Applied Languages Books

Just received the book , excellent book, font a bit small.
But why should I buy a brand new book to get it packaged in too small cardboard panels ?
It is all damaged, I wanted the brand new hard cover book.
I buy a lot of books from AMAZON this is the first time it happens but where
should I complain ????

An excellent book , damaged. I wanted a perfect book undamaged.

In all those years of perfect service from AMAZON all I wanted is get it fixed or at least tell them something is wrong in packaging. But where do you put such a complaint ?

My complaint is simple : if you send a hard cover book with cardboard panels that are for a smaller size book then this book ( mine ) will get
all corners damaged just like an old second hand book.

I must say in over 15 years or more buying books from AMAZON this is my very first problem.

The material is alright but it is just kind of old. I can not tell from the original description otherwise, I will
not have bought it.

Yes, the book lacks formality. Instead it tackles problems the way smart people really tackle them, and not as some after-the-fact rationalization of the process. It is easy, even fun, to read.

The main purpose of the book is not to show the recipes, although to a degree it does, but it is instead it shows how to pick which recipe to use. For some readers it will document and explain processes they may have already been using unconsciously. For others, there may be some "aha" moments.

This is the best book I have in my optimization library. It is excellent for students and teachers as well. It introduces you to optimization using a simple language, practical examples explained in a very didactical manner. It surveys optimization techniques and categorizes it in a very well-arranged and simplified format. You wouldn't have to read tens of pages with unsightly symbols, messed with subscripts and superscripts to understand a single optimization technique.
It also brings an uplifting introduction to the concept of problem solving. I highly recommend this book to Optimization and Mathematics students and teachers.
Read the book, once you are done, look at the table of contents and give a five minutes lecture on each single title and subtitle, which is what you will be capable of doing at the end.

Most evolutionary computation or math books deal with the techniques of solving problems. This book teachs you how to think of a solution for the problem you face, and not what problems are appropriate for the technique in hand.

The logic is that when you do a craft work, you do pick the appropriate tool from your tools box, but you don't grasp a tool and then find a job to go with it, which is the case when you can only handle this tool.

I just got this book and had a great time looking at all of the suggestions. The text is very straight-forward and while you can create most of these items yourself, it is nice to have high-quality materials already made and ready to duplicate. Also, the book incorporates questions that one may not think to include in his or her own worksheet creations. There are many examples and useful tidbits for teachers. I would recommend this book to new teachers like myself and veterans whom are looking for different methods to teach English. I look forward to putting these exercises and suggestions to use when the school year starts!

This book is wonderful for new teachers...it is the third copy I have purchased because I keep lending it to newbies and then never seem to get it back. I know this book saved me my first year of teaching...especially being hired less then a week before school started.

This book is great, esp. for the news teacher. Should be augmented w. other resources that include course handouts and activities.

I've been online searching for books to use in the classroom, I was happy when I found this one. It'll serve me well.

What I liked most about this book is that Brandevik used easy to follow steps and multiple ideas to teach English to students. After browsing through the book, the ideas and techniques the author used were refreshing.I will be using this book as a guide in my classroom! I truly believe that this survival guide is a lifesaver for English teachers and students. I also like how an educator can make copies of vital information, lessons, activities, etc from the manual.

Who is the books audience? Its a second book. A second book to a theory book. A second book to a textbook. A second book to a your lecture notes. It will never be ~the~ book for a topic by itself, but it just a brilliant job of filling gaps.

I picture it like this: if your going into a graduate program that uses R buy this book and you will use it. 2 out of 3 courses I took in spring semester used R heavily. I am surprised none of the instructors had the line "Recommended for students continuing in R is MASS..." in their syllabus. Because that is exactly what I would say. This is one of those books you want to get early, and keep it around.

It never explains enough of the statistics to stand on its own; however, its coverage of R and R packages is more complete than anything I have found elsewhere. And having got it a year after I first started using R, I am sad I didn't get it sooner =)~

If you're changing topics alot like a student does is it ~the~ desk reference for R? Probably. Maybe I will run into a better one in a few months though? I dunno.. you get it and tell me.

This is a great programming reference book for S-plus or R. I would imagine any serious programmer in S-plus already has this on his/her desk.

Nice feature about this book:
where S and R differs in grammar, they are labeled very clearly.

I started using R to do linear modeling and found that I was using 'library(MASS)' much of the time. MASS, it turns out, stands for Modern Applied Statistics with S. R is a free ware version of S-Plus. I assumed that R is simply S-Plus without the GUI. I was close, but not right. There are some minor differences. This book, written for S also addresses the use of R in the applications presented, and also notes differences between the two, when they exist. I am quite pleased with Venerables and Ripley's book; it presents much of the theoretical background as well as 'command line' code for doing the analyses presented in each chapter. The book assumes the reader has some background in statistics.

The first five chapters are a brief overview of /introduction to S-Plus (or R). These chapters present enough information and examples to make the rest of the book fairly easy to work through.

I got the book primarily to work design of experiments. The chapters on linear statistical models and general linear models were perfectly suited to my needs. Topics like factorial experiments, random and mixed effects, nested designs, partially balanced designs are covered. In addition, techniques of robust analysis and bootstrap methods are presented.

The book covers many other areas - non-linear models, classification, time series, optimization.. I have not worked through any of these topics in the book.

Overall I find Modern Applied Statistics with S to be an excellent book, invaluable if one is using R (I don't have S-Plus) as the vehicle for analyses.

This is *the* book to have on S+/R. It provides excellent value for its price (indeed, any price): it is concise, broad, informative. All the same, I think it would be useful to identify intended audience for this book (in my view). First, the book is not for novices in Statistics. You'll learn how to fit generalized linear models in the language, not how and why to apply such models properly. To this end, there are plenty of specific monographies, and the majority of them use R for examples. Just to name a few, Friedman, Hastie, Tibshirani, Harrell, Faraway employ R. Also, this book assume some basic knowledge of programming. R is a more elegant language than Matlab and Thinking in R becomes very natural after some practice. But I have not seen so far a tutorial on "R as a first language". Summing up, this is a great book for undergraduates in Statistics/Engineering and up, who want a comprehensive, usable reference. My only criticism is that since 2002 there have been giant changes in the language. First, R is now the main implementation of the language, with S+ being an industry-supported variant. Second, the S4 object model is here to stay and grow, and is crying for a user-friendly introduction. Lastly, the number of packages is probably twenty times what it was in 2002. SVMs, ensemble methods, shrinkage, sparse representations *are* modern applied statistics, and are underrepresented in the book.

Still, this is a must have for any applied statistician.

This text is very popular and frequently cited in the statistics literature. The authors do an outstanding job of displaying modern statistical methods through the S programming language. It is an intermediate level book and certainly worthy of 5 stars.

This book did what no other reading program could do, it taught my child to read! Thank you so much!

This book and the method contained in it are a life saver. I see that 1 or 2 people couldn't seen to use it but it has worked for over 40 kids we have used it with in our special education school. Thank the lord for new thinkers like Dr. Furr and thank the lord for this method!!

Another parent referred me to this book. I have to say that it seemed just a little too easy and a little too fast to be real. My mother always told me that if something seemed to good to be true, that it usually wasn't true. NOT the case here! This book should be in every teacher and every pricipal's hands. It not only teaches reading super fast but it is 100% painless for all those concerned. This book has forever changed my two sons' lives! Neither could read, both had given up, I was very close to giving up when I tried this book. Now both are readers and not only that they both feel so good about themselves that it is truely wonderful. If I could, I would send you a million dollars because that is what this has been worth to me.

I bought this book with hopes of helping my son improve his reading. The premise of this book is basically to read and reread the same passage twice a day for a week. This really seemed to help my son at first but after several months I felt like his ability to read unfamiliar stuff was no better than before. This book would be a good addition to a reading program but it did not help my child with word attack skills at all. I also bought the reading material that they sell to go with the program and found it to be very disappointing. The company neuro reading sells the "books" which are really just pamphlets.

This program works. I am using it to work with my 10 yr old son, who has seen wonderful improvement in his reading ability over 3 months of use. From that standpoint, I would give this book 5 stars. However, in the beginning of the book, Dr. Furr states "I quickly realized that I actually knew very little about English grammar." and I have to agree. I recommend the program highly, but I had to overcome issues of confidence in it as I came across typographical errors, redundancy, punctuation errors and misspellings throughout the book. This is a well-designed approach to a serious problem and would have benefited greatly from an editor who could have given this book the professionalism it deserves.

I don't exactly agree with this type of therapy, kind of brainwashing, some kids just need time to flourish on their own. Maybe good for some. Not very good for very sensitive children.

This book is so informative that I wrote to the author to tell her what a great job she did - and what a service for the community. It's in easy language and VERY helpful to the professional, as well as the parent. I highly recommend it!

This book is easy and enjoyable to read. It explains, in simple terms, what VB is and gives you guidelines which are easy to follow. Useful for both parents and professionals.

I am an ABA/VB professional as well as an author of a book on the topic of the Verbal Behavior Approach to ABA. I have met Mary only once but I have read her book and found it to be an excellent introduction to the science of behaviorism and particularly to the Verbal Behavior Approach to ABA. If you are currently trying to decide the best way to approach the education of the child with autism in your life or if you have already found the benefits of ABA and want to see the science of Behaviorism through the eyes of someone versed in Skinner's analysis of Verbal Behavior, this book is a great start. Once you have the basics down, you can continue your education of VB with "Educate Toward Recovery: Turning the Tables on Autism" A Teaching Manual for the Verbal Beahvior Approach to ABA also available here on AmazonEducate Toward Recovery: Turning the Tables on Autism.

As a mother of three children on the spectrum, I want to share how much this book has changed our lives forever. Hope is a powerful feeling and one given to us from this book.

We were going along following the "standard" recommendations of the professionals working with our children on the spectrum without much change for over the past two years. Sure, we had some changes, but not like the ones we were about to experience using the Verbal Behavior Approach.

This book was very easy to read and did a great job of detailing exactly how to do what we were reading about. For us, the concepts were all completely new and a totally different way of intervening. Having Mary Barbara's personal story throughtout the book helped make it more real for us as a parents.

This book has given us the power to help our children ourselves. No longer do we have to follow recommendations from others that just don't seem "quite right" for our children. We have the tools to make a difference ourselves. The therapists we do have that work with our children, are much happier also and feel a better sense of direction now. They have told me how much more hopeful they feel now having the resources they needed. They report that following the Verbal Behavior Approach has changed them professionally as well.

We have spent the past few months working through behavior problems with our children. I am glad to report that for my middle son, age 4, 20+ meltdowns a day is literally down to none or an average of 3 a week. What a difference! We have our lives back! Each child on the spectrum is different of course, but I just wanted to share one personal detail in this review to give specific evidence of the changes we are experiencing.

We feel so much closer and more connected to our kids. I don't know what more a parent with a child on the spectrum wants. We are forever grateful. I highly recommend this book to anyone out there who wants to help their children, clients, family member, and self grow and learn. I recommend this book to parents on the spectrum and parents of non-spectrum kids as well.

We still have a long road ahead of us, but we are up for the journey having the resources we need now. (This book stays by my side and I refer to it daily.)

I am a proficient MSXML coder but i can't get what I want (knowledge about .Net XML programming objects) from this book because the author habitually relies on advanced concepts from related technologies to explain things. So unless you are a pretty competent .Net programmer and already proficient in ADO.Net/ADO you will struggle to understand this book and struggle to understand the significance of what you are being told and why. I gave up and resorted to looking for articles on MSDN. Undoubtedly there is good stuff here but Mr Esposito writes as an extremely knowledgeable person for the already extremely knowledgeable person only.

Dino does a great job on this book. It is a great reference on how Microsoft handles and processes XML.

This book only has one drawback that it is outdated as it refers to Visual Studio 2003 and many things in Visual Studio 2005 have been changed or are outdated.

Hope they pubblish soon a book that is more up to date.

Gr8 book if you need assistance with xml programming and also helps in using all methods of reading, writing and using xml. Dino! High five.

Dino Esposito has total, absolute command of the subject matter that he expertly teaches in this book. This is a template for how all technical training books should be written. I wanted in-depth coverage of the XML object library in .NET and that is exactly what this book delivers. This is THE book on XML in .NET. Don't waste your money on anything else.

It is also terrific supplemental material for the Developing XML Web Services and Server Components certification exam. I recommend Mike Gunderloy's book as an all-encompassing source (look up my review for that book); however, I recommend reading the first four chapters of this book before you start Gunderloy's book if you don't have much experience reading and writing XML in .NET. Chapters 12 and 13 on remoting and web services, respectively, are also great sources of exam prep material. In fact, Chapter 12 on .NET Remoting is the best chapter on the subject you will find anywhere.

Terry, MCAD and MCSD for Microsoft .NET

Dino tells all in this superb and in depth look at XML on Microsoft's .NET platform. The book is well organized, starting at the fundamental classes and then branching out to the high abstraction level .NET classes and other Microsoft products such as SQL Server 2000 and Internet Explorer.

As an example of why this book is so wonderful, there have been several situations where I needed to do something in XSLT that just didn't seem practical (maybe not even doable). The section on how to use standard .NET languages such as C# from XSLT is itself worth the price of admission.

Keep in mind that readers are expected to have a good grasp of XML; the book is a .NET book.

I wish i could review it, dispite various emails this has not been delivered and I have not even received a decent response to my requests. So when I do buy it from a book store I will doubt I will giving Amazon a review

Kegan's books on development through the life span are always highly informative, and his seamless and reader-friendly writing make them thoroughly easy to read. This is his latest since he has moved into applying his psychology of adult development to the functions of business. A must for anyone in the field of business, or simply anyone in a peopled work place.

This book presents a simple worksheet to help you analyze your resistance to change. Once completed, you will understand the inner conflicts that hinder your personal and professional development despite your best intentions. Of course, simply understanding these conflicts isn't enough, so the authors present methods to understand the usefulness of your resistance, eliminate your judgement around it, and harness its power for change.

This method has helped me overcome my greatest dissatisfaction at work and I've experienced amazing results. I must warn, however, that despite being simple it entails quite a bit of self observation and continued effort. But this in itself is a huge asset.

I highly recommend this book for anybody experiencing even the slightest dissatisfaction at work or in life.

I love the analysis of the way we communicate breaks down common misconceptions. This book shows the things that create negative responses and reactions. I think that while it shows ways to change, very few people actually change. I plan to use these concepts with my employees and see if it has an impact. My supervisor told me about this and advised trying it out with a partner first. I can see ways that I and others I work with fall into patterns that can be changed.
Judy

Imagine getting so much perspective on habits you're not happy about that you can actually keep your commitments to yourself. Using language structure as both the diagnostic and the cure, Kegan and Lahey offer up a fresh guide to creating sustainable change.

While it is designed to be used for workplace issues, it can also be used in other aspects of life. This book is clear, well-written, and so easily accessible it can even be used as a workbook. In fact the authors recommend a study group, and give clear steps to applying the model and specific case studies of participants who have successfully used it to create change. The significant difference between this and all other "managing change" books is a respectful recognition of competing commitments. That is, we don't need to conquer resistance, we need to understand it as a legitimate and experienced based reluctance designed for self-protection. Only then can the source and the solution be brought to light. This way of thinking is a treasure.

There are about three books about XP that you MUST read, if you plan to do XP. This is one of them.

If you are interesting in Extreme Programming or need to evaluate it, I recommend this book. It is a very readable book but does have some drawbacks:

1. It is way overpriced. Too thin, not enough info for [price], even if Amazon discounts it. Ideas are repeated over and over again.

2. These authors (and others who review their buddies' books on Amazon and give biased reviews) are making a living off you buying into XP. It is funny how they say the last thing you want to do is adopt XP only partially.

3. So don't waste your money on more than one book from this group of XP diciples who are rehashing the same info over and over in about a dozen different books.

4. You can adopt only some of the principles provided in XP without adopting the whole practice. I've seen it done successfully in many places. These principles existed before XP and they can exist without it.

This is the most practical book among all the XP books ever published. You do only need to read Kent Beck's XP manifesto "Extreme Programming Explaining" before studying this book. Then you may skip all other books from the "Extreme Programming Series" and start to interpret written material about individual XP practices:

- Design Improvement: " Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code " by Martin Fowler;
- Test-Driven Development: "Test Driven Development: By Example " by Kent Beck;
- Sustainable Pace: "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency" by Tom DeMarco;
- Pair Programming: "Pair Programming Illuminated" by Laurie Williams and Robert Kessler;
- Whole Team: "Agile Software Development" by Alistair Cockburn;
- Planning Game: "Planning Extreme Programming" by Kent Beck, Martin Fowler;
- Small Releases: "Software Project Survival Guide" by Steve C McConnell.

This book covers most of the XP practices at a glance, but with sufficient level of details. It tells in practice:

- How to introduce XP, how to overcome managers' and developers' resistance, how to set the right attitude (Part One);
- How to remember XP core values, how to handle exceptions if something has broken, e.g. the customer won't write stories or the number of developers is odd, how to do pair programming or stand-up meetings, how to steer and how to plan the whole project and the individual iterations, how to write tests, to create the pair-friendly space, how to refactor, and how to reduce the risk (Part Two);
- How do design the simple, what collective ownership means, how to automate acceptance tests and not get distracted by the code, why the overtime is not the answer and how to coach and keep the score (Part Three);
-How to "sell XP" (commercial aspects of XP projects, e.g. how to bill the customer), how to "scale XP", and how to "measure XP" (Part Four).

Enough said, this is the most practical book among all the XP books ever published.

This is the first in-depth book on Extreme Programming (XP). If you are at home with the concepts of XP, but have lots of questions that you feel the XP literature doesn't answer -- this is the book for you! I myself have been into XP for little over two years, and I can't think of any questions I've had, that aren't addressed thoroughly by this book

The book is focused on introducing XP, dealing with things like how to tackle resistance from developers and managers; which XP practices should be implemented first; what factors are important in order to successfully implement XP, and so on.

The authors list six of the XP practices as "the bare essentials". Not that the other practices are unimportant, but they can wait until the first six are in place. The six are: Planning Game, Small Releases, Testing (unit testing only; acceptance testing can be addressed later), Pair Programming, Refactoring and Continuous Integration. These six practices are very thoroughly described, dealing with the how and why a practice works, how to start doing it, and so on. As for the remaining practices, they also explain why each practice can wait until the first six are in place.

I tried to read this book with a critical mindset, so I kept notes of things I thought they failed to address properly -- only to find that they returned to them later in the book, forcing me to cross out items on my list. What was left on my list were only minor details, except one item: I would have liked them to deal with the System Metaphor as exhaustively as the rest of the practices.

Just as "XP Explained" by Kent Beck and "XP Installed" by Ron Jeffries, et al, this book basically says that, well, it is good if you can come up with a metaphor, but if you can't, that's not too big a deal. In these books, the topic of the metaphor and how it relates to the concept of architecture, is given only a few pages (2.5 pages in XP Applied). This is a pity, because I feel that it is an important issue. (I suggest reading "XP Explored" by William Wake, which has two very good chapters on this.)

If you only intend to buy one book about XP, I would recommend this book over "Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change" by Kent Beck (which is the XP manifesto). This is not to say that "XP Explained" is a bad book, though -- I nominate that book to be one of the most important software development books, ever. But if your aim is to learn as much about XP as possible, this book is in a league of its own.

If you can afford more than one book, I would suggest starting with either "Extreme Programming Installed" by Ron Jeffries, Ann Anderson and Chet Hendrickson, or "Extreme Programming Explored" by William C. Wake. I think that one of these books is a good start, since they both are very practically oriented. After reading one of them, I think it's a good time to read "XP Explained", which very elegantly describes the philosophy behind XP. Finish off with "XP Applied" to get answers to all your questions. I bet that you'll have a very solid understanding of XP by then.

As a complete newcomer to XP I bought this book based on the review by Peter Lindberg (see below) and I agree with his comments.

Some parts of the book assume that you know a little about XP at the start and you have to wait for a fuller description further on in the text to gain understanding. I didn't find this too much of an issue but you may want to buy one other introductory XP book to help.

I enjoyed the authors writing style and liked the use of guest experts in reinforcing the methodology.

Well worth the cost as you only need to buy this book and perhaps one other to get the XP story.

First, I want to weigh in on the general controversy over Press et al.'s treatment of the code as proprietary. This is a joke and I think was basically intended as such. A lot of the odd job programming world still works on the honor system, and it works, because enough of us respect what is done right and we respect other people's labor. But if you've already plunked down your $60 for the book, and you have a program that in some sense you are paid for (not that you're Adobe or someone big), they expect you to be crawling to them for permission to use a single routine. And yet these routines make use of other routines that I really doubt they wrote. I see the same basic code floating around a number of places. And for some things, it's so straightforward it seems crazy to say that it is "their" routine.

At the same time, the code is clear, well explained with examples, and--most important--easy to modify. Given a choice between two versions, one which was elegant but a bit confusing and one that was straightforward, they did the second.

Given that there's a new edition, and that we are 30 years past FORTRAN 77, you might wonder whether this book should still be in circulation. But there are a lot of industrial machines that are still running programs written in 77, say for process control, and it's nice to be able to alter them as opposed to starting from scratch. For example, you might find that a minimization routine actually can help for a program running the control of a valve in a mixing vat. Some of these routines are slow, but my attitude is, that just gives you more time to drink your coffee and look around, though of course, you might not like what you see. [12]

This is the single best book that I have found for teaching numerical methods in science and engineering to upper division undergraduates and graduate students. Students often comment that this should be the selected text even in the programming course because it provides both an overview of the methods and examples that demonstrate the application. The discussions are excellent and the Fortran 77 programs easy to follow even if one is more familiar with C or C++. You should not purchase the Fortran 90 version of this book without getting this book as well because the Fortran 90 book does not contain the excellent discussion of the methods and procedures. Rather it references this book for discussion and simply provides the F90 versions of the routines.

This book contains hundreds of "canned codes" in the FORTRAN language. The book provides several variations of many popular numerical techniques and provides the most stream line (comp. time) codes available. Most codes allow for optimization to be build in, such as an RK4 (4th Order Runge-Kutta) with variable steps sizes. Great if you don't want to write your own code for a subroutine, or it you just don't know the method well enough to write it yourself. The book also provides some basic explaination of the techniques and codes with is very helpful so that the code is less of a black box, although its not that detailed.

There is also a CD available that has the codes already written and ready to go. I prefer to type it in on my own, or just make my own because it gives a better udnerstanding of what the code is doing. The biggest turn-off for me is that some codes have subroutines upon subroutines which can make things a mess.

All around a useful tool for programmers, researchers, and students.

I first bought this text in 1994 while doing scientific programming for graduate school work. A fellow graduate student had suggested I use an undocumented routine that (I later discovered) came from Numerical Recipes (NR). I was impressed enough with NR's presentation of ideas that I also bought the example book ISBN 0521437210 (which I've hardly cracked since) and a diskette of source code (which cost as much as the book but worth it). I was able to do a lot of basic research quickly with NR code, and I still occasionally use NR's routines.

The authors have certainly done a good job assimilating a lot of material. Since other reviewers have done well to highlight the importance and utility of this landmark book, there is no need to repeat those sentiments here. However, to this title's detriment, the authors consider their book to be a proprietary library of source code more valuable than the explanatory text discussing it (one can in fact download the text on-line though it's hardly worth the hassle). This perception is ironic since the authors confess that "the lineage of many programs in common circulation is often unclear" (p.xviii), and many details of presentation, ideas, and algorithms are clearly "borrowed" from other excellent (some now out-of-print) numerical methods books or journals.

I often wondered why NR routines occasionally adopted bizarre and/or obviously inefficient programming structures - over time I decided that this was probably done to make these algorithms appear as so not to clearly violate other published material. As a student, NR's legal disclaimers regarding derivative works (p.xvi) never bothered me and I was willing to overlook the sometimes unpolished source code insofar as it functioned properly. However, as a professional I now find the lack of fair-use provisions on the uncompiled source way too restrictive to rely on these routines in good conscience (I have to buy another textbook or license for every soft copy or machine upon which the source code resides!). I suspect this policy ultimately hurts NR's textbook sales: it would be nice to able to use and pass along the source code between professional colleagues without restriction because most would certainly buy (if they don't already own) the textbook to understand what the source does (just as I did). Source code used in scientific programming is practically worthless without proper documentation, and there's no better documentation than a full length textbook!

I have since expanded my numerical methods library to other references supporting true public-domain codes. With an expanded basis of comparison, I regret to say that I am becoming less and less impressed with NR's implementations and explanations. I am finding many of NR's algorithms to be inefficient or unnecessarily approximate, and - on rare occasion - buggy. There have been quite a few bugs uncovered over the years, and the NR web site has done a good job of keeping track of them (although I know of at least one bug uncorrected by NR to this day).

This book is excellent for students wanting a good reference for quick and dirty types of analyses or scientific computing. Professional programmers, scientists, engineers, specialists or analysts performing software development for laboratory or scientific research would be well advised to reference this title, but ultimately they will likely need to rely other resources if they require efficient and/or unrestricted (public-domain) source codes for their work.

(P.S. - A reviewer elsewhere noted that the "quality of the binding was terrible" and I've also found this to be the case. My hardcover is literally had to be taped on after a few years of use.)

This volume, and its companions for other programming languages, is an absolute classic. The authors strike the right balance between cookbook solutions and theory, so that most of us get just enough background to choose the right algorithm but not so much to get drowned in theory. This edition is the first devoted only to Fortran, but is the second edition published by the authors. It includes a number of additions and corrections, many of which appeared in Computers in Physics (now the journal Computing in Science and Engineering published jointly by the IEEE and the APS). My only criticism is, where were these books twenty years ago when I needed them? I would recommend these books to anyone involved in the application of numerical methods. They are tremendous time savers.

I never bothered with the discs, as most of the routines are fairly short and not a problem to type in, but I recommend the companion example books to help get the routines running.

I found this book very informative and valuable. Knowing about genetics is important because it is more and more penetrating into our lives. If somebody does not like that state of affairs he or she should get informed to be able to exercise qualified opposition.

The book is well written and on a non-expert level.

Book based on a series of BBC programmes.
The main themes are evolution through mutation and natural selection, and heredity.
The treatment is popular.
The text could have been better edited because certain topics are repeatedly discussed, although always with other examples.
This book is only recommendable as a first introduction.
Congratulations to the BBC.

I got a little bogged down with this book. I'm pretty familiar with genetics and this is an excellent overview of human genetics (though the copy I have is from 1993 and an updated edition would be nice.) I like how the author presents human genetics in light of our evolutionary history: the book is as much about anthropology as it is about genetics. I thought the prose was a bit static and there were times that I had to reread passages to figure out what the point was. All in all a good book, though, with tons of information.

The study of genes, and in particular the human DNA, is progressing at phenomenal speed. "The Language of Genes" gives the reader an excellent understanding of the importance of this scientific branch. The book avoids the scientific particularities and concentrates on implications and conclusions drawn from its insights. Steve Jones gives us a good understanding of how present days genes make for documentation of evolutionary history - and how evolution triggers genetic responses that can be seen in the genetic mix of the world we live in.

Jones touches some of the moral questions connected with genetic science. I personally appreciate the anecdotal style with lots of stories about mistakes from earlier days. But Jones also points to dubious conceptions in today's society as well as future dilemmas we will face when our ability to screen and manipulate individual DNA is improved even more.

"The Language of Genes" is enlightening layman reading for many years still. Since the matter at hand is subject to intense research and progress it is however inevitable that sooner or later the need for an update becomes apparent. The book is now ten years old, and since it was written we have seen the human genome being mapped in total and there are claims being made for the first cloned human babies. My advice is: Get a grip on what genes are, what they tell us and how genetic science will influence our future. "The Language of Genes" by Steve Jones is a good place to start.

Having but a limited background in Anthropology, there is much in this book that I appreciated. I found it to be a great way to start understanding a subject more shrouded in rumor than actual, factual, representation. And that is too bad. How typical it is though, for so few to understand the ramifications, and importance of this subject. And I laugh every time I see a horror movie that is based on a monster who was genetically engineered. It's important when someone from within the community of science comes out to report on what has been discovered, what direction(s) we're going in, and what it all really means to our place in this world, and our comprehension of that place. Steve Jones does a wonderful job, and it is important to note that he does stray from the subject of genetics, into the other strange facets that such entails. Like Anthropology, Statistics, Mathematics, Chemistry, and of course Biology. Not to mention a few laughs at the expense of those lunatic Creationists. But the book does not lack humility at the same time. There are just as many pokes at the scientific community as well. This book will make you feel smarter, and make you wonder about things like, why are there males? and, Are we just carriers for our DNA, who have their own agenda? It's a very compelling read. Therefore I must recomend it.