Practitioners Books

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"

I have worked on several projects developing E-commerce sites. I am currently in a project management MBA program and purchased this book as alearning tool. The author knows nothing about the Internet. You will not learn anything from this book. If you must spend the money buy a pack of gum for $23.00 and you will get more for your money!!!

This guide provides the detail and 'meat' that is terribly missed in the PMBOK. The PMBOK provides a foundation where as this guide will help you get to the 'what', 'when' and 'how' to apply a project management methodology. If you are running a project that involves software development, network infrastructure or any other techical project type, this guide will literally run you through the set up of your project, provide excellent tools for tracking and monitoring the project and reporting to senior management, and last but not least, step by step work instructions. I need to point out that this guide is valuable for ALL projects, regardless of the industry you are in - simply because it contains the detail that is so lacking in the PMBOK. I have used a number of the tools and applied-adapted some of the excellent work instructions in one of my projects. It was a tremendous help.

At last a Project Management book that focuses on Internet related projects! This book has all the practical knowledge I needed. It covers the entire life cycle of the project from initiation to close out. The book is well organized and has some great examples which are easy to use and very informative. Highly recommend it to anyone who is managing the entire project or if you need to understand the overall process flow of any good project plan.

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.

I purchased the Review CD to help me prepare for upcoming boards. This CD did not meet my expectations. The sound quality was very poor so I had to read the power point presentation which did not come as a full page. The material can be printed and you can folllow the lecture but the whole purpose of purchasing a CD is to listen to the material over & over until it sticks. This was not the case. I could have very well bought a book for less than half the price. This product is overpriced and does not live up the expectations. By the way I still need to go and buy a review book. Something needs to be done about the audio and the size of the page of the power point presentation.

Excellent review of pediatrics. I am actually studying to be a FNP and used this course for my pediatric portion and found the information useful. I did not find navigating around the CD rom easy, but once I loaded everything onto my computer the materials were great

Material that was provided was good, but the entire coarse was not audio as presented. Only half of the lecture was provided; CD would go to next scetion mid sentence. However, all the notes were available to print.

The best compilation of information for differential diagnosis for acute care nurse practitioners. Easy to read and follow. Great for preparing for boards as well. I keep this close to me always. Great reference for ACNP and adult NPs as well.

This is by far the best and most concise guide created specifically for the Acute Care Nurse Practitioner. I highly recommend it and the classes held by Dr. Barkley.

Some of the information contained in this manual is helpful and informative - but I also noted some marked errors. (I'm not that smart and don't pretend to be, but some of these errors are common knowledge.)
However, these discrepancies are significant in that anyone following some of these outdated guidelines could actually do much more harm than help - and in situations where the condition isn't frequently encountered - well, that's EXACTLY when someone would consult this book.
For example - in the section on toxicity - specifically theophylline toxicity, page 824-5, the guidelines are more than just plain wrong (according to some famous and well respected toxicologists and ED MDs) but would actually prevent the patient from receiving prompt and lifesaving treatment. While acute theophylline toxicity is not especially common anymore; it can be a severe, life-threatening event. In severe toxicity, emergent dialysis and potassium replacement are urgently needed, not syrup of ipecac. Syrup of ipecac/ activated charcoal is worse than useless - (since toxicity causes violent, repeated emesis- it actually exacerbates the severe hypokalemia that characterizes theophylline toxicity*.) But this is just an example of why this book REALLY needs revision and updating.
In addition - the sources listed for this section of the text show an inadequate research base for the information provided - there is not one text that refers to toxicology, or specific aspects of the toxicity related to this particular medication. It's just a nonspecific application of general treatment of most toxicities - using a basic Internal Medicine primer (used primarily by med students) and another general source. I would expect better references and resources to be used in a book like this - which serves as a resource to healthcare providers to treat people!
Without revision, it of little use to healthcare providers because information may or may not be trustworthy. Who has time to go through the entire book to see if the information provided meets national standards for treatment? If we had that sort of time, we wouldn't be purchasing this book.

*Note* I am happy to provide a list of references for all information relating to the pharmacology, and treatment of theophylline toxicity, and toxicology resources which served as a basis for these comments.

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.

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.

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.

This a wonderful reference book, but please don't study for the pediatric boards using this book. I spent months studying from this book, and it did not cover anything that the boards covered! It was time wasted on such an expensive exam!

The "Core Curriculum..." should be at the top of the list for all Advanced Practice Pediatric Primary Care Nurses. This learner selected the book as an excellent resource for preparing for upcoming PNP certification exams!!

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