As the book "astronomy with a calculator" this book lacks the concept of tracking outside our solar system (other stars and galaxies). The fact that BASIC is used is almost bad, a better language to display science in is Pascal or now Delphi.

Although the book covers a great range of astronomical programs, its psudo-code doesn't make for easy translation into other landuages like C++ or Pascal. He goes through the program one by one, but one can't help but feel it was ment to writen as one big program. Not for the novice astronomer or programmer.

This is another airplane profile book, with a lot of pictures and little substance. Why is it that aviation writers have the idea that the people who buy their books can't read, but like to look at pictures? However, if you want a profile book, this is the one to have. It has the best information related to the various models of the airplane. But if you want to find out what C-130s have done, look somewhere else.

Sam McGowan
C-130/Vietnam Veteran, author "The Cave", a novel of the Vietnam War.

After picking up Mr Smith's latest work titled after an airplane that I spent most of my 20yrs in the military on or working with I was pretty excited. I saw pictures inside that I hadn't seen before and a format that I enjoyed.
Then, I started reading the captions under the pictures. Bare in mind I have read a mistake or two in books I liked and they did little to distract from the overall impression of what was published but I kept finding more and more mistakes I felt something was wrong. Please, perhaps Mr Smith was not aware these were mistakes and took face value what someone told him. An example of such a mistake is page 52, which we are told is an aircraft that crashed in 1969 in a paint scheme not used until the late 80's, early 90's. Page 57 is captioned as a JC-130B, when in fact it is a EC-130H.
Perhaps the facts outside the pictures are more acurate but I would invite other aviation enthusiasts to check more closely before purchasing this book.

This is a very interesting book about an exceptional airplane. So many books have been written about the C-130, both the military and commercial versions, that it's difficult to come up with a new way of doing it. Mr. Smith has done just that. He covers every single variant of the airplane and freely uses the msn (manufacturer's serial number) of particular Hercs; a feature missing from most other books about this airplane. Although there are quite a few errors in the background of some of the many different models and the companies operating the commercial models, a redeeming factor is the many, never before published photos. In a book of this magnitude, it's almost impossible to have it 100% correct. A must for any Herc enthusiast.

One big disappointment about the book is that, not only are few solutions to problems provided, there are a relatively large number of errors in the solutions which are presented. This is very frustrating to students trying to learn this material. Given that the text is in its second edition, this is really not understandable.

The book is surprisingly inexpensive, however. Perhaps it cost less to publish since proofreaders were not utilized.

If you need as few texts as possible that cover all the maths you need for engineering purposes, this book is a must buy. Adding Kreyzig's Advanced Engineering Mathematics and maybe a Statistics text to it and you should have no problems with 99% of the maths for the rest of your life (unless you want to do substantial computer program design, in which a discrete maths text may help).

A few problems though: a proper treatment on sequences and series is absent, l'Hopital's rule is not discussed either (both presumably because they are too pure maths for engineering, but some advanced engineering maths courses do use them), and there are some topics (like Simpson's rule) that are only discussed in problems sections but not in the main text.

Whether your personal focus is upon mathematics, engineering, physics, or even computer science or the arts, this work provides a superb instructional foundation for applied mathematics.

Beginning with differentiation and integration, the text continues on its mathematical journey, taking the reader through complex numbers, linear algebra, differential equations, even LaPlace transforms and Fourier series. It then ends with overview chapters on such varied topics as graph theory, set theory, boolean algebra, probability and statistics. In addition there is a section devoted to using symbolic computing with applications such as Mathematica, which are essential to anyone interested in learning or using mathematics today.

The overall look of the book is exquisite. The typefaces, equations and graphs are a pleasure to the eye (even as they grow substantially in complexity). The prose discusses the subject matter with rigor, yet is easy to read and guides gradually and carefully.

Anyone wishing to review the fundamentals of mathematics or to further the education started through school will find this book to be a joy to go through. Solutions to many exercises are provided in an appendix.

The softcover edition is highly durable. Upon completion of every chapter the reader will have substantial expertise in or exposure to major branches and topics of mathematics. For this wealth of information to have so low a cost is remarkable.

Highest possible recommendation, with superlative marks in virtually all categories of review.

Another book that is not worth the paper it is printed on.

I wish I hadn't opened the CD encasing so I could return it and get my money back. Unfortunately, it was required for an AfterEffects class last term and I had no choice. By the end of the class even the instructor gave up on the book. This term the instructor went back to the Classroom in a Book even though it's for AE 5.0, and rightfully so.

The examples are impossible to follow, the support files are incomplete. It's just a pain to learn from.

This book is not very good if you are a brand new user to After Effects. I found myself continuously going to the help button to find the item the book told me to use. I thought about selling it back as a used book, but I didn't want to be responsible for someone else wasting their money. Do not buy this book unless you already know the basics in After Effects. There are some good tips, but that was not why I bought this; I had never used After Effects and thought this was a step by step tutorial.

Interesting little stories about bush flying between 1950 and 1960 in Alaska and Canada.
enjoyable to read for heli freaks to become an idea how heli flying was during this time.

easy to get in Alaska (1996)

I do not feel this matches Marlowe's "Faustus," "Massacre At Paris," "Dido Queen of Carthage," or "Edward II." But it does have some memorable features. At first, Barabas is a sympathetic character, but like many of Marlowe's characters, he goes too far and becomes detestable. Barabas' daughter Abigail is a striking figure. She initially feels sorry for her father but later sees what he has become and falls victim to her father's wickedness. Her death as a Christain in 3.6 is memorable. Ithamore is convincing as a villain who knows no honor. Ferneze is fine as the hero who eventually restores order. It's not Marlowe's best play, but it is still worth some interest.

Ah, if only, indeed. Sessions approaches this reading as if it were the first time he had seen the material. Any grasp of Ustinov's fabulously wry novel would have led him to understand that god should be, like Ustinov himself, quietly powerful. His rendering of Mr. Smith is, however, appropriately sniveling.

I've read a bit more than half of this book, and I can already say that it is probably the most RACIST book I've ever read. While trying not to make race a big issue in this novel(I think that's what Lehrer was trying to do by having a diverse debate panel), the author made the fact that Barbara Manning(African-American) and Henry Rodriguez(Hispanic) were minorities THE central issue inadvertently. Every time these two characters are mentioned in the novel, their ethnicity is brought up. Even worse, the character of Henry is a stereotype of Mexican people. On page 111, it is mentioned that Henry's favorite food is a bean burrito. Nearly every time Henry makes a statement in the novel, he uses the word "Ole`". I'm still waiting for him to break out and start refering to people as "Essay"(which, I'm sure is coming up) I think that the only thing Lehrer knows about Hispanic people is what he learned by listening to Cheech from Cheech and Chong! I'm not even going to start on the fact that every Republican in the novel is portrayed as a Neo-Nazi-type of supervillan. This is a book with weak characters that use poor dialogue.

"The Last Debate" is a page turner, an easy, quick read, good for the beach or a night of insomnia. Even though much of it was predictable, I was tantalized enough at each stage to continue on. That said, however, the plot is hardly realistic. Any decent journalist (and the hero Howley was characterized as such) or news organization possessing the "explosive" goods on one of the candidates, would check it out carefully unlike the four debate panalists. Furthermore, it is hard to believe that a candidate who behaved as the Republican candidate did could get as far as he did without at least one or two of his accusers (and there were many!) not going public much earlier on, i.e., during the primaries. Look what happened to Clinton in 1992 -- not to mention 1998. The "minority" journalists are one dimensional and stereotypical. Still, given the weaknesses in the plot, it was an interesting read, and I'm trying one more Lehrer fiction piece to see if he does any better.

Days before the election, the moderator of the presidential debate (Lehrer has of course moderated many presidential debates) is given some secret, damning info on one of the candidates (the right-wing Republican who all the press realize is a truly evil man who will ruin the country) and has to decide whether to step over the journalistic line and use this info in a way that will damage the candidate in the eyes of the voters and so change American history.

It's an interesting moral question but because it is set up so weakly, a lot of the impact is lost. The candidate's character is somewhat like Pat Buchanan, but the situation is more like that of when Ross Perot first came on the scene, and he seemed such a wonderful guy, until we all found out about the steel-tip-booted way he ran his businesses, and how badly he took criticism, and saw the guy he chose for V.P. Everybody said, "Whoa! and I was going to vote for this guy?!"

In "The Last Debate," though, the American public still doesn't know about the man's real character 8 days before the election. It just seems awfully unlikely that nothing would have come to light before that time. And even then, why couldn't the journalists bypass the moral issue by just giving the damning info directly to the press to report it as news? Lehrer does kind of explain these things, in a way, later on, but these kinds of doubts gave the premise a tinge of unreality which weakened its impact for me.

You have to read this book, also, with the assumption that Lehrer is being very loose and imaginative here, probably aspiring to something a la Jonathan Swift, because the characters do express themselves in very simple, repetitive, often stereotypical ways, and say a lot of things out loud that you would never expect such people to say. But he might have done that to simplify things, and of course, ambitious people are, sometimes, extremely simple and childish, underneath it all.

And you can't really call all the characters superficial. The Democratic candidate is kind of a dummy, but he's not really a nice guy, as we see in how he treats his campaign manager. (Is Lehrer telling us they're all like that?) And I thought the contrast between the narrator (a young journalist) and the "hero" moderator (from the old school) was very interesting. And also the contrast between the somewhat opportunistic narrator and the deeply moral and patriotic private investigator.

(Lehrer also leaves open the interesting question of whether the American public is better off with the dumb Democrat rather than the crazy Republican.)

Lehrer writes with a sort of Southern lilt which is kind of nice, but then, he has everyone - the narrator of the story and most of the characters - talk that way off and on, which is a bad idea if you're trying to keep characters separate. For instance, the narrator and several characters frequently do what I give an example of above in my title: use 4 nouns or adjectives in a row. There's no point building up verisimilitude by using all sorts of place and brand names, but then making this sort of sloppy error.

Still, the book is interesting if you watch the Newshour and want to read about the Washington scene. The pacing is nicely done, and Lehrer is an honest and good man, so you do trust what he says about his world.

An aside: I couldn't help remembering Stephen King's "The Dead Zone," which also involves an evil politician and a hero who knows the truth about him. That book had a great solution to the problem, a little more physical, of course. A major flaw with King, in my opinion, is that he's lived up there among the pinecones, watching TV and reading paperbacks too long, and a lot of his plots nowadays are too far from reality, even for his genre. And I thought, wow, wouldn't it be great if Lehrer and King teamed up for a novel or two?! Or is that a little TOO Swiftian to hope for?

This is a CD that can run alongside CADKEY 20+ but it is not designed to interface with it. I am using CADKEY ver. 20.3 the latest and greatest version.

I found the presentation mechanism to be poor at best. The interface is the Microsoft Explorer presented with Windows Media.

Once the individual tutorials start the full screen option (which is recommended) does not fill the screen. (It overfills the screen) This causes you to have to scamper around with the horizontal and vertical scroll keys to attempt to see which icon or menu item is being selected by the presenter. The script appears to be done off the cuff, the speaker being prompted by his knowledge of the program and not by some program design to get the pertinent information out to you.

The program bills itself as an intro to the new CADKEY 20+ release but spends about half of its time on matters that are either not new or can be figured out easily enough.

Some functions just plain do not work as described. Other attempts at demonstration (remember this is supposed to be new) assume you know something that is not given on the screen.

Mr. Walt has been the author of many books on CADKEY. I have several of them, but his style is considerably oppressive to the student. (on the subject of hot keys it's either "my way or the highway") But the largest complaint I have with his attempt at teaching (he know an awful lot of information) is he tells you what HE knows and not what YOU as a student needs to know. There is a wide rift between the two. None of his works (even the elementary ones) have what I would call great continuity from beginning to end, but this one is especially jumpy and disconnected.

The real problem is that if you do not buy Dr. Walt's books/CD's there is no other alternative for paced self-study of the subject. Were it not for the long counseling sessions (and heavy medication like TUMS antacid) by my local VAR representative I would be in total LA LA land on this program.

Also it must be stated here that I am NOT well versed on the nuances of ANY drawing/drafting/3D program, but these programs are supposed to bring you up to minimum speed. This one just puts you out on the highway in a Yugo at 75 mph and hopes that you will absorb some "rubber" as you are pummeled by oncoming traffic.

Far too little for far too much money.

The format of this book is not user friendly. I am an SRNA and I often have to refer to other texts because Smith's does not have the information that I need to prepare for a case.