Joe

Good, but limited

Revisado: 06-27-24

I'm very new to welding. I've used for some light repairs on my jeep. There was very little in this book that I hadn't picked up in researching too buy my MIG welder. The book talks about stick, MIG, and TIG welding and briefly mentions gas welding.

The safety info in the beginning was useful. Being self taught, I'm never sure I've learned enough in this area. Otherwise, the book is very skimpy on details and fairly repetitive. There wasn't enough basics on technique to really get you started.

At this price and length, I wasn't really expecting much, but it still feel a bit short.

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Run-narrator mangles math-Content lost in metaphor

Revisado: 05-21-24

I'm 1/3 of the way through this book, and I'm returning it. It's terrible. This book claimed to teach the important concepts in calculus that get lost in all the formalism. Sadly, it replaces the formalism with flowery language that obscures the subject much more than the pedagogy ever could. It makes me miss my freshman calc prof who couldn't speak English.

it reminds me of some of Dickens' work where it is obvious that he was being paid by the word, Cloaking a simple, one sentence idea in a page of mixed metaphor and $10 accademic words does not convey the clarity the author intends.

Adding insult to injury, the narration for the audio book is worse than the writing. His voice and tone are fine. The problem is that he has no understanding of the subject area. Let's start with pronouncing Euler's name -- it's "Oiler" not" Youler". Easy mistake but, this is a math book! Doesn't the editor have it on a list of comononly mispronounced names?

It gets worse, he is completely lost when it comes to simple math notation. Two to the x gets read 2 x. log base a of x becomes log ax.

Even worse, Euler's equation, correctly described as the most beautiful equation in math, gets read e i pi + 1 = 0 not e to the i pi plus 1 equals 0. No beauty in that.

His utter lack of comprehension of exponents comes out shortly after this. He calls f sub 0 and f sub 1 f0 and f1. Acceptable. f sub 2 becomes f squared! Not f superscript, but f subscript is read a raising to a power. While listening, I almost cheered that he figured out what an exponent was. Then things got really confusing and he started talking about f 22 and f 12.

I went back and looked at the kindle text and saw the mess. I realized that f squared was actually f sub 2, f 12 was f sub 1 squared and f 22 was f sub 2 squared.

I give up. Listening to math is hard enough. It's a disaster when it is read so very wrong. It almost made me miss the rambling, meaningless prose.

Don't buy this book. The print or kindle versions are just bad. The kindle version is a crime.

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Good introduction, a bit dated

Revisado: 06-20-19

I was familiar with most of the material presented, but overall it's a good presentation of the topic, with many tidbits I wasn't familiar with.

It was prepared before LIGO detected gravitational waves, so it lacks the rich insights provided by that team over the past few years. It also predates discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC, so that conversation is also dated.

The other challenge with this presentation is that he is regularly describing visual aids that he is using in the class. Fortunately, his descriptions are detailed enough that he conveys the main points, but it is frustrating at times. There is a detailed .pdf available at audible, but it doesn't contain all of these visuals either.

Still, this was an enjoyable presentation that I enjoyed and learned from.

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esto le resultó útil a 16 personas

Too generic. Read like a Vietnam War book report.

Revisado: 04-27-19

I love this subject, but was sorely disappointed in this book. Having spent 21 years in the USAF, much of it preparing for or directly supporting the SEAD/DEAD mission, I was looking forward to a good book on the birth of the wild weasel mission. This wasn't it. Three quarters of the book is a vanilla rehashing of all the mistakes made during the Vietnam War and an uninspiring criticism of the various leaders. There was nothing new in that. The rest was random stories recounting single missions conducted by wild weasel crews. Never enough to get you interested in the people, and no real insights in the development of the missions.

The weasel program started as a black program as a desperate move to address the return threats our pilots were facing. There was lots of drama and real heroics by the aircrew and the designers who made it happen. I wish this story covered that instead of repeating what we already know about the war in general.

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Disappointed... Didn't live up to other reviews

Revisado: 02-26-19

I'd read that this was one of Peter Cline's best books. I didn't think so. Paradox Bound was much better. This book was high concept, but lacked in execution. The book provides a very long, slow build up as you slowly learn the secrets of the building, then quickly dashes through the action to a relatively quick resolution. At the end, I felt "that's it?" The concepts in the book were interesting and fairly unique. There was a lot of potential for a great story that never materialized.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Very good overview of the subject

Revisado: 03-01-18

This book provided a great survey of and incredibly broad and complex field. I particularly liked the opening chapters and their coverage of Newton and other early theorists. The author connected many of these early ideas into this framework of modern physics instead of skimming over it like many other books.

The rest of the book continues in an extremely accessible and complete manner, tying the history, the personalities, and the theory in an engaging dialogue. This book stays at the conceptual level and doesn't require any math.

My only critique of the content is that it doesn't cover the breadth of modern approaches to the challenging questions of gravitational theory. It discussed string theory at length, but doesn't consider loop quantum gravity.

The narration is generally very good. Her voice is clear and she navigates the jargon as well as a "native speaker" of physics. My one major complaint with her narration, and the audio book in general is that she does a very poor job with accents when doing quotations. All the Americans sound like a cross between a team and a gangster. Her German accents seem like caricatures of Einstein. It was distracting from the otherwise enjoyable narration. I would have preferred her to just do these in her own voice instead.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

Good book, with some interesting insights

Revisado: 12-29-17

I've read many books on the manned space program, and this is one of them. Not the best, not bad either. Bringing the perspective of the grounds controllers helps fill in a much needed perspective. It makes the events of those days relatable from a perspective we might have more in common with.

The book does tend to wander a bit. It starts with a description of all the positions, possibly before you are ready to consume it all. On paper, you could quickly refer back to that section, but that doesn't work well in and audio book format. As the book moves to tell the story of all the missions, the transitions between mission phases, people's back story, and even different missions are abrupt at times.

That being said, I enjoyed it, and I learned a lot from it.

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esto le resultó útil a 5 personas

Space is NOT a place. Who knew?

Revisado: 11-10-17

Good book. I listen while I drive and this is a book that needs your attention. I would up skipping back often to stay with the ideas. Starts with a good historical perspective on locality, then works through many competing modern concepts. Much more than just a discussion of entanglement. He drifts a bit at time and sometimes overworks the metaphors, but that's probably unavoidable.

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I gave up at chapter 5

Revisado: 11-01-17

This was not meant to be an audio book. As others note, the narration is terrible. I'm not sure it wasn't narrated by a computer voice. The paperwork pauses .. are ... way ... to ... long ... between ... sentences. it makes for a very copy flow.

Additionally, the material is superficial, with no substance. lots of lists, with little to no substance to explain the content on the lists. As an audio book there is no way to remember all the list items as you listen.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Not bad

Revisado: 10-29-17

I enjoyed it and read/listened to it pretty quickly. The story was good, but not unique.

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