Cheng Books

Integrated Chinese is a well-paced introduction to the language that, while perhaps too advanced for high school students, is perfect for university students or adult learners. The lessons progress in an organized and logical fashion, and the book (whose Chinese title translates as "Chinese Listening Speaking Reading Writing") strikes a nice balance between these four areas of foreign language proficiency. My only criticism is that the photographs of Chinese text and environs are occasionally dated and the illustrations are quite ugly at times. Overall, an excellent college textbook!

Nathan Dummitt
author of Chinese Through Tone & Color

I teach Chinese. This is the best Chinese text book I've found on the market. The text is difficult but it's excellent for serious students who want to learn how to read, write and speak Chinese. If you just want to pick up a few Chinese words, this book may not be suitable for you.

This book, compared to my last one, is much better. The cultural notes are up to date, the words and conversations are relevant to today's world, and everything-characters, pinyin, and english is easily accessible to the reader. I definitely would recommend it.

Overall it's well written, but confusing in places as well.

I am using this book for beginning Chinese. It is very good because it has easy vocabulary for a beginner and gradualy turn difficult. I like specially the first section that tell you about the radicals, and certain rules for the use of pinyin that other books don't tell you, which makes you pronounce the words incorrectly. and also I like the chart that tell you the manner to pronounce the Chinese letter which are different than English ones, such as the "ch" which it is not exacltly the english "ch", as well as the "r", or "zh" or other.

the con ot that the audio does not come with the book, I do not know where to get it because it was provided in my class.

...and is still interested (somehow!) in actually learning [traditional] Chinese, this textbook and its attendant workbooks are for you. Grammatical notes, explanations, and cultural references abound, not to mention supplementary flashcards created by another student that are available on the internet. Most importantly, the workbooks (character and regular) give you an excellent chance to practice writing and to learn the characters in context, greatly helping with the necessary (but drastically de-emphasized) memorization component.

I haven't had any experience with any Chinese textbooks other than this one and the **** we had to use in Chinese school, so I can't speak about how this one fares in comparison to other non-Chinese-school textbooks, but on its own merits, I would definitely advise you to buy it.

If you were to read only the contents of Francois Cheng’s, “The River Below”, you could easily believe you had just read a memoir translated from Chinese to French, and finally into English. In truth it is a novel that is bracketed by a Foreword and an ending that suggest the Author has presented the memoir of a Chinese Artist through some of the horrific events of 20th Century China. I cannot remember reading another book in this format, which I presume was used to maintain that the contents of the book were non-fiction when in truth it was a novel. The cover states it is a novel, and then you arrive at the forward and begin to wonder.

The novel, like the culture it describes, is full of self-questioning. No event is seen as random, every occurrence has a meaning if only it is looked at correctly. The result is that throughout the book there is constant analysis occurring whether in rhetorical inward investigation, or by the teaching of others that hold to a given religion/philosophy. This process makes for a contemplative novel with a correspondingly slow pace. I generally have difficulty finishing works like this, however there was a familiar theme that made the work interesting to follow.

Shakespeare was a master at setting up multiple conflicting relationships that even when based upon love would end in disaster. These relationships often took the form of a triangle that involved deception or events that were misinterpreted to defeat characters either spiritually, physically or both. Mr. Cheng I believe used this format to good effect as he placed the theme in 20th Century China as it moved into the horror that was Mao’s China, which is about as far away as one could get from where William staged his events.

I am not suggesting this is nothing more than imitation. It is not. It is a well-written work that requires a bit of patience and does not succumb to being rushed no matter how quickly you may try to read it. When all this is combined with the unusual format the reading experience is unique and worthwhile even if it rarely, if ever, raises your pulse.

This may be the most powerful and beautiful book I have read in the past ten years. I would rank it far above Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier as an example of the hero's journey.

The book presents a landscape of mastery and memory where our protagonist receives a classical Chinese education and presents himself to the world as a true man of art, elegance and passion.
He falls in love with the beautiful feminine that is just too distant to be embraced and integrated. He experiences friendship that is complicated by a love triangle.

He is dispossessed and terrorized by the worst tortures human's can endure and emerges to see true emptiness and the vision of the feminine in nature.

The novel is a virtual tour of the Chinese mind and tradition and works at all levels -- character and education (the Confucian worldview) the love of a woman (the alien feminine in Chinese history), devoted friendship (the intensity of a Chinese friendship is something I hope everyone can experience), the power of nature and cycles (Taoism), the deepest terror and brutality of hell (totalitarianism), and deepest compassion and the purity of human intention (Buddhism), the constantly emerging world ablaze and transitory, emptiness and its infinite vista.

I feel privileged to have found this book and other works by Cheng. His is a broad and deep way.

Confucius taught that the responsibility of the human life is to develop our character to contribute to the world. But, truly we must wake up right now -- even when our hair is on fire.

The main character of this book has enormous depth, emotional honesty, and courage. These qualities give his search for artistic integrity and his endurance of tremendous hardship and suffering profound emotional impact. The author uses a palette of rich and distinctive visual metaphors that tie the story together and underscore the main character's generous and enlightened heart. Before reading this book, I knew little about the differences in the vision of Chinese and Western Art or of the unimaginable horror visited on the Chinese people by the Mao years. This book has opened me up to knowing more about both. This is one of the best books I've read in a long, long time.

I must confess that I read with pure, unadulterated JOY this masterful tale of Wu Jingzu. "The Scholars" is an incredible work, and the translation presented here is masterful.

I can add little to the excellent review below. "The Scholars" is a well-crafted satire displaying the virtues (few) and vices (many) of the Confucian scholar-officials of the early Ming dynasty. The tales are often humorous (sometimes, even slapstick), and though many of the conventions will be unknown to the general reader (such as wedding and funeral ceremonies, adoption principles, host-guest relationships, etc.), the gist of the novel cannot be missed.

The good news here is this: now, only the hardcover version (available through FLP, Beijing) is available. This version has nicer paper, and the illustrations are much more clearly rendered (and there is a print-quality rendition of the author to lead off the text). Oh, did I mention that the hardcover version is fifteen dollars less than the paperback? Do yourself a favor and give this excellent collection of tales a try!

I have just begun reading, but I am totally encapitvatd. This is a very amusing tale, rather in the humorous spirit of "Journey to the West" (another which I've only just begun reading), and I am surprised how enjoyable they are. I was afraid it would be like reading Beowulf or Shakespeare, but the story was quite "modern" for the most part. That's what I want to say about this story: it's social satire and reads very well (likely due to the translation in many ways, no doubt; I have the Columbia University edition, which I suspect may be more lively than the one put out by the Bejing Foreign Languages Press). Reading this story is a wonderful and most educational contrast to learning about classical China in school. History is written by the elite, but this story has an Everyman's sensibility and pokes great fun at Chinese conventions and customs, many of which persist to this day.

I think it was Mark Twain who said that a classic is a book that everybody wants to *have* read, but that nobody wants to read. The Scholars is an exception to this generalization. It is one of the masterpieces of the Chinese novel, but it is as fun for a contemporary American to read today as it was for Wu Ching-tzu's contemporaries to read in imperial China.

This book is an incisive satire of hypocrisy and corruption among Confucian intellectuals. Although the circumstances of the stories will be unfamiliar to the general reader, this translation supplies supporting material that will help explain the context. And we immediately identify with the cast of characters and their catalogue of vices: arrogant officials, obsequious would-be officials, impoverished students who become exactly like those who exploit them as soon as they are given a chance, etc.

Wu Ching-tzu's worldview is not wholly negative, though. There are characters in this world who have honor. We get the sense that the author believes that the true spirit of Confucianism is very different from the debased institutional form it has taken in his era.

One brilliant but challenging feature of this work is that it is not a simple linear narrative. Wu Ching-tzu weaves the stories of individuals in and out of one another. One storyline will abruptly stop, seemingly abandoned; another storyline will begin; then the characters from the previous storyline will reappear in the new story. This is dazzling narrative, but sometimes a little hard to follow: I recommend that you scrawl some brief notes in the margins or the back of the book so that you can remember who a character is when he or she reappears somewhere down the road. (I did a chart myself.) Believe me, though, it's worth the effort to fully appreciate this book.

This is a delightful, humorous, and humane novel that will transport you to another world, but leave you with insights into human nature that are universal.

The authors do a very good job for writing this book, especially for some students who don't really have mathematical background. It's very easy to understand what is the authors purpose. I recommend this book.

Hi,

When I try to look into the table contents of this book, I found it is for beginners of statistics only. Unless you are entry level of this area, I suggest you to buy some other books together.

I used the first edition this book teaching financial econometrics at a university in Boston. The text is an excellent beginning book in statistics at the undergraduate and the MBA and MSF levels.

For my advanced students I covered the chapters on analysis of variance and chi-square tests, simple regression analysis and correlation coefficent, multiple regression analysis, other topics in applied regression analysis, nonparametric statistics and time series analysis including forecasting.

The statistical theories showed the mathematical derivations, often in appendices, yet included easy to follow numerical examples which students appreciated very much. The first edition was one of the first statistics books with particular attention paid to appllications using corporate finance, investment and banking data.

The only shortcomings dealt with typographical errors found in several places, and solution errors in the accompanying instructors' manual.

Overall, an excellent statistics book for the first-timer and a worthy addition to the library of a specialist, especially one with a financial perspective.

Bought this after upgrading from Flash MX 2004 Pro to Flash 8 in order to delve deeper into AS 2.0 and the new classes offered in Macromedia/Adobe's latest Flash release. This is the best resource I have found for any Flash release and has earned a permanent spot on my desk until I upgrade again.

Review of Actionscript Language Reference for Macromedia Flash 8

Introduction:

Actionscript Language Reference for Macromedia Flash 8 from Macromedia Press and Rew Riders is a "thick book" that every Flash Designer or Developer should have sitting next to the keyboard. But don't let the words "Macromedia Flash" fool you into thinking this book is about animation or designing in Flash. This is a no nonsense dictionary-style resource that provides a ton of information about the powerful scripting language behind Flash 8.

Because this is a reference book, I will be comparing the content to another book published by New Riders and Macromedia Press, Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Actionscript 2.0 Dictionary. These two books are very similar in content and I would consider the Flash 8 book to be the second
edition of the Flash MX 2004 book.


First the bad news:

Because I had previously read the Flash MX 2004 book, I was a little suprised to see that the Flash 8 book has omitted, in my opinion, some valualbe editorial content in the beginning of the book. The Flash MX 2004 book includes articles from Flash Community Leaders that helps to build a good foundation for the rest of the book. The second issue that I had while reviewing the Flash 8 book was that it was a bit harder to find the reference information I needed. This is because the Flash 8 book uses a different style to list the language elements that is a bit harder to read (see below example).


Flash MX 2004 Dictionary: LoadVars.onData

Flash 8 Language Reference: onData(LoadVars.onData handler)


The second example bunches up the information and provides redundant information, and the issue is compounded by the Font style that is used which a bit too "bubbly" and does not stand out as much as the font used in the Flash MX 2004 book.



Now for the good news:

While the lack of introductory content is a small issue, the Flash 8 book more than makes up for it with extra content added for each language element listed. The explanations have improved and I think the money spent on this book is given back by the greatly improved examples that are provided for each listing. There is not longer just a few lines of code for each example. The book now has extended examples that really help to explain how the language element should be used while.


Conclusion:

While there is room for improvement, this reference manual is full of examples that make up for any Issues that I have with the fonts and listing format. The depth of information is what makes this book a very valuable asset to own, and I would highly recommend picking up your own copy. On a scale of 1 to 10 I would give this book an 8.5 and recommend it to any Flash Developer or Flash Designer looking for a reference manual on Actionscript for the Flash 8 environment.

My daughter used this for her high school Japanese class. We purchased it so she can keep up with her Japanese, and I'm now learning as well. It looks like a great textbook and I'll be using it soon.

This product was very helpful in keeping my daughter lessons from school fresh in her mind. It helped with her writing and translation from English to Japanese and reverse.

This book is a a godsend. People crticize me for being too crtical, but I think this book is excellent. Unfortunately most Chinese dictionaries and textbooks are really bad. They don't explain the usage of the words they teach correctly, so when you have to write an essay there are always many things that don't make sense. Native Chinese teachers who don't even bother to read the numerous monolingual books in Chinese (students can't use them because there's no English) often claim that they can't be explained. This book proves them wrong. Scholars might be concered with some individual entries, which might reflect Taiwanese usage more than Mandarin, but for the student this is a minor matter. Unfortunately they marked of the price for this book a lot, because I bought it in mainland China for much cheaper. But its worth the money.

This book is fun to read. It explains the subtle differences in meaning and usage for many close words, with ample examples to accompany the explanations. It finally cleared to me the difference between gexing and xingge which are both translated as character, or personality, after not even native chinese speakers could explain this in I way I could understand.. The fault of this book is that it could be bigger, a lot bigger. It basically only covers a few hundred common words and synonyms. Still, definitely only for a student who knows how to say a sentence or two in chinese, and although all the characters are accompanied by pinyin, a knowledge of 1000-1500 characters would come in handy. It's NOT a tutorial nor a course!

The Field Of Life And Death & Tales Of Hulun River is a revised edition of Howard Goldblatt's excellent translation of two classic works by Chinese author Xiao Hong (1911-1942), China's first feminist novelist. The ravages of poverty, war, and Japanese imperialism are unflinchingly portrayed in this memorable and vivid work. Highly recommended for personal and academic literary and Asian Studies collections, Lu Xun's original preface (in translation), a new translator's preface, and a revised introduction by Howard Goldblatt set apart this edition of eye-opening stories about the hardships faced by peasants of rural China.

This book gives an account of the lives of peasants living in a small village in northeastern China during the early twentieth century. It is roughly divided into two sections. The first section illustrates Chinese agrarian village life. Time is circular and marked by the passing of seasons, the harvest, and the cycle of life and death. Accompanying this cycle is a deep sense of melancholy and fatalism. The villagers are desperately poor and untouched by the greater world. They are plagued by famine and disease, and in the face of these crises they are helpless and resigned.
The second section deals with the effects of the Japanese invasion and occupation during the early 1930s. The raising of a Japanese flag, which the villagers comically believe represents a dynastic change, begins this section of the novel. The Villagers soon realize their error as Japanese troops enter the village and terrorize them. In the face of the Japanese invasion, the villagers remain fatalistic, ignorant, and for the most part, passive. The youth of the village do attempt to organize a small volunteer army called the Red Whiskers, but they are immediately defeated.
The characters in The Field of Life and Death are intentionally underdeveloped and represent archetypes. An exception to this is the character Golden Bough, whose story arc ties the novel together. Golden Bough is introduced as an innocent youth who, not so innocently, goes to the river to rendezvous with Ch'eng-Yeh. As a consequence she becomes pregnant and is obliged to marry him. Golden Bough is mistreated by her violent husband. He kills their newborn child. Following the Japanese takeover and the death of her husband, Golden Bough is forced to go to the city of Harbin where she is mistreated and raped. When she feels she can take no more abuse she returns home only to be persuaded by her mother to return to Harbin to make more money. Golden Bough then decides that she wants to be a nun, but even in this endeavor she is thwarted, as the nunnery is closed. The story of Golden Bough is a powerful representation of the plight of peasants and women in China. Her character also mirrors the troubled times of China herself.
Overall, The Field of Life and Death is a well-written and fascinating novel that gives the reader a palpable feel for life in Northeast China during this time. While it is often portrayed as an anti-Japanese novel, its political content is not the novel's most dramatic aspect. The Japanese are portrayed as only another misery to be added to the pile of miseries heaped on these forgotten people. This is best illustrated by Golden Bough's statement, as she tries to ascribe blame for her miseries, "I used to hate only men: now I hate the Japanese instead (...) Do I hate the Chinese as well? Then there is nothing else for me to hate." This statement gives the reader a powerful sense of the nature of peasant life in the face of poverty and war.

Inductive logic programming (ILP) has come a long way since the early work of the 1970's. The last decade saw the field explode due to practical inductive programming languages being developed. The ability of machines to engage not only in experimentation but also in scientific hypothesis generation that is competitive with human scientists has recently been reported in the literature. It remains to be seen how efficacious these machines are in producing useful scientific hypothesis, but the fact remains that inductive logic programming has played a major role in these developments, and this will no doubt continue in the years to come. This book gives a good overview of ILP from a foundational and theoretical viewpoint. Due to lack of space only selected chapters will be reviewed here.

After a thorough overview of logic programming in the first part of the book, the discussion of inductive logic programming begins in part 2, namely in chapter 9, wherein the authors begin by defining induction as learning a general theory from specific examples. Inductive logic programming is characterized as the `intersection of machine learning and logic programming', whose goal is to learn from examples within the framework of clausal logic. The examples and the `background knowledge' are clauses, and the theory derived from them will also consist of clauses. The examples consist of `positive', which are true, and `negative' examples, which are false. The examples are usually ground atoms or ground clauses, depending on the approach used for generalization. In order for the eventual theory to be meaningful, it must, along with the background knowledge, be `complete' (imply the positive examples), and `consistent' (not contradict the negative examples). A theory that is both complete and consistent is said to be `correct'. It is not assumed that the correct theory will be unique. In fact, the authors assume that there may be many "hidden" theories that could be extracted from the examples and background knowledge. The discovery of a satisfactory theory thus implies that a search be made in the search space of permissible clauses.

The authors distinguish between `batch learning', wherein all the examples are given right away, and `incremental learning', where the learning takes place on examples one at a time. Also addressed is the need for bias in the search for theories, and the resulting trade-off in efficiency and the quality of the resulting theory. `Predicate invention' is described as something that might be needed for successful theory construction. The authors stress that the results of the book can be applicable to a nonmonotonic setting.

A more formal discussion of ILP is given in chapter 10. A clausal language consisting of the `observational language' that includes the positive and negative examples, and the `hypothetical language' that is used to formulate the theory, is considered. An oracle is used to obtain the truth-values of the examples. The authors discuss how to weaken a theory by using backtracking, and how to strengthen a theory using refinement operators.

Chapter 11 discusses `inverse resolution' which is the tour de force of inductive theory discovery. Although not required for understanding the rest of the book, this chapter does introduce the reader to a very important strategy for bottom-up approaches to ILP.

In chapter 12, `unfolding' is introduced as a specialization technique that is dual to inverse resolution, and consists of constructing resolvents from given parent clauses. It is used to correct a theory that is overly general. UDS specialization is discussed as a specialization technique that performs a finite number of applications of unfolding, clause deletion, and subsumption on a definite program, and is shown to be complete.

Using the results on lattices in chapter 13, namely the lattice of atoms quasi-ordered by subsumption, the authors show that clausal languages and Horn clauses are lattices under subsumption in chapter 14. This means that every finite collection of clauses has a least generalization and a greatest specialization under subsumption. They also show that one cannot generalize this to arbitrary clauses, in that there exists clauses that do not have finite complete sets of downward or upward covers. All of these results depend on defining a strict order on clauses, which is called the `atomic order'. Particularly interesting in this discussion is the complexity measure that the authors introduce on the set of clauses. This measure is not based on size, but instead is a pair of coordinates, where the first coordinate is the size of the largest literal in the clause, and the second coordinate is the number of literals in the clause.

The authors take up the difficulties of doing implication between clauses in chapter 15. Subsumption is prevalent in ILP because it is decidable, whereas implication is not. The authors give examples illustrating that subsumption is weaker than implication, and that subsumption is not sufficient for the construction of least generalizations. Recognizing that Horn clauses do not have a least generalization under implication, the authors give criteria for when a finite set of clauses does have a least generalization, namely that set must contain at least one function-free non-tautologous clause. For the case of greatest specialization, they show that every finite set of clauses has a greatest specialization under implication.

The role that background knowledge plays in subsumption and implication is the subject of chapter 16. This brings up the topic of `relative subsumption', which goes way back to the beginnings of inductive logic programming. The authors address the existence of least generalizations under relative subsumption by first giving a counterexample showing that in general they do not. They then give criteria that guarantee the existence of least generalization under relative subsumption. The authors then discuss relative implication, showing that relative subsumption does not imply relative implication, and then give criteria for the existence of least generalizations under relative implication. Also studied is a notion of generalized subsumption which applies only to definite program clauses. The relation of this notion to implication and subsumption is discussed in detail.

This book is broken into two parts: logic programing, and inductive logic programming. Before I read this book I had previous exposure to automated reasoning and prolog, but not a good understanding of how they were related. The first part of this book (logic) did an amazing job in moving from propositional logic all the way to the theory behind prolog; and by the end of this part I saw the "big picture". The second half of the book seemed less magical, but certainly just as interesting nonetheless. The chapter on unfolding seemed very good and I particulary was intrigued by the attention paid to clausal languages and the different types of generality lattices that can be defined over both the atoms and clauses. My first reaction to those chapters was "how can one design hierarchical neural networks to support efficient traversals along these lattices structures?". May be another book will address such a hybrid approach in the near future. There is also a nice chapter on PAC learning which fills a void in the current literature. The writing and examples seemed both very clear and well-chosen throughout the entire book. In conclusion, I highly recommend this to anyone interested in prolog, automated reasoning, and/or machine learning.