Following in the tradition of Yale's Cardiovascular Health Guide, the Harvard Medical School Family Health Guide, and the Johns Hopkins Medical Guide to Health After 50, the venerable Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons offers us this latest addition to the health-obsessed consumer craze for complete home medical references. As expected, this book offers only more of the same: a good name, a lot of pages, and a redundant course in layman's medicine. Given the sheer size and weight of the volume (lifting it is an exercise itself), you would expect the entries to have more detail and, well, more specialized terminology. The diagrams which accompany many of the chapters elicit more boredom than information (save for the psychiatric section's tables, which are rather good), and the overall organization of the book sacrifices content for accessibility. I've seen many home medical guides at the bookstore lately, and this one just doesn't stand out in particular. My honest recommendation is that you look past the University's illustrious name and opt instead for the MERCK MANUAL HOME EDITION (paperback version), which for its small size and affordable price is the best home medical guide for the entire family.

Very informative. I suffer from PVC's and try to get my hands on as much info as possible. I found this book to be very helpful in my understanding more on this condition.

This book really deserves two separate ratings. The first five chapters introduce domain engineering in general. If you are new to the idea of family-based software development, or need some convincing of its intended benefits, this section isn't bad. The two case studies presented gloss over some of the complicated concepts while providing too much technical detail in others. For example, the important but non-trivial job of creating the "decision model" for the domain is given minimal coverage. On the other hand, every class in the JAVA code used to illustrate one example is explained individually. I'd give this section a 3-star rating as an introduction to domain engineering.

The rest of the book is an incredibly detailed reference into the authors' implementation of the FAST process. They spend two chapters bringing the reader up-to-speed on the process modeling technique called PASTA. Then they provide almost 200 pages of reference information (also included on CD-ROM) on the specifics of FAST. If you are looking for a recipe to use to try domain analysis and implementation in your company, this section covers it. If nothing else, you'll see a very well defined process modeling notation in action, one that can be used in many applications. Without any personal experience implementing the process, I hesitate to rate this section. But if the process works as well as this section is detailed, I'd give it at least 4 stars.

Its hard to say from their examples how well the FAST process will scale to industrial-size domains. But the authors have presented an easily read book with enough detail that a motivated software engineer may be able to win management support and give domain engineering a try.