Being new to computers, graphics programs and digital photography I have had to rely on instruction manuals which have more often than not been inadequate. When I ordered my camera I also ordered a book specific to the camera because I had read that the instruction manual and CD were inadequate or impractical. When I purchased PSP I bought an additional instruction book. All seem to assume prior camera or graphics knowledge. When I started to read Digital Photography Answers! I knew I had found what I needed. It's like having a knowledgeable and patient friend here. The book is extremely well laid out and indexed and seems to assume that the reader is intelligent but new to the genre, and includes basic information in addition to more detailed info. If you're new to digital photography and struggling with your graphics program (or even if you're not), this book is wonderful.

The book explains how digital cameras work, what the differences are between various technologies and gives you ideas about what to look for in purchasing a digital camera. There are chapters explaining the various camera options and their proper use and comparing them to 35 mm tools. There's information on composition and lighting and other standard photographic concepts, but the author also looks into batteries and battery life, photo manipulation software (Paint Shop Pro is the program used in the descriptions), incorporating photos into Power Point and scanning photos. The book would be perfect for someone who had a little bit of experience using a scanner or digital camera and uses Paint Shop Pro. For others, there is still a good deal of solid information within.

I've had a 35mm camera for years and got a digital camera recently. I love this book -- I've read others but this one had all the info I was looking for. It talked about compositional skills, plus how to take and edit digital pictures. The fact that I've framed a picture from my camera on the wall I pretty much owe to this book.

This is one of the best books I've ever read. Not only does it show the other side of the history of colonial Australia, it's also really funny. Calling the Chief Protector of the Aborigines an "upwardly mobile bricklayer" (as Mudrooroo does) says it all. :)

A novel that provides a much needed Aboriginal perspective on Australian history - and does so with great originality, compassion and humour. I recommend it as a truly important and fascinating read. It provides a unique perspective on colonialism and indigenous resistance that is too often ignored by mainstream press and politics.

This is a truly amazing book, a view into a world that has been lost, an examination of a historical tragedy that is unfortunately not unique: the death of an entire people at the hands of another. It is a compassionate work of great spiritual power, and ultimately affirms the human imagination and the strength of the human soul. It is written in extraordinarily restrained language by a justly acclaimed poet.

The author, Mudrooroo, may not be well known to American readers, but is a leading (and somewhat controversial) literary figure in Australia. The novel was previously published several times in the United States as by Colin Johnson, the author's birth name. I completely agree with the assessment of Stephen Cobb that it is an extraordinary accomplishment.

The poetry of "Elements" has all of the functional, singular assets which make poetry the art that it is. It is clear, decisive, dynamic, and above all, strictly inundated with the spirit of the writer. The author, Laura Johnson, gives the reader a sensual, provocative, and pragmatic view of herself through her writing, as well as an enlightening look at the essence of a mind re-defining itself through poetic interpretation of events which surround the author. I recommend the book highly, not only as an example of literary clarity and beauty, but also as an example of a strong personality balanced with the tenderness of love for the craft.

Laura Johnson's work is truly outstanding. At once soft and sensual with a mind provoking kick that leaves you enamored with her style and passion. This book is one of the best I've seen of this genre in years.

Laura Johnson's poetry conjures up exquisite images that linger long after reading the book. Her unique voice captures the essence of beauty, grace and style. Elements is truly a poetic treasure and an asset to any home library.

This is the best work I've read on the solar system, period. The text is wonderful but I dearly wish the author had included the American measuring system along with the metric one. I'm one of those old fogies who has to cogitate in the extreme in order to convert kilometers into miles. Oh, well.

Seriously, this book is a "must-have" for astronomy aficionados and for those who merely wish to brush up on their knowledge of our solar neighborhood.

I also wish the book had a sewn binding. Otherwise, it is a really great read and a "keeper".

Don't buy this book thinking it will be an entertaining reference for your twelve-year-old nephew who enjoys astronomy. This hefty tome is more akin to a college-level textbook than an encyclopedia. If you want to get a detailed, but not overly technical, overview of modern solar system science, this is the book for you.

Following a thematic progression, ranging outward from the Sun to other planetary systems, the Encyclopedia of the Solar System details the dynamics of motions and rotations, solar wind, planetary, geologic, and atmospheric conditions, as well as other processes in the formation of planets, satellites and the smaller bodies of our planetary environment. The Encyclopedia covers the latest observations employing planetary radar, radio, infrared, and ultraviolet wavelengths.

Features convenient glossaries of technical terms, over 700 illustrations, numerous color plates, extensive cross-referencing throughout, further readings, useful appendices, and a comprehensive 4,500 entry index. Readers and web denizens like me will particularly appreciate the convenience of using the accompanying website (academicpress.com/solar) to link to related on-line resources.

Keep watching the sky!

Follow Mr. Johnson's classroom organization and teaching philosophy and you will have a math class that works. He tells you how to start your class on time with the bell and have nonstop learning the entire period. The books are very short (66-98pages) but packed with techniques you can use right away.
You can use his techniques on any grade level and with any subject, not just math.

I read this book about 11 years ago before I started teaching, and this little booklet has influenced my teaching more than anything else I have read. I credit this book with much of the success I have had as a teacher.

This book is one of the most informative books that I have read addressing how to keep a class on track. It gives ideas for class interaction, homework, quizzes, group work, and others. I have found his ideas very helpful, this being my first year of teaching. There are also two more books that follow.

This book has some of the best photography of volcanoes I have ever seen. It's a great volcano book.

I think this book is well writen, and easy to understand, but the thing i like the most about this amazing book is the coolerfull pictures. Most of this book is pictures of erupting valcanoes with captions explaning the pictures. This book taught me many, many things about volcanoes. I recumend this book, Fire on the Mountain for all ages.

This book covers the different types of volcanoes with excellent photographs accompanying and expanding on the text. Even if you just look at the photos, the book's price is worth it, but the text really added to the book as well with very accurate geologic information in a non-textbook format suitable for the general public. The reading level is probably 9th grade and up. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and plan to give more copies to others as gifts.

With over 500 stickers illustrating simple German words, First Thousand Words in German Sticker Book is a superbly organized and presented activity book for young people. An easy-to-understand basic pronunciation guide enhances the charming full-color illustrations and the great many "peel-and-stick" stickers that help enhance memory and comprehension. First Thousand Words In German Sticker Book is an excellent and thoroughly "kid friendly" title for budding bilingual children. Also very highly recommended from Usborne is Heather Amery and Stephen Cartwright's First Thousand Words In Spanish Sticker Book.

This book has been a fun way to introduce my kids to German and helped me refresh on something I haven't taken since high school. While my kids are still pretty little (1 and 2) we've had a fun time learning that there are other words out there for dog, cat, bike, etc. The illustrations are great and keep my kids attention as well.

This is like a mini version of The Oxford-Duden Pictorial German-English Dictionary ISBN: 0198645023.
Only this one shows the big picture. It has an index of words and more words that at not pictured. It even comes with an Easy Pronunciation Guide. The pictures are cute and colorful.
...

I almost gave this book five stars. It was laugh out loud funny -- I first read it about 15 (?) years ago it in the car with my parents and they kept asking my what I was laughing about. I've since read it again, and it is just as hilarious. That's my true litmus test for a humor book. My only complaint was there were too many exploding animals for me. Those jokes got old very quickly. The rest of the book was hilarious and insightful. The neat thing about Dave Barry is that he makes me laugh, but he also always has something to say, so I find myself thinking as well.

Dave Barry really fulfills the position of funniest man in America with this book; he makes every line something to laugh about. When I read this book I had to keep myself from laughing out loud, and scaring those. The book gets funnier and funnier as it goes along, but its not all just booger jokes, its a lot of jokes that make you think and have a meaning behind them. Don't get me wrong there still are plenty of booger jokes that everyone has come to know and love from Mr. Barry. The book covers many interesting topics like; Exploding animals and other assorted things, dogs, and buying cars. I gave Dave 5 stars for his epic novel Dave Barry Talks back, so go buy, rent it, what ever you have to do to get it, just do it.

My cousin bought me the audio version of this 7 years ago. I wasn't sure why, but I had heard that Dave Barry was funny. I listened to it on the way back to Sonoma County from San Diego. It was a fantastic 3 hours that took me from Mojave to just north of Fresno.

Mr. Barry has an unusual sense of humor, mixing a sarcastic wit with observation and whacky schemes to get rich and/or better the world. He takes us on a voyage from the usefulness of the word "weasel" to Disneyworld, to buying a boat, to the Nintendo world, and later topping it off with his own airline with Sean Penn as the official spokesperson.

I have to say this, though, I have had others listen to this masterpiece, and while a few liked it as well, others didn't get it and therefore did not like it. You either like Dave Barry or you hate him. As for me, I went about buying many other audiobooks of Dave Barry, as well as actual books. No 4- or 3-star review would pull that much money from me!

This is a very personal history as the author takes personal interest in the Lt. Kidder massacre that occurred to a platoon of soldiers carrying a dispatch from General Sherman to Custer. This was during the 1867 Kansas Indian war during the military's unsuccessful campaign to defeat the various tribes. Earlier references to Kidder stated that the young inexperienced officer was unfamiliar with Indians and was ill prepared for his mission. However, the author through research confirms that Kidder had Civil War and Indian warfare experience. The latter was during the Sioux wars in Minnesota. The author provides more detail than the normal few pages in books about Custer. The detail includes a biography of Kidder, a detailed description of his family and particularly information about his father who was a judge and politician in South Dakota. High points include the story of the massacre. It starts initially with Kidders recent re-enlistment and assignment in Kansas and within a few weeks of his arrival, the mission to deliver Custer a dispatch who at that time was with the 7th trying to locate and defeat the Indians. Kidder finds Custer's trail but unfortunately where Custer turned off the Wallace trail, Kidder misses the new yet faint trail perhaps because he passed it at night. Approximately 200 warriors found Lt. Kidder instead and he tries to escape finally fortifying himself in a small ravine among high grass. It sounds familiar to the last survivors of Custer Hill running to a ravine for cover also killed without survivors. The author's surprisingly successful archeology digs help them map a course of battle and determine what may have happened. Kidder also had an Indian guide who died with all 11 army members. The author also writes of Kidders father making a brave trek to the battle site to recover his son's body, which actually encouraged the army to recover all the bodies. It's a personal trip with history and a real person's story about the need to find more detail about an often referred to event without elaborate research. The authors virtually take you there with their visit through descriptions, maps and photos.

This is a very personal history as the author takes personal interest in the Lt. Kidder massacre that occurred to a platoon of soldiers carrying a dispatch from General Sherman to Custer. This was during the 1867 Kansas Indian war during the military's unsuccessful campaign to defeat the various tribes. Earlier references to Kidder stated that the young inexperienced officer was unfamiliar with Indians and was ill prepared for his mission. However, the author through research confirms that Kidder had Civil War and Indian warfare experience. The latter was during the Sioux wars in Minnesota. The author provides more detail than the normal few pages in books about Custer. The detail includes a biography of Kidder, a detailed description of his family and particularly information about his father who was a judge and politician in South Dakota. High points include the story of the massacre. It starts initially with Kidders recent re-enlistment and assignment in Kansas and within a few weeks of his arrival, the mission to deliver Custer a dispatch who at that time was with the 7th trying to locate and defeat the Indians. Kidder finds Custer's trail but unfortunately where Custer turned off the Wallace trail, Kidder misses the new yet faint trail perhaps because he passed it at night. Approximately 200 warriors found Lt. Kidder instead and he tries to escape finally fortifying himself in a small ravine among high grass. It sounds familiar to the last survivors of Custer Hill running to a ravine for cover also killed without survivors. The author's surprisingly successful archeology digs help them map a course of battle and determine what may have happened. Kidder also had an Indian guide who died with all 11 army members. The author also writes of Kidders father making a brave trek to the battle site to recover his son's body, which actually encouraged the army to recover all the bodies. It's a personal trip with history and a real person's story about the need to find more detail about an often referred to event without elaborate research. The authors virtually take you there with their visit through descriptions, maps and photos.

This book provides an interesting and poignant study of Lt Lyman Kidder and his brutal demise.The work also affords the reader an insight into the tragic existence of the frontier family by following the journey of Lyman's father to claim his son's body from the remote battlesite. The authors' skillful use of original sources paints a vivid picture of a father's search for meaning following the death of his son. Judge Kidder's subsequent correspondance with Custer and Sherman, among others, affords an invaluable window into these turbulant times. The book will not only be enjoyed by students of American Frontier history, anyone with any degree of empathy with, or sympathy for, a family's love for their son will be moved. I recommend this book without reservation.

Don't get me wrong, I truly love a large selection of the poems in this volume. However, that is a measure of Emily Dickenson and me, not T. Johnson's collection. What makes this book better than many that are around and about, as has been mentioned, is the lack of editing to her poems--something that has always bothered me. In this regard, the content of the poems is better than many others, however there are other issues of note.

This is, of course, an abridged collection. As such, we are forced to rely on the opinion of another. Granted this is common enough with poetry collections, but that doesn't change the very nature of each person having differing interests. There is no way to know if the ones he leaves out are just as good or even better, from each individuals perspective, without going to more comprehensive texts.

Regardless, I do have one gripe with this book that is unrelated to the above pettiness. The method of dating each poem seems silly to me. The reason is that they are all claimed to be from one of several (if memory serves 3) years separated out over several decades. That and there are two listings of dates for each poem, which I don't recall off hand why they did that, and it may serve some purpose, but it's not useful information if when these poems were written can only be pinned down to plus or minus five-ten years. I can't blame Johnson for this as I imagine that is as close as is known, but, by the same token, the dates could have been left out so that it doesn't detract from the actual poetry.

All in all I would recomend this book, but I might suggest getting a more complete version instead (so long as it is unedited--Emily hated it when people wanted to edit her poems, and I think that we should respect that).

I was never actually a fan of poetry until I encountered Emily Dickinson's poems. It seems as if she has written a poem for everyone. I strongly recomend this book, as my English teacher did to me, not only because of my love for Emily Dickinson, but for the quality of the book. It is obvious that Thomas H. Johnson, the editor, put many long hours of hard work into gathering this collection. Many of her poems were simply scribbled on little pieces of paper, which makes me wonder what kind of literary genius she must have been. With the help of this book, she has become my favorite poet, and I have learned that poetry can be strong medicine for the hurting soul. Final Harvest never leaves my side.

When it comes to choosing an edition of Emily Dickinson's poems, we need to be very careful. Selections of her poems have appeared in many editions, and the earlier ones - which are still being reprinted - often contain extensively edited and revised versions of her poems which do not give us what she actually wrote.

Her poems are so unusual, in terms of their diction, meters, grammar, and punctuation, that earlier editors felt obliged to replace her characteristic dashes with more conventional punctuation, and to regularize and smooth out her texts to make them more acceptable to readers of the time.

In fact, it was only when Thomas H. Johnson's editions appeared that readers were finally given an accurate version of the original texts, with Emily Dickinson's diction and punctuation restored.

Johnson has produced three different editions of the poems. The first, a 3-volume Variorum Edition (1955), includes all of her many variants, since Emily Dickinson often added alternate words to her drafts and in many cases seems never to have decided on a final reading. These variants, though extremely interesting to scholars, enthusiasts, and advanced students of ED, are not really necessary in an edition for the general reader.

What the general reader needs is an edition in which the editor, after closely examining the manuscripts and taking into account all relevant factors, gives what he feels is a sensible and acceptable reading, and this is what Johnson has given us in the two other editions he prepared, a Reader's edition of the Complete Poems (details of which are given below), and an abridgement of this which included only what he felt were her best poems.

In other words, readers can feel confident that in the present edition they have been given (insofar as it's possible to get her idiosyncratic manuscript drafts over into typography) at least one accurate reading of ED's original draft.

Those who would like to look at the variants can always consult Johnson's Variorum (1955), or the more recent Variorum of R. W. Franklin (1998). Better still, if they can, they might take a look at R. W. Franklin's sumptuous 2-volume 'The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson' (1981), which gives photographic facsimiles of many of her manuscripts.

Emily Dickinson is a very great poet. Personally I think that in some ways she is the greatest poet of all. In the present edition we have been given accurate texts of a selection of her poems, arranged so far as was possible in chronological order of composition. Johnson's is an edition which should serve the general reader well enough for most ordinary purposes.

Another excellent Reader's edition that can be recommended has been prepared by ED's most recent editor, R. W. Franklin (1999). Either of the Johnsons or the Franklin (which contains 14 additional poems) will give you access to a body of poems that are so far above the ordinary run of poems that we really ought to have another word for them.

Just as a prism breaks up light into a band of colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet - and their infinite gradations, so do Emily Dickinson's poems become, as it were, a prism which conducts the white light of reality, a reality which as it passes through the prism of her poem explodes into a multiplicity of meanings.

It is the rich suggestiveness of her poems, a suggestiveness which generates an incredible range of meanings, that prevents us from ever being able to say (to continue the metaphor) that a given poem is 'about red' or 'about blue,' because her poems, as US critic Robert Weisbuch has pointed out, are in fact about _everything_. This is what makes her so unique, and this is why she appeals to every kind of reader.

Emily Dickinson's poetry is one of the wonders of the world. Whether you select one of the Johnsons or the Franklin edition, it will become a book that you will cherish, a golden book and endless source of pleasure and inspiration that you will find yourself returning to again and again.

For those who may be interested, details of Johnson's reader's edition of the Complete Poems are as follows :

THE COMPLETE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. 784 pp. Boston : Little, Brown, 1960 and Reissued. ISBN: 0316184136 (pbk.)