Practitioners Books

I purchased the Review CD to help me prepare for upcoming boards. This CD did not meet my expectations. The sound quality was very poor so I had to read the power point presentation which did not come as a full page. The material can be printed and you can folllow the lecture but the whole purpose of purchasing a CD is to listen to the material over & over until it sticks. This was not the case. I could have very well bought a book for less than half the price. This product is overpriced and does not live up the expectations. By the way I still need to go and buy a review book. Something needs to be done about the audio and the size of the page of the power point presentation.

Excellent review of pediatrics. I am actually studying to be a FNP and used this course for my pediatric portion and found the information useful. I did not find navigating around the CD rom easy, but once I loaded everything onto my computer the materials were great

Material that was provided was good, but the entire coarse was not audio as presented. Only half of the lecture was provided; CD would go to next scetion mid sentence. However, all the notes were available to print.

I bought this because it said "like new." This book looked like it was actually new.

This is a very helpful, comprehensive guide for empirically supported treatments and assessments for a broad range of problems. I have used it countless times and I highly recommend it.

I want to try to overwrite a misguided one-star review that appears to be a mistake but is logged in here anyhow and makes this look at a glance like a crummy book. This book is quite good. It is encyclopedic, and both well written and well edited, even well bound. The authors snipe at what they call "psychoreligions", meaning psychotherapy based on tradition, optimism, convenience, or anything other than hard clinical evidence. Like a mystical belief system rather than scientific knowledge. This seems like a polarizing how do you do for a worthy new way of thinking. Aside from that little slap, this book is a welcome chunk of terra firma. The disabilities with which I am most familiar are tightly and thoroughly described and the treatments that are actually known to work best laid out nicely, all just enough but not too much, with good references. A timely reference.

There are two types of writers about terrorism, experts such as Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson who write from a distance and others that write graphic tales of first-hand from the trenches war stories. Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities, is unique in that author Malcolm Nance is a 20-year veteran of the U.S. intelligence community and writes from a first hand-perspective, but with the organization and methodology of writers such as Pipes and Emerson. Those combined traits make the book extraordinarily valuable and perhaps the definitive text on terrorist recognition.

The main theme of the book, as detailed in chapter 1 is critical awareness. The book notes that criminal investigators spend years studying criminal behavior to better understand and counter crime. Nance writes that the field of terrorism is no different as it is a specialized subject that requires serious study and requires that those in the front line of defense be as knowledgeable as possible.

In a later chapter, Nance gives the Iraq war as an example of a group of leaders that were not as knowledgeable as possible and ignored the advice of those that were as knowledgeable as possible. Had the Bush administration consulted Nance, a trillion dollars and thousands of lives could have been saved in the Iraq debacle.

The book is divided into 5 sections comprising 21 heavily-detailed chapters. Each chapter is a progression in detailing, understanding and identifying terrorists. In chapter after chapter, the book details every aspect of terrorism and indentifies all of the various elements. The various aspects of different guns, explosives, and other elements are described and categorized in detail.

In the section on suicide bombers, an important point the book makes is that contrary to popular belief, suicide bombers are rarely insane. They are most often intelligent, rational individuals with beliefs that those in the West finds difficult to comprehend. Nance does not for a second rationalize the actions of such groups and individuals. But notes that it is critical to understand why they do it in order to prevent future attacks.

Chapter 8 is quite valuable in that it provides a comprehensive overview of how terrorist cells operate and are organized. While the cell is the fundamental unit of a terrorist group; cell operations and their members are the least understood part of terrorism. Their operations are always secret and never seen, until they attack. The chapter details the many types of terrorist cells, operative membership pools, and how cells and leadership communicate.

Chapter 19 is a fascinating primer on al-Qaeda and the global extremist insurgency. The chapter details how al-Qaeda divides its enemies into two categories: Far Enemies and Near Enemies. The terms are taken from the Islamic concept of the community and those who oppose it. While the far enemies of al-Qaeda are the USA, Australia, UK, Europe and Israel, the near enemies are those Moslem's or nations that al-Qaeda sees as corrupted governments or apostate rules. These include the governments of over 20 countries including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bangladesh, India and many more comprising billions of people.

While the post-9/11 attacks from coalition forces have indeed hurt al-Qaeda and killed many of its top leaders, Nance notes that al-Qaeda now acts a terror strategy consultancy. This transformation of al-Qaeda is in response to the loss of its base of operations in Afghanistan and the displacement of its leadership to the Pakistani border. The most significant changes were a shift of operational responsibility from the regional terror commanders, who executed a long awaited plan for jihad operations, to a more radical and difficult to detect posture: jihadist who were self-starting and worked independently from al-Qaeda.

The most significant changes al-Qaeda's structure occurred when it was able to co-opt the Jordanian Salafist group Tawhed Wal Jihad and organize the foreign fighters into Iraq into al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). AQI changed the structure of the military committee's roles dramatically and Iraq would become the cornerstone of al-Qaeda's global operations. Much of the invasion of Iraq was premised on a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. There was never such a link, but the war turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as al-Qaeda is now a mainstay in Iraq.

The book writes that it is important to note that contrary to popular belief, al-Qaeda is not a single terrorist group, rather a collection of like-minded organizations that cooperate and receive funds, advice and orders from Osama bin Laden and his supporters. al-Qaeda has transformed itself from a physical chain of terrorist training camps to a virtual network that uses the Internet to create a network centric information and advisory body. Nance therefore notes that al-Qaeda has transformed itself from a global terrorism operation into a terrorism management consultancy. The 6 main aspects of this consultancy are that al-Qaeda: provides inspiration, contributes finances, shares collective knowledge, provides weapons resource and contacts, accepts responsibility and releases video propaganda.

Besides a few minor historical errors, some grammatical and punctuation mistakes, and not a lot of details about cyber-based terrorism, Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities is a most important book in that it avoids all of the hype, politics and bias that come along with such titles, and simply focuses on its task at hand, to be a field guide for anti-terrorist and counter-terrorist professionals to use to prevent attacks.

Such a title is sorely needed by groups such as the TSA, who still think that anti-terrorism means having people remove their shoes at airports. The book notes that the European approach of guarded vigilance via a sustained level of anti-terrorism readiness and awareness is a much better concept than the US approach of spiking to heightened alert levels.

The Terrorist Recognition Handbook is a must-read for anyone tasked with or interested in anti-terrorism activities. One would hope that every TSA and Homeland Security manager and employee get a copy of this monumental reference. It would change the face of TSA and the Department of Homeland Security, and might perhaps really enable them to identify terrorists, and not simply require the elderly to take off their support shoes at airport checkpoints.

The attacks of 9/11 have put America into the awareness of terrorists within its borders more than ever. "Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities" is a manual for those in charge of tracking down these criminals. Covering the origins of terrorists and what makes them do what they do, "Terrorist Recognition Handbook" offers an examination of common and uncommon terrorist tactics - and how to identify an attack before it happens. Presented in an easy to use handbook format, "Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities" is highly recommended for those in charge of security and community library military collections.

The author is one of the "experts" that didn't manage to recognize the terrorists of 9/11. And now he wants to get paid for a story on "recognizing terrorists".

Don't expect an in-depth coverage of the theory behind the calculations. Said that, the book is a "concise" presentation of the programs used to calculate special functions present on the CD. For every program, the author shows the underlying equations and the bibliographic sources, plus nice discussions on accuracy/performance when you have the option of several methods.

I would say the book is more useful to the engineer/physicist having to do certain calculations, than to the mathematician/student wanting to learn the ins and outs of special functions theory.

The only dissapointment is a rather poor produced CD: the names of the programs on the CD are in 8.3 format, and I think (not sure though) that not all the code of the driver programs shows up on the CD- there are names of program snippets that are not on the CD- this may be an unnecessary hasle for someone trying to follow the examples in the book to the letter.

According to the author, the practicality of books on functions is often limited by the graphical content, and that books of tables like Abramowitz & Stegun "serve a very limited purpose" today (primarily to check function evaluating software). This "Atlas" tries to fill this void, and it does a respectable job. However, detailed function exploration and visualization is left to Mathematica users, the primary audience for this book. Without Mathematica 2.2 or later, and/or a Fortran 90 complier, a great deal in this title cannot be fully appreciated. Of course, the reader can often explore function behavior by plotting an equation using common spreadsheet software, or a graphing calculator, without using F90 or Mathematica. But much of this high-priced textbook consists of small blocks of F90 code and everlasting references to Mathematica notebook calls. Part II contains ~200 pages of Mathematica notebook descriptions and ~100 pages of F90 driver programs, not to mention the F90 code documented throughout the first 600 pages.

Most the "Atlas" graphics are small (~2") gray-scale screenshots of Mathematica plots. The quality of some graphics leaves something to be desired though (Figure 7.2.2 p. 117 for example). Many figures are obviously grainy - vertical lines and text characters often appear as broken line segments, not unlike a tilted faxed image. These gray-scale images are fairly bland; I expected at least a little color and only the highest quality graphics for a book calling itself an "atlas", especially for the asking price.

"Atlas" is no substitute for the timeless books of tables and equations such as the (inexpensive) A&S (ISBN 0486612724) or the CRC Standard Math Tables. In computing the error function (erf), for example, Dr. Thompson defines erf in terms of a function call of the gamma function, while A&S provides many, many more alternatives suitable for machine solution. The discussions here, while more generous than A&S, are often not quite as insightful as Numerical Recipes, which the author often references. Instead, pictorial surveys primarily forego a lot of the detailed explanation of the underlying function theory. A few of the functions, such as the Voight distribution, are hard to find in the classic references, but the reader will find very few new topics here. "Atlas" is a well packaged presentation but not quite the insightful, general purpose book for which I had hoped.

The contents are almost identical to an earlier C version by the same name (ISBN 0471002607). The availability in C, F90 and Mathematica is commendable, although it seems that the F90 version may now be out-of-print having been listed at a price for almost two hundred dollars for several years. Programmers of the older Fortran 77 standard will find the level of F90 programming reasonably suited for translation back to the older standard - or even C itself, if necessary. Therefore, Mathematica users in particular will find the used but now heavily discounted F90 copies the much greater bargain.

These two books are very slender and too pricey. There are better review books out there, such as the FNP Certification Review by Kidd, Robinson, and Kish.

My friends and I used Health Leadership's Family Nurse Practitioner Study Question book set which included the ANP, PNP, and WH books. And they were right on target. We felt we were really prepared for the exam when we went to take it. We walked out feeling great!!!!!!!!!Plus the price is excellent. Three (3) books for $70.00 what a great deal. We highly recommend Health Leaderships FNP Study Question Books to get ready for the exam. Go for it.

Thanks HLA for a great prep.

Students from Univ. of MD

Good review before the exam. Gets you thinking in the way the test will be written.

I was rather disappointed with this purchase. Rationales are not given to the questions. I would have also liked to have divided sections on topics and then maybe a couple of full practice tests at the end.

Davis presents a set of essays on various aspects of developing software. But these are not at the narrow technical level of purely programming issues. Instead they concern higher level and more intangible matters. Often involving managing a team.

Especially interesting was a chapter where Davis delved into a software startup that he cofounded. It gave the travails faced by many startups, and not just in computing. Like how they started in a garage and then upgraded to an unfinished office space. And how the founders shared all sorts of information with their employees.

But his company seemed to have two key problems. While they applied for 3 patents, these were ultimately denied by the US Patent and Trademark Office, because others had pre-empted them. So unfortunately, they were not innovative enough. Or, at least, not innovative early enough.

Another problem appears to have been the narrow scope of their products. These did not address critical enough problems at potential customers. Resulting in very few sales.

This not a bad book, but if you happen to read IEEE Software regularly, there is almost nothing new. I have not yet read the whole book, and Davis claims that he has updated the original articles, but most of the stuff has not changed.

On the other hand, if you have not read the articles before, they are quite fun to read, e.g. "Art or Engineering, One More Time".

But I have an issue with the title: the "debates" are mostly some paragraphs at the end of the article, that are more like questions in a text book that might start a debate, but do not really dig into a controversial issue.

I very much prefer, Robert E. Glass': "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering", which contains similiar topics, but is much more to the point. And makes the controversies on his issues much more explicit.

Funnily, Glass, on the other hand, thinks very highly of an older book of Davis': "201 Principles of Software Development"

Women's health is not my area but this book gives me a quick review and provides peritent information on health history, preventive care, ect... It's a good reference to have and fits in your pocket.
thanks

Lots of good information. Not something I could use, however, I asked for a refund.

We love these books at our clinic because they are so brief and easy to read. We had to return the Transfusion book however because it was geared more towards running a blood bank. It did not have enough information for us that was geared towards our technicians for educational purposes.

This book is a excellent tool to everyone who needs learn the basic steps to proceed a blood transfusion, from collection to infusion, of easy way.

Very useful lecture. As a psychotherapist I am now more confident with situations, where I dont know what to do, what to say. I leave space and somehow answers come...It works. On the other hand I see, that there is no need to mistify such people as Tolle ( somehow superficial knowledge about analytical therapies). Anyway: great wisdom, new aproach, fresh look, "evidence based" work.

Matjaz Lesjak MD

This set of CD's would be more suited as a DVD. There are several long pauses, mostly in the first and last CD. Since the listener cannot see Tolle's "presence" we are sometimes not sure what is happening.
This set is worthwhile, but I would recommend "Through the Open Door" as Eckhart's best CD.