India is a secular country that respects all religions. It is the birthplace of both Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism. It also has one of the world's oldest Jewish communities (though it is fast depleting thanks to emigration to Israel). The tolerance and acceptance of each other's very different beliefs is a part of the Indian psyche. Whatever one may read about religious violence in that country is more a result of manipulations by politicians than anything else.

This coffee-table format book offers a simplistic high-level introduction to the very complex subject of religions in India including Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism, Christianity, Jainism, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism- some more detailed than the other. It contains color photographs on every page. Rather than the photographs complementing the text, each text block describes a specific photograph. Some pictures and text associated with Hinduism are very region specific and are not a general representation of the religion. E.g. picture of the Bride and the practice described is very specific to Bengal state. This may be as much as 95% different for other brides, depending on the state. Since an attempt has been made to cover a very complex subject in a few pages, the result is surface grazing of the subject rather than deep insight or detailed treatment. The impact of religion on daily life is well represented and explained. This book by Lonely Planet is a decent starter book for introduction to various religions.

Beautiful evocation of the many religions that make up India. The book focuses mainly on the tenets and customs of the four major religions in India...Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, and Buddhism...but touches on the other religions as well, if more briefly. The juxtaposition of the photographs, history, explanations of religious practices, and the words and experiences of the faithful brings these religions to life with great clarity. My only complaint is that the pictures are too small...although a "coffee table" size book might have proved a bit more unwieldy to read, the photographs would have had greater visual impact had they been larger. Yet overall, I would recommend this book as a good introduction to the spiritual life of India and its people.

The work is pooly researched and based on an unauthentic manuscript, which the author refers to as the Goindval Pothis. Before selecting and basing one's thesis on a primary source, it behooves a scholar to ensure that it is authentic. Gurinder Mann has failed to do so. Scholarly analysis, _Early Sikh Scriptural Tradition: Myth and Reality_, by Balwant Singh Dhillon (Amritsar: Singh Brothers, 1999) shows that Gurinder Mann's _The Goindval Pothis_ and subsequent works are highly problematic. They are based on his pooly written PhD thesis. Dhillon's aforementioned work is a definitive refutation of all of Gurinder Mann's research. Save your money and purchase Dhillon's work which provides a much better understanding of the Sikh cannon and also gives insight into work by fading scholars such as Gurinder Mann.

I would highly recomend this book to any one who is interested in the Sikh History, particularly the history of Sikh Scriptures.

Gurinder Singh Mann's work is by far the most detailed study of the Goindval Pothis, two sixteenth-century Sikh manuscripts, to appear in print. It is divided into three sections. In the opening section, Mann introduces the history and textual issues related to these manuscripts. The second section gives a detailed table of contents of these texts. The third section presents the compositions that are available here but did not make it to the Adi Granth, the Sikh sacred text. Given the fact that only a handful of scholars, less than six as Mann claims, have been permitted access to these early manuscripts, Mann has done great service to the field by telling the world what is contained in these texts. His research fully supports the Sikh traditional understanding regarding the role of the Goindval Pothis in the compilation of the Adi Granth, but does it with hard textual evidence. Mann is a rare breed of scholars who brings a very high degree of scholarly rogor to his work without losing a deep sympathy for the traditional beliefs. I would strongly recommend this book to any one who is interested in early Sikh history or more specifically the history of Sikh Scripture.

The book lacks the basic ingridient which one would need to understand something, that is truth. The pakistn phobia of the author seeps through the pages of the book. If one needs to understand the conflict there are absolutley better books available in the market.

Excellent unbiased book about Pakistan's duplicitous role. It is a must read for anyone who think Pakistan is helping International community in fighting terrorism.

This book provides an authentic account that is verifiable through independent sources intimately connected with the region.
It tells the story in plain language and allows the readers to understand the true dynamic of a situation that spawned a new kind of teledrama where we saw perpetrators openly disowning their own to cover their tracks only to reverse their stance once US president Bill Clinton invited the now deposed prime minister of Pakistan for an open meeting and laid bare to him what the US had seen through its eye in the sky.

First of all, let me correct any misconceptions you might be having about this book: It is not about general, three-tier web development using Oracle and Java - instead, it is focused entirely on in-database programming with stored procedures, using Java where PL/SQL either has no solution or lacks in some aspect.

For me, this book was very useful. Before I read it, I didn't see much use in Java stored procedures, finding PL/SQL a much better alternative. In short, this book tries hard to illustrate the role of each language within the Oracle database, and in the end, is successful in doing that. The issue of PL/SQL vs. Java - both in terms of performance and usefulness - is a concurrent theme throughout most of the book.

For me, that latter half was the real meat on the bone. The first chapters are thought for beginners to Java and JDBC, but I skipped them mostly. The chapters on security, OS resources and PL/SQL-Java interoperability were very useful. I actually found more than one case where Java would have made a great difference for a past project! Additionally, I appreciated the performance section at the back, which cleared up many of my initial misconceptions on the subject.

To summarize: If you are interested in extending your Oracle database applications by using the abilities of Java, this is the right book for you.

This book is a great guide to writing Oracle Java stored procedures. Of course, it has its cons and pros. On the bad side, there are the obvious differences in writing style and flavour of the different chapters (although not to the level of irritation), which is probably a result of so many authors.

Although I had some experience with Java, JDBC and SQLJ before, I really liked many of the chapters dealing with the fundamentals, especially the Exception chapter. I found much of the Oracle-Java specific material very useful, such as the chapters on Java and SQL performance, on using Java and PL/SQL together, and more. All in all, this book is packed with useful examples and practical solutions to real-life issues (mostly scalability and performance related), which made it very useful and pleasent to read.

As an Oracle developer, I found this book very helpful in my day-to-day chores. It is divided into four main sections, which I discuss further below.

The first section is a Java tutorial, for the Oracle developer. Having dealt a little with Java before, I found little new in this section. A word of caution, though: this book assumes some familiarity with PL/SQL (while no assumptions are made of Java knowledge). The material is divided so that you can just scan through, or skip, the first section (ca 100 pages), if you feel like it.

In part 2 of this book, we have a few chapters on both JDBC and SQLJ. Most emphasis is on Oracle-specific stuff and extensions. These chapters were different in quality, but served their purpose.

Part 3 is the heart of the book. This is where the authors delve into the details of Oracle Java, and illustrate how PRACTICAL problems may be solved by using Java or the joint efforts of PL/SQL and Java. I found some of the chapters in this section very pleasent to read, and I have already used some of the code presented in my own work. Highlights include the chapters on the Oracle JVM and the uses of Java utilities and OS resource handling (e.g. mail client that takes BLOB attachments).

Finally, section 4 discusses performance, both of Java and SQL, and compares Oracle Java with PL/SQL. Although this discussion is a little lightweight (this is material for whole books!), the emphasis on using bind variables is easily justified.

Overall, I greatly recommend this book for any Oracle developer seeking to use Java stored procedures in the database!

Finally someone scours existing literature, gets permission to reprint some similar articles, and publishes them all in a book. Imagine the hours and hours spent entering search phrases. And here is the result of all that work. Zounds consort!

Isolate your noisy stuff from your quiet stuff with whatever trenches or diffusions you can find in the crummy ... process you are stuck using, work on your various rejection ratios, pray for luck, hope your stock options become worth something someday, and spend the price of this book on beer and doughnuts.

It is very hard to understand why anyone will be willing to pay for an unedited copy of freely available papers... disaster.

Wow guys - amazing stuff here. I work as a Rail Inspection Officer here in the US and was looking for a book on SIGNAL INTEGRITY but i bought this by mistake. It so happens I also have a passing interest in CAD engineering and instead of returning this book i decided to read it and found it so amazing! Now i dont even touch my DVD collection or waste time playing baseball at the beach.

I recommend this book to Rail Inspection Employees and everyone else too!

There is far to much handwaving in this book. It would make a mediocre reference book for some well versed in the subject. It is a horable text for a first year graduate student. There are far better versions on the market.

It seems to me that this book is definitely overmarketed. I noticed that tendency at J. Wiley and sons more than once (american publishing houses ?). When looking at the jacket of the book, too many features are promised to the reader. In fact the book seems to have been rapidly written and while it certainly discusses many modern topics, it is certainly not the reference book it calims to be. L. Reichl's book at the same publisher (also overmarketed) is a lot better in that resepct.

I thought this book was great. The first two chapters of the book are a great review of basic concepts. This is one book that does a great job of presenting the physical insight beyond the math (better than Pathria and Huang). I also liked the inclusion of various programs that illustrate the concepts (no one else that I know of does this). My biggest complaint however is that the programs are not provided on disk or on a webpage and they are not written in C. In conclusion, this book does a very good job of 1) explaining how to do the math, 2) explaining the physics behind the math, and 3) providing examples of current applications in this field. It is definitely a great book to include your library; although, it probably shouldn't be your only Stat Mech book (Pathria_is_the standard).

A fable that made me think! Though I think it's way too long. Could have been much shorter had the author been just a little less descriptive. Too much is too much. Also he uses Hindu words like "Naniji" and "Dhol" which he never explains. I had to look these words up on the net! Which is upsetting. Other than that it makes you reflect on the harried nature of our lives and what's really amusing is the way the 'Warhogians' speak. They speak in 'Wise old sayings' which they memorize without ever understanding, or which they say and then do its opposite. I think I know about a dozen or so people like that! It's a good laugh.

Too much politics for a fable. Don't expect to be drawn into the story like his other fable. This one takes a while to get into, and the ending is kind of a let down. I didn't expect this from the author of The Butterfly.

This course looks pleasant, with nice pictures, but is not nice to use at all. I could point out several faults, but the worst is that dialogues and language information are disjointed. You go through a dialogue, then you read the grammar trying to learn how the language works, but you get little or nothing. The language information comes in rigid blocks that have little or nothing to do with the more practical sections of the book. A logical link is missing between the two. It is very difficult to learn the language with this course.

This book provides one with a good introduction to the grammar and vocabulary necessary for conversation in panjabi. It uses the typical gurumukhi script, though transliterations of the dialogues accompany all but the very last lessons. Those who have studied Sanskrit or Hindi before will find the punjabi letters slightly familiar but slightly dissorienting, rather like cyrillic appears to English readers. Nonetheless, it is simpler than Sanskrit/Hindi nagari and easy once one gets used to it. The only shortcomings of this book for me were the lack of reading sections (only conversation is taught), and not so much as an appendix showing the perso-arabic script used to write the language in Pakistan. Nonetheless, the dialogues include Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim usages so the book is still useful if you're only interested in Pakistani panjabi (though it could be more so.) All in all, language books tend to be either sufficient to learn the language or total wastes of money, and happily this one met my needs admirably.

I am not an expert in this field but what I learn are just some simple concepts. It takes some pages on the bluetooth SOC design
example with fractional C code. There is no structure about the examples and its hard to understand what the authors will explain(actually, I just feel ??what??)

This may be the world's most complete over view of digital system-on-a-chip verification. I don't know.

I was excited to find a book on this subject, because this is a specialized subject not covered well by the publishing industry, because this is a subject that is very difficult to write about, with only perhaps a few tens of thousands of active specialists, and because of these quotations from the book's back cover "[fully covers] system on a chip," "Bluetooth because it addresses reality," "comprehensive guide to overall SOC verification," "authors... leave no stone unturned in this comprehensive overview of [chip verification] tools and methodolgies."

Now that I have received the book, I feel that it is important to make note of what I know this book is not. It is not a book with any significant coverage of analog.

I am an analog chip designer that has 24 years experience, a good part of that time spent verifying my analog and mixed-signal designs. This book has a single 24 page chapter on analog, "Analog/Mixed-Signal Simulation," which taught me nothing. The chapter lists and defines the standard specialized nomenclature of the analog verification software, gives an example simple VerilogA behavioral model for a crude resistor-transresistor DAC, and gives a crude behavioral test example. I think that most all stones are left unturned for analog or mixed-signal chip verification. The authors mention SPICE, spectre, and Cadence Analog Design Environment only. I just finished a 37000 transistor analog & mixed-signal chip verification, and this book mentioned none of the tools and methods that I used, which included Mentor's Modeltech Modelsim and Synopsys's Saber. The examples are of value in giving existing digital chip verification experts an example of how to get started with a crude VerilogA behavioural modeling of analog blocks to be fit into a digital chip verification flow.

All of the authors are or were associated with Cadence Design Systems, according to the book. They write "The [EDA software] industry has been slow in responding to the mixed-signal design and simulation requirements." "Analog engineers have been using [SPICE] for analog simulation for over 30 years..." "The third VSIA verification meeting concluded 'verification is not just very hard, it is very, very hard.'" I agree, but there is still much left to write about. I congratulate them on being some of the first to attempt such a writing task.

this is perhaps the only available book on Dr Salam which highlights his early life in Punjab, province of Pakistan, his college days, his time at Cambridge. The book has very little on Dr Salam's own thoughts, his ideals, his love for his country, religion and above all his simplistic attitude towards life in general. Mr Singh nevertheless has succesfully acheived what no one has yet been able to; telling us about the early life of Dr Salam and the ill treatment meted to him by the government of his country; the country he dearly loved. This was perhaps the biggest irony of Dr Salam's life which Singh has so masterfully captured i.e his love for his country which was never reciprocated, if anything he was despised and unforgiveably disrespected. Mr Singh manages to enlighten us on these aspects and thus for anyone wishing to gain insight on the early life of Dr Salam; this is the book.