Professional Resources Books

Thomas Moore meanders around various aspects of work based, it appears, almost exclusively on his personal life's experience. Some of his observations seem insightful, but he completely blows his credibility by long-winded and unsubstantiated diatribes about corporations, corporate managers and technology. These seem to be very naive, uninformed and based largely on the author's sentimental longing for a return to simpler times. Well, folks, that is just not going to happen. If he had spent time discussing on how to best adapt to these times, his observations might be more worthwhile. As it is, this two tape program is too pedantic for an investment of either your time or your money.

My anticipation was high as much of the literature on PTSD in forensic context is very new. Chapters are written by individuals reputed to be knowledgable in each area. Editing left much redundancy, such that I skip 1/4 of the book because I'd alread read it! It is also very elementary. If you have very little idea of what PTSD is, and have never been to court, this is for you. Others, keep looking.

The amount of detail is this book drowns out any overall message on the proper way to create operating procedures. No plant could ever actually follow all the recommendations, steps, and layers listed. (A collegue stated that his calculus text book was easier to read.) However, the mind numbing detail is basically correct and properly focused on what plant workers should have in a useful procedure. Too much clutter with peripheral issues like how to get your boss to approve your project. A big weakness is the focus on document formats and document production methods optimized for printing on paper. Process plants are moving en-mass to computerized document management and delivery systems. This book does not explain how to format documents for optimum presentation on a computer screen. Also missing is any useful discussion of management of change methodologies to keep documents current.

Have you ever picked up a book and not been able to set it down? Don't worry, this isn't one them. Dry and ever meandering from one unrelated topic to the next, I felt confusion after just a brief reading period. Thankfully it was fairly inexpensive, and luckily for me another training book I own was able to fill the voids (and yes there are expansive voids).

It's your money, but don't look here for original thoughts.

Bought for a college class, did not find anything enlightening or new, thought most of the book was common knowledge for those studying child develoment.

First, I have returned this book. I did not completely read it, but rather skimmed through and was disappointed with my findings. It is pitched at a comparatively elementary level, not the quantitative measures of benefit to a process engineer. In general the teaching presented, which appeared to be little, was inconsistent with the content implied by the title.

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.

The class is a joke. Teachers or upcoming teachers should already know these basics. This is why Education in America has gone to heck.

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.

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.