Conferences Books

Easy reading with valid tips. There is not much more to say. This book really helped us with our trade show planning strategies. We purchased 2 books and this one was by far the better one. We could not even get through the first chapter in the other book.

This book is fabulous! I recently attended my first tradeshow with some business partners. We had less than two months to prepare for the tradeshow and very little money. We relied almost entirely on this book to prepare us for the show... and it did! The book does an excellent job of outlining the types of folks you meet at a tradeshow and how to handle them to maximize your qualified leads. It also discusses how to prioritize your spending. There were no surprises when we got to the show and we were amazed at how on target the book was. We felt more than prepared. I highly recommend!

I find this book an excellent guide to exhibition and exhibit marketing. The book gives an in-depth review on exhibit marketing, which is quite a unique area in marketing that you do not usually find on regular marketing textbooks. It also provide an A-to-Z guide and tips to participate an exhibition. One thing that is very interesting about this book is that it was written based on factual figures and statistics from the field. On each important "quote", it usually comes with backup figures. So it does looks somewhat like reading an academic thesis or research article, but with an relaxing written style, still the reader can feel as if the author were casually discussing the issue in front of him/her. The author seems to want the reader to know that he is not making those issues up, but he has taken them from the real world. It is a must for experienced exhibitors, who wishes to seek new advices or ideas on how to continue improving their success at the fairground.

Chris Dortch is a terrific basketball writer who regularly covers the SEC and helps put together the Blue Ribbon Basketball guide each year. He has written an excellent book that covers all 12 SEC programs, discusses their histories, and focuses on a 10 year period during the early 1990's until the early 2000's, a period when the SEC was at the top of the college basketball world.

The book features detailed accounts of each program's successes, terrific recruiting stories, insights into the various coaching personalities, and helps put a lot of the wins and losses into context. A terrific read for any SEC basketball fan.

This is the book for the hard-to-buy-for-Dad- an easy to read, interesting look at SEC basketball- I will make two Dads happy with this one!

While the writing tends to be more of a reporter's style and doesn't deviate much from a recitation of the facts and events, it is still a very interesting read about the development and trials of the basketball programs around the SEC. Dortch knows this topic as well as anyone and does great job of covering the league.

Highly recommend this book for any fan of the SEC

Dr.Thomason's book Writer to Writer allows any teacher the freedom to take the writing process one step further in their classroom. We had the luxury of bringing Dr. Thomason to our district as a consultant and I was convinced that he alone, initiated our teacher's to be risk takers and allow their children the opportunity to express their thoughts freely and without failure. I recommend this book to any teacher struggling with implementing the writing process in their classroom.

As a former editor who became a teacher late in life, I was miserable at conferencing. All I could do was point out mistakes and things that need to be revised. No wonder my kids didn't enjoy writing! The one line from Dr. Thomason's book that jumped out at me was "The editor's job is to improve the writing; the teacher's job is to improve the writer." That says it all. His book is easy to read--I read it in about 3 hours, then wrote a summary of it for my colleagues. Lots of practical advice...how to conference, how to start peer conferencing, how to get them to self-conference. Another valuable piece of advice from the author: Don't praise the writer, praise the writing. Always find something to praise, even in poor writing.

Writer to Writer is an easy "read", one that allows busy teachers to pick it up, read a chapter and come away with a practical and effective strategy to use with student writers. The strategies suggested by Dr. Thomason are designed to help turn a classroom into a writing community and go beyond improving a piece of writing to developing the writer in each child. He is a writer who truly understands not only the writing process, but the challenges for teachers and students in today's classrooms.

Following a general introductory part, the guidebook gives a description of each section of the AT in MA and CT (a trail section is roughly a 10 mile or so segment, generally cut by notable roads). The description consists of two portions: general and historic information (nearby towns, sites, camping, etc.) and trail description. The latter is a list of mileage points and directions. While it is very dry, it provides precisely the information one needs for hiking the AT. The water-resistant (plastic-like) maps are very detailed. A rather unusual feature is charts showing elevation change versus distance traveled.

In principle, either the maps or the book are sufficient to follow the trail, though each conveys useful additional information. Some people might perhaps find the two way too detailed and narrowly focused. In contrast to more comprehensive guidebooks (such as the White Mountain Guide), it describes little more than the AT (a few side trails are described), but in my view it does a fantastic job at what it sets out to. I have used this guidebook in MA and generally found it to be very accurate, even though it is 8 years old.

This book tells you what you need to know to hike the trail over these sections. The maps are accurate. It even includes sections on flora, fauna and geology of the region and hinking saftey.

The definitive guide to the AT that you can buy. Extremely detailed directions. Great waterproof maps with side trails and elevations. If you get lost using this guide, you're just plain stupid.

Overall this book describes all of Pennsylvania's hiking trails. Pennsylvania has over three thousand miles of hiking trails, so it is important to find a good book the depicts all of them. It also includes several modern waterproof topographical maps that are very useful with navigation of the trail. Longitude and latitude are availible for compass and navigation headers. However while this book is an excelent guide, it does seem to be never-ending with the trails. There is always one after another. Although this is one of my favority hiking guides. The philosophy of the book states, "The basic goal of this edition is to provide the hiker with a comprehensive list of available hiking areas and trails". This book is still not limited to trails alone, it shows helpful places to camp, and to restock supplies. This book was written with the help of the Keystone Trails Association which is an alliance of Pennsylvania organization's which share the belief of helping hikers. This book is an excelent guide.

A network here mean a graph with with weighted, undirected edges. This short (113 page) book is written in a clear style, and could be used as a textbook, athough it does not include exercises. Emphasis is placed on proving the efficiency of the algorithms presented. No knowlege of graph theory or algorithms is assumed, but knowlege of basic programming and college-entry level math is required.

The first half of the book covers the data structures used in solving the network problems that are presented in the second half. These data structures including disjoint sets, heaps, and search trees. Highlights of this half of the book are Tarjan's proof of the amoritized cost of union find, and explaination of self-adjusting binary trees.

The second half of the book covers four classical network problems: minimum spanning tree, shortest paths, network flows (e.g. min-cut), and matchings.

I found the first half of the book more interesting, because more of it was new to me, and because it seemed more likely to be of practical value to me in my work. I have seen presentations of the network problems before, but not with the analysis of efficiency, and comparison of different approaches.

Robert Tarjan (the author) has written many papers on efficient graph algorithms, and appears to be a pioneer in applying proofs of efficiency to graph algorithm. He is often cited in reference to the efficient graph algorithms he has discovered.

This book was published in 1983, but does not seem to be dated.

This is a superb book. I taught a graduate level course based on it at Lehigh University in 1984 or 1985. It was awarded the prestigious annual Lanchester prize for book of the year Operations Research Society of America about that time. Robert Tarjan was awarded the ACM's Turing award, computer sciences closest equivalent to the Nobel Prize for his contibutions to the theory of algorithms. This book is an excellent introduction to his work. The algorithms in this book were state of the art when it was published, but I don't know how close they are to today's best.

Most of the optimal algorithms in the book grew out of Tarjan's pioneering work on algorithms that minimizes total complexity by allowing individual chunks of work to consume large amounts of computing resources if they build up "credits" that make subsequent steps more efficient. Until Tarjan used this approach to develop superior algorithms for a number of classical problems, the state of the art had been to limit the resources consumed by each step and bound total complexity by multipying the number of steps by the worst case resource consumption per step.

Tarjan's exposition illustrates the power of abstraction. He uses abstract data types throughout, carefully defining them in terms of their fundamental operations. This approach will be very natural for anyone familiar with object oriented programming.

There is a huge amount of information in very few pages, but it is organized very well. Often Tarjan's carefully chosen words say a lot more than is apparent to casual reader's. I spent one 75 minute period explaining his 12 line proof of one of his algorithms. Then the class demanded that I illustrate how the algorithm actually worked on a real problem, so we spent another 1.5 classes applying the algorithm to a small problem I contrived to exercise all of its boundary conditions.

Other faculty advised me that this book was much too hard for course intended for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students, but the students disagreed. More than one commented that the material was hard after first reading, but that after hearing my lectures and rereading their assignments, they realized that it was really pretty easy and that the book presented it well. Most would have appreciated worked out examples to observe the dynamic behavior of the algorithms. One student animated some of the algorithms and went on to write his masters thesis on algorithm animation.

This is the best way to invest in markets in the present! Using the neural technology to teach your PC investing by you. You only need to be a good teacher. This book will help you for sure...

This book contains 33 articles some of which discuss using Neural Network models to predict the direction of the Stock Market on a short term basis (see table of contents on hardcover version). For those of you who are targeting long term results exclusively, you may want to look elsewhere. What I liked about the book, is that the articles are very specific, and they follow the format of A. Here is my idea for a model, B. This is how I tested it, and C. Here are my results, with plots. Some of the book is easy reading while other articles are more difficult and require some knowledge of calculus and probability. Most of the articles assume some knowedge of statistics. The writers and editors are well known in their field. Some are professors from business schools, others are from investment comapanies, and some are have an engineering or physics background. No lightweights from what I can tell.

If you are serious about modeling the market using your computer (and making money on your investments) then this book may help you do that. It is a serious book for academically oriented individuals. It has none of the fluff usually contained in consumer targeted books (aka - get rich tomorrow with my new stock picking plan...). One thing I didn't like about it is the smaller print on some of the articles, but this was not a big factor in my decision to buy it. When I saw this book it only took me a few minutes to decide that I was not leaving the store without it.

This book is highly readable and certainly not like many other books on the subject which tend to be a dull and technical recitation of the Versailles Treaty process which ended World War 1 in 1919 and sowed the seeds for World War 2. It brings the era and the place and the treaty process alive with the historic figures who shaped the peace and some who will later be important in world history. Ideal for someone who wants to get an overview of the end of the first Great War and the era. Shows how important events can proceed by happenstance. Has very good footnoting. Easy to read and enjoyable.

An anecdotal account of the Paris Peace Conference. Enjoyable and informative but lacking a coherent narrative to tie everything together. This book does a good job of showing the breadth of changes that had occurred since the end of the war and the hopes with which people from all nations awaited the work of the delegates.

I really enjoyed this book full of short snippets and quick accounts of many aspects of the conference. The anmimosities, the friendships, the never ending sense of confusion.

I bought my copy in 1981, and I am *still* using it in my research and historical art projects. An absolutely critical, major book, irreplaceable source material by actual participants of the dawn of computing -- the only lack are contributions from Turing and von Neumann, as the editors note, due to their premature deaths.

This is a technical history, and some essays contain technical details. A few border on pedantic, two are bad, but most utterly shine and are brilliantly illuminating. The list of references is wonderful, and with the 'net, may even be findable (most are in-context).

I cannot express what a useful and interesting book this is. Though it might appear to concentrate on U.S. efforts due to the conference location (Los Alamos) in fact most of the early computer work -- and the first *two* running stored program computers -- were British, and are well covered here. A lot of the British work was only declassified in the late 1970's, so the participants are able to talk about it for the first time publically.

There are also papers on early USSR developments, and history of pre- and proto-computing equipment.

Last, but hardly least, for me, in I.J. Good's essay I learned for the first time of Turing's open and unashamed homosexuality -- "... it was only after the war that we learned he was a homosexual... if [security] had known... he might not have obtained his clearance and we might have lost the war." Indeed!

Sadly, this was literally a last-minute collection of data; most of the contributors were quite old when it first published in 1980.

Amusingly (or not), I thought the book was expensive in 1981, at $29.50; now list price is over $100... but if you are serious this is a book to keep forever -- I would pay it now without hesitation (but critical books being this expensive keeps it out hands that could use it...)

This, plus Andrew Hodges' ALAN TURING: THE ENIGMA, have been two of my major inspirational sources for close to 20 years -- what more can I say?

Written in 1980, this book desperately needs an update, so that it in fact spans computing across the entire 20th century. The author/editor Nick Metropolis is quite famous in scientific circles for what is now known as the Metropolis-Monte Carlo algorithmn. It is often used in numerical integration, where this might be over several variables. Before Metropolis found his method, many such problems were often impractical to compute. So he is well qualified to write a history of computing.

The book's time span is an era just before the advent of personal computers and workstations. A lot of the narrative discusses government computing, often military-classified. The heritage of computing. The first modern computer, ENIAC/MANIAC, was built during World War 2 to solve problems in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. Ever since, Los Alamos has been at the forefront of high powered computing. Where Metropolis was for decades, in fact.

Soviet computing gets a mention, but understandably sparse. This book was written during the Cold War, and much of the other side's effort was very secretive. So if indeed Metropolis did understate the Soviet effort, it was no fault of his own.

The discussion of commercial computing tends to revolve around IBM and its 360/370 families. IBM dominated commercial computing so thoroughly that its competitors were almost an afterthought.

"Horse-andBuggy Mennonites" is an excellent, sympathetic, sociological study of one of the Mennonite subgroups in the US. On issues of community viability and love for the earth, the horse-and-buggy (Wenger) Mennonites can teach us lot. Kraybill is a student of various Mennonite groups and he applies all his skills in this presentation.

My sister is really interested in the Mennonites but has had trouble finding any good literature. I sent her this book and she raved about it and told me she leant it to her friend - also interested in Mennonites.
Thank-you for having such wide choices in literature.