We thought this book would be a great way to research riding vacations.
We naiively took the descriptions as accurate and ended up stranded far from home in what was basically a dirty PIT, literally inhabited by individuals convicted of crimes and again in trouble with the law during our stay. It was a most bizarre, horrible environment and experience. Luckily the weather was good, so we managed by avoiding the "resort" every day and also avoiding the staff as much as possible. (They were very inattentive anyway, beginning the first day, when they forgot to pick us up.)
Afterward, we noticed some fine print on the inside cover of this book: "The information in this book has been provided by the ranches themselves . . . . The auther and publisher make no representation that this book is absolutely accurate or complete. All ranches are included without charge to them." Consider this a big red flag!!! We will NEVER take the chance of going somewhere we have read about only in this book again.

I took the author's course in "Biology for Non-Majors" at a college/university in the northeastern United States where he was a tenured full professor and this was our laboratory workbook. As to his course generally, in areas that have not changed (I had gone back to college to complete my B.A. after some time had elapsed since my high school and original college years) I felt that I had had better biology in high school. One area stands out in particular: in high school I had meiosis and mitosis-in humans- (the former is the process in by which chromosomes divide in the developing gametes with the result that each sperm and unfertilized ovum has half of the chomosomes for each trait from, each parent having two-so that when the the human ovum is fertilized, the resulting zygote has a complete set of chromosomes, half from each parent, the latter is the process by which chromosomes are reproduced in the body's cells which enables cells to reproduce themselves) he only taught meiosis. This is important because the final lecture and the finale of his course was dedicated to the proposition that abortion is necessary because while birth can be good it can also be terrible, as in the case of (horrible) hereditary disease. He was able to give the name of a horrible hereditary disease and enumerate it's horrors, the details of which I do not remember, but I did not like the fact that somehow he had failed to teach anything whatsoever about meoisis in humans which I attributed to a fundamental psychological lack on his part ( have a B.A., and only a B.A., in Psychology from the Univerisity where he taught). I thought and still think that in not teaching about this process and result in all of its beauty and magnificence, he failed the students taking the course, and I think his treatment of this subject matter was inadequate therefore. It is even possible that there might be fewer abortions resulting from unwanted pregnancies if students were taught about this suject matter WELL. That he appeared to me to be incapable of doing at that time and I'm sure he hasn't changed. I see that his lab book (and I assume it was the same one we all had) is out of print and I think that is as it should be, unless at least one correction was made. There was only one exercise involving genetics, and I do not rememember what the assignment was except that we had to read a little of his material on the genes and answer a simple ques- tion or two. It seems to me that the questions had to do with the hypothetical eye color of the offspring of a hypothetical blue eye horse and a brown eye horse. Whatever he wrote in this lab book about brown eyes being dominant characteristics and blue eyes being recessive somehow didn't get translated into the terms of his exercise because instead of a B to represent the dominant characteristic from the brown eyed parent and a b to represent the recessive characteristic of blue eyes possibly in the brown eyed parent and definitely in the blue eyed parent (the following combinations would be possible: Bb, and bb- the first would result in brown eyed offspring, depending on the genotype of each parent, the second would result in a blue eye offspring but would only occur if the brown eyed parent carried a recessive gene for blue eyes), he had just ONE B or possible ( I don't remember but there should have been TWO for each parent, NOT one) for each parent. I remember complaining the woman professor who ( I was glad) ran the lab that I did not know how to proceed with the excercise and why. She told me that I would be more correct. The upshot was that I filled in the blanks and completed it (and the course) with a passing grade. However, I now see that he has written an expensive textbook, and since I think his treatment of these subject matters was inadequate, I can't but wonder about the quality of his text. Also, I do not know if he is still teaching or not, however if anyone reading this review is considering taking a course in which his text is the required text and/or a course which he teaches himself, I would suggest that you seriously consider the alternatives. That he may have written a book about drug use, does not make his treatment of these vital and important areas good enough. I think there's got to be better available in biology texts and courses than his (We also had to read The Naked Ape by Desomond Morris which I do not wish on anyone either, that author managed to treat violent conflict-mostly between animals, I believe, without dealing with the question of the rightness and wrongness on the side(s) of the parties to begin with in conflict between and among humans -I seem to remember something about losing animals appeasing winning animals and something about that author's automatically being obsequious to a policeman when stopped for a possible violation of the traffic laws). I recommend that you try to do better if you possibly can.

Unfortunately, I used this book in my Organization Theory course one term. I found the book inadequate in several respects: only a small minority of exercises were truly experiential, and several I couldn't bear to assign because they were simplistic, they generated student laughter, and they were probably not particularly valid with respect to the concepts they purported to teach. Many "exercises" were non interactive questionnaires that again had questionable validity and didn't yield particularly enlightening results. The exercise on "Name that Organizational Design" was too elementary; actually naming designs from "real" organization charts (not standard text examples) would be more challenging. Students couldn't grasp the exercise based on Perrow's technology classification at all and couldn't apply it to their own cases. The best of the bunch was the exercise on political negotiating involving "scarce resources." Even though the scarce resources were common office supplies, the students seemed to get the point. I continue to use this demonstration from time to time. My advice to the authors is to send this book out for review (if the publisher is interested in a second edition) and solicit recommendations for deletions/additions. There are many good "experiential" texts now in the OB area. These also would be worth looking at for ideas that might improve this text. The IM was also a bit sparse when it came to instructions and discussion ideas. These can all be problems common to a first edition; I'm left wondering why after several years, a revision was never commissioned.

I bought this book for a class and was hoping it would help me through it, since my teacher was not the best. It just made it more confusing. The book is littered with information, just too much for a person taking algebra based physics. Most people taking Algebra based physics need a step-by-step approach at learning the subject matter. This book does a poor job at doing so. The concepts are not clear and concise, and fails when attempting to outline major equations. The problems in the back have answers for the odd problems, but how do we access answers to the even problems? Where's the student solution manual? It adds much difficulty to the learning process. Wouldn't recommend it.

we shouldn't dwell on the past; let's do away with history particaularly when it elicits such a headache!

Above all a book on bird photography should have good pictures of birds. This book fails miserably. Many of the photos are grainy, out of focus,or under exposed. This is an amateur book written by an amateur photographer. - Do we really have to be told that a telephoto lens "Causes a subject to seem closer than it really is"? The images on the included CD bird screen saver are of the same poor quality. Save your money, or better yet buy Arthur Morris' "The Art of Bird Photography".

Would not read this if the library burnt down and it was a choice between it and a Famous Five trilogy

I received a copy of the 10th printing of the first edition, copyrighted in 1995. If you are using Mathematica 3 or 4.+, this book is out of date.

Also, you cannot use this book without understanding linear algebra; that is, you must be taking Lin Alg concurrently. So it is not useful for self-improvement, or fun. If you know Linear Algebra or Mathematica already, this book will not help you.

There are some major problems in the examples. For instance, Johnson writes about For loops in Mathematica, but one example simply produced a runaway calculation (p. 29). Also, (p.37) the Mathematica "manual" row reduction example needs a special warning: if you make an error, you cannot simply go back and correct it by overwriting; you have to return to the beginning. Else, your results with have compound errors embedded.

Problems like these float elsewhere in the book. Too bad.

For students beginning Linear Algebra, a better book (and one we hope gets revised soon) is C-K Cheung et al., Getting Started With Mathematica.

I am sorry that Brooks/Cole and the Wolfram website still market Johnson's out-of-date and error-prone book. If Johnson revises the book, hopefully incorporating Mathematica 4.2, I hope these errors get corrected. At that time I hope I can change this review to a 5*.

This book was used by the author when he taught digital design theory. The examples are trivial and terse and the book rambles on with no clear connection of concepts. I can't recommend it, especially since it is quite overpriced. Terrible.

I have not read this book and I'm not going to. I took a full year's undergraduate course called "Biology for Nonmajors" from him, years ago, and while we did not have this book, we did have his laboratory workbook entitled "Experiences in Biology: A Laboratory Guide" which I'm happy to see is out of print because I din't think that that book was good enough anymore than his lectures were. I have touched on a couple of the reasons why I think anyone reading this review who is contamplating taking a course for which this is the required text and/or a course taught by him, if he is still teaching, should seriously consider the alternatives and really try to do better in my review of his lab book which I did have ( I do have a B.A. from the university where he was teaching at the time). I suggest you read it before buying this book too. This can't be good enough.