Practitioners Books

I had to order this book twice. I kept requesting the Hardcover version and they kept sending me the soft cover one; and everytime I had to return the book I had to pay shipping charges and AMAZON pays only cents of the charges. I had used a gift certificate to buy the item and they only returned the money I had paid and not the gift certificate. I guess this is the last time I buy at AMAZON. POOR service.

This impressive 54-chapter volume is the first comprehensive clinical textbook for both students in acute care nurse practitioner (ACNP) programs and practicing acute care NPs. Its focus is on the core skills, pathophysiology, diagnostic reasoning, and therapeutics that comprise the "meat and potatoes" of the ACNP's daily work. This well-constructed, well-written book deserves a close look. It contains many interesting and unique features (useful tables, for instance) and has particularly strong coverage of cardiology and some surgical specialties. As well as being of obvious interest to NPs and NP educators in adult acute care (for whom it's a "must-have" book), and perhaps physician assistants, the sophistication of the coverage in some areas (cardiovascular medicine is one), would make it an excellent choice for clinical nurse specialists and educators.

This book is not one I would recommend for "personal enrichment" use. It is very technical, with the usual statistical graphs, etc. I found the categories considered to be components of dysfunction somewhat interesting.

This second edition is one of the best treaties on the issue of sexual disorders that I have ever read. Completed by the first edition this pack is something that you not want to miss. A great book that does disappoint in some areas[...].

Q. What's there to know about most software-intensive system safety standards?

A. They proscribe what is considered to be an appropriate level of software engineering rigor proportional to the risk associated with the development.

The objectives each standard requires are somewhat different - eg 50128 front loads on formal analysis, DO-178B emphasizes verification of expected behavior etc...

If you really need to know the difference between standards then chances are you need the standards in question. This book won't provide you a better insight than that. If you are in the business of system safety you will quickly outgrow the works of Hermann and Leveson.

Software Safety and Reliability is an excellent resource for those who want to learn more about software safety. By going into detail into the approaches taken by a number of respected organizations, the reader can take the best of each and apply them to their own problems.

The major weakness in the approach was the reliance on software reliability as the major tool. A system safety approach as advocated by Dr. Nancy Leveson is much more complete and effective than reliability. Her latest book, Safeware: System Safety and Computers is a better resource for those who are really interested in the "How to's" of an effective software safety program.

For the Software Safety professional, both references would be essential for your bookshelf.

Although the title promises alot, the results are extremely unsatisfying. A colleague recommended this book and I found it to be so general and basic to the practice of treating trauma survivors that I quickly moved on to other titles. In contrast, Jonathan Shay's *Achilles in Vietnam* handles the depth and complexity of the Vietnam warrior in a much more literate and lyrical fashion. Judith Herman's *Trauma and Recovery* places trauma treatment in a better historical context and provides a comprehensive approach to treating survivors. Fay's book is weak in the patchwork feeling to the flow of chapters. For a more comprehensive and strong coverage of cognitive and behavioral treatments, I strongly recommend the fairly recent volume by Victoria Follette and colleagues (*Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies in Trauma*).

I love this book! It offers a comprehensive look at PTSD in combat veterans, domestic violence victims and sexual assault victims. While I worked at Vet Center as a counselor to combat vets, many of the staff highly recommended this book to me. It offers great insight as to what PTSD is, how PTSD develops and how to treat it. At 172 pages, it cannot be not an end-all book. (PTSD treatment manuals written for therapists can be over 400 pages long) but this book is hard to beat for practical information. I love it as a counselor and still recommend it to clients today. You don't have to have a graduate degree to understand it.

If you are a first time teacher, maybe this book would be helpful, but I have taught 15+ years, and I really didn't learn anything new. I was hoping it would give strategies to help with ADHD students in the classroom, but not so much. It did give lots of research, which I wasn't really looking for.

According to the author, the practicality of books on functions is often limited by the graphical content, and that books of tables like Abrahamowitz & 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 C 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 that came with his computer w/o using C or Mathematica. But much of this high-priced textbook consists of small blocks of C code and everlasting references to Mathematica notebook calls. Part II contains ~200 pages of Mathematica notebook descriptions and ~100 pages of C driver programs, not to mention the C 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. 119 for example), since 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 much less detailed than an explanatory book like Numerical Recipes. 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.

I expect this title, being heavily tied to a particular software package and computer language, will find itself being re-issued in later editions as software inevitably evolves. I therefore wouldn't expect too many individuals paying $175 for what is almost a software book. All in all, a well packaged presentation but not quite the insightful, general purpose book for which I had hoped.

If you need to pass the PRAXIS II subject test in special education in order to receive certification in emotional and behavioral disorders, then this book will illustrate most of the major concepts with one or two exceptions due to its age.

Please get this book cheap in order to save tons of hours (and white paper) printing out information from Internet seach engines.

This book does have useful information, but the way it is formatted makes it difficult to understand. The book does not flow, the information is written through a series of bullet points. There are chapters, so you can go to the subject you want to learn, but within the chapter the information is not organized in a typical "textbook-like" way. Maybe if it wasn't such an in depth topic some bullet points would be beneficial, but hundreds of bullet points just make it harder to learn. Some people may prefer the way the book is written, I find it more of a hinderance then a help. Although it is written more for a vet than a student.

This books is very interesting to me. The members of the group described herein have a very obvious agenda that they are promoting, but I felt that they also wanted to empart some wisdom to the world.

I had totlly mixed feelings about the content. I really liked what the teachers in Part I did, but I felt that Parts II and III had a very anti-White tone.

Interesting, but not beathtaking.

After participating in two European projects with major European aircraft manufacturers and suppliers, the authors have written this book dealing with the development of DEPENDABLE Ada software. This book gives advice on the optimal use of Ada to design dependable software; it is not a presentation of the language.