Practitioners Books

I bought this book because I needed it for my education administration class. I thought it would be another boring book that I would read because I had to. I was pleasantly surprised as I started reading it. The book takes you through a story of a principal and all of the incidents he had to go through. I read the entire book in three days. The story captured my interest. I was reading it for pleasure, not because I had to. I looked forward to reading it every one of those three days. I enjoyed it very much!!!!

This story of Grant Sterling, a fictitious (?) public school principal, reads like a novel as it tells the so-strange-they-must-be-true anecdotes of Sterling's work life. By developing this funny, caring, and slightly imperfect character to follow through his career as principal in several different schools, the author creates an engaging case study of leadership in action. Readers may not agree with what Sterling does--but he will make them think, react, and probably both laugh and cry! Prospective school leaders will get a glimpse at the challenges they will face, parents will gain insight into why principals do what they do, and others interested in education and leadership will be entertained-- as well as stimulated to think. And ALL readers will wish, with some wistful nostalgia, that THEY would have been lucky enough to have had a principal like Grant Sterling!

Not being a teacher or principal, I didn't expect to particularly enjoy this book, but I was delighted to find it funny, touching, and just plain enjoyable! Sterling is a wise and yet humanly flawed main character, who shows us what a challenge it is to meet the day to day rigors of a job most of us take for granted.

I never knew the job of pricipal included so many "hats". Sterling's adventures can both teach and entertain any reader....even those who just want to read this book for fun, and not just as a textbook ( lucky students ). This book should be sold in popular bookstores, not just at the University !!! Super book.

Well written text book. Useful in understanding the role changes that can occur when becoming an APN! Required reading for my graduate program.

The chapters within this book are on relevent topics for the APN student about to assume the APN role. I plan to keep it as I find it a goldmine of information on topics such as precriptive practice, resource management, malpractice insurance, and the law as it pertains to APN. The writing style reads like a nice story, it is not dry. Each chapter is concise and full of relevent information.

This book is very succinct in its assessment on the essentials of advanced practice nursing. The chapters are easily navigated, and the study questions at the end of each chapter provoke further discussion. It is nice to have web-based references, since my course is all online.

I have found this book so full of info. I don't know what I did without it.

Swartz and friends provide a thoughtful and extensive review of the history,methods,and applications of biofeedback practice. Primarily intended for health professionals, the book covers a variety of disorders/medical conditions that can be treated by biofeedback, and provides detailed instructions as to how to treat each disorder. Schwartz has been an integral figure in the development of professional standards for biofeedback practice as well, and the book also addresses this topic, as well as ethic issues. Has proven to be extremely helpful in training and practice. Well written.

If you are going to get into biofeedback as a practitioner you really must have this book. It provides a wonderfully comprehensive, detailed picture of a wide range of biofeedback applications, modalities, issues and techniques. Edited and partially written by Mark Schwartz, founder of the Mayo Clinic Biofeedback program, and Frank Andrasik, both past presidents of AAPB (Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback,) the book offers an encyclopedic amount of information on the most frequently used forms of non-EEG biofeedback. It only has one chapter on EEG biofeedback-- though that one, by Joel Lubar, is an excellent. Even practitioners getting into work which focusses primarily on EEG should buy this book and include in their library, since it offers valuable perspectives on working with the kinds of clients/patients likely to be encountered.

if you are getting into a practice, working with headache, stress disorder, behavioral medicine, etc. then this book should be on your bookshelf.

Frankly, being a bit of a bibliomaniac, I have at least 40 different biofeedback books-- one of the largest libraries on the subject anywhere. I've also co-edited two books on biofeedback myself (published in Russia.) As a biofeedback practitioner since 1972, a biofeedback product inventor, software developer international meeting organizer and entrepreneur, I have recommended the book to hundreds of people and have probably sold, over the years, through my business, at least 300 copies. I know that at least three or four years ago, before the release of the 2nd edition, I heard that over 12,000 copies had been sold. That's pretty amazing for a book of this sort.

other good books on biofeedback include: Basmajian, Fuller-Von Bozzay, and for EEG biofeedback: Wise, Evans & Abarbanel

Software development has grown from a hobby/research level to a vast industry that the modern civilized world depends on. Who cared about quality assurance back 20 years ago? A few. Then in 80-90s the QA boom changed the market. Now, no commercial software development company can exist without QA department.

Every 3-5 year period brings a new aspect to the software development: documentation, security, migration. You name it...

I call this book a 'bible' because it covers almost every aspect of software development. It's big a help for ones who don't want to sink in the ocean of the buzz words.

I picked up this book coz I have read Saran's other work too. Having been in the software field for over 20 years, this book was a refreshing change. It is definitely more practical... the writings on systems and System Thinkers is refreshing. The attention on Quality had some good tips. I also like the way they have started with Failure upfront, and then tried to show ways to eliminate it.

Overall, a book that definitely opens one to think differently.

Saran & Krishnamurthy have managed to accomplish in this work a singularly new and valuable insight: that of bringing to the "art" of designing robust and valid software systems perspectives from the larger body of work and thought around the areas of general (not software specific) systems design, media ecology, even philosophy - that have long existed but (for reasons unknown) never till now been leveraged to add value to the software system's architect/ manager's arsenal of tools and knowledge. Particularly interesting are their inclusion of Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety and quotes from McLuhan's seminal work "Understanding Media" and their contextualization of these to the building of software systems.

In addition, another thing I greatly appreciate in this volume is the candid documentation of learning and thoughts from what is the authors' clearly hands-on experience in architecting and managing engineering lifecycles of complex software systems. They rightly point out that while failures and execution challenges have long been shared across and analyzed in industries other than software and consequently mitigated, that has not been the case for the area of software systems design. They attempt to fill this gap.

It is apparent that the authors clearly understand the challenges faced by techno management and business stakeholders that have long hampered efficiency and execution. They candidly and rightly acknowledge that "the map is not the territory". Rather than offer another complex and elaborate lifecycle management framework, they take the approach of offering a simple "SEE" model that is general enough to be implemented under business constraints. The comments are straightforward and made in context of the environment and business challenges, dynamics of the software industry today (especially applications development) - for instance there is a fairly comprehensive discussion of "insourcing" vs. "outsourcing" as strategic choices and outsourcing business models.

All in all, I recommend this volume, especially since it takes the practical approach of not offering a canned solution to building better software touted as a silver bullet - because none exists - and places emphasis instead on fostering thought and reflection through a number of insights, learning from hard experience, nuggets of wisdom and a general thought and planning model. After 15 years of building and managing the development of complex software systems, it's not often now that I come across a whole lot really "new" or "valuable" (to me) in works of such nature... But because of the observations I made above- I was pleased to discover that this book was a worthwhile exception!

A must have for ANP student or professional. Concise and accurate. Excellent source for collaborative practice agreements.

This is a great book for nurse practitioner students and NPs. The information is very valuable and organized. I highly recommend this book!

This book is a must for any NP in Primary Care Practice. Well written, large print, easy to follow protocols.

A great book to help understand why we behave in selfdefeating ways and how to recognise these habits and apply change

I have a personality disorder and I've found it difficult to change. This book explained why and gave me a concrete method to effectuate change. I read the lay version "Reinventing Your Life" but I found this version more useful. After almost 5 years of therapy with a competent therapist, I felt like a cognitive therapy failure. Now I know that cognitive therapy can work, but not the way I expected it to--not the way it works for many people. No "Ten Days to Self Esteem" for me. I have to work harder, at a deeper level, in order to get better. This book gives practical advice on how to achieve the change I want.

I highly recommend this illuminating and comprehensive guide. Young's ability to integrate various theoretical orientations and provide a clinically systematic, straightforward method for working with maladaptive traits is astonishing. This book rocks.

For a more conversational style that can be used for client homework, check out his companion book, "Reinventing Your Life."

This is a very practical guide for consulting work. There are some usual forms that are free to be used by individuals but unfortunately there was no accompanying CD so they need to be copied or re-typed.

I loved this book. It was written for consultants who provide (or will provide) various kinds of help to nonprofits. More specifically, the help provided falls into two broad categories: help for nonprofit programs, and help with organizational issues like management structure, finances, fundraising, etc. And the help one can get from reading this book will definitely help strengthen the quality of their consulting to nonprofits.

The book was split into just four chapters. I would have liked it better if it had been split into the following nine chapters (each of which received a summary in the book):

1. Consulting roles, dynamics, and ethics
2. Consultation and the nonprofit sector
3. Contracting
4. Gathering and analyzing data
5. Planning the work
6. Implementing and monitoring
7. Sustaining change and evaluating impact
8. Terminating the consulting project
9. Managing your consulting practice

For two years I worked as a consultant to nonprofits. I worked for a firm that provided capital campaign direction to nonprofits involved in multi-million dollar capital campaigns. So much of what I lived and experienced during those two years I found written about in the pages of this book. I found the blurbs interspersed througout the book covering quotes from 30+ consultants from across the US made the book special. Without them I think the book might have gotten a 3-star rating from me.

Since the 1970's the hiring of consultants by nonprofits has become part of doing business in the US. And this book does a wonderful job answering what the most common kinds of consulting are. I can say that when I made the move to nonprofit consulting for two years I was not prepared for the culture shock. For-profit consulting is all about getting the job done quickly and competently. Little sugar coating of the services is required. But in nonprofit consulting people skills exuded by the consultant are so critical and important. And this book explains the difference in the consulting styles. The writing of this book was necessary because of the people skill factor in nonprofit consulting.

Dealing with a nonprofit executive director is not equivalent to dealing with a for-profit CEO. In the nonprofit sector the real power is usually held by the nonprofit Board. A savvy consultant will always keep this in mind. And after reading this book they won't forget it. Deal with the Board! And at page 29, Diane Brown is quoted as saying that if she bid on a whole project with a nonprofit that she usually took a bath. Why a bath? I say because she was dealing with a nonprofit. You have to approach nonprofits differently as a consultant than you would a for-profit.

I would have liked the book better if the title of the book had been "Consulting to Nonprofits." Consulting "with" a nonprofit makes me think of someone going to a nonprofit for advice. And the instant book is about consultants providing advice to nonprofits. 5 stars!

Not only is Lukas's book easy to read and engaging, it has gotten me very excited about my career. Lukas draws not only on her own wealth of experience, but also on the experience of countless other consultants. This adds a depth to the book that I never expected. Instead of reading about one person's style of consulting, I am privy to expertise and stories from the trenches of the pioneers in the field. The worksheets, examples, appendices and bibliography will serve me well in my career. I anticipate that this book will be a constant resource for me - it will look dog-eared and well-used in no time at all!

I have spent my entire career writng and teaching about the therapeutic relationship, and this is one of the best books by far on the subject. Her thinking is bold and progressive, and she has done the work to support it. I highly recommend this book to any therapist in training, any practicing psychotherapist, or anyone interested in learning more about psychotherapy or other intimate relationships.
Avrum Geurin Weiss, Ph.D.
Director, Pine River Psychotherapy Training Institute
[...]

The author provides an insightful review of countertransference responses to trauma victims and discusses appropriate use/management of same. I found the book to be readable and interesting. This material has been very useful in working with trauma victims and in supervision of clinical staff.

Connie Dalenberg is a brilliant research-clinician and this, her first book, is absolute proof. Don't miss it.

John Forester's latest book entitled "The Deliberative Practitioner encouraging Participatory Planning Process", (MIT press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 1999) develops the key ideas of his earlier writings on participatory planning processes by examining the challenges and difficulties of planning in the midst of contested power relationships.

Forester perceives planning as the effort to build consensus towards commonly perceived goals. Since the context of the planning is always fraught with differences, conflicts and inequalities, a planning process necessarily shapes opinion, creates value, transforms not just material conditions but human relationships.

The emphasis on democracy and participation is central to Foresters search for effective planning practices. Keenly sensitive to a world 'riddled with racial violence and discrimination with vast differences in levels of political organization and mobilization', Forester highlights the significance of public deliberations that give space to plural voices and strengthen democratic practices. Adversarial situations are not predetermining. They can be negotiated towards collaborative action. Deliberative planning is seen as a process of learning together to craft strategies towards greater community good. Forester's concern with planning focuses on the issues of rationality, emotional sensitivity and moral vision. Forester defines rationality as an interactive and argumentative process of marshalling evidence and giving reasons. By ethics, Forester understands not a system of fixed codes and predetermined standards, but the continuous allocation and recognition of value inherent in every pragmatic choice assessable by its quality of action and consequences. Emotional sensitivity is seen as a source of knowledge and recognition. "Deliberative practitioner" highlights these issues in a 'live' way by using 'stories' as a narrative method because stories deepen our understanding of planning as a human interaction. Stories bring into play our dual roles of actor and critic, crucial to planning. By capturing situations in their complexity, Forester sensitizes our perceptions to the significance of many non-formal processes and the elements of unpredictability and surprise in planning cautioning against a 'rush to interpretation' and simplistic cure-alls.

Forester's book makes significant contributions to the discussion on participatory planning. The stories he selects indicate how planners can through their technical inquiry, explicit value inquiry, and learning about social identities succeed in a pragmatic synthesis of rationality, ethical judgements and emotional sensitivities. Forester's book has special relevance to developing contexts, fraught with unevenness, caught between their indigenous cultures and the new cultures that the culture of external development aid brings with it. Development projects in such contexts, under the pressure of measurable, time-bound performance indicators, tend to abandon the process of deliberative planning. Forester's book reminds the planners in contexts of developing economies, of the need for culturally-sensitive planning process if sustainable development has to happen. It underscores the possibility and need of cross-context learning. It also reminds that in a situation of unequal relationship, participatory planning can be said to be successful only if existing relationship have been transformed through greater transfer of power to those who are the subjects of planning. Forester's book creates an effective, innovative way of educating planner, using theory and practice, the general and the particular, to mutually illuminate each other. Finally, and most importantly, it bridges the gap between theory and practice in a way that makes practice insightful and theory relevant, each enriching the other. It restores the practitioner to the centrality of planning discourse, and in doing so, the importance of people in planning.

Once I started reading this book I could not put it aside for long. Perhaps this is because so many of the insights that the author offers on what practioners of deliberative planning and rural development actually do resonates so much with the work I am involved with in Indonesia and the Philippines.

Unlike many other books I have read on planning and development, this book relates stories of planners' real world experiences. It appears that most of the skills practitioners use to deal with the diversity of interests in the face of conflict are rarely taught in universities or textbooks. One wonders where practitioners learn what they do best.

While a solid professional background is necessary, planners must also use improvisation to deal with deliberative processes which involve many stakeholders. What I enjoyed most about this book, unlike many others, is that it contrasts rationality with emotional sensitivity, calculation with improvisation, all of which are necessary for good practice.

The author aslo addresses an often overlooked aspect of deliberative processes in the design professions, that is, how to balance pragmatism in contexts where there has been a history of injustice towards particular groups.

The book makes use of extensive practical experiences of real-life planners and attempts to draw theory from that praxis. These experiences are just as fascinating to read as the authors' insights into theory. It's like being immersed into a deliberative dialogue.

As Forester explains in his Introduction makes, the title of his book is an intentional reference to Don Schön's path breaking The Reflective Practitioner. To use a trite cliché, that his book begins where Schön's book left off. There is, on the one hand, a remarkable similarity between the way Schön frames the situation the planner faces on the one hand, and Forester's description of the planner's world and his concept of deliberation on the other. The difference is in Forester's upfront, no-illusion understanding of the conflict-ridden nature of the world of planners and policy makers. Where Schön's reflection-in-action can, perhaps somewhat unfairly, be read as an improvement of the received view of professional knowledge as the sage expert who solves complex problems for clients in need, Forester has no illusions anymore about the moral and instrumental bankruptcy of the expert model. This becomes nowhere as clear as when we look at the examples each author uses. Where Schön uses one-on-one encounters between a psychotherapist and his supervisee, or an architect and his student, Forester examples include a bitter, entrenched fight over urban development in the Oslo harbour, a black home buyer counsellor in the overtly racist environment of a low income white settlement house, or housing improvement among poor campesinos in rural Venezuela.

Between Schön's and Forester's book lie almost twenty years of massive social, economic and political change, and, in its wake, almost twenty years of disenchantment, if not disillusion, with the role of politicians, administrators, and experts in the public domain. The world that Forester's planners or today's administrators inhabit is the fragmented, pluralistic, adversarial world that has eroded the steering capacity of central governments and that transferred policymaking power to a fragmented field of social and political actors. It is a world that has become so complex and tightly coupled, that the only thing that seems certain to policy makers is that their actions will generate massive unforeseen effects. A world in which the "privileged" knowledge of experts time and again dramatically fails to foresee or solve social and technical problems, and in which, consequently, citizens no longer take the authority of experts for granted. A world, moreover, in which debates about policy solutions are often less about the effectiveness of solutions as about the nature of the problem or the identity of the parties involved. As Forester makes clear, any theory of planning or policymaking or public administration that aspires to even a modicum of social or political relevance, has somehow to come to terms with this world. Listen to the way Forester, subtly commenting upon Schön, sets the stage for his book: "As planners work in between interdependent and conflicting parties in the face of inequalities of power and political voice, they have to be not only personally reflective but politically deliberative too."(1999: 2) Planners, in order to be effective in this pluralist and conflicted world, have no choice but to work with others in an open, transparent and mutually respecting way.

So what does democratic deliberation in the real world of politics and administration entail? Without being exhaustive, let me just touch upon some of the more startling insights of this rich and rewarding book. First, deliberation is more than debate and dialogue; more than the opportunity of being heard. (1999: 115) It is above all active participation in joint problem solving situations. Despite the practical stance of the book, it's key argument is epistemic and circles around the twin notions of unpredictability and complexity. Actors have no choice but to immerse themselves in the messiness, ambiguity, and open-endedness of practical situations. Not only are they literally captives of the everyday world, but the social-technical complexity of most public problems is such that it discounts any general problem solving strategy, and demands from the actors' immersion in the rich, diffuse detail of concrete situations. Knowledge, thus, is essentially local and relational.

In line with the book's epistemic theme, Forester argues that an important part of participatory inquiry consists of telling stories as a special, pragmatic kind of knowing. Much has been written in the last two decades about the role of stories in providing meaning to unstructured, conflictual situations. Forester is particularly insightful about the central role of storytelling in working through everyday political situations. Stories, he tells us, are not mere representations of meetings or encounters between planners and their clientele. Instead, stories are generative; they open up possibilities and close off unwanted or unfeasible lines of action by helping the actors narratively explore the complexities and contradictions of the situation at hand as it is situated in its proximal and distal environment. As Forester puts it, with a particularly happy phrase, stories do all sorts of moral and practical "work": "descriptive work of reportage, moral work of constructing character and reputation (of oneself and others), political work of identifying friends and foes, interests and needs, and the play of power in support and opposition, and, most important. ...deliberative work of considering means and ends, values and options, what is relevant and significant, what is possible and what matters, all together." (1999: 29) Stories are, thus, the prime means for practical judgement. They retain the rich detail that we need for a valid assessment of the situation at hand, yet, by situating the concrete event in a wider moral and causal landscape, stories allow us to connect the particular with the general, the concrete situation with the more general standard. In addition stories allow the actor to explore the emotional dimensions of his actions, both for himself and for others.

This is a must buy book for both kinds of people: students or people in academia and practitioners who want to understand different type of risk they face at a macro or micro level. The reasons I like this book on risk management better than thousand others already out there are following. I like to describe this book as having two sections, both the sections are very important and people can focus on either depending on what they are looking for. The first part of the book provides a very good understanding of the risks faced by managers, for example risk managers, head of a trading portolfio or a desk or even CEOs. Very often these people face risk which are hard to quantify or even understand and are not often talked about. The author draws from personal experience and provides interesting case studies,. which makes this part of the book a pleasure to read. I learnt about model risk, reputation risk and other such risks which typically a junior person on a trading desk is not exposed to. So this understanding is very valuable in order to communicate with your boss or to get more insights about risks that management may care about.
The Second part of the book focusses on risk management of different type of instruments, instruments range from plain vanilla to complex path dependent options. It spans through assets classes as well. As promised by the author, the level of mathematical and quantitative background required is kept to the minimum. The text provides intuition about what market variables or market moves a specific instruments depends on rather than complex formulae to price such instruments. For somebody like me, who has a little more mathematical background than an average reader, the text points to latest research or specific papers that I can explore if I want to flex my quantitative muscle.
The book is full of very interesting exercises and case studies, which are truly practical. This is something which is completely different from many texts that I have seen on this topic.
Overall, I highly recommend this book to anybody who has anything to do with trading financial instruments.

Allen's book is absolutely phenomenal. Most of the risk management books out there are too technical to be of any practical use. Allen truly focuses on the practice of risk management and gives us insights on how to be a truly good risk manager. Traders could benefit from his insights as well. I particularly liked his breakdown of linear vs. non-linear risks, and liquid vs. non-liquid positions. In terms of the practical risk management of options (vanilla and exotics) I haven't seen anything this clear and this comprehensive. The accompanying CD is an absolute blessing in order to fully understand the concepts like price vol matrices, etc. This should be a required additional reading for all students in financial mathematics/MBA programs around the world! Well Done Mr. Allen!!

Allen delivers the most insightful look at market risk management for dealers since the Group of 30 Report. While other books are taking on an increasingly bureaucratic tone when it comes to risk management, Allen is refreshingly proactive. I really like the treatment of valuation reserves. His discussion of managing spot, forward and options risks bridges the gap between what a trader is thinking and what a risk manager should be thinking. This isn't a book for the sort of risk manager who hasn't been on the trading floor in a few months. It is a tactical book for the pro who works shoulder to shoulder with quants, traders and salespeople. Note that the book is qualitative. For the quantitative side of all this, see Holton's landmark "Value-at-Risk".