For I have read Alice in wonderland in Spanish, French, Italian and English. I know that translations can mutilate the piece of work, but in many cases (such as Alice and 100 years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez) it can feed the literary sense of the pages. The game of words, in every language will dispose of different elements, thus giving the images within the text new visions, new symbols, new meanings. Wonderful book, wonderful dream. for life, what is it, but a Dream?

Where it all began.---The book grew out from an epic scientific paper in 1948, but luckly its author Shannon chose a light touch and a gentle delivery in his presentation. The paper became a book, with a 1949 first edition, which is now a classic, and which has been reprinted a number of times since, ending with the present lovely 1998 edition. It is still the place where readers can learn the essentials, including the two equations of information theory, that are now named after Claude Shannon.

The book about information theory. It is old but contain all the basic concepts. Even better, you can enjoy reading it!

I think it is fair to say that this book, based on Shannons landmark paper represents what I believe to be, the most important engineering paper ever written in the history of the world (both up to this point, and likely will remain so in the future). In terms of "practical implementation" of theory, it's fair to say that this seminal work has had a far greater contribution to mankind than Einsteins' paper on general and special relativity (just don't say that to a physicists face).

... All to often, famous theorists are relegated to "cult-like" obscurity. Persons like Shannon, Gallager, Forney, Komolgorov may be legendary within a cult-circle of die-hard communication theorists, but are relegated to unfortunate obscurity by the masses. It's rather unfortunate, with todays advanced communication systems, and techniques of coding (Turbo codes, modified LDPC codes, etc..)which push the boundaries to the ultimate limits as defined by Shannon.... that more people (both engineers, and laymen alike) don't recognize the names of early pioneers who started the revolution, and who's theories are the basis for many of our modern luxuries which allow us to download information at such rapid rates.

People often underestimate the deepness of Shannons' work,due to Shannon's writing style. He was one of those rare writers (somewhat like Forney, or Massey) who can actually explain complicated subjects using mere words, without the need for prettying the theory up with fancy math. Comparing the equation filled textbooks of today, versus Shannon's work, one might get the impression that Shannon's work was simplistic. I think it's clear to anyone whos studied his work, that IT WAS NOT SIMPLISTIC. Obviously, there was alot of "behind the scenes" math which Shannon had to go through to actually codify his many theorems. Just because Shannon did not show extensive derivations for each one of his theorems does not mean that he was not a good mathemetician..It merely means that he did not want to write a 1,000 page paper... he wanted to keep it simple (as was the customary writing style in the early to mid 1900's).

In short.. This book should be on YOUR shelf if you dont already own it, and if you are interested in information theory, and the deeper underpinnings of digital communications. I give the book 5 stars, not because it's any kind of elegant literary masterpiece; simply because it is based on the most important paper ever written. ... S.A. Hoffman -

Weaver's book (actually written in the early 1960's) is becoming somewhat dated. Since this was before calculators were readily available, the book's examples don't take advantage of the readers access to powerful number crunching such as factorials and exponentials. Having taken over 4 years of calculus in college, I don't consider myself mathematically challenged, but I often had a hard time following the author's reasoning and his sample problems. Those without a good mathematical background could easily get lost and discouraged in this book unless they just skimmed over the rough areas and picked up those subjects and anecdotes of possible interest to them. For a quick read of probability theory at a low price, this isn't too bad; but more modern books are available.

The main strength of Mr. Weaver's "Lady Luck" lies in its sheer readability. Mr. Weaver is very careful about presenting his arguments so that they may have maximum intuitive appeal, while at the same time refusing to compromise the mathematical rigor that is necessary to construct any serious theory of rudimentary probability. What is most important about the work is that it provides the reader an extremely entertaining and well written framework for thinking about questions of probability. A concept such as "independent random variable" which a mediocre statistics textbook may quickly skip is a surprisingly philosophically complicated idea, and has troubled academicians, let alone lay people. Mr. Weaver's work, far from being in any sense "slow," deals with how we are to take into account this very basic ideas that form the starting point to this particular area of the mathematical sciences. Finally, Mr. Weaver's references to distinctively late 50s early 60s phenomenon provide an entertaining look at the thoughts of the time.

I could not put this book down. The author, Warren Weaver, writes in a very unpretentious, personal voice. He unravels the complex subject of probability in a manner that is both encouraging and challenging. The reader develops a personal intuition for applying basic probability formulae (with careful consideration of relevant factors and an increased sense of self-confidence). I believe this book could be understood by any person familiar with basic algebra. On the other hand, the average physics PhD would likely find it equally interesting, because its intuitive approach is so refreshing.

This book is very good in that it offers numerous questions, which gives the student very good practice, but the answers that follow have no explantions. Also, it lacks info on the actual format of the test, the pacing a student should use when taking it, and the time allowed. The tactics given are helpful, but this book would have been better if the book had set times the student should try to achieve, offered explanations to the preceding questions, and given more information about the format of the test. However, it did offer much practice, which was very useful.