Languages Books

I received the book in just a few days. It was just like new! Hopefully this will make my connection of the arabic letters clearer.

I love this tiny book. The summer before taking an introductory Arabic language course in college I decided to make things easier for myself by getting acquainted with the alphabet in advance. So I bought this book. I went through it twice and when I finally had to absorb the Arabic alphabet in the fall, it was really easy.

It has four parts: chapter one discusses the Arabic language and such things as word roots; chapter two discusses the alphabet and the sounds in general terms; chapter three is the most important one as it goes through all the letters and their different shapes (initial, medial, final, isolated) and instructions how to write them; chapter four includes reference material (hamza, handwriting, a map of Arab countries, a passage from the Qur'an).

Chapter three is tons of fun since after each letter it gives examples of Arabic words that contain it. I used to cover the transliteration and try to read it - that is a great tool for becoming more comfortable with the alphabet.

If you are going to start Arabic, grab this book first. It is short, clear, and very helpful.

Pretty good introductory guide to the arabic alphabet and pronunciation, with some grammar stuff, too.

By humane, I mean that the authors' humanity and humility make this more than an intelligent book. They convey their understanding of Arabic and their appreciation of its beauty.

I am currently working my way through this book, filling up about a third of a page of college-lined notebook paper each night with Arabic. I have been doing this for two weeks and expect to make it through the entire book in about eight more weeks of this hour an evening, five day a week approach. It is a testament to the authors' approach that I can already take the romanized Arabic and turn it into 90% correct Arabic script for those letters I have already learned.

I agree with Mr. Awde that we should learn to read and write Arabic as a PRECURSOR to studying its grammar. So I am studying this book concurrently with Pimsleur's Conversational Arabic. And when I finish these two, I will progress into an actual Arabic textbook.

I enjoy and appreciate this book and so I highly recommend it to anyone wishing to learn Arabic.

This book is a must into the introduction to Arabic writing. It is clearly and intelligently written and easy to understand. As an American born Arab, I learned to speak the language along with all its nuances in tongue placement and glottal stops. I would never have believed that anyone could explain how these sounds could be recreated without the use of CDs or an actual Arab. However, these guys nailed it! If you really read this book and practice like they explain, you will definitely have a great basis for advanced study.

This is a gripping adventure story about imprisonment and escape. Henry Charriere (1906-1973), or Papilon, was a French criminal sentenced to life for murder (he claimed innocence) in 1931. Readers follow as he arrives across the Atlantic Ocean at the penal colony in Guiana (South America) for a life of hard labor under the hot sun. Papilon set his sights on escape, and flees on a small boat to Columbia, where he is captured and re-imprisoned. Escaping again, Papilon lives with some coastal Indians, moves on, and again is captured. Eventually returned to Guiana, Papilon endures two years in solitary confinement. Then he escapes by boat to Venezuela, ends up imprisoned there, and is set free in 1945. Readers follow his every move with great interest, but we don't know how much of this narrative is true - all, most, or some. Whatever the facts, this is a gripping story of adventure, daring, justice (or injustice), and escape.

The book is somewhat different than the also-superb 1972 movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. Also, Charierre married and ran a resturant in Venezeula, returned to France as this book arrived in 1969, and put out another (BANCO) before dying of cancer in 1973. Then, in 2005, a 104-year old ex-convict named Charles Brunier (1901-2007) claimed he was Papilon, adding to the mystery.

A petty thief wrongfully convicted of murder by a French court in 1931. The bulk of this narrative, and it is a tremendous one, is this man's incarcerations in penal colonies in French Guyana: the many escape scenarios and attempts; the final escape to the mainland; and 2 years living with the local Indians.

Charriere's writing style is spontaneous, lucid, and totally without pretense; real storytelling prowess. The storylines are inbued with perserverance, grit, and undercurrents of humor. He never surrenders to despair; his sense of intrepid survival and courage sustain him throughout the 13 years of his imprisonments. The will to live is the engine that drives these riveting episodes.

The question of the authenticity of this narrative, like the Castaneda books, arises; but ultimately, it doesn't matter if this story is true or not. This is an adventure story; and hyperbole is always involved in the narration of any adventure, regardless of degree. It is the power of the storyteller that mesmerizes the listener/reader in this, a hero's journey. In this case, it is a journey of liberation from a series of hells.

After reading this book, you will come away feeling enriched by this man's intrepid spirit. Highly recommended.

Extracts: A Field Guide for Iconoclasts

Charriere's book was impossible to put down. Whether novel or real, his story as a prisoner is unforgettable. Highly recommended.

One of the great adventure books of any time; certainly had had huge impact on my childhood as it was more mesmerizing and novel and gripping than any of the more conventional classics. There it was: a documentary that once again proved that the human spirit at its highest truly becomes indomitable and cannot be destroyed.
The writer erected the monument to the spirit that went unbroken even in the harshest brutality of the Guyana's tropical gulag.

No, there's no need whatsoever for some poor sod to re-translate the whole book! It still reads beautifully. But, and this is a BIG but, the translation is, today, WAY TOO TAME. The quaint, oblique, charming English expletives he employs now badly interfere with the book's mood and thrillingly immediate, rough flavour. He translated this book way back in 1969; even the English aren't so delicate any longer. Please, isn't it time to honour Charriere's original manuscript, and dirty things up a bit??!

This is a great gift for a baby shower. It encourages parents to read to kids from birth and tells them why it is important. It then gives book titles for every age and summaries of each book. I read to all 3 of my sons until they were seniors in high school. They all have doctoral degrees or are working on them. They attribute their success to a love of reading!

Let me start by saying I've become thrifty since I had children. Given that I don't work outside the home as much as I once did, I've been getting my books from the library at least as much as I've been buying them, but this is a book I have to own!

Jim Trelease is "preaching to the choir" with me, as we read to our children before they were even born, and then continued since the day they were born. My husband and I are both big readers, and we enjoy reading to our children every day. I initially got this book (from the library) to look at the list of suggested titles to read aloud. I wanted suggestions that would make sense for my children and their respective ages/abilities, including titles I might not otherwise come across....I thought I'd skim quickly through the front half of the book (the research which is meant to inspire parents to read to their children) since I was already motivated to do so. I wanted to get to the list of titles. But I found myself stopping to read the research with excitement and added motivation.

I picked up tips about the types of books to choose, the fact that we can read (and should read) aloud to our kids until they are teens (my sister whose children are 9 and 12 had mistakenly been thinking that she shouldn't read to them much anymore in order to force them to do most of it themselves....she was thrilled to hear that she should continue to read aloud to them and went immediately to the library to get some books), the ways to present even more opportunities to our children to read, etc. For example, this morning I read a section in The Read Aloud Handbook about how to get a 12 year old to sit still for a reading, and the author suggested reading to the child while the child is washing the dishes. The book shows a photo of the author doing this with his own son when the son was 12 (the son is now ~40). The author goes on to say that when he suggests this to parents, he gets some funny looks, and he points out to them that if there is a 12 year old in the house who doesn't have to do the dishes, then that child has a higher IQ than the parent ! :-)

This morning, my husband read a little to my son, who is 5 1/2, while he was eating breakfast, and when I wanted to motivate my son to come brush his teeth before school, I lured him with the book. I got no complaints about coming (which I usually do), and between my husband and I, we knocked off a chapter in the book!

There are so many little tips in the book, and the book is an incredible source for suggestions of books to read aloud. The author has a website which includes many of these book recommendations, I think, and even updated ones since the book went to print in 2006.

Yes, I got this book out of the library, but thrifty as I am, I am going to have to buy a copy of this book as it has so much information for the many years to come that I know I'll want to reference it again and again as I choose books to read to my children.

A great book and resource for parents. It is so important to get children involved with books early on. No better way is to read to them and interact with them and at the same time teach them reading skills.

Just like some things can only be learned through experience, some books cannot be summarized. They must be READ. Trelease's Read-Aloud Handbook is one such book. There is no short-cut.

This book is chock-full of "Wake up, America: We're killing our readers!" statistics and anecdotes. Parents and Educators of all levels need to read and, in the words of Kevin from Freak The Mighty (Scholastic Signature): "Be Amazed."

The gist is, nothing in education is more important than the goal of creating lifelong readers. Besides the duh-factor of not being able to do anything else in academics if one is not truly literate, for the good of society, for the good of our posterity, for our own personal gain, nothing replaces lifelong reading. And yet, in Chapter 1, Trelease demonstrates to the readers that "By twelfth grade, only 19 percent read anything for pleasure daily." In Trelease's own words: "Any business that kept losing that much of its customer base would be in bankruptcy."

I am a parent. I am a teacher. From both standpoints, I can tell you that Trelease is absolutely, completely and totally correct. Education must be built on the foundation of true literacy, and Trelease's argument is that true literacy cannot be attained without voluntary reading.

Therefore, once again, it is the moral and societal obligation of education to create lifelong readers.

I am only touching on one part of this significant work. Besides being monumentally important for parents and educators, it's actually a fairly interesting read. Trelease throws in the perfect balance of anecdotes and statistics to keep the reader entranced. And while the bibliography for recommended read-alouds is in now way comprehensive, it is certainly a great place to start.

This book is on my Top 10 list. If you're a parent, read it, and then ask the principal of your child's school to read it. Our future as a society might well depend upon it.

This book is appropriate for every caring parent. I am a homeschooling mother of three and I can't recommend it highly enough. After reading the library's copy I had to buy my own copy, plus several for friends and family members who have kids. It is full of high-quality info and ideas about reading to children, and about them ultimately reading to themselves. There is also an organized and valuable "recommended books" list in the back. Wonderful!

If you like Good Night Moon, you will love this as well. I told my husband that when are girls are too big for bedtime stories, I will want him to read me these two books at bedtime. They are so soothing. My girls both love looking at the details of the pictures. This is a classic.

Illustrates animals going to bed! I love books that show everyone is going to sleep!

What a wonderful story! The rhyming text is a pleasure to read, and the book progresses from day to night, making it a perfect bedtime story. I've read it so many times to my five year old twins that we now know it by heart. Get it!!!

My son loves to read books, but this one does not keep his attention. He likes Goodnight Moon, the Boyton Books, and others, but this doesn't keep his interest. I do like that it shows various animals and their noises.

This is one of my favorite books to read to my son. The prose is beautiful, concise, and profound. It's a very subtle book and takes some quiet time to truly appreciate it. The Big Red Barn is a picture of utopia; animals coexisting in peace, playing throughout the day, and then resting at night.

When I received this book, I sat down and read it cover to cover, running my highlighter over all the key points. Now, I use this book, frequently as a resource. Shepard does a great job of explaining the concepts without being too wordy. It's only about 165 pages, but absolutely filled with valuable information.

If you want to learn how to sell more books on Amazon, this is the best book I've read on the subject. Shepard teaches:
How to title your book for Amazon search engines
How to create a book cover that favors Amazon sales
How to use several free tools available on Amazon to boost the
visibility of your book.
How to set discounts that work to the author greatest advantage.
How to go about self-publishing a book with Lightning Source
The reasons not to publish an eBook version of your book.
A pricing strategy for selling your book on Amazon.

Thanks to books like this one, self-published authors have a chance to succeed against our traditionally published competitors.

This book clearly dispells many of the myths and exposes the secrets of the publishing and the self-publishing industry. He does not day how to write your book, rather how to get it into print and distribution. He has terrific ideas about promotion and boosting sales and ultimately profit. He has 95% of submitted manuscripts, pays low royalties (approx 10%), and take up to three years to get your book into print, all the while usurping all the control of the content and layout.

I am a self publishing author myself and always researching ways to market books, especially here on Amazon. I thought I really knew all the tips, tricks and tactics of Amazon marketing...boy was I wrong!

Aaron Shepard lines it all out in an easy to understand guide to marketing your book to the best of your ability on Amazon. But, please do not let the name of the book fool you; it goes way beyond Amazon marketing, including how to actually build and create a book from scratch, covering concepts such as researching before writing, naming the book, interior design and which printing company to use.

If you are a self-publisher or aspiring author, add this book to your shelf. Mr. Shepard has years of experience in the writing field and is generously passing it on to us. I actually have it by my computer as I write for quick reference. I was so impressed by his simplistic and informative writing style that I am now ordering his other books.

"Aiming at Amazon" by Aaron Shepard is my favorite book right now because I successfully used it to create my already written book, "The Magi of Futurity", and have it listed on Amazon. After checking with others and reading the reviews for Aaron's book, I was very impressed and couldn't wait to order it. Within two months after reading this book, along with Aaron's "Perfect Pages" book, I had accomplished my goal. Thank you, Aaron, for producing such wonderful guides for aspiring authors!

Aiming at Amazon is the most valuable book I've ever read. It will save you money during the production of your book, and make sure that you make more money after it is produced. Highly recommended for anyone thinking about self-publishing.

I am 44 years old and yesterday, at our Thanksgiving celebration at a relative's home, I came to read this wonderful book for the first time. I was so touched by it, really all choked up as I read about Ferdinand. I just couldn't hold back my tears. I will be reading this book to my 71 children, at the public school where I run an After School Program. This is a marvelous book and I recommed it to parents, teachers, educators and anyone else interested in planting seeds of peace into the hearts of others, specially children. I am Ferdinand, and I am happy. I also fell in love with his mother... what a loving, sweet cow....

This is not a review, others have done that excellently, it is a memory. When i was eight, Ferdinand was my favourite. Thirty eight years later and unremembered until finding it just now, the flashback was so intense i could hardly finish reading the Amazon review through tears of nostalgia. I smelled the flowers and felt that simple happiness that Ferdinand radiated all over again. If you want your child to enjoy a great yarn, be engaged by intense illustrations, learn to be peaceable and stay true to themselves, and have a powerful remembrance of a book later in life, get them "The Story of Ferdinand".

i read this story when i was little and always love it but it never made me think as much till i found out my best frind was going to have a baby being a book lover herself and a Liberian she told me right away that she wanted her baby to have as many books as possable but mostlly this one in it's Original hardback form with black and white pictures and i went about finding it for her for the baby shower she got a lots of books that day but i will be one i will never forget the look on her face when she got this one or how i felt or what lesson i rembered learning when i read the book later after i gave it to her so guess we bouth got something from it and one day when her 1 1/2 year old Daughter get's old enough to read it i'm sure the Tradition of what this book teachs to young and old alike will carry on with my Niece and any other like her who read this book because books carry a great power to teach us many things if we are only willing to listen and this is true for any book if we just take the time to stop and read them

I remembered this book from my childhood and ordered it in remembrance of my husband's grandfather whose last name was Ferdinand. It is a beautiful story and the illustrations are a perfect compliment to the text.

Ferdinand marches to the beat of his own drum. A great parable of being yourself, regardless of outside influences.

There is a reason this book has five stars from over 80 reviews and has withstood the test of time with impunity.........the book works!

great buy! I was referred to this book by a family friend. It arrived in perfect condition and on-time.

What was refreshing about this book is the fact that the past tense is immediately introduced. Think about it, how many times do you tell people what you did a day ago, an hour ago, etc? The answer is - often.

In my high school Spanish class I took more than a decade ago, it was unfortunately anchored by slower/uninterested students. We never even got to the past tense. I was stuck in the present with no past and future!

Not anymore!

This book will make one the master of the preterite as well as the present. What I can understand and speak has multiplied tremendously. What I wish this book delved into a bit more is the subjunctive tense. It seemed merely touched upon. Also I really loved doing the exercises. When I was confused about a concept, the exercises would finally make things clear for me. The last two chapters have no exercises, it's only reading. I wish at least an exercise or two appeared in order to cement the rest of the concepts home.

Despite that, this book is wonderful for people like me who need to refresh their high school Spanish and would be great for beginners who wish to have a try at different verb tenses immediately.

My hint- DON'T SKIP ANY OF THE EXERCISES!

Make no mistake, you won't be fluent. But you will have a great Spanish foundation to build upon after finising this book. I ditto what others have said about also getting resources to go along with this book. I found the Michel Thomas Method to be an excellent accompaniment and found his explanations for the preterite as opposed to the imperfect are very similar. He will slam dunk the grammar into your brain without you realizing it!

Also I just started listening to Learning Spanish like Crazy based on recommendations. After doing the book and MT, I feel pretty advanced right now(I am just starting at the beginning so that may change as I progress). But for pronunciation practice it can't be beat!

Also Madrigal's book See it and Say it in Spanish is also a great little book you can use. Small enough to carry around everywhere!

A great improvement to this book would be audio! Publishers are you listening? Still a great learning tool without it. This book was published, I think in the 60's?? It still holds up to this day!

OK, it's not perfect. It is, however, a good book, better than most textbooks, and way, way ahead of Berlitz, for learning Spanish. Most Americans think they can learn a language in like 2-3 weeks. This is not so. It takes consistent practice to learn a language. This book supports that rather well. I'm sure the author is long gone, however, the book lives on. It is cited in The Next Whole Earth Catalog, by way, which is why I got my first copy of it.

This is an excellent book. Its approach to teaching a language is unique in that it gives fourteen patterns of Spanish words relating to English words. Rather than learning one word at a time, I can learn 50 - 100 words. I don't even have to learn individual words. I just have to remember the pattern, e.g. words ending in "ity" in English usually end in "idad" in Spanish. I also have been able to apply some of these patterns to other Latin-based languages such as French and Italian. This has been a great help to me since I sometimes do research work in Europe. Thank you for making this book available to us at such a reasonable price.

If you think this book will make you a designer well you are wrong. It is a great piece in the myriad of books on architectural theory and certainly a good read. However, this book is intended for architects and urban planners to read and to use as a reference. If you are not one of these people or even if you are, do not think that this is the only valid book by which to base your designs. Also this is not the greatest book on architecture ever written. If you think so then you have not read very many books. It is just the most popular because uneducated people think that they can pick it up and know how to design houses, buildings, and cities by looking at all they pretty pictures. Believe me when I say that it was not Mr. Alexander's intention to make the average person with no experience what so ever be able to design things.

my purchase arrived when it was supposed to, and was exactly what i ordered (quality and edition). No problems.

Time has not eroded the significance of this book's contribution to the world of architecture. Though it reaches back to timeless solutions to architectural problems, it is also a way forward. As we devour our social capital in a half century of indiscriminate urban sprawl, this book offers alternatives that will help us revitalize our urban centers.

This book is the quintessential book on the subject of creating authentic living spaces.
This book provides a near mystical approach to architecture in a very simplistic form that anyone can understand.

I bought this book after reading the glowing reviews on amazon. It was also an inspiration for Will Wright to make SimCity and the SIMS..... so I had high expectations.

I was shocked to find how opinionated and philosophical the book is. I expected the book to look at the history of cities, towns, etc. and describe patterns that already exist (much like the GoF's software design patterns book talks about patterns that people actually use). Instead the book presents a series of ideals about how the world should be structured.

If these ideals came from concerns I could identify with, I would take it more seriously. But instead they attack "problems" which I do not perceive to exist. For example, on p. 43 "The homogeneous and undifferentiated character of modern cities kills all variety of life styles and arrest the growth of individual character." This statement is contrary to my experience. I have met many great characters from cities, and seen profound cultural differentiation emerge from cities (e.g. jazz, abstract painting, hippie culture, punk, you name it). But the authors proceed as if cities killing character is axiomatic. I agree that there is a rural character that is not present in cities. But citydwellers have another type of character which is equally valid.

I have only made it through the first 100 pages. In these pages are so many naive ideas about mixing cityspace and vacant space. I live in Los Angeles so I know about sprawl & I also know a lot about cars -- while they are aiming for less sprawl then LA, they also neglect traffic congestion. They claim that making small roads in places make people reluctant to drive there.... the experience worldwide (worst in Malaysia, I hear) is that people use whatever roads are present, and if the roads are small, they then just end up sitting in traffic. The author's are naive in their structuring of space, nowhere do they cite any hard evidence of how these structures function.

I might make it the rest of the way through.... at least it's an easy read, with so many repetitions in how the models work you can kinda skim through it. I like the spirit of the book, it is reminiscent of P.M.'s bolo'bolo.... but where bolo'bolo comes from a purely emotional position, these authors take themselves seriously and believe what they are saying is objectively true. I give the book 3 stars because it is nice to see someone work through the ideas of bolo'bolo (which was actually written ~6yrs after alexander's book). I would give 5 stars to a book that did so by looking more at actual data of how spaces are utilized, and presented designs that didn't have obvious flaws in them.

Thick Oracle book which is intended for developers who might need to understand the Oracle internals and administration parts besides writing SQL. It's useful for them working in other database also as the general database concept is simlar. Developers can now have more DBA knowledges after reading before on-going performing some DBA task.

Gr8 stuff for all the Oracle ppl.

A true masterpiece, and a great way to learn Oracle concepts. No more to say.

I have been an Oracle DBA for about six years and this book is still the one I turn to when looking for deeper insight into tough Oracle problems. The author recently published a new book on 9i and 10g and that one is also quite excellent. When it comes to analysis and clear writing style, no one can beat Tom Kyte for excellence. Highly recommended.

I bought this book on cheap clearance after the original publisher went out of business -- the best $12 I ever invested. Remembering even 10% of this book makes you better than 90% of Oracle developers, modelers and architects. Mr. Kyte's real world experience and reliance on solid examples instead of folklore makes this light-years ahead of any other Oracle book; it's the only Oracle book I re-read regularly. If you can afford only one Oracle book, this is it. And you may not need any other.

I am savoring every word in this book. The exercises at the end of every chapter have helped me brainstorm deeper and more intense scenes for the book I have been attempting to write for years. I have many other books on plot and scene writing - this book has me writing more effectively than I have for a long time.

invaluable advice for anyone whos considering writing. very impersonally written and easy to follow. i'm still reading it (about halfway through) and i consider it a must have for my writing research library.

This book is most effective when you do the corresponding exercises at the end of each chapter. Bell doesn't give you busy work. Each assignment helps you flesh out material that can be directly used in your novel. In other words, his chapters are insightful and helpful. I found his verbiage easy to understand. Whether you've taken writing classes in the past or not, this novel on plot and structure will give you a new way of looking at your stories. Filled with examples from other bestsellers, Bell makes it easy for readers to get a sense for what will help make their fiction stand apart from other bland novels on the shelf. I highly recommend this book. There's plenty of variety here to keep you interested and once you're done, you'll feel ready to get going on your next novel--I know I am!

James Scott Bell continues to make learning the craft interesting and worthwhile. A must have for all writers, new and old!
Revisions & Self -Editing is of the same quality. I find that even though I have read it I go back to them.

I only wish he would come out with more writing books!

Every so often I get insecure in my efforts to write a decent book, and I check out one of these craft books. Often they help, often not. This one falls in the latter category. It outlines the most common concepts of the most common fiction (the necessity of conflict, an objective for the main character, opposition thereto, the three act structure, etc.), and tells you how to fill in this cookie-cutter design and maybe tweak the shape so you come up with a new variation on the reindeer or the Christmas tree (or the thriller or the mystery or the romance). The section on plotting can be summarized as, "If you're going to plot, and you should, just think of anything that could happen, write it on a card, fill lots of cards, and then put the cards into a sequence that leads to someone getting shot and then someone else having to deal with it." I exaggerate, but only slightly. A good scene usually ends in some sort of drastic action, a gunshot being a good example. Passing reference is occasionally made to literary fiction as something that could involve more subtle developments, and everything else herein is only useful for the true novice or the genre writer. Which has it's purpose. The most basic basics must be learned. Maybe this is a good place to get them. If you do order this, even if you have never written before, you will smack your head a lot and go, Duh, that makes sense. Of course!... (BTW, I'm no literary snob and certainly not writing from any position of authority. The writer of this book had published some books. If you read this and follow his advice, you might too. They might even get published. They will not be that ultra-subtle stuff where nothing happens, and not very interestingly, for hundreds of pages and we are made to suffer the 'artists' pretension--and that's certainly a good thing. But to learn to write exciting, lively prose, this doesn't seem like the route.)