Simulation Books

This handbook while well researched and written is essentially worthless without the accompanying software. I ordered the book in January received it in February, as yet (early April) have NOT received the advertised electronic media which is critical to inclusion with every purchase.

The book only (actually) serves as the guide for installing and programming data acquisition sub-routines (templates) within the National Instruments LabVIEW programming language, again which is supposed to be on the ACCOMPNYING CD-ROM.

I have requested the software twice since my initial order, and each time only received the handbook manual. Oh, the shipping of a replacement is quick enough, there just seems to be no one within the distribution chain aware enough to know to bundle the handbook with the "virtual instruments" LabVIEW proprietary software.

What the book discribed is banausic and profound!

I was really looking foward to getting this book only to be disappointed. The strategic information included was way to general in nature and the player ratings incomplete ( where were the ratings for the superbowl, all-time and pro-bowl teams?) OK, all the codes are included and thats nice, but this book was a little too light on strategy to suit my tastes. For rookies it my be a good source of general information. Anyone looking for some indepth strategies should look elsewhere.

It Tells you every thing you need to know and it is simple as that

This book is not at all what its title and blurb suggest. It purports to help you to assess strategic alliances by using "metrics", which are defined as "that which should be measured" (at xi). Unfortunately, the author has a distinctly inadequate approach to this concept: she will tell you that you should use something as a "metric", but she does NOT tell you (i) how to measure it, or (ii) how to weight it against other "metrics" that are qualitatively different. If you are expecting the book to provide even a single template or checklist that will enable you to accumulate a bunch of metrics and compare them -- in fact, if you're expecting anything quantitative at all -- yours is a vain hope.

Moreover, the metrics she proposes are often quite vague. For example, she proposes "strategic alignment" and "strategy fit" as two separate metrics during the development of an alliance (at 43-49). The distinction between them is never made clear, although for the latter she includes a kind of flow diagram with 12 boxes filled with terminology like "Misson/Vison/Values", "SWOT", "Product Lines" etc., and other chestnuts from undergraduate business textbooks. Here are some other examples of metrics, verbatim (at 214): "Define expectations and success continually", "Educate the customer about [your company's] value," "Negotiation - change the conversation from how much to how good". Maybe these are good bits of advice in some contexts, but the use of the word "metric" for each of them is quite misleading.

The "case studies" that make up most of the book are no more illuminating about the nuts and bolts of implementing a measurement process. They consist mainly of the authors's big-company clients patting themselves on the back while describing the things that were important to them in various deals, without describing any process for scoring or comparing these factors.

The author does take great pains, however, to remind us that, e.g., she once did some research at Cal Tech, that her current firm (into which her old firm merged) is "considered the world experts in Negotiation and Relationship Management processes" (at 57), and that she wrote another book (which you are encouraged to buy and read). This constant huckstering is tiresome. So is the prose style. It's an endless permutation of empty business-speak like "leadership", hand-off," competency" and "critical", e.g., "leadership is critical at this stage" (as if it isn't at other stages?), or the non sequitur: "The operationalization metrics, a cumbersome term, relates [sic] to the multitude of activities that put flesh around the skeleton of the alliance. This is also the moment of alliance hand-off from those who developed and negotiated the alliance to those who must implement it [at 63]."

If you can tolerate soporific prose about alliances, you would be much better off reading Mark De Rond's "Strategic Alliances as Social Facts". In addition to critiquing the "life cycle" model of alliances on which Segil relies, it offers a great deal of substance -- including a convincing argument that the success or failure of alliances often is based on factors the parties didn't initially expect to measure.

Segil's expertise shines through in this book about the role metrics play in creating successful business relationships. Segil's use of real-world examples shows how the unpredictable, complicated realities of alliances can be overcome and managed by applying the right metrics. With her keen insights and first-hand experiences, readers finish the book armed with the tools and direction they need to use alliances to their advantage. A great book!

We are writing this review of the book as our response as authors to the other review posted on this page. This book is intended to be an introductory text for students and beginners of Mechanics of Composite Materials. The presentation is simple and brief. Furthermore, it is accompanied by a CD-ROM that has numerous MATLAB functions that can be used to do the basic calculations in this subject. And we stress that we emphasize the basic calculations with no attempt to introduce advanced topics.

It is true that the calculations in this book could also be done using EXCEL. However, it is not straightforward and very difficult to perform some of these calculations in EXCEL. In fact, EXCEL is not designed to handle matrices and matrix operations like MATLAB. The choice of MATLAB for this book is based on the fact that MATLAB is a Matrix Laboratory - it was specifically designed to handle matrices and matrix operations. And we know that these types of calculations are exactly those encountered in Mechanics of Composite Materials. Thus MATLAB and not EXCEL is the right choice for this kind of book.

The subject of damage initiation is mentioned briefly in a short chapter at the end of the book. Indeed this is an advanced topic that is not normally covered in texts on Mechanics of Composite Materials. The most popular books on Mechanics of Composite Materials (like the books of Kaw, Jones, Gibson, etc) do not even mention this advanced topic. The only book that we are aware of that shows some discussion of damage initiation is the book by Herakovich - but this is the exception not the rule. We have included a short chapter on damage initiation solely to introduce the subject and guide the reader where to find additional detailed information. Furthermore, we as authors have written another book especially on the topic on damage initiation in composite materials. The book is entitled "Advances in Damage Mechanics: Metals and Metal Matrix Composites" by Voyiadjis and Kattan, Second Edition, published by Elsevier in 2006. The interested reader may refer to this advanced book for details on damage initiation in composite materials.

We have included another short chapter on homogenization at the end of the book. Again this is an advanced topic that is not normally covered in other books on Mechanics of Composite Materials. We have included this short and brief chapter to introduce the topic and guide the reader where to find further information. The interested reader will have to look into advanced specialized books on homogenization such as the book by Nemat-Nasser. He will not find this information in any competing books on Mechanics of Composite Materials.

We feel that we are fully justified in leaving out the detailed presentation of these advanced topics of this book. Again, the book is intended for students and beginners who do not seek these advanced topics in an introductory book like ours. Finally, we should note that we included the complete Solutions Manual to most of the problems in the book at the end of the book and also on the accompanying CD-ROM. The rest of the book is a printout of the Solutions Manual which some people may erroneously perceive as MATLAB output.

A critique of this text must not go without a brief mention of the book's merits. The included CD contains lots of .m files for simple calculations and manipulations of the constitutive matrices. The book is ordered in a fairly straightforward manner. The calculations described in the book are correct. But that's about it.

You see, "Mechanics of Composite Materials with MATLAB" does not go into much detail about the mechanics of composite materials. Instead, it assumes you have a thorough knowledge of classical lamination theory (and an appropriate text for reference of said theory) and instead focuses on the MATLAB implimentation of lamination theory. Which would be great if the things the author does in MATLAB couldn't already be done in Excel.

Instead of focusing on the merits of MATLAB, like its ability to solve complex differential equations or to display contour plots and response surfaces, the author insists on devoting endless pages to elementary manipulations of various compliance and stiffness matrices. Half the book's pages, in fact, are devoted to showing raw MATLAB output. Which might be alright, if that information weren't already included on the CD. The useful information (if you call it that) ends on page 204. The rest is MATLAB output.

Worse yet, the three redeeming chapters of this book -- the ones on failure theories, homogenization methods, and damage initiation -- are brief (about 20 pages between the three of them) and WITHOUT SOLUTIONS (in print or on the CD). That's right. Even if you purchase this book, you will remain unable to plot a failure envelope, evaluate Eshelby's tensor, or do anything else that goes beyond the level of trivial.

Perhaps I shouldn't be so harsh in reviewing this book, but I feel that a text whose title claims to impliment MATLAB in studying the mechanics of composite materials should have a bit more meat to it. In fairness, I think this book could be complimentary to an introductory class on composite materials.

An approach which, of necessity for design, addresses the numerical treatment of subjects which are not easily amenable to this. Many working "laws" therefore have an empirical basis. The approach appears to be thorough but unfortunately, as the supplier was unable to furnish the "MODSIM" program CD-ROM which should accompany the book, I was unable to try it. Others may like to comment.

The book is fine for our 4th year Metallurgy students but neither the first copy or the replacement copy sent by Amazon had the CD-ROM with the MODSIM simulator relevant to the text. Apparently none of this particular text has the CD, and one of our students managed to source the book and CD from an Indian online book supplier.

I have been trying to read this book .There are a considerable number of grammatical errors and I have just read the first two chapters. It makes reading difficult sometimes ,and understanding of the material unclear in some instances. I hope the publishers have another look at it. This is a big minus, on a book that could have been very good.

How do you write a book on a subject when the material is covered broadly in the field, and the computational program(Matlab) already sells complete packages? Just like this book does. Not being in the field that most of this stuff is directed towards, I was amazed how the author introduced the subject, developed it, and let it go just at the right time. The reader could take the material and go to communications applications, or membrane diffusion analysis using epidermal patches. While the use and generation of random numbers is usually the domain of the statistics people, the author adroitly skirted definition confrontations to bring out the main and important points of the subject. Best of all the the CD contains the same information in both Matlab and MatCad. If nothing else this can be used to see how the two different machines work the same problem. The book provides a different way of looking at some basic concepts even when the reader is familiar with the material (Dirac, Impulse,detection).

The author addressed the principles of simulation and related techniques well. Discussion on the phases of model building were very interesting, esp. the discussion of the psychology of people management related to modeling projects. The book is well clarified for beginners with limited experience or exposure to simulation modeling. It covers the basic concepts in sufficient details, but yet not to overload the reader with advance abstract concepts, or hard mathematic discussions. Basic understanding of statistics is really all one needs to work through this book.

Substantial sections of the book is dedicated to ARENA, SIMPAK, AutoMOD and AutoStat which I do not personally use, thus was not helpful for me. I felt that these section should have been eliminated.

I was totally lost on Appendix 2. It was not very relevant for the reader. It is a recap of the Table of Contents. It should be removed.

The simulation examples were superb, and were very insightful. More discussions could have been made to these examples, particularly around the model building sections, and the analytics of the results. Unfortunatly, the author simply summarized the process, which I was disappointed.

Overall, I concluded that this book is intended for beginners into simulation modeling. Experienced modelers may not find this book as helpful, particularly for the price paid.

Does a very good job of popularizing simulation among the non statistically, non engineeriing and the non OR oriented.

Christian Gouriéroux is maybe the best French econometrician. In particular, his last discovery, the indirect inference, seems to be a very clever way of solving the problem of highly complicated likelihood functions. But in this book, only 4 pages are dedicated to present the subject, and they are filled with over complicated mathematical formulas and a very short explanation. The notations are extremely complicated for economists (at least for myself) and, if you don't have a very solid mathematical background, you'll feel lost from the beginning until the last one. Nor undergraduate economics students neither graduate applied econometricians should feel comfortable with the style of the book. I guess only professional researchers are aimed by this book. It's rather disappointing, because the array of subjects are very interesting and the author is a great econometrician.

A truly wonderful book. If you like simulation-based methods or you are just interested in learning about the frontier in econometrics, buy this book. You are not going to find a better introduction or a clearer description of issues

Probably the most bloated book I've ever encountered. It seems like this isn't targeted for computer science students. It was completely impossible to read it without falling asleep, because the book could go on and on for pages without presenting anything new except that 1+1=2.

The best source for learning about tabu search would be to read a basic book about (combinatorial) optimization just to teach the vocabulary (like an exact neighborhood etc.). After that, just head to springerlink and download a few articles from the Lectures in Computer Science-series or use some other source for papers relating to applications of tabu search to various optimization problems.

This book is quite good for a reference though.

It's good to read the book that the writer and inventor of theory are the same person. Glover and Laguna conduct this book in a self-comprehensive book. I've never found any good resource of Tabu Search as great as this book. Only drawback is the price... too expensive for student. I only read it in the library though. I'm glad to know they have the paperback edition but I'm not sure about the quality of printing. Lastly, get it whenver you can afford it!. It's worth your money every characters.

I think this is a great software program though i do not own it now or will ever i should

Well I was looking for a text to help me put some realistic looking clothing in a game I want to make. I don't think this is the right text. While it has many chapters on collision detection and even one on numerical integration, it seems to be high level, abstract and somewhat vague about implementation. There is absolutely no source code, just some pseudo pseudo code snippets. I have a feeling I could find info more useful to me on the web in Siggraph proceedings. This book seems to be meant for fashion designers who want to use the computer to see what their clothing would look like before hiring a seamstress and a supermodel.