Ferguson Books

i had to buy this for a macromedia flash class i took, i never opened it once. dont bother learning macromedia, get a program called SWiSH. you can do almost everything you can in macromedia but a thousand times easier.

Don't buy this book. It is full of errors and omissions.

The anatomy is explained with spacial relations of parts of the brain that have not been discussed. In some cases, the names exist only as descriptors and the location remains a mystery without another textbook. In other cases, there is a structure named with location shown in many places, but there is no description of it's function in the book. Acronyms exist without a glossary listing of them, so the only way to know the acronym is to flip back in the book until you find the location it is first used - fun for a >600 page book.

when I first recived this book it seemed great, it was very colorful, has many diagrams and clinical case presentations that you may see on the USMLA. However, over time, it seemed difficult to read, often mentioning a topic without having previously having discused the topic. For example the motor systems chapter is very confusing and I had to use another textbook to understand plantar reflexes and B sign. I would say get the atlas and textbook by Nolte and the text by Martin.

I was surprised to see that this title is still in print, almost twenty years after it was written. The first chapter of the book, on the role of pre-understanding, is valuable and worth reading. However, the rest of the book suffers from a number of flaws: overly scholarly language (as one with a Master's degree in religion, even I had trouble understanding parts of the book), a bias toward conservative interpretation, and an over-reliance on white male and especially German theologians. Liberation theology is given only a glancing mention, and feminist theology is nowhere to be found. There are newer and better texts to be found on the market, that take advantage of the diversity of voices that are being heard in theology today.

Ars Magica is an interesting line for a rpg. On the one hand the game is set in 13th century Europe; therefore there is a historical basis to the game. On the other hand the major characters are wizards, and that of a not particularly medieval stripe. This being said, Ars Magica is, after 30+ years of gaming with various sets of rules, my single favourite system. I looked forward to Covenants because it was going to be the first serious attempt to nail down the "metacharacter" of the game, the covenant itself, since the 2nd edition. Sadly, it did not live up to my expectations.

The current notion of how to create a covenant is different from in earlier editions. Previously the creation of a covenant was an absolute endeavour -- you created all of the parameters of the covenant, top to bottom, with the notion that there might be rules within the covenant itself that might restrict access to certain sections. Under the 5th edition rules, however, covenants are designed stritcly around the players. Thus a covenant may actually have more goods and materials available to them than the created ratings suggest, at least in terms of magical volumes. This creates an odd situation. If, as I have had happen in various sagas, the players go over to the second generation (apprentices who become magi and take over for the primary magi, who are themselves more or less retiring to their laboratories), the covenant statistics are no longer valid. In simple terms, the statistics created for the covenant only work for a given group of players, not to older or young NPCs or subsequent apprentices. This is a failing.

In Ars Magica money has never been of central importance. Characters have very broad, generalized "wealth levels". This has worked well in that no one has had to really think about where the money comes from. For covenants in the past this was a good idea -- how is a covenant able to support itself? A handwave would suffice. With this supplement, however, the covenant must know precisely from what source its monies derive. This creates a major problem. As most wealth in the 13th century derives from land, and land is not a saleable commodity, the covenant must come up with some sort of plausible reason for why it owns the land. In addition the supplements list a "typical" holding of lands for a covenant to be equivalent to "a large tract of wheat fields ... with a half-dozen villages." This is more than a standard knight of the 13th century would hold, closer to a small barony. Such a covenant, therefore, is not simply a landholder, but a considerable one. Certainly such a group, assuming it could even persuade others that they have actual rights to the lands, would be drawn into the mundane conflicts of the day. Prices for various commodities are provided, yet not how quickly such items would be used up, so the costs versus needs are impossible to calculate.

Now while such sections seem to balance more towards the mundane, concrete, and historical side of the equation, the supplement also has material that, quite improbably, leans heavily towards the fantastical, bordering on the Moorcockian. There are options for mutable and flickering auras, pattern Warping, predetermined natural disasters, fantastical cavalry, death prophecies, and other bizarre environmental factors. Of course this is all intermixed with hard-and-fast rules on realistic fortifications and maintainence, so it is hard to tell precisely which direction the authors meant this books to jump.

There are also rules in here that make it much harder to run your covenant. The rules on prevailing loyalty are horridly broken was written; there are fixes to this over in the errata section at Atlas Games, but they do not go far enough. Instead of merely adding flavour to the game, it is now nearly impossible to have loyal covenfolk. The Extended Rules section on the writing of books, while appear to add extra options, instead takes the core book writing rules and declares that the only way to achieve the levels of Quality found in the core rulebook is with a greater expenditure of money and time than the core rules call for.

There are also a great number of spells of questionable use in this book. The Scribal Magic found in Chapter Seven, while quite charming, has no use or application. While each of these spells seem to be useful to the game there is again the problem of we do not know just how much is needed materially to create books, thus the spells, while at first glance useful, cannot actually be sued in the game. They create specific amounts of material needed for writing and copying books; since we do not know how much of this material is needed, the spells provide no benefit.

The book is not without redeeming features. Chapter Six, which deals with Vis Sources, is both imaginative and charming, the sort of thing that provides great colour to any saga.

Overall this book could have provided great material for Ars Magica sagas. Instead it provides minutiae that confuses many players, dwells on mundania that ultimately confuses the issue of the place of covenants in the Mythic European landscape, creates extra rules that limit (rather than adding to) options, yet also provides fantastical elements to add into a realistic setting. I cannot recommend this volume for any serious saga.

If you know nothing about diet and exercise, this book may enlighten you some. But if you know anything at all, this is monotonous. There appears to be some good recipes, but I haven't tried any yet. All it says is eat well, exercise, and make time for yourself - don't need 130 plus pages for that.

After going to Europe for five weeks, and travelling to Pamplona (Spain), Bilboa (Spain), Lille (France), Venice (Italy), Geneva (Switzerland), all from Paris train stations, I found that this book was a good place to hold my Eurorail tickets rather than any of the info it provided. Either go to the website and get train info, or go to the station. The train schedules that they provide are a rough rough idea of where trains go and what type of trains. This is what I would do with the book, put more pictures of train stations and highlight where they are located in cities, because the train stations have all info. Also pictures of the trains themselves and how to know what train station you are at, because if you space out for a moment you might miss your stop (and it's not that hard). Major train stations always have english speakers, and then the rest you have to rely on mix of their broken english and your broken spanish, french, german, italian. Good luck, but don't waste your money on this, go to the website by eurorail.

Well I purchased this book along with some other travel guides including "lets go Europe" and just looking at it made me board. I traveled Europe for 3 months from London to Istanbul and I found this book of little use or interest. I think it might have to do with the type of travel I found myself doing. I was jumping on trains by the seat of my pants: buying tickets only the day before and using a 3 month unlimited ticket.

The first topic the author discusses is the Titans. Thus she goes through the story of the castration of Ouranos and his son, the usurper, Cronus. Only she calls him Cronos. Although there is a one letter difference between the two, this is indeed a serious, albeit commonly made, mistake. Chronos (Chronus, Khronos) is the god of time while Cronus (Cronos, Kronos, Kronus) is the titan father of the Olympians. I doubt that this is simply a slip of tongue (or pen) on the author's part, since she often refers to Cronus as "Father Time" (another name by which Chronos is known).

Although I have not read the entire book, thus making this review rather partial, I felt that prospective buyers should be aware of this error since there are no other customer reviews by which to judge. Perhaps the remainder of the book is 100% accurate, I don't know. In my opinion every mythology book should be read with caution and should not be used as the single source for information on the subject.

Up until this point, my review has focused on the negative qualities of this book. Were it not for the author's aforementioned slip, I would sing her praises. This book is eloquently written and is a joy to read. Although the myths mentioned are the commonly known, less obscured ones, the author does a very thorough job of telling them. It definitely contains some things which are found in very few, if any, introductory mythology books.

I haven't yet decided if the good out-weighs the bad, so my stance is rather neutral. There are better books out there and there are worse ones as well.

This book does give you good advice adout rape and rapist. But, the section on self-defense techniques is too brief, and the instruction is not complete enough to teach the average women proper techniques.

this book wasn't too good at all. i was expecting it to inform me well, but it really didn't at all