Postscript Books

The book provides too many examples. Some of them (30%) are useful.
The rest are boring. The definition of the Current Transformation matrix is wrong (colums and rows are exchanged) showing that the author has no idea about linear algebra and matrix products.
However this is the only book available for me, so I had to learn
PS with it.

This is an extremely helpful book, *if* you are a little familiar with PostScript and want to know more. Although it suffers a bit from lack of organization, the subsections are fairly self-contained and are generally extremely clear. As a hobbyist, my primary interest is in PostScript drawing rather than text manipulation, and this book has good coverage of drawing and graphics. My understanding of PostScript was greatly deepened by this book. (I finally understand dictionaries!) PostScript level 2 is discussed in some detail, which is unusual among the available texts. I have looked at several books and have not found a better intermediate level text.

In fact, I could barely get through it.

My introduction to PostScript was through the Language Reference Manual and the Supplements. Plus it was quite helpfil that I was surrounded by PostScript gurus.

By the time I got this book it read like a Dr. Suess novel. Bored, I was.

Skip it.

Although this book could be useful to the person who cares nothing of how things work, I found it extremely lacking in the area of defining the way Postscript works. From the outset, the book shows many examples which the authors touts as the best way to learn something. However, many of the examples used have little or no explanation of some of the cryptic commands contained within. You end up wasting a lot of time scratching your head trying to find out *what* is going on. It becomes a matter of wading through the entire book since many terms are not even listed in the index. A glossary and perhaps a command reference would have been extremely useful in this book.

Although I found this book to be accurate, I did not enjoy it. Concepts jumped from chapter to chapter without any order. The index is totally lacking. It covered graphics completely but failed on handling bitmaps. It left text formatting to your imagination. As a programmer, I need to create reports. This book left me out in the cold. If you want to manipulate graphics using PostScript this book is for you. If you want to produce a spreadsheet on PostScript look elsewhere.

Herbert Feigl's "The 'Mental' and the 'Physical'", originally published in *Minnesota Studies In The Philosophy Of Science*, was for many years considered a genre-defining work of analytic philosophy: that is to say, its attempt to bring the phenomenalist scruples of Feigl's early days up to materialist "spec" set the tone of discussions of the "mind-brain identity thesis" to an extent greater than attested to by the rate of adoption concerning Feigl's particulars. In some respects, this is a more finely wrought work than subsequent discussions of the topic: and those concerned with the benefits brought on by confessions of materialism would do well to consider it (especially Feigl's off-hand dismissal of Wilfrid Sellars) as a historical document neglecting to "index" certain commonplaces of the time.

The essay is certainly available to today's reader only in that format, and perhaps there is lesson enough about obsolescence contained in that: those concerned with revitalizing the mode of speech associated with its condition of production ought to think hard about the extent to which the intellectual manners of logical positivism are simply outdated, in that a great many of the Vienna Circle's goals for popular discourse on scientific matters have been achieved, others completely sublimated, and the remainder available almost exclusively "at a distance" (that is to say, in materials deriving from work done in proximity and at cross-purposes to them). But an honest assessment of postwar intellectual life in the US requires the granting of considerable respect and to popularity for their views.

An interesting look at a little known chapter of WW2 espionage. Moyzisch was a German attache in Ankara. He was approached by a man claiming to be the British Ambassador's valet, who offered to sell classified British documents. The Germans bought the documents with forged money. Curiously, they wondered if the documents were forgeries. They weren't. Former Ambassador Franz von Papen has written an introduction in which he urges the reader to take Moyzisch's account seriously.

I suspect that fans of Albert Camus and Stephen King would give more stars to this book. If you prefer protagonists who combat evil and overcome hardships, avoid this book. The book is set in California during the Depression. The book convincingly portrays the agony of the dust bowl victims who headed for California in the hope of starting a new life. Among the travelors is a man named Cooper. Cooper, to avoid a prison term, becomes a paymaster for an orange grower who employs and abuses migrant workers. A nanny employed by the orange grower believes that she has the power to control dead animals and dead people. Cooper, seemingly unable to control any circumstances, is driven by circumstances beyond his control into mental and emotional hell.

The first chapters reads like the advertisements from Sun. Since the books is written years ago all the comparisons are with Windows 3.1, and there is little information about the Internet.