I was looking for a present for my baby's first birthday and was overwhelmed with the choices in the store. I looked at the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio, 2003 and it greatly simplified the process for me. It not only told me which toys one year olds enjoy, but how best to use the toys from an educational standpoint. I can't imagine ever purchasing a toy for a child without first looking at this book. I would highly recommend it.

This crew never stops. Thankfully, there are people in this world who spend the time actually helping parents. Oppenheim Toy Portfolio, 2003 is as great as ever. I can't even imagine how they rate all these toys, books, videos, cd-roms, etc. Once again Toy Portfolio, 2003 is excellent. Their recommendations have become my bible. I share this book with every parent I know and I have yet to find any parent who hasn't gone out and bought it for themselves. Thank you so much and I look forward to 2004.

This is the kind of book that no one thinks they need to buy but that all your friends want to borrow once you've got it. Even parents who insist on simplicity and refuse to buy the new, plastic gizmos that kids clamor for each year, will appreciate the suggestions for music, literature, and classic toys. Ones that will be passed down through the generations. Ones that you played with as a kid but may have forgotten or didn't realize were still around. Founded in 1989, the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio is the only independent consumer review of children's products, everything from literature and audio/video to learning toys, top-rated science products and big ticket items. The testers are real "families from all walks of life" and the criteria used to determine a toys suitability for a coveted listing in this yearly manual include: product design, safety and interactivity, developmental appropriateness, learning and entertainment value, and more. The listings are grouped by age, subject, and also into special award categories, like the SNAP award, the Special Needs Adaptable Product Award for those toys that are easily adapted for children with special needs. Despite all these groupings and listings, the book is very easy to navigate and so very useful.

the oppenheim toy portfolio, is the best source of information, when shopping for your children's toys,etc,i have used earlier versions to buy my grandaughter toys from birth to now, and she is 2, i do have this book,and i do not buy toys, without first going through it, shopping without it, would be throwing away your money, barbara daniels BDani45871@aol.com

This book guarantees that my kids love what I bring home. It's so well organized that I can look up the best books, toys, videos and software and know quickly what's appropriate for each of my kids. The 800 numbers are also great for finding the products.

My daughter is developmentally delayed, but loves music, and Eency Weency Spider was her first favorite song. I really like this expanded version of the poem, especially the 'refrain', "Oh, Eency Weency Spider, weave your silvery web. Oh Eency Weency Spider, spin your silvery thread. Upsy-downsy outs and ins, see how Eency Weency spins!" Eency Weency also gets incorporated into the poems about a fly, Little Miss Muffet, Humpty Dumpty and Little Jack Horner. The rhymes are sometimes a little awkward (I try to sing the book to my girls), but the illustrations are pretty and Eency Weency is cute and colorful. Never since Charlotte's Web have I liked a spider so well, and I don't like spiders.

My evaluation for this book, 2 stars, is based on my specific needs and wants that were the motivation for my purchasing this book, and resulted in disappointment.

I'm a first-semester graduate student in electrical engineering, and wanted to self-learn a lot of MATLAB and its uses with DSP, so that I could get a head's start in gaining the background I would later need for my research in DSP. I knew this book was a collection of exercises in which you create MATLAB programs (.m files) to solve DSP problems and explore various DSP topics. However, I also expected the book to give full solutions to the problems, working through the MATLAB scripts for you so that you could learn the DSP applications of MATLAB through practice.

Unfortunately, I was wrong... The book is divided into a series of projects, and with each project there is a brief explanation of the related theory, and then several problems which tell you to program MATLAB to do so and so, sometimes along with a few hints.... and NO SOLUTIONS ARE GIVEN. In fact, it's basically just a collection of problems. I think it's meant more for TEACHERS... to assign the problems in the book as homework for students in their DSP classes. In that respect, it is natural that there are no solutions included in the book.

In summary, this is not a book you want to buy if you're looking for something you can use to STUDY and LEARN how to apply MATLAB to DSP. It is essentially just a list of DSP problems which require you to use MATLAB. I'm sure the problems themselves are beautifully-crafted problems that would give you lots of insight and grasp of concepts once you have given lots of effort into them and then saw the solutions.... As just a book of problems, I'm sure it would be a top-quality book worthy of 5 stars (after all, look at its authors). But if nobody gives you the solutions, you can't learn a great deal from just the problems and briefly-explained theory.

Just make sure you know what this book is about and whether it really is what you're looking for before you purchase it. I'm planning on returning mine.

This Schaums Outline-type manual apparently had been issued with an earlier text of McClellan's. It is made up of lecture-type problems too brief to understand without a closely keyed text. I'm returning the book. Hope you don't get fooled.

I have the previous edition of the book (Using Matlab 4) and this review is on that version... I find this book to be an excellent APPLICATIONS book. It is not intended to be a Matlab Primer; you are supposed to know Matlab programming already. It is also not intended to be a DSP Primer. This book takes the basic DSP knowledge you already have and allows you to expand on it by applying it to a variety of real problems, like radar ranging or speech processing or filtering. It also deepens your knowledge by giving you drill problems that go deep into the workings of the DFT and other basic DSP tools. I had the good luck of taking a couple of DSP courses with McClellan and Schafer when they were writing this book and they used to hand problems from the book as special homework after they had taught the underlying material. Doing these exercises after you know the basics is an excellent way to cement that knowlege and become more proficient both in matlab and in problem solving.