This handbook is easy to approach. It provides general information about infectious diseases, although not comprehensive in detail. For medical students and those who are not specialists of infectious diseases, this book is the one that you can buy and read.

A Practical Approach to Infectious Diseases offers the medical resident and ID fellow a thorough yet accessible and practical resource for dealing with commonly encountered ID problems. The section of STD's is particularly informative as are the sections on Bone and Joint Infections and UTI's.

The major texts for ID are often cumbersome to find the exact information needed. This text however is easily referenced with discrete chapters and excellent references at the end of each chapter if a more comprehensive review is desired.

I recommend A Practical Approach to Infectious Diseases for medical residents and ID fellows. These individuals need easily accessible, concrete and precise information which this text provides very nicely.

I love Degas, so don't get me wrong. For a book as big as it is, it's lacking. Way too much text at the expense of Degas wonderful work. It is a big book, why are there so few big reproductions in it. There could be more color images too. This would have been a great book had they made use of the size and done a better layout between text and image, as all books on artist should be. It also seems like they've left out a lot of good stuff the should have had room for. Overall, it just seems like not much thought went into the actual layout of the book.

I don't recommend it as a keeper book on Degas, however if you find a cheap copy, why not, it is Degas afterall and the reproductions do look decent.

This is a great book for any Degas fan, the color plates are absolutely gorgeous!

This book is incredible! I stumbled upon it at a [local] book store and it was marked down to an incredible [price] so you can bet I snatched it right up. This book goes from his drafts up through wonderful color photoplates. It has a total history of Degas, his family etc. Wonderful! Buy this book!

Was this a Power Point presentation... gone missing?

First, it's important to realize that this book is part of a series of "Introducing..." books from a UK publisher. So good authors were probably forced to follow a bad format.

That format apparently required glitzy graphics which overpowered the book. Each small page seemed to be on a separate topic... much like a Power Point slide presentation.

There was disappointingly little coverage of the math side of the material. OK, there really was next to none. The saving grace was the coverage of where fractals were being used in practical applications.

Let me tell you a little more on these graphics. They were (professionally done) hand drawn cartoons. Mostly of famous mathematicians having quirky things to say about the subject, on an 8th grade level.

Overall, I think the authors did a fair job of trying to jamb an excellent subject into a stupid book format. The problem lies most likely at the feet of the publisher. This format makes sense for some of their other 8th grade books: "Introducing Feminism"... Freud... Jung... Marx... Einstein, etc. How they were able to pull off "Introducing Math" in one of these small books is probably a story in and of itself. They even have an "Introducing a Post-Feminism" book, if the first one was not enough.

This book was not a complete zero for me, as I did learn many new things. It was a fast read, but I think I have yet to find the best introductory book on Fractals. If you buy this book, you'll never have to pick up a pencil and solve a problem, or even use a calculator. It's just all... a quick read.

John Dunbar

This book was very interesting. It takes a look at fractals and their basic geometric properties and gives a fairly extensive history from their discovery to their current use today. This book is not technical at all and could be read by almost anyone. The best part about this book is that it offers numerous reasons for why we should care about fractals in the first place. It offers an argument that nature is naturally based on fractals and that an understanding of fractals is essential to understanding nature. The book has a comic on just about every page making it an enjoyable and quick read.

Some of the not-so-great aspects of the book are that it is almost too short, not quite technical enough, and has grammatical errors all over the place. I read this book in one sitting and it left me wanting to know more. It makes up for this, however, by listing several books about fractals and chaos theory for you to move on to after reading this book as well as telling you the level of expertise one would need to read these other books. The grammatical errors in the book are numerous. It makes me believe that no one proof read this book before it was published.

Overall, this is a great book to start learning about fractals with. If you are a math whiz, then perhaps you might want to look elsewhere for a more formal introduction to the mathematical properties of fractals, but for the layman, this book is great.

Discovered this book serendipitously- It's easy to read, and the witty illustrations pull you right into it. It's a good book because, while it follows a logical sequence of explanation of fractals, it can also be opened almost anywhere and "read in". I will pass this book on, both to adults and young people I know, and they will get a great introduction to fractals!

This is a companion book to "The Alarming History of Medicine" by the physician, writer and humorist Richard Gordon, who also authored the "Doctor in the House" series. It contains medical commentaries on 31 more or less famous people, picked (more likely than not) for the availability of their disease records than for other communalities they may have had.

Medical gossip can be a lot of fun, and Gordon exploits this subject very well, adding obscure and recondite facts to what might be common knowledge. Yes, most people know about G. Washington's dentures, but it is surprising to hear about the English fad for dental implants that resulted in "barrels full of teeth" taken from US Civil War cadavers by macabre entrepreneurs and shipped to Britain, there to be sold by mail-order. Most know vaguely about "Typhoid Mary," but the story of Mary Mallon, an Irish cook, is seldom told as the medical detective account in which Dr. Geoge Soper was able to track her down by sheer obsession, luck, and statistical skills. Many know about the divine Sarah Bernhardt's leg amputation, but here the anesthetist's notes are transcribed, and the history of her injury and treatments, before and after the removal of her right leg is recounted.

Napoleon's hemorrhoids at Waterloo? Hitler's missing left testicle? Queen Victoria's abscessed armpit? Probably more than one cares to contemplate; but for the inveterate gossips and trivia collectors amongst us it is a treasure of scuttlebutt, rumor and history that will be cherished. There is no index, and for a book of this type that should cost at least one star. The fair bibliography is good enough, but it doesn't make up for the absent index.

This book offers you an interesting look into the stories that are told around the land. These stories come from various regions and the author is nice enough to give credit to each and every storyteller that gives him these stories. I cannot verify how much truth is any of the folklore, but it doesn't really matter each are satisfying in their own way. The color illustrations are marvelous and done by oriental artists, not western artists. Each color plate gives the feeling of a painting making the story feel like both painting and story have been around a long time. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Japan or would like a slightly different look into the history of Japan. Note this may not be historically accurate, but in my opinion, the stories that are handed down tell as much about the culture as the history itself.

This book is well-written and offers a fascinating theory: that eating disorders might be categorized as "cultural diseases." The idea of a cultural disease springs from the theory that in different cultures, there exist different unspoken rules for rebelling or acting out. The rules for this behaviour depend on social advances and fashion within the culture. Gordon compares anorexia and bulimia to other 'period' illnesses such as hysteria, and the interesting Asian cultural disease of 'running Amok.' This book is mainly theoretical (meaning it is not heavy on pure research data) but offers a fascinating point of view. It is also fast, easy reading for those interested in eating disorders, as well as concise.

This is not a book about learning golf. For that there is Bobby Jones's book. This is not a book about the swing. For that, I love Ben Hogan's book. But I still value that I read this book because it quickly introduces you on the lingo and buzzwords and topics that a golf person might want to be aware of. So I would recommend it if that is what you want, and will help round you out if you want to understand golf talk.

Can a textbook be delightfully written? This one is. Authors Richard L. Hughes, Robert C. Ginnett, and Gordon J. Curphy explore every aspect of leadership and smoothly weave research conclusions into the narrative. Examples abound, from Colin Powell to Walt Disney. The authors are all psychologists who specialize in leadership issues. They have written conversationally and intelligently, using plenty of sidebar material (even famous cartoons) to bring their reporting to life. We [...] recommend this classic (now in its third edition) to everyone interested.

This novel could be coined the X-files of the 1850's. There is suspense, intrigue and lots of action. This book is well written and tickles the imagination of any history buff.

This is NOT a book for beginners who wish to learn JSP/servlets and EJBs and the techniques of J2EE. On the other hand, if you already have some knowledge with these techniques, the book may help to improve your background of J2EE and its components.

1.The strong points of the book are:

- the book does a wonderful job in explaining different key points of J2EE techniques especially at the beginning of each chapter; although the discussion sometimes becomes pretty vague and less clear at the end.

- the book's code examples use j2sdkee1.2.1, orion and jboss which are available for you free with unlimited time.

- the book looks quite impressive, 1600 plus pp. hardcovered.

2.The weak points of the book:

- all the code examples are fairly easy. In fact, too easy to do much help to the readers who need a better workout to pay attention to some key points of the techniques.

- Since only half of the book is devoted to really J2ee techniques, people who already experienced with jsp/servlet may find the other half of the book unecessary.

In conclusion, you may want to check this book out if you alread know jsp/servlet and j2ee( through the Sun's tutorials and examples and wish to have a better understand of this popular but pretty complex technique.

The content of the book is a great way for Java programmers to get an overview of the J2EE APIs and Java-based Web applications with reasonable hands-on depth. I can't say enough in that regard. More depth requires more specific books, but that's just due to the size of J2EE. However, the editing on this book is just short of awful. There are numerous typos and non-grammatical sentences. Part of this is obviously insufficient attention given to the writing of non-native speakers. The approach differs radically from chapter to chapter, ranging from elaborated regurgitation of the documentation (useful due to its experienced commentary) to teaching almost solely by example. In one chapter, the author's coding style is full of distracting peculiarities. If he were consistent in their use, it may not be so distracting, and his at time really strange departures from common control structure idioms leaves you guessing. If the chapter weren't so strong from an architecture and design perspective, you would wonder about his command of Java. All in all, I recommend this book as in introductory cram course on J2EE, but the Wrox multi-team approach broke down somewhat here.

As lots of wrox book, this book does provide some interesting information. UML diagrams are used for better explanation, design issues for JSP, using XML with JSP, how interface object, control object and entity object fit EJBs, JMS, Corba, Unit test, are all well explained.

However, as the non J2EE edition, the code still contains errors: for all the Primary key classes in examples of EJB, hashCode and equals are not defined, you have to add them yourself. There are errors for package names, for the example, in Chapter 20, Order and Product classes are defined in book.order and book.product classes, and other classes imported them from factory.order and factory.product classes. You have to change "book" to "factory" class by class manually!

They used jBoss and orion server to implement EJB examples, I am not against these two servers, but I think it may be better to test the examples with Weblogic as well, since it is the most popular application server, they did not. And they never mentionned Weblogic in the book, not even in the appendix.

In split of all these errors, there is no serious error, this is a good and interesting book.