No comments about Handbook of Membrane Separations: Chemical, Pharmaceutical, Food, and Biotechnological Applications.

3 comments about Explosives.

1. While lacking complex descriptions of explosive concepts, this book provides the user with an invaluable reference guide to the basic concepts behind explosive materials and explosive physics. An invaluable reference guide to a wide variety of commercial and specialty explosive materials, this book is a must have for anyone involved in the field of commercial explosives



2. This text is best described as being a dictionary of terminology, materials and techniques in the field of explosives. The tables for translating terms between languages are of some use in translating texts. but are too small to be useful to the average translator.
   
   It also suffers from being a translation into English, and thus tends to ignore many of the more obscure technical terms found only in the English language. This can be a problem for more advanced users.
   
   Its coverage of pyrotechnics is very limited. The coverage of this subject is only as it touches explosive materials. This field is closely related to explosives, and often the two overlap. Unfortunately, it does not cover this topic adequately.
   
   Within these limitations, it is a very good reference text to be included in any library on energetic materials. It covers many commercial materials that would require considerable time searching for this data. Being a basically European text, its coverage of this commercial material is primarily european.
   
   I would like to see its coverage expanded, but not its scope, which would make it more of an encyclopedia than a dictionary. Its price also is somewhat high, but considering its' subject mater, not too excessively so.
   
   I recommend it to those working with energetic materials.



3. I found the book little more than a disorganized glossary of explosives and related terms.
   Yes, it does have hundreds of different explosives types listed, many of which are very esoteric and rare. And it does contain good thermodynamic data for many explosives.
   But the explosives, terms, and safety data are all lumped together and only classified alphabetically in a single group.
   Coverage is spotty. For example, black powder gets good coverage (relative to the overall superficial coverage of all subjects), while TNT is barely mentioned. Prills are covered in some detail while nitrification isn't even mentioned. Manufacturing techniques and intermediate reactions are at most just a few sentences, even for important commercial explosives.
   All the information contained in the book can easily be found on the Internet or at your local library, and in much better detail.

5 comments about Building Powerful Platforms with Windows CE(R) (Addison-Wesley Microsoft Technology Series).

1. I was a very disappointed as the book only covers Windows-CE 3.0 and older versions. It does not cover CEC-filer not the new method of component selection.



2. Sure this book is a tad outdated, but there aren't many books that address this topic. I have not read Boling's book, but browsed a copy and I think it does not address the low level programming to the extent that this book does. You won't find a better book on the development of the actual platform than this one. This covers drivers, OAL, bootloaders, hardware accessing, and also generally how a CE project could be planned by management right down to developers. I would not want to work on a CE platform without this book. Anything outdated about this book, can be supplemented by reading MSDN documentation. But this book gives you a starting point and a great high level explanation of the system as a whole, which is something that is hard to get out of reading tons of MSDN documentation if don't already have a lot of experience in a topic.



3. This book was written in 2001 (as were most of the positive reviews for it here on Amazon.) It only covers up to Platform Builder and WinCE 3.0, which are now up to version 5. As a result, the how-to parts, as well as the references, are mostly useless. In fact, I'm not sure any of the sections are relevant or can be trusted since WinCE has changed so much.
   
   Considering the price of the book, I feel cheated. The authors need to write a new version and THIS version should be pulled from circulation.



4. Book is out of date and is exteremly overpriced. Anyone who attends a DevConference receives more information that is upto date than what was covered in the entire book. Waste of time and money.



5. A good overview...lots of useful information. Just be aware that this was written for CE 3.0, and 5.0 is current, with 6.0 in Beta, so there are detail differences. Still, a good starting point, and I can't find any more current books on the subject. So if you need to learn to use the Microsoft Platform Builder to do Windows CE embedded sysgens, this is the only game in town.

No comments about Process Chemistry of Lubricant Base Stocks (Chemical Industries Series).

No comments about Kirk-Othmer Concise Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology 2 Volume Set.

No comments about Problem Solving in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering with POLYMATH, Excel, and MATLAB (2nd Edition) (Prentice Hall International Series in the Physical and Chemical Engineering Sciences).

1 comments about Contracts and the Legal Environment for Engineers and Architects.

1. I read this book as a contractor seeking to modify my standard contract to that which would apply to architects and engineers as sub-contractors. This book clearly introduces every aspect of contracts, and amplifies the reasoning behind these aspects using cases and examples. This book is only for those who wish to study and apply these concepts. It has no "templates" or boilerplate contracts. It is very valuable in developing an understanding of what is in construction contracts and why.

1 comments about The Physics of Rubber Elasticity (Oxford Classic Texts in the Physical Sciences).

1. This is THE classical text on rubber elasticity. It is elegantly and clearly written. It is referenced in nearly every article about rubber in the top-quality journals, such as Macromolecules, Rubber Chem. Tech., etc. Most technical libraries no longer have any copies of it, as it is has been heavily pilfered by those that find this text indespensible.

1 comments about For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Clarendon Paperbacks).

1. Robert Scribner claims that the populace of the sixteenth century was highly sensitized to signs and the many ways of reading them (Robert W. Scribner, For the Sake of the Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 250). Therefore, in order to better understand the social and cultural history of the Reformation, Scribner engages in an extensive semiological analysis of the visual propaganda from the Protestant side. His central thesis in this book is that the contemporary historian can gain a more accurate understanding of how the Reformation appealed to the common man by studying its visual propaganda than by studying the written material alone.

   Scribner begins his actual analysis of the Protestant visual propaganda by considering Protestant depictions of Martin Luther. In popular pictorial representations, Luther is often portrayed either in the form of monk, doctor of the church, or teacher. Scribner states that three dominant paradigms concerning Luther emerge from these portraits: 1) Luther the saint, 2) Luther the teacher of true doctrine, and 3) Luther the great nationalist and humanist hero (Scribner, p. 32). The end result, Scribner argues, is that Luther becomes a great figure of religion who is set apart from other men, especially with regard to his knowledge of true Christian doctrine, his personal piety, and his devotion to God. The antithesis of this observation is the conclusion that those opposed to him were also opposed to the source of his message, and therefore opposed to God and in league with the Devil. Scribner states that early Protestant polemicists effected this perception by drawing on various social codes of the day such as the general anticlerical sentiment (especially toward monks), the socio-economic grievances some had with established religious orders, biblical imagery (especially the sheep/wolf metaphor), proverbs that were then current, and cultural stereotypes.

   Scribner then examines, in some detail, some of the social codes that were drawn upon from popular culture in the Protestant propaganda. For example, he analyzes how various games (such as jousting or the German game of Strebkatz) were used in propaganda, which often pictured Protestants/Christ engaged in some sort of contest against the papacy/Devil. Other codes from culture that were drawn upon involved the use of images of triumphant processions (with the pope and clerics pictured as conquered prisoners), animal representation (with the antagonists pictured as ferocious or ignoble animals), coats of arms, and scatological pictures. Scribner argues that Protestant propaganda particularly exploited the sense of eschatological urgency that was then current - especially by interpreting astrological phenomena, contemporary mystical visions/prophecy, and ominous omens and portents (all of which were to portray the papacy as wicked and aligned against the Gospel and Christ). Two additional beliefs that Scribner examines in considerable detail were 1) the general belief in the Antichrist, and 2) the motif of an inverted world order. Protestant manufacturers of propaganda closely identified the figure of the Antichrist with the papacy, especially through visual portrayals that vividly contrasted the life of Christ with that of the papacy (e.g., Christ fleeing an earthly crown, the pope greedily pursuing it; Christ crowned with thorns, the pope crowned with a golden tiara; Christ humble in the nativity seen, the pope armed and ready to wage war). Additionally, Scribner argues that Protestants took advantage of the general belief of the populace that the world order was seriously inverted. Therefore, pictures of "God's earthly representative" which portrayed him as being ultimately inspired by the Devil were images that resonated with the popular beliefs of the day.

   Although Protestants were able to denigrate the papacy through their visual propaganda, Scribner argues that in their positive aim of setting forth evangelical doctrine, they were only able to communicate a very low level of theological content through this media. As a result, the pictorial propaganda served more as visual aids to evangelical teaching rather than as instruments able to singularly indoctrinate the uninitiated (Lucas Cranach's visual contrast between the Law and Gospel was especially useful as an aid in setting forth the Protestant doctrine of justification).

   Scribner concludes the book with a brief examination of the anti-Lutheran propaganda, which he concludes was slight by comparison to the Protestant material and of questionable impact. He also summarizes the data from the preceding chapters and the subsequent "rhetoric of image" that emerges from the Protestant propaganda, and he analyzes it's effectiveness. In the final analysis, Scribner claims that the Reformation popular propaganda did not measure up to its own ideals of effectiveness, especially since it failed to create powerful new interpretive frameworks that were substantially different from the old faith (Scribner, p. 249).

   This book presents a fascinating window into the popular belief and culture of sixteenth century Protestants. The pictures that are liberally scattered throughout are very intriguing and they provide a detailed glimpse into the various social codes that were drawn on by Protestant propaganda. Having observed the pictures, together with the written propaganda that was presented in this book, this reviewer feels as if he does have a more comprehensive understanding of the cultural and social history of the Protestant Reformation. On the other hand, this books suffers from some weaknesses as well. First, many of the descriptions of the pictures are on different pages than the actual picture themselves, which requires turning back and forth between the picture and description, which eventually becomes tedious and irritating. More substantially though, Scribner claims to evaluate the effectiveness of the propaganda "on its own terms" and he then argues that it ultimately fails due to its alleged failure to construct a new powerful "symbolic universe." This review wonders how employing the later category of "symbolic universe" in assessing the Protestant propaganda of the sixteenth century engages it on its own terms. Although this book presents an interesting collage of pictures representative of the Protestant Propaganda of the Reformation, the author's subjective negative value judgments offered in the conclusion of the book seriously detracts from the overall quality.

1 comments about Industrial Gas Handbook: Gas Separation and Purification.

1. This is really an outstanding book! Although there are a few books available on cryogenics, there is nothing like Frank Kerry's "Industrial Gas handbook" for both completeness and depth of coverage of pretty much everything related to ASU (oxygen -- nitrogen -- argon) plants and the Industrial Gas business. Engineers and really anyone interested in industrial gas -- ASU plants will appreciate the efforts Frank Kerry made to assemble all of this useful and complete information in the Handbook.