Wednesday, 26 January 2011

Mr. Bloomfield's Orchard: The Mysterious World of Mushrooms, Molds, and Mycologists



Mr. Bloomfield's Orchard: The Mysterious World of Mushrooms, Molds, and Mycologists
Nicholas P. Money | 2004-01-01 00:00:00 | Oxford University Press | 224 | Biology
Wow! I never thought Id enjoy a book on fungi this much. Parts of it are not a particularly easy read, but the information it contains is mind blowing. Forget terrorists; if fungi and mold decided to take out the human race it would be no contest.

We tend not to think of fungi as being a very important part of our world. We might occasionally have mushrooms on pizza or steak, we might notice fungi growing on an old tree or on something that has been kept too long in the refrigerator, but thats about it. In fact fungi has a vast influence in our world, from breaking down fallen trees in the forest to making our bread and beer. Have you ever wondered how dandruff was formed? Guess what plays a major role.

The writer, who presents often bizarre information with wit and style, reminds us that one fungi, covering 2000 acres in Oregon, is thought to be the worlds largest living organism. Even the more prosaic information comes to life in this book - I enjoyed his description of the speed a spore is catapulted from a gill.

Some of the most interesting sections are the mini-biographies of scientists who have researched fungi and added to our knowledge of them. There was Buller, for instance, a professor whose students called him Uncle Reggie, and Ingold who found a totally unknown kind of fungus in water. There are now over 300 species of Ingoldian fungi known and in fall you can find about 20,000 of them in every litre of brook water.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in the natural world. Youll need to expend a little effort reading the more scholarly parts of it, but youll learn some amazing stuff about fungi, mold and the scientists who discovered them.
Download this book!

Free Ebooks Download

Amazon Web Services Made Simple: Learn how Amazon EC2, S3, SimpleDB and SQS Web Services enables you to reach business goals faster



Amazon Web Services Made Simple: Learn how Amazon EC2, S3, SimpleDB and SQS Web Services enables you to reach business goals faster
| 2008-11-12 00:00:00 | | 0 | Web


Hundreds of thousands of customers have joined the Amazon Web Services? community in order to build solutions for their businesses. The AWS cloud computing platform provides the flexibility to build your application, your way, regardless of your use case or industry. You can save time, money, and the difficulties of managing your own infrastructure, without compromising on scalability, security, or dependability.

The types of solutions customers have built include Application Hosting, Backup and Storage, Content Delivery, E-Commerce, High Performance Computing, Media Hosting, On-Demand Workforce, Search Engines and Web Hosting.

This book covers AMazon Web Services'comprehensive cloud computing platform and what it means for your business:

Amazon Web Services is more than a collection of infrastructure services. With the same pay as you go pricing, you can save time by incorporating identity, payment, database, messaging, and other services that will give you a head start on delivering for your business. All AWS services are priced on a pay as you go model, with no up front expenses or long-term commitments.

- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2?) - A web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Configure an Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) and load it into the Amazon EC2 service. Quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change.

- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3?) - A simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve large amounts of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.

- Amazon SimpleDB? - A web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database-real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data-without the operational complexity.

- Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS?) - A reliable, highly scalable, hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. By using Amazon SQS, developers can simply move data between distributed components of their applications that perform different tasks, without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available.



User review
Such a waste of money
This book's `chapters` remind me of the messages that you can find inside the Chinese fortune cookies.

Cryptic, poorly translated and useless.


An excerpt from page 77:


`GoGrid is very phenomenal with its ability to install and

set up Windows and Linux servers in just a few minutes without

the need for a complex installation process and configuration.`


Whoever wrote this book just went over the internet copying and pasting random stuff that seemed to fit together.

Don't waste your money on this.




User review
I wish I had read the reviews before buying !
This book is indeed very very poorly written, many sentences don't even make any sense, some look like they have been translated by Google Translate and not checked.


Many points are inacurate or even wrong. Some services proposed on top of AWS are presented as being AWS.


Yes it does look like a patchwork of cut and paste from blogs submitted into Google Translate.


Please stop buying this book, and get the OReilly instead.

User review
Don't Buy This Book - Reads Like a Bad Blog,,,,Worse, actually
If you've ever read a blog and thought `huhh,,.?` - that's this book is like for over a hundred pages. I met a guy once at a conference who told me his service is to compile blog entries into `books` for marketing purposes. This is like that kind of book, except without editing.


See the other review by P. Smith for details

User review
Look for another book.
The title is misleading. In fact, the 2nd page of the book has the title:


Amazon Web Services 100 Success Secrets


Each section of the book is mostly 1 page long, some 1.2 pages long.

Clearly someone was paid for 100 very short essays, like:


The Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing


The grammar in the book is terrible. It appears a 1st year college

student has compiled a 1st draft copy and successfully published it

without it being edited.


Somewhere in the book I noticed a section with the phrase:


`,,.using it is.`


and from that I could discern the nationality of the author which makes

reading very tidous when you have to stop and re-read the content and

try to convert it to English.


In my opinion, I got only $5 worth of what I spent on the book, and most

of that is in the entertainment I got thinking about what it would be

like to sit and listen to the author trying to sell me some product in

person without laughing.









Download this book!

Free Ebooks Download

The Making of Saints: Contesting Sacred Ground



The Making of Saints: Contesting Sacred Ground
James F Hopgood,James F Hopgood,Yoram Bilu,Irene Stengs,June Macklin,Phyllis Passariello,Gillian E. Newell,William Breen Murray,Carolyn S. Stevens,Erika Doss,Walter Randolph Adams,Roberto Bosca | 2005-04-24 00:00:00 | University Alabama Press | 248 | Social Sciences
Celebrities and popular icons are increasingly ubiquitous figures of a 21st century postmodern world. Some, in death, blur age-old distinctions of sanctification and trespass on sacred ground long held exclusively by religious saints. An emerging continuum is transforming that sacred arena and raising a number of important issues, including the nature of the relationships between the worshipped and the worshipful and the types of institutions that sustain them. The Making of Saints: Contesting Sacred Ground investigates a number of religious leaders, healers, folk saints, and popular icons in seeking to identify their commonalities and discover how they speak to the same inner yearnings of human beings for gods and heroes. Issues of social relations, love, emotion, charisma, power, and sanctification are addressed by the contributors. Analyses of hagiographies, biographies, media, control of space, pilgrimage, and acts of devotion provide the bases for the authors' explorations of these issues. Among the sanctified included for analysis are the folk saints El Nino Fidencio and Teresa Urrea; the charismatic rabbis Baba Sali, Baba Baruch, and Ifargan; King Chalalongkorn of Thailand; two political figures, Evita Perón and Ché Guevara; and three celebrities: James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Japanese rock star, HIDE. The contributors challenge notions of what is sacred and who may be sanctified, and argue that a broadening of views is needed to accommodate and appreciate emerging contemporary realities. Contributors: Walter Randolph Adams, Yoram Bilu, Roberto Bosca, Erika Doss, James F. Hopgood, June Macklin, William Breen Murray, Gillian E. Newell, Phyllis Passariello, Irene Stengs, Carolyn S. Stevens James F. Hopgood is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Founding Director of the Museum of Anthropology at Northern Kentucky University. Author of Settlers of Bajavista: Urban Adaptation in a Mexican Squatter Settlement, Hopgood was presented the 2003 Strongest Influence Award by the NKU Alumni Association.


Download this book!

Free Ebooks Download

Die Inka. Geschichte, Kultur, Religion.



Die Inka. Geschichte, Kultur, Religion.
Catherine Julien | 2001-05-01 00:00:00 | C.H.Beck | 127 | Subjects

Download this book!

Free Ebooks Download

Handbook of Drug Monitoring Methods: Therapeutics and Drugs of Abuse



Handbook of Drug Monitoring Methods: Therapeutics and Drugs of Abuse
Amitava Dasgupta | 2007-10-23 00:00:00 | Humana Press | 446 | Internal Medicine

Written in a handbook style with specific methods and tips on eliminating false positive and false negative results, this book is a practical guide to the detailed mechanisms of such occurrences.


Reviews
Some months ago I was tested postive for Hydromorphone from a test given by my pain specialist. I was very angry, confused, frightened, and almost had a nervous breakdown. I have never taken this drug, yet I tested positive. My doctor thought I was a liar and I had nowhere to turn. I searched the internet and talked to many people about this situation. I was not the only one in my situation. Another of his patients tested positive also and didn't understand why. He just happens to reside in the same condo as I. I am sure many other of his patients also were in this confusing situation. The reason we tested positive is that we all take very high doses of morphine and oxycodone. Certain urine tests will show a false positive for patients taking high doses of these narcotics. It took time for me to straighten this out. Now my physician is very wary of any testing. This makes his job very difficult.



Had he had this book as a reference, this problem would have been resolved by further testing by more proficient laboratories. I hope all Pain Management Physicians would get and read this manual.

Download this book!

Free Ebooks Download

The Tomes of Delphi 3: Win32 Graphical Api



The Tomes of Delphi 3: Win32 Graphical Api
David Bowden,Larry Diehl,Phil Dorcas,Kenneth Harrison,Rod Mathes,Ovais Reza,Mike Tobin,John Ayres | 1900-01-01 00:00:00 | Wordware | 879 | Software Engineering
A comprehensive reference to all of the Win 32 API function calls used to display graphics and user interface elements, this book highlights such topics as drawing primitives, color palette management, regions, and paths. The highly innovative InstallShield and DemoShield software are included on the CD-ROM. .
Reviews
Is this a tome? I was expecting deep subject coverage. What we have instead is a reproduction of the API docs. Does that a tome make? I think not. What's missing? Complex examples. Real-world examples (who creates windows with API calls when we have TForm?). Undocumented insights behind the APIs -- things you can't find in MSDN or the Platform SDK. More than anything, this book highlights the bloody lack of good Delphi books. This one is definitely a pass.
Reviews
Couldn't help but notice the obvious similarities between this book and the examples in MSDN and the Platform SDK. If you have either of these, I don't know why you'd need this book. I bought it thinking I'd get expert advice and insights. All it really is is a rehash of what's publicly available from MS anyway.
Reviews
I don't know many Delphi developers who can't at least read VB code. Obviously, the authors of this book can, because the examples are eerily similar to the VB Win32 examples in MSDN. So much so that I rather doubt a competent Delphi developer who has MSDN would really get much value from this book. If you can read VB, you don't need this book. I was expecting unique insights into the way that Delphi implements the API, particularly the graphics API, but instead got a lame VB-to-Pascal translation. Can't recommend this book.
Reviews
Like a fool, I bought this book in spite of the many negative reviews on this page. I was sorely disappointed. As the other reviewers have said, if you can read Visual Basic and you have MSDN, you don't need this book. The examples are beyond useless. The writing is disjoined and poor. Basically, this thing is nothing but a very expensive paper weight.
Reviews
I didn't think I really got my money's worth on this one. For the price paid I expected a lot more than a hackneyed translation of the graphics API. For one thing, all the examples use 8 bit graphics -- something that was passe when the book first came out and something that's certainly passe now. For another, there isn't much depth here. Many of the examples are overly simple. Last, there's too much repetition. Do we really need every graphics-related record structure repeated multiple times? I would return this one, but I've waited too long. Don't be like me -- don't waste your money on this one.

Download this book!

Free Ebooks Download

Mathematical Tools for Physicists



Mathematical Tools for Physicists
George L. Trigg | 2005-01-01 00:00:00 | Wiley | 686 | Mathematics
Mathematical Tools for Physisists is a unique collection of 18 review articles, each one written by a renowned expert of its field. Their professional style will be beneficial for advanced students as well as for the scientist at work. The first may find a comprehensive introduction while the latter use it as a quick reference.

The contributions range from fundamental methods right up to the latest applications, including:

* Algebraic/ analytic / geometric methods
* Symmetries and conservation laws
* Mathematical modelling
* Quantum computation
Download this book!

Free Ebooks Download