Gregory Hines and Joel Gray present horrible readings of two of Poe's best poems. Gregory Hines sounds like a used car salesman when reading "Annabel Lee," and Joel Gray sounds like a spastic nut when reading "The Bells." Did they ever listen to themselves? Christopher Cazenove represents the best reader and the savior of this otherwise fiasco. Although he left out the last stanza, his reading of "Ulalume-A Ballad" is by far the best reading I've heard of this powerful poem. Michael York's reading of "The Raven" is ok, but he lacks correct interpretation with the "wispered word, 'Lenore?'" The only other reader to read this phrase like a question is Edward Blake. For some reason many of the poems have background music. Did the producers of this collection really think that these poems lacked something? Perhaps this collection going out of print was an act of mercy.

Like the first reviewer, I thought Gregory Hines absolutely ruined "Annabel Lee" for me, which is--or now, was--also one of MY favorite Poe poems. What's next, "Gregory Hines Tapdances 'A Cask of Amontillado'"? Stick to you day-job, Greg! Michael York and David Warner are much beter readers than Hines, though when York reads "I shrieked..." it hardly sounds like a shriek. Their readings are good, but not great. By far the two less-famous (to me, anyway) readers on the tape, Roger Rees and Christopher Cazenove, are giants compatred to the other three. Rees' reading of "The Conqueror Worm" alone is worth the price of this tape. Obviously Rees and Cazenove are experienced Shakespeare-trained actors who love--and know how to utilize to startling results--the English language. I would pay almost anything for a new version of this tape read by Rees and Cazenove alone, or possibly by them and other accomplished Shakepearean actors (Patrick Stewart? Ralph Fiennes? Simon Russell Beale?). It's just not enough, to effectively read aloud poems or prose written by a master, to be famous (Hines) or even British and famous (York and Warner); you have to be GOOD! Anyway, overall this tape's worth buying.

If "Annabel Lee" is your favorite Poe poem, be warned that it is read by Gregory Hines, and the AudioFile review is being generous when it says that his readings lack drama and force. Though it is one of my favorite poems, or, more precisely, because it is one of my favorite poems, I fast forward through it everytime I listen to the tape, lest his reading impare my ability to enjoy the poem in the future.

This is somewhat compensated for by Michael York's exellent rendering of "The Raven" and David Warner's various readings which wonderfully capture Poe's mood and spirit.

Overall, still worth the price. I don't regret having purchased it and I'm still enjoying it a month later. If only "Annabel Lee" had been assigned to Mr. York or Mr. Warner!

Roger's hermenutic is highly questionable. His messages are anecdotal rather than scriptural. If one is going to write a book for pastors, they had better take what the bible says about being a pastor seriously. It is clear Roger does not. He admits to many mistakes in his book, mistakes people will make, but these things disqualify him as a pastor. If he took GOD's word seriously, and loved his congregation, family, and most of all GOD, he would of voluntarily stepped down. Shamefully, if you read this book it will become clear to you that he doesn't take GOD's word seriously. Don't waste your money on this book.

Roger Barrier may seem like a bible teacher, but nothing can be farther from the truth. To begin with, he has an obsession with the false teacher Neil T. Anderson, writing off anyone who disagrees with these teachings as demonized or part of the occult. He takes an unbiblical esoteric approach to scripture and the christian life. His emphasis is on unbiblical notions of promptings, rather than sound biblical reasoning. His messages aren't based on scripture but his own shallow experience, which he uses as a pretext for his interpretation of GOD's word. You would have to be crazy to buy this book.

This is a truely inspiring book to continue and prolong your spiritual life, and Roger has a very true down-to-life attitude that I love; not a facade. He uses real life experiances in his book and presents his own flaws as a parent, husband, and pastor. I would highly reccomend this book.

I am writing this review because I am SOOO angry after spending 20 minutes reading the same pages over and over. I had to find a way to make the Author pay for the pain he gave me.

This book said that it is good for a beginner and advanced alike. Well, I don't know about the latter, but it is hardly useful for a beginner. Just look at this line in the first chapter:

"Lock: This tool locks a bone, basically indicating that it is the base to an Inverse Kinematic chain without being at the highest level in that heirarchy."

Inverse Kinematic? Heirarchy? Wha...?

Too much of this book is written in the same way. The author busts out with loads of jargon, but never bothers to define it- via example or analogy. I have been doing Technical Writing for 6 years and, if I didn't know any better, I would think that the author is just pulling the text out of the manual, as he doesn't know enough about it to explain it to a layman.

Further, the text is long and dry. The author/editor doesn't chunk information into easy-to-read pieces, rather choosing to overwhelm the reader with a cascading wall of words on each page, with hardly a breather for indentation or line breaks. This is a naive and frustrating mistake for a software guide, as any author/editor worth his salt should know that the user will be glancing from page to screen and back. With better chunking of information, one wouldn't spend 20 minutes trying to find his spot in the middle of a run-on sentence.

Because the author/editor doesn't know how to properly format text for usibility, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the illustrations are WOEFULLY lacking and misplaced. You'll often find yourself pointed to an illustration on a sepperate page (leading to more lost-my-place frustrations), and too many critical or difficult steps were left out completely.

This book is a great example of how NOT to write a useful refference/learning guide. I cannot stress my frustration more. The only reason I give it 2 stars is that it is one of few references for A:M out there.

Pray for the day when another reference emerges.

GAH!

I am upset with this book. It is a great book to learn where everything is located and how it works in Animation Master, but it is written like a TEXTBOOK. Hard to follow tutorials mainly do to the Authors "know it all", he assumes that everyone who reads the book is tuned to the same frequency as he is on. The only thing that is very well done are video tutorials, which do help to understand how the author got from point A to point B. But not all the time. And you do need to have a working version of Animation Master if you plan to learn it hands-on.

It's about time Animation:Master had a book this good to help people learn it. It's just too bad that it had to come from a third party instead of the software company. I have started and stopped with A:M for over three years I read Jeff Praires books. I read the manual. But i made little progress and was frustrated at every turn.
This book has finnaly explained things in a way that I can understand them! I have made my first model and a simple walk cycle, I even remember why I bought this program in the first place again!

While written over 24 years ago, I was hoping this book would give me an understanding of the mathematical basis (if not the current state-of-the art;) ) of computer graphics. Despite (arguable to many) years of university math courses, I found this volume merely humbling, rather than enlightening. If you are more comfortable with fairly advanced mathematical notation and concepts than most, especially relative to geometry, you may find this book useful. I found it only marginally useful -- primarilly as a reference to some concepts I had previously been exposed. Best of luck.

Excellent coverage of matrix transformations. Some I had seen elsewhere, some not. This books real strength is the coverage of splines and patches however. Very readable w/ little procedural seggestion, i.e. implementation left to the reader.

I read a review of the book in a industry magazine and it described it as useful for a professional financial advisor, as the title also implies. It turned out to be a pretty basic educational book with general but basic financial information. A good book for a beginner or someone who is just beginning to break into the financial services industry, but not necessarily for a seasoned professional.

This text offers a useful introduction to spread spectrum communications. However, I find its exposition of channel fading confusing, despite its very considerable length. Rappaport's text and Proakis' text are much more articulate on this topic. This text has useful chapters on frequency-hopped spread spectrum communications, covered from a defense-electronics point of view. While this text is a useful reference for me; I would use Proakis' "Digital Communications" as my starting point if I were to start learning spread spectrum again.

This book is a pretty straight forward and easy to carry in lab coats during calls on pediatric floor.The author tried to incorporate most of the common problems faced by the house officer on the call. The organization of priorities and therapy is excellent.The only negative aspect is that it does not replace any textbooks or manuals in pediatrics; one has to read other books for individual diseases and their management. Overall it is absolutely worth it's price and useful for junior pediatricians

The topic of the book itself is a current and very much of State of the Art Technology. Geographical Epidemiology is a century old but the GIS applications makes the field more reacheable to the masses. It also focuses on the appropriate use of IT in the subject. This will be an asset to the Health planners and epidemiologists for better planning.

This Rand Corporation report, prepared for the U.S. Air Force, presents a tight, concise analysis of the current and future Sino-U.S. relationship. Zalmay Khalilzad and company don't present anything new or earth shaking, nor should they have since the purpose was to analyze and present information useful to policy makers. It's a good Rand report, as most are, and is a good reference -- reassuring to those who have spent time studying the issues, and informative to those just embarking on careers as defense analysts.

The central theme of "The United States and a Rising China" is that our policy toward China should be a combination of the current "engagement" approach and "containment" -- "congagement" is the term coined by the authors. This modified engagement/containment approach recognizes China as a rising power, one which will have a gross national product equivalent to the United States in a few decades or so. It encourages continuation of enhanced economic, political and cultural ties with China, but would be "less solicitous of Chinese sensitivities on such issues as human rights." The key to success of such a policy would be to maintain a balance in the application of its co-principles of engagement and containment.

"The United States and a Rising China" covers these topics in some detail: determinants of Chinese national security behavior (which I found of interest); China's military modernization (which is a good summary, but lacks depth); and U.S. policy options (which are worth a look).

Perhaps most valuable is the analysis that looks at future military implications of a more powerful China. It's not that they would pose a threat as a peer competitor. Rather, China appears to be increasingly capable of projecting power in a limited way around its peripheral areas while still maintaining enough of a strategic capability to give caution.

So, the recommendation of the authors is to continue engagement with China, but to also hedge our bets against a future, possibly threatning regional power. The Rand analysts look out only to 2015 in assessing military capabilities of China. I found this a little bit of an analytical hedge, since Chinese analysts themselves are looking out 20 to 30 years with respect to a true military revolution in technological, doctrinal and organizational change; and the U.S. Air Force itself has studied future military capabilities to 2025.

I've just started reading this book for a university course and though I've only finished one chapter, I have to say that the writing is so poor that I would not recommend this book to anyone. I find myself continually having to re-read sentences because they are oddly worded. The omission of serial commas and the lack of semicolons in many lists containing the word "and" merely add to the confusion. There are many HCI books out there, so save yourself a headache and find one that's well written.

If you've been using this book (1994) and you want a revised edition, then take a look at our new book (2002) "Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction", jointly authored by Jenny Preece, Yvonne Rogers and Helen Sharp, published by John Wiley & Sons.

I've been developing user interfaces for about 20 years, and during that time, I taught user interface development for software engineers for about 12. When Preece et al came out in 1994, I thought that they had done for HCI what Pressman and Sommerville had fdone for software engineering in their widely adopted textbooks: digested the research and practice and presented the material in a pedagogically sound manner. ALthough there have been fine books in HCI theory (Card, Moran & Newell),

research (Beacker et al), and practice (Shneiderman; Hix & Hartson), I felt that in 1994, and even now at the end of 2000, the Preece et al book is the best that meets the billing of a good textbook for graduate and undergraduate use. Still, I think that a student, even one with limited programming experience, can sit down with the book and learn about the field. Perhaps most importantly, the book conveys the excitement of the authors (and so many of us) for the field.

Preece et al provides good historical perspective, good general coverage, but I was disapponted to find little about avenues for professional advancement (e.g., ACM SIGCHI at http://sigchi.org).

I thought "Design and Analysis Methods" was the best collection of chapters, with a lot of general advice about how to manage design. The section on Evaluation was not organized as I would have expected, but the first and last chapters do a good job of introducing a rational view of evaluation and of choosing among methods.

The book has many useful features, including interviews, chapter aims and objectives, key points, and further readings (some of which are becoming dated, and for which I wish they had a website, like Shneiderman's http://www.awl.com/dtui/).

Six years after publication, I still think this is a good textbook for college, and a good overview of the field for the many practitioners in the field who lack formal training.