I am not sure who this book the 'committee' wrote this for, but I can think of no one. More like a hodge-podge collection of Internet clippings somewhat related to Java & Macs, interspersed with useless code. It is sad because the Mac market needs a Java book covering getting started and the many options and tools Apple has provided the Java student & developer.

I am sorry I wasted my money & was responsible for the deaths of the trees that made it!

This is probably the worst technical book that I have read. Its more a collection of papers than anything else, and much of the content is trivial. Beginning progrmmers would find nothing in here. Advanced programmers will probably find a few nuggets of information that are useful, but they are few and far between.

If you are looking for an excellent book on Java on the new Macintosh operating system OS X, this is one to get. The writing style is well done and the book, in terms of content, is well thought out. I am enjoying the authors coverage of pure Java vs Mac OS X specific issues in particular. Keep up the good job.

This book was the worst LSAT book I used to prepare for the test. It's compact size made it stressful on my eyes and the book was hard to keep open during a practice test. The questions were misleading and sometimes irrelevant. I would estimate my score went down from using this book.

I would recommend this book to someone who is wanting to narrow down their trouble spots and then move on to another source to tackle them. This book is excellent at helping you sort out your problem areas and gives questions that are about the same as those found in other test prep books. I found this, combined with a pile of prep tests availble from law services prepared me well for writing the lsat. I wouldn't suggest one use this book on its own and expect to get gleeming scores. It works great to a point, but another study aide is essential to compliment it.

This book is great. I've taken a lot of these standardized tests, and I've found that for a test like the LSAT, the best preparation is to know the format of the test well, to practice each section (timed and untimed), and to finish with taking a few full length practice tests. There is no need to buy a big ... book for the LSAT. There's no need to take a course. Simplicity is the key and this book is all you need. It's a ... good little book.

Edited by William O. Einwechter and containing chapters by some of the Christian Right's most unstable extremists, Explicitly Christian Politics is nauseating. Attempting to deny what Christ said about his kingdom not being of this world, these devils would substitute Christ's heavenly kingdom for their own dictatorship.

The book's premise is straightforward: Jesus Christ is both Creator and King, and therefore all of life, both private and public, is subject to the author's interpretation. That is, the authors are pretending to be god. The implications of this should be obvious, but alas are not: today 1/2 of the U.S. Senate would sleep soundly at if the reigns of goverment were turned over to Pat Robertson- or, e.g., if John Ashcroft were to become attorney general.

Every ideology is inherently hubris, since it inevitably makes assumptions concerning creation and the nature of reality and the source and meaning of right and wrong.

Hopefully Americans will learn of the diabolical nature of these Reconstructionist theocrats before it's too late.

Edited by William O. Einwechter and containing chapters by some of the Christian Right's most distinguished thinkers, Explicitly Christian Politics is an impressive read. Attempting what is today unheard of -- an approach not only to political issues but also political theory that is rooted entirely in Christian thought -- it succeeds in making its case in a consistently scholarly fashion that is still light enough to entertain and to reach virtually any lay reader.

The book's premise is straightforward: Jesus Christ is both Creator and King, and therefore all of life, both private and public, is subject to His rule. The implications of this should be obvious, but alas are not: modern society becomes hysterical at the very thought of anything which might, in modern terms, "mix politics with religion." Of course this hysteria is nonsense. Every ideology is inherently religious, since it inevitably makes assumptions concerning creation and the nature of reality and the source and meaning of right and wrong. But the Christian religion and its trappings are out of vogue in this century, while the cults of the all-powerful state and the relativistic individual reign supreme, and it should surprise no one that the acolytes of the modern polytheism should seek to silence the ancient monotheism at every opportunity.

So just what are the implications of a consistently Christian political theory? Perhaps it is best first to understand what the implications are not. While the authors call for a Constitutional amendment recognizing Jesus Christ as Lord and as the Source of its life, liberty and law -- much the same as almost every other Western nation has -- they emphatically do not call for what moderns refer to as a "theocracy". "Theocracy," which is to say, rule by God, already exists: Christ's kingdom is "not of this world", and He rules the affairs of men no matter what they do or say. Rather, the authors believe a consistently Biblical social theory requires a separation of church and state, that the two institutions, along with the family, are ordained by God and meant to operate in very different spheres. They do not call for the submission of government to the church, or any earthly clergy: what they want is conformity of civil life, and indeed of civilization, to the teachings of Christ.

In practice, this means that the authors do not favor a change in the form of American government; they favor a change in its character and beliefs. It is an ideological and spiritual revolution they seek, not a revolution of the modern sort, and it is entirely based on principles familiar. The authors stake the claim of Jesus Christ's rights as King, but do not call for an Earthly king to rule in His stead; instead, they call for repentance and conversion on the part of those who do rule on Earth -- the electorate -- and for the election of leaders who will faithfully discharge their Constitutional duties not as faithful humanists or faithful Marxists but as faithful Christians.

And what does leadership as a faithful Christian mean, aside from not committing adultery, not breaking campaign promises, and not selling secrets to the Chinese? Well, actually, it means a change in worldviews, just as did the shift from the old order to New Deal statism in the 1930s. The authors take time to explore the Christian foundations of liberty in the modern world, noting correctly that of all the ideologies in history, only Christianity produced modern political and economic freedom. They detail the depravity which results (and which has resulted) from an abandonment of absolute right and wrong, and show why no adequate legal standard -- and certainly no truly free one -- can be built apart from the standard of Scripture. They trace the free market's roots in Biblical law and show why government must be both very small and very unintrusive. They offer a completely new paradigm for education, and call for reason over "sentimentalism." In short, they address, and address well, most of the vital issues of the day.

One cannot come away from Explicitly Christian Politics without a deepened realization of the religious nature of the "isms" of our time and the abysmally bad politics that flows from them; likewise, one cannot read this volume without an appreciation for the fact that these Christians have devised a better model. Quibble with the details all you like: Explicitly Christian Politics is nothing short of the rebirth of a vital Christian social theory, far beyond the "me-too" pluralism of the Christian Right to date. There's something special here. it is very clearly not going away.

Copyright: Rod D. Martin, 8 May 1998.

This book provided some helpful hints and useful lists. But, the practice tests were extremely difficult and somewhat arcane. I used it as a backup book to help me prepare.

In the literary world it is perhaps blasphemy to say a bad word against Daniel Defoe's most acclaimed novel. So here goes. The fact that the book was originally titled The Life And Strange Surprising Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe illustrates the major flaw in Defoe's literary form. Put simply, this would be a far more interesting and gripping story were it not so superfluously lengthy. The author makes a habit of repeating himself, especially when it comes to the act of dispatching kittens, which seems to be more of an obsession here than octogenarian ladies are to MatronsApron. It is difficult, you may think, to keep the subject matter fresh when describing the daily tribulations of a fellow stranded on an island for thirty years, without occasionally repeating yourself. True, but perhaps a straightforward solution to this diminutive quandary would be to simply truncate the duration of the story. There are some wonderfully intriguing and suspenseful moments, and some juicy action to boot, but sadly these are gratuitously diluted by lengthy descriptions of the unremarkable everyday goings on in Crusoe's life, and rather than serving to build up the suspense, they merely obstruct the reader's relationship with the more exciting parts of the story.
However, those with more patience than my ignorant self will find in Robinson Crusoe a delightful tale, which as well as being a fictional documentary of the most unusual thirty years of Mr. Crusoe's life, also has time to ponder upon philosophical and theological ideas, in a style that makes the reader feel as if they are involved in the conflicts between the functionalist and cynical thoughts going on in Crusoe's mind. It may not be a gripping white-knuckle adventure, being rather more leisurely and acquiescent, but it is still rather easy to see why Robinson Crusoe is regarded by some as one of the greatest novels of all time.

I read this book in the manner the author suggests. In doing that a person needs to read each chapter more than once. It did prove to be a task that showed me some of the ways in which i had been sleepwalking thru my life. I enjoyed the correlation of multiple philosophies.

Consider the following statement from page 256. Here's some "early lessons" from the "new economy":

Dot-com startups as well as clicks-and-mortar strategies can be viable for B2B for B2C ecommerce if the applications leverage Internet technologies AND a marketplace strength.

Aren't you glad you bought the book? You ALSO need a marketplace strength to be successful, not just the Internet stuff. Kinda makes you wonder, doesn't it?

This text has a tendancy to give misleading information or entirely incorrect information. Even in the most basic concepts, the authors misuse terms or create terms used nowhere else in the IT industry. The authors relay their lack of understanding for basic computer concepts in this supposedly 2001 updated edition.

As an example for those who are literate in IT, the authors make statements such as "virtual memory is used only on larger computer systems". Got a 6 year old computer running MS Windows? You've got virtual memory.

If you wish to learn about IT, please find another book written by authors who understand the field, not business professors.

I am finding this book as an extremely useful reference tool for writing my senior thesis at Rutgers University (NJ) on the Internet and B2B transactions. I find it very easy to read and useful, and some of the case studies are very interesting and helpful. Some of the other buyers don't seem to think the book is worth its price but I STRONGLY DISAGREE WITH THEM. I believe the book is worth its price.

My College Calculus professor uses this book as a suppliment to provide examples for the class use. Everyone hates the problems as they are vague and lack any explanation on how to solve the problem or even where to begin. It appears to me that someone wrote a book simply to create problems that cannot be solved by the book's explanations. Calculus requires a working understanding of the ideas and concepts of the base math before an sort of obscure application should be used. I would not recommend this book to anyone, unless they already have a good understanding of calculus and wish to delve further into the application of the math to the real world. In that case, buy the book. For the other 95% that are just wanting to learn calculus; go buy a different book that teaches you something first.

In my experience with this text, students either love it or hate it. They hate it because it does not offer a brief overview of the topics, like many more popular calculus text books. Instead "Calculus: Single Variable" requires that a student throughly read many examples as it explains rules and laws along the way. Those who love the text do so because the examples offer a firmer understanding of the concepts at hand, instead of just covering enough material to answer the questions at the end of each section. Although this is a very good text book, it definitely requires patience on behalf of the reader, and may not be the book for students who just want to slide by.

This book was used for my Fall 2002 Calculus III (multivariable) class. We used the last section of the book, chapters 12-19. I was able to review old concepts when needed from the earlier chapters, which were presented nicely.

I have noticed that a lot of other reviewers here have mixed feelings about this text. It would help if they stated their background which should be taken into account. I am a junior computer science/mathematics double major who does well in both subjects and is not afraid of reading through a long proof or spending time on advanced problems. Thus, my perspective is that of an advanced student. I noticed that the other students in my class were not all mathematics majors and there were a lot of physics/chemistry majors in the group. These people are probably learning from a pragmatic perspective and could probably care less about proofs, so as long as they pass they are happy.

The chapters from the book that I read in detail (12-19) I found to be full of great illustrations and examples and were presented in a clear logical manner without superfluous material/examples. Starting with the basic tools needed for multivariable calculus (multivariable functions, vector algebra), I found myself grasping topics and ideas very quickly (I aced the course). The exercises were not too difficult and could be solved in a few minutes using the information from the section. The problems require more time and sometimes ideas from other sections/subjects, but none are too difficult. Mostly every topic was given a algebraic and geometric explaination. The book provides a great introduction for beginners while the scope of topics covered appeals to advanced students as well.

In comparison to my old calculus text (Stewart) I found this book to have a lot more material in general that wasn't in Stewart, such as trig sub and fourier series. There is also a chapter on differential equations, which I should probably read before my class starts next semester ;D .

In summary, this review is from the perspective of a young mathematician, and I felt that it was perfect for me to learn from. I liked it enough to keep it. If you are in the same category you will find this to be a wonderful text. It is hard to say whether or not it should be recommended for beginners/non-math students, since I am not one, but from the other reviews on here it seems like some people have had trouble. If that's the case you might want to find a supplement (Standard Deviant's or Cliff's Notes). Learning calculus for the non-math student is not easy, so the best way is to just work harder.

The book is a disaster. I had to suffer with it for 2 semesters. None of the other students in my Calc I and Calc II courses got anything from it either, as far as I can tell. I had to scramble and seek information from other calc books in order to understand what differentiation and integration was all about. The text in no way prepares one for the exercises. There's no connection between the text and the exercises. In the exercises there appear some inane, open-ended questions that seem to be trying to make some unfathomable point. This is not a book anyone can learn from. I would strongly advise any student who must use this book as their course textbook to CHANGE COLLEGES. There are many great calculus books out there, on all levels. For those who prefer a 'calculus reform' approach, I would recommend Calculus Lite, by Frank Morgan. For the more traditional approach, I got a lot out of Anton's classic.

Teaching with this text - which I've been doing for the past two semesters - is an uphill battle, to say the least. It's a text designed for non-majors; I teach business and social science students. Instructors of these sorts of students need to convince their pupils that they DO need to know how to reason mathematically, and that math IS relevant to their life plans - they can't just rely on their calculators to do all their work for them. When the textbook seems to disagree, our job is all the more difficult.

The authors of _Calculus_ don't seem to have made up their minds regarding whether or not it is necessary to introduce the notion of mathematical justification in this book. On the one hand, the examples feature sound arguments for why a curve looks the way it does, or why a critical point is a maximum or minimum - but on the other hand, alongside Newton's Method and the Bisection Method for estimating roots, is a "Using the Zoom Function on Your Calculator" primer on how to estimate the zeroes of functions. Offhand remarks about "and you can use your graphing calculator for this and that" serve to seriously undermine any attempt to explain to first-year students the concept of mathematical argument - which is unfamiliar to many.

The organization of the chapters is also somewhat questionable. Differentiation is broken up into two sections: one dealing with the concept of a derivative (complete with pictures), and the other pertaining to computing them. While the idea of introducing differentiation through a concrete example - measuring instantaneous velocity given a displacement function - is a good one, by the time students actually get to work with derivatives, they're no longer focused on what they actually represent. Curve sketching is introduced vaguely at the end of the second chapter - before the shortcuts to differentiation are mentioned - and then revisited only in chapter 4.

The section on integration is even worse: again, it's introduced in a concrete manner - this time, by asking how displacement can be computed from a velocity function. But for some bizarre reason, the authors don't take this opportunity to explain that the area under a velocity curve - the integral - is that same displacement function whose derivative was the velocity. It's a perfect opportunity to do so, as it's an interesting and surprising (to the beginner) result, and one that's accessible at this point in the course. But instead, the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus is relegated to a later section, long after the "integral as an area" idea has been abandoned and students are just working with integrals as antiderivatives. (Even more curiously, there's a section entitled "The Second Fundamental Theorem of Calculus", but none called "The First Fundamental Theorem of Calculus".)

I'd highly recommend James Stewart's _Calculus_ instead of this text for a first-year calc course: the material is far better explained, and there's even a section on the inadequacies of graphing calculators (which are expensive, and which most first year students don't have the mathematical background to use properly).

When I took Multivariable Calculus, we used "Multivariable Calculus" by James Steward in class. I personal like Steward's book very much because it made me understand without the help of my professor. With a supplement of this book, I found I understand Multivariable Calculus in a more comprehensive way. All in all, I like this book a lot.

Besides the picture on the front, this book is horrible! I've learned more by personal derivation and experimenting than through this book. The explanations are overly bloated, and include so many approximations and tables that the theory behind this book's ramblings is lost completely. Instead of focusing on theoretical multivariable calculus while introducing, as a short diversion an approximating method, this book builds around a foundation of approximations, which clouds the actual mathematics in the process.

In my opinion, unless theory is ingrained in students' heads from the start, they will never even attempt to understand it. After all, the book gives the theory second priority, so why should students pay any attention to it?

Moreover, in the introduction, the book promises to have problem sets that a student "cannot just look for a similar example to solve... you will have to think." However, after working with this book's homework problems, I've found them to be the exact opposite of this! There are plenty of similar examples for any given problem, and as a result the teacher's role becomes trivial, while at the same time students don't really understand anything they're doing. Not only this, but the problems are overly MUNDANE, and there is too much practice for a single concept. If a student has taken calculus, he can do derivatives, so he should not need 31 exercises to learn how to do partial derivatives.

Capping all this off, there are no truly challenging problems at all in this book. All of them focus on mechanical methods rather than clever application of known theory. The biggest challenge in this book, in fact, is keeping your hand intact as you take 50 partial derivatives, and then hit a problem that says "repeat for the second partial derivatives."

Meanwhile, your fine motor skills deteriorate quickly as you overwork them drawing or re-drawing a graph or table every other problem.

Bravo, Debbie Hughes, you can use Mathematica's graphing capabilities to their fullest. We're all proud of you. Now can you keep them out of your textbook? No one wants to see a billion tables staring them in the face, and then have to copy and change a billion more for homework. That's not a way to learn. This whole textbook is just a way to pretend you're learning.

Waiting to really learn anything from this book is like waiting for Richard Simmons to get married. Trust me, it's not gonna happen, folks.

kubkhan

"This innovative book is the product of an NSF funded calculus consortium based at Harvard University and was developed as part of the calculus reform movement" Beware of Harvard, i.e. reform Calculus. Instead of teaching people about maxima and minima, you show them how to use a calculator to guess. What a load of junk. Nobody learns what anything means, just how to apply formulas, etc. It is a shame what books and authors like these are doing to college mathematics. This book is particularly bad, a whole bunch of fluff, not a damn ounce of substance.

I have to disagree with my fellow Californians and unfortunately agree with someone from New York. This is an excellent foundation overview without the clutter of Anton's and Stewart's books. I found it to be a conveniently carried paperback and an enjoyable read.