Brandon Fraser, eat your heart out!

What an odd, entertaining book this is. Written probably the cash in the success of Frankenstein, Jane Webb Loudon wrote it as a political satire and a tale of the supernatural. Distinguished because it is the first novel to feature the creature of the Living Mummy, the story centers around a corrupt English government in the year 2126, and Cheops, the resurrected-by-a-mad-scientist, 3000 year-old Mummy's attempts to fix it to earn a redemption from his accursed past.

In the meantime, there are battles that spark thoughts of Braveheart, and the whole thing is a fascinating mix of comedy, Gothic horror, politics, and science fiction. I am surprised this didn't become a great literary classic, ranked up there with Dracula and Frankenstein. Indeed, this story is equal to them in just about every way. Way ahead of its time both socially and in intelligence, thanks to this recent re-print, however, Jane Loudon's The Mummy has a chance to emerge in the full glory that it deserves!

This is truly a wonderful book, consisting recommendations of implementation on most of the basic and common algorithms.
The book is shaped to be useful both for developers with little experience in C programming and also for professionals wanting to learn some more, and maybe make their programs run faster and with greater stability.
Possibly more than anything this book taught me how to get much better memory consumption and smaller code using small yet very intelegently designed functions.

I believe that reading and tryng some of the many examples in this book for your programming needs, would change the way you think in programming, in a way that you would automatically make much more efficiant programs no matter if you write them in C, in C++, in Java, in Perl or any such language for that matter.
Recommended for people that think there might be someting they could improve in their programming especially in C.

: )

I have read a half-dozen or more books pertaining to C Algorithms, and most of them were the same. This touched on the usual stuff - sorting, hashing, linked lists, etc. But it touched on these subjects in ways that are so general purpose that the sample code can be used with little modification! It also adds a couple of new things such as Set algorithms and an explaination of how to pass functions as paramenters to functions.

There could have been a few more examples, and he could have explained some of his material in plain english, instead of engineerese.

Overall the book is excellent, and I will refer to it often.

Mastering Algorithms in C is the most readable algorithms book I've ever encountered. Not only does the author have a tremendous command of English, he has a writing style that is simply a pleasure to read. The author also deserves mention as having one of the cleanest coding styles I've come across. Having taught and worked with computers for over 15 years, I've seen many. It is no easy feat to present the subject of algorithms using real C code in a consistently elegant manner. This book does it wonderfully. Another feature of the book that works exceptionally well is its detailed presentation of interesting (and I emphasize interesting) real-world examples of how various data structures and algorithms in the book are actually applied. I'm a computer science type, so I especially enjoyed the examples about virtual memory managers, lexical analyzers, and packet-switching over the Internet. But the book includes many other examples of more general interest. Students will find all of the examples particularly insightful. Although most of the code in the book does make use of many of the more advanced features of C, an inordinate number of comments have been included which should help even the feeblest of programmer carry on. In addition, there are two great chapters on pointers and recursion. Exceptional writing, elegant code, great examples, not to mention a lot of entertainment value -- O'Reilly has another winner here. I highly recommend it.

For an introduction to quantum optics, the author is to be highly commended for keeping the mathematics and derivations straightforward and easily followed by a senior or 1st year graduate student in experimental physics. Unfortunately, he does not go beyond the math to discuss the physics which the mathematics describe. The problems he includes for students to work out are all derivation of formula with absolutely no application of formula. By the time I got throught the book, I realized that I still had no real intuition of how a laser worked, or any understanding of how to apply the quantized radiation field to any real problems.

So if you're looking for a handbook to give you a simple tour of the mathematics in the quantum theory of light, this is the book for you. If you're looking for a more comprehensive treatment, look elsewhere. The selection of topics is very limited: too little math for a theorist, and too little physics for the experimentalist.

The rating says that this edition is perfect for babies and preschoolers. My wife and I have been reading a section to our five year-old child every night before bedtime. He didn't really care too much about blackbody radiation, but he appreciated the importance of the Einstein A and B coefficients. By working with that phenomonological theory you can obtain the inversion dependence of the gain coefficient much more easily than by solving the problem of a two level system subject to an oscillatory perturbation.

I highly recommend it! After we finish this we'll probably introduce our child to Coldren's book on semiconductor lasers!

Seriously, leaving aside my mockery of the inaccurate reading level rating, it is a decent book. I'd agree that it can be dry and focused on equations more than physics at times, but it offers a very balanced selection of topics, and clearer explanations than many physics books.

I particularly like the progression from old quantum theory to semiclassical theory to the fully quantized theory. It emphasizes the useful aspects of each theory, in particular the usefulness of the old theory in terms of simplicity and accuracy in many situations. History may not always be the best approach to science, but it works if you emphasize the usefulness of simple models and how they follow from more sophisticated models.

Besides, it's much better than Yariv (but what isn't?).

One major complaint: It deals almost exclusively with atomic systems. Those of us who work with molecules or semiconductors need a second reference book to learn more about transitions into a continuum of states (or at least numerous and closely-spaced states).

I began reading this novel hoping to gain new insights into social life in the American South. Instead, I discovered a moderately interesting social analysis of the South that focuses a bit much on the psychological aspects of southern life without telling me why they were unique to the time period. For instance, Stevenson devotes an entire chapter to the challenges of marriage and the conflict between financial success and the marital bond. She doesn't always say what makes this problem unique to the South. I also noticed a creeping political correctness in her writing (e.g. "heterosexual" marriages among slaves) that she doesn't justify with historical evidence. This book served as a reminder of inequality, but maybe used too modern a standard to criticize a not-so-modern society.

There is certainly a market for a lower-cost alternative to the many glossy textbooks on marketing research. This book was obviously intended to close this gap. It gives a good overview of the field at the level of an introductory course, from research design and measurement issues to data analysis, hypothesis testing, and the presentation of reports. It contains 16 short cases on various topics of marketing research, and is complemented by a CD-ROM with data files pertaining to these cases. The files are mainly in the SPSS format, one of the most widely used software packages for statistical analysis which is fully compatible with other applications under Windows. The book as such is a useful introduction for undergraduate classes or for self-study, and the research cases are valuable and original learning tools. At a lower price than most competitors, this no-frills book without color illustrations largely fulfills the same purpose as many other textbooks.

So far so good, one would say -- were it not for the numerous typographical mistakes, particularly in the chapters on sampling methods and on data analysis. The text was evidently written in Word and simply reproduced by the printing house. But there was no thorough editing. Since Word comes with a formula editor, it is regrettable that most formulas on pp. 169ff., 229 etc., contain typos, from missing equation signs to missing sigmas, misplaced subscripts, etc. At least these pages make little sense. It is hoped that a future edition of this otherwise useful textbook will correct these flaws.