"Both new in concept and timely in publication....Bring together, for the first time, the fundamental of atomic scale crystal structure and chemistry... A cutting-edge text at the forefront of the modern materials revolution"

- Professor David B. Williams, Lehigh University, USA

"Unique...focuses specifically on the intrinsic connections among several crystal structure systems and their evolution behavior...Fills a gap left in the field ... This book will be a basic reference in the domain of oxides which are to be the basis of functional and smart materials"

- Professor C. Boulesteix, Universite Aix-Marseille, France.

"In materials science the spotlight is on functional and smart materials, since they are important components for electronic devices. The textbook by Wang and Kang summarizes all types of known functional materials and describes the structure evolution problems. A large section of the book is devoted to structural characterization focusing on transmission electron microscopy, the main field of expertise of the author. The book is extremely valuable for materials scientists working on functional oxide materials, studying the structure, structure evolution and defects. It may serve also as an interesting textbook for teaching since it gives a good overview of this field which is of increasing importance. The clarity of its writing style should make it ideally suited for graduate students."

- Professor Manfred Ruhle, Institte of Werkstoffwissenschaft, Germany

The authors consider the atomic scale crystal structure and chemistry of oxides with physical and chemical properties that are sensitive to changes in the environment such as temperature, pressure, electric or magnetic fields, pH, and optical wavelength. They explain relationships among different structures and explore approaches to characterizing and synthesizing these important components for electronic devices.

"... this book is a unique, cutting-edge text on smart materials ... it is recommended as an adjunct to device design books used for engineers as well as scientists during the development of smart devices and structures" .

I ordered this book because I was taking a course on Unix... and once I got it, I realized that I wasted my money. I was expecting the 'with X' part to cover programming with X windows, or motif. It is just on how to run xterm pretty much. One of the key things that you will notice is that man pages are more informative than this book. For instance, the section on sed, awk, and grep. It is very vauge in covering regular expressions and use of any of the languages. Besides man pages, much of the information can be found on the internet as well. If you have no idea what a man page is, or how to even use telnet... then you should consider getting this book. For someone who needs to know how to login through telnet, or how to use chmod, then this book is fine. But for what I would consider an 'advanced' view of Unix, I would look toward the internet. So if you have used any *nix before, its pretty useless. Unless you have an anal professor who absolutely requires you buy this book, don't.

If you're a beginner, an intermediate, or an expert, you'll
use this book. It won't gather dust on the shelf. Just look
at the table of contents and you'll want it. It also has the
most complete appendices of any book I've seen on the subject.

This book is used in 'UNIX & C' course in CSE dept. of Inha Univ. that I went to. I also read this book and I'm always read this book whenever necessary. There are several books about UNIX for beginning users in bookstores, I found that this book is by far the most informative, readable, helpful and well organized in both breadth and depth. All the other books looked just so so. APUE by R. Stevens has been very popular since that book is really great book, 'An introduction to Unix with X and the Internet' also should be very popular if many people know this book are available. Whenever I don't understand about some topic in Unix clearly, I read this book about that topic, get almost clear understandings, and finally I'm deeply impressed that this book is really great book. Both for beginners and for professionals, I think this book is really a must-have if one is concerned with Unix. I am also pleased that this great book is written by Asian person, knowing the fact that GRUs live everywhere in the world. ;-) About 550 pages of great information on Unix, this book should be retitled to 'Unix fundamentals bible'. Buy this book, and you won't regret. This book deserves its worth even if you are just having it, not reading steadily.

The portable cards which constitute this 'book' are well-designed. They will assist any student who is taking undergraduate organic chemistry course prepare for revisions. Although that they lacked details in some respects, their coverage did embrace wide areas.
They are particularly useful in learning about the various nomenclature, as well as the physical and chemical properties of a functional group in a given homologous series.
"OrgoCards" impressed me with the way it handled those nucleophilic substitution reactions that members of Carbonyl group undergo. Despite its haphazard lessons on Acylation, its efforts on Alcohols, Aldehydes, Ketones, Esters, and Carboxylic acids are quite commendable.
This "OrgoCards: Organic Chemistry Review" should be seen either as a textbook complement, or a notebook alternative. I will suggest that you consider buying it if your lecturer is the type that is not enthusiastic about giving class-notes.

These Orgocards were extremely useful not only while studying for my organic chemistry course but especially for the MCAT.

I tried making my own flashcards but I found them immediately obsolete after I got Orgocards which contain the critical information in a very understandable and easy to read format. They were also really a critical part of my studying for the bio section of the MCAT since a lot of the detailed info from o-chem had become a bit fuzzy by that point.

A definite must buy.

I used it for studying the o-chem portion of the MCAT this summer. These cards are fantastic, full of details and great summaries and figures. It is too bad that it was not available a year ago when I was studying for the course. Highly recommended!

POEMS OF WANG WEI : Translated with an Introduction by G. W. Robinson. 144 pp. (Penguin Classics). Penguin Books 1973, and Reissued.

Wang Wei (+ 699-761) is one of the greatest poets in Chinese literature. During his life he experienced a number of political upheavals, and divided his time between the court and his country estate, where he drew inspiration from his beautiful natural surroundings and solitude. His poems, though deceptively simple, can conceal real depths, and, since he was a Buddhist, some exposure to Buddhist thought may be necessary to fully appreciate some of them.

The present book, after a brief 12-page Introduction, gives us over one hundred of Wang Wei's poems, lightly annotated and in adequate translations which are of varying degrees of success. Here is an example of Cooper's style at his best (with my obliques added to indicate line breaks), a short poem entitled 'Return to the Wang River' :

"Distant bell sounding at the mouth of the valley / Fewer and fewer the fishermen and woodmen / Away in the far mountains it is evening / And I am going alone towards the white clouds home / Water-chestnut flowers so delicate so hardly still / Willow catkins so light so easily fly / Colours of spring on the banks of the marsh to the east / And I am melancholy as I shut my door" (p.63).

The book, which also includes a brief Bibliography and finding numbers for all the poems, would make a useful introduction for anyone new to Wang Wei. But if, after reading it, you'd really like to discover what lies behind Wang Wei's seeming simplicity, and learn something of how his poetry works, you might take a look at the excellent bilingual anthology by Wai-lim Yip which contains a detailed treatment of a number of his poems. Details are as follows :

CHINESE POETRY : An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres. Edited and translated by Wai-lim Yip. 358 pp. Durham NC and London : Duke University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8223-1951-9 (pbk.)

Of the Chinese poets, Wang Wei has a special quality of painting with words. This collection is representative of his writing and will delight those who have read Wang Wei's poems and will provide a good introduction to those searching for a remarkable poet.

This book qualifies as the best medicine against stereotypes, of which the infection is so great.. College professors cannot be fired (a lifeteime paycheck) when they do not have the knowledge, or the passion, or the desire to learn... attorneys will say that the story of their ignorance is simply defamatio... the proof? They have degrees in some other field!!! Benjamin Franklin did not even attend High School, yet, among his many pionering endeavors, there is the railroad..yes, Franklin, a railroad pioneer. George Washington did not attend West Point. Etc. So, where does Academia get its airs?

Excellent collection of old photographs. The history and photo collection stopped at the late '70's. Largely incorrect on facts regarding recent, especially Monterey Park immigrants.

Unlike "Shades of L.A." which covers a wide spectrum of L.A. resident culture, "Lonely Queue" brings to life the history surrounding L.A.'s Chinatown and its many pioneers and benefactors. Unfortunately, one would wish to have a formal index at the end of the book to allow searching of a particular individual and their photo, rather than mere chapter endnotes and perhaps more care should have been taken to identify how people were placed in photos, i.e., confusing row entries. And often photographs were placed arbitrarily within timely chapters without regard to relevant topic headings. But nevertheless, this scrapbook-based pictorial is truly illustrative and historical and should be considered a major reference book in anyone's personal library.

"The Lonely Queue" is a high quality, oversized book about the history of Chinese Americans in Los Angeles. The text starts with 1850 when there were only two Chinese male house servants recorded in the census and continues through the 1990s. The primary divisions are: Early Settlement in Los Angeles, Chinese Exclusion Act Years in Old Chinatown, Social Conditions in Old Chinatown, The Birth of China City, Chinese Americans in World War II, Postwar Years in New Chinatown, Chinatown Troubles, The Development of Suburban Chinatown, The Emergence of the San Gabriel Valley Chinese Communities, New Roles of Chinese Americans, and The Future.

The book is filled with so many pictures and illustrations from the various time periods that it appears more space is dedicated to the pictures than to the words. While this might not be appropriate in other books, I have always found it to be wonderful in historical texts. Nothing takes you back in time and gives you a feel for the period as well as a period photograph or illustration. This is a highly recommended and very valuable book for anyone interested in the history of Chinese Americans in Los Angeles.

The book shows how to correctly draw the character proportionately and using the correct stroke order, but it just has simplified characters.

This book goes through the 2000 most commonly used Chinese characters in a way that I haven't seen done before. It is very helpful because it includes just about every detail one would ever want to know about the character. One aspect that I appreciated was how it gave the character with other characters to show its many meanings. It was helpful to see the order of strokes needed to write the characters properly. For those who are studying Chinese on their own or through a class, this is a great book.

During my freshman year at the school of architecture, we examined Herzog & de Meuron's two houses to use them as a starting point for our 'room' designs. Their work is very impressive. The houses were the Koechlin House, in Switzerland and Kramlich House, in California. Both of them were quite comprehensive designs and yet with totally different approaches to their aims.

Koechlin House was designed as a three-story building, in which the top floor was the rotation of the trapezoid shaped-second floor, which formed the main movement in the house. The architects have brought the outside to inside, and inside to outside by placing movable huge glass windows, which are reflective as a mirror. The building's almost black color serves to the means of making it seem both visible and invisible at the same time to the people walking outside.

The other house, Kremlin House, was designed for two artists who were dealing with media art frequently. To this respect, Herzog & de Meuron, designed the house in such a way that all the walls within the house could be used as projection screens for the artists. To enhance the design, they've curved the walls to provide continuity to the works being projected. I believe that there cannot be any better solution than what the swiss architects have offered.

I've purchased the book to look at their other works, and I'm not disappointed at all. Their other works reflect similar level of quality, creativity and problem-solving. The book contains about 75-100 works of them, with all the essential information regarding the context, juxtaposed with self-explanatory pictures. Some of the bigger projects have plans and sections as well. The editor has included a couple of sections on the background of the architects, and a timeline of their work.

The book is in both german and english. Therefore, the amount of information revealed is halved, but it is still sufficient. The reason I'm rating this book with 4 stars is that I find the book somewhat dull and not-very-inviting than the usual charming architecture books. But, this is just my opinion, and this cannot hinder the book's value or success by any means. It is a good source of both Herzog & de Meuron, and general Swiss architecture, indeed.

Me fascinan los espacios minimalistas. Herzog & de Meuron, transmiten la esencia del lugar con materiales universales. los espacios se llenan de vida con el estudio de la luz.

The book describes the analytical techniques based on electron diffraction, reflection and imaging in the TEM (and STEM) for the analysis of materials surfaces. As with most texts dealing with analytical techniques these days it is awash with acronyms and the ones representing the candidate methodologies are frequently encountered. These are RHEED (reflection high energy electron diffraction), REM (reflection electron microscopy), SREM (scanning REM) and REELS (reflection electron energy loss spectroscopy). Many others are included, but the author is considerate enough to define them all in the early pages of his book. The dust-cover notes state that this is 'an entirely self-contained study' in which the 'theories, techniques and applications of REM, RHEED and REELS are comprehensively reviewed'. Inspection of the text reveals that this is, indeed, the case, with three parts (logically Part A, Part B and Part C) of approximately equal length covering the three areas of reflection electron studies. This is preceded by a comprehensive review of the kinematical theory of electron diffraction. This chapter is a very helpful (and necessary) prelude to the rest of the book. It deals with kinematical scattering in the usual numerical manner but the associated text makes this chapter extremely readable. The main body of the text is written in an equally attractive style with the theory of the various topics being introduced alongside the experimental procedures involved. There are many applications of reflection electron microscopy and spectroscopy scattered throughout the book; although inmost cases they serve as illustrations of particular facets of the experimental procedures rather than points which emphasize the relative strengths of the candidate techniques. This is, however, a minor criticism, and the inclusion of examples of real micrographs, diffraction patterns and spectra throughout the text may provide some readers with much needed relief from the undoubted rigour of the theoretical treatments provided.

For those with a TEM background it represents, perhaps, the definitive text for reflection methods.

There are two particularly attractive aspects of this book to be found in the closing pages. The first is an extensive set (ten) of appendices which contain much useful data along with five FORTRAM programs for interpreting spectra and modeling electron beam/specimen interaction. These have presumably been widely tested in the author's laboratory and their inclusion here is to be welcomed. The other feature, warmly welcomed by this reviewer, is the inclusion of a separate index of the materials used to illustrate the various facets of the reflection techniques. Also included as an Appendix is a chronological bibliography of REM, SREM and REELS covering the years 1975-1995. RHEED is presumably excluded as it is the most senior, and widely used, of the methods considered. This book is not one for those with a peripheral interest in RHEED, REM, SREM and REELS. Referring once again to the cover notes it is offered as an 'ideal guide for scientists and graduate students working on quantitative surface structure characterization using reflection electron techniques' and there is no doubt that this target audience will appreciate the publication of such a concise, authoritative and well written text in their chosen area of endeavor. For those with a TEM background it represents, perhaps, the definitive text for reflection methods and provides all the theoretical information necessary for a thorough appreciation of these techniques. At such a reasonable price for a very specialist text one would hope that it will soon find a place on the bookshelf of every electron microscopy unit with a practical need (or even aspirations) to carry out surface structure determination in the TEM or STEM. For those with a need for such a text this book fulfills all the claims made on its behalf. Dr. Wang is to be congratulated on writing a very accessible text. The book is thoroughly recommended.

"It contains a lot of illustrations and excellent images and a good balance of theory and experimental techniques... it is a book that any materials science or physics libraries should be holding"

As with all good "for dummies" that came before it, this reference gives you pointers on the most useful aspects of Microsoft's office programs and it does it with a sense of humor.

This book looks if it is specially designed for beginners... It provides quick, easy answers and maybe too easy for me, but I love it.

As long as you know enough to point and click this is a very good tutorial for beginners. Instead of scratching your head and wondering, "What's this?" you can at least get the Windows monster to fly before crashing it.

Having owned this book for several weeks, now I could make some comments here. Well, if you need some books on ESD or IO design, you won't be able to find many. This book is one of several good books with comprehensive coverage on ESD protection. It addresses ESD test models, protection circuit design techniques, failure analysis, layout and simulations.

However, my personal feeling is that this book came from lots of author's paper collections instead of his own experience. Especially, in Chapter 6 (ESD Failure Analysis and Modeling), virtually all examples were borrowed from others, and the reproduced FA images are poor. Also, I agree ... that the book was not well written. It has too many long sentences which make you read uneasily.

Looking for a better one? Wiley just published the second edition of "ESD in Silicon Integrated Circuits" which is far better than first edition, and it's more practical and much cheaper than this book, with super quality. Maybe I can give a brief comparison between these two books here, academic vs. industry, professors vs. engineers.

I found this book a nice complement to existing literature such as "Basic ESD and I/O Design." The complementary characterisitc of this book arises from addressing the issue of designing ESD structures from the standpoint of an IC designer, with plenty of actual circuit examples (although mostly digital).

The only criticism is that the book is poorly written, too colloquial, with many grammatical misconstructions.

I found this is a truly useful book for practical IC designers like myself.