Professional Resources Books

If you review a new word, expression, or grammatical point 10 minutes, later, one hour later, and the next day, that new item has a greater chance of registering in your long-term memory.
This is what research has demonstrated, and this is what the authors tell us on pages 24-26.

I admit, this is a very valuable item. I am studying a non-Indo-European language, and I have been having trouble committing words to long-term memory.

However, in order to learn this one bit of knowledge, I had to suffer through countless platitudes--efficient study habits, thinking in the second language, setting realistic goals, grouping related words, watching for non-verbal cues, watching for cognates, writing well-organized essays. If these topics are already familiar to you, then you can probably write a foreign language learning strategy book which is almost as good.

A very bad book. The intent of the author is to avoid abstractions to make things simpler, but it only makes them worse. I don't think we may avoid abstractions when discussing about semantics.

This is the first book I've read on the topic after a few days getting a feel for RDF through web resources (W3C et al). I'm a nocive for sure, but have experience with XML/XSD and I'm an accomplished programmer / developer. This isn't a "Developer's Guide".

Though the author shows mastery of the topic and makes excellent points that have helped me in design issues, the general text is hard to read and hard to folow. This may speak more to my (lower than average?) reading skills but frankly I'm not sure. If I were well versed in RDF this may be a good book for opening academic discussions, but it's a bad read for beginners (and I'd consider myself a rather advanced beginner).

This book is okay but needs work. It has neither good examples of RDF or programming with RDF. A better background to RDF, more examples, and better explanations are required.

In spite of the bad reviews on this site,I decided to buy this book partly because this may be the only book on the sementic web in the market,and I did not want to wait till others were published.

Unfortunately,I too cannot recommend this book to anyone.Here are
my reasons:

1)Both the title of the book as well as the title of the series(Professional Developer's Guide Series)are highly misleading.No developer will learn anything practical from this book.There are no examples or any other practical instructions whatsoever.The most "difficult" examples I could find were the analysis of statements like "Hjelm is the author of a book".

2)What this book is is a theoretical and acedemic discussion of artificial intelligence(AI),XML,RDF,and intelligent agents(IA).But here too there is a catch.You wont understand much unless you already know these fields.I have some background in these fields but I found the presentation so monotonous and boring that I too learned nothing new.

3)This book could have been a classic if properly written.Time may be ripe for artificial intelligence to enter the mainstream of computer world via the gateway of XML.Therefore,the unification of AI,XML,RDF,and IA is a highly fascinating project for the future.And a classic is desperately needed on this theme.But Hjelm's book is not that classic.

I picked up this book, and several others, because I was interested in catching up on some of the emerging protocols. From the table of contents, it looked like it presented a broad overview on a variety of topics, as well as the in-depth discussion of RDF. Frankly, though, it is one of the worst books I've read in years.

There are two problems: the content, and the author. The writing and editing is poor and sloppy. The text is disjointed to the point that I often had to flip back after moving to the next page, to make sure that I hadn't skipped one. At some points, it refers back to examples that don't exist, and at others, it refers to figures that just don't match up. The larger structure is as sloppy and disjointed as the text. It's not even useful as a reference, because no single section contains all the information needed to understand the format.

The book reads like what it is: an attempt to fill 320 pages with the information that could have been (and should have been) written in a 20 page white paper ...

His editorial comments are full of contradictions and misstatements that read more like Usenet flames than thoughtful commentary. He liberally trashes SOAP, AI, and CORBA, while ignoring or glossing over any shortcomings in RDF. My favorite contradiction: KQML is a failure because it uses a lisp-based syntax, which is *hard for humans to read*. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the book, he states that humans shouldn't write out their own RDF, and should always use a remote syntax checker, because it's just too easy to make a mistake. Looking at his half-page examples of even the simplest schemas, filled with angle brackets, quotes, and syntactic oddities, makes me long for the simplicity of a lisp-based syntax, even if I have to put up with a prefix notation.

The book is a waste of time and money. One could get more information, in a better format, and with less irritation, just by going to the w3c web site.

Normally I don't have problems reading the texts schools use but this one is the worst book I've ever had to read. My instructor provided outlines of each chapter that were provided by the author. Without those I would not have been able to make heads or tails of this book.The author needs to ake this book less dry and more learning friendly.

My teacher assigned this book for my Labor Relations course and I wish he picked out a better book. The definitions are awful and you have to read them like 3 times until you fully understand what information the book is trying to provide. There was one part that really made me think that this book was thrown together in a couple of minutes. One sentence in this book stated that, "Southwest airlines was not unionized." My aviation management teacher saw something wrong with this statement because Southwest is heavily unionized. I think the author had a particular issue in his life and was trying to smurf it off in his book. This book is definately not for beginning students, unless you have time to decifer what the author is trying to say..... I could talk more about how terrible this book is, but I think you get the point
P.S. There were some really bad run on sentences in this book

Sometimes books can't help but to cover dry material. This book does not excell past being extremely dry. The book is well documented, thorough, and comprehensive. The eight edition is aesthically pleasing, but still does not seem to achieve the ability to make itself an easy read. I would highly recommend another book for this study, or using this one as background information for study.

This book is written as a novel and contains very few useful facts. I am very sorry that I ever bought this book

Lot of verbage with not much use for theory and calculation methods. I am glad I bought this used because I did not waste a lot of money.

It`s amazing how little you can get from this huge book!
Many formulas in the first three chapters have misprints. The theory sections are poor (just a little more than you can see in a good thermodynamic book). Some figures are blurred and every section has few or no references at all. There are almost no application examples. Chapter 19 (about bearing design) has 152 pages and 36 references (a little too much for a compressor book); chapter 1 (about compressor theory) has only 15 pages and 3 references! Maybe a recall would be in order (following the example of the car makers) removing the book from the market and fixing it.

This type of learning should not be taught with a traditional textbook, anyway. This particular one suffers from poor layout, way too many colors, and fonts that strain the eye.

This is a required text for a class I'm taking. It's a waste of money. What's sound (the basics on skinner, piaget, etc ad nauseum) is already in every other education textbook and the technology segments are dated, frequently wrong, and assume you are mentally retarded.

Does anyone really need to be told what a keyboard is? For 2 pages? Book also has a profound Microsoft bias and seems to openly deny that anything else exists.

Avoid, if possible.

I had to read this book for a Technology and Education class, and it was a total waste of time and money. I'm a professional computer consultant in the middle of a Masters in Education, so I feel qualified to discuss the technical aspects of this book.

While this book was Copyrighted in 2005, almost all the pictures and content are so dated I think that little has changed since the first edition. A Third edition has just been released, which may be more up to date, but I feel it will be just as useless.

The main problem with this book is that it covers everything with no regard to technical ability. For instance, the book informs the reader what a scanner is, and then says they can be usefull for converting a printed page to editable text on the computer. If you are learning what a scanner is for the firs time today, then you AREN'T ready to start using OCR to import documents. In other places, it says floppy disks (yes, the 3.5 disks) are useful for storing information (most computers don't even accept floppy disks).

Additionally, the book is entirely pro-microsoft. It briefly touches upon 'free' software as it distinguishes between shareware and freeware, but doesn't mention Free/Libre Open Source Software. Between Sakai, Open Office, Firefox, and the myriad of other programs, this is inconceivable. All the pictures are for Word, Outlook, and Internet Explorer. It also makes no mention of Apple Computers (at least I didn't find any) or GNU Linux/*BSD.

Finally, it is filled with cute buzzwords that mean nothing, at least to me, such as "The DID's formative feedback look ensures performance objective validity." which appeared on the sidebar with a lightbulb.

Basically, if you don't know anything about technology, this book will be of no use, as much of it will gloss over what you need to learn, and if you are already a competent computer user, this book will be dated and provide scattered information that might have been helpful 5 years ago.

I would recomend not buying this book. If you are a teacher and want to see how technology can be used in your classroom (without learning useless information like what a POST is) I'd try Will Richardson's Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts. That was useful and interesting, while not being too technical.

Too basic and outdated

As far as pension industry books go, anything published over two to three years ago can be considered obsolete. This being published in 1992 missed all the changes that have affected 401(k) and pension plans, especially EGTRRA. You are better off finding something either written in the current year or something written after 2002.

This book turned out to be nothing more than a pamphlet, with roughly 20 ideas for enrichment activities. Some of the professional advice given isn't bad, but the references used to write this skinny pamphlet were sorely outdated. I could not recommend it as a resource for Gifted teachers.

The wingnuts of the religious right now have a manual advising them how to push their political agenda under the guise of tax-exempt church. Except the advice tendered by these crackpot authors is dubious at best, and will likely land the reader who follows it in jail. It's unbelievable how little it takes to become an "authority" on anything these days.

A waste of money. Don't read this for any information on quail habitat.

(Note: I had to enter a number of stars for this review. Actually, this book deserves NO STARS!) Unfortunately, I had to purchase this book for a class on private sector issues. This is a horrible book. I do not recommend this book to anyone. The author cannot write. The author cannot communicate. If you have to explain in parenthesis what you just said, face it -- you're not communicating. This book is disorganized, redundant and much of the text unnecessary. The terminology used is cumbersome. But what really concerned me were the grammatical errors. I wonder if Wiley employs any copyeditors! You find sentences like: "Many of this ilk are potential problems are in the realm..." (pg. 119); "If a is plan is in place..." (pg. 122); " ...as low as -- or in the same manner as -- as sprinkler systems..." (277); "The forth domain..." (pg. 283 - shouldn't that be fourth?). There are so many other examples, I don't have space to list them all. Suffice it to say, this book is bad. If you need a book on facility management in a crisis, get it from FEMA and the American Red Cross. Theirs is actually useful.