Probe Books

This was an excellent survey of the USA's unmanned missions to explore the solar system. Kluger wisely chose the Ranger program to delve into detail for the first American space program, and his description of the problems of getting a Ranger to the Moon and to fulfill its duty (the first six missions were failures) were a great way to highlight the later successes of the Viking, Mariner and especially, Voyager 1 and 2 missions to the outer planets. He gives an entertaining, if somewhat melodramatic, view of the science and human factors involved in developing space programs. The latter part of the book gives emphasis to the Voyager mission, a good choice to contrast with the early failures of Ranger.

It's not stated directly, but the book ultimately makes a great case for the further use of unmanned missions as the most cost-effective way to do scientific exploration in space, as opposed to the stunts of manned missions to the Moon and Mars. The present success of the Cassini mission to Saturn and the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars is making the case stronger still, that unmanned missions are the way to go if you really want to do science in space.

The writer often uses too many adjectives. The book is however full of interesting tidbits of information about the science returned from voyager etc. It also has some interesting anecdotes about the people and events surrounding a mission.
Over all : a good book to get you started on solar system science
-kg

Kluger has tackled the task of covering the complete history of the exploration of the solar system's moons. In 320 pages Kluger has managed to fill a long standing gap in the historic documentation of space exploration. Beginning with the Ranger projects of the 1960's the author continues summarizing the major planetary/moon visits up until this time (2001). While, in so few pages, the book cannot delve into the level of technical and management detail that many would like to see, the author has done justice to the task in so few pages. Kluger has gone well beyond the usual abbreviated technical presentations found in NASA/JPL news releases.
This book should prove of great interest to engineers involved in space and ocean exploration where technical failure is a constant threat. Those who practice engineering understand that learning how things fail is as important as learning how things succeed and Kluger has shown several examples of the engineering difficulties and work arounds that led to the most far reaching and remarkable exploratory effort in human history. From a scientific perspective the author has done a nice job summarizing the scientific interests and expectations for the known moons in the solar system.
This book will prove to be a good one source reading for a concise summary of planetary exploration to this time.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Its intended audience is probably those who have an interest in space, without being true fanatics (I use that term in a good way), since a great deal of what is presented in the book probably would be well-known to the long-time enthusiast. It should also be enlightening for those who just wish to learn more about the early space program and some of the robot probes first sent to the outer solar system.

The book is arranged chronologically and begins with the Ranger program, which was intended to send probes crashing into our own moon. This may be a program readers under 30 or so will have very little knowledge of (this reviewer is slightly older than that and still had little working knowledge of it). This portion of the book is most effective in its descriptions of the personalities involved (again, most of whom most people have never heard of) and the long, tedious, error-prone process by which these things got off the ground and to their eventual destination. The descriptions of the various problems that caused the first Rangers to fail is enlightening and shows how difficult spaceflight was (and is) even when the mission is fairly simple. Also of particular interest is the effects of failure on programs and personnel; recent events regarding the shuttle fleet show that constant vigilance on quality and safety issues are a recurring, probably an intrinsic, problem within NASA and really any organization.

I would have liked more discussion on the followup Surveyor missions, but from that point focus shifts outwards to the outer planets, and Mars and Venus. The Voyager program is where the book hits its stride, describing the inception of the program and the tradeoffs that had to be made within congressional budget constraints. Also fascinating is the explanation of how these things are navigated through space a billion miles away, a tedious job that most people don't think about. It is sure to increase our respect for the accomplishment of flying a small, barely-powered spacecraft to within a few thousands of miles away from a moon from over a billion miles away. It was truly an extraordinary accomplishment.

The later missions, Casini and Galileo, are probably more familiar to most readers so the novelty somewhat wears off at this point. There is still a good deal of useful information, much of which did not make it into the general news media so it is worth reading for this reason.

The great strength of the book is its descriptions of the spacecraft systems themselves and the personalities that built and flew them. The instruments, how they worked (or didn't), and the myriad of small things that had to go exactly right for the mission to succeed makes this book an excellent read for the technologically interested. Just as remarkable are the systems that didn't work and the ways the engineers and flight controllers worked around them. Less effective, though necessary of course, are the scientific examinations of the moons themselves and what was learned about them. However, this is a minor quibble and Kluger handles these issues effectively, providing enough detail for context but not getting bogged down in planetary detail. All in all, definitely a worthwhile read if you are at all interested in this aspect of NASA's history of unmanned spaceflight.

Don't overlook this book. It is extremely well written and the content held my attention from beginning to end. It is the best account I have ever read regarding the US unmanned space program from the early space race through the Apollo era. The book provides fine accounts of the people and technology involved in the unmanned program, particularly the contributions of the scientists at JPL. I'm awestruck at the technology invented by these scientists and their scientific discoveries. The JPL was often ignored in the shadow of the more popular manned space program. Moreover, I believe the discoveries discussed in "Moon Hunters" contribute more to space science than the manned space program. The book is easy to read and has extremely intersting information about the planets and moons of our Solar System. Perhaps more remarkable is how the JPL scientists were able to navigate unmanned craft in deep space with such great accuracy to "visit" the many moons of the solar system.

Robert Hanson, a researcher who heads up a team monitoring a space probe, gets strange data and even a video of an extra-terrestrial ship which stuns the team. But, his company wants it kept quiet. Why?
This near-future novel gets more and more involved as Hansen is drummed out of work and suspects a conspiracy. He's right, but he has no idea HOW high the conspiracy goes. Ed Lerner, a research engineer, has woven a Crichton-like story with intelligence and science that keeps you reading chapter after chapter..IF you like this kind of stuff.
Lerner certainly know HIS stuff..the tech is spot-on and readers may quibble with some things, but generally it's a good bedtime/airplane/vacation read.

I enjoyed this book and I was looking for a follow up from Mr. Lerner, since this book seems to have been published 10 years ago...
Especially fun to read a book with Chicago suburban settings that I can recognize

I found the story and characters magnetic, I enjoy the second read as much as the first. Please think about a sequel, it would be truly enjoyed by this reader. Thank you for your 1st novel....

This is a hard review to write because any serious discussion of the plot would require spoilers. Suffice it to say it has a number of surprises, most of which are exciting or, at least, interesting, but some of which may leave the reader wishing the story had gone in another direction.

In feel, I think it comes closest to "The Terminal Man," by Crichton. A number of different sciences and technologies get to play their parts, most (but not all) showing that the author knows what he is talking about. Weakest is the non-technical, office-political axis of the story. The reader may feel this dimension lacks the same first-hand contact the others do, for its author.

Regardless, it's a good book with some neat ideas and a few good twists, set in the Very Near Future (an era that is, IMHO, underused in fiction). If like Crichton, or books like, "Oath of Fealty," you'll probably enjoy this one.

Too bad Mr Lerner is not a full time writer. He has potential for lots of great stories and awards!
His first and only SF novel is a high energy tale about mankinds first contact with a probe possibly sent by aliens from outer space. What starts like a common first contact story quickly evolves into a complex and intriguing plot about knowledge, power and the means to sustain it: coverups, treachery and deceit.
If you liked Crichtons SPHERE you will LOVE probe! Lerners style of writing is as complex as the plot itself but immensly entertaining. Believe me: This is an ALL TIME HIGHLIGHT!!!

When the Internet was being set up, who could have possibly believed just how unfriendly a place it was going to be out there. After all, it was just a concept where scientists could exchange papers. Even if you would have told the original developers where it was going to go they would have just laughed at you.

Anyway, Snort is another tool in stopping the bad guys from coming into your system. In particular it is an intrusion detector. Note the word detector. Snort monitors your system to see what's happening. It is not an anti-virus like program that detects, quarantines, deletes, etc. an infected file. Instead it watches what is going on in the system and looks for behavior that is outside the rules.

Snort watches, records and reports on what the systems in you network might be doing. On a big network, running Snort could well be a full time job. It can produce volumes of information. Some of this information regarding your employees might be considered spying on them, there are also some words (a few more wouldn't hurt) on what you can do to outsiders vs. your own people.

Actually, probably everything you'd need for a tutorial is in here; it just isn't put in one place up front. Therefor, for someone totally unfamiliar with Snort, the sudden jump from installation to cook-book recipes may be confusing and unsettling.

As there is plenty of material at http://www.snort.org/docs/ and as getting Snort running isn't all that complicated anyway, that's not a major flaw.

Like another reviewer here, I think the rules sections are probably the best part of the book, though I was also impressed by the attention given to the specifics of Windows and Mac OS X - it's nice to see that level of completeness.

I read the Snort Cookbook because I am always trying to learn more about Snort. I've read almost every book on the open source intrusion detection system, so I hoped the Snort Cookbook might offer advice not found elsewhere. Unfortunately, whatever good material appears in the book is overshadowed by outdated or outright bad advice. The best Snort book is still Syngress' Snort 2.1, so I recommend reading that title.

The Snort Cookbook starts poorly with ch 1, which at 50 pages is the book's largest. After repeating installation instructions covered in online resources, the book turns to dubious packet collection recommendations. Item 1.10 suggests creating a listen-only Ethernet cable but never mentions disabling ARP traffic with ifconfig's -arp option. Item 1.11 describes how to build a homebrew tap but doesn't address signal regeneration problems that could result in traffic loss.

Item 1.12 gives terrible advice: "If your Snort machine has only one network interface, using the passive tap, run both lines to a small hub. Then from another port of the hub, run a cable to your IDS. This will combine and maybe even buffer the traffic for the IDS and give a full duplex connection." Wrong -- this is a nice way to never see traffic when full-duplex packets from the two transmit lines collide in the hub.

Item 1.14 says "Snort itself is incapable of sniffing a wireless network," but it ignores the fact that while Snort doesn't understand 802.11 traffic, the sensor can join a wireless network and interpret what it sees. Item 1.15 demonstrates more ignorance of hardware issues by saying "Linux-compatible gigabit Ethernet cards are available with up to six ports. Coupled with machines that have space for three or four PCI cards, you could have as many as 24 Ethernet ports." This suggestion completely ignores the fact that a single gigabit NIC will saturate a 32 bit, 33 MHz PCI bus, and many BIOS will not be able to handle interrupts from more than about 8 NICs in a PC.

Item 1.25 says "two to four million records is the max for MySQL," which is odd. One MySQL database I use to collect session data on Sguil has over 31 million records. Item 1.25 also covers the often-repeated and incredibly naive method of having Snort log directly to a database, without utilizing Barnyard as an intermediary. Thankfully we see Barnyard covered in ch 2, but recommended for "high-speed network[s], such as 1 Gbps or greater." Barnyard is definitely appropriate when monitoring at less than gigabit speeds.

Throughout the book, the obsolete ACID Web-based alert console appears. BASE has been available since October 2004; it addresses stale code problems in ACID and should have been covered. I was disappointed to see the Sguil suite mentioned but never given any discussion, even though the older Snort 2.1 book introduces using Sguil. Item 4.2 mentions "RST scans" even though they are a fiction of one security researcher's imagination. Item 6.6 claims to offer ways to test Snort by showing three programs (Snot, Sneeze, Stick) that have had little effect on modern Snort implementations (e.g., 2001 on).

On the positive side, in many cases the Snort Cookbook properly addresses questions which frequently appear on the snort-users mailing list. Items 2.15 and 2.16 show how to send Snort alerts to email, a pager, or cell phone using Syslog and Swatch. Item 3.2 discusses rule updates with Oinkmaster. Rule issues in ch 3 were generally helpful, like dynamic rules (3.4), evasion issues (3.10), optimization (3.13), and even Spade (3.18). Perfmon coverage in items 4.6 and 7.0 help discover how well Snort is working. I also liked the policy-based IDS ideas in item 7.5.

The back cover of the Snort Cookbook says the book "can save you countless hours of sifting through dubious online advice or wordy tutorials." That online advice is frequently more correct than what appears in this book. While some of the book is helpful, often that material has already been introduced in online documentation or best covered in Syngress' Snort 2.1. Perhaps a second edition will address the concerns in this review and produce a more useful cookbook for future readers.

Snort Cookbook O'reilly
by: Orebaugh, Biles & Babbin

What can I say designing a reliable detection system is a challenge at best.
This book makes it seem easy! I thought this was the best layout of a tech.book I have ever saw.
Problem > Solution > Discussion. they gave you the information in a precise way with out overloading you
with material you did not need. The Rules section was espcially useful...
The only downside is I wanted to see more on rules with samples.
Overall this was a very useful Book. I already had snort in place this made it much more useful.

Brett Hoff

The core of this book is the chapter on Rules and Signatures. Snort is renowned for its rule language and its vast flexibility. It is a reasonably high level "script" that seems more declarative than procedural. Ok, I'm speaking a little figuratively, but if you scan the rules, you might see what I mean. The chapter explains how to build rules of varying levels of complexity, depending on your needs. One neat trait is the profuse range of options for detecting traffic around the machine running Snort.

Of course and inevitably, the default rules base has grown and it is regularly updated. Currently, these defaults number some 3000, and few sysadmins have the expertise to understand all of them. So one recipe tells you how to get and run an updater program (Oinkmaster). Though you are cautioned about letting it change your rules automatically.

Other recipes expand upon the rule scope in interesting ways, like looking for p2p or Instant Messaging traffic. You might be responsible for a corporate network that bans these, perhaps. Here is a simple way to show a supervisor how you can stay on top of the problem.

Although wrapped in a science fiction premise, a lost alien probe moving around the earth seeking something not revealed, this book is a captivating detective story. The characters are well written and believably human. I read this book in two sessions, an evening and the next morning, and would have read it through in one go had not tiredness gotten the best of me.

Although wrapped in a science fiction premise, a lost alien probe moving around the earth seeking something not revealed, this book is a captivating detective story. The characters are well written and believably human. I read this book in two sessions, an evening and the next morning, and would have read it through in one go had not tiredness gotten the best of me.

I started this book, expecting it to be just another traditional mystery novel and was rather pleasantly surprised to find out that it had some horror (my genre of choice) undertones as well as sci-fi. Actually,with the exception of prologue and epilogue, sci-fi part could be easily dissmissed and when you think about, it isn't much about detecting either, as the sleuths in the book figure out fairly early on what's going on and spend the rest of the time chasing and attempting to destroy the evil that hides behind the title "dark door".
In my opinion, the story had much more potential as a horror novel, with a good spooky original idea and great setting places. One thing about reading a book that is a part of series is the preprogrammed notion of the invinsibility of the main characters, which taints the whole idea of a good scare. Although that does sound rather morbid:)
With the exception of Carson/John, the characters didn't do much for me,as they kind of lack that "certain something", however seemed well developed and rather believable. The real star of the "production" was definetely the idea behind the story itself. I would have given it about three and a half stars, but it was overall an entertaining read and I guess it put me in a generous mood:)

I started this book a little bit before my bedtime and read half of it before I forced myself to go to bed. I thought that it was a novel idea (no pun intended) to have evil as not being native to Earth but sent here by an entity in another galaxy. I thought her characters were not only well developed but believable. The action is nonstop and the two main characters were a great sleuthing team that I wished were featured in a series. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I did.

In a book where the centerpiece should be the graphics, why oh why did they choose to print the diagrams in a muddy purple on a light purple background? I guess to make them look somewhat like blueprints, but I would have preferred clarity!

Pretty, superficial treatment. I agree with another reviewer's question about why purple drawings on a light purple background? It's amazing and sad how many of the spacecraft detailed have already been cancelled or deferred.

Excellent book, great graphics, a great explanation of the technology. I am tired of reading books written in the 60's and 70's about future space designs that didnt happen. Everything in this book can and will happen, and as an engineering student I will work hard to make these designs a reality. Thanks for providing a fresh, and modern view of what will happen in this century.

This book provides a summary of all the current and planned space exploration projects, both manned and unmanned and at the time of publication it was fairly up to date. The timetable presented for the International Space Station is outdated, but the expected launch dates for the planetary missions are correct. The book also provides a summary of many of the commercial space adventures which I have not seen anywhere else.

There are no photos anywhere in this book, but each section contains several drawings or more of each piece of hardware. The drawings are intended to look like the old blueprint drawings (hence the subtitle name), however, as an engineer who works for NASA, we don't use blueprints anymore.

On a sad note, due to the recent budgetary cutbacks associated with the new Bush Administration, many of the projects presented in this book have been canceled or deferred, so this new and exciting book is unfortunately already out of date. Get it anyway; it's still a good book and the drawings are top notch.

I bought this book thinking it would be a great coffee-table book for my theatrical home. I even thought I could use it for trivia games with my theatre students. But it only focuses on 10 movies - one for each chapter. And the trivia questions are for people who are obsessed with that particular film. I was hoping for a book full of fun, random questions about a wide array of movie musicals, but this book is not that. However, if you've watched Wizard of Oz 50 times, this would be the perfect book for you!

Jeff Kurtti's "The Great Movie Musical Trivia Book" perhaps surprisingly doesn't include "The Sound of Music," but does feature chapters about "The Wizard of Oz," "Singin' in the Rain," "Guys and Dolls," "My Fair Lady," "Mary Poppins," "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," "The Music Man," "Hello, Dolly!," "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," and "Beauty and the Beast," each a classic in its own right.

Each chapter opens with brief paragraphs about the featured film, followed by three difficulty levels of questions and answers. Kurtti deserves credit for not making the first level, "The Easy Stuff," either condescending or too easy, such as the "Mary Poppins" question, "Who 'gets stuck with the children with no nanny in the 'ouse!'," The answer (no, I'm not going to tell) includes a career rundown of the performer who played the character that made the statement in the film, imparting information beyond just answering the question. "Not So Easy" and "No Easy Stuff" questions test the reader's knowledge, such as who was the associate producer of "Hello, Dolly!" and who is the famous father of the animator of The Beast. These too lead into mini-essays, providing interesting facts with which trivia buffs will be able to astound their friends. Each chapter includes an assortment of photos related to the film covered, and concludes with its screen credits. Highly entertaining, the book may well provide new information even for those who think they already know all the answers.

It's here. The perfect gift book for anyone who likes a good movie musical. This isn't the weird, obscure, only-a-show-queen-would-know stage musical or the fluff "name the year of blah blah blah" trivia. This is complete coverage; from stats through awards, to fun dirt on ten of everyone's favorite movies. Kurtti just picked his personal favorites to delve into, but who doesn't love "Mary Poppins" and want to know more?

The trivia begins with the MGM Musicals of "The Wizard of Oz" and "Singin' in the Rain" and covers the spectrum from "My Fair Lady" to "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," to "Hello, Dolly!" and even to the animated "Beauty and the Beast." Each of the ten musicals has questions divided into three categories. The easiest questions are about the story and the characters, followed by the medium, not so easy questions, concerning actors, artists, and others. Finally, the hard category, with no easy stuff, Kurtti appropriately labels the minutia and obscuria. While the book is set up to be read as simple Q and A, the fun comes with Jeff's researched follow-up stories after the answer. The questions are used as springboards to delicious little secrets about stars, sets, Munchkins, and mistakes. An example of a brief but interesting medium rated question and answer for "The Wizard of Oz," reads as follows:

Q: Who was originally cast as the Wicked Witch? A: An early casting memo shows both Edna Mae Oliver and Fanny Brice as potential "witches" (their ethical orientation is not discussed, wicked or otherwise, but it's not hard to guess the casting). Finally, on August 20, 1938, Gale Sondergaard was announced for the role-a beautiful villain in the style of the evil queen in Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (q.v.) She did tests for the picture during the last weeks of September 1938, but left by mutual agreement with the producers in early October,! when it was decided that the beautiful witch was not acceptable and attempts to hide Sondergaard's beauty in "ugly" make-up seemed ridiculous. The next year she would have the part of Tylette the Cat in "The Blue Bird."

The stories range from brief paragraphs to full pages of bizarre information that Kurtti has uncovered through years of curious collecting and inside information at major studios. The book ignores all the obvious and targets the truly tasty fresh facts one can't resist. Juice combined with Jeff's witty personal commentary, make the book a great summer dessert sprinkled with photographs. This becomes the only drawback of the book, beginning with the colorful candy cover, it grabs you and you can't quit nibbling.

This movie musical trivia book has a delightful introduction by Shirley Jones, who sums up the book nicely: "If you're a fan of the celluloid musical, got ready you are about to have one terrific time.' -- William Christopher

This is a new edition of Harland's fine 'Mission to Saturn', adding
100 new pages of Cassini findings through summer 2006, including of
course the results of the Huygens encounter at Titan. As usual, a
handy, comprehensive volume, nicely written and illustrated. (There is no point in buying Mission to Saturn now, since its contents
are included in CaS:HR)

It may be true that this book contains a lot of information about Saturn and its moons and all the other findings in the outer solar system, however, the writing style is quite complicated for someone that isn't thoroughly experienced in the field of astronomy.

The writing style is extremely technical and overly detailed. For example, there are several sections in the book where the author describes each specific part on the space probe that NASA has built using highly technical terms that only a veteran astronomer or NASA scientist would be familiar with. The average reader will get lost quite fast in all the technical explanations and get quite frustrated. Here is a typical example of the style of writing that the author uses:

"The Ultraviolet Spectrometer (UVS) did not have a lens, it had a series of linear apertures set in line which served as a collimator to produce a field of view 2 by 15 milliradians, then a diffraction grating illuminated a linear array of 128 detectors, each of which measured the brightness on a 1024 point scale to measure the range of 50-170 nanometers in a spectral resolution of 1 nanometre. It was to investigate ultraviolet glows in interplanetary space and in ionospheres, and use limb sounding measurements of the extent to which insolation was absorbed during solar occultations to profile the chemical composition of the upper regions of planetary atmospheres...."

If you can figure out such details then this book is for you. He uses this kind of writing throughout the majority of the book and it gets quite frustrating to try to decipher all the technical jargon.

Furthermore, the author fails to focus on perhaps the most important part of the subject matter, the planets and the moons themselves. He spends so much time going into every little detail of how NASA actually sends its probes to their locations that you get lost trying to figure out what he was trying to explain to begin with. He constantly uses terms only familiar to physics and chemistry majors.

If you are looking for a more amateur-friendly book about astronomy then I recommend checking out David Grinspoon. His writing is a lot less technical and he focuses on the important big picture instead of letting his readers get lost in all the insignificant details that are only important to a scientist, not an amateur astronomy enthusiast.

After being immersed in the Christian education camp for about five years, I finally picked up this book which had been quoted and recommended so many times. I found it a little disappointing because the author so capably criticized non-evangelical positions on education but did not defend well his own position.

The author posits the need for a pluralistic school system and a curriculum that is largely core and content-based (based around a classic body of knowledge), but does not argue what substantiates this philosophy or what (if any) its weaknesses would be. It comes across more as another alternative system that the reader will have to judge relatively to others, rather than, as his evangelical orientation maintains, that it is a more *right* method of education.

In particular, the justification for the classical approach is weak. It is reminiscent of the "Cultural Literacy" approach that Ed Hirsch takes, but without a lot of justification for the skeptic of tradition. It simply relies on "it's what we've always done and so it must work" premise. That might be good for Catholic or Hebrew readers, but not most others. His case needs to be stronger if he really wants people to adopt his core curriculum (with specific, chosen authors and works) rather than their own.

Still, well worth the reading.

This book has never gone out of print and is readily available from the publisher, Probe Books, in Richardson, TX. The Publisher can fill any order from amazon. The same publisher supplies "The Gospel and the Greeks", also available from amazon. The book investigates the reasons for the deplorable state of education in America's government schools and also in America's colleges and universities.

Dr. Peter Cattermole was a former lecture of Geology at the University of Sheffield and a former principle investigator for NASA's Planetary Geology and Geophysics Program. As one would expect from a person with this background, this book presents a geologist's view of the planet Mars. Unfortunately, if one is not a geologist or versed in the sciences, this book maybe difficult to follow. Even this reviewer, who is an amateur geologist and well versed in a variety of engineering and science disciplines, could only read a few chapters at time (sometimes only a paragraph) without having to put the book down and reflect on what I had learned.

Each chapter of the book covers a different aspect of Martian geology. For example, there are chapters on craters, dunes, polar regions, the weather and climate, plus many more. There are also sections on the two moons of Mars and a summary of the robotic exploration of the planet. While there were times when I I had to put this book down to digest all the information I had read, I can definitely say that I learned more than I ever have about the planet Mars.

While the text maybe difficult for some people to follow (including this reviewer at times), there are numerous high resolution black and white photographs as well as some nice color photograph maps which present the many varied geological terrains that exist on Mars. Many of the photographs I have never seen published before, especially those from the Viking orbiters.

The author does provide a detailed reference list of over two hundred separate sources, which will allow the reader to thoroughly a specific topic. I found it refreshing that the author chosen only a few of his own papers for reference material, which does not always happen.

In summary, if you know geology, like high quality space photography, are out for a challenge, or want to learn a whole bunch about Mars, this book is for you

This book is very surprising: the large hardcover format makes you think that you are about to read a beautiful Mars book, full of pictures with limited scientific information... You couldn't be more wrong! What you have here is a highly technical, accurate and up-to-date scientific review of our present state of knowledge about the Red Planet.

The text and presentation is completely similar to the articles found in the scientific publications such as "Science": text split on two columns, black-and-white pictures, graphics and bibliography.

In order to get the most out of this book, you must already have some good knowledge of the planet and of geology, because the author does assume that you know a lot of things and will not bother explain the basics. From this point of view, this book is a welcomed surprise for the Mars enthusiasts like me, because it brings you one step (or more) further. For the beginners, you should avoid this book, and get instead the beautiful "Mars : Uncovering the Secrets of the Red Planet" (by P. Raeburn, National Geographic, ISBN 0792273737).

Now, for those really willing to learn about Mars with this book, let's get into the details.

As I said, you should know about Mars before reading this book. The best way to get there is to read the massive "Mars" (University of Arizona Press, ISBN 0816512574). This 1500-page Mars bible covers everything, but is in some way outdated (published in 1991, before Phobos 1 & 2, Pathfinder, and MGS). This is where the book by Cattermole becomes complementary, and could be considered as an update of the other one.

The large majority of the chapters are on Martian geology: plains, volcanism, craters, polar regions, fluvial activity, etc. Every aspect is covered in great details, including the latest results from MGS. But unless you are a trained geologist (like the author), you will probably be a little overwhelmed by the vocabulary. But even with a partial understanding of the science, the wealth of information is worth the effort. A piece of advice: get a map of Mars and keep it with you while reading.

Only a few chapters are about the atmospheric conditions, the satellites or even the possibility of life on the planet. This is not surprising since the bulk of our current knowledge is about geology, but may leave you disappointed. Especially the chapter on weather and climate: quite a lot is known about Martian weather, but this chapter is confusing and ambiguous, revealing that the author is not an expert in this field.

Regrettably, this book suffers from many errors, typographical or worse. I have spotted 2 figures where the curves are not even printed, leaving the arrows pointing nowhere (fig. 4.5 and fig. 13.2); fig. 3.7 is weirdly centred at 31.53°S 130.73°N; fig. 8.9 is centred at an impossible 241°N (!) and on p.89 we learn that Apollinaris Patera is lying at 96°S; fig. 9.8 lacks the "solid line" used in the explanation; on p.48, we learn that the upper limit for micrometeorites is 1 billion kg (which does not sound very microscopic)... The list could go on. This is unfortunate, because the scientific quality of this book is weakened by the fear of reading something erroneous because of poor proof-reading.

Despite the many errors, this book is an impressive summary of our current knowledge, and is worth reading. And with the arrival or Mars Odyssey, you will be well prepared.

This book is one of the principal lectures that every research need to understand "Scanning probe apparatus". Its content refer all the different areas of actual interest and the different type of measurements that actually could be make with this type of system. This book is more than a simple introduction in this wonderful area of physics. For all this reasons I thing that is one of the most important books that every research have to read.

The price of this paperback of SPM book is very good compared to that of the hardcover. However, the print quality is poor. In some of the images you barely see the featutres they talk about in the book. I am a SPM user so this is really bothering me. The SPM imagaes in this book are not very informative due to the poor print quality. Maybe the hardcover one has better print quality.