A great introduction to the subject of chaos, 13 Jun 2001
Book review of: Does God Play Dice? - The New Mathematics of Chaos by Ian Stewart

Beautiful fractals, the butterfly effect and unpredictable systems were the images that chaos conjured up in my imagination before I sat down and read this book. Within its pages the incredible diversity of chaotic systems; and the diversity is remarkable; is presented and explained. It is staggering to see the picture unfold, the gradual realisation that 'the' scientific statement of the eighteenth century; that the universe runs according to a set of immutable laws; is unable to explain much of the behaviour in even the simplest of classical systems. The discovery of a whole new world, and one that has been in existence since the beginning of the universe: chaos. This book is merely an introduction to a comparatively new and exciting area of mathematics; but using the word merely is doing it an injustice, since it encapsulates the topic superbly and leaves the reader with a desire to study the mathematics of chaos in more detail.

Fittingly the opening chapter commences with the backdrop to this word 'chaos'. Three hundred years ago, Newton published, 'The Mathematical principles of Natural Philosophy'. This work is unrivalled in the field of mathematics; its basic message has been absorbed into our culture: "Nature has laws and we can find them." Unfortunately, although mathematics allows us to calculate the solutions to many difficult problems, we are still left in an unordered world, where apparently simple motions, on closer inspection, become unpredictable and hence unexplainable in the language of mathematics. It is appropriate at this point to introduce the nature of chaos. Stewart is quick to point out that since this branch of mathematics is still in its formative stages, giving it a precise definition is not possible or wise. However to get us off the mark he gives the definition reluctantly reached by the Royal Society in 1986: "Stochastic behaviour occurring in a deterministic system." More roughly speaking, random behaviour in a system governed by laws.

Where is the dividing line between order and chaos? The chapter 'The Laws of Error,' introduces another field of mathematics, Probability theory - the mathematics of chance. Mathematicians had found that analysing the detailed workings of large systems was too involved and complex. Probability theory grew out of a need to simulate detail without actually having to examine it. As Stewart states: "Mathematicians could calculate the motion of a satellite of Jupiter, but not that of a snowflake in a blizzard."

The book continues with a look at one of the prime examples of chaotic systems in our World, weather systems. This century has seen many attempts to write equations that will linearize weather and use them to predict exactly how weather systems will behave. As we are well aware short-term predictions are accurate a large percentage of the time, but long term predictions are much harder to make. What we learned in the 'Strange Attractors' chapter can be applied here. The initial conditions that we feed into any model we have will have finite accuracy. Even if we obtain data exact to many decimal places, it will not take many iterations before it digresses from the path that the described weather system follows. Lorenz stumbled upon this when computing weather systems. After examining results from two separate calculations involving the same set of data, albeit with different rounding accuracies, he discovered that his results were very similar for a short period of time, but then diverged extremely rapidly and followed distinct paths. This breakthrough was later to be named the 'Butterfly effect', illustrating the manner in which a trivial dynamic can upset a disproportionably large system. .

At this stage in the book, Stewart leads us into a chapter entitled 'Recipe for chaos'. It firstly attempts to describe the workings of chaos as analogous to a recipe, presumably in an attempt to simplify the concepts and avoid any complex mathematics. It does not really achieve the desired effect. This chapter was the hardest to grasp, which is a shame since it contains many of the fundamental facts about chaos and its axioms if one can use such a word.

Fractals are important part of chaos that joins the discussion at this point. They present us with a language to describe what we see happening with chaos. A fractal, generally speaking, is a geometric object, which continues to exhibit detailed structure over a wide range of scales. Self-similarity exhibited again. Interestingly the method of describing the detail level of a fractal is by allocating it a dimension, known as its Hausdorff dimension. These dimensions tend to be fractional (hence fractal).

The final three chapters are new to this, the second edition of the book, and they describe some of the advances in the subject since 1989, namely the prediction and control of chaotic systems, which are both perfectly possible.

In its totality, this book gives any discerning reader an opportunity to delve into the World of chaos and come away with a greater understanding of the topic as a whole and a glance at the variety of areas and applications it covers. The mathematics of chaos is involved; this is not surprising since the initial discovery of the topic was due to the inability of conventional mathematics to describe certain behaviours. Nevertheless, on the whole Stewart does a good job of explaining concepts and then illustrating them with simplified examples, avoiding the need for much of the mathematics. However there were one or two places where his desire to seek analogies for his models overlooks the aim of aim of the analogy in the first place that is to aid the readers understanding of the topic. Helpful too, was the inclusion of a fair number of diagrams and schematics that in several cases proved invaluable to my understanding of the book. This is a great introduction to a subject that is becoming increasingly important and perhaps indispensable in mathematics.

Readable Introduction to Chaos Theory, 06 Feb 2001
Relatively easy to read, even the Maths (honest!), Ian Stewart writes with an obvious passion but injects some much needed humour at times. He delivers the bulk of the subject (including the historical theory) in a fairly concise way. Probably best used in conjunction with another introductory text (e.g. James Gleick's 'Chaos')

A incredible book...about Chaos.., 01 Feb 2001
This book explains in a easy way, all the mechanism related to Chaos Theory. Ian Stewart shows a clever & interesting way of describing it.

A good introduction to the science of Chaos, 11 Oct 2000
If you are interested in the subject of Chaos, this book can be a good introduction. Very readable and engaging, you will find accurate descriptions of the key discoveries of that science in a language easy to understand to everybody. I loved that book!

Coauthored by its creator, Programming PHP is a nitty-gritty guide to PHP development. PHP is an open-source scripting language used to build dynamic Web sites. In this title, the authors go step-by-step through the language, including brief coverage of common applications such as graphics or database work.

The first six chapters explain PHP essentials, including data types, functions, string manipulation, arrays and objects. Next comes a look at basic Web techniques, followed by an introduction to database access. There is a chapter on generating graphics with the GD extension library and another on creating Adobe PDF documents. The authors then show how to parse XML, and there is a section on security with some handy tips for protecting PHP sites. A chapter on application techniques looks at code libraries, performance tuning and handling errors. Next there is an explanation of how to build extensions to PHP using C, followed by a look at Windows issues such as COM and ODBC. Finally, there is a complete reference to the standard functions in PHP 4.0.

This is not an advanced programming book, but even experienced coders will discover new things about the language and get a clearer understanding of how PHP works. The specialist chapters such as those on XML or PHP extensions tend to be introductory, so readers will need further resources. For example, the database section is short, and would be best read alongside Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL or another book with more detailed database coverage. Even so, this is a strong hands-on title that PHP developers will want to keep close at hand. ----Tim Anderson

A great introduction to the subject of chaos, 13 Jun 2001
Book review of: Does God Play Dice? - The New Mathematics of Chaos by Ian Stewart

Beautiful fractals, the butterfly effect and unpredictable systems were the images that chaos conjured up in my imagination before I sat down and read this book. Within its pages the incredible diversity of chaotic systems; and the diversity is remarkable; is presented and explained. It is staggering to see the picture unfold, the gradual realisation that 'the' scientific statement of the eighteenth century; that the universe runs according to a set of immutable laws; is unable to explain much of the behaviour in even the simplest of classical systems. The discovery of a whole new world, and one that has been in existence since the beginning of the universe: chaos. This book is merely an introduction to a comparatively new and exciting area of mathematics; but using the word merely is doing it an injustice, since it encapsulates the topic superbly and leaves the reader with a desire to study the mathematics of chaos in more detail.

Fittingly the opening chapter commences with the backdrop to this word 'chaos'. Three hundred years ago, Newton published, 'The Mathematical principles of Natural Philosophy'. This work is unrivalled in the field of mathematics; its basic message has been absorbed into our culture: "Nature has laws and we can find them." Unfortunately, although mathematics allows us to calculate the solutions to many difficult problems, we are still left in an unordered world, where apparently simple motions, on closer inspection, become unpredictable and hence unexplainable in the language of mathematics. It is appropriate at this point to introduce the nature of chaos. Stewart is quick to point out that since this branch of mathematics is still in its formative stages, giving it a precise definition is not possible or wise. However to get us off the mark he gives the definition reluctantly reached by the Royal Society in 1986: "Stochastic behaviour occurring in a deterministic system." More roughly speaking, random behaviour in a system governed by laws.

Where is the dividing line between order and chaos? The chapter 'The Laws of Error,' introduces another field of mathematics, Probability theory - the mathematics of chance. Mathematicians had found that analysing the detailed workings of large systems was too involved and complex. Probability theory grew out of a need to simulate detail without actually having to examine it. As Stewart states: "Mathematicians could calculate the motion of a satellite of Jupiter, but not that of a snowflake in a blizzard."

The book continues with a look at one of the prime examples of chaotic systems in our World, weather systems. This century has seen many attempts to write equations that will linearize weather and use them to predict exactly how weather systems will behave. As we are well aware short-term predictions are accurate a large percentage of the time, but long term predictions are much harder to make. What we learned in the 'Strange Attractors' chapter can be applied here. The initial conditions that we feed into any model we have will have finite accuracy. Even if we obtain data exact to many decimal places, it will not take many iterations before it digresses from the path that the described weather system follows. Lorenz stumbled upon this when computing weather systems. After examining results from two separate calculations involving the same set of data, albeit with different rounding accuracies, he discovered that his results were very similar for a short period of time, but then diverged extremely rapidly and followed distinct paths. This breakthrough was later to be named the 'Butterfly effect', illustrating the manner in which a trivial dynamic can upset a disproportionably large system. .

At this stage in the book, Stewart leads us into a chapter entitled 'Recipe for chaos'. It firstly attempts to describe the workings of chaos as analogous to a recipe, presumably in an attempt to simplify the concepts and avoid any complex mathematics. It does not really achieve the desired effect. This chapter was the hardest to grasp, which is a shame since it contains many of the fundamental facts about chaos and its axioms if one can use such a word.

Fractals are important part of chaos that joins the discussion at this point. They present us with a language to describe what we see happening with chaos. A fractal, generally speaking, is a geometric object, which continues to exhibit detailed structure over a wide range of scales. Self-similarity exhibited again. Interestingly the method of describing the detail level of a fractal is by allocating it a dimension, known as its Hausdorff dimension. These dimensions tend to be fractional (hence fractal).

The final three chapters are new to this, the second edition of the book, and they describe some of the advances in the subject since 1989, namely the prediction and control of chaotic systems, which are both perfectly possible.

In its totality, this book gives any discerning reader an opportunity to delve into the World of chaos and come away with a greater understanding of the topic as a whole and a glance at the variety of areas and applications it covers. The mathematics of chaos is involved; this is not surprising since the initial discovery of the topic was due to the inability of conventional mathematics to describe certain behaviours. Nevertheless, on the whole Stewart does a good job of explaining concepts and then illustrating them with simplified examples, avoiding the need for much of the mathematics. However there were one or two places where his desire to seek analogies for his models overlooks the aim of aim of the analogy in the first place that is to aid the readers understanding of the topic. Helpful too, was the inclusion of a fair number of diagrams and schematics that in several cases proved invaluable to my understanding of the book. This is a great introduction to a subject that is becoming increasingly important and perhaps indispensable in mathematics.

Readable Introduction to Chaos Theory, 06 Feb 2001
Relatively easy to read, even the Maths (honest!), Ian Stewart writes with an obvious passion but injects some much needed humour at times. He delivers the bulk of the subject (including the historical theory) in a fairly concise way. Probably best used in conjunction with another introductory text (e.g. James Gleick's 'Chaos')

A incredible book...about Chaos.., 01 Feb 2001
This book explains in a easy way, all the mechanism related to Chaos Theory. Ian Stewart shows a clever & interesting way of describing it.

A good introduction to the science of Chaos, 11 Oct 2000
If you are interested in the subject of Chaos, this book can be a good introduction. Very readable and engaging, you will find accurate descriptions of the key discoveries of that science in a language easy to understand to everybody. I loved that book!

The treatment of objects lets this book down., 27 Apr 2008
One of the primary reasons I got this book was to get a decent understanding of the use of objects. It fails to deliver on this front. The book assumes you alread know the ins and outs of objects, and fails to adequately explain their role in the language. For instance, it tells you how to create a static method, but doesn't say why you might want to do so, or indeed, how a static method differs from a non-static method! I can make an educated guess at this, but educated guesses are not the way to learn something properly!

Having said that, prior to geting to the object chapter, the rest of the book had been much better. So if you already know your objects or don't intend using that aspect of the language, then you can add at least 1 star to this review.

Too many mistakes, 22 Dec 2006
I found this book a good introduction to PHP. But, it has a lot of mistakes. I think these have happened when the book was updated to cover PHP 5.

For example, when it describes constructors it says the constructor is a function named __construct(). But then it immediately gives an example where the constructor for class Person is a function called Person(). The former is PHP 5, the latter is PHP 4. Perhaps the update was a rush job.

If you can't already program in C or C++ then this book may not be for you. If you can, then it's OK.

Very Good, 03 Aug 2006
Written in the standard O'Reilly style, this book gives you a comprehensive coverage of PHP without being overly verbose or too dryly technical. Now in its 2nd edition this book covers the most recent version of PHP, version 5.

While I wouldn't want to learn PHP as a first programming language from this book, anybody with a basic knowledge of HTML and an OOP based language (Java, C++ or even JavaScript) will quickly be able to code PHP.

While the book isn't perfect: the aforementioned lack of concrete examples (the cynic in me might think that O'Reilly were saving these for the PHP Cookbook which is due out soon) and the chapter on objects being only 20 pages long, it's still all you would need as both a reference and a learning resource. A strong buy.

An O'Reilly Classic, 20 Aug 2003
This book is similar to every other O'Reilly book in that it is clear, concise and to the point. Never does it waffle on, and never does it go into too much detail and complexity that everyone except the best programmers understands it.
I personally found the explanation of objects and their classes to be better than the other explanations I have read for different languages, and certainly made picking up OOP in PHP a lot easier. Throughout is the obvious knowledge of the authors, something always reassuring in a title like this. The book fits well for beginners and seasoned programmers alike: the basics are explained well, and the technical reasons why things happen are included for good measure.

I was also surprised by the size of this book, as it significantly thinner than the other O'Reilly books (and other computer books for that matter), that I own. Computer books often appear large, daunting and dry. This book is an exception to that rule, and is perfectly good for someone wanting to learn PHP from the ground up to someone wanting to pick a chapter to swat up on, and use it as a reference book. All in all, a very good book.

Easy start in dynamic webpages, 26 Jun 2003
PHP is a great language to start creating dynamic websites with - it's easy to learn, but very powerful.

This book will start you out on the right tracks with PHP and help you build up your experience - even once you're experienced, you'll still turn to it for reference.

As usual, it's a solid O'Reilly title, it won't let you down. Being co-written by Rasmus himself (the creator of PHP) it benefits from more than a little extra experience and inside information.

Basically, if you want to create dynamic websites with a lot of power, PHP is the language you want, and this is the book.

A great introduction to the subject of chaos, 13 Jun 2001
Book review of: Does God Play Dice? - The New Mathematics of Chaos by Ian Stewart

Beautiful fractals, the butterfly effect and unpredictable systems were the images that chaos conjured up in my imagination before I sat down and read this book. Within its pages the incredible diversity of chaotic systems; and the diversity is remarkable; is presented and explained. It is staggering to see the picture unfold, the gradual realisation that 'the' scientific statement of the eighteenth century; that the universe runs according to a set of immutable laws; is unable to explain much of the behaviour in even the simplest of classical systems. The discovery of a whole new world, and one that has been in existence since the beginning of the universe: chaos. This book is merely an introduction to a comparatively new and exciting area of mathematics; but using the word merely is doing it an injustice, since it encapsulates the topic superbly and leaves the reader with a desire to study the mathematics of chaos in more detail.

Fittingly the opening chapter commences with the backdrop to this word 'chaos'. Three hundred years ago, Newton published, 'The Mathematical principles of Natural Philosophy'. This work is unrivalled in the field of mathematics; its basic message has been absorbed into our culture: "Nature has laws and we can find them." Unfortunately, although mathematics allows us to calculate the solutions to many difficult problems, we are still left in an unordered world, where apparently simple motions, on closer inspection, become unpredictable and hence unexplainable in the language of mathematics. It is appropriate at this point to introduce the nature of chaos. Stewart is quick to point out that since this branch of mathematics is still in its formative stages, giving it a precise definition is not possible or wise. However to get us off the mark he gives the definition reluctantly reached by the Royal Society in 1986: "Stochastic behaviour occurring in a deterministic system." More roughly speaking, random behaviour in a system governed by laws.

Where is the dividing line between order and chaos? The chapter 'The Laws of Error,' introduces another field of mathematics, Probability theory - the mathematics of chance. Mathematicians had found that analysing the detailed workings of large systems was too involved and complex. Probability theory grew out of a need to simulate detail without actually having to examine it. As Stewart states: "Mathematicians could calculate the motion of a satellite of Jupiter, but not that of a snowflake in a blizzard."

The book continues with a look at one of the prime examples of chaotic systems in our World, weather systems. This century has seen many attempts to write equations that will linearize weather and use them to predict exactly how weather systems will behave. As we are well aware short-term predictions are accurate a large percentage of the time, but long term predictions are much harder to make. What we learned in the 'Strange Attractors' chapter can be applied here. The initial conditions that we feed into any model we have will have finite accuracy. Even if we obtain data exact to many decimal places, it will not take many iterations before it digresses from the path that the described weather system follows. Lorenz stumbled upon this when computing weather systems. After examining results from two separate calculations involving the same set of data, albeit with different rounding accuracies, he discovered that his results were very similar for a short period of time, but then diverged extremely rapidly and followed distinct paths. This breakthrough was later to be named the 'Butterfly effect', illustrating the manner in which a trivial dynamic can upset a disproportionably large system. .

At this stage in the book, Stewart leads us into a chapter entitled 'Recipe for chaos'. It firstly attempts to describe the workings of chaos as analogous to a recipe, presumably in an attempt to simplify the concepts and avoid any complex mathematics. It does not really achieve the desired effect. This chapter was the hardest to grasp, which is a shame since it contains many of the fundamental facts about chaos and its axioms if one can use such a word.

Fractals are important part of chaos that joins the discussion at this point. They present us with a language to describe what we see happening with chaos. A fractal, generally speaking, is a geometric object, which continues to exhibit detailed structure over a wide range of scales. Self-similarity exhibited again. Interestingly the method of describing the detail level of a fractal is by allocating it a dimension, known as its Hausdorff dimension. These dimensions tend to be fractional (hence fractal).

The final three chapters are new to this, the second edition of the book, and they describe some of the advances in the subject since 1989, namely the prediction and control of chaotic systems, which are both perfectly possible.

In its totality, this book gives any discerning reader an opportunity to delve into the World of chaos and come away with a greater understanding of the topic as a whole and a glance at the variety of areas and applications it covers. The mathematics of chaos is involved; this is not surprising since the initial discovery of the topic was due to the inability of conventional mathematics to describe certain behaviours. Nevertheless, on the whole Stewart does a good job of explaining concepts and then illustrating them with simplified examples, avoiding the need for much of the mathematics. However there were one or two places where his desire to seek analogies for his models overlooks the aim of aim of the analogy in the first place that is to aid the readers understanding of the topic. Helpful too, was the inclusion of a fair number of diagrams and schematics that in several cases proved invaluable to my understanding of the book. This is a great introduction to a subject that is becoming increasingly important and perhaps indispensable in mathematics.

Readable Introduction to Chaos Theory, 06 Feb 2001
Relatively easy to read, even the Maths (honest!), Ian Stewart writes with an obvious passion but injects some much needed humour at times. He delivers the bulk of the subject (including the historical theory) in a fairly concise way. Probably best used in conjunction with another introductory text (e.g. James Gleick's 'Chaos')

A incredible book...about Chaos.., 01 Feb 2001
This book explains in a easy way, all the mechanism related to Chaos Theory. Ian Stewart shows a clever & interesting way of describing it.

A good introduction to the science of Chaos, 11 Oct 2000
If you are interested in the subject of Chaos, this book can be a good introduction. Very readable and engaging, you will find accurate descriptions of the key discoveries of that science in a language easy to understand to everybody. I loved that book!

The treatment of objects lets this book down., 27 Apr 2008
One of the primary reasons I got this book was to get a decent understanding of the use of objects. It fails to deliver on this front. The book assumes you alread know the ins and outs of objects, and fails to adequately explain their role in the language. For instance, it tells you how to create a static method, but doesn't say why you might want to do so, or indeed, how a static method differs from a non-static method! I can make an educated guess at this, but educated guesses are not the way to learn something properly!

Having said that, prior to geting to the object chapter, the rest of the book had been much better. So if you already know your objects or don't intend using that aspect of the language, then you can add at least 1 star to this review.

Too many mistakes, 22 Dec 2006
I found this book a good introduction to PHP. But, it has a lot of mistakes. I think these have happened when the book was updated to cover PHP 5.

For example, when it describes constructors it says the constructor is a function named __construct(). But then it immediately gives an example where the constructor for class Person is a function called Person(). The former is PHP 5, the latter is PHP 4. Perhaps the update was a rush job.

If you can't already program in C or C++ then this book may not be for you. If you can, then it's OK.

Very Good, 03 Aug 2006
Written in the standard O'Reilly style, this book gives you a comprehensive coverage of PHP without being overly verbose or too dryly technical. Now in its 2nd edition this book covers the most recent version of PHP, version 5.

While I wouldn't want to learn PHP as a first programming language from this book, anybody with a basic knowledge of HTML and an OOP based language (Java, C++ or even JavaScript) will quickly be able to code PHP.

While the book isn't perfect: the aforementioned lack of concrete examples (the cynic in me might think that O'Reilly were saving these for the PHP Cookbook which is due out soon) and the chapter on objects being only 20 pages long, it's still all you would need as both a reference and a learning resource. A strong buy.

An O'Reilly Classic, 20 Aug 2003
This book is similar to every other O'Reilly book in that it is clear, concise and to the point. Never does it waffle on, and never does it go into too much detail and complexity that everyone except the best programmers understands it.
I personally found the explanation of objects and their classes to be better than the other explanations I have read for different languages, and certainly made picking up OOP in PHP a lot easier. Throughout is the obvious knowledge of the authors, something always reassuring in a title like this. The book fits well for beginners and seasoned programmers alike: the basics are explained well, and the technical reasons why things happen are included for good measure.

I was also surprised by the size of this book, as it significantly thinner than the other O'Reilly books (and other computer books for that matter), that I own. Computer books often appear large, daunting and dry. This book is an exception to that rule, and is perfectly good for someone wanting to learn PHP from the ground up to someone wanting to pick a chapter to swat up on, and use it as a reference book. All in all, a very good book.

Easy start in dynamic webpages, 26 Jun 2003
PHP is a great language to start creating dynamic websites with - it's easy to learn, but very powerful.

This book will start you out on the right tracks with PHP and help you build up your experience - even once you're experienced, you'll still turn to it for reference.

As usual, it's a solid O'Reilly title, it won't let you down. Being co-written by Rasmus himself (the creator of PHP) it benefits from more than a little extra experience and inside information.

Basically, if you want to create dynamic websites with a lot of power, PHP is the language you want, and this is the book.

Interesting but not easy, 18 Nov 2008
I was looking for a relaxed read on the tube. This book was more substantial and quite a lot heavier going than the title implies.

I didn't find this book all that easy to read even though I have studied economics, mathematics and physics to quite a high level.

Interesting, but not a very short introduction, 01 Jul 2008
This book aims to introduce the key concepts of chaos in a readable way, including no mathematics. The title is a bit misleading, since there are over 160 pages and the book covers some quite advanced concepts. Overall, the book attempts to cover too much material for a short introduction, and I feel that readers who are not already familiar with the topic will be left confused.

The first chapter leaps directly into the concepts of deterministic nonlinear systems and sensitive dependence, and includes a wide-ranging discussion of the work of scientists including Laplace, Newton, Franklin and Darwin.

The second chapter explains exponential growth nicely, with several examples. Chapter 3 introduces examples of dynamical systems and their associated concepts. Here, new concepts such as state space, fixed points and attractors arise very rapidly and I wonder whether they have time to sink in for the reader who is not already familiar with them. Some of the new concepts are not clearly defined.

Chapter 4, 'Chaos in mathematical models', describes the universal period-doubling cascade, the Lorenz system, the Henon map, delay equations and Hamiltonian chaos. Again, too many models are introduced too rapidly. Chapters 5 and 6 cover fractals, dimensions and Lyapunov exponents, the measures of chaos, and the book then moves on to real numbers on a computer, statistics, predictability, weather forecasts, climate change and finance, ending up with some philosophical remarks.

Although I quite enjoyed reading this book, I would not recommend it as an introduction to the subject.



Good. But you need a preliminary, 11 Jun 2008
The book introduces the chaos theory relatively in details (compared with "the quantum world" J.P which introduces the entire structure of quantum physics less than 90 pages). The chaos is a very new and popular theory. It is based on the dynamical system, or dating back further, integral by I.Newton. The book itself produces nothing extremely exciting but progressively, makes you learn a lot. I find it really helpful to scan the dynamical system part in my financial math textbook before reading it. My suggestion is that you understand some concepts on integral and dynamical system first. They may be rather naive compared with the chaos theory but they at least give you a basis to develop your thoughts.

A Great Introduction, 04 Oct 2006
A very readable introduction for anyone interested in nonlinear dynamics, time series, weather forecasting or climate modelling.

A great introduction to the subject of chaos, 13 Jun 2001
Book review of: Does God Play Dice? - The New Mathematics of Chaos by Ian Stewart

Beautiful fractals, the butterfly effect and unpredictable systems were the images that chaos conjured up in my imagination before I sat down and read this book. Within its pages the incredible diversity of chaotic systems; and the diversity is remarkable; is presented and explained. It is staggering to see the picture unfold, the gradual realisation that 'the' scientific statement of the eighteenth century; that the universe runs according to a set of immutable laws; is unable to explain much of the behaviour in even the simplest of classical systems. The discovery of a whole new world, and one that has been in existence since the beginning of the universe: chaos. This book is merely an introduction to a comparatively new and exciting area of mathematics; but using the word merely is doing it an injustice, since it encapsulates the topic superbly and leaves the reader with a desire to study the mathematics of chaos in more detail.

Fittingly the opening chapter commences with the backdrop to this word 'chaos'. Three hundred years ago, Newton published, 'The Mathematical principles of Natural Philosophy'. This work is unrivalled in the field of mathematics; its basic message has been absorbed into our culture: "Nature has laws and we can find them." Unfortunately, although mathematics allows us to calculate the solutions to many difficult problems, we are still left in an unordered world, where apparently simple motions, on closer inspection, become unpredictable and hence unexplainable in the language of mathematics. It is appropriate at this point to introduce the nature of chaos. Stewart is quick to point out that since this branch of mathematics is still in its formative stages, giving it a precise definition is not possible or wise. However to get us off the mark he gives the definition reluctantly reached by the Royal Society in 1986: "Stochastic behaviour occurring in a deterministic system." More roughly speaking, random behaviour in a system governed by laws.

Where is the dividing line between order and chaos? The chapter 'The Laws of Error,' introduces another field of mathematics, Probability theory - the mathematics of chance. Mathematicians had found that analysing the detailed workings of large systems was too involved and complex. Probability theory grew out of a need to simulate detail without actually having to examine it. As Stewart states: "Mathematicians could calculate the motion of a satellite of Jupiter, but not that of a snowflake in a blizzard."

The book continues with a look at one of the prime examples of chaotic systems in our World, weather systems. This century has seen many attempts to write equations that will linearize weather and use them to predict exactly how weather systems will behave. As we are well aware short-term predictions are accurate a large percentage of the time, but long term predictions are much harder to make. What we learned in the 'Strange Attractors' chapter can be applied here. The initial conditions that we feed into any model we have will have finite accuracy. Even if we obtain data exact to many decimal places, it will not take many iterations before it digresses from the path that the described weather system follows. Lorenz stumbled upon this when computing weather systems. After examining results from two separate calculations involving the same set of data, albeit with different rounding accuracies, he discovered that his results were very similar for a short period of time, but then diverged extremely rapidly and followed distinct paths. This breakthrough was later to be named the 'Butterfly effect', illustrating the manner in which a trivial dynamic can upset a disproportionably large system. .

At this stage in the book, Stewart leads us into a chapter entitled 'Recipe for chaos'. It firstly attempts to describe the workings of chaos as analogous to a recipe, presumably in an attempt to simplify the concepts and avoid any complex mathematics. It does not really achieve the desired effect. This chapter was the hardest to grasp, which is a shame since it contains many of the fundamental facts about chaos and its axioms if one can use such a word.

Fractals are important part of chaos that joins the discussion at this point. They present us with a language to describe what we see happening with chaos. A fractal, generally speaking, is a geometric object, which continues to exhibit detailed structure over a wide range of scales. Self-similarity exhibited again. Interestingly the method of describing the detail level of a fractal is by allocating it a dimension, known as its Hausdorff dimension. These dimensions tend to be fractional (hence fractal).

The final three chapters are new to this, the second edition of the book, and they describe some of the advances in the subject since 1989, namely the prediction and control of chaotic systems, which are both perfectly possible.

In its totality, this book gives any discerning reader an opportunity to delve into the World of chaos and come away with a greater understanding of the topic as a whole and a glance at the variety of areas and applications it covers. The mathematics of chaos is involved; this is not surprising since the initial discovery of the topic was due to the inability of conventional mathematics to describe certain behaviours. Nevertheless, on the whole Stewart does a good job of explaining concepts and then illustrating them with simplified examples, avoiding the need for much of the mathematics. However there were one or two places where his desire to seek analogies for his models overlooks the aim of aim of the analogy in the first place that is to aid the readers understanding of the topic. Helpful too, was the inclusion of a fair number of diagrams and schematics that in several cases proved invaluable to my understanding of the book. This is a great introduction to a subject that is becoming increasingly important and perhaps indispensable in mathematics.

Readable Introduction to Chaos Theory, 06 Feb 2001
Relatively easy to read, even the Maths (honest!), Ian Stewart writes with an obvious passion but injects some much needed humour at times. He delivers the bulk of the subject (including the historical theory) in a fairly concise way. Probably best used in conjunction with another introductory text (e.g. James Gleick's 'Chaos')

A incredible book...about Chaos.., 01 Feb 2001
This book explains in a easy way, all the mechanism related to Chaos Theory. Ian Stewart shows a clever & interesting way of describing it.

A good introduction to the science of Chaos, 11 Oct 2000
If you are interested in the subject of Chaos, this book can be a good introduction. Very readable and engaging, you will find accurate descriptions of the key discoveries of that science in a language easy to understand to everybody. I loved that book!

The treatment of objects lets this book down., 27 Apr 2008
One of the primary reasons I got this book was to get a decent understanding of the use of objects. It fails to deliver on this front. The book assumes you alread know the ins and outs of objects, and fails to adequately explain their role in the language. For instance, it tells you how to create a static method, but doesn't say why you might want to do so, or indeed, how a static method differs from a non-static method! I can make an educated guess at this, but educated guesses are not the way to learn something properly!

Having said that, prior to geting to the object chapter, the rest of the book had been much better. So if you already know your objects or don't intend using that aspect of the language, then you can add at least 1 star to this review.

Too many mistakes, 22 Dec 2006
I found this book a good introduction to PHP. But, it has a lot of mistakes. I think these have happened when the book was updated to cover PHP 5.

For example, when it describes constructors it says the constructor is a function named __construct(). But then it immediately gives an example where the constructor for class Person is a function called Person(). The former is PHP 5, the latter is PHP 4. Perhaps the update was a rush job.

If you can't already program in C or C++ then this book may not be for you. If you can, then it's OK.

Very Good, 03 Aug 2006
Written in the standard O'Reilly style, this book gives you a comprehensive coverage of PHP without being overly verbose or too dryly technical. Now in its 2nd edition this book covers the most recent version of PHP, version 5.

While I wouldn't want to learn PHP as a first programming language from this book, anybody with a basic knowledge of HTML and an OOP based language (Java, C++ or even JavaScript) will quickly be able to code PHP.

While the book isn't perfect: the aforementioned lack of concrete examples (the cynic in me might think that O'Reilly were saving these for the PHP Cookbook which is due out soon) and the chapter on objects being only 20 pages long, it's still all you would need as both a reference and a learning resource. A strong buy.

An O'Reilly Classic, 20 Aug 2003
This book is similar to every other O'Reilly book in that it is clear, concise and to the point. Never does it waffle on, and never does it go into too much detail and complexity that everyone except the best programmers understands it.
I personally found the explanation of objects and their classes to be better than the other explanations I have read for different languages, and certainly made picking up OOP in PHP a lot easier. Throughout is the obvious knowledge of the authors, something always reassuring in a title like this. The book fits well for beginners and seasoned programmers alike: the basics are explained well, and the technical reasons why things happen are included for good measure.

I was also surprised by the size of this book, as it significantly thinner than the other O'Reilly books (and other computer books for that matter), that I own. Computer books often appear large, daunting and dry. This book is an exception to that rule, and is perfectly good for someone wanting to learn PHP from the ground up to someone wanting to pick a chapter to swat up on, and use it as a reference book. All in all, a very good book.

Easy start in dynamic webpages, 26 Jun 2003
PHP is a great language to start creating dynamic websites with - it's easy to learn, but very powerful.

This book will start you out on the right tracks with PHP and help you build up your experience - even once you're experienced, you'll still turn to it for reference.

As usual, it's a solid O'Reilly title, it won't let you down. Being co-written by Rasmus himself (the creator of PHP) it benefits from more than a little extra experience and inside information.

Basically, if you want to create dynamic websites with a lot of power, PHP is the language you want, and this is the book.

Interesting but not easy, 18 Nov 2008
I was looking for a relaxed read on the tube. This book was more substantial and quite a lot heavier going than the title implies.

I didn't find this book all that easy to read even though I have studied economics, mathematics and physics to quite a high level.

Interesting, but not a very short introduction, 01 Jul 2008
This book aims to introduce the key concepts of chaos in a readable way, including no mathematics. The title is a bit misleading, since there are over 160 pages and the book covers some quite advanced concepts. Overall, the book attempts to cover too much material for a short introduction, and I feel that readers who are not already familiar with the topic will be left confused.

The first chapter leaps directly into the concepts of deterministic nonlinear systems and sensitive dependence, and includes a wide-ranging discussion of the work of scientists including Laplace, Newton, Franklin and Darwin.

The second chapter explains exponential growth nicely, with several examples. Chapter 3 introduces examples of dynamical systems and their associated concepts. Here, new concepts such as state space, fixed points and attractors arise very rapidly and I wonder whether they have time to sink in for the reader who is not already familiar with them. Some of the new concepts are not clearly defined.

Chapter 4, 'Chaos in mathematical models', describes the universal period-doubling cascade, the Lorenz system, the Henon map, delay equations and Hamiltonian chaos. Again, too many models are introduced too rapidly. Chapters 5 and 6 cover fractals, dimensions and Lyapunov exponents, the measures of chaos, and the book then moves on to real numbers on a computer, statistics, predictability, weather forecasts, climate change and finance, ending up with some philosophical remarks.

Although I quite enjoyed reading this book, I would not recommend it as an introduction to the subject.



Good. But you need a preliminary, 11 Jun 2008
The book introduces the chaos theory relatively in details (compared with "the quantum world" J.P which introduces the entire structure of quantum physics less than 90 pages). The chaos is a very new and popular theory. It is based on the dynamical system, or dating back further, integral by I.Newton. The book itself produces nothing extremely exciting but progressively, makes you learn a lot. I find it really helpful to scan the dynamical system part in my financial math textbook before reading it. My suggestion is that you understand some concepts on integral and dynamical system first. They may be rather naive compared with the chaos theory but they at least give you a basis to develop your thoughts.

A Great Introduction, 04 Oct 2006
A very readable introduction for anyone interested in nonlinear dynamics, time series, weather forecasting or climate modelling.

OK in some respects flawed in others, 01 Jul 2008
As another reviewer has said this is hardly a 'Master' handbook but it does have some useful and interesting things to say to the beginner. What is most disappointing is that a textbook on acoustics, printed in 2001 (the date of this edition) stills uses imperial measurements! Anywhere that distance is discussed it is given in feet and inches. This is the 21st century right? A pretty lazy attempt at updating this text.

Fantastic, 13 Jan 2004
At over 600 pages, you certainly get your money's worth with this book. It is replete with information on the design of acoutical spaces, noise isolation, reverb time, control of room resonances, room modelling and numerous other related topics. I bought this book to gain a better understanding of acoustics for the design of a home studio and it certainly paid off. It will take you a while to get through this book, but you'll be able to amaze your friends (or bore them) with your in depth understanding of acoustics. Highly recommended.

Not a Masters' book but a good place to start., 19 Jan 2002
This book is very well explained but lacks that which some may hope for from a book entitled 'The Master Handbook of Acoustics'.
If you are an 'acoustic enthusiast' and a knowledge of acoustic concepts is important to you, then, this would be worth buying - maybe an undergraduate physics/engineering student might also benefit from its approach.
However, if you are someone that wishes to go beyond, getting to the heart of problems like; noise/vibration control and acoustics, you should go for something like Frank Fahy's Engineering Acoustics, Kinsler and Frey, or, if you are up to it!, Pierce...

Outstanding!!!!!, 04 Aug 1999
To say that the Master Handbook of Acoustics is an 'incredibly comprehensive work' it's like saying that the Beatles were 'some band from Liverpool'. Without a doubt, a must-have. Better than that, buy two and enlighten a friend! :-)

Now really, this is the absolute definitive book on acoustics, covering topics ranging from sound propagation to room acoustics to absortion, diffusion, refraction, reflection, diffraction and everything else you can think of.

Perfect for anyone looking to upgrade their acoustics palet, 08 Aug 1998
This book can be a tremendous asset to anyone interested in cleaning up their audio listening invironment. It would be difficult to imagine myself not having this book around now with all the wealth of information it possesses. Highly recomended.

A great introduction to the subject of chaos, 13 Jun 2001
Book review of: Does God Play Dice? - The New Mathematics of Chaos by Ian Stewart

Beautiful fractals, the butterfly effect and unpredictable systems were the images that chaos conjured up in my imagination before I sat down and read this book. Within its pages the incredible diversity of chaotic systems; and the diversity is remarkable; is presented and explained. It is staggering to see the picture unfold, the gradual realisation that 'the' scientific statement of the eighteenth century; that the universe runs according to a set of immutable laws; is unable to explain much of the behaviour in even the simplest of classical systems. The discovery of a whole new world, and one that has been in existence since the beginning of the universe: chaos. This book is merely an introduction to a comparatively new and exciting area of mathematics; but using the word merely is doing it an injustice, since it encapsulates the topic superbly and leaves the reader with a desire to study the mathematics of chaos in more detail.

Fittingly the opening chapter commences with the backdrop to this word 'chaos'. Three hundred years ago, Newton published, 'The Mathematical principles of Natural Philosophy'. This work is unrivalled in the field of mathematics; its basic message has been absorbed into our culture: "Nature has laws and we can find them." Unfortunately, although mathematics allows us to calculate the solutions to many difficult problems, we are still left in an unordered world, where apparently simple motions, on closer inspection, become unpredictable and hence unexplainable in the language of mathematics. It is appropriate at this point to introduce the nature of chaos. Stewart is quick to point out that since this branch of mathematics is still in its formative stages, giving it a precise definition is not possible or wise. However to get us off the mark he gives the definition reluctantly reached by the Royal Society in 1986: "Stochastic behaviour occurring in a deterministic system." More roughly speaking, random behaviour in a system governed by laws.

Where is the dividing line between order and chaos? The chapter 'The Laws of Error,' introduces another field of mathematics, Probability theory - the mathematics of chance. Mathematicians had found that analysing the detailed workings of large systems was too involved and complex. Probability theory grew out of a need to simulate detail without actually having to examine it. As Stewart states: "Mathematicians could calculate the motion of a satellite of Jupiter, but not that of a snowflake in a blizzard."

The book continues with a look at one of the prime examples of chaotic systems in our World, weather systems. This century has seen many attempts to write equations that will linearize weather and use them to predict exactly how weather systems will behave. As we are well aware short-term predictions are accurate a large percentage of the time, but long term predictions are much harder to make. What we learned in the 'Strange Attractors' chapter can be applied here. The initial conditions that we feed into any model we have will have finite accuracy. Even if we obtain data exact to many decimal places, it will not take many iterations before it digresses from the path that the described weather system follows. Lorenz stumbled upon this when computing weather systems. After examining results from two separate calculations involving the same set of data, albeit with different rounding accuracies, he discovered that his results were very similar for a short period of time, but then diverged extremely rapidly and followed distinct paths. This breakthrough was later to be named the 'Butterfly effect', illustrating the manner in which a trivial dynamic can upset a disproportionably large system. .

At this stage in the book, Stewart leads us into a chapter entitled 'Recipe for chaos'. It firstly attempts to describe the workings of chaos as analogous to a recipe, presumably in an attempt to simplify the concepts and avoid any complex mathematics. It does not really achieve the desired effect. This chapter was the hardest to grasp, which is a shame since it contains many of the fundamental facts about chaos and its axioms if one can use such a word.

Fractals are important part of chaos that joins the discussion at this point. They present us with a language to describe what we see happening with chaos. A fractal, generally speaking, is a geometric object, which continues to exhibit detailed structure over a wide range of scales. Self-similarity exhibited again. Interestingly the method of describing the detail level of a fractal is by allocating it a dimension, known as its Hausdorff dimension. These dimensions tend to be fractional (hence fractal).

The final three chapters are new to this, the second edition of the book, and they describe some of the advances in the subject since 1989, namely the prediction and control of chaotic systems, which are both perfectly possible.

In its totality, this book gives any discerning reader an opportunity to delve into the World of chaos and come away with a greater understanding of the topic as a whole and a glance at the variety of areas and applications it covers. The mathematics of chaos is involved; this is not surprising since the initial discovery of the topic was due to the inability of conventional mathematics to describe certain behaviours. Nevertheless, on the whole Stewart does a good job of explaining concepts and then illustrating them with simplified examples, avoiding the need for much of the mathematics. However there were one or two places where his desire to seek analogies for his models overlooks the aim of aim of the analogy in the first place that is to aid the readers understanding of the topic. Helpful too, was the inclusion of a fair number of diagrams and schematics that in several cases proved invaluable to my understanding of the book. This is a great introduction to a subject that is becoming increasingly important and perhaps indispensable in mathematics.

Readable Introduction to Chaos Theory, 06 Feb 2001
Relatively easy to read, even the Maths (honest!), Ian Stewart writes with an obvious passion but injects some much needed humour at times. He delivers the bulk of the subject (including the historical theory) in a fairly concise way. Probably best used in conjunction with another introductory text (e.g. James Gleick's 'Chaos')

A incredible book...about Chaos.., 01 Feb 2001
This book explains in a easy way, all the mechanism related to Chaos Theory. Ian Stewart shows a clever & interesting way of describing it.

A good introduction to the science of Chaos, 11 Oct 2000
If you are interested in the subject of Chaos, this book can be a good introduction. Very readable and engaging, you will find accurate descriptions of the key discoveries of that science in a language easy to understand to everybody. I loved that book!

The treatment of objects lets this book down., 27 Apr 2008
One of the primary reasons I got this book was to get a decent understanding of the use of objects. It fails to deliver on this front. The book assumes you alread know the ins and outs of objects, and fails to adequately explain their role in the language. For instance, it tells you how to create a static method, but doesn't say why you might want to do so, or indeed, how a static method differs from a non-static method! I can make an educated guess at this, but educated guesses are not the way to learn something properly!

Having said that, prior to geting to the object chapter, the rest of the book had been much better. So if you already know your objects or don't intend using that aspect of the language, then you can add at least 1 star to this review.

Too many mistakes, 22 Dec 2006
I found this book a good introduction to PHP. But, it has a lot of mistakes. I think these have happened when the book was updated to cover PHP 5.

For example, when it describes constructors it says the constructor is a function named __construct(). But then it immediately gives an example where the constructor for class Person is a function called Person(). The former is PHP 5, the latter is PHP 4. Perhaps the update was a rush job.

If you can't already program in C or C++ then this book may not be for you. If you can, then it's OK.

Very Good, 03 Aug 2006
Written in the standard O'Reilly style, this book gives you a comprehensive coverage of PHP without being overly verbose or too dryly technical. Now in its 2nd edition this book covers the most recent version of PHP, version 5.

While I wouldn't want to learn PHP as a first programming language from this book, anybody with a basic knowledge of HTML and an OOP based language (Java, C++ or even JavaScript) will quickly be able to code PHP.

While the book isn't perfect: the aforementioned lack of concrete examples (the cynic in me might think that O'Reilly were saving these for the PHP Cookbook which is due out soon) and the chapter on objects being only 20 pages long, it's still all you would need as both a reference and a learning resource. A strong buy.

An O'Reilly Classic, 20 Aug 2003
This book is similar to every other O'Reilly book in that it is clear, concise and to the point. Never does it waffle on, and never does it go into too much detail and complexity that everyone except the best programmers understands it.
I personally found the explanation of objects and their classes to be better than the other explanations I have read for different languages, and certainly made picking up OOP in PHP a lot easier. Throughout is the obvious knowledge of the authors, something always reassuring in a title like this. The book fits well for beginners and seasoned programmers alike: the basics are explained well, and the technical reasons why things happen are included for good measure.

I was also surprised by the size of this book, as it significantly thinner than the other O'Reilly books (and other computer books for that matter), that I own. Computer books often appear large, daunting and dry. This book is an exception to that rule, and is perfectly good for someone wanting to learn PHP from the ground up to someone wanting to pick a chapter to swat up on, and use it as a reference book. All in all, a very good book.

Easy start in dynamic webpages, 26 Jun 2003
PHP is a great language to start creating dynamic websites with - it's easy to learn, but very powerful.

This book will start you out on the right tracks with PHP and help you build up your experience - even once you're experienced, you'll still turn to it for reference.

As usual, it's a solid O'Reilly title, it won't let you down. Being co-written by Rasmus himself (the creator of PHP) it benefits from more than a little extra experience and inside information.

Basically, if you want to create dynamic websites with a lot of power, PHP is the language you want, and this is the book.

Interesting but not easy, 18 Nov 2008
I was looking for a relaxed read on the tube. This book was more substantial and quite a lot heavier going than the title implies.

I didn't find this book all that easy to read even though I have studied economics, mathematics and physics to quite a high level.

Interesting, but not a very short introduction, 01 Jul 2008
This book aims to introduce the key concepts of chaos in a readable way, including no mathematics. The title is a bit misleading, since there are over 160 pages and the book covers some quite advanced concepts. Overall, the book attempts to cover too much material for a short introduction, and I feel that readers who are not already familiar with the topic will be left confused.

The first chapter leaps directly into the concepts of deterministic nonlinear systems and sensitive dependence, and includes a wide-ranging discussion of the work of scientists including Laplace, Newton, Franklin and Darwin.

The second chapter explains exponential growth nicely, with several examples. Chapter 3 introduces examples of dynamical systems and their associated concepts. Here, new concepts such as state space, fixed points and attractors arise very rapidly and I wonder whether they have time to sink in for the reader who is not already familiar with them. Some of the new concepts are not clearly defined.

Chapter 4, 'Chaos in mathematical models', describes the universal period-doubling cascade, the Lorenz system, the Henon map, delay equations and Hamiltonian chaos. Again, too many models are introduced too rapidly. Chapters 5 and 6 cover fractals, dimensions and Lyapunov exponents, the measures of chaos, and the book then moves on to real numbers on a computer, statistics, predictability, weather forecasts, climate change and finance, ending up with some philosophical remarks.

Although I quite enjoyed reading this book, I would not recommend it as an introduction to the subject.



Good. But you need a preliminary, 11 Jun 2008
The book introduces the chaos theory relatively in details (compared with "the quantum world" J.P which introduces the entire structure of quantum physics less than 90 pages). The chaos is a very new and popular theory. It is based on the dynamical system, or dating back further, integral by I.Newton. The book itself produces nothing extremely exciting but progressively, makes you learn a lot. I find it really helpful to scan the dynamical system part in my financial math textbook before reading it. My suggestion is that you understand some concepts on integral and dynamical system first. They may be rather naive compared with the chaos theory but they at least give you a basis to develop your thoughts.

A Great Introduction, 04 Oct 2006
A very readable introduction for anyone interested in nonlinear dynamics, time series, weather forecasting or climate modelling.

OK in some respects flawed in others, 01 Jul 2008
As another reviewer has said this is hardly a 'Master' handbook but it does have some useful and interesting things to say to the beginner. What is most disappointing is that a textbook on acoustics, printed in 2001 (the date of this edition) stills uses imperial measurements! Anywhere that distance is discussed it is given in feet and inches. This is the 21st century right? A pretty lazy attempt at updating this text.

Fantastic, 13 Jan 2004
At over 600 pages, you certainly get your money's worth with this book. It is replete with information on the design of acoutical spaces, noise isolation, reverb time, control of room resonances, room modelling and numerous other related topics. I bought this book to gain a better understanding of acoustics for the design of a home studio and it certainly paid off. It will take you a while to get through this book, but you'll be able to amaze your friends (or bore them) with your in depth understanding of acoustics. Highly recommended.

Not a Masters' book but a good place to start., 19 Jan 2002
This book is very well explained but lacks that which some may hope for from a book entitled 'The Master Handbook of Acoustics'.
If you are an 'acoustic enthusiast' and a knowledge of acoustic concepts is important to you, then, this would be worth buying - maybe an undergraduate physics/engineering student might also benefit from its approach.
However, if you are someone that wishes to go beyond, getting to the heart of problems like; noise/vibration control and acoustics, you should go for something like Frank Fahy's Engineering Acoustics, Kinsler and Frey, or, if you are up to it!, Pierce...

Outstanding!!!!!, 04 Aug 1999
To say that the Master Handbook of Acoustics is an 'incredibly comprehensive work' it's like saying that the Beatles were 'some band from Liverpool'. Without a doubt, a must-have. Better than that, buy two and enlighten a friend! :-)

Now really, this is the absolute definitive book on acoustics, covering topics ranging from sound propagation to room acoustics to absortion, diffusion, refraction, reflection, diffraction and everything else you can think of.

Perfect for anyone looking to upgrade their acoustics palet, 08 Aug 1998
This book can be a tremendous asset to anyone interested in cleaning up their audio listening invironment. It would be difficult to imagine myself not having this book around now with all the wealth of information it possesses. Highly recomended.

Simply a great book on Silverlight, 16 Nov 2008
I bought this book at the PDC 2008 in Los Angeles last week and started reading it on the plane home...

I must say that I already knew quite a lot on Silverlight, but this book still amazed me. It's clear, contains the right number of samples and correct information and is in my opinion a great book to start Silverlight 2 development. If you have no experience with the platform, or if you have already (some) knowledge about it, this book will give you all the information you need.

A word on the reading style: the book is one of the easiest books I have ever read (and I have read quite a lot...). The last sentence(s) of a paragraph already introduces the upcoming one, giving it a really interesting flow. Also, because of this, you easily make links between the several topics you're reading.

In conclusion, a great book!

A great introduction to the subject of chaos, 13 Jun 2001
Book review of: Does God Play Dice? - The New Mathematics of Chaos by Ian Stewart

Beautiful fractals, the butterfly effect and unpredictable systems were the images that chaos conjured up in my imagination before I sat down and read this book. Within its pages the incredible diversity of chaotic systems; and the diversity is remarkable; is presented and explained. It is staggering to see the picture unfold, the gradual realisation that 'the' scientific statement of the eighteenth century; that the universe runs according to a set of immutable laws; is unable to explain much of the behaviour in even the simplest of classical systems. The discovery of a whole new world, and one that has been in existence since the beginning of the universe: chaos. This book is merely an introduction to a comparatively new and exciting area of mathematics; but using the word merely is doing it an injustice, since it encapsulates the topic superbly and leaves the reader with a desire to study the mathematics of chaos in more detail.

Fittingly the opening chapter commences with the backdrop to this word 'chaos'. Three hundred years ago, Newton published, 'The Mathematical principles of Natural Philosophy'. This work is unrivalled in the field of mathematics; its basic message has been absorbed into our culture: "Nature has laws and we can find them." Unfortunately, although mathematics allows us to calculate the solutions to many difficult problems, we are still left in an unordered world, where apparently simple motions, on closer inspection, become unpredictable and hence unexplainable in the language of mathematics. It is appropriate at this point to introduce the nature of chaos. Stewart is quick to point out that since this branch of mathematics is still in its formative stages, giving it a precise definition is not possible or wise. However to get us off the mark he gives the definition reluctantly reached by the Royal Society in 1986: "Stochastic behaviour occurring in a deterministic system." More roughly speaking, random behaviour in a system governed by laws.

Where is the dividing line between order and chaos? The chapter 'The Laws of Error,' introduces another field of mathematics, Probability theory - the mathematics of chance. Mathematicians had found that analysing the detailed workings of large systems was too involved and complex. Probability theory grew out of a need to simulate detail without actually having to examine it. As Stewart states: "Mathematicians could calculate the motion of a satellite of Jupiter, but not that of a snowflake in a blizzard."

The book continues with a look at one of the prime examples of chaotic systems in our World, weather systems. This century has seen many attempts to write equations that will linearize weather and use them to predict exactly how weather systems will behave. As we are well aware short-term predictions are accurate a large percentage of the time, but long term predictions are much harder to make. What we learned in the 'Strange Attractors' chapter can be applied here. The initial conditions that we feed into any model we have will have finite accuracy. Even if we obtain data exact to many decimal places, it will not take many iterations before it digresses from the path that the described weather system follows. Lorenz stumbled upon this when computing weather systems. After examining results from two separate calculations involving the same set of data, albeit with different rounding accuracies, he discovered that his results were very similar for a short period of time, but then diverged extremely rapidly and followed distinct paths. This breakthrough was later to be named the 'Butterfly effect', illustrating the manner in which a trivial dynamic can upset a disproportionably large system. .

At this stage in the book, Stewart leads us into a chapter entitled 'Recipe for chaos'. It firstly attempts to describe the workings of chaos as analogous to a recipe, presumably in an attempt to simplify the concepts and avoid any complex mathematics. It does not really achieve the desired effect. This chapter was the hardest to grasp, which is a shame since it contains many of the fundamental facts about chaos and its axioms if one can use such a word.

Fractals are important part of chaos that joins the discussion at this point. They present us with a language to describe what we see happening with chaos. A fractal, generally speaking, is a geometric object, which continues to exhibit detailed structure over a wide range of scales. Self-similarity exhibited again. Interestingly the method of describing the detail level of a fractal is by allocating it a dimension, known as its Hausdorff dimension. These dimensions tend to be fractional (hence fractal).

The final three chapters are new to this, the second edition of the book, and they describe some of the advances in the subject since 1989, namely the prediction and control of chaotic systems, which are both perfectly possible.

In its totality, this book gives any discerning reader an opportunity to delve into the World of chaos and come away with a greater understanding of the topic as a whole and a glance at the variety of areas and applications it covers. The mathematics of chaos is involved; this is not surprising since the initial discovery of the topic was due to the inability of conventional mathematics to describe certain behaviours. Nevertheless, on the whole Stewart does a good job of explaining concepts and then illustrating them with simplified examples, avoiding the need for much of the mathematics. However there were one or two places where his desire to seek analogies for his models overlooks the aim of aim of the analogy in the first place that is to aid the readers understanding of the topic. Helpful too, was the inclusion of a fair number of diagrams and schematics that in several cases proved invaluable to my understanding of the book. This is a great introduction to a subject that is becoming increasingly important and perhaps indispensable in mathematics.

Readable Introduction to Chaos Theory, 06 Feb 2001
Relatively easy to read, even the Maths (honest!), Ian Stewart writes with an obvious passion but injects some much needed humour at times. He delivers the bulk of the subject (including the historical theory) in a fairly concise way. Probably best used in conjunction with another introductory text (e.g. James Gleick's 'Chaos')

A incredible book...about Chaos.., 01 Feb 2001
This book explains in a easy way, all the mechanism related to Chaos Theory. Ian Stewart shows a clever & interesting way of describing it.

A good introduction to the science of Chaos, 11 Oct 2000
If you are interested in the subject of Chaos, this book can be a good introduction. Very readable and engaging, you will find accurate descriptions of the key discoveries of that science in a language easy to understand to everybody. I loved that book!

The treatment of objects lets this book down., 27 Apr 2008
One of the primary reasons I got this book was to get a decent understanding of the use of objects. It fails to deliver on this front. The book assumes you alread know the ins and outs of objects, and fails to adequately explain their role in the language. For instance, it tells you how to create a static method, but doesn't say why you might want to do so, or indeed, how a static method differs from a non-static method! I can make an educated guess at this, but educated guesses are not the way to learn something properly!

Having said that, prior to geting to the object chapter, the rest of the book had been much better. So if you already know your objects or don't intend using that aspect of the language, then you can add at least 1 star to this review.

Too many mistakes, 22 Dec 2006
I found this book a good introduction to PHP. But, it has a lot of mistakes. I think these have happened when the book was updated to cover PHP 5.

For example, when it describes constructors it says the constructor is a function named __construct(). But then it immediately gives an example where the constructor for class Person is a function called Person(). The former is PHP 5, the latter is PHP 4. Perhaps the update was a rush job.

If you can't already program in C or C++ then this book may not be for you. If you can, then it's OK.

Very Good, 03 Aug 2006
Written in the standard O'Reilly style, this book gives you a comprehensive coverage of PHP without being overly verbose or too dryly technical. Now in its 2nd edition this book covers the most recent version of PHP, version 5.

While I wouldn't want to learn PHP as a first programming language from this book, anybody with a basic knowledge of HTML and an OOP based language (Java, C++ or even JavaScript) will quickly be able to code PHP.

While the book isn't perfect: the aforementioned lack of concrete examples (the cynic in me might think that O'Reilly were saving these for the PHP Cookbook which is due out soon) and the chapter on objects being only 20 pages long, it's still all you would need as both a reference and a learning resource. A strong buy.

An O'Reilly Classic, 20 Aug 2003
This book is similar to every other O'Reilly book in that it is clear, concise and to the point. Never does it waffle on, and never does it go into too much detail and complexity that everyone except the best programmers understands it.
I personally found the explanation of objects and their classes to be better than the other explanations I have read for different languages, and certainly made picking up OOP in PHP a lot easier. Throughout is the obvious knowledge of the authors, something always reassuring in a title like this. The book fits well for beginners and seasoned programmers alike: the basics are explained well, and the technical reasons why things happen are included for good measure.

I was also surprised by the size of this book, as it significantly thinner than the other O'Reilly books (and other computer books for that matter), that I own. Computer books often appear large, daunting and dry. This book is an exception to that rule, and is perfectly good for someone wanting to learn PHP from the ground up to someone wanting to pick a chapter to swat up on, and use it as a reference book. All in all, a very good book.

Easy start in dynamic webpages, 26 Jun 2003
PHP is a great language to start creating dynamic websites with - it's easy to learn, but very powerful.

This book will start you out on the right tracks with PHP and help you build up your experience - even once you're experienced, you'll still turn to it for reference.

As usual, it's a solid O'Reilly title, it won't let you down. Being co-written by Rasmus himself (the creator of PHP) it benefits from more than a little extra experience and inside information.

Basically, if you want to create dynamic websites with a lot of power, PHP is the language you want, and this is the book.

Interesting but not easy, 18 Nov 2008
I was looking for a relaxed read on the tube. This book was more substantial and quite a lot heavier going than the title implies.

I didn't find this book all that easy to read even though I have studied economics, mathematics and physics to quite a high level.

Interesting, but not a very short introduction, 01 Jul 2008
This book aims to introduce the key concepts of chaos in a readable way, including no mathematics. The title is a bit misleading, since there are over 160 pages and the book covers some quite advanced concepts. Overall, the book attempts to cover too much material for a short introduction, and I feel that readers who are not already familiar with the topic will be left confused.

The first chapter leaps directly into the concepts of deterministic nonlinear systems and sensitive dependence, and includes a wide-ranging discussion of the work of scientists including Laplace, Newton, Franklin and Darwin.

The second chapter explains exponential growth nicely, with several examples. Chapter 3 introduces examples of dynamical systems and their associated concepts. Here, new concepts such as state space, fixed points and attractors arise very rapidly and I wonder whether they have time to sink in for the reader who is not already familiar with them. Some of the new concepts are not clearly defined.

Chapter 4, 'Chaos in mathematical models', describes the universal period-doubling cascade, the Lorenz system, the Henon map, delay equations and Hamiltonian chaos. Again, too many models are introduced too rapidly. Chapters 5 and 6 cover fractals, dimensions and Lyapunov exponents, the measures of chaos, and the book then moves on to real numbers on a computer, statistics, predictability, weather forecasts, climate change and finance, ending up with some philosophical remarks.

Although I quite enjoyed reading this book, I would not recommend it as an introduction to the subject.



Good. But you need a preliminary, 11 Jun 2008
The book introduces the chaos theory relatively in details (compared with "the quantum world" J.P which introduces the entire structure of quantum physics less than 90 pages). The chaos is a very new and popular theory. It is based on the dynamical system, or dating back further, integral by I.Newton. The book itself produces nothing extremely exciting but progressively, makes you learn a lot. I find it really helpful to scan the dynamical system part in my financial math textbook before reading it. My suggestion is that you understand some concepts on integral and dynamical system first. They may be rather naive compared with the chaos theory but they at least give you a basis to develop your thoughts.

A Great Introduction, 04 Oct 2006
A very readable introduction for anyone interested in nonlinear dynamics, time series, weather forecasting or climate modelling.

OK in some respects flawed in others, 01 Jul 2008
As another reviewer has said this is hardly a 'Master' handbook but it does have some useful and interesting things to say to the beginner. What is most disappointing is that a textbook on acoustics, printed in 2001 (the date of this edition) stills uses imperial measurements! Anywhere that distance is discussed it is given in feet and inches. This is the 21st century right? A pretty lazy attempt at updating this text.

Fantastic, 13 Jan 2004
At over 600 pages, you certainly get your money's worth with this book. It is replete with information on the design of acoutical spaces, noise isolation, reverb time, control of room resonances, room modelling and numerous other related topics. I bought this book to gain a better understanding of acoustics for the design of a home studio and it certainly paid off. It will take you a while to get through this book, but you'll be able to amaze your friends (or bore them) with your in depth understanding of acoustics. Highly recommended.

Not a Masters' book but a good place to start., 19 Jan 2002
This book is very well explained but lacks that which some may hope for from a book entitled 'The Master Handbook of Acoustics'.
If you are an 'acoustic enthusiast' and a knowledge of acoustic concepts is important to you, then, this would be worth buying - maybe an undergraduate physics/engineering student might also benefit from its approach.
However, if you are someone that wishes to go beyond, getting to the heart of problems like; noise/vibration control and acoustics, you should go for something like Frank Fahy's Engineering Acoustics, Kinsler and Frey, or, if you are up to it!, Pierce...

Outstanding!!!!!, 04 Aug 1999
To say that the Master Handbook of Acoustics is an 'incredibly comprehensive work' it's like saying that the Beatles were 'some band from Liverpool'. Without a doubt, a must-have. Better than that, buy two and enlighten a friend! :-)

Now really, this is the absolute definitive book on acoustics, covering topics ranging from sound propagation to room acoustics to absortion, diffusion, refraction, reflection, diffraction and everything else you can think of.

Perfect for anyone looking to upgrade their acoustics palet, 08 Aug 1998
This book can be a tremendous asset to anyone interested in cleaning up their audio listening invironment. It would be difficult to imagine myself not having this book around now with all the wealth of information it possesses. Highly recomended.

Simply a great book on Silverlight, 16 Nov 2008
I bought this book at the PDC 2008 in Los Angeles last week and started reading it on the plane home...

I must say that I already knew quite a lot on Silverlight, but this book still amazed me. It's clear, contains the right number of samples and correct information and is in my opinion a great book to start Silverlight 2 development. If you have no experience with the platform, or if you have already (some) knowledge about it, this book will give you all the information you need.

A word on the reading style: the book is one of the easiest books I have ever read (and I have read quite a lot...). The last sentence(s) of a paragraph already introduces the upcoming one, giving it a really interesting flow. Also, because of this, you easily make links between the several topics you're reading.

In conclusion, a great book!

Accessible chaos, 30 May 2004
Strogatz's approach to Nonlinear Dynamics is suitable for anyone equipped with a good basic understanding of ordinary differential equations. He allows the reader to gradually build-up their understanding through a series of illustrations and examples - this is the sort of book that will be indispensable the night before a final year undergraduate Chaos and Nonlinear Dynamics exam. Not excessively mathematical, contains solid explanations and leaves you wanting to learn more about this fantastic area of physics.

Great undergrad text, 04 Aug 1998
I recently took an undergrad course which used this book as the text. This book is very easy to follow, contains great explanations and diagrams, and is just plain interesting to read. Anyone who has had a basic calc/ODE class background could understand this book.

Great intro to nonlinear dynamics with excellent examples, 28 Jul 1998
This book is an excellent introductory graduate level text on nonlinear dynamics for those who wish to understand the basic concepts before seeing the mathematical rigor at the heart of the subject. Strogatz avoids getting caught up in mathematical nuances which often cloud the big picture for non-math students, and thereby clearly impresses upon the reader the essence of nonlinear dynamics, eventually building up to chaos. The examples and problems are truly unique and inspiring. This book is an excellent starting place for someone who knows little or nothing about nonlinear dynamics but has done some basic work with linear differential equations and linear algebra.

A sufficiently elementary and yet thorough introduction., 17 Jul 1998
A very good book. Recommended for all readers familiar or even vaguely familiar with Ordinary Differential Equations and Calculus. Its informal style helps a lot. The examples are clear and enough background information is given to understand them.

A little complex..., 15 Apr 1998
This is an excelent text with challenging problems (which you should work at for a while and not give up!)and clear explanations. The book explains a mostly geometric approach, and leaves the ananlytical side to you. Buy this book even if you've never heard of "Nonlinear Dynamics". You'll be glad you did!