations that could evolve from such a publication. "Oh no, another book of fluff. More stuff to buy." But after reading it cover to cover, I'd have to say I was quite impressed. No ad's really (just ones telling you about future White Wolf Mind's Eye Theater publications) , full of USEFUL information, including the all important forum and FAQ sections, as well as a listing of LARP's for all genres in the WoD. I can see this will be a great tool for communication in the world LARP community and is must for Live Action Storytellers and players everywhere. Good job guys!

I liked this book because it was a very interesting story about Squanto and his journeys with the English in the New World and in England. I found it sad the way he was put on display and mistreated by Captain Weymouth. In the end it was wonderful that he found a home in the New World with the pilgrims.

You need to read this book ! Squanto goes to London. When he comes back his village is gone. Every one ...! It had many sad parts. Because a ... .

Squanto is very good book.It is about an Indian who lives in a little village. He is going to the new world to see the white men. To see what they do. on the ship most of the people died on the ship.

The 1973 book by Duda and Hart was a classic. It surveyed the literature on pattern classification and scene analysis and provided the practitioner with wonderful insight and exposition of the subject. In the intervening 28 years the field has exploded and there has been an enormous increase in technical approaches and applications.

With this in mind the authors and their new coauthor David Stork go about the task of providing a revision. True to the goals of the original the authors undertake to describe pattern recognition under a variety of topics and with several available methods to cover each topic. Important new areas are covered and old but now deemed less significant are dropped. Advances in statistical computing and computing in general also dictate the topics. So although the authors are the same and the title is almost the same (note that scene analysis is dropped from the title) it is more like an entirely new book on the subject rthan a revision of the old. For a revision, I would expect to see mostly the same chapters with the same titles and only a few new chapters along with expansion of old chapters.

Although I view this as a new book, that is not necessarily bad. In fact it may be viewed as a strength of the book. It maintains the style and clarity of the original that we all loved but represents the state-of-the-art in pattern recognition at the beginning of the 21st Century.

The original had some very nice pictures. I liked some of them so much that I used them with permission in the section on classification error rate estimation in my bootstrap book. This edition goes much further with beautiful graphics including many nice three-dimensional color pictures like the one on the cover page.

The standard classical material is covered in the first five chapters with new material included (e.g. the EM algorithm and hidden markov models in Chapter 3). Chapter 6 covers multilayer neural networks (a totally new area). Nonmetric methods including decision trees and the CART methodology are covered in Chapter 8. Each chapter has a large number of relevant references and many homework exercises and computer exercises.

Chapter 9 is "Algorithm-Independent Machine Learning" and it includes the wonderful "No Free Lunch" theorem (Theorem 9.1), a discussion of the minimum desciption length principle, overfitting issues and Occam's razor, bias - variance tradeoffs,resampling method for estimation and classifier evaluation, and ideas about combining classifiers.

Chapter 10 is on unsurpervised learning and clustering. In addition to the traditional techniques covered in the first edition the authors include the many advances in mixture models.

I was particularly interested in that part of Chapter 9. There is good coverage of the topics and they provide a number of good references. However, I was a bit disappointed with the cursory treatment of bootstrap estimation of classification accuracy (section 9.6.3 on pages 485 - 486). I particularly disagree with the simplistic statement "In practice, the high computational complexity of bootstrap estimation of classifier accuracy is rarely worth possible improvements in that estimate (Section 9.5.1)". On the other hand, the book is one of the first to cover the newer and also promising resampling approaches called "Bagging" and "Boosting" that these authors seem to favor.

Davison and Hinkley's bootstrap text is mentioned for its practical applications and guidance for bootstrapping. The authors overlook Shao and Tu which offers more in the way of guidance. Also my book provides some guidance for error rate estimation but is overlooked.

My book also illustrate the limitations of the bootstrap. Phil Good's book provides guidance and is mentioned by the authors. But his book is very superficial and overgeneralized with respect to guiding practitioners. For these reasons I held back my enthusiasm and only gave this text four stars.

The 1973 edition of Pattern Classification by Richard Duda and Peter Hart is one of the most cited books in the fields of image processing, machine vision, and classification. It contains perhaps the clearest, most comprehensible descriptions of statistical inference ever written. Though intended for the image processing audience, it is general in its approach, and is broader in coverage than other contemporary books like the redoubtable Van Trees (1969). The section on Bayesian Learning anticipates the EM algorithm which appeared a few years later (Dempster, et al. 1977) and their description of Parzen windows for density estimation is more often cited than Parzen's own papers.

The appearance of the 2000 2nd edition led this writer to wonder if D&H could repeat with an offering as good as their first. In particular, would D&H have kept up with the considerable growth in methodology in the 1990s? Well, they have! With the addition of David Stork as third author, the second addition re-presents the basic theory, illustrated with some beautiful and complex figures, and knits it neatly with an exposition of neural networks, stochastic methods for posterior determination, nonmetric classification (tree search and string parsing), and clustering. Chapter 9 is a particularly interesting review of the recent machine learning research making the point that, absent knowledge of a problem's specific domain, no one classifier is better that any other. This chapter also reviews solutions to the problem of training on too-small samples including the Jackknife and bootstrap methods, and newer bagging and boosting algorithms popular in data mining applications. Each chapter is well-designed, with a summary, many exercises (including computer exercises), and references to the literature (typically 50-100) including many recent references.

This book is designed for an upper-level undergraduate/graduate audience. It doesn't assume a knowledge of statistics, but requires some familiarity with methods from calculus, real analysis, and linear algebra.

The first edition was a particularly important element in this writer's education; the second edition is certain to find a similar place in the working and intellectual lives of many new readers.

Before this book was published, I considered "Pattern Recognition", by Theordoridis to be the best text for learning pattern recognition and classification. Although Theordoridis' book has some difficulties (not enough concrete exercises, ommission of structural methods, and not enough material on Bayesian Networks and HMMs), it seemed significantly better than previous texts. However, not only does Duda, Hart, and Stork's book succeed in those areas where the former fails, but it also has other strengths that the former book does not have: better illustrations, boxed formulas and algorithms, and highlighted defintions. Although somewhat superficial, these improvements mark the fact that pattern recognition is now considered a mainstream subject, and thus requires a mainstream text that keeps the integrity and rigor of the subject matter, while simultaneously making it more accessible to the average engineer. The new champ, however, does not come without it's own shortcomings. For example, I believe the last 3 chapters of Theodoridis' book should be read by anyone who wants a deeper understanding of clustering techniques for unsupervised learning. Moreover, this book fails to acknowledge the brilliant work done in computational learning by Vapnik and Chervonenkis, which reveals the authors' bias towards practice over theory. I believe it deserves more than passing mention in the historical notes section of unsupervised learning.

Having bought this book about a year or so ago, I just picked it up from the bookshelf and had a look at the current URLs of the examples provided. Given the rate of change of the web you would expect many of these example sites to be different - I found that many were no longer there - and those that were have changed their style radically. Hmmm. Not a good advert for the book!

I used this book largely as a reference and for the samples on the CD-ROM. The book emphasizes the importance of incorporating feedback from web surfers and using this feedback to customize the site as well as other applications.

The book is lengthy and does not offer many pictures; however, the advice is very sound and definitely comes from one who has been there. It is a good reference and worth the purchase for the CD-ROM.

100

I speciallize in computer crisis management, and this book was full of false information and cliche'd conclusions. This book is a disgrace.

While I am a Year 2000 Project manager, I found this book interesting. It is a helpful guide to determine if the project is equipped with the appropriate staff to support those changes required to complete a year 2000 project. This is good reading for business managers and CIOs to help them understand what is required to staff the project adequately so that daily tracking and progress management can be delivered on a regular basis - esp. what with all the legal implications being forewarned about companies who have not started to address the century shift. I encourage the business managers worried with Year 2000 to pick this up if they haven't already

This is an excellent book that every computer professional should keep on their desk for the next several years. It is inspirational as well as informative, and it should be read seriously by anyone who has an honest desire to get a basic understanding of the Year 2000 computing problems, regardless of whether they have an inclination to accept the problem or not. This book helps to dispell the myths and focuses on the realities as well as opportunities related to this problem. Peter and Richard are the original Year 2000 experts and should be given a Nobel prize for bringing this problem to the attention of industry experts such as Gartner Group, and the U.S. Congress GAO and OMB. This book helps to prepare the reader for the fact that this little two-byte problem could have enormous consequences, and there will probably be some disasterous results if there are not enough programmers who care to volunteer for this Mission Impossible to be able to do all of the work that needs to be done. This book should be a starting point for Year 2000 awareness for the programmer or business executive who can't personally attend a Y2K seminar, but should be followed by one of the detailed technical solutions book such as those by Dr. Keith Jones and Dr. Leon Kappelman. All in all, this is the book you need to read first if you really want to understand what this problem is all about, and care about what happens to the rest of the world outside the four walls you live and work in

Unfortunately this book has not been updated in over 25 years. Taxonomic changes in some groups of mammals have left this rather inadequate. The illustrations aren't bad except for sea mammals which have black and white sketches for illustrations. It may have been a decent guide when it came out, but I don't see the point in publishing a book which may not have the animal you're looking at in it! This book needs a revision.

This book was issued in 1976 not in 1998 as I was led to believe...... I just received my copy and it is a 3rd edition, clearly copyrighted in 1976. Apparently it was reprinted recently, but not updated. Who knows how much has changed on our knowledge of mammals over the past 25 years? Also, the binding on this paperback has left little space for the inside margin which will make this a little difficult to use and probably shortern its lifespan. RK

Peterson's field guide to mammals is one of my standard references as a mammology student. I constantly use the range maps,color identification plates, and animal descriptions. The book provides you with good identification characteristics indicated by arrows on the illustrations of each animal and a brief life history of every species north of the border. There are skull plates at the back of the book that are good for comparing different families but do not include every species and in some cases are poor positions to see defining attributes. The color plates for the most part have good illustrations but a few look hoaky like the Mountain Lion. Nevertheless, they all still provide good size comparisons and coloration of the animals. Consistant with other Peterson guides.

Fr. Richard McBrien is a well-known cleric who has made a career of public dissent in the Church. If this is the position he wishes to take, that is his business. However, when he purports to write a history of the papacy, is it too much to expect precisely that?

Instead, McBrien has provided several hundred pages of typical, tiresome "Catholic" dissent badly disguised as a history book. As a non-Roman Catholic clergyman, historian and theologian, I find that very unfortunate.

For a far better book from an academic perspective, I would suggest Dr. Owen Chadwick's Oxford Dictionary of the Popes as a much more valuable reference tool.

This is a great book if you're curious about the basics of the life of a particular pontiff, or about papal statistics (i.e., shortest reign, longest reign, dates of reigns, etc.). It is not a history, and does not advertise to be one. It is a reference book from which history can be extracted (there are sections on papal history and the book is divided up into sections or epochs). You can literally pull up the name of a pope and get a glimpse of what his rule was like, as well as the highlights and relevant dates for each pope.

This book was perfect for me, coming from a non-catholic background. Since it does not read like a book laden with catholicism, I wasn't turned away by the language or structure of the book. Not once did I feel the author was trying to proselytize me (something sadly lacking in some other books about the catholic church). What I found was an honest, objective look at the papacy: there have clearly been good and bad popes (some, though very few, have been downright loathsome people), and there have been popes who were incredible men. This book is honest in its appraisal of the men who held the highest earthly order of the catholic church.

There is a slant, and the author hits you in the face with it, but not until the very end of the book. It is not laced throughout the text. Depending upon your perspective, it will either horribly offend you or surprise you with its candor. I personally found it refreshing.

In short, if you're curious about the papacy from a historical perspective, this is a good place to start.

McBrien tries to compress almoat 2,000 years of religious, social and political history into one volume and does a pretty solid job. He gives anywhere from a few paragraphs to a few pages on the over 260 popes throughout history, with the bulk of his text spread out over the popes of the 20th century.

For the most part, McBrien looks at the popes with a scholarly and critical eye, describing how most of the popes throughout history were preoccupied with political and military matters rather than spiritual ones.

However, he does drift from a scholarly, critical examination from time to time. For example, I thought that he was improperly airing out his theological complaints against the current pope in his section on John Paul II (McBrien is theology chairman at Notre Dame), but I enjoyed his passage about the much-beloved pope, John XXIII. (can someone out there recommend any good books on this pope?)

McBrien ends this reference work with some papal facts, like "best and worst" and "firsts and lasts" and has a chronological list, as well as an alphabetical list, of the popes. However, my favorite parts of this book were the introductions to each chronological period of papal history. McBrien gives a general picture of the mood of the day and how each pope dealt with military, political (and sometimes spiritual) issues of the day. He also takes a look at internal church politics and stresses that throughout history, popes were sometimes under control of kings, emperors, powerful families and groups of bishops and clergy.

I've even used this book to settle barroom discussions over popes and in August, 2002, when the press began to ask if Pope John Paul II was going to resign, I referenced this book when people were asking me if other popes have resigned in the past (they did, BTW).

The book is a solid reference if you someone asks you who Pope Eugenius or Sixtus II was, and when they were popes. Since McBrien had 2,000 years of history to cover, it piqued my curiosity to learn more about these fascinating individuals and the times in which they lived.