I first read the book when I was four. I am now, at the age of ninteen, a fully qualified obstrician/gynecologist, all because of this book. I have now, of course, read this several times, but it is still like reading it for the first time. As the title implies, my father is David Olive, the editor of this book. I fully recommend this book to anyone who is remotely interested in a profession as a gynecologist.

A comprehensive book, essential to every Ob-Gyn resident or clinician. Takes you from the basics of anatomy and physiology of the female reproductive tract to the management of complicated gynecologic conditions.

Susan Smith Jones is well thought of as a health and fitness expert, and this tape certainly presents her at her inspirational best. The purpose of the program on this tape is to help you reflect and renew, spend quality time in solitude and silence, simplify and rediscover your relationship with God, and ultimately make peace your constant compantion. These three cassettes contain 40 messages and affirmations. Some benefit most by listening to them all at once and others will find playing one message each day of most benefit. You may find suggestions that don't seem appropriate for your situation. For instance, a vegetarian diet might not be right for you. This shouldn't spoil the value of the total program though. This program is so good for your mind, your body, your soul.

If you enjoyed Spirit of African Design, then you will love this book. There are nice room pictures showing african art in primarily a contemporary design style.

It's a great coffee table book for anyone who loves both African Art styles and contemporary interior design.

Garbage collection is a very interesting and complicated topic. To understand different garbage collection algorithms, one has to go through various research papers published over last 30 years or read the simplified descriptions presented in Java site and Bill Venners artima.com. This book does an excellent job in putting together all these algorithms in a logical order that gives us a chance to understand the different challenges sceintists and programming language authors faced and how the algorithms evolved over the time. The book starts with basic overview and history of commonly known algorithms: Reference counting, Mark and Sweep, and Copying algorithms. It then elaborates each of these algorithms, enumerates their pros and cons, and presents imporvements done by different researchers. After this, the book moves on to advanced algorithms like Generational algorithm and concurrent mark and sweep algorithm. I recommend this book to anyone interested in garbage collection. I haven't seen any other book on this topic. Even for programmers who mostly don't have to worry about GC as it is "automatically" done, this is a good book to understand and appreciate what goes on behind the scenes. Also, knowledge of the concepts in this book will be invaluable in performance tuning.

I wanted to know about the generational algorithm that Java is now using. The book was pretty clear about how things work. I haven't read the whole book but what I've seen is very encouraging. The first few chapters are a broad overview and then you can dive into the particular algorithm you are interested in.

The book is so well written and easy to understand its worth buying it even you only read the first two chapters.

I used this text in my pharmacology course in phar. school. It was very helpful in understanding the broad picture. Although little is written in detail, Rosenfeld offers a good summary of such a complex topic.

Susan Smith Jones is a warm, vibrant personality, a renowned author and health & fitness expert. And she is intensely spiritual. This program starts with her review of both the spiritual and also the physical benefits of meditation. As she gives her message, she outlines various techniques. With practice of these techniqes, you'll learn to relieve negative stress in your life and benefit from the resultant positive thinking. With the aid of this tape program, you learn how to make the proper connection to your inner source of power, love, and strength.

I first read Moby Dick; or The Whale over thirty years ago and I didn't understand it. I thought I was reading a sea adventure, like Westward Ho! or Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym. In fact, it did start out like an adventure story but after twenty chapters or so, things began to get strange. I knew I was in deep water. It was rough, it seemed disjointed, there were lengthy passages that seemed like interruptions to the story, the language was odd and difficult, and often it was just downright bizarre. I plodded through it, some of it I liked, but I believe I was glad when it ended. I knew I was missing something and I understood that it was in me! It wasn't the book; it was manifestly a great book, but I hadn't the knowledge of literature or experience to understand it.

I read it again a few years later. I don't remember what I thought of it. The third time I read it, it was hilarious; parts of it made me laugh out loud! I was amazed at all the puns Melville used, and the crazy characters, and quirky dialog. The fourth or fifth reading, it was finally that adventure story I wanted in the first place. I've read Moby Dick more times than I've counted, more often than any other book. At some point I began to get the symbolism. Somewhere along the line I could see the structure. It's been funny, awesome, exciting, weird, religious, overwhelming and inspiring. It's made my hair stand on end...

Now, when I get near the end I slow down. I go back and reread the chapters about killing the whale, and cutting him up, and boiling him down. Or about the right whale's head versus the sperm whale's. I want to get to The Chase but I want to put it off. I draw Queequeg with his tattoos in the oval of a dollar bill. I take a flask with Starbuck and a Decanter with Flask. Listen to The Symphony and smell The Try-Works. Stubb's Supper on The Cabin Table is a noble dish, but what is a Gam? Heads or Tails, it's a Leg and Arm. I get my Bible and read about Rachel and Jonah. Ahab would Delight in that; he's a wonderful old man. For a Doubloon he'd play King Lear! What if Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of The Whale? Would Fedallah blind Ishmael with a harpoon, or would The Pequod weave flowers in The Virgin's hair?

Now I know. To say you understand Moby Dick is a lie. It is not a plain thing, but one of the knottiest of all. No one understands it. The best you can hope to do is come to terms with it. Grapple with it. Read it and read it and study the literature around it. Melville didn't understand it. He set out to write another didactic adventure/travelogue with some satire thrown in. He needed another success like Typee or Omoo. He needed some money. He wrote for five or six months and had it nearly finished. And then things began to get strange. A fire deep inside fret his mind like some cosmic boil and came to a head bursting words on the page like splashes of burning metal. He worked with the point of red-hot harpoon and spent a year forging his curious adventure into a bloody ride to hell and back. "...what in the world is equal to it?"

Moby Dick is a masterpiece of literature, the great American novel. Nothing else Melville wrote is even in the water with it, but Steinbeck can't touch it, and no giant's shoulders would let Faulkner wade near it. Melville, The pale Usher, warned the timid: "...don't you read it, ...it is by no means the sort of book for you. ...It is... of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it. Warn all gentle fastidious people from so much as peeping into the book..." But I say if you've never read it, read it now. If you've read it before, read it again. Think Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Goethe, and The Bible. If you understand it, think again.

It's always dangerous to label a book as a "masterpiece": that word seems to scare away most readers and distances everyone from the substance of the book itself. Still, I'm going to say that this is the Greatest American Novel because I really think that it is--after having read it myself.

Honestly, Moby Dick IS long and looping, shooting off in random digressions as Ishmael waxes philosophical or explains a whale's anatomy or gives the ingredients for Nantucket clam chowder--and that's exactly what I love about it. This is not a neat novel: Melville refused to conform to anyone else's conventions. There is so much in Moby Dick that you can enjoy it on so many completely different levels: you can read it as a Biblical-Shakespearean-level epic tragedy, as a canonical part of 19th Century philosophy, as a gothic whaling adventure story, or almost anything else. Look at all the lowbrow humor. And I'm sorry, but Ishmael is simply one of the most likable and engaging narrators of all time.

A lot of academics love Moby Dick because academics tend to have good taste in literature. But the book itself takes you about as far from academia as any book written--as Ishmael himself says, "A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard." Take that advice and forget what others say about it, and just experience Moby Dick for yourself.

Finishing "Moby Dick" goes up there with my greatest (and few) academic achievements. It was a gruelling read, but---in the end---completely worthwhile.

I've been reading it for 6 months. I started over the summer, during an abroad program in Oxford, and I remember sitting outside reading when one of the professors came over, saw what I was reading, and said: "It's a very strange book, isn't it?"

Looking back, that might be the best way to describe it. The blurb from D.H. Lawrence on the back cover agrees: Moby Dick "commands a stillness in the soul, an awe...[it is] one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world."

Now there are those who will say that the book's middle is unbearable---with its maddeningly detailed accounts of whaling. Part of me agrees. That was the hardest to get through. But, still, even the most dull subject offers Melville an opportunity to show off his writing chops. He's a fantastic writer---his text most resembles that of Shakespeare.

And, like one Shakespeare's characters, Melville sees all the world as a stage. Consider this beautiful passage from the first chapter:

"Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnifient parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces--though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment."

The end of "Moby Dick" informs the rest of the book, and in doing so makes rereading it inevitable. It is telling that Moby Dick doesn't appear until page 494. It is telling, because, the majority of the book is spent in anticipation---in fact, the whole book is anticipation. It's not unlike sex, actually---delaying gratification to a point of almost sublime anguish. What comes at the book's end, then, is mental, physical, and spiritual release (as well as fufillment).

The book leaves you with questions both large and small. I was actually most troubled with this question---What happened to Ishmael? No, we learn his fate at the book's end, but where was he throughout it? We all know how it starts---"Call me Ishmael"---and the book's first few chapters show him interacting with Queequeg and an innkeeper. But then we lose him onboard the Pequod---we never see him interact with anyone. No one ever addresses him. He seems to witness extremely private events---conferences in the Captain's quarters, conversations aboard multiple boats, and--what can only be his conjecture--the other characters' internal dialogue. Is he a phantom? What is he that he isn't? Somehow I think this question masks a much larger and more important one.

Try "Moby Dick." Actually, don't try it---read it. Work at it. Like lifting weights a bit heavier than you're used to, "Moby Dick" will strengthen your brain muscle. Don't believe those who hate it, they didn't read it. They didn't work at it. Be like Ishmael, who says: "I try all things; I achieve what I can." Or, more daringly, be like Ahab, whose ambition is his curse, but whose curse propels and writes the book itself.

I just took my first "C" class this semester, and when I looked at our textbook written by Foster, at first glance it looked good. However, for the beginner programmer this book is NOT for you! Yes, it comes with a floppy with sample code. It helps with the first 2 or 3 chapters, but after that Foster gets to theoretical and technical in his explanations. His C++ Preview is a joke. For the beginner I suggest books meant for the layman. Especially, "C by Example", by Greg Perry Que Publishers, and Greg's other book " Programming C in 12 Easy Lessons", Sams Publishing. Of course the " C for Dummies" is a big help also. Perry excels at teaching the beginner by making the concepts of functions, passing values and addresses, static variables etc much easier to understand. I own all the books above and like Greg Perry's the best.

Good Luck Programmers. " C" you later

Uliv

This was the second class of C I have taken. In my first class, we used a textbook written by the original creators of the language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie. Although this book was complete, it seemed more like a reference book than a manual. C by Discovery is a great book. It teaches you the basics of the language and includes a source code disk with all the examples. Best of all, it's written as a textbook should be with explanations and plenty of examples. I would definitely recommend it, although if you mew to C, I would first learn some basics of standard programming. (ie BASIC or Pascal)

I highly recommend this book. When asked by friends or coworkers to recommend a C book, I always recommend this one.

I used to know assembly language. When I got a C programming project, I used this book to study. Within one month, I finished my C programming project.

For every C concept, this book has a good example (short C code) to demonstrate it. Some people might say that this book requires some programming background. But a friend (who has no programming experience in C, assembly, or any other language) also bought this book to study and said she enjoyes it and truly appreciates the clarity that this book in explaining C concepts.

This book is also fun to read.

The reviews listed with this book are for other books, not this one. You missed a good chance for an order because I couldn't evaluate this book.

Please check the reviews for this book - the last two posted are not for this book! I was just browsing and noticed the error.

It is a great book for learning 8086 Microprocessor.