Practitioners Books

I bought this because it said "like new." This book looked like it was actually new.

This is a very helpful, comprehensive guide for empirically supported treatments and assessments for a broad range of problems. I have used it countless times and I highly recommend it.

I want to try to overwrite a misguided one-star review that appears to be a mistake but is logged in here anyhow and makes this look at a glance like a crummy book. This book is quite good. It is encyclopedic, and both well written and well edited, even well bound. The authors snipe at what they call "psychoreligions", meaning psychotherapy based on tradition, optimism, convenience, or anything other than hard clinical evidence. Like a mystical belief system rather than scientific knowledge. This seems like a polarizing how do you do for a worthy new way of thinking. Aside from that little slap, this book is a welcome chunk of terra firma. The disabilities with which I am most familiar are tightly and thoroughly described and the treatments that are actually known to work best laid out nicely, all just enough but not too much, with good references. A timely reference.

Barry Boehm is a renowned professor. He is well known for creating Spiral Model. He possesses comprehensive knowledge in Software Engineering field. However!! Despite his fame and knowledge, I don't recommend his books. Unless you are going to do research in Software Engineering, you wouldn't need them. I had to buy two of his books because those are the textbooks for Software Engineering and Economics class in USC. They made the homeworks and exams questions impossible to answer unless I bought the books. Whenever I ask questions to TAs, they always say "It's in the textbook". So am I just venting here? no.. I actually read less than 10 pages throughout the course. That is all I needed for the class and I didn't find anything worth reading after the class is over. I read the two comments below praising this book and they are wrong!!

Dr. Barry Boehm has provided a great deal to the software engineering community. From estimation to economics and many additional topics, his works need understanding by every software engineer. When I read other literature on software engineering, I seem to typically find references to Dr. Boehm. He has influenced many in this field.

I have been a member of the IEEE since 1971 and have developed/tested software since 1969, so I have read dozens of Barry Boehm's articles in the various journals. This were, without exception, all of value, and many quite eye opening, as our professional struggled to advance both the technology and the discipline of software development.

By the mid-80s, Barry's name was so well known to me from my reading that I would immediately read anything with his name attached. In about 1985 I attended a reception held by TRW in a large new building to the south of their main campus in Redondo Beach - invited by someone who told me that Barry "BEEEM" - the manager of some kind of software project - was interested in talking with me. I'd never seen Barry at a IEEE function nor heard his name stated verbally. But I attended the function - a typical function the excessive style of the mid-80s, expensive foods, etc. Then I was led to a small conference room and met "BEEEM." We had an interesting chat but nothing extraordinary. When I left, one of his aides gave me his card... it was then I realized who I had been talking with!

We could have discussed in detail and overview, any number of his papers, but I didn't know what his name sounded like or what he looked like.

This collection has to be termed definitive and certainly comprises a wonderful record of the development and advances of the software engineering community.

Don't expect an in-depth coverage of the theory behind the calculations. Said that, the book is a "concise" presentation of the programs used to calculate special functions present on the CD. For every program, the author shows the underlying equations and the bibliographic sources, plus nice discussions on accuracy/performance when you have the option of several methods.

I would say the book is more useful to the engineer/physicist having to do certain calculations, than to the mathematician/student wanting to learn the ins and outs of special functions theory.

The only dissapointment is a rather poor produced CD: the names of the programs on the CD are in 8.3 format, and I think (not sure though) that not all the code of the driver programs shows up on the CD- there are names of program snippets that are not on the CD- this may be an unnecessary hasle for someone trying to follow the examples in the book to the letter.

According to the author, the practicality of books on functions is often limited by the graphical content, and that books of tables like Abramowitz & 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 Fortran 90 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, or a graphing calculator, without using F90 or Mathematica. But much of this high-priced textbook consists of small blocks of F90 code and everlasting references to Mathematica notebook calls. Part II contains ~200 pages of Mathematica notebook descriptions and ~100 pages of F90 driver programs, not to mention the F90 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. 117 for example). 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 often not quite as insightful as Numerical Recipes, which the author often references. 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. "Atlas" is a well packaged presentation but not quite the insightful, general purpose book for which I had hoped.

The contents are almost identical to an earlier C version by the same name (ISBN 0471002607). The availability in C, F90 and Mathematica is commendable, although it seems that the F90 version may now be out-of-print having been listed at a price for almost two hundred dollars for several years. Programmers of the older Fortran 77 standard will find the level of F90 programming reasonably suited for translation back to the older standard - or even C itself, if necessary. Therefore, Mathematica users in particular will find the used but now heavily discounted F90 copies the much greater bargain.

These two books are very slender and too pricey. There are better review books out there, such as the FNP Certification Review by Kidd, Robinson, and Kish.

My friends and I used Health Leadership's Family Nurse Practitioner Study Question book set which included the ANP, PNP, and WH books. And they were right on target. We felt we were really prepared for the exam when we went to take it. We walked out feeling great!!!!!!!!!Plus the price is excellent. Three (3) books for $70.00 what a great deal. We highly recommend Health Leaderships FNP Study Question Books to get ready for the exam. Go for it.

Thanks HLA for a great prep.

Students from Univ. of MD

Good review before the exam. Gets you thinking in the way the test will be written.

I was rather disappointed with this purchase. Rationales are not given to the questions. I would have also liked to have divided sections on topics and then maybe a couple of full practice tests at the end.

Davis presents a set of essays on various aspects of developing software. But these are not at the narrow technical level of purely programming issues. Instead they concern higher level and more intangible matters. Often involving managing a team.

Especially interesting was a chapter where Davis delved into a software startup that he cofounded. It gave the travails faced by many startups, and not just in computing. Like how they started in a garage and then upgraded to an unfinished office space. And how the founders shared all sorts of information with their employees.

But his company seemed to have two key problems. While they applied for 3 patents, these were ultimately denied by the US Patent and Trademark Office, because others had pre-empted them. So unfortunately, they were not innovative enough. Or, at least, not innovative early enough.

Another problem appears to have been the narrow scope of their products. These did not address critical enough problems at potential customers. Resulting in very few sales.

This not a bad book, but if you happen to read IEEE Software regularly, there is almost nothing new. I have not yet read the whole book, and Davis claims that he has updated the original articles, but most of the stuff has not changed.

On the other hand, if you have not read the articles before, they are quite fun to read, e.g. "Art or Engineering, One More Time".

But I have an issue with the title: the "debates" are mostly some paragraphs at the end of the article, that are more like questions in a text book that might start a debate, but do not really dig into a controversial issue.

I very much prefer, Robert E. Glass': "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering", which contains similiar topics, but is much more to the point. And makes the controversies on his issues much more explicit.

Funnily, Glass, on the other hand, thinks very highly of an older book of Davis': "201 Principles of Software Development"

Women's health is not my area but this book gives me a quick review and provides peritent information on health history, preventive care, ect... It's a good reference to have and fits in your pocket.
thanks

Lots of good information. Not something I could use, however, I asked for a refund.

We love these books at our clinic because they are so brief and easy to read. We had to return the Transfusion book however because it was geared more towards running a blood bank. It did not have enough information for us that was geared towards our technicians for educational purposes.

This book is a excellent tool to everyone who needs learn the basic steps to proceed a blood transfusion, from collection to infusion, of easy way.

Very useful lecture. As a psychotherapist I am now more confident with situations, where I dont know what to do, what to say. I leave space and somehow answers come...It works. On the other hand I see, that there is no need to mistify such people as Tolle ( somehow superficial knowledge about analytical therapies). Anyway: great wisdom, new aproach, fresh look, "evidence based" work.

Matjaz Lesjak MD

This set of CD's would be more suited as a DVD. There are several long pauses, mostly in the first and last CD. Since the listener cannot see Tolle's "presence" we are sometimes not sure what is happening.
This set is worthwhile, but I would recommend "Through the Open Door" as Eckhart's best CD.

This is one of the best practical books out there on how to adhere to accountability in clinical practice. Becoming a true scientist-practitioner is not just a pipe dream although many people would have you believe this. It astonishes me how adamant many mental health practitioners are these days about the "impossibility" of mixing empirical approaches with clinical practice in a balanced, responsible way, especially people who have never tried to do so or know very little about how to achieve this type of synthesis in the first place.

Having studied experimental research designs for the past 6 years and numerous topics dedicated to the subject, I have found this text to be the most convoluted and dense book on the subject of research yet. Rarely do the authors speak in a language that is accessible and meaningful to the general audiences of researchers and pre-researchers. Instead they are overly verbose and convoluted which makes searching for the key points and important concepts like fishing for a needle in a haystack. Here is an example sentence from page 202:

"The multiple baseline consists of a coordinated series of two or more replicated simple phase changes in several different data series arranged by person, behavior, time period, situation or any combination of these, in which the phase changes occur at different points in real time and after different first-phase lengths such that behavior changes are generally seen in interrupted series before phase changes are made in uninterrupted series."

A long, dense run-on sentence which does not succintly clarify the pointin a pithy or concise manner. Translation please! This book contains 386 pages of such text, and although there is valuable information within it, it is not user-friendly in the least.

If interested in research methodology and design, I would instead recommend Research Methods texts written by Zechmeister, Zechmeister, & Shaughnessy.