I remember reading this story over and over in elementary school. It was a favorite for everyone in my class and would create fights over who got to borrow it from the classroom. One of my fondest memories of 2nd grade was performing a play of this story.

Like the other books in the "Oxford Introduction to Language Study" series this book aims to provide a "brief but comprehensive introduction" (blurb) to its topic. Generally, Spolsky suceeds admirably: he provides a dense but still easily readable account which can be used as a first introduction to the field but also to recapitulate the most important areas of sociolinguistics. As usual, the book contains a survey of key concepts (only 80 pages!), short readings from other relevant works and a selection of annotated references.

However, readers should be warned that the book is (because it is so short) necessarily rather dense. I regard this as positive, though. I'd rather read 70 pages than 300 with the same amount of information!

I'm a Phd student from Turkey. I read some aspects of this book. I must say that this is the book which i always want to have. It have a enormous content about soil dynamics. Every geotechnical engineer must have this book

This novel won the Goncourt Award in 1930 (This is the French equivalent of the Literature Pulitzer Award). It focus on the life of a former French Soldier of the First World War who after a conversation which one of his fellow comrades in arms feels the paradox inherent in everyone of life's conflicts. The conversation is broken to be retaken ten years afterwards when the meet in Malaya at a country club. Now his mate is the owner of a rubber plantation and he works in the administrative post with another company involved in the same type of business.

Helped by his friend, he will slowly but surely develop a wider perception of life, boosted by the fact that the customs of the locals allow him to relax his usual frame of mind. It is a novel of self discovery written at a time when such type of travel was not hype, so it feels very authentic.

The little known Oxford Archaeological Guides series provides information that you cannot find elsewhere This guide was written by Henry Cleere in 2001 and gives information about many of the (mostly Roman) archaeological sites of southern France. Sites are described in great detail with an emphasis on how the site might have looked in ancient times and changes occurring over centuries. Information is provided here that I have not seen in any other guidebook. The amazing Roman bridge the Pont du Gard, near Nimes, is described in great detail. This immense stone structure was built in 20 BC over the river Gard to supply water to the expanding settlement of Nemausus (present day Nimes). The automobile-sized stone blocks of which the bridge is built were quarried from a site less than a kilometer upstream. There is no better illustration of the power and wealth of ancient Rome than that such a massive structure was built (50 meters high and 275 meters wide) merely to provide abundant water for a minor settlement. Other not-to-be missed sites are given the attention they deserve: The very similar amphitheaters of Arles and Nimes are well described. The beautiful Roman theater and the triumphal arch at Orange are explored in detail I have not seen elsewhere. This book would not be suitable as the only guidebook to take with you on a trip, the information provided is far too specialized. I'd recommend taking along the Michelin Green guides or the Knopf guide for Provence as well. Some minor drawbacks: the drawings and maps are not as detailed as they could be and the few photographs that are provided are black and white and of poor quality. These complaints are not critical flaws; the book would still be invaluable even if it didn't contain a single illustration.

This is a wonderful resource for those interested in the prehistory and early history of Spain. The book is well organized, with maps that cross-correlate with listings of sites by time period. Each site is described succinctly, and directions for finding the sites are clear and detailed. Obviously, the book is now about 5 years away from the most recent research, but nonetheless it represents a comprehensive guide for some essential places to know.

If you are seriously studying Spanish, and need a compact, complete resource for Spanish grammar, this is the book for you. It is extremely comprehensive, yet very manageable. This book is fantastic as a supplemental resource for any student in formal Spanish training. The book is beautifully arranged, containing clear explanations without sacrificing utility. I grabbed this book so many times that I almost wore it out! I cannot list the number of times that I have used grammatical constructions that I learned through the use of this book.

Continental Europe in the 1830s was well on the way to making Christianity irrelevant. Britain's turn would come and already the Church of England was shocked to find its ancient sources of revenues and its ability to manage its own affairs effectively challenged by a liberal and secularizing Parliament. The Oxford Movement (OM) was created in 1833 to reverse that trend. In the end it did far more. It also revitalized the Church of England both as a force for Gospel truth and for a sacramental view that everything in this world is a kind of language pointing to a higher, holy transcendent world which all men are invited to attain.
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Historian Christopher Dawson's brief overview of the OM's first seven or eight years is masterly. It rewards repeated reading. First written a hundred years after the OM began, THE SPIRIT OF THE OXFORD MOVEMENT was almost unique in its day for flagging three facts.
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The first fact is that the driving, almost demonic, force behind the Movement was the young Richard Hurrell Froude. Froude was the most gifted person whom John Henry Newman had ever met. Froude's unceasing nagging had the effect, over time, of removing every last one of John Henry Newman's inherited Protestant detestation of the Papacy. Without Froude, said Dawson, one could not have predicted that Newman would become a Roman Catholic Cardinal.
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The second fact which Dawson convincingly and virtually uniquely among historians sketches is the impact of Calvinist theology on the young Newman. This theology John Henry imbibed from his Low Church Evangelistic parents and later at school from one or more teachers and from his reading in church history. Till the end of his days Newman, undisputed leader of the OM, firmly embraced Catholic views first learned under Calvinist auspices: the Majesty of God, the Incarnation and Predestination of the saints. As today's Baptists and Presbyterians become aware of Newman's abiding albeit critical Calvinism, they may join those Anglican/Episcopalians and Roman Catholics who see in the writings of Cardinal Newman a way to stitch up shattered Christian dogmatic unity. Newman is not normally presented as indebted to the thought of John Calvin or of the Geneva school of theology.
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Thirdly, Dawson illustrates at work within the microcosm of the soul and conscience of Newman an evolution which Newman presented in THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. There Newman argued that the one true form of orthodox Christianity, led by the Holy Spirit, will absorb all that is good in the world and cultures around it: Platonism, Aristotelianism, Protestantism, while rejecting what is untrue or harmful. Newman also believed that God gives each human person from birth the wherewithal to find Him, to transcend the limitations of his or her particular family or time in history, to respond to God's voice echoing in conscience and to find the true religion or at least move in its direction under guidance from the Holy Spirit.
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Similarly, John Henry Newman himself is presented by Christopher Dawson as evolving towards God: reading the Bible as a youngster much as he read the Arabian Nights, then at 15 becoming and ever remaining a converted, pro-active Christian. This fervor endured for a time at Oxford but was challenged then fleshed out by Newman's flirtation with rationalism and liberalism. He then moved into High Church Anglicanism and its belief that it had added nothing to the faith of the Greek and Latin Fathers of the early church. Relentlessly Newman's conscience moved him toward Rome, fighting every step of the way. Finally, he converted to Roman Catholicism only when sadly convinced that he could no longer save his soul in the Church of England.
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Dawson's THE SPIRIT OF THE OXFORD MOVEMENT and its very brief supplement NEWMAN'S PLACE IN HISTORY are unlikely to be unsurpassed as short, brilliant introductions to Hurrell Froude, John Henry Newman and other giants of the early days of the Oxford Movement.

This book is succint, 187 pages excluding the bibliography. It starts from scratch (no statistical background) introduces the relative frequency and Bayesian (subjective) interpretations of probability. Both viewpoints are given throughout the book, where appropriate. The last chapter is a very useful treatment of deconvolution in the presence of limited resolution of a measuring device, and it makes the connection to image restoration.

Time series analysis is not included.

The author's background is particle physics, and he works at CERN. Many examples come from that arena, but the presentation is definitely more accessible to an engineer, physicist or chemist than the numerous treatments by financial analysts and social scientists.

After desperately searching for a good book in statistical estimation theory in the library I found this book to be an excellent resource and worth buying. It has easy explanations and the examples help one better understand the material. It covers both estimation and detection theory. This book is probably best for the engineering student that is more concern with applying the concepts than deriving theorems.