Used price: $4.15
Collectible price: $13.22
Buy one from zShops for: $5.95
Ok - I did get some new information, but i am ultimately disappointed.
Please only get it, if you are a complete beginner. I thought that i was a complete network newbie, but I knew most of the information already....
Used price: $3.75
Buy one from zShops for: $5.99
Used price: $3.50
Buy one from zShops for: $6.70
Used price: $6.75
Collectible price: $15.34
Therefore, if you're interested in really learning about why G N' R is such an important band and your interest in music extends beyond what you hear on a CD, than I strongly recommend this book.
A word of caution...I have to say that this is not your typical sex, drugs and rock n' roll biography. If you're looking for a book that's just about the drunken exploits of Axl and the band,you'd best look else where. Not that this book does not cover off on these subjects, its just that there is much more to this book than that.
Used price: $7.95
Buy one from zShops for: $8.75
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).
Used price: $3.48
Buy one from zShops for: $9.95
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
Used price: $1.91
Collectible price: $8.95
Buy one from zShops for: $11.99
Used price: $26.00
Buy one from zShops for: $49.99
This book is a pleasure to read, and it CERTAINLY is not diffcult to understand. It is in fact the clearest and most vibrant law text I've encountered. Students having trouble finding the majority opinion need to read the whole case; those not understanding the order of the tort law presentation need to read the entire book.
Used price: $2.39
Buy one from zShops for: $20.00
Used price: $2.85
Buy one from zShops for: $33.99
If you had never heard of a network before it might be useful, but even as a relative beginner I found this book to be _way_ too simpleminded.
I like information to be presented in a non-technical, accessible way. This book manages to be irritatingly simplistic and unclear at the same time. Quite a feat.
I was particularly disappointed because I've liked other books in the same series. I really doubt that anyone with any experience (even just surfing the internet) would find this book very useful.
I hope the authors put a lot of effort into improving the next version, if there is another.