Applied Languages Books

this is a fun book to look at.

... and read the online documentation instead. The authors state that this handbook "adds to the online help". In a way that's correct. It may serve as a print out version of the online help if you are too lazy to click through the help desk. The latter, however, is for free.

I found the Maltab 5 Handbook very usefull, not only with the general information such as basic operation, but also with its explanations of the Matlab toolboxes, which I found difficult to understand in the Matlab book provided with the software. Also its in depth, but step by step explanation in using the Matlab Editor for Mathematical program writing. All in all I rate this book very highly and a must for all matlab users.

A good book. If you know Mathematica 3 or later, a little of differential geometry, is a good way to do symmetries in differential equations.

I regret the time and money expended in acquiring the following information. In no way can I recommend this book to any reader.

This work is incoherent and reflects the incoherence of the design of the MathLie Mathematica Package. The text is neither an adequate introduction to the package nor a suitable reference. Descriptions of functions are locally incomplete and globally scattered throughout the book. Only after considerable searching does one find that, in fact, there is little functionality for the solution of any but the most trivial systems.
As a tool to learn applications of Lie Groups to Differential Equations, this text is useful only insofar as it represents the thinnest introduction to the material, suitable neither for the expert nor the novice.
As a tool to expand the capabilities of Mathematica, it is a pointless exercise in using essentially undocumented encrypted code with no evident organizational principle. One may well do better to seek help from a divining rod.

Before giving my opinion I would like to point out that there is a very negative review of this book by Dr. P.A. Clarkson. It appered in SIAM Review, Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 549-581.

Now for my opinion.

I am doing research in nonlinear PDEs. What I need is a good Mathematica package to take me through the tedious calculations. Unfortunately, MathLie package included with the book does not meet my needs. I have often encounterd very cryptic error messages produced by the package internal functions. I could not find the root causes of those errors, because these functions are not accessible. This makes the results of the calculations suspect. In some cases they do not agree with published results. Dr. Clarkson in his above-mentioned review reports similar experience.

Most importantly, the book really does not help to interpret the output produced by the package. The online help is very inadequate.

I cannot recommend this book as either a textbook (too cryptic) or a research reference/tool (results are suspect).

In summary, I agree with Dr. Clarkson that "this book should have never been published". I only wish I saw his review before making a mistake of purchasing it.

Instead of this book I recommend "Introduction to Symmetry Analysis" by B. Cantwell, which is much more readable and provides a Mathematica package.

If I lived in the US I'd have returned this book. The games aren't that great. Furthermore, they don't cover the grammar and conversation I teach in junior high school in Japan. The illustrations are terrible - I don't claim to draw and I could do better than this. To use any of these games (they're actually more puzzles than games) I'd cover up the ugly drawings with liquid paper.

I teach ESL in El Cajon, California. I have used this book for over ten years. I like it very much. A previous review was very negative. I did not find this book to be a dissappointment. I use it as a supplement. It is true that the book does not give explanations of grammer. To be fair it does give examples of proper grammar and usage. I use it as a fun supplement. You can create a lesson around the worksheets in this book. Another of my colleagues also likes it very much.

The book is a good supplement to review material that you have already explained in class. I get a lot of use out of it.

I was very pleased with this product. It came well wrapped and in good shape,

This book was recommended by a professor as a good supplemental text. So far, I have been glad I bought it. The main text is very good, but very technical. This book helps to fill in some of the holes that come up.

It is quite bright and colorful inside, and not what I expected. It is easy to read and demonstrates how to get started using MATLAB.

I strongly disagree with the previous reviewer. The book is a little terse but it takes you right to the point. There are other books out there, some 800+ pages in length, but most of them teach you how to program before they teach you C++. That is not the case with the present book. The author states in the preface that the intended audience are students taking their *second* programming course. So, they are supposed to have already been exposed to flow-control, conditionals, variable definition/declaration and the like. I have already completed half the book and I must say I am very satisfied with it. The only drawback is the price. It is difficult to convince one to buy a 280 pages, $70+ book when one sees better known books for almost the same price.

This book is really the worst book on C++ one can possibly buy. It tries to be academic and deep by making 'hard to understand' language concepts even harder and by making the easier ones as inaccessible as Salomon's cave. If you're a nerd and desperately seeking your mum's adoration for doing something completely useless with your time, then go for this book. Anything you can learn from it, you can learn it faster and with far less frustration from other C++ books around (Like Lipmann's C++ Primer). I fed this book to my dog.

Prerequisites: Knowledge of calculus and some knowledge of linear algebra.

This is a rather informal book on wavelet analysis. It is fairly comprehensive despite its length, covering quite a few types of wavelet analyses, transforms, and algorithms. It is also explained fairly clearly but the theory is not given enough emphasis. As the other reviewer stated, this book unfortunately relies on a commercial S-PLUS package. In addition to the fact that it requires commercial software, the functions which are used are very high level, so the details that the reader should be made aware of are hidden and if you were to implement the theory in a non-commercial software package, you would pretty much have to start from scratch. Also, they sometimes let the code get in the way of the theory, that is they often spend more time discussing the package and its applications than on the concepts that you would need to know if you didn't have this high-level software available. The book does a fairly good job early on in terms of mathematics and technical details, but it begins skimping on these things far to much later in the book telling the reader to "use this function" instead of giving the reader plenty of information that will be useful to them if they don't have this package handy. Also, though the book includes plenty of applications, it does not give you enough information to determine when each of these analyses would be useful in other real world applications. So the applications are not made to seem truly tied into the concepts, even if the analyses applied to them are fitting. It's more like "this works for this example" instead of "this works for this CLASS of problems". They do take the latter approach sometimes, but not a whole lot.

The writing style may be clear, but the sum of its flaws makes this book essentially useless.

A nice treatment of data analysis using wavelets. Very nonmathematical and intended to be used while seated at the computer. I was a little disappointed to see that it was so tightly bound to the authors' commercial S+Wavelets software, which seems to render it pretty much useless if you or your institution doesn't have S-plus and S+Wavelets. (R implementation, anyone?)

I took a course numerical methods in Mechanical Engineering which covered much of the same material. The class text was "Applied Numerical Methods for Engineers" Using MATLAB and C, by Robert J. Schilling and Sandra L. Harris.

I found the Schilling book very tedious. Also the MATLAB code included with teh book was really awful. Some of the codes contained mistakes so that they would produce the wrong answers. Other codes contained mistakes that would generate errors when you tried to run the programs. Other codes from the Schilling text were just ported over from C; the structure was inefficient and hard to follow- not well suited for MATLAB.

The Schilling book didn't encourage the reader to use many MATLAB functions that were built-in. The text tried to explain everything the hard way and was overall a very mediocre book- All the students and Professor in teh class agreed that Schilling's was a very mediocre book. I found it very confusing.

So I finally bought this one [Numerical Methods in Engineering with Matlab, Kiusalaas] on the recommendation of another student. It helped tremendously so I could do the final project and salvage a 'B' from the course. The codes are simpler to follow and more appropriate to MATLAB. It contains a much better explanation of the eigenvalue problems and systems of linear algebraic equations.

It's more practical if you want ot learn to do instead of [Schilling] putzing around getting stuck in minutiae. Or if you might prefer to do something first and then go back for a try at understanding the minutiae later.

I only wish I had bought this book sooner. The Schilling text ["Applied Numerical Methods for Engineers" Using MATLAB and C, by Robert J. Schilling and Sandra L. Harris] sucked. This book [Numerical Methods in Engineering with Matlab, Kiusalaas] was much better for MATLAB users.

Not recommended as a DE text or an introduction to programming in Maple. The "Maple Connections" and "Math Discussion" links are confusing. This text is a good resource only for those who are already familiar with Maple and DEs.

In contemporary artificial intelligence/cognitive science operations in the cognitive or "knowledge level" are performed by lower level components of the program level. Operations in the program level are, in turn, performed by components of the register level. This decomposition continues from the register level down through the logic level, circuit level, and device level. Each level has its own components and each is described by its own laws of operation. (Unified Theories of Cognition, Allen Newell, Harvard Univ. Press, 1990) The program level, for instance, is composed of sequences, decisions, and loops. The logic level is described by the laws of Boolean algebra while the circuit level is governed by Ohm's and Kirchhoff's laws.

In human beings the circuit level would be replaced by a network of neurons and the device level would describe those neurons using the laws of electrochemistry. The circuit and device levels could just as easily be replaced by mechanical elements such as linkage differentials and racks and pinions. (Mechanisms and Dynamics of Machinery, Mabie and Ocvirk, John Wiley and Sons, 1975, chapter 8 "computing mechanisms") These mechanisms would be exactly those governed by the mechanical principles that Doyle focuses on (e.g. Newton's laws of motion). But Doyle's mistake is to apply the same laws to the cognitive level. Rather, I believe, the cognitive level involves operations like knowledge base search, analogy, classification, compression, etc. (R. Jones, Trans. of the Kansas Academy of Science, vol. 109, no. 3/4, pg 159, 2006). I would also want to see his theory implemented in an executable computer program that we can test.

I bought this book based on my desire to gather as many perspectives on Applied Linguistics as possible, but wound up being deeply disappointed. The let-down was founded just as much on the book's lack of consistency and quality as it was on my disagreement with the author's views.

(I have to admit that Davies is probably an acceptable and experienced figure within his own domain, but he didn't do a good job of convincing me via this book - published by Edinburgh, incidentally, not Columbia - that his ideas were valid; hence the negativity that follows.)

Davies's approach to exploring Applied Linguistics (AL) is on the surface akin to Grounded Theory in the social sciences - he believes that to approach AL properly, we should examine it as it unfolds in its practical contexts. Only then, goes the line of reasoning, will we be in a position to draw (with very careful restraint, mind you) tentative theoretical maps of our territory. There is nothing wrong with this approach per se, as much of sociology and linguistics has benefited from this bottom-up strategy. But the way in which it is executed wants for a lot, in my opinion as someone who is more comfortable with theory and less experienced in the classroom slash laboratory. With those caveats in place, I would argue that Davies's view of the Applied Linguist as pure practitioner, coupled with his refusal to engage important bodies of theory in even the most circumscribed manner, makes for an approach that goes too far in the opposite direction, thus bordering on anti-intellectualism if not crossing the line entirely. His tone is sometimes insider, sometimes introspective, sometimes oversimplified; suffice it to say that the work is an enigmatic read to anyone wanting to learn something substantial and balanced about the field. Perhaps insiders will find a hidden code consisting of high-order wisdom regarding AL, but I was unable to find much more than an impressionistic series of digressions.

The first chapter, "History and definitions," is a 15-page treatise on the difference between AL and Linguistics "proper." Where are the boundaries of the fields drawn with respect to one another? Does one discipline neatly engulf the other, or do they cover different object domains altogether? Is AL Applied Linguistics, or Linguistics applied? Where is the Venn diagram? It really gets pretty convoluted, folks, and this is only the beginning. After the end of this tortuous and torturous first chapter - a peripatetic movement "about" the subject that never really quite says anything - one is left confused and without a sense of where the book will go next.

The subsequent chapters on experience, practice, and learning and teaching offer slightly better treatments of the material, and thus some vindication of his approach. But these chapters are still vague and watered-down, and probably useful only to a few who already have quite a bit of experience in the first place. The chapter on the professionalization of AL is weak due to the lack of sociological insight - it could have been so much better with only the slightest of tweaks. In these body chapters, one sees the limitations of the theory-free approach - one that was initially touted as the book's primary strength. I am not suggesting a major shift in focus, because that would undermine his whole premise, but I will hold that even the most cursory treatment of theory, in any of these chapters, would have improved the discussion considerably, even as background to practical narrative. More often than not, the naive reader (myself included) is given the impression that Applied Linguists working in the field should simply be "winging it" with no principle but their own experiential impressions and practical knowledge. Sometimes the conversation veers so much toward practical knowledge and knowledge of familiarity that I am lost as an outsider - which does not bode well for an Introduction. It does not help me evolve as a writer, beginning student of linguistics, or teacher of English as a Second Language.

Nonetheless, it is in the final body chapter, "No 'bookish theoric'," that the already-wobbly foundations of the book simply crumble. This is due to what I see - in my biased manner - as the author's inexcusable failure to understand the fundaments of the life-work of some of his (geographically) most proximate fellow linguists who are working with critical approaches. Because he misreads critical scholars (scholars of CL, CDA, and similar schools) with an almost-schoolboyish innocence, he sets up a simplistic contradiction between the former and the latter - and this needless contradiction fatally undermines thrust of what AL, in his own words, is about!

One of the few unequivocal statements that we manage to get from Davies is this: Applied Linguistics should, in practice, involve the application of linguistic knowledge to real-life social problems. So far, so good. Why, then, does Davies - in his final chapter - attack well-developed linguistic approaches that do just that, such Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)? I hesitate to say it, but it appears that Davies attacks critical linguistics due either to ignorance or laziness, or both. His lack of knowledge of CDA, such a closely allied field, leads him to collapse anyone who uses critical theory in his or her linguistics work with the stereotypical apolitical, disengaged, and impractical thinker - in other words, worthless.

For example, Davies attacks (and dismisses) Norman Fairclough's highly influential formulations of CDA as, in the last analysis, postmodernism "dressed up" as modernism. If one can suppress one's laughter long enough to recall the broad base of empirical, heuristic social science (Bourdieu, Weber) and critical theory (Habermas) upon which Fairclough's CDA is based - and that his CDA rejects Lyotard's fatalistic brand of postmodernism explicitly (cf. Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999) - one will recall that CDA's approaches (including those of Fairclough, but also of Wodak, van Dijk, Scollon, and so on) is one of the most powerful frameworks to use when applying linguistic knowledge to real-life social problems. Davies apparently doesn't think about the ways in which CDA is and can be applied to social problems (new capitalism, racism, media discourse, subaltern narratives, gender issues), though, because he "plugs in" Widdowson's jaded critique of Fairclough's CDA (as overdetermined and therefore unable to be disproven) and leaves it at that - without mentioning CDA's sine-qua-non dependence on reflexivity in practice and Fairclough's other rebuttals to Widdowson's criticisms. Davies is also acutely dismissive of Mark Featherstone, whom he describes as almost an outright "danger" to the practice of linguistics with his flashy postmodernism and high theory. In summary, some of the most important contemporary linguistic approaches (CL, CDA, and related fields) are dismissed by Davies in the space of a few pages, in much the same way that a child will reject the taste of an unfamiliar but nutritious vegetable without even tasting it.

All in all, then, Davies's book is a disappointment many times over. Even if you agreed with Davies's initial ambition of writing a book firmly based in Scott Lash's "ground" and moving upward to practice from there, you would still be disappointed with his fumbling, fallacious treatment of the topic. As the founding volume of the series "Edinburgh Textbooks in Applied Linguistics," its lack of quality unfortunately casts a long, dark shadow over other authors who come later in the series. His one-sidedness is disconcerting, and what is ultimately his anti-critical, anti-intellectual stance is nothing short of disturbing to see in a supposedly academic text. If AL is really the application of knowledge to social problems, then we first need some knowledge - any knowledge - with which to approach our various problems. I didn't find much here.