Behind the Painting remains one of Thailand's most cherished novels. On the surface it chronicles the romance and eventual heartbreak between a married woman visiting Japan and her young guide, an overseas Thai student. Beyond that however, it is also a portrait of the end of the Thai aristocracy at the heels of the new bourgouis class. Kiralee, the young wife of a retired aristocrat, accompanies her husband on a trip to Japan. There, they are met by an overseas Thai student who has been assigned as their guide throughout their visit. Love soon begins to blossom between the two, only to be stunted by the woman's return to Thailand. Heartbroken, the young student buries himself in his career only to discover that upon his own return to Thailand several years later, he has forgotten the woman he once loved. She, however, has never forgoteen him.

I recently picked up this book in Bangkok and found I could put it to immediate use. Such an example would be the use of serial verbs where in English we would need a number of conjunctions. This enabled me to break out of stilted, one sentence at a time, conversation with my Thai friends.

This is not a dry academic treatise but a ready-to-use guide that is clearly explained in lay terms.

The author also wrote the Teach Yourself Thai book which I found very helpful when first visiting Thailand.

I strongly recommend this book, particularly for those people like myself wanting to "break out" of beginner's Thai. It is an invaluable reference that will need to be supplemented with a text book and good tape set, if you do not already have those.

This text is well written, but not very technical. It is not particularly useful as a reference, if your goal is to get a project or projects off the ground. The text does a nice job of explaining and motivating the different methods. I found the book to be very informative and useful, worth reading and perhaps owning, but other books such as Elements of Statistical Learning by Hastie et al. have more to offer.

"Principles of Data Mining" was my first book on the subject, and although I haven't read it all, I can state that this book has done its job in explaining the fundamentals of the topic. It has a very well written recap of statistics and probability and is consistent throughout the chapters in terms of notation, which is important for such texts. Although my primary interest in this book was the EM algorithm (the coverage of which could have been better and longer), the other chapters that I read were fairly well written. I might be however a bit biased in my judgement, because one of the authors' office is 10 metres from mine :)

Bottom line: a good book, if you're interested in the subject. It's also not too expensive, considering other titles.

This is an excellent book for students in engineering and computer science who would like an introductory and statistical treatment of data mining. It has much more statistical content than other widely-used data mining texts such as those by Han and Kamber or Witten and Frank. And it is better suited to senior undergraduate or first-year graduate students in CS and EE than the text by Hastie and colleagues, since it has broader coverage of data mining topics and a more tutorial-style introduction to the basic principles of inference from data.

The coverage emphasizes breadth rather than depth and this works well for an introductory text. Numerous and extensive references are provided for further reading. The layout of the book is interesting, proceeding from data visualization (often ignored in many data mining books) through general principles of inference and algorithms, to more specific techniques in classification and regression. If you are interested in data mining and would like a statistically-motivated introduction, then this is the book to start with.

This Khmer course is the only one I know of currently available which comes with audio tapes. Huffman's older coursebook(s) is (are) much more rigorous, but the tapes for that course can be obtained from Yale only for a very hefty price, so for an introduction to Khmer this will have to serve for most people.

The book is written for the "lay person", anyone who might want to learn Khmer. That has its ups and downs. I am a linguist, and I found myself having to transcribe the pronunciations myself because the author's attempts at mimicking them with English spelling -- while systematic to a large degree -- end up being irritating and insufficiently informative to anyone with linguistic training (for example the register differences on vowels and the effects these may have on voice quality are not indicated). However, this may be the best compromise for readers who have no clue about transcriptional conventions. Otherwise, the book is excellent at promoting conversation and listening skills, and adequate, although hardly authoritative, on matters of elementary grammar. (I have to confess that the English language narrator on the tapes sometimes sounds as if he is addressing small children, but I suppose some learners may find that reassurring.)

The Cambodian alphabet, which is really very baroque, is introduced gradually, at a sensible pace. The dialogues are I think realistic, and some of them stress the extraordinary trauma most Cambodians experienced in the 1970s, which, while depressing, is an important reality in understanding Cambodia today.

For the money, this is really an excellent course for most learners. For linguists a better course could be devised, but it's clear that the market for such a course is probably very limited.

I hope that this book will encourage more people to learn and appreciate Khmer, an unusual and beautiful language and monument to an ancient and fascinating culture.

I am about to be transferred to Thailand and will be taking formal and intensive Thai instruction next month. I wanted to get a head start on the language and after reading the..reviews purchased the Smith book with the two cassette tapes. After three weeks of study I find myself (to my surprisE) learning to read and speak Thai. First let me mention some things I do NOT like (but remember I am a pure beginner). The transliteration is confusing and frankly often does not match what I hear on the tapes. Second, there are disconnects between the tapes and what the book says I am supposed to be hearing. Third, the tape's intro to tones is not sufficient. Now what I like about the Smith book. I am learning to actually read Thai! It is a complicated alphabet (no matter what David Smith says) but I am progressing. The text progresses easily from one step to the next. Contrary to some reviews I like the practical application in the dialogues e.g shopping, menu ordering. etc. But most of all I like the easy and maybe even chatty way the book guides you into the language. I must admit I certainly enjoy studying this language with this book. And Smith is correct that 20 minutes a day is more effective than one 2 hours session weekly. Yep, a new edition of the tapes is needed but it is the best 20 bucks I spent in a long time!

I'm with the US Peace Corps in Thailand, a job (the toughest one?) that requires learning Thai, and it's not by coincidence that more of us have Mr. Smyth's book than any other.

I found learning to read essential in learning Thai, and this book teaches better reading better than any other book I have seen. As for teaching the letters out of dictionary order, well, I haven't found that many Thais who could answer a question analogous to "What letter comes before S?" without reciting the whole alphabet. It's just not how they learn, therefore, most Thai dictionaries have an index of the letters in the beginning. The lesson here is that you are a lot better off learning the letters by class (and therefore tone rules) than you are by dictionary order, which will come later as you use a dictionary more.

I've only listened to someone else's tapes briefly, but they seemed to give good assistance separating the tones and learning to pronounce the sounds that we don't have in English.

If you are just going to Thailand for a week, I imagine any number of books would suffice, but if you want to learn Thai more than "snake-snake-fish-fish" (bits and pieces), then get this book.

Oh, c'mon, people! What's with all these bad reviews? This book teaches you how to speak, write, read, understand the Thai language. The Thai writing system is listed both in dictionary order in the back and in a more systematic tonal order on another page also in the back. There's also a handy summary of the tone rules on one page in the back. Copy it, laminate it, make a bookmark and dive in. This book maps the Thai language inside and out. Grammar explanations are there in abundance. The cassette tape is excellent, too (but there's one big boo-boo at the very beginning where the English guy says something like,"Here's how to ask someone what their name is:" and the Thai woman says,"Hello, how are you?" But that's such an obvious mistake anyone can catch it). The book teaches you how to read and write in little sections in each chapter. But from chapter one to the end the author gives you Thai script as well as a romanized transcription for all the dialogues. So you can start writing from the very beginning if you want to. Just skip to the writing sections of later chapters. Who said it's forbidden to read ahead? Just like, photocopy all the writing sections and put them all together in a little writing chapter pamphlet thingy. Take it, shake it, make it your own! This book has everything you need. It has cultural and historical points, too ; like, why is Bangkok called Bangkok? And why is the Thai word for Bangkok not "Bangkok"? (the Thai word for Bangkok is "GrOOng-tayp" which means "city of angels"... Los Angeles?) Thai people are super friendly and most people will speak Thai with you if you try even just a little bit. Get the book and go to Thailand. Now.

It's an excellent book for beginners. The tapes done very well using native speakers of Khmer. The English speakers have a distinctly British accent. The book uses it's own system of romanisation that is easy to learn. It covers the language basics one would need to suvive in Cambodia. The book also focuses somewhat on Cambodian culture and the Holocaust. It would be a good book for Cambodian Americans who wish to learn Cambodian Script. I would not recomend it for more advanced speakers of Khmer.

This book is extremely helpful for those who would like to learn enough khmer to really enjoy a trip to cambodia. It is pretty basic, but it will get you to have small conversations in no time. It's really a great introduction to a fascinating language and culture.

p.s. If you are not going to be in cambodia or don't have any khmer friends, you REALLY need the tapes.

Tha roman-alphabet renderings of the Khmer words is misleading, but for most aspects of the course only good things can be said. The exercises are well-chosen and paced in a way that makes learning Khmer about as painless as it can be, which is still pretty painful.

This book supposes no prior knowledge of Khmer. The other Khmer book I have seen, by Huffman, is very technical and seems to suppose a level of training in structural linguistics and phonetics that is beyond what most people have.

This small dictionary seems to be modelled on Robertson's Thai dictionary. In this context it is light years ahead of its model. But it is next to useless for all but very basic vocab. Be warned too, that nine times out of ten the word you are stuck for will not be there, and if perchance it is, there will be no help at all on usage. The transliteration is terrible and often misleading or wrong. Be careful too because the meanings are likely to also be sufficiently incomplete or even wrong to create some embarrassment. Not very useful for anybody wanting to communicate in Khmer, and completely inadequate for anybody wanting to learn the language.

The Tuttle Practical Cambodian Dictionary is a good quick reference guide. Pocket sized and easy to carry, it isn't designed to be comprehensive, but has most of the essential words and phrases one is likely to encounter in everyday usage. I have some minor quibbles on pronunciation of a few words, but, spoken Khmer is often at variance with the written form of the words. For technical translation, a more comprehensive dictionary is a must, but for travelers and translation of simple documents, this is a fine tool.

Conversational Thai in seven days? Conversational in any language in one week? Some common phrases yes. Vocabulary and niceties in common contexts, yes. Conversational level Thai in 7 days? Absolutely ridiculous.

This book requires that you spend the first few hours listening to the audio casette to get the feel and the rythm for the language. It is at first difficult to read the romanized words and repeat the sounds accurately but with practise I think I was on the right track. The audio casette does not follow the book in the exact sequence as it is written so at times when you think you are following along comfortably you will be taken to a different phrase or word section that may cause you to put the book down and just listen again. The author claims this is to help keep you from relying on the book. The phrases are useful and there is a small Thai/Engilsh dictionary towards the back. I would prefer a book that was easier to follow along with the audio casette but I can say a few words now and do not feel completely isolated. mai bpin rai.