Applied Languages Books

Listening in Language Learning is probably the most authorative and comprehensive text about listening in a second language that has ever been written with both the applied linguist and language teacher in mind. It covers auditory perception of linguistic processing, including lexical, syntactic and schematic effects, learner inference, collaborative and non-collaborative listening skills and strategies, developing and assessing listening skills, and the placing of listening in a language curriculum. This book may not be the ideal choice for a teacher new to EFL, as there is rather a lot of specialist terminology - so much to the extent that at times I felt that I was reading a linguist's learner dictionary. What I liked best about this book is that it allowed me to focus more clearly and scientifically on creating and evaluating listening tasks for my high school teaching situation, and for that reason alone, the book was worth buying.

I've been using this book to teach introductory mathematical logic to computer science students for many years. Every year or two, I look again for something that might cover the ground better, but, despite some notational flaws and an occasional error or poor choice of phrase, this one comes out on top every time.

This book is a good choice for engineers, scientists or students who need to learn Maple 7 in a short time. The first chapters are written as a hands-on tutorial, beginning with Maple's environment and basic commands and progressing step by step toward programming structures, document preparation and ample discussions of some higher math topics (such as differential equations, 2d and 3d graphics, linear algebra, vector calculus, complex analysis and statistics).
The last chapter contains overviews of many other packages (about group theory, number theory, combinatorics and a lot of other things), including the new packages found in release 7.
There is also a glossary, a bibliography and references to Maple sites in the web.
On the other hand, you should know that the author does not delve into Maple's inner workings. He does not explain in depth what a data structure is in Maple, or how expressions are evaluated. Well, most of us can live without that... but if you are planning to do lots of programming with Maple, or perhaps writing a new package, probably you'll need more information.

I keep this volume next to my _Mathematica_ and _Standard Add-On Packages_ books. I've used Mathematica since its introduction to make thousands of graphs and figures for publication and communication. Still I can always use as much help making better graphics as I can get. Written by one of the Mathematica team, this book provides an excellent set of tools for everyone from the novice to the experienced user for making even better visual material using Mathematica.

One of the top 10 Mathematica books without a doubt.

This book is a gem of problem sets AND solutions, in the field of algorithms. The problems were from actual examinations given at Stanford in various computer science classes. About half the book is good descriptive text about the ideas that the problems probe. Certainly, well written, as befits Knuth's contribution.

But I would suggest to you that the best use of the book is in tackling those problems. In the spirit of Knuth's classic Art of Computer Programming series, where he gives extensive questions and answers.

I realise my suggestion may have appeal to only some of you. But I'm addressing my remarks to the smartest amongst you glancing at this. Test and improve your understanding of algorithms.

When the Journalism Department at San Francisco State decided to offer a mandatory course in journalism ethics, the decision prompted after several embarassing incidents that occurred in our laboratory newspaper, we sought the advice of the Philosophy Department which taught a course in ethics. The chairman of the Philosophy Department scoffed, "Journalism ethics--that's an oxymoron." Then he agreed upon the value of such a course.

Unfortunately, that view may resound today with many consumers of the news media. Recent polls show that respect for the news media in the United States ranked even lower in the public's esteem than did politicians.

I wish that Professor Claude-Jean Bertrand's book had been available then. Students and instructors would have benefited. The book, small in size, packs in original, practical principles. Ethical journalism , the book stresses, means that serving the public's needs must be the news media's foremost role. The name of the game--accountability.

What qualifies Professor Bertrand, a sociologist and a professor emeritus at the University of Paris, to offer principles to guide the news media in the United States as well as in the world's democracies. He has lived in the United States and has written extensively about American journalism reviews.He has been visiting professor and guest lecturers at several universities, among them Stanford University, Syracuse University, and the

University of Missouri.

This book contains many interesting examples for engineers and scientists that I have not seen in other elementary probability textbooks, such as the expected distance between points in a two-dimensional spatial Poisson process ("distance between wildflowers in a field" example) which I find useful to model IC defects and in many other applications. The level of mathematical rigor is perhaps low for mathematics students, but I think is fine for most engineer and science students. The book is quite readable. There are many worked examples, as well as answers to many problems. I think it is a mistake to integrate the text so much with Mathematica, since the text is unique enough to stand alone. There is a one chapter on statistics including hypothesis testing which is a reasonable although brief introduction, but I do not think fits in well with the rest of the book. The book is biased toward EE applications.

This book is a very good reference for those who believe that scientific computing needs a little bit more of software engineering practice. It provides a collection of papers from the major researchers in this area, with interesting examples of real applications. It is not a text book for undergrads, but it provides good pointers to the main subjects, from where the reader can go by him/herself. I have been following HPC research for eight years and OOD for three, and this is for me the best reference in this subject so far.

Dr. Maddock's book offers insights into human motivation that are easily understood and more importantly, easily adapted - especially in the marketing arena. Complex issues that have perplexed me for 26 years as a marketing professional have now become significantly simpler as a result of reading this book. The basic premise that spiritual survival is actually more motivating than physical survival helps explain behavior that has historically become jumbled into tired traditional research jargon that is unusable beyond a single study. This book is now on the shelves of every client we handle. And every prospect as well. If you are in marketing, you will either read and use this book to understand your customers, or pray your customers don't.

An excellent advanced book on numerical methods. The authors discuss a variety of methods, and furnish example code written in Fortran. A good indication of the serious nature of the book comes in seeing that right at the second chapter, it discusses solving nonlinear systems. More elementary books often neglect this, or put give more emphasis on handling linear systems, since these are amenable to matrix techniques.

The choice of Fortran for coding underscores that language's continued dominance of numerical work in science and engineering. Though if you are skilled in another language, you may still want to consider this book. The descriptions of the algorithms are explicit enough that you should be able to code from those in your language.