5 comments about HarperCollins College Outline Music Theory (Harpercollins College Outline Series).

1. Most books found on this subject are designed for beginers and are frustrating for those who want to learn more. This book is for those who want more and accomplishes that feat.



2. This is a practical book that summarizes the most important aspects in the Music Theory, Harmony and an introduction to the Musical Analysis. The book is well structured and the explanations are clear and intelligible, for wich it is well adapted for beginners, teachers at college level, and also for those that, not being professional musicians, but they studied this matter years ago, they are looking for an a single-book-abridgment to refresh their knowledge quickly. It only lacks, from my point of view, of an appendix with the answers to the proposed exercises, what would help the self-students a lot.



3. I searched this book for my AP music theory. Wow, such a fabulous review material that other basic thoery books couldn't compare. As a matter of fact, I read this book instead of my text book (which was tedious and didn't explain well). I personally don't recommand this book for beginners, it's very fast paced, especially on the basics. However, for college freshmans or those who take equivalent courses(like me), the book covers a wide range of different concepts to certain depth. Some of the wording has to be read several times before u understand. Overall, the book is quite profundity to me except for the front cover.



4. This book is very informative. Whether you are a beginner or advanced musician, or simply someone interested in music holistically, this is an excellent book.



5. This is a good beginning book for music theory. However, as someone using the book outside of the classroom, I would have liked an appendix with answers or samples for the end-of-chapter exercises.

5 comments about Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity (Helix Books).

1. In the worlds of Complexity and Artificial Intelligence, the name of John Holland is revered, and for good reason. One of the most important contributions to both fields was Holland's invention of genetic algorithms, a class of optimization techniques that applies a survival-of-the-fittest heuristic to a broad range of otherwise intractable problems. He is certifiably a genius, and his words on the subject of complexity should be considered close to the gospel.

   To the benefit of all mankind, this god of complexity has seen fit to lay down his word on the subject in a manner suitable to the masses. He posits seven basic properties of complex adaptive systems (worth reading and memorizing in their own right), then uses the rest of the book to demonstrate that adaptive systems possess these properties and shows us how a computer can capture such adaptive mechanisms. Pure gold and totally accessible.

   This book excels as an exposition of complex adaptive systems for the masses, and as a tutorial for the technically inclined. If you are so technically inclined, follow this book with Holland's "Emergence" and "Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems." Then head on over to Goldberg's book on genetic algorithms and maybe some Koza (a quick Amazon search can find these for you).




2. The ideas presented in this book by John Holland are no doubt interestring. The thought of spontaneous self-organization though hardly new has intrigued humans for centuries. Intuitively it makes sense and appeals to most peoples physical and methaphysical sensibilities. We know and hope that there is more to life than our common sense knowledge of it and the often dull and mechanistic accounts of natural science. Emergence theory therefore has an immediate appeal. Holland manages to keep this "flame" alive for one chapter (the first one) then the wholle enterprise is drowned in techno babble and most "non-hacker" readers are bored and dissappointed. This book is one more instance of a genuinly interesting idea being mercilessly slaughtered by bad writing. It's a true waste. It makes you wish writing courses were made compulsory for natural scientists and techo folks. Unfortunatelly it is hard to reckommend a better book on this subject... Most of the existing books are either written by litterary incompetent but hard core techno devotees or by soft science writers ruminating the self evident and riding the tidal wave of hype. All for the buck and a snapshot in the spotlight. A non-trivial sign of an over-hyped field of inquiry, dangerously bordering the realms of pseudoscience. At least chaos theory had Edward Lorenz as a respectable and astute front figure, managing to keep the delicate balance between scientific integrity and popular appeal. As for emergence theory that post is still vacant. Holland may be an important contributor to the field of emergence theory but he fails the requirements for that post.



3. I think this is an excellent book for someone interested in constructing complex adaptive systems. It clearly lays out the technical guidelines that you would need. And of course, it was written by the man who originated genetic algorithms!

   However, if you are new to the phenomena of complex adaptive systems (CAS) or agent-based models (ABM), this might not be the best intro book for you. This is particularly true if you are wondering what a genetic algorithm is right now. I think you will get the most out of the book if you are already somewhat familiar with CAS and ABM as Holland does not dwell on illustrative examples. (Yes there are examples, but they are very short compared to other authors on this topic.) Because of this, I think this book will be rather dry and technical and non-intuitive for a real newbie. If you have no idea where to begin, try _Growing Artificial Societies_ by Joshua Epstein and Robert Axtell.

   One final comment: for excellent in-depth look at the reiterated Prisoner's Dilemna model with genetic algorithms that Holland briefly discusses, read _The Complexity of Cooperation_ by Robert Axelrod. (Axelrod and Holland mention each other in their books.)




4. It gave me the basic concepts in very clear and rogorous way



5. Hidden Order is a seminar re-arranged into a book. The outcome is not a good read. It is tedious and lacks interesting cases.
   If complex adaptive systems are of interest, take a class and skip this book.

5 comments about The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.

1. I do not recommend you read this book unless you are an academic in the field and need to do so. Although I am unsympathetic with many of the ideas in it, the primary reason for my low rating is that the book was overlong and poorly written where it matters.
   
   I'll start with what I liked about the book. The first chapters were on the history of evolutionary theory, and it is here where Gould's principal strength as a popularizer comes through well. Although these chapters could have been more concise, and they were oriented towards backing Gould's ideas, I enjoyed them for the most part. The last chapters in the modern theory section on the importance of constraint were interesting, though they suffered heavily from Gould's style of discourse. I found the last pages of the book on the importance of contingency to be quite beautiful.
   
   The bulk of the book consisted of the material on punctuated equilibrium and Gould's hierarchy of Darwinian individuals. I had issues with the ideas themselves, but these are a distant second to what I felt about Gould's notion of an argument. Evolutionary biology is not a branch of philosophy and textual analysis should not, as Gould claims, "be pursued more often in scientific discussion." They are not done so, according to him, because of the "philistinistic culture of science." Molecular biology and mathematics are vital components of evolutionary biology, as much and perhaps more so than the incomplete fossil record. Gould gave lip service to molecular biology and much less respect to the now venerable and important discipline of population genetics - except of course when the results from these fields backed up his narrative.
   
   Gould's use of lawyerly argument, where verdict is truth, is the reason why he is rightfully disdained for opening the door to creation "science" in the debate on teaching evolution in schools. By stripping away hard science, and replacing it with metaphors, cartoons, and narratives, Gould took a rigorous theory, based firmly on empirical and deductive facts, and replaced it with a secular creation myth that is open to attack. Although this has made him the darling of what he calls the "literati", it is also what made him a bad scientist. The fact that he addressed modern Darwinism tangentially, chose instead to focus on Darwin's and others Victorian era writings, and rejected ideas because they didn't "feel right," didn't improve his standing with me.
   
   Gould's writing when it came to the science under debate was a nightmare. Intentionally or not, he constructed a complex hierarchy of nested, irrelevant tangents; tangents that were fragments within sentences, which were then tangents within paragraphs, which were in turn tangents within sections, ad nauseam. One of the most frustrating aspects of the book was that he refused to give a clear definition of what he meant by "punctuated equilibrium" until pg 1001: "We locate any revisionary status for punctuated equilibrium in its suggestions about the nature of stasis, and particularly its implications for attributing macroevolutionary phenomena to causes operating on the differential success of species treated as Darwinian individuals. Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation." Others, such as Richard Dawkins, have done much on addressing this definition of punctuated equilibrium. My comment here is that it took so long to come to it, and up until this point Gould hinted at saltationist underpinnings to punctuated equilibrium, only to later decry and impugn the integrity of his critics for criticizing these alternative definitions.
   
   My main intellectual criticism was of Gould's hierarchy of Darwinian individuals. I thought this was fine as a phenomenological tool to describe macroevolutionary events, but Gould inverted cause and phenomena to claim that species selection is irreducible to gene or organism selection. His reason why? "Nonlinearities." Along with not knowing what the word "fractal" means, which he used quite a bit to mean either "self-similar" or "scales up", Gould thought "nonlinear" meant "hopelessly complex." His style of argument? Keep repeating the word irreducible until the reader breaks down. Gould was snidely dismissive towards the results of population genetics, but only addressed them directly in a (relatively) brief two page discussion where he claimed that they had to be invalid because population genetics models were able to explain both punctuated equilibrium (stasis followed by rapid change) and his cartoon notion of Victorian gradualism. Since Gould himself was clear that both are evident in the fossil record, it is strength, not a weakness, of a modeling system to be able to explain both.
   
   Although the ideas in the book did not all resonate with me, I would have recommended it if it was more clear and much, much more concise, since the ideas in it are an important part of the current discussion on evolutionary theory. But because of the poor writing in the important scientific parts of the book, and Gould's often unprofessional comments towards critics, I don't think this behemoth of a tome is worth your time.



2. Anything and everything by Gould is worth reading. He was aware that he was dying as he finished this book, and it bears the marks of an attempt to cram a lifetime of study and thought into one work. One feels that had he lived longer, the book would have been shorter. The extensive coverage of nearly forgotten figures who represent many examples of one type of opinion is not really necessary to make his points. The reader who is not a specialist will want to do a bit of skimming.
   
   But the length is a minor flaw. The book is an attempt to make all of his conclusions available to both the lay reader and his colleagues. Fundamentalists will read it as a critique of Darwinism; it's not. It represents an extension of Darwin to take into account all that the 20th century revealed about genetics, extinction, cladistics, emergent properties, and astronomical catastrophes. Hopefully it will stand as a monument to empiricism in the face of the new Dark Age that some see coming -- a time when we will forget not only what we knew, bu that we ever knew it.



3. In the weeks I spent poring over this landmark volume I don't recall any explanation of the social insects which have been heavily researched by others in recent years. Societies occur among very few vertebrates and the insects, the world's champs in mimicry including behavior mimicry, a possible clue.



4. This book (Gould's last) is a behemoth. With over 1400 pages, it becomes a physically taxing task to read it. This task is not lessened by the verbiage (and verbosity) that exemplify Gould's style. That being said, this book emcompasses such marvelous theoretical views and includes such a thorough history of evolutionary ideas, that it would be a shame to allow its size and density to prevent you from reading it. Gould spent his entire life pondering the big questions of evolutionary thought, and his ponderings are here revealed with significant insight into the roots of the questions themselves. It is an endeavor to read (as it was a lifetime to write), but the rewards of such an endeavor are innumerable and priceless.



5. An excellent academic book that covers Gould's life work in detail. It will (or should) become a standard reference for postgraduate students of biological evolution. It is not easy reading but is helped by an excellent table of contents; it summarises the main arguement of the book. My only critisism is that it seems to neglect the work of Simon and Salthe, both of whom have made significant contributions to a heirarchical (multi-level) theory of evolution.

5 comments about Acoustic Design for the Home Studio.

1. The equipment available today at the 'advanced amateur' level far exceeds that which was available to the professional only a few years ago. But the quality of the recordings being made do not come up to professional standards. Apart from skill at using the equipment, the biggest difference is the studio where the work is being done.
   
   If the sound is being bounced all around the room in an uncontrollable manner, this will be recorded faithfully by the equipment. The equipment cannot distinguish the sounds you want (and hear) but takes in what your ears are rejecting.
   
   This is an excellent book that gives a bit of the theory of acoustics and studio design and then gives practical examples of studios that were constructed using these principles. There are a number of designs described which cover a range in cost from near nothing to designs that you'd better discuss with your wife before you start spending money. Most of these designs do not involve altering the basic structure of the room itself, just panels you might attach and then take down when you move.
   
   This book is an excellent introduction to a fairly arcane subject.



2. It used to be that musicians went to a professional studio to make recordings; but with all the advancements in computer and recording technology, such a studio is affordable for the home - and ACOUSTIC DESIGN FOR THE HOME STUDIO tells how to make a room perfect for the recording sound desired. Tips on how to sound-proof a home or project studio tell how to use an existing room, whether it be garage or bedroom, and provide diagrams, photos of revamped rooms, and tips on getting the most from such a project.
   
   Diane C. Donovan
   California Bookwatch



3. There are a lot of books on setting up and working in a home studio - very few on treating the frequency response - fewer on doing it on the cheap using the room you have. This is such a book. The case studies are useful and after seeing a few, a pattern emerges and the mystique falls away and you realize that its not such a black art and you can do it yourself using various inexpensive materials. I definitely found this to be a great reasource for getting my room response under control while spending just a couple hundred dollars.
   
   This book is a gem.



4. Before this book I read Basic Home Studio Design by Paul White. This book was very introductory and helped me get somewhat comfortable with the terminology and some standard ways of treating rooms.
   
   Mitch Gallagher's book was definitely a step up from that. It was much more informative and introduced many ways of treating a room (broadband absorbers, bass traps, foam, ceiling clouds, etc.)
   
   This book will without a doubt help one get associated with acoustics. Read the book in its entirety. The only crucial thing that I don't think it focused on much was how to measure your room yourself (acoustically, for flutter echo, decay time, frequency response, etc.)
   
   But, it does give some information that one will be able to figure out and apply properly with a little internet research.
   
   All in all, a very good book that will be very helpful.



5. I have read many articles online concerning acoustics as well as have had the pleasure of working in some wonderful million dollar + studios. I must say that this book is perfect for the Novice who is just getting into acoustics as well as someone like me who has a backing and understanding as well as experience in the field. For its price, I recommend it to EVERYONE!

1 comments about Producing Great Sound for Film and Video, Third Edition (DV Expert Series).

1. I've read Jay Rose' articles in the various video trade magazines, and am glad to have this book. What I've read so far is great and will be very helpful in my work. Thank you, Jay.

5 comments about Audio in Media.

1. The most important in this book is that you can find anything about sound. I mean 1) fundamentals in sound 2) technology from past to future and 3) aplications. This book speaks of any thing in sound for any aplication (TV, studios, acoustic ect)



2. I have had Stanley Alten for a professor and he knows what he is talking about. He is the know-all be-all of sound. His books are easy to read and to understand and great for people learning sound techniques.



3. This was my college text for Broadcasting in 1984/85 and I taught Radio Production from this book. I am a video editor (Avid) and a freelance audio engineer having mixed/recorded over 500 music performances. I STILL reference this book. It is easy to understand, direct and thorough; maybe the only textbook you might keep.



4. This text is a broad-based approach to audio for radio/TV/film, and music recording. The emphasis is on audio for production students rather than for engineers, and the text covers informational, perceptual, and aesthetic aspects of sound as they apply to each stage of the production process-from planning to post-production.



5. If, as this book claims, is a beginner's guide offering a nontechnical approach, than I am the Queen of England. I have an advanced degree, am published myself and work as a college professor in another field, but for all practical purposes, this book might as well as be in another language. If this book is truly for beginners, it would avoid sentences like "There are two parallel signal strengths, channel and monitor. In the I/O section, equalization and other signal processing can be delegated to the monitor system for auditioning without effecting the signal being sent to the multitrack recorder, or the signal can be sent to multitrack recorder, or both." Sure.
   
   The editors at Wadsworth should have caught this, but my guess is no editor ever read it. Expensive and frustrating.

5 comments about Live Sound Reinforcement (Mix Pro Audio Series).

1. I am a classically trained musician working as a secondary school teacher, and I bought this book to help me understand how to use amplifiers, PA's, mixing desks etc as I am teaching a 'Live Music' subject. It has plenty of information without getting too technical and is written in an accessible and interesting way. I would highly recommend this book to anyone with a basic mathematical and musical understanding of sound.



2. I've used this book myself and have been referred to it by the best sound guys around. Great for beginners wanting to get a handle on how a sound system works from power amps, pre-amps, microphone differences to why feedback happens and how to stop it, and lots of other practical advice on how to mix live sound. Good for more advanced sound people who want to advance their skills.



3. I received a copy of this book when I was preparing the curriculum for a college course I taught as an adjunct professor for two years. I believe it gave my students not only a good classroom study book, but also a useful reference book for the "real-world" after graduation! Scott Stark gives great rule-of-thumb knowledge, as well as deeper technical fundamentals behind the knob turning and fader moving decisions that every sound engineer will face at the helm of a live sound reinforcement system, no matter whether for 100 or 100,000 listeners!



4. This book is fantastic! The author has an incredible ability to explain complex phenomenon in a concise manner that is easy to understand. I learned a great deal from this book.



5. Being new to sound reinforcement I was looking for a book that would provide me a solid understanding of live sound reinforcement. The included DVD that comes with this book allowed me to quickly understand the principles and made reading the text in the book more immediately understandable. I found that some chapters went into too much detail, whilst others perhaps lacked a little. However, overall I found this to be an excellent overview of live sound reinforcement that was easy to read, took a very practical approach and coupled with the DVD has allowed me to quickly gain a much better understanding of the topic. The book is also available in soft cover without the DVD, but if you are relatively new to live sound reinforcement I would recommend the deluxe version with the DVD.

5 comments about Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a C World.

1. A MUST read for environmentalists. And for business, community and anyone willing to adapt the thinking to their situation. Brian and David have done a superb job in translating resilience theory and its close ties to complex adaptive systems. I have been looking for a book to recommend to my clients and students and this is it. I would also strongly recommend that the 'old guard' sustainability brigade have a look at this. The strategies that sustainability largely pursues are unsustainable. Resilience thinking is a more accurate path for us to head toward something that resembles sustainability. Well done.



2. This book is Latour's actor network theory in another guise, with the physicalization of Kuhn's paradigm shift thrown in for good measure. It is a very interesting book on an emerging way to look at environmental crises (note, not the environmental crisis. We seriously need local knowledge and local experience to manage each individual ecosystem).
   
   My major issues with this book are twofold. One is that it is not well written, though not altogether poorly written, you can simply tell when the science writer came in to jazz things up. Secondly, the authors spend a little too much time trying to convince the reader that resilience thinking is NEW, DIFFERENT, SUBVERSIVE, and the like. We get, on page 29, something that I just cannot stand: a little briefer than brief history of challenge to dogma. Galileo spoke out about the Copernican model (which was still perfect circles, Kepler had it right but Galileo ignored him) and the church shot him down. Darwin dared to say species change and the world exploded! Now, we, the humble new scientists bring you a new challenge to the dogma of ecology today. Give me a break! I would have thought a science writer on the team would have had the experience to leave out this trite nonsense. Just tell me about your idea and spare me the drama! Sorry, but poor history of science is a real pet peeve. :-)
   
   But either way, this is still an important book that should be read by ecology students, politicians, resource managers, and anyone interested in new ideas. The case studies are really informative and clear, and the message is properly urgent



3. This is a gem of an educational book. Mixing case studies with elaborating chapters on key concepts, it's as a good a volume as I have found for teaching undergraduates, graduates, and practitioners (farmers, factory managers, investors) the core ideas needed to restore a sustainable social-ecological system.
   
   Highlights for me:
   
   + Optemization is a false premise, simplifies complex systems we do not understand, with the result that we end up causing long-term damage.
   
   + Resilience thinking is systems thinking. I cannot help but think back to all of the excellent work in the 1970's and 1980's--the authors were simply a quarter century ahead of their time.
   
   + In a nut-shell, resilient system can absorb severe disturbance.
   
   + System resilience is affected by context, connections across scales of time and space, and current system state in relations to threshholds.
   
   + Fresh water, fisheries, and topsoil depletion are major failures.
   
   + Drivers of environmental degradation are poverty, willful excessive consumption, and lack of knowledge (from another book, I recall that changes to the Earth that used to take 10,000 years now take three, one reason we need real-time science).
   
   + Key concepts are threshholds and adaptive cycles. Adaptive cycles have four phases: Rapid Growth; Conservation; Release; and Reorganization.
   
   + Redundancy is NOT a dirty word (just as intelligence--decision support--should not be a dirty word within the United Nations)
   
   + Ecological networks cannot be understood nor nurtured with a tight linking and understanding of the social networks that interact with the ecological networks.
   
   + Subsidies are a form of social denial, as they subsidize unsustainable practices and prevent adaptation and change.
   
   + Lovely--absolutely lovely--chart on page 89 about time-scales of climate and natural disasters like major fires.
   
   + One size does not fit all--solutions for one social-ecological network, e.g. in the USA, will not be the same as for another, e.g. in Norway.
   
   + Diversity is the key to regeneration.
   
   + Governances must be able to see and act upon key intervention points.
   
   + A Resilient world would be characterized by:
   
   1. Diversity
   2. Ecological variables
   3. Modularity
   4. Acknowledgement of slow variables
   5. Tight feedbacks
   6. Social capital
   7. Innovation
   8. Overlap in governance
   9. Ecosystem services
   
   Within this small and very easy to absorb book one finds a great annotated bibliography of recommended readings, a fine reference section, and a very solid index.
   
   Other books that come to mind as complements to this one (limited to ten links by Amazon):
   The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
   Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
   Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications
   Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
   Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage
   Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
   The HOK Guidebook to Sustainable Design
   High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
   Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy
   The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster, and the Water We Drink



4. Brian Walker, Program Director Resilience Alliance and a scientist with the CSIRO. Canberra Australia, has, with the assistance of science writer David Salt, written the best and most straightforward work on ecological resilience entirely suitable for a wide audience of readers; activists, teachers, scientists from any number of disciplines, interested in gaining a familiarity with a study area that is of critical importance in this present world of catastrophe, forever changing with the calamitous onset of climate change and where stategies of adaptation are quite indequate mechanisms for survival in the white-water world we will have to navigate.
   
   It is not a scientific treatise but a work from which all interested readers will benefit substantially no matter what their background or credentials. This is a twentyfirst century production coauthored with a skilled science writer and a model for any NGO or scientific group who wish to influence and inform policy makers with something they can readiliy understand.. Resilience capability and building such capacity is perhaps the best, but still uncertain, way to buffer social-ecological systems--your everyday environment--from unpredictable, disastrous events and accompanying change. Adaptation and models based on orthodox science are unfortunately inadequate to meet such crises. I recommend this book to any concerned person no matter their level of understanding. They will find something new and enlightening here.



5. This is a fascinating and very timely book. Easy to read and understand with many examples from real life.
   Makes one understand why the serious problems in our world's environment will not go away unless we fix them. And some very practical ways to do that.

5 comments about The Essence of Chaos (The Jessie and John Danz Lecture Series).

1. Edward Lorenz takes a complicated topic and makes it accessible for all people, regardless of prior knowledge of chaos theory. He provides interesting and easy to follow examples of chaos, fractals and complexity. The illustrations are helpful and he includes a glossary of terms to aid the beginning chaos enthusiasts to quickly become familiar with the terminology. Mr. Lorenz gives a brief history of chaos and explains how it is used in the study of mathematics, meteorology, economics, music, and other fields. The book is very interesting and is highly recommended for those who would like to acquaint themselves with the exciting world of chaos.



2. Lorenz has done it again. This is a terrific inside look at chaos by the man who made Gleick's book possible. And it had a few interesting new ideas too--who would have thought there was a different way to present fourth-order Runge-Kutta? Who would have thought Runge-Kutta could convert a phase-space circle to a nice-looking fractal attractor? A good book for the air plane.



3. My first intro to chaos was Gleick's book *Chaos: Making a New Science* which focused on the history of the discovery of chaos. Although this was fascinating - and a good read for those just learning about dynamical systems, strange attractors, and the like - Lorenz's *Essence of Chaos* was much more satisfying. Lorenz analyzes specific chaotic functions, gives you the math (equations are in the appendix) and generally accomplishes what the title suggests - that is, exploring the essence of chaos. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in this deeply fascinating subject.



4. Lorenz did a great job when he wrote this book!
   The very first time when I heard of chaos theory was year ago while watching some old documentary about Nostadamus. In film was mentioned chaos theory and said that acceptance of it by many people could change whole look to life and so on. Movie left to me questions - what is that theory, what it's standing for.
   Finaly my interest lead me to this book and it clearly showed me what kind of staff is that chaos theory! That was and is really intriguing!
   Book is well written. There was of course some places that wasn't easy to understand. I myself have studied high math,encountered differential equations but anyway had some difficulties. That's why not 5 stars to book - it's really not for absolutely everyone although almost close to it. I couldn't stop it reading, I was done in two days.
   This book encouraged me for further reading.



5. Having read several books about Chaos Theory, and having been promised a user-friendly and yet academic book on the subject, this book fell a little short. Certainly academic, not so easy for someone who does not have a solid background in the sciences and mathematics fields. The various sections cover much of the recent research, and if you can get past the equations, you get a more complete sense of the progression in the subject.

5 comments about General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications.

1. Bertalanffy is one of the best educated men and deepest thinkers ever. General Systems Theory is a monument to his greatness. Keep a dictionary handy, and brush up on your Latin. This is the top of the intellectual mountain, where men no longer tread.



2. Although he wrote a lot about the general theory of systems,
   I think it is his approach to the problems of how living systems
   interact with their environment in a catabolic manner
   that makes him really important.
   He has had impact from fields like biology to
   fluid dynamics.
   He set a standard for how we think about history
   and with Lewis F. Richardson The Collected Papers of Lewis Fry Richardson (Collected Papers of Lewis Fry Richardson, Vol 2)and Isaac AsimovThe Foundation Trilogy
   made a science possible.



3. This book is good to someone who wants to think about systems. However, is not the book aim to give details about the system definition. For example, is hard to see definitions of open system, feedback, components, inputs, outputs. The reason for that is the historical moment of the book.
   
   It is a good book. Anyone who thinks about system should own this book.



4. The best view, writed on general system theory, selected and edited to show the evolution of systems theory and to present its applications to problem solving. Recommended on such widely diverse disciplines as biology, economics, psychology, and demography.



5. I've looked high and low for a text summarizing systems theory and I write this review in near shock having just finished this book. I say "shock" because I just can't believe how remarkably undated this book is after nearly 40 years (first edition 1969). I've read books by Checkland, Lazlo, Weinberg and many others but nothing summarizes the systems world view better than this classic. You've gotta love a scientist/philosopher who quotes Aldous Huxley liberally. I'd give it six stars if I could.