Practitioners Books

I bought this book for my APRN class. It seems to be the most up to date book for now. The shipping was fast and I have an A in the class, the book is working!

This book is thorough and easy to understand. It is great for the Advanced Nursing Student.

I'm currently taking pharmacology this semester and we are using this book. Most of the students in the class, including myself, found so many inconsistencies inside this book. I told my professor that she should consider changing textbooks for next semester, but I was told that the school has a "contract" and can't change textbooks. I ended up getting supplemental books to study from. I don't recommend this book for graduate study. It is too wordy and has too many inconsistencies.

This text is awful. It is very hard to follow and is not nearly as in-depth as it should be. It is poorly organized. For example, if you look up "ACE Inhibitor" in the Index, its listed on 39 pages, ranging from p75-1086. Obviously, these are not all in the same chapter. Its mentioned in the chapters entitled: Culture and Ethnic Influences etc, Drugs affecting the cardiovascular and renal systems, Drugs affecting the Hematopoietic system, Drugs affecting the endocrine system, drugs affecting the reproductive system, a chapter about Angina, a chapter about Diabetes, a chapter about heart failure, and a chapter about hyperlipidemia. As you can see, this is just one example of how spread out information is and how it is hard to get a concise view of a drug or method of treatment. I would not recommend this book. I gave it one star because Amazon makes you give it at least one star.

I bought this book two months ago and it has been an excellent resource. I am currently taking an advanced course of pharmacology (FNP-S) and after reviewing several other textbooks I decided that this was the best one. If you are working towards an advanced degree in nursing this is a "must have textbook". I strongly recommend it.

The book covers the entire spectrum of prescribing from the eyes of a nurse in advanced practice not from the eyes of a pharmaceutical. If you need to know the chemistry and the composition of drugs you need to look for another book.

J.M "family Nurse Practitioner"-Student

The author links academic and practical knowledge and sets them onto equal footing. He explains how practitioners know what they know, and he emphasizes the creative processes involved in planning and problem-solving. Schon's work addresses a variety of professions -- engineering, architecture, management, psychotherapy, and town planning -- and distills what they have in common.

Dr. Schon addresses how professionals can better join in a process of learning and decision-making. By seeing life as a process involving both the service provider and the client/customer, the interaction itself provides additional tools and information. Coming out of an industrial engineering perspective, processes of decision-making can be structured to require step-by-step participation in problem definition and solution clarification. Best quote: "A skillful teacher draws out critical facts, and by a sequence of astutely chosen questions leads students through a process of inquiry which serves both to structure the "solution space" of the situation at hand and to demonstrate a mode of thinking about business problems."

i wasn't too thrilled with this book... mainly because .... i didn't find it eye opening.... i felt that it took simple concepts and made it into high concepts and it became repetitive... if this is what ppl have to read to discover that ppl scale situations differently using a combination of their experience and knowledge... ~ save your money, eating a hamburger would be better off....

chpt 5 talks about the structure of reflection in action...
- evaluatin experiments in problem setting
- bringing past experience to bear on a unique situation
- rigor in on the spot experiment
- virtual worlds
-stance in inquiry

ie. schon's virtual world is to simulate reality... the practitioner constructs and manipulates virtual worlds in order to experiment rigorously (#3 see above)... pg 157... ie. architecture & sketchpad, engineer and models/computer simulation, etc.... we should know this... that's all i mean...

This book discusses the history and theory of professional learning. Schon spends a great deal of time justifying what every professional knows - that framing problems is difficult and that book learning is insufficient to deal with these problems.

If you are interested in positivism, technical rationality, and the evolution of the modern professional school, then this book is loaded with meaty material. If, however, you want to apply methods built upon other epistemologies, go straight to his 2nd book, "Educating the Reflective Practitioner".

The book is well thought out, but I found it a heavy read. Not for the faint-of-heart.

I got a lot out of it. Recommended only for epistemology or history of professional school wonks.

This is a critical book that provides a foundation for most of the other work on organizational learning (such as Senge) and complexity in organizations (Wheatley). As most classics are, this is not the most up-to-date book on reflection and action, and if you are looking for something that will give you a fast pay-off, I suggest looking elsewhere. If, however, you are interested in reading one of the foundational pieces of writing on these issues, this is one of the classics, and an important book.

Bootstrapping is a computation-intensive method to estimate properties of an estimator by measuring those properties when sampling from an approximating distribution such as the empirical distribution of the observed data.

The book is well written. The author has managed to cover broad topics of the bootstrap within less than 200 pages. To do that the author scarifies some of the mathematical details, instead he gave the main results and development histories. I enjoyed reading it and have got exact what I need with a very limited time. The book is unique in the sense it covers such board topics efficiently and provides extremely valuable bibliography using 1/3 of the book. I have been in academia and industry for long time. The best way for me to do researches is read a book such as this one for the overview of the area and have (well categorized) the bibliography materials. If I decide to do the further research on that direction, I will read other type of books or research papers that will cover enough mathematical details. However, there are too few books like this one. As a result, it often takes me much long time to get what I need and it is often difficult to get the big picture. I encourage practitioners and researchers to read this book if he/she is interested in this topic. I am particularly interested in chapter 9, where some of the controversial/challenge issues discussed.

We have two suggestions to the author: (1) Cover more on chapter 9, especially on the unsolved issues and future research directions; (2) Most of my time spent on researches is finding the right materials and read them. Therefore, it will be even more helpful if the author can divide the bibliography materials into categories.

Please be aware that this is not a typical text book with well-instructed mathematical formulations and exercises, otherwise you will get disappointed.

This is my husband's first book. He tried to satisfy more than one audience and thus got mixed reviews. Some praised him while others booed. Many of the top researfchers in the field appreciated the intense research that covered many topics and applications and surveyed a vast literature. Others like some of the readers who have given him a bad review here have complained about too many references and not enough depth. The second edition comes out this November or December. He just got the final page proofs yesterday. In the second edition there will be more recent and in depth coverage of certain applications and an update on progress that has occurred over the past 8 years. Since most of the competing bootstrap books have not brrn revised. So Mike's new addition will be the most current.

This book is seriously deficient in depth of coverage. While it is nominally 264 pages long, only 144 pages are devoted to matters of substance. The rest is either "historical notes" or bibliography. The latter takes up 84 pages.
Chernick is a shameless name-droper. Even the 144 pages that I've characterized as "substantial" are filled with citations and irrelevant details (such as the years in which his Stanford fellow students completed their dissertations).
My advice: save the $90 and seek a better book.

If you want a PRACTITIONERS Guide to the bootstrap look elsewhere. I would label this book miscellaneous topics in the use of the bootstrap. I really wonder who the intended audience really is. I have a PhD in Statistics so I have no difficulty reading the book. I can imagine someone purchasing this book because they think they might want to employ the bootstrap or they want to understand the bootstrap because they have seen it applied in their industry. This book will not provide much help.
I seldom provide book reviews because I believe that there are always those who could benefit from a given book. In this case I think Wiley company needs to hear the message. This book is no bargain at even 20% of the list price!

Michael Chernick ... has written this book which may be considered as a first complete account of the Bootstrap methods since Efron's seminal paper in 1979. Chernick has used the Current Index to Statistics CD ROM, and several other search engines ... to collect all journal papers and books that have any relation with the Bootstrap. The result is a list of 1600 references of which more than 600 are actually cited in his book. Apart from this, I found his book interesting to read, especially his sections on the error rate estimation in two-class discrimination problems leading to the so-called .632 estimator (which is one of the big succes stories for the bootstrap), and the applications of bootstrapping in Kriging, analysis of mixture models, censored data analysis, missing data problems, and Bayesian bootstrapping. Finally he devotes a chapter on situations when Bootstrapping might fail, such as in the case of extreme value estimation.

This is an introductory and coincise text in differential topology. While for beginner or advanced students, this text should probably be accompanied by more descriptive texts to developper this matter.

I originally bought this book because I wanted to see a more modern treatment of Morse theory, as contained in Milnor's book. Hirsch provides just that, and much more. It's really readable, and doesn't require too much differential geometry to understand.

My one comeplaint with this book, and the reason it didn't get 5 stars, is that Hirsch uses a bit too much functional analysis in his book. That's just my taste, and I could be wrong, but I'm not too keen on learning what a "jet" is in the mathematical sense. I don't even really like to fly.

The book is very nice in appearence. I'm sure it looks very impressive on my shelf. Many women have commented on it's nice burnt orange color, though it does not match my older springer GTM books.

Hirsch has assembled a very fine text which is suitable for a second year graduate mathematics course in differentiable manifolds. The development and presentation of the material is quite accessible.

The prerequisites or co-requisites for this book are a solid background in general topology. I highly recommend Munkres' Topology (2nd Edition). You'll also need a good understanding of analysis as you might find in Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis. It's helpful to know the basics about vector spaces and their duals, and I recommend Hungerford's Algebra for this. Finally, for the material on intersection numbers and Euler characteristic, you might like to know something about homology and cohomology. A good basic reference for this is Munkres' Elements of Algebraic Topology.

The author begins his study with an introduction of differential manifolds and maps in Chapter 1. Hirsch introduces the tangent space rather intuitively, but his formal definition in terms of equivalences class of triples is not intuitive. This may also seem strange to readers who think of a tangent vector as a first order differential operator. The highlight of the first chapter is a very nice, geometrically motivated prove that smooth compact n-manifolds can be smoothly embedded in 2n+1 dimensional Euclidean space.

The main aim of Chapter 2 is to study when a smooth map of manifolds can be approximated by an embedding. This is technical, but crucial material needed for the important study of transversality. To achieve this, the author carefully studies the topology of the spaces of maps between differential manifolds. In order to show that (weakly) closed subspace of maps of manifolds is a Baire space, the concept of an r-jet and the r-jet space are introduced.

Chapter 3 is a short chapter which focuses on the all-important concept of transversality and general position. The key to showing that differential maps can be approximated by transverse maps is the Morse-Sard Theorem. The author gives a very nice treatment of this and is carefully only to introduce the simple notion of a set of measure zero and not get side-tracked by a discourse of Lebesgue measure theory.

Up next, the notions of tubular neighborhoods and collars are studied by introducing the general concept of a vector bundle in Chapter 4. Basic properties and construction techniques are introduced before covering orientability. The tubular neighborhood is defined and shown to exist. Basic isotopy properties of the tubular neighborhood are studied. The chapter concludes with a study of collars on manifold boundaries.

Chapter 5 - 8 are really tantalizing chapters, especially for readers of Rourke and Sanderson's Introduction To Piecewise Linear Topology. Chapter 5 covers some basic algebraic topology concepts such as the degree of a map and intersection numbers. Chapter 6 covers Morse theory and attaching handles. Chapter 7 introduces the notion of a cobordism and Chapter 8 studies the isotopy extension theorem.

Equipped with the basic ingredients of the last 4 chapters (plus the Whitney Trick), the reader is now fully equipped to understand Smale's proof of the H-Cobordism Theorem and the proof of the Poincare Conjecture for homotopy spheres of dimensions > 5. This material could easily serve as a springboard into the modern research literature.

Unfortunately, Hirsch chose not to pursue the H-Cobordism Theorem and instead gives a handle-theoretic proof of the classification of compact surfaces. This seems like a waste of all of the beautiful theory that has been developed. It is definitely a re-hash if the reader has gone through Munkres' Topology (2nd Edition) text and studied the very accessible basic proof of surface classification contained there.

Each section concludes with a nice set of exercises which often continues the thread of discussion. Exercises have difficulty levels marked by a "*". Two-star problems are important results that are usually published in the research literature. Three-star problems are open, unsolved problems at the time of printing (6th printing, 1997).

This book introduces the basic concepts in differential topology, a field that has taken on particular importance in medical imaging, game theory, and network optimization. Although written for mathematicians, and therefore somewhat formal, a good course in multivariable calculus should prepare the reader for this book. The most difficult chapter is probably Chapter 2, where Hirsch studies manifolds by means of function spaces and jets. He does do a good job in this chapter though of explaining the origin and need for partitions of unity and gives examples. He also gives the reader good insight into why analytic maps are more difficult to handle than the C-r case, and wets the readers appetite for further reading on the analytic case. The important notion of transversality is discussed in Chapter 3, which would be good reading for one interested in applications of differential topology to dynamical systems. A more detailed discussion of vector bundles would have been helpful in Chapter 4, which discusses these important objects and the idea of a tubular neighborhood. Sring theorists or those learning the mathematics should get a lot out of Chapter 5, wherein intersection theory in differential topology is discussed. The most important chapter of the book is Chapter 6, which discusses Morse theory. The applications of Morse theory are immense, and cover not only mathematics, but physics via quantum field theory and string theory, economics, and even computer graphics. A short chapter on cobordism follows, which is very nicely written, but a few more words would have been nice on this topic. After discussing isotopy in Chapter 8, Hirsch gives a good proof of the classification for surfaces in the last chapter of the book. A nice book to have for reference if one is interested in the subject for its own sake or for its many applications. It should prepare one for further advanced reading in differential topology, such as the work of Freedman and Smale on the Poincare conjecture in dimesions 4 and above. Those interested in applications of differential topology will be amply prepared to apply these results to the relevant areas, which are many.

It was useful as toilet paper, but not much else.

I wish I had this book a year ago. Most other Tcl books are the "How to create a Tk app", type of thing, that gloss over the details that have you pulling your hair out later. This book goes through the details of how things work, in detail, with excellent "mini-quizes" that illustrate all the important concepts. If you program in another language and need to do work in Tcl, do yourself a favor, get this book and spend a weekend going through it first.

Mind you, as the title suggests, this shouldn't be your very first experience programming. It's not a "learn Tcl in 7 days" book. You want to have some other languages under your belt first. It's aimed at someone who will digest a lot of information fairly quickly. The writing is fun and humorous. The very first chapters are essential, as Zimmer does everything he can to explain the nuts and bolts behind braces, quotes and variable substitutions. He uses these core pieces of Tcl in ways you will likely never encounter in actual Tcl/Tk programs, but serves the purpose of breaking them, soliciting head-scratchingly unintuitive results, etc. so that when you start coding yourself, you wil know to be careful with your syntax-- know what the pitfalls are and avoid them. If you are patient enough to go through all of the exercises, you will have a very strong and solid understanding of this fantastically elegant and programmer-friendly language. The only part I don't like is that the index at the back of the book is too brief. The book partly makes up for this by having 2 more indices used to locate specific functions and procedures. I recommend you also invest in the O'Reilly Nutshell or Pocket Guide books, because this book is more tutorial than reference in nature.

This book definitely has its pros and cons. The main likable aspect is that Zimmer gets right into the language; no long history or touchy-feely introduction. If you've done some programming and are comfortable with typical flow-of-control structures, expression syntax, and have done some shell programming on Unix platforms, you will quickly get a handle on Tcl with this book.

However, Zimmer uses some unusual verbiage (eg., "action families"), and expects the reader to understand quite a bit already. Given that the content organization is a little strange, and that the index is brief, it is difficult to quickly dive in and create useful scripts.

Lastly, on any given topic, the book covers the basic concepts then immediately proffers exercises (for which solutions are given at the back of the chapter). If you work thru this book from start to finish and do the exercises, you will value this book. Personally, I despise exercise-based books; I prefer authors who bring the material to me via explanations and well-documented examples. If I wanted to learn strictly by doing, I'd download the spec and figure it out for myself.

The scans for this reprint were low resolution, and the pages weren't even straightened. I was pretty disappointed. I'm not going to comment on the book content at all. Just the binding and finishing.

One of the first books printed that goes into detail on the wonderful art of massage - used so extensively in the east but only brought to light again in the west in the mid to late 1800's. A valuable book for anyone in the healing arts wanting to know a little history behind a phenomena that is finally becoming an accepted and beneficial alternative form of healing.

I was interested in generally learning more about the art of massage. This is a wonderful book for the curious or the practitioner. It is a great introduction to massage, speaking of the history as well as practical application. Excellent!

Collaboration in International Rural Development: A Practitioner's Handbook, is a most useful reference book for anyone who wishes to engage in or already employed within the field of community development. The book informs the reader as to the wide variety of approaches to development, but takes care to impress on the reader that programmes and projects that are truly collaborative in their conception, design and implementation tend to be the ones that are more succesful.

The book is intelligently written but is also very accesable. The concepts and 'edicts' throughout the text are substantiated and brought to life with many examples from the field. I without reservation, endorse this book.

To the author of the book: Why do you give your own book five stars while asking a question to Amazon? Here is one star for balance.

This is not a review, but a question to Amazon. Why do you list this book as "not yet published" when it has been available for over a year now? As one of the authors, I do not believe it appropriate for me to review it, but if you continue to tell customers it is not available, no one will review it.

This is an excellent, comprehensive dictionary, but it is a little dated now (2005). It was far better than any others available at the time I purchased it (2001).

One of the reasons I purchased this dictionary was because of the IEEE endorsement.

It would be great if in addition to their online database, the authors would publish a second, updated print edition.

This dictionary has a good Russian-English glossary as well. It would be worthwhile to expand it, thus making this book into a true R-E-R computer dictionary.

An excellent working aid for professional translators--even though it's dated, I highly recommend it.

The first review of this book is by one of the authors and not a customer. It seems a little self-serving if you ask me and should not be listed as a "customer" review.

The Comprehensive Russian Computer Dictionary is intended to be a reference for computer professionals, translators, students -- anyone who works with computers using English and Russian languages.

This dictionary distinguishes itself by: a) comprehensive, yet concise, modern lexicon; b) inclusion, in a single volume, of complete English-Russian and Russian-English sections; c) linear-alphabetical structure with multiple cross-references to contextually related translations.

Numerous new terms are included in the dictionary -- terms that did not exist, particularly in Russian, as recently as a year ago. Russian entries include both, native expressions and widely accepted Cyrillic transliterations of foreign terms. Preference is always given to usable translations readily applicable to written and spoken word. Brief explanations are provided to clarify otherwise ambiguous translations.

For the convenience of our readers, the latest version of the dictionary database can be accessed on line at the same website as e-mail address.

The authors, Yury Avrutin and Paul Druker

Schon focuses his book on "reflection in action" and "reflection on reflection in action". While reading this book, he did make me self-aware of many teaching techniques that I currently use, but very little new ground was broken here. Not really worth reading, but may be of some value to new "professionals"

Intense reading, appropriate for anyone involved in educating professionals for the new millenium. Schon puts forth challenges for teachers as well as students and uses some excellent examples to demonstrate his thoughts. He also presents difficulties encountered in the educational process, along with proposed solutions. Allow several days to absorb the information in this text, but definately give it a try if you are teaching at the college level!

The problems that face professionals (physicians, lawyers, architects) are rarely straightforward and clear. They are complex and lack "right answers." Skillful professional practice often depends less on factual knowledge than on the ability to reflect before taking action. Yet most professional schools only teach theory and how to apply it to straightforward problems. Frankly, future professionals are being poorly equipped for the real world.

In this book, Schon argues that professional education should be centered on enhancing the practitioner's ability for "reflection-in-action." Building on the concepts introduced in his first book, "The Reflective Practitioner," Schon offers a new approach to professional education in several areas.

Michael Beitler, Ph.D.
Author of "Strategic Organizational Learning"

An excellent book about tort law. The author revises every issues and explains clearly the subject. Dobbs quotes abundant cases and bibliography too. The content is : Part I. Introducing Tort Law; Part II: Physical interference with person or property; Part III, Operating and altering the tort system in personal injury cases. Finally, I must point out that this book (with 1600 pages) have an accurate updating.

This excellent volume was one of my own study aids during my first year of law school and it's now a valued part of my burgeoning law library.

If you're a One-L looking for study aids, this is a handy hornbook to have. Dobbs breaks the topic up into lots of subtopics and provides easily-digested discussions under each heading. The result is a longer book than Prosser and Keeton, but it's easier to read in many ways.

It's also more up-to-date; Prosser's classic work was most recenty updated in 1984, which means that much of the field (especially products liability) has left it in the dust. However, if you can possibly do so, try to get both: Prosser's more extended discussions are classics in the field, and deservedly so.

And if you want just _one_ text to supplement your casebook, I'd recommend _A Concise Restatement of Torts_, published by the American Law Institute. That's the text to use for "black-letter law."

Ideally, you can do what I did: get all three.

This is biased, pro-plaintiff, and hard to follow. It is a self-justifying, defender of the out of control legal profession. Only 60 pages are devoted to the defense. There is nary a word, beyond brief dismissal, of the devastation wrought upon our besieged Nation by the profession. There is nary a word about changing the unconscionable 80% error rate in tort litigation. There is nary a word about the wackiness that passes for judicial decision making, mind reading, fortune telling, etc.

If you have poor vision, good luck. A very large fraction of the text, often the most important point, is in tiny font in the footnotes. Its physical content discriminates against anyone with poor vision or who is out their twenties. The language is filled with double negatives, inscrutable constructions, undefined latin phrases. Is English the native language of either the author or his editor? My 7th grade English teacher would have made the author stand in the corner.

Memo to the editor: ban footnotes containing more than a reference. Ban double negatives. Take an English as a second language course, for Pete's sake.