This is a good starter book if you are learning Director 5. It's a simple book for the beginner to understand. Macromedia also includes a cdrom will all of their product demos. Also includes a save disabled version of Director 5.0

It might be hard to believe that writing about the making of a telescope could make for a good book. This husband & wife team pulled it off wonderfully. "Revealing the Universe..." takes you easily (even for the novice) through some basic physics and the history of X-Ray astronomy. Then the authors get into the Chandra project proper and the going gets good. They take the reader through the often dramatic process of getting such a complicated and costly project through the cogs of bureaucracy and politics and the infinite patience and perseverence of those scientists and administrators who made the project happen. Among the most interesting parts of the book are the descriptions of the technological miracles the scientists had to perform to make Chandra a reality; the impossibly precise requiements for the mirrors, for example, stretch the imagination and make for great "mind trips". Reading through sections describing crucial "make-or-break" tests of the different components is intense, like watching Robert DeNiro in a great car chase scene. And then, first light...the thing works...just like it was designed...or better! Awesome!
"Revealing the Universe..." is excellent for those interested in astronomy as well as for those interested in expanding your mind with a good read.

If you're new to Director, this is an excellent place to start. Step by step tutorials give you the hands on approach to learning the basics of Director. Poor testing prior to publishing makes their tutorials a bit buggy, but don't let that stop you. Consider it part of the educational value!

I found Director 6 and Lingo Authorized to be useful for the Director beginner with well thought out tutorials and a building block process that allows you to gain a gradual understanding of the application. However, I struggled in each chapter with technical problems. Every chapter had at least one or more mistakes that you as the inexperienced user had to troubleshoot. It became a frustrating process knowing that I would run in to a problem that wasn't created by me. I spent at least a quarter of my learning time troubleshooting what turned out to be simple typos in the book. Additionally, not all aspects worked, at least not on a Win 98 platform. Anything that was video oriented didn't play and some of the completed lessons didn't work properly either. Some contained script errors and others just didn't work. I have a hard time recommending this book because of those problems even though I think the material is good. If Macromedia improved the quality, I would highly recommend it. Otherwise, I wouldn't get it unless you have a great deal of patience.

MacroMedia Director is a fairly intricate application to learn. This book does a good job of describing both Mac and PC commands, as well as presenting step by step instructions to get started. The examples and included media are good for getting started while providing a satisfying product for the time spent. Sound and video clips are good examples of how to keep a multimedia document to a manageable size. A few of the visual examples show stage and picture sizes of 8 to 16 bit, where our Pentium II computer was giving 1 6 to 32 bit in the same place, but this did not seem distracting while trying to learn. I would highly recommend this book to someone who wants to learn Director (and Lingo) thoroughly and on her own!

I bought this book for a class that I was taking in Director. This was the textbook that we used in the class, and after using it, I was not satisfied.

This book consists of tutorials that you perform, which increase in difficulty as you progress. However, instead of teaching you Director and Lingo, and how to use them, this book just has you do mindless tutorials. Sure, it tries to explain a few things along the way, but for the most part, you just follow directions, and do the tutorials.

I learned a whole lot more about how to use Director and Lingo from Director 7 Demystified. It explained things in clear terms, and taught you how to USE the program, instead of just telling you what to do next for the tutorial. Demystified is also a vast reference for Director and Lingo, whereas once you go through the tutorials in this book, you will probably never come back to it.

If you are trying to learn Director, I would definitely go with Director 7 Demystified.

This book is a very good book for beginners and even intermediate level director users, has lots of good examples using lingo and other basic director features.

However if you have director 6 authorized, dont waste your money, its almost a complete rehash of the last book, the lessons are exactly the same as last time, even the table of contents reads exactly the same.

If you dont have the previous book I would suggest this as a good place to start learning director.

BUY this book. - Explanations are a little rough - and sometimes seem a little "cut-off". Probably a problem with me because I have no prior multimedia editing experience. General knowledge of multimedia programs similiar to this program is helpful. GOOD, easy to follow tutorials are explained. A problem I sometimes had was when I did NOT get the result that The TUTORIAL SAID i WAS SUPPOSED TO GET. Me, being such a premie, I didn't know how to trouble-shoot it. This book is still one of the best out of the 4 DIRECTOR 7 books I purchased. DO NOT BUY THE DIRECTOR 7 QUICK START guide BY PEACH-PIT IF YOU ARE NEW to director 7 ! I SPENT TOO MUCH TIME reading entire book and - LEARNED NOTHING THAT THIS BOOK DIDN'T TEACH ME IN THE FIRST few CHAPTERS!

This book is not correct. the pictures that is shows in it is just a reformatted version of director 7 and lingo. the text, pictures and the lingo are all director 7, wil little to no director 8 features

This book clearly describes director , shockwave and Lingo. Examples are given to illustrate the various concepts covered in the book. However, the converage of Lingo is not extensive , Director 7 Demystified offers better description of the Lingo programming model.Its a good book for beginners , however , for a extensive understand of Lingo , Director 7 Desmystified is a better choice

One thing that is nice about this book, is the fact that it has the lingo code that can be used not only for Director CDs, but also for Shockwave sites.. A must have.

... The layout of the book was confusing and so where theexamples and explanations. If it where not for a great math teacher Iwould have been lost in the class if I was just left to the book alone. I would recommend students and teachers (if your considering this book for your class) to stay away from it... END

Excellent seller. It arrived much faster than I expected.
Thanks a lot

This book is addressed for understanding of the Calculus and not for the traditional teaching that sins for the excess of formalism. It is an excellent book for who wants to understand and to learn Calculus through the application of problems of the Real World. The book also motivates the use of graphic calculators to have a better vision of the problem.

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.

Skipped around leaving some odd problems out of book. Only explained a few problems in total detail. This is by far the worst solutions manual on the market. Bring it back for a refund before its to late.

This is, without a doubt, the most incredibly worthless book I have come across in my college experience. I am getting an A in Calculus in spite of, and NOT because of this book. The so-called "Harvard Method" leaves the student with the concepts of calculus, but with none of the tools to actually perform the operations. If you get stuck with this as a required text, I strongly recommend you also purchase a traditional calculus text to actually learn from.

I used this book about three years ago for all my three calculus classes, and most of my classmates liked it. We found this book to be very challenging because it made us think all semester long. We also liked it because our professor explained every single example of the book; most of all, they were very explained by our professor. Now I am looking forward to see the new edition of the book.

The text is very wordy and problems could be answered in the book or in a solutions manual. Very few illustrations are a problem. Our Prof. had to explain several mistakes in the text that were completely incorrect.

This textbook, although presenting a basic approach to the fundamentals of Precalculus, provides a cluttered collection of confusing explanations and poorly edited questions. The cover proves to be the best designed part of the bookl; inside there is little illustration and lots of wordy text. The book contains no full set of answers which could often leave a teacher stranded in some of its poorly phrased, misguided questions. Overall, a poorly conceived, designed, edited, and published textbook.

I read the preceding reviews and don't find what was said untrue. The simplicity and algorithmically solved problems, however, belie the sophisticated look at functions. My students found the work with difference equations difficult because of the symbolic manipulation, but their teacher (me), appreciated how the text took the idea of derivatives, reduced this concept into a discrete function, and concluded with the antiderivative. Very clever.