Electronics Books

This is a great book if you are studying for your CNA. It explains all the clinical work in the detail you will need to pass your test.

I really like this text book it is really useful and answers lot of my questions

This book was fantastic! Very detailed and easy to follow.No question was left unanswered. I highly recommend it to anyone studying to be a nurses aid.

This book is a wonderful guide to get you on your way to becoming a Certified Nursing Assistant. This is a wonderful career to have in the medical field. Helping people as a CNA is extremely rewarding.

Even if you're not looking to become a CNA, this book has excellent information for anyone who is in a caregiving situation. It has information ranging from infant care to elderly care.

I would recommend this book for anyone who wants to pursue a career in the healthcare field or anyone who has someone they take care of.

I am currently studying to become a CNA in the state of Maine. This is the textbook and workbook we are using. I have found this text to be very thorough and I enjoy it very much. I would recommend it to any CNA or CNA student.

Thomas Chavez has done a mssterful job of taking what can be an overwhelmingly complex subject, paring it into understandable and digestable pieces.

This is the most comprehensive work on the subject I have had the pleasure to read. Chavez brings a compassionate common sense to what it takes to overhaul one's health.

I've just read Body Electronics. Wow, this book is solid gold. From the first sentence on the first page all the way to the last paragraph of the last chapter we get magnificent insights and miraculous possibilities, each one built up from solid foundations of scientific fact and careful observation. Everything in clear, rational, step by step bites. Nothing has been dumbed down or skipped over, just clarified and made wonderfully real. His take on the whys and hows of supporting health by eating living foods is especially powerful for me as I've tried in the past and failed. I've already gone raw again. This time I'm gonna win. If you want to be "honest to God" healed, or just want to find out how real healing works, and why, this one's for you. But this great read, as amazing as it is, is just the beginning.

A friend just went though what they call an "intensive" with the author, Thomas C. Chavez. Three days of straight Body Electronics overseen by the master of the form. Awesome miracles for everyone there! I'm taking on the recommendations in the book as my lifestyle, and look forward to joining a Body Electronics group as soon as one forms where I live.

'Body Electronics', by Thomas Chavez, is a masterful work about healing, I dare say one of the best I have ever read. I am currently working toward my Doctorate in the field of Natural Health and have an extensive library of books on Natural Healing that I have spent more than 30 years pouring through with fascination. But, I now see that vast groundwork of prior information as a mere launch pad for the veritable space shuttle of knowledge that Chavez perfectly engineers and ignites into countdown in 'Body Electronics'.

Chavez was a student of John Ray, the brilliant healer who devised the original Body Electronics modality which was based on Ray's extensive research and experimentation with miraculous cures. It is a synergy of techniques with an emphasis on organic, chelated, colloidal mineral supplementation, enzyme intake and 'pointholding' which is a leap beyond accupuncture and accupressure with the goal of thoroughly dissolving the tiny bundles of crytals that form energy blockages and contribute to disease and discomfort on many levels.

Chavez pays admirable homage to Ray, having internalized his teachings completely, while leveraging his own extensive research, training, and experience in the world of Natural Healing as a classically trained Homeopath. He pulls together a vast and diverse body of knowledge that represents his very best attempt at formulating an ultimate healing protocol and lifestyle. Based on all the information I have personally been exposed to through my own passionate studies and practices, this 'very best attempt' is the very best I've ever encountered, beautifully and comprehensively communicated!

As soon as I received this book from Amazon.com, I opened up the book randomly to a paragraph about the healing effect of a Niacin flush on skin injuries such as bad sunburns experienced in one's youth. I then flipped to another random page and read about "blotting" one's teeth, a technique superior to brushing which very effectively cleans your teeth. I flipped to another part regarding the effects of herbs and herbal "remedies", then read about the success of a program that improves one's eyesight naturally, then I scanned through a collection of practical exercises and techniques for manifesting our intended goals that really made sense to me.

Another random flip had me reading about "holding time", an interaction between a parent and child that allows a child's stressful emotions and anger to de-fuse naturally in a circle of acceptance and love, encouraging a lifetime of natural, authentic, healthy emotional responses without all the ills that come from chronic emotional suppression through punishment and subtle guilt and control trips as most of us have experienced as the Western 'norm' in parenting.

I was only a few minutes into my preliminary explorations of Body Electronics and I was already completely inundated with fascinating new information I had never before encountered! I turned to my husband and exclaimed, "I'm SO glad I got this book!" Elegantly expressed concepts gave rise to instant insights, and I found myself already unraveling personal pain and suppression that sprang from my own childhood just as it did for my parents and grandparents.

This book draws on Chavez's many years of living and practicing Body Electronics, which he very effectively shares with his readers, so that they too can see their way to working out their own, constantly evolving cure, which in turn positively effects all within their sphere. Chavez is richly generous with his knowledge, obviously tapping into the mindset of his intended readership and presenting his case with clarity and inspiration. He hands us a pragmatic and usable roadmap for our own personal journey to perfect health, without excluding anyone by being overly spiritual or to far "out there". The more I studied the illustrative examples, the more I began to understand the finer points of the healing process, the multiple, sequential levels of vitality and it's opposite, the levels of consciousness that set the tone for our overall level of health, and the dangerous business of unaccepting attitudes and suppression of symptoms.

As I began the fascinating journey of reading the book cover to cover, I was delighted by Chavez's truly artful way of inviting the reader to look, really look, at many of the basic agreements that we as humans unwittingly buy into from birth. He points out the "Off-Management" behaviors we have inherited, all the ways we ineffectively deal with life's challenges, from the way we parent, to the way we eat, to the way we express emotions and deal with stress, to how we navigate tricky family, group and societal dynamics. Then he offers "On-Management" methods and techniques that have proven very effective, whole ways of thinking that had never occurred to me before. I have seen many authors attempt to describe similar concepts, but the way Thomas Chavez has put it all together rings true and clear. Reading this book was truly a life changing experience, a real gift!

I was discouraged and every activity felt like drudgery. In my early 60s I had developed peripheral neuropathy in my feet and they hurt all of the time. Walking three or four blocks would bring excruciating pain that would last several days. I was taking the maximum level of prescription medication that my doctor would allow. The neurologist said that my feet would continue to get worse unless a miracle drug was found, but nothing hopeful was in view.

Quite by accident-or so it seemed three years ago-I heard of a seminar on the subject of Body Electronics being offered by Thomas Chavez. Having no interest in the subject beyond idle curiosity, I decided to attend. Following the seminar, I decided to become active in a local Body Electronics group. Nothing in my previous life experience had prepared me for the profound physical, emotional and mental changes that would take place and for the enthusiasm for living that would become mine. Today, at age 66, I would not trade this quality of life for anything I have previously known.

After two years of "BE" I returned to mountain climbing, cross-country skiing and mountain biking. I no longer take any of the prescription medications that my doctor recommends. Contrary to conventional medicine (and some alternative therapies) Body Electronics is free of financial burden, but is not free of the need to continuously update one's education. Body Electronics by Thomas Chavez is a wonderful source of practical information about what really makes a difference in our lives. I am most thankful to have this book close at hand.

If you are ready to make changes in your life and are looking for guidance, this is the book for you. This book not only explains what Body electronics is but includes valuable information about diet, emotional healing and physical healing connected to this modality.

.... but I'm undoubtedly too late! Fully fleshed-out characters and compelling, overlapping themes - relationships, personal growth, and the dot-com bubble bursting in 2000. An exceptional read.

This book is simply fantastic. An awesome read. I would recommend it to anyone!

I thoroughly enjoyed this account of the dot.com world. The star of the book for me was the wondrous Sierra who is a former stripper hired into the firm for her obvious attributes. Endowed with more smarts than her resume might indicate, Sierra identifies the power behind the throne, Farouk Kharrazi, who has too much money and one wife too many. Sleeping your way to the top may not be the most ethical business practice, but Sierra uses what she knows best and does an end run around the manager Jonathan Scarver and his right hand man Brad Smith. Ultimately, "Boomtown" comes down to a question of values. No amount of money in the world brings peace of mind, although it can bring a nice luxury apartment in New York City. There is a bit of a high-tech comedy of manners as computer geek Steven Bluestein reads everybody's email and then creates a virus that sends their emails to everyone else. This spirals out of control as the virus spreads around the world, bringing in the FBI to investigate the origins of the hoax. Greg Williams does a wonderful job of painting this world and making us care about it. I kept picturing Marge Helgenberger from CSI playing Sierra in the movie version. Enjoy!

A highly enjoyable, engrossing read, "Boomtown" (not related to the excellent but short-lived NBC series of the same name) charmed and delighted me. Moving quickly through the New York dot.com landscape of the year of the bubble burst, Williams uses his own experience (including perhaps his undergraduate major) to write a story that kept me turning the pages from start to finish -- with great interest -- in one satisfying day.

The ensemble cast includes the functional (and, at times, dysfunctional) protagonist, Brad Smith, the PR vice president for a content-free start up. We never really learn or need to know what it is they are selling; this makes for a good parable about the entire dot.com mirage/mania. Smith provides the central point to the strange populace from his firm, including the duplicitous general manager, the former stripper turned PR assistant, the Middle Eastern investor, the oversexed personal assistant, and the nerdy tech guy. They are an interesting crew and Smith stumbles aimlessly, drunkenly for much of the novel before finding some light at the end of the dot.com tunnel, most of it from a fellow traveler who wants something quite different than what Smith seems to be seeking.

In a parallel world, Nicole Garrison, aspiring actress, leaves her unfaithful boyfriend, spurns a calculating but clueless Wall Street type, earns her big break, loses it, and...well, let's not give away the entire plot.

The crash of the greedy, paper-rich Internet employees of the end of the last century provides good fodder for a "Bright lights, big city" like romp through the bars, bedrooms and refurbished office space that makes New York such an interesting setting for the book, much better than any bone-dry Silicon Valley setting. The characters, perhaps based on Williams' own experiences in this era, may be a bit stereotypical, but they are fun to watch. Sort of like "Sex in the city," only with more realistic work schedules.

Williams provides some personal insight about the dot.com collapse, some philosophy about contemplation, and a beguiling, almost too quick close to the story. The story would make a great movie and the conclusion provides the lead-in to a possible sequel.

A great way to spend a hot summer day.

Boomtown is a great, fast-moving novel that takes place in New York City during the pre 9-11 dot-com bubble. New York City serves as a glittering backdrop for the very compelling characters, the delusional dot-com schemes ("it was another great week for Biz Dev"), and painfully fragile relationships. The characters are entirely believable, and I felt genuine sadness for many of them. They get swept up in something much larger than themselves, and soon find themselves and their beloved city caught up in a new cycle of "creative destructiveness", seeing relationships end, seeing dreams end, but still holding on. This book struck a deep chord with me, and I highly recommend it.

Business Process Change provides a very clear and comprehensive discussion of the methodologies surrounding successful business process management. This has become my new guide for developing a BPM Group within our organization. I very much look forward to more writings by Paul Harmon.

This is about the best Business Process book I have read so far. I worked in a IT transformation for a big Telecommunications company which entailed adopting a new approach to Business Process and Operational Process Development and I found this book very useful. This book with the book Business Process Management - Practical Guide to Successful Implementation provided me with most of the knowledge needed.

I have been leading business process management projects and working in the BPM space since the late 1990's. I found this book to be as complete and well written as any reference could hope to be.

From my perspective, this book does for BPM what Harold Kerzner's books do for project management - set the standard for others to follow.

I think this is the best book that I have seen that allows an organization to consider business process at the enterprise and department level. I have been engaged in business process management in the government for years, trying to define the processes, trying to communicate them, trying to improve them. This is by far the best treatment and guide I have seen. This is what I have been looking for and couldn't find.

In 2004, I worked in a business unit at my company that had experienced a period of declining performance. Our senior management felt that one of the causes was work processes that had become cumbersome and inefficient over the years. I was asked to sponsor a process improvement initiative to try to simplify and streamline how we did work. I didn't know where to start, so I went on a crash course to learn everything I could about improving business processes. I read some great books by Geary Rummler, Roger Burlton, Michael Hammer, and many others. I learned about things like process modeling, process redesign, process improvement, process automation, BPM tools, swimlanes, value chains, CMMI, process owners, Six Sigma, Lean, process architectures--and the role of IT in enabling all of this.

This intense study provided me with a valuable foundation of knowledge, but I still didn't know how pull all of the pieces together. Organizations are extremely complex systems. To improve performance, which approaches work best under which situations? Which tools to use? What skills are needed to improve and redesign processes? What's appropriate, and what's not?

In early 2005, I discovered Business Process Change, First Edition, by Paul Harmon. This book provided me with the big picture perspective of the BPM world that I sorely needed. It helped me to ask the right questions and to structure our process improvement plans more effectively. The issues we have been addressing require long term solutions, and this work continues today. But, we are building an infrastructure that will integrate people and technology into our process change initiatives to ensure the sustainability of our efforts and results.

The First Edition not only helped me organize a more effective process improvement strategy in our business unit, but I also consider the knowledge and perspective gained to be a significant factor in my being selected to lead our relatively new Center for Process Excellence (CPE), a central BPM group located in our corporate offices. The mission of our CPE is to promote a process-based culture throughout our company. We currently lead process improvement and redesign projects to solve specific business problems, and we have begun to develop process modeling skills in our lines of business. We are now focusing on establishing an enterprise business process architecture for our organization and securing executive support for large-scale business transformation.

Thankfully, I now have the Second Edition to consult as we continue on our process journey and take our work to even higher, more ambitious levels. I bought my copy two weeks ago, and while I haven't read it cover-to-cover yet, I have read enough to know that this is not the First Edition with just some cosmetic changes. It is a complete overhaul. It reflects the newest and best thinking in business process change and management today. Like the First Edition, it is a surprisingly clear, practical and useful guide. That's the bottom line for me--what works and how can I use it.

If there was ever a must read book for business process change professionals, this is it.

Following a concise and accurate history of the markets last 2-3 years and the possible developments that may effect participants in the markets.

This book is worth a read, by anyone interested in the markets.

I'm only sorry that I think the political aspects of these changes not happening is not addressed.

Patrick Young looks into his magic eight ball and reveals what the future holds for the financial markets. Very radical and probably very acurate. A must read for those traditional brokers who are contemplating a second house in the Hamptons

As the cover of this book says: Liquidity! Accessibility! Transparency!

The authors take a European perspective to challenge the traditional way that financial markets have operated in the United States and elsewhere. They point out, correctly I think, that the revolution is here. Fully automated markets now do the bulk of the worldwide futures trading. For example the Chicago Board of Trade was overtaken in futures volume by the fully automated German-Swiss EUREX in Frankfurt in 1998. London was charging from behind to take a big piece of the automated futures business as well. Automated trading experiments are going on in a number of other places, as well.

The vision the authors have is captured by a quote from Ludwig von Mises: "Economic history is the story of the gradual extension of the economic community beyond its original limits of the single household to embrace the nation and the world."

This vision is essentially of convergence into one global market, with one clearinghouse, and one regulator to do everything. The need to get costs down will require that convergence as the ultimate solution. How imminent this vision is has to be a guess (the authors convey the vision in the form of a dream), but the stories in the book show how often the complacent, traditional view has been wrong. The authors are good at pointing out the speed bumps that will delay progress, and outline good ideas for better and faster implementation.

But they are definitely tolling the bell in the near future for face-to-face selling. "In the future there will only be electronic traders." They also see a rise of small traders, small banks (doing direct placements of IPOs over the Internet with traders without underwriting syndicates), and greatly squeezed paychecks for traditional investment banking and trading activities.

I found the book to be consistent with my own vision. I was still left with the question of why the transition has not been a faster one. Financial markets should be converging at a much faster rate, if one looks only at the technology and the use of the Internet. Which aspects of human stalls are the worst delayers? Probably the tradition and bureaucratic stalls, because the existing markets and regulators are very slow to see new opportunity. Consider how recently fixed trading commissions disappeared. Those should have been gone in the Roaring Twenties.

If you want good detailed information on the state of the electronic market revolution, this book is essential reading. If you own a seat on an exchange, your pocketbook requires immediate attention.

There is an excellent section on how to prepare for the transition, and another one on the dangers to be cautious of.

Good look in building your wealth faster through more efficient markets!

In reading the book, there are many things that would scare traditionalists in our business. The rules are changing, and unless we adapt as traders and exchanges, we will be doomed. As I have discussions with other board members, and other floor traders, some intuitively understand the coming electronic age. Others pass it off as a purely European phenomena. "It won't happpen here.", is a phrase I hear every day. Brokers and traders see that the computerized competitors are having a tough time gaining a foothold in the American futures market. They rest thinking that their future is secure, and that maybe their margins will be squeezed a little. The revolution has only begun. While some of the positions the book posits seem outlandish, Columbus was seen as outlandish in 1492 too. This is a must read for any person associated with floor trading or an exchange. This also makes good reading for anyone involved in government regulation. Barriers are being broken down. Borders set by politics are not relevant to the sea change taking place in the financial marketplace. The U.S. is the titan of investment capital today, but a government that shackles the growth of the marketplace due to over regulation, is doomed to see all that capital leave for less regulated environs. I am on the Board of Directors at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, so I speak from experience. The revolution has begun, and we are trying to embrace it.

Building on the monthly news and insight from Patrick Young's ADTrading.com newsletter, Patrick Young and Thomas Theys have put together a concise history of recent developments in capital markets, especially the futures markets, and the steady advance of electronic trading. As a longtime reader of the newsletter I have been exposed to most of these ideas on a monthly basis; as an industry executive I have watched the events unfold day by day. Nevertheless, this compilation provides fresh insight into Capital Markets trends.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in an overview of the recent history of the futures, equity and FX markets and a plausible view where the markets are heading.

I would also recommend Capital Markets Revolution to industry insiders who are well aware of the events and ideas discussed, as they can benefit from the framework and view of the future into which current events are placed.

Cons: The book seemed slightly long for what it was, kept reusing the same semi-obscure examples from the writer's experience, and didn't always go in the directions I wanted it to go (for example more detail on world building, settings, or individual story scenes would have been appreciated).

Pros: It didn't matter that it didn't go where I wanted it because it was still very entertaining and unexpectedly beneficial to follow the writer on his path. The book is solid from start to finish and doesn't have a false air of superiority about it; everything is very practical and friendly. Definitely a good read that rewards the effort.

I really enjoyed this book, and I think it's definitely worth considering if you're interested in how stories can be told in video games. I've bought plenty of books about video game design and storytelling. (I'm a programmer who's been making video games professionally for about 10 years -- I wish more people would include their personalbackground in their book reviews...) Some books on game design are written by people who obviously have more "static media" backgrounds like books or movies, and don't understand the fundamental problem of making a story in a situation where the audience has freedom to do what they want. Another problem that a lot of people don't understand is that people playing a video game don't necessarily WANT a story, in the sense that they are playing a video game because of the interactivity, and not to watch a 10 minute cutscene to learn some back story. If they wanted to watch a movie they'd pop in a DVD.

I think the author really understands these difficulties. You want to make an emmersive worl, but you need to do it very quickly. So he talks about dialog, and how to convey as much information as possible in as few words as possible. He talks about how to get the player to sympathize with a chaacter, from the situation that characetr is in, to the design of the character art, to the words that the character says. All of the information is very practical, not like some books that leave you with a bunch of high-level nonsense that doesn't work in a real game. I really appreciated that he wasn't one of these "video games are mindless because they don't tell a story" type of guys. Or acting as if video games need to learn how to tell a story in order to "grow up" like movies or TV have. In a straight up action game or fighter, you don't need as much of a story as you do in a more adventure game. Playing a video game is a just a different experience, and the story has a different role, it's NOT the holy grail like some people think. Rather than trying to tell you how to convert video games into novels, he describe ways that you can inject story without taking away from the inetraction. I think he makes a good case that in almost any game, you can introduce just a bit of characetr depth and relationships, without stopping for a ten minute cutscene, and it adds value to the game.

This author's background was originally in TV, but he also has considerable experience in video games. I felt like he has a good background to be writing the book, and was speaking from experience.

The only negative comment about the book is that I found several of the chapters to be very similar. Like you'd be reading a chapter, and you'd think, "Hey, didn't I just read this exact same thing a few chapters ago?" Actually, you didn't, this chapter is covering a very slightly different topic. In other words, I think he could have consolidated a few chapters, which would have saved me some time. I suppose this makes it easier to jump around, since you don't rely on information from previous chapters. But I found it a little repetitive.

All in all, a really good book for anybody interested in video game design or storytelling in general.

I've known Lee Sheldon for several years. He is one of the most pleasant and knowledgeable people I've met in the game industry, so I was very much looking forward to this book. Suffice it to say that I wasn't disappointed.

Writing for games has a lot in common with writing for other media (e.g., character and theme) and a lot that is unique to itself. Lee does an excellent job of covering both aspects - so much so that I would recommend this book to writers with absolutely no interest in interactive media. (I've read my share of writing books over the years, and this one stands at the top of the heap.)

Of particular interest to me were chapters 3-6 on character and chapter 14 on modular storytelling, the most elegant way I've seen of organizing a linear experience into a non-linear structure. The book also does an excellent job of discussing storytelling in massively multiplayer games and provides extensive background material, much of which is intended to set up and justify Lee's modular storytelling model - rather more background than necessary, actually, since you should be sold on the need for something like modular storytelling long before he gets around to explaining it.

The book's does have a few faults. For example, a couple of the later chapters feel out of place, and the text is dusted with a handful of puzzling and sometimes repeated typos (Eowen? Kalishnakov?) But these are of little consequence and should not detract from your enjoyment.

Highly recommended.

This book is excellent. Sheldon is witty and insightful and his book is a joy to read. I can't really think of anything negative to say, although I should perhaps mention that this book is pretty focused on RPGs and adventure games, since these are the genres which have traditionally relied most on story. Anyone interested in developing their understanding of storytelling in games should definitely pick this book up.

I am working on forming a game development studio, and our team is in the middle of producing our flagship title, an RPG entitled "Revolution's Dawn." I am the main writer of the script, and I just recently finished reading this book. Where I thought my duties as a writer were finished, I now see new openings to provide dialogue and sidequests to fill in the backstory, plot gaps, and other means of enrichment that I didn't see before. Because of having read this book, my team and I can now take this game and bring it into the realm of what we intended it to be-a vehicle for telling a story.

While the title of the book is "Character Development and Storytelling for Games," the book really focuses more heavily on the latter. I was expecting the former, but by no means am I complaining! I have been able to break through blocks in my own role as a writer for this project.

If you are looking for the "right" way to write your story, you won't find it here. What this book does instead is to open doors, and then let you decide whether to walk through them or not. And even then, you still have to choose for yourself what to do once you've walked through them. If you are looking for new openings in crafting your game _and_ writing your story(and synthesizing them both together), this is the book for you.

This was a huge help to me to get through some tough levels that I was really stuck on. It is not so much a "cheat" as a walkthrough of what is going to happen. I only gave the book four stars because I thought it could have gone over actual in game controls more thoroughly.

This is a really good book i don't think that i cold have beaten the game without this book it tells u all about the units and what to do in each of the missions

It includes instructions on how to beat the individual missions, tips for playing the AI, differences between Nod and GDI. A great book for a great game! A definite buy!

This book helped me beat Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun. It helped because I was stuck on the last GDI mission and the sixth Nod mission. The book helped me beat these missions so that I can go on.

This book helped me beat Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun. It helped because I was stuck on the last GDI mission and the sixth Nod mission. The book helped me beat these missions so that I can go on.

Having been a Pinball addict since my teens (too many years ago), I bought this book to re-live some of those memories. I was not disappointed. It is full of information on all types of machines together with excellent colour pictures. Many of my favourite pinballs of the sixties and seventies (but also modern ones if you prefer those) are featured together with explanations of what made them special.

The only problem is that it brought back my enthusiasm to such an extent that I went out an bought my own machine, so this book cost me a lot of money!

If you like pinball, you'll LOVE this book. I own several bookson my favourite hobby and this one is by far the best. It covers allaspects of the silver ball and has a great many beautiful colour photos.

I own over 10 different pinball books which I've bought over the years but none of them comes REMOTELY close to this one. This is an exhaustive book which has over 300 jam-packed pages of information. Every imaginable feature that has ever been in a pinball machine is documented in great detail throughout the book. There is even a chapter which talks about and lists every video pinball game ever made for home video game systems and PCs! If you have even a passing interest in pinball machines, you must have this book. Period. The price seems a little steep, but when you hold the actual book in your hands, you'll know where that money went...

Stunning!

Pinball? Strange word grouping. I don't really see how a pin can be a ball, but I am just one little guy trying to think this out. No matter, Keynote told me all about the pinball arcades and games of this nature. And he bought me this terrific book. Now I know a whole lot about all kinds of balls made out of pins and the way you can play games with them. This was very cool. I like this book very very much. And you will too.

Well layed out, informative, impressive amount of detail. The author's love of every part of the game shines through on every page. A truly great pinball book.

This book has got to be one of the best illustrated wiring books. I have used this book for multiple minor projects. The photographs allow you to follow closely and clearly as to the correct process for wiring. I lost my 1st book to rain, just ordering my office reference book now. Now I have a "working copy" and a home reference copy (safetly tucked away). The book is good enought that I bought it twice.

Very informative book which will be referred to constantly. I found muliple tasks which needs to be repaired and/or added to my older home. Anyone can repair or replace electrical problems within their home or garage with the help of this book. Not only did it inform me of electrical projects, it explained cable DIY projects. Stanley did such a great job with this book, I am going to order more DIY books for other repairs for my home. Thanks, Stanley and Amazon for offering this book at a resonable price.

All I planned to do was to add a new outlet in my bathroom. NOW, however, I plan to add a few, add a new circuit to the panel box, add a few outdoor lights and install 3 recessed lights above my bed in the master bedroom along with a switch so I can turn them off before I go to sleep. Heck, I should make it a two-way switch so I can turn them on when I come in the room.

This book started me from the beginning - planning and how to ensure I wasn't putting too much on one circuit. Explains basic concepts if you care to read them, and how to fix, add or change just about anything electrical in exactly the detail needed to be confident you can do it.

I'm a mother of two trying to re-do my bathrooms and not have to fork out 150k (the estimate I got for a bathroom remodel). I am buying the other Stanley books now - tiling is next!

This is a really well designed text. Very userfriendly. They talk you through sections that might give you pause, and give you plenty of well-taken photos to document what they mean/for you to look for.

The honest truth is, 99% of home wiring can be done by you, with the basic tools you probably already own. This text will help you get those done. From the planning, to the purchasing, to the work itself, just take a deep breath, and a few bookmarks handy.

Because the information in these types of books is often the same (DIY is DIY after all); the presentation becomes very important. The Stanley series of home improvement books has step-by-step instructions with a large volume of clear photos and diagrams. I learned how to install a ceiling fan using this book and feel confident about doing basic electrical wiring in my house.

If you are a beginner, read all the safety instructions... very sensible advice.

The computer and natural language is a sub-domain of computer science in which one of the major aims is to imitation of man, focusing on two topics: psychology and linguistics. If we wish the machine to do something, we must tell it what to do and it must be able to understand us. The easiest way to tell a computer what to do is to give it a program to run. "Humans, if they are machines at all, are vastly general-purpose machines and what, is most important, they understand communications couched in natural language." Work must be done for a machine to understand natural language. "Man's capacity to manipulate symbols, his very ability to think, is inextricably interwoven with his linguistic abilities." A machine must be able to extract semantic content from the messages impinged upon it, adopt a syntactic structure of a visual scene and adopt a certain conceptual framework. The question of what comprises a visual symbol is in question. The developer defines the elements of the machines primitive vocabulary. Robert Lindsay said, "high quality translations could be produced by machines supplied with sufficiently detailed syntactic rules, a large dictionary, and sufficient speed to examine the context of ambiguous words for a few word in each direction."

Eliza was a program consisting mainly of general methods for analyzing sentences and sentence fragments, locating so-called keywords in texts, assembling sentences from fragments and so on. Eliza created the remarkable illusion of having understood in the minds of the many people who conversed with it.

In ordinary two person communication, each has a working hypothesis, a conceptual framework, concerning who the person is and what the conversation is about. The hypothesis serves an indicator of what the other person is going to say and what he is going to mean by what he is about to say. Often, the erroneous prediction is falsified before the sentence is completed and the listener makes corrections on the fly and virtually unconsciously. Each brings into mind an image of the other person, the image consists in part of the other's identity, attributes based on evidence derived from independent life experiences of the participant. "Our recognition of another person is thus an act of induction on evidence presented to us partly by him and partly by our reconstruction of the rest of the world; it is a kind of generalization". Eliza starts with the hypothesis that the system does understand.

Rogar C. Shank, based his theory on the central idea that every natural-language utterances is a manifestation, an encoding, of an underlying conceptual structure. Understanding an utterance means encoding it. The theory proposes a formal structure for the conceptual bases for making predictions. The theory creates formal rules for converting utterances into a conceptual base. One difficulty is that every individual's belief is constantly changing mean that an individuals entire base of conceptions is changing. "When a person enters a conversation he bring his belief structure with him as a kind of agenda."

Terry Winograd, of M.I.T, was working with a group were building a computer-controlled "hand-eye" machine; the computer could see its environment and manipulate objects in its environment by means of a computer-controlled mechanical arm. Winograd design and coded the software to enable humans by natural language, too instruct the computer, how to manipulate and explain events with respect to the toy world of blocks, in a natural language. "The robot can manipulate toy blocks on a table containing simple objects like a box." The robot could be ask to manipulate the objects, doing such things as building stacks and putting things in a box. It could be questions about the configuration of blocks on the table, about events that were going during the discussion, and it could be told simple facts about the objects which could be stored and used for reasoning later. The conversation goes on within a dynamic framework - "one in which the computer is an active participant, doing things to change his toy world, and discussing them."

An authority in the field of artificial intelligence and computer science in general, Joseph Weizenbaum provides insight in proceedings in that area but mainly warns about what these developments may lead to. It is very entertaining to read this book some 20 years after original publication and see how many of what we believe are recent developments were actually implemented back then already (on one or two priceless "super" computers).
Very dogmatic and patronizing at times, it still is a good read if only for the thought provoking ideas like: if electronic computers would have been used in the manhattan project, today we would assume that development of the atomic bomb would have been impossible without it.

This book is a basic philosophical treatment of computing. I think that it should be included as a basic part of any Computer Science / Computer Engineer curriculum in respectable universities, along with Roger Penrose book, The Emperor's new mind, it creats a better understanding of what is human and what is mechanic for all those who need to know it.

Should Computer Science / Engineering freshmen/women in universities know? My answer is YES, in their first year !

I read parts of this book, thinking highly of it. I thought one particular passage from it, as quoted in Gates by Stepehen Manes and Paul Andrews, particulary stood amid the limelight: [t]he computer programmer . . . is a creator of universes for which alone is the lawgiver. . . .No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage of field a battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.

This is perhaps the best book ever written on issues of computer technology and modern life, in the sense that it says a lot of really important things and is also very readable by both lay persons and technical persons. People like Jacques Ellul, Arnold Gehlen et al. have written very important texts in this area, but are much less "accessible". If the truth only counts when it is absorbed by persons, Weizenbaum's book stands out as being engrossing and a pleasure to read, as well as saying what needs to be said. It is very sad that the second edition which was supposed to be out a year or so ago has not appeared. But in no way has 20 years "dated" the present text. _Computer Power and Human Understanding_ explains why we have such problems as Y2K, etc.