Without impugning Mr. Johnson's ability as a lighting designer, I thought his book was uneven at best.

It's hard to separate the book from the work it features: generally the overwrought, more-is-better, ego-stroking stuff that passes for architecture in this era which I hope against hope is not the twilight of American culture. Mr. Johnson's relegation of the architect to a subsidiary of the general contractor in his formula for a design team is telling-it is either the arrogance of the nouveau-riche who blusters, "Just design me the d--d house; I'll attach my architecture to it as I see fit!" -or a sorry statement on feeble, derivative design that is typically being put forth today.

Mr. Johnson is a clever engineer; his innovations, such as removing the silver and etching the perimeter of a mirror to conceal a bathroom light source, are efficient as well as beautiful. However, on the pages of his book, the miniscule diagrams of such details require a magnifying glass to be appreciated.

The best works featured in the book are the kitchens and bathrooms. To me, it is here that Mr. Johnson demonstrates his sensitivity, and acknowledges that shadow is as important as light in creating a pleasing effect.

Though creative, this book seems to be nothing more than a sales brochure for Mr. Johnson's firm. There is not enough substance in the book to allow anyone other than Mr. Johnson or his associates to create the design schemes shown in the book. Mr. Johnson's ADAPTIVE design is creative, but is given only in a generalized sense. There is no real design criteria (lumens/ft2, wattage for varying spaces, etc.)to help the reader know if all ADAPTIVE design elements are actually achieved if someone other than Mr. Johnson were to design the lighting scheme. Mr. Johnson's work is very beautiful and artistic. I only wish the book had more substance.

Those looking for "connect the dots" instructions for various lighting projects will probably be happier looking for more detail-oriented books, perhaps books in the Sunset or Black and Decker series.

That said, I rate this above the other dozen or so books I have recently acquired on this topic in preparation for working on a new house. The reason is simple: this is the book that suggests ways of thinking about lighting and demonstrates the consequences of planning -- or not planning -- in various ways. To think usefully, not to mention creatively, about lighting, I felt I needed a way to think about the overall impact. While other books provide lots of specific information about particular situations, this is the one that offers more of a systemic outlook.

But it is not lacking in specifics. It offers enough detail about every technical aspect of lighting that I finally feel able to listen more intelligently to lighting specialists and electricians. The information seems up-to-date, at least in terms of what's available in the market where we live, and it is the single book on the topic that I would not part with as we begin the day-to-day slogging through making another house into our home.

Don't buy this book if what you really want is a specific recipe to cook up half a dozen recessed lights and some task lighting in your kitchen. You'll be disappointed. But if you're willing to tease apart the vagaries of your particular space and suss out the special uses of your own kitchen, this book will reward you by empowering you to develop and evaluate lighting solutions for yourself.

I found this to be a helpful reference guide to a collector. The pictures are clear and the descriptions are good.Not much in the way of pricing but good information to help learn about the multitude of antique textiles. This is a good addition to a collectors library.

Mr. Lee's book was one of the first martial arts books I ever bought 18 years ago and one that has found a permanent place in my library.

The best part of this book is the "Techniques Basic To All Kicks" section. I thoroughly enjoyed this section and although I did not agree with all of it, I found it to be very beneficial to anyone learning how to kick.

The sequential pictures for the proper execution of each kick presented were very well done and for the most part quite accurate. I did feel that the picture angle used on some of the kicks could have been done better in order to allow for a better view of each kick.

This book also lacked an application section which would have enhanced the book even more by showing you how each of the kicks was to be applied to an opponent.

This book spends too much time on quantity of kicks, and too little time on the quality of each individual kick. Which seems to be the norm for books dealing with this subject. Thirty-one kicks are explained in this book and the average explanation of each kick is two pages in length, which consists of anywhere from 8 to 14 pictures, and what amounts to 2 to 5 paragraphs of written text on how to perform each kick.

Although the text sections are too short, they are still a lot better than some of the others that I have seen in other kicking books.

As the developer of tours at Crown Hill Cemetery where Dr. Gatling is buried I found this book to be very useful. It has much more information about him than I have found anyplace else, though from my more narrow focus, it contained too much information about other family members. I especially enjoyed the photographs.

Though I can offer no direct proof, I also want to comment that given the cemetery's practice of burying blacks in lots next to whites, even in the 1860s when the cemetery first opened, I question the veracity of of the statement about how difficult it was for Jordan to have his black cook buried in his family plot.

But that is a rather small point. For any one interested in the inventor of the Gatling Gun, this has more information than anything else I have ever found.

THIS BOOK IS VERY GOOD FOR WHAT THERE IS OF IT. I LIKED THE PICTURES PROVIDED , A GOOD MIX OF B/W AND COLOUR AND THEY WEREN'T THE SAME OLD SAME OLD THAT HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED IN EVERY MAG GOING.

THE SYLE IS EASY TO READ AND FAIRLY WELL WRITTEN.

IN TERMS OF CONTENT THE BOOK WAS PRETTY BRIEF A SAMPLING OF EVERYTHING.

I WOULD HAVE LIKED TO SEE MORE THOUGH AND THINK THAT THIS BOOK WOULD BE BETTER IF THE AUTHOUR HAD GONE FOR A 196 PAGE EFFORT.

WHAT COULD BE INCLUDED ARE: 1) A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE P40 (IE THE P 36) AND ITS FOLLOWONS AND OTHER LOOSERS (P 37, P 42, P 46) 2) A BRIEF HISTORY OF CURTISS WRIGHT AND DON BERLIN AS WELL AS SOME OF THE TROUBLES HE FACED WITH DESIGNING THE PLANE HE REALLY WANTED 3) MORE COMPARISIONS IE MERLIN VS ALLISON P 40 VS ZERO ME 109 ETC THIS WOULD BE DONE SHOWING TURING CIRCLES ALTITUTE RATINGS TATICS ETC. 4) DEFINITELY CUTAWAYS AND THREE VIEWS.

THERE HAVE BEEN GOOD MAG ARTICLES ON THIS STUFF IN WINGS/AIRPOWER AND BOOKS BY BILL GUNSTON. PUT THIER STUFF IN WITH JOHNSEN'S WORK AND YOU'VE GOT A WINNER.

YOU CAN MAKE THE SAME COMMENTS ON KAGA'S ZERO. LONG ON THE FATAL FLIGHT AND SHORT ON TECHNICAL AND DESIGN INFO ON THE PLANE. NEEDS TEST RESULTS, CONTRUCTION DETAILS ETC.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit and am somewhat sad to see it out of print now. I bought it only a while ago from Amazon when it was still in print. Perhaps it will return to print again someday.

Each chapter shows demonstrations from various UK pastel painters using different techniques and/or subject matter. One of the odd things is that many of the pastel paintings definitely LOOKED British to me. I don't know what it is but apparently a lot of Brits really like rather drab, dull colors (well, drab & dull to me anyway seeing as I'm from bright, sunny, and in the summer, blisteringly hot Dallas). Maybe it's something to do with UK weather. The landscapes in particular always look like they're painted on a cloudy, overcast day. Go figure...

One chapter demonstrates using pastel for tonal studies (the artist's subject was a landscape). Another chapter demonstrated using pastels for moving water or clouds. Still others for architectural paintings, portraits, wildlife or demonstrating how paper texture and color can change the end result of the same subject.

Practically all of the demonstrations except one are executed in a "painterly" style. That is, a loose manner that showcase the beauty of each stroke. The final demonstration showed one artist who prefers to use pastels in a very tight and highly realistic manner. One of the ways he achieves some of the sharp edges and high definition is the use of mechanical drawing aids such as clear plastic rulers and/or templates to mask out some areas.

This book is most useful to beginner or intermediate pastelists. Advanced pastelists would probably enjoy it more for the paintings shown than for any instruction it holds. The only downside I can think of is if you wanted to learn more about painting in a high definition or realistic style. In that case you'd really only find the last chapter helpful. Overall, I found it to be helpful for my own attempts at learning pastel painting and I think it could be for other beginners as well.

Stephen Johnson has chosen an extraordinarily specialized topic -- the theater roof garden. In the era before air conditioning, some theaters realized that if they set out tables and chairs on their roof with an informal stage, they could attract customers hoping that rooftop breezes would give relief from summer heat. In some instances, the roof garden became a completely enclosed room, which one would think defeats the original intent.

Today, there are none left in New York. The New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street still stands, and its fully-enclosed roof garden still exists, but (to the best of my knowledge) the roof garden is not open to the public. The Theatre Republic (now "New Victory") once had an open-air roof garden, which is long gone. Once upon a time New York had other roof gardens, but they're completely gone now. The only roof garden still is use is Toronto's Elgin Theater.

The author methodically traces the history of this phenomenon, giving attention to the architectural aspect as well as the performers and performances. The 76 illustrations are mostly b&w photos, but there are also seating plans, maps, and a few floor plans and cross-sections of theaters. If you're curious about this architectural phenomenon, then this is the book for you, but most people will find it excessively specialized and esoteric.

I purchased this book in hopes of getting a large "database" of different schematic symbols. I found this book lacking many of the schematic symbols that I needed, such as thermocouples, circuit breakers, different switches, etc.

This book is geared more towards a beginner, on "how to develop a schematic diagram" or "how to read a schematic diagram." This is prompted by the title of this book "Schematic Diagrams The Basics of Interpretation and Use." However, I felt that the author could have included a larger variety of schematic symbols as it's hard to find a great book with the 'right' symbols for me to use in drafting.

I'm glad this book cost me under $20.00 used, as I don't feel I have any use for it.

You have to hand it to the author, he's found a rich vein of critically acclaimed theater to ape in his debut as a playwright. These two plays, with shared characters between them, pluck some of the most pleasing tropes of Sam Shepherd's more cogent writing (criminal brothers, abusive mothers, emotionally paralized fathers, powerless clergymen--heck, almost all of Buried Child, though in this case it would be Flattened Child) and make them more amusing than mysterious. However, while the elements are often unoriginal and somewhat out of date, Johnson has a knack for understanding what makes a scene dramatic. His characters almost always want something and take risks to get it. As a result, the plays are conflict driven and offer actors meaty motivations to chew on. That's more than what often passes for playwrighting today, so there's promise here. Like the writer's novels, the tone is Western noir, with some biting wit carrying the banter. The reader, like the performer, will certainly be amused, though may not find that the works create any lasting impact. Hellhound, the first play, is a series of mildly absurd two-person scenes that reveal their interconnections gracefully if without surprise. Shoppers, the second play, hews more strictly to unities of time and place, but erupts in a more theatricalized style (subverting stage realism with an invisible dog and a television that interacts with the "real" world--a device that even the characters remark upon for its novelty). Stage directions by the author insist on only the music he indicates and realistic set pieces. That's a shame, because Johnson's at his best when he takes off on original, unrealistic flights of fancy--finding his own dramatic style and inching beyond realism, Shepherd, and watered-down cultural criticism. The strength here is in images, particularly in unusual juxtapositions. Sample these for the potential hinted at, and let's hope that the author has more dream-poetry-drama to come, particularly in the third play in this series, which centers on a character oft-mentioned but not seen in these works. Act one of that work, Soul of a Whore, is published in the latest edition of McSweeney's.

This is a good book. The book covers the fundamental concepts for adaptive filtering and explains it in a very simple way. You can really learn even if you are just begining in this field.

However I was wonder that this will be a new book and not just a new edition of the book edited in 1986 by John Wiley & Sons. Unfortunately, the structure of the book is exactly the same and just have few matlab examples to substitute the old fortan programs.

I hope that the authors realize that and add recent topics of research in the wireless communication cenario or at least improve the last chapters of the book that are too simple.