I have been working with crystal skulls for two years now. During that time, I've read a lot of books, many of them excellent, but primarily with strong emphasis on the ancient skulls. Marion has done a wonderful job introducing readers to the amazing contributions of contemporary skulls. She shares information about selecting, cleansing, dedicating, becoming acquainted and working with skulls that come into one's keeping. I recommend this book for anyone who is curious about this crystal skull phenomenon. An excellent introduction for new keepers, and a great resource for those of us who have been working with contemporary skulls for years. I wish this book had been available a few years back when I started my own crystal skull journey!

Marion has done it - plain and simple. Her words are clear, filled with loving admiration and knowledge for her subjects - contemporary carved stone skulls. There are books and countless websites about the ancient and old skulls, but there has been so little shared about the new skulls... until now. Marion covers ths subject very well - sharing good basic information and a lot of personal experiences and stories that help the reader connect with and understand the magic and mystery of the stone skulls. All too often contemporary skulls are dismissed in comparison to the ancient skulls, but those of us that have worked with the contemporary skulls recognize their power and presence. It's nice to see this recognitioned mirrored to us through Marion's work. I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking to learn more about contemporary stone skulls. If I could have given the work 10 stars, I would have without reservation.

Single crystal structure determination has become an important and extremely powerful tool not only for inorganic and structural chemists but for all kinds of chemists interested in the structures of their compounds. The major disadvantage of this method was hitherto the lack of useful introductions into it's practical use.
This gap has been filled by Massa's book.
It focuses - unlike other crystallography books - on the practical applications and enables the reader to attack own structural problems by himself. Additionally, this book will provide the necessary theoretical background to understand how X-ray diffraction works, how crystals are built, all this symmetry stuff and so on.
The absolute highlight is, however, the step-by-step explanation of a structure determination, where one can almost see the author sitting in front of his computer and struggling with one of his structures, explaining every step in detail.
Crystallography still needs heavy brain work sometimes. But this book won't cause unnecessary headaches as many other crystallography books do.
Therefore, I recommend this book warmly to my crystallography students.

This review is important for me because I'm working in a Lab.

If you purchase the book used/without the stones- here is a list along with substitutions for the 5 hard-to-find ones:
red cullet(sub: red aventurine), rose quartz, red jasper, carnelian, golden tiger's eye, brown agate(sub: turritella agate), green quartz, dark green aventurine, hematite, sodalite, deep amethyst, banded/chevron amethyst, clear A grade quartz, cloudy B grade quartz, silent stone(sub: snow quartz), Montana agate(sub: green moss agate), smoky quartz, & black onyx(sub: obsidian)

There are 18 stones (smaller: half to three-quarter inch) that are used in a variety of "spreads" such as The Tree of Life (10 sephiroth), The 12 House Zodiac Wheel, etc. Appendix B gives blank forms to photocopy & use to record readings. There are correspondences with Tarot, Astrology, Numerology, & Color as well. Her color scheme is very Chakra-oriented (intentional??) which is slightly different than the online interactive Tree of Life that I learned from. She also gives instruction on adding your own stones (in balance to the Tree) to the system. The "board" is a full color 6x11 sheet, but you will HAVE to laminate it (it's not even cardstock). ....

You will not find a better written, more clearly illustrated book on this subject. This book is loaded with hunderds of illustrations depicting each concept. Every aspect of the subject is explained in detail with many references to the original literature. This is the book from which contemporary authors turn for explanatory details. Solid state chemists or physicists, materials scientists or crystallographers should not be with out a copy.

If this is the same text as the hardcover 1971 edition (does not say any other edition), then this review may be appropriate here:

This crystallography text was prepared for college undergraduates who have had no prior experience of the subject. Even before I became an undergrad student, I recognized the worth of this text (I snapped up the hardcover for $10 at a used book shop; what a bargain!).

Chapters include:
1. External Symmetry
2. Crystal Classes, Axes, and Systems
3. Crystal Nomenclature and Calculations
4. Crystal projections (stereonet etc)
5. Crystal Forms and Class Determination
6. Translational Symmetry: Lattices
7. Internal Symmetry: Space Groups
8. Crystal Chemistry
9. Principles of Crystal Structures
10. Structural Variations, Composition & Stability
11. Physical Properties
12. Crystals and Light
13. Introductory X-ray Crystallography
Atomic Weights, and INDEX.

Each chapter in sections, and most chapters include references and recommended reading, and most include a few exercise questions and answers.

This may be the best text for the student in print. It is lucid, clearly well written (as well as a college text can be expected to be), and treats well a subject which is often found difficult by students. Many a later text refers to this one for much of its information on the subject. You really have to be into crystallography to learn it; if so, consider this text. -DMM

The publication of this book is very timely since it appears right before the happening of the first "International Conference on Multiscale Materials Model(l)ing", which has been held in June 2002 at the Queen Mary University of London. But it is the subtitle (Modeling Across Scales), not the title, that conveys you what the book's content is about. In other words, the author engages himself in the (difficult) task of showing you how real materials can be modeled (or thought of) by mean of a multiscale approach bridging the atomistic to the macroscopic structure & behavior. As you can well imagine, this is an outstanding task!

The book is organized in four parts and it contains 13 chapters:

Part I: Thinking about the Material World
1. Idealizing Material Response
2. Continuum Mechanics Revisited
3. Quantum and Statistical Mechanics Revisited

Part II: Energetics of Crystalline Solids
4. Energetic Description of Crystalline Solids
5. Thermal and Elastic Properties of Crystals
6. Structural Energies and Phase Diagrams

Part III: Geometric Structures in Solids: Defects and Microstructures
7. Point Defects in Solids
8. Line Defects in Solids
9. Wall Defects in Solids
10. Microstructure and its Evolution

Part IV: Facing the Multiscale Challenge in Real Material Behavior
11. Points, Lines and Walls: Defect Interactions and Material Response
12. Bridging Scales: Effective Theory Construction
13. Universality and Specificity in Materials

Considering the difficulty of the subject and how it has been presented throughout the book, the clarity of language and the good quality of both graphs and figures, this book deserves five stars.

This is the absolutely best book I have seen in the general materials science field--the writing is clear, the explanations excellent, and detail sufficient. The books title is correct, but I think a bit unfair--the book really shines as a general, graduate level introduction to all of materials science, if you take the quite reasonable view that the ability to better model crystals, defects, and microstructures forms the core of the field.

As the author staes in the introduction, this books teaches you habits of the mind and modes of thought that help link up the disparate fields that make up materials, mechanics, and condensed matter physics.

There is no book in my (admittedly limited) library I got more out of during the course of my studies.

Final note: the book has excellent references, and is typset beautifully.

This is one of the best general books on Fostoria I have been able to locate thus far. Well organized and useful. Great pictures.

If you have stemware and need to identify it, this is the book for you. There's a goblet index in the back which refers to the main book by numbers. I have found it invaluable for quick reference. Having ounces and height given really helps to identify which pieces one has. Each pattern is given production dates, and if it was made in several colors, production dates are given for each color.

I had no idea that Fostoria Glass was so plentiful.

As a seller in an antique mall & on-line, I can kick myself that I have passed up so much Fostoria Glass. I have overlooked expensive cigarette holders that I thought were unusual candle holders, bowls with lids that are old cigarette holders, glass coasters, and much much more at auctions & estate sales that I could purchase for pennies on the dollar.

I always thought fostoria was either made with hobbs or very fancy glass. This is not so.

This comprehensive book will more than pay for itself. In the evenings, I will carefully study sections on Fostoria so I do not overlook it again.

If you collect or sell glass, You NEED this book!

Milba Long & Emily Seate's Fostoria does contain plenty of color, providing an identification and value guide for ornamental fostoria glass of all kinds. From jellies to coasters and lamps, this packs in all kinds of fostoria glass works.

This is the first book I have so far encountered on interface growth to treat the subject in a simple, intuitive and entertaining manner. All the basic mathematical concepts are explained, the book is easy to read and contains plenty of illustrations and examples from real life. Barabasi and Stanley show how processes ranging from accumulation of snow on car windows, to bacterial colony growth on agar surfacees, are governed by similiar mathematical laws. Exercises are conceptual as well as mathematical, with many questions asking for discussion or further research. This book is essential for novices and experts alike.

This book does not deseves critics in completelly perfect

FUNDAMENTAL WEB DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT SKILLS
AUTHOR: Rachel Andrew, Chris Ullman and Crystal Waters
PUBLISHER: Glasshaus
REVIEWED BY: Barbara Rhoades

BOOK REVIEW: The very first thing I always look for when a book contains a CD is the contents of that CD. If it has a trial version of the software the book is about, it is one I would think of buying. Fundamental Web Design and Development Skills has such a CD and it contains Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX, Flash MX and Fireworks MX. Anyone buying this book is off to a flying start with these programs available to them

Next I check out the Contents section. Fundamental Web Design has 16 Chapters and the titles of the Chapters make real sense. A reader would know where to look for a specific item. Then I look at the Index which, of course, is another version of the Contents but gives a more in-depth listing. There are 28 pages of information located here. Between the Contents and the Index, no reader should have to wonder where to go to find the information he/she wants.

In reading the book, the chapters give a good explanation of what the chapter is about. It doesn't skimp on explaining what HTML or XHTML is but it also doesn't go overboard to the point of boring a reader or giving extraneous information. The chapters contain visual examples of what is being discussed and each chapter ends in a summary of that chapter.

This is a book I wish I had known about when I was beginning to learn Web Designing. I would have been able to "test-drive" the software and would have bought these programs to begin with rather than going through different software first. The CD also contains all the files needed to work through what the chapters are teaching and as it says on the CD, there is "an extensive list of links to provide you with further reading and material to compliment the wealth of knowledge already contained within this book......."arranged into categories for easy reference.

I would highly recommend Fundamental Web Design and Development Skills to anyone even if you already have some knowledge of web design. Why the writing in this book so understandable may be due to the fact that two of the three authors of this book are women and the only man has interests in art and literature, is a cat lover and has worked with a baby in his lap.

Glasshaus has a new book for anyone looking to get involved in web development, and learn the best ways to go about things from the outset. In this book we see an admirable dedication to sticking to the modern standards of XHTML 1.0, HTML 4.01 and CSS; with little space wasted on discussing the common methods that forward-looking web designers are trying to distance themselves from.

While this book is very much targeted at the beginner just starting to make their way in the field, it would serve equally well as a guide to the modern way of doing things for any developer still mired in the un-compliant techniques and inaccessible practices of the past. Careful attention is paid to explaining fully the relationship between HTML, XHTML and XML, and the future-compatibility ramifications of your choice of markup. The only time deprecated elements (like the tag) are ever mentioned are necessary notes for those coders who are tasked with redesigning existing sites authored in old-style markup.

Covering a wide range of topics, all extremely relevant to anyone in the business of making quality websites, this book should help any reader to feel confident in their awareness of the current state of play. The first few chapters introduce the fundamental concepts of markup languages and hypertext, before diving straight in to page and graphic design. Designing page layouts using tables is advised against, and the superior CSS positioning options are championed. Subjects usually left out of introductory texts - like accessibility and site administration - are here examined and explained without ever being simplistic (or stunting the reader's understanding with overly-technical information). In fact, the book carries a very strong commitment to usability and accessibility, and includes many practical implementation tips. A complete introduction to JavaScript is also included.

While a complete discourse on each subject area are naturally beyond the scope of the book, adequate exposition is given for each topic, which will provide ample foundation for further learning. This book is an excellent starting point that will quickly set interested readers on the right track.

-- Ross Shannon, yourhtmlsource.com