This is a very illuminating book. I've visited and seen the present-day Chester Cycle sites and this particular overview makes the past eminently accessible to readers interested in the cycle plays and, indeed, in Medieval theatre.

This book does exactly what it says it will do: it teaches you how to operate your Mac in a non-Mac world giving many, many practical solutions. It even gives impractical solutions when no practical solutions are available! Published in year 2000, it is a treasure of fresh web links that allow you to get current information on every topic covered. Instead of going into boring, techno-babble the book focuses on giving scenarios of what is trying to be accomplished, such as finding the best way to transfer files between Macs, PCs, and Unix platform machines. Then it provides solutions in general terms naming any hardware or software required to accomplish the task. Finally, it provides a resource list at the end of each topic which includes related commercial, shareware, and freeware publishers, hardware manufacturers, and their web sites. If you are the person in your cross-platform organization or school that other people rely on to provide them answers, this book is a valuable resource!

This book really made me think. I thought I never would agree with the authors' conclusions, but after looking at those people close to me (father, father-in-law, uncles, friends, etc.) who are no better off now than when they started working in Organizational America 30 years ago, I have to agree.

Can we change before things get worse? Maybe with Hart's & Scott's recommendations and insights (really nothing more than reiterations of what most of us already know and believe) we can!

I agree with the editor who says that this account is more believable than most of the new-age channeling books out today. The account is totally believable but I wish there was a little bit more from Elsa; apparently she knew Judge Hatch for six years and I would have liked a deeper analysis from her on the letters.

Kathy Kart's editing is also a bit obvious. I wish I could read the original text but I understand that she felt it necessary to make the letters as available to the modern reader as possible.

Regarding the title: I believe that the letters are genuine and that Judge Hatch's travelogue from the other side describes his experience there. But like he said (and I'm paraphrasing here) 'most people have the experience here that they're expecting to have.' If that doesn't throw the ball back in your court, I don't know what does. This is good news or bad news depending on your thinking...

Good luck. :-)

What a blessing to have found this book at just the right time in my life...and what a blessing that (nearly 90 years after its original publication) someone like Kathy Hart had the determination to see it republished. Elsa Barker, an established author in the early part of the 20th century, began receiving messages (through automatic writing) from a recently deceased friend (a highly respected California judge who passed away in 1912), who desired to tell her and the rest of humanity about what awaits us on the other side and why we have experiences here in the physical world.

Regardless of what your beliefs may be about religion, spirituality or the means by which these letters were communicated, one cannot deny the wisdom often expressed in these 53 brief essays. Elsa Barker in her own introduction tells the reader very straightforwardly that she was herself very skeptical about the entire experience and even initially resisted the letter-writing process and the recommendation from friends that the letters be published...but certain coincidences and experiences along the way made her finally accept the legitimacy of that was occurring.

Up until the time I read "Letters", I had always been fairly conservative about my spiritual and religious ideas, but had always been receptive and accepting of differing viewpoints and other people's experience. Elsa Barker's book has had a dramatic effect on the way I see myself as I relate to the universe...and the way I comprehend the physical as it relates to the spiritual. It is a profoundly moving and interesting work with the potential to greatly impact ones life without requiring that one buy the entire message.

This book should be read by everyone on the planet. It is a marvelous read. Very informative, sparks your own internal questions, challenges dogmatic beliefs and takes away the fear of dying. Wonderful, enlightening and uplifting. Learn that there really are "spooks" out there! Here about the artists, writers, inventors, etc... "up there". Helps you work right through death and lets you live life for what it is. Just a quick educational spin around the block! :-)

Yippeee!!!
Finally, a book that explains Fractal noise, Bump mapping, textures and Terrain modelling in a simple way that doesn't boggle your mind

I've always wondered how to make my own Smoke effects, how 3D Fractal Terrain is created, how to make Clouds and a whole lot more...
This Book is really cool! It does feel a little *academic*, but its a fascinating read and even a dummy like myself can follow the text! (Hey, I hate Maths!)

Excellent!

This book covers all of the CG aspects needed to code material and texture applications. Many commercial CG softwares are using the essential theory and practice given in this book. This book seems as if the compilation of the best Siggraph papers of the pionering researchers of the subject.

If you need to learn the procedural textures and materials: this is THE book.

The reason I am writing this is because of all the previous negative reviews that I have read.

I really find it irrational to complain for the content of the book claiming it is poor, just because it does not cover everything about the subject. This is a broad field and many topics might be very advanced and very specific to be covered, however it does provide a lot of references for anyone interested in something that specific. I strongly believe that this book is a lot more than an itroductory, with straighforward explanations to several advanced topics and many well documented examples. I also like the "wordy" approach that some of the authors do for advanced topics. This makes the text a lot more comprehensible and might also be helpful for mathematically inclined people.

Another thing that has to be mentioned is that previous posts are all refering to the second edition of this book and many information are not valid anymore (e.g. there is a thorough desctiption of Worley's cellular texturing in the third edition).

Concerning all this moaning for the high price of the book, I think it's totally unfair, as besides anything else it is of exceptional print quality (great paper, full color, etc). I personally consider this book one of the most valuable that I have ever had, so even if it was a lot more [pricey], I would still buy it.

Dear David and Philip:

Thank you for a very helpful book. Previously, I have searched for a wide variety of current sources on setting up a Mac server. Your book has already been very useful to my computer lab's elementary student leaders who are learning to set up a Macintosh server. Especially helpful has been the book's links to sites relevant to the various topics.

Themis Drakos, Port Royal Public School, Toronto District School Board Canada

I bought this book with every intention of turning my new Mac G3 minitower into a webserver. The "Cookbook" easily walks new and experienced users through the set-up of a web, e-mail, FTP, and news server, then does more. The authors actually set up their own and list the pros and cons of various software packages, which were mostly shareware. For those of us who don't want to buy OSX, this is the way to go.

This book was cool. It certainly lists a lot of songs...but if you have the knack for it, you could make up a lot that are better than some listed. But all in all it really helped my campaign, I wouldn't say it is a must buy but it does help.

This is a very readable social history, identifying books that American consumers made best-sellers. Explores social mores, historical background of each era, and provides interesting details about bookselling and the development of the publishing industry. Highly recommended.

This book is a revised edition of Duda and Hart's classic text "Pattern Recognition and Scene Analysis" which was originally published in 1973. In fact, the 1973 edition of the book played a pivotal role in introducing me (and countless researchers of my generation) to the field of pattern recognition. Needless to say, I was looking forward to the release of the revised edition. Unfortunately, I was extremely disappointed with the new edition. I had expected much more from the masters: Duda and Hart!

My reasons for disappointment with this book are as follows:

Given the 27 years that have elapsed since the publication of the first edition of the book, and the immense progress that has taken place in pattern recognition, machine learning, computational learning theory, grammar inference, statistical inference, algorithmic information theory, and related areas, the revisions and additions in the 2000 edition are essentially of a patchwork nature. In my opinion, they do not reflect the current understanding of the topic of pattern recognition.

A disproportionate number of pages are devoted to topics like density estimation despite the fact that it has been well established in recent years, through the work of Vapnik and others, that when working with limited data, trying to solve the problem of pattern classification through density estimation (which turns out to be, in a well-defined sense of the term, a much harder problem than pattern classification) is rather futile. When modern techniques for learning pattern classifiers from limited data sets (e.g., support vector classifiers) are touched on in the book, the treatment is disappointingly superficial and in some cases, misleading.

There is virtually no discussion of problems of learning from large high dimensional data sets, incremental refinement of classifiers, learning from sequential data, distributed algorithms, etc. The treatment of non-numeric pattern recognition techniques (e.g., automata, languages, etc.) is extremely superficial. There is almost no discussion of essential aspects such as preprocessing and feature extraction techniques for dealing with variable length, semistructured, or unstructured patterns.

There is very little contact made with a large body of pattern recognition algorithms, results, and approaches developed by the machine learning community, with the possible exception of the decision tree algorithm.

There is little discussion of the extremely important topic of computational complexity and data requirements of learning algorithms.

On the positive side, the discussion of most topics that were originally covered in the 1973 edition has been further refined and in many cases, made more accessible through the addition of illustrative examples and diagrams. Topics such as Bayesian networks receive an intutive and accessible treatment. The exercises at the end of each chapter seem useful

Perhaps it is too difficult for any individual or a small group of individuals to write a textbook that reflects the state of the art in pattern recognition. Perhaps my expectations of Duda and Hart (based largely on the extraordinary job that did on the 1973 edition of their book) were too high to have a reasonable chance of being met by the 2000 edition. Perhaps I have come to expect more out of graduate level textbooks after having worked as a researcher and an educator in this field for over a decade at a major university.

In short, the book fell significantly short of my expectation.

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.

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.

There's nothing in this book that's either complete or concrete. For example, the Apache web server comes standard with X, but this book spends only 6 pages with it; 2 of those pages explain how to use the GUI to turn the web server on or off. (The book is called "Web Server Handbook", right?)

When you're talking Unix and mail servers, the first thing that comes to mind is the freeware Sendmail program, which is available for OS X. Oops, "Sendmail" isn't even in the index of this book.

On the other hand, the book does devote 12 pages to "Choosing a Browser". 12 pages about choosing a web browser? This isn't something I couldn't figure out for myself?

So, what fills the rest of the pages? Glossy catalog style descriptions of Real Player and Quick Time, iTools and Communigate Pro. With less information than you can get from their respective web pages. There's a quick (surprisingly short) overview of network security. A nice introductory writeup of what TCP/IP is all about. You'll find a few reasonable snippet code examples. There's a good but overly brief introduction to databases. And there's some lightweight filler material about XML, XHTML, HTML, PHP, Java, and other buzzwords.

If you're new to all of this, this book jumps over too many topics to make it worth bothering with. If you're experienced, this book doesn't really cover anything you don't already know.

I picked up this book, because as you can probably guess.. I am planning on running the Apache Server so I can develop web applications and test them on my local machine. Either I misread the back, or I thought this book was going to teach me everything about setting up and developing on a web server.. however the author tends to just glide over the good stuff and spend oodles of time telling you about the millions of things you can add to your server, but fails to go into any real detail on anything. Oh well, live and learn.

Actually, this book is a controversy.

It looks like people really liked it or hated it. And this depends on whether what they were looking for was in this book or not.

The book's title is misleading because the book will NOT teach you how to actually manage a Mac web server.

Instead, it will tell you everything you need to know about Mac servers and will give you weblinks to deepens your search.

I didnot know anything about Mac server and now, I am pretty knowledgeable about all possible options to choose from for how to use a Mac server.

What I really appreciated was the panel of options Hart describes of web software.

This is a general book with only horizontal knowledge.

A great first time user's book!!!