Products Books

Really helped prepare for the AP exam. The practice tests are key. They really get you a good feel for the exam. Princeton Review does a great job.

This book will easily get anyone who really understands it a 5 on the exam, especially if you can score well on the practice tests in the back. It's better for review, rather than learning. If you want an AP book that you can learn from, I suggest using 5 Steps to a 5. I never really understood electromagnetic induction or nuclear physics from my textbook, and this book was even worse for that, but 5 Steps to a 5 cleared up all my issues with those topics in about an hour. I think that this book is way better for review, though, mostly because the questions they ask at the end of each chapter are better and help your understanding of the concepts.

Don't be discouraged if you don't score well on the practice tests in the back, because the actual AP exam is much more conceptual and less calculation-based. But if you can do the Princeton Review tests, you'll have no problem with the real one. It's not overly difficult though, so don't let that discourage you from buying it.

Overall, this definitely gets a 5/5 for its explanations and for being so concise and on target regarding information the exam will test you on.

I think we'll have to buy some more copies of this story, my son makes us read it at least 4 - 5 times a week to him. He loves firefighters (and George of course) so this is a perfect fit.

I've noticed some of the newer stories "inspired" by Margaret and H.A. Rey -- this is one of their originals / classics. Timeless and precious are words that come to mind when thinking about the actual story.

So many opportunities to learn / teach within the classic George stories -- I think because some of the pictures, things, stuff in the story are vintage and unfamiliar it encourages the child to inquire more.

We're huge fans -- and if you watch the specials, sometimes they have 4 for price of 3 on [...]

Of course, you should try to support your local bookstore whenever you can!

This is a cute little story perfect for my 2 1/2 yr old for bedtime...he loves it.

We love the plan book and it is very functional but part of my order was shipped first and then when the rest was shipped it was lost. I had to scramble to find the plan book elsewhere.

I have been teaching preschool for many years and used many plan books. This one is by far my favorite. I found it at Lakeshore last year but when I went back to buy it again it wasn't there. However, Amazon had it!
This book has some great features including large pages, a calendar, sub. pages, daily schedule, student information, and much more. It is so complete you can't help but be organized!
A must buy for any preschool teacher.

My friend was delighted with this gift, and tells me it is the most entertaining way to learn Spanish.

The only way these stories could be better is if Hayes could tell them to you personally. All children, but especially those from the American southwest, will appreciate having a collection of these oft-told tales. Get ready to laugh about the day it snowed tortillas and get shivers when the wind's moans down by the ditch sound like those of a woman.

You have to have these books, they are great for all ago groups and so helpful!!!

The book begins with a day-by-day list of all the celebrations throughout the month (not only the famous ones but others as well...do you know when chewing gum was first patented?), and then a reproducible calendar for the classroom with clip art of symbols to place on the calendar.

December idea book contains reproducibles for the following topics: December Activities (including a word search, a letter to Santa, board game, shapebook, trivia, snowman math, lined paper, Math Elf wheel, among others), "For Goodness Sake" (this section contains awards, pencil toppers, shaped bookmarks, certificates, puppets, etc), Holiday Crafts (lots of Christmas paper ornaments to make, cards, puppets, shapebooks), Merry Christmas Many Ways (information, activities, crafts and lots of beautiful reproducibles to celebrate Christmas according to worldwide traditions, like the Mexican Posadas, the Italian Befana, the Swedish Santa Lucia Day, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and much more),

This book contains lots of reproducible international children that can be used for multicultural bulletin boards. It contains pictures of boys and girls from: Africa, Israel, Sweden, Holland, Italy and Mexico. And for every topic, you will find not only lots of creative activities but also cultural information to support the learning.

Great resources for the elementary teacher!

I would recommend is from the 3rd 2002 design and emotion conferance. It may be 5 years old, but the book contains papers all based on emotional design. Split into subsections, which are

Generative tools,
Evauative Tools,
Emotive Effects of Visual Properties,
Emotive Effects of the Other Senses,
From Design to Emotion,
Affective Usabilty,
Attachment,
Product Character,
Theoretical and Ethical issues,
and
Emotion in Design.

There is a paper for just about everthing, and there are only 4 - 5 pages long.

she sure is one crazy gal.
she knos her beautiful people.


roight.

This book is definitely a strong addition to the body of knowledge for Reliability Professionals and for any Company that wants to improve the business competitiveness by improving the product reliability.

The book clearly provides the correct focus on the customer, but it also elaborates on the fact that one customer is the corporate business enterprise.

The book shows the optimum sequence of DfR activities in the development phases. This book also has impressive details for the specific DfR elements. It is also an excellent resource for guidance into specific details.

I like the balance of graphics with text and the graphics added excellent additional understanding.

This is an outstanding Industry leader that has documented the implemented practice in this book.

I did not attempt to verify every mathematical formula.

As one of the authors/editors of this book, let me describe the valuable technical content. First, let me impress upon you that this is a rare practical work in reliability written by members of a highly technical company that apply reliability science every day to products. Thus, academics are stressed only as a tool. Therefore, this book has something for everyone. It starts off with a management perspective on how to organize a reliability program. Chapter 1 - 5 overview a unique stage-gate approach to growing reliability. What tools and building blocks are needed from a management perspective to be world-class. What tests to perform when is also key. This approach assures optimum reliability grow in a commercial atmosphere of on-time reliable product deliveries. The book then evolves technically providing essential engineering topics. Chapter 6 describes key information for performing process reliability studies. Chapter 7, is without question a compact chapter on failure analysis that describes each analysis tool including SEM, SAM, EDS, FTIR, FIB, SIMS, etc. The numerous physics of failure analysis examples in diffusion, corrosion, intermetallics, ESD etc are illustrated with detailed FA images. Then Chapter 8 provides what you need to know for reliability statistics. It covers basic definitions for failure rate, CDF, PDF, the main distributions used (Weibull, lognormal, Exponential, Normal). A well-organized chapter presenting key essential reliability statistics needed in industry. Chapter 9 details accelerated testing, the primary historical equations governing temperature, temperature-humidity, vibration and temperature cycle/shock, and electromigration. It provides common sense guidelines for assessing overstressing. How to use these equations for test planning. Advance topics including Step-stress and how to describe life distributions as a function of stress. Chapter 10 on Accelerated Reliability Growth is fairly unique. What tests do you perform and when, using stage-gate and recent accelerated reliability growth mathematics for planning. Growth can be obtained and assessed in a timely manner. Chapter 11 provides the essential for system reliability. Series, parallel, and n of k subsystems as well as predicting reliability using both Bellcore, and 217 methods are addressed. Chapter 12 is an excellent overview of FMEA. Chapter 13 teaches methods for evaluating product risk and conducting risk program management. Lastly, Chapter 14 is an advanced topic, thermodynamic reliability engineering. No other book teaches thermodynamics and how the 1st and 2nd laws are fundamental to the science for Physics-of-Failure. In no other book can a reader find derivations for accelerated testing time compression expressions in fatigue, temperature-humidity, Miner's rule, and diffusion. Additionally, an advanced Arrhenius kinetic topics on logarithmic-in-time aging are provided. This topic as a seminar received the highest ratings at the 2001 RAMS conference. Thank You - Alec Feinberg.

It's helpful for M.E. for plastic parts design. So many informations to help engineers how to design plastic parts and how to asembly it.

Excellent book covering all aspects of designing plastic parts for assembly and mass production. Bryan McDonald. Apple Product Design. Product Design Manager.

I have spent a good part of my life studying books on global statistics. This is truly one of the best. There is virtually no other book that takes a global look at world economics and goes back hundreds of years into the past. You might want to check by profile for some of my Listmania lists on the world future if this subject interests you.

In the last few years I have been searching books offering a general overview of the past, and I have realized that many books entitled "History of ...whatever" only provide information about the West, the rest of the world being almost ignored.

Maddison's on world economy is different, is truly global. It offers historical statistics of the last two thousand years and is to be read together with "The world economy. A millennial perspective" (a combined edition of both volumes is to be published on December 2007). In my opinion this is masterful work that can be savored by the professional historian and educated layperson alike, so my rate is between 5 (content) and 4 (pleasure, sometimes falling to 3, sometimes raising to 5). I highly recommend the two volumes.

Other works whose scope is as amazingly global as Maddison's and which I would suggest to read (hoping that will be of use for those looking for a broad framework to understand ourselves) are the following: 1. Agrarian cultures: "Pre-industrial societies" by Patricia Crone; 2. Government: "The History of Government" by S.E. Finer; 3. Ideas: "Ideas, a History from Fire to Freud", by Peter Watson; 4. Religion: "The Phenomenon of Religion: A Thematic Approach" by Moojan Momen; and 5. War: "War in Human Civilization" by Azar Gat.

"Digital Play" critically analyzes the video and computer game industry and theorizes about its significance in contemporary society. The book is somewhat unusual in that it is the collaborative product of three authors, but the writing seems to blend perfectly and makes for a consistent and high-quality read. The end product is an accessible and entertaining book that could serve to introduce a wide audience to critical postmodern analysis.

Nick Dyer-Witheford of "Cyber-Marx" fame is one of the authors. Mr. Dyer-Witheford's influence is discernable in at least several sections where the post-Marxist themes of corporate control versus freedom that are evident in "Cyber-Marx" are used to very good effect. First, he deflates the wildly optimistic claims of techno-utopians such as Alvin Toffler, reminding us that technology remains in service to corporate profits and therefore narrows and limits the possibility of "choice, interactivity and empowerment" that digital games purportedly offer. Second, Mr. Dyer-Witheford points to piracy and hacking as evidence that freedom from corporate control and a return to "play" in its purest sense may yet remain possible.

The authors contend that video games are worthy of serious study because they represent the "ideal-type" postmodern commodity. So whereas the automobile is closely associated with the "industrial capitalism" of the Fordist era, the video game embodies the "information capitalism" of today's "perpetual innovation" society.

The ideal-type commodity does not mean that it avoids crisis, however. The authors posit that the accelerating "circuits" of technology, culture and marketing that drive postmodern society in general and the video game business in particular "can be broken or come into contradiction" in numerous ways. The authors go on to critique each of these three circuits and produce many pages of very thoughtful analysis.

For example, an interesting aspect of the industry that is often overlooked is manufacturing and the international division of labor. Electronic game equipment is often produced by proletariat labor in the poor countries of the South for the benefit of relatively wealthy consumers in the North. The authors point out that the game industry, like most capitalist enterprises that exploit the so-called free trade system in search of higher profits, will find it difficult to develop new markets for its products until it is willing to pay its third-world factory workers enough money to stimulate demand. In fact, the authors state that corporate managers should not be too surprised when intellectual property gets pirated by people who feel that they have been cheated by the economic system.

But probably the most stinging criticism concerns the close connection of games with Cold War research and development. The "militarized masculinity" that characterizes so many games originated here and has been perpetuated by corporate marketing in pursuit of profits. But the authors point out that if the industry fails to find successful alternative game genres and graphic violence continues to escalate, future interest in gaming may be jeopardized even as the potential damage to children exposed to such psychic intensity remains unknown.

In short, "Digital Play" is highly recommended to everyone interested in deconstructing the multi-faceted and increasingly fantastical world that has been brought to us by the "military and entertainment" complex.

Books on electronic gaming and video game culture predominantly concentrate on the history of the industry or on nostalgic returns to retro gaming, often punctuated with coloured photos and screenshots. Digital Play is one of the few books currently available that provides an insightful look into the social, cultural, and economic relationships between game players, and the engaging game texts, technologies, and market forces of the information age. As interactive gaming continues to establish itself as a major global media business, it becomes increasingly important for us to employ a critical perspective of the blossoming industry. Kline, Witheford, and Peuter's Digital Play couldn't have arrived at a better time.

Digital Play is cleverly divided into three segments, each focusing on different bearings of interactive gaming but effectively converging into a single conclusive "coda." Discussion begins with a theoretical approach to analyzing gaming and its industry as it relates to circuits of interactivity including culture, technology, and marketing. Theoretical concepts collected from media theorists Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams, are successfully transferred to the medium of the videogame. What follows is a look at the existence of interactive gaming in a post-Fordist, and postmodern society of information technology and hyper-reality. This facilitates the understanding of historical circumstances of developing circuits of interactivity outlined in earlier chapters. While the first segment may seem theoretically and linguistically intense, it remains deeply involving and is ever mindful of the topic at hand: video games.

The second segment of Digital Play covers the historical background of games from their early beginnings in the military-industrial complex to the relentless corporate firefight known to many as the "console wars." However, unlike previous electronic gaming texts, the historical accounts are retold stressing the importance of technology, culture, and marketing. Digital Play thus provides a fresh and extremely entertaining parade through electronic gaming's past. What readers may find most absorbing in this stretch are the political-economic struggles endured by the gaming companies (Atari for example) who pioneered the industry only to meet with fierce competition and an unstable market for interactive entertainment.

The initial chapters of Digital Play concentrated on technology and communication studies, and the following chapters zeroed-in on history and marketing practices. However, this theoretical triad could not be complete without the presence of one more area of study: game culture as an industry and practice. In a chapter entitled "Workers and Warez" the authors examine gaming technologies on global levels of production and consumption, such as the exploitation of off-shore labourers and increasing levels of hacking, console "modding", and software piracy. Subsequent chapters provide studies in branding and licensing, violence and gender, and my personal favourite...political economy. Chapter 12 assembles the major themes of Digital Play, suggesting that Electronic Arts' best-selling game "The Sims" can be viewed as a microcosm of our own capitalist society, wrought with consumerist ideology. While we manipulate the digital Barbie dolls of our virtual technology, so too does a system of communication technologies, global enterprise, and postmodern digital culture manipulate our symbolic relationship with the logic of a capitalist system.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Digital Play and wouldn't hesitate to purchase any game-related books that any of the authors might publish in the future. Digital Play offers an engaging critical look at the gaming world's industry, technology, and culture, and should not be ignored by those looking to study interactive games from an academic viewpoint or by those simply looking for enjoyable reading.