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Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance
Pascale Aebischer
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0521829356 |
Book Description
Looking at the violation of bodies in Shakespeare's tragedies, especially as revealed (or concealed) in performance on stage and screen, Pascale Aebischer discusses stage and screen performances of Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Othello and King Lear. Aebischer demonstrates how bodies virtually absent from playtexts and critical discussion (due to silence, disability, marginalization, racial otherness or death) can be prominent in performance, where their representation reflects the cultural and political climate of the production.
Book Description
By 1907, staff at the Tianjin YMCA were rallying their Chinese charges with the cry: When will China be able to send a winning athlete to the Olympic contests? When will China be able to invite all the world to Peking for an International Olympic contest? Nearly a century later, on the eve of China's first-ever Olympic games, this innovative book shows for the first time how sporting culture and ideology played a crucial role in the making of the modern nation-state in Republican China. A landmark work on the history of sport in China, Marrow of the Nation tells the dramatic story of how Olympic-style competitions and ball games, as well as militarized forms of training associated with the West and Japan, were adapted to become an integral part of the modern Chinese experience.
Customer Reviews:
The clash of Imperial China and Western revolutionary modern.......2004-12-04
An important book on the politics of physical culture in China. Those wishing to get a deep insight into the role and importance of martial arts to Chinese nationalism will find this book invaluable. The book focuses on the terrible time during the political, social, and economic collapse of traditional China and offers a deep insight into the clash of Imperial China and Western revolutionary modernism.
During the New Culture Movement of the 1910s, two clear factions developed among martial arts associations. The modernists rejected old Imperial values and proposed reform along the lines of Western and European ideas as a way of keeping martial arts relevant. Resisting these changes were the conservatives who hoped "to preserve China's old ways and skills and who reject(ed) Europeanization." The reformers strongly criticized the old traditional Shifu and associations for favoring oral transmission to a select few. They claimed that traditional factionalism and secrecy was limiting the vitality of the martial arts and even misleading the public with "mumbo-jumbo." During the first decades of the Republican era, some members of the martial arts community began repackaging wushu in modern, scientific terms, and promoting it as part of modern physical education. They argued that the martial arts were an indigenous physical culture, as useful as European exercise and sport.
Interestingly modern China, in re-packaging its culture, has taken this same route.
Book Description
Since 1992, more than 25 countries have sent teams to the annual World Puzzle Championship—a global competition for puzzle supremacy and international bragging rights. The puzzles are created by top constructors of many nationalities, with an emphasis on visual, math, logic, and observation skills. All puzzles at these competitions are language- and culture-neutral, making them ideal for people of any background. This book contains nearly 70 puzzles from the 12th World Puzzle Championship, held in the Netherlands, as well as a complete US Puzzle Championship test, used to select members of the US and Canadian teams.
Along with favorites such as Sudoku, Battleships, Paint by Numbers, Cross Sums, and observation puzzles, you'll find a fascinating array of less familiar puzzle varieties, including some you may never have seen before. After you master them, visit the official Team USA Web site at
wpc.puzzles.com. The annual online qualifying test is open to everyone!
Average customer rating:
- Truly challenging reasoning puzzles
- serious disappointment
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World-Class Puzzles from the World Puzzle Championships, Volume 4
Manufacturer: Random House Puzzles & Games
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Puzzles & Games
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Puzzles
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ASIN: 0812935055
Release Date: 2003-04-08 |
Book Description
Each year, at the World Puzzle Championship, teams representing countries from around the world compete to solve challenging language- and culture-neutral puzzles of every variety.
With this fascinating mix of logic, math and visual puzzles from the Tenth Annual World Puzzle Championship, held in Brno, Czech Republic, solvers can test their skills against those of the world's best puzzlers. Also included in this volume is the 2001 U.S. qualifying test, which Team USA wannabes can use to hone their skills: open qualifiers are held online in June!
Customer Reviews:
Truly challenging reasoning puzzles.......2007-07-06
These puzzles push the limits of a puzzler's logic and reasoning capabilities. It's even more amazing when you remember that these are the same puzzles that are done under time constraints in a competitive setting. They're difficult enough being done at one's own leisure! I love these puzzles for keeping my reasoning skills sharp. All you need is logic to do these, no matter what your native language, nor how much trivia you know.
serious disappointment.......2002-01-11
I enjoy problems and puzzles that make you think. Most of the "problems" in this book can be solved by tedious trial and error. There is hardly any need to or opportunity to think rationally. If you like grunt work in solving problems you might like this book, but if you like challenging thought problems, this is the wrong book. I gave it a one star rating because zero stars is not an option.
A waste of money!
Average customer rating:
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Nearly out of Heart and Hope: The Puzzle of a Colonial Labourer's Diary
Miles Fairburn
Manufacturer: Auckland University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1869401182 |
Average customer rating:
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World Class Puzzles
Erwin Brecher
Manufacturer: Sterling
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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Puzzles
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ASIN: 0806994584 |
Book Description
Start with general puzzles that will loosen up your thought processes; then go on to Fallacies (logic that looks airtight but contains a tiny flaw) and Paradoxes. Next come Science Puzzles and sequence puzzles, and word and logic puzzles. 96 pages, 20 b/w illus., 5 3/8 x 8 1/4.
Customer Reviews:
Very poorly written.......2006-03-09
Got the book used for $2. Otherwise I'd be very disappointed. I'd guess that more than half of the puzzles are inadequately described.
For example: "the marble paradox" tells you to put four marbles in a box (white, red and two blue). Then draw two and put a blue marble on the table. But what if you didn't draw a blue marble? It doesn't say.
Customer Reviews:
Interesting and entertaining........2002-11-09
I enjoyed this collection of interviews. It was fascinating to learn how some of today's top players got their starts in bridge and hear them retell stories of their most memorable hands. This is a nice book for anyone who enjoys reading about bridge personalities or wants a more "up close and personal" look at their favorite player.
The book delivers as promised: "Twenty-six of the world's best players talk about bridge -- how they got started, their best and worst memories, their favorite hands, the players they most admire, the opponents they most fear, and their hopes for the future of the game."
Among the players interviewed are: Benito Garozzo, Bob Hamman, Geir Helgemo, Jeff Meckstroth, and Zia Mahmood.
Book Description
Ruby is an increasingly popular, fully object-oriented dynamic programming language, hailed by many practitioners as the finest and most useful language available today. When Ruby first burst onto the scene in the Western world, the Pragmatic Programmers were there with the definitive reference manual, Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide.
Now in its second edition, author Dave Thomas has expanded the famous Pickaxe book with over 200 pages of new content, covering all the improved language features of Ruby 1.8 and standard library modules. The Pickaxe contains four major sections:
- An acclaimed tutorial on using Ruby.
- The definitive reference to the language.
- Complete documentation on all built-in classes, modules, and methods
- Complete descriptions of all 98 standard libraries.
If you enjoyed the First Edition, you'll appreciate the expanded content, including enhanced coverage of installation, packaging, documenting Ruby source code, threading and synchronization, and enhancing Ruby's capabilities using C-language extensions. Programming for the World Wide Web is easy in Ruby, with new chapters on XML/RPC, SOAP, distributed Ruby, templating systems, and other web services. There's even a new chapter on unit testing.
This is the definitive reference manual for Ruby, including a description of all the standard library modules, a complete reference to all built-in classes and modules (including more than 250 significant changes since the First Edition). Coverage of other features has grown tremendously, including details on how to harness the sophisticated capabilities of irb, so you can dynamically examine and experiment with your running code. "Ruby is a wonderfully powerful and useful language, and whenever I'm working with it this book is at my side" --Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks
Customer Reviews:
Good, but far from perfect........2007-08-27
This book is a great reference, but the tutorial is somewhat confusing. This has two main reasons:
1. Ruby itself is a somewhat confusing language. Really. Don't believe all the hype surrounding it. I'm not saying it isn't good, but it uses lots of concepts which aren't that common in other languages and the syntax is unnecessarily bizarre sometimes. Python has everything Ruby has, but it's *always* legible, clean and - let's face it - beautiful.
2. The top-down approach of the tutorial isn't efficient if you've never programmed before. I have a good deal of experience with other languages, so it was quite straightforward to me, but if that wasn't the case - and this book is also targeted at the newbie audience - I'd probably be lost sometimes.
That said, this is still THE book to get if you're interested in learning Ruby, at least until someone writes a better one.
Not for a Java programmer.......2007-07-26
Information is set in a haphazard manner. Cannot get a clear picture of how a Ruby program is structured.For ex: Chapter 4 is on "Containers, Blocks, and Iterators". Chapter 7 "Expressions" again has different information on Loops, Iterators, For ... In, Variable Scope, Loops, and Blocks etc.
Great book!.......2007-07-24
I decided to learn Ruby on my own and I'm glad I picked this book. It's very easy to follow and the instructions were very concise. If you're new to programming like myself, this book will be a great help in getting your feet wet.
A classic, a must-have for anyone learning Ruby.......2007-06-27
This is the book which made Ruby popular in America. I like the way they start out talking about blocks and closures early in the book. As the book notes a reviewer said about blocks "This is important!"
You must have one.......2007-06-21
Dave Thomas is surely one of the best writers I've ever seen. He doesn't treat you like an idiot, so it's perfect for experienced programmers to learn very fast many aspects of the Ruby language.
Amazon.com
As a textbook suitable for the classroom or self-study, Michael Scott's Programming Language Pragmatics provides a worthy tour of the theory and practice of how programming languages are run on today's computers. Clearly organized and filled with a wide-ranging perspective on over 40 different languages, this book will be appreciated for its depth and breadth of coverage on an essential topic in computer science.
With references to dozens of programming languages, from Ada to Turing and everything in between (including C, C++, Java, and Perl), this book is a truly in-depth guide to how code is compiled (or interpreted) and executed on computer hardware. Early chapters tend to be slightly more theoretical (with coverage of regular expressions and context-free grammars) and will be most valuable to the computer science student, but much of this book is accessible to anyone seeking to widen their knowledge (especially since recent standards surrounding XML make use of some of the same vocabulary presented here).
The book has a comprehensive discussion of compilation and linking, as well as how data types are implemented in memory. Sections on functional and logical programming (illustrated with Scheme and Prolog, which are often used in AI research) can expand your understanding of how programming languages work. Final sections on the advantages--and complexities--of concurrent processing, plus a nice treatment of code optimization techniques, round out the text here. Each chapter provides numerous exercises, so you can try out the ideas on your own.
Students will benefit from the practical examples here, drawn from a wide range of languages. If you are a self-taught developer, the very approachable tutorial can give you perspective on the formal definitions of many computer languages, which can help you master new ones more effectively. --Richard Dragan
Topics covered: A survey of today's programming languages, compilation vs. interpretation, the compilation process, regular expression and context-free grammars, scanners and parsers, names, scopes and bindings, scope rules, overloading, semantic analysis, introduction to computer architecture, representing data, instruction sets, 680x0 and MIPs architectures, control flow and expression evaluation, iteration and recursion, data types, type checking, records, arrays, strings, sets, pointers, lists, file I/O, subroutines, calling sequences and parameter passing, exception handling, coroutines, compile back-end processing, code generation, linking, object-oriented programming basics, encapsulation and inheritance, late binding, multiple inheritance, functional and logical languages, Scheme and Prolog, programming with concurrency, shared memory and message passing, and code optimization techniques.
Book Description
Thoroughly updated to reflect the most current developments in language design and implementation, the second edition
*Addresses key developments in programming language design:
+ Finalized C99 standard
+ Java 5
+ C# 2.0
+ Java concurrency package (JSR 166) and comparable mechanisms in C#
+ Java and C# generics
*Introduces and discusses scripting languages throughout the book and in an entire new chapter that covers:
+ Application domains: shell languages, text processing and report generation, mathematics and statistics, glue languages and general purpose scripting, extension languages, scripting the World Wide Web
+ Design concepts: names and scopes, string and pattern manipulation, high level data types, object orientation
+ Major languages: Perl, PHP, Tcl/Tk, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, XLST
*Updates many sections and topics:
+ iterators
+ exceptions
+ polymorphism
+ templates/generics
+ scope rules and declaration ordering
+ separate compilation
+ garbage collection
+ threads and synchronization
New pedagogical features
Design & Implementation boxes
+ Highlight the interplay between language design and language implementation
Test Your Understanding review questions
+ Help students assess their understanding of key points of a section
In More Depth CD supplements
+ Present more advanced or peripheral material for students who would like to extend their knowledge
Explorations
+ Provide students with additional exercises that are open-ended, research-type activities
New reference features
+ Over 900 numbered and titled examples help the student to quickly cross-reference and access content for initial study and later review.
+ Indices (in the printed text) for both the Design and Implementation boxes and the numbered examples.
+ CD search engine for both the printed text and the supplemental sections.
+ Live links on the CD to Web-based language tutorials, reference manuals, and compilers and interpreters.
On the CD
+ In More Depth sections and sub-sections that are introduced in the book and presented on the CD
+ In More Depth Exercises and Explorations for students wanting additional challenges
+ Links to Web-based language reference manuals and tutorials
+ Links to Web-based compilers and interpreters
+ Text files containing the code fragments featured as examples in the book
+ Search engine to search both the main text and the CD-only content
CD System Requirements
PDF Viewer
The CD material includes PDF documents that you can read with a PDF viewer such as Adobe, Acrobat or Adobe Reader. Recent versions of Adobe Reader for some platforms are included on the CD.
HTML Browser
The navigation framework on this CD is delivered in HTML and JavaScript. It is recommended that you install the latest version of your favorite HTML browser to view this CD. The content has been verified under Windows XP with the following browsers: Internet Explorer 6.0, Firefox 1.5; under Mac OS X (Panther) with the following browsers: Internet Explorer 5.2, Firefox 1.0.6, Safari 1.3; and under Mandriva Linux 2006 with the following browsers: Firefox 1.0.6, Konqueror 3.4.2, Mozilla 1.7.11.
The content is designed to be viewed in a browser window that is at least 720 pixels wide. You may find the content does not display well if your display is not set to at least 1024x768 pixel resolution.
Operating System
This CD can be used under any operating system that includes an HTML browser and a PDF viewer. This includes Windows, Mac OS, and most Linux and Unix systems.
Instructor support
+ Password-protected site for adopters who request the password from a sales representative
+ Solutions to most exercises
+ Figures from the book in several formats
+ Lecture slides prepared by other instructors
New Coverage:
* Addresses the most recent developments in programming language design, including C99, C#, and Java 5.
* Introduces and discusses scripting languages throughout the book as well as in an entire new chapter.
* Includes a comprehensive chapter on concurrency, with coverage of the new Java concurrency package (JSR 166) and the comparable mechanisms in C#.
* Updates many sections and topics, including iterators, exceptions, polymorphism, templates/generics, scope rules and declaration ordering, separate compilation, garbage collection, and threads and synchronization.
New Pedagogical Features:
* Highlights the interaction and tradeoffs inherent in language design and language implementation decisions with over 100 "Design and Implementation" call-out boxes.
* Adds end-of-chapter "Exploration" exercisesopen-ended, research-type activities.
* Provides review questions after sections for quick self-assessment.
* Includes over 800 numbered examples to help the reader quickly cross-reference and access content.
Customer Reviews:
Very Good Book.......2007-07-20
Overall, "Programming Language Pragmatics" (PLP) is a very good book. According to the Preface:
"It aims, quite simply, to be the most comprehensive and accurate languages text available, in a style that is engaging and accessible to the typical undergraduate....
At its core, PLP is a book about how programming languages work. Rather than enumerate the details of many different languages, it focuses on concepts that underlie all the languages the student is likely to encounter, illustrating those concepts with a variety of concrete examples, and exploring the tradeoffs that explain why different languages were designed in different ways."
I'm not knowledgeable enough to pass judgment on "the most comprehensive and accurate" part. But, I'm pretty happy about the book meeting the rest of those goals. I read through the book on my own and have only a few significant gripes:
- Chapters 2 (Programming Language Syntax) and 4 (Semantic Analysis) are tough to get through. They're basically trying to teach enough about Alphabets, Languages, Regular Expressions, Context-Free Grammars, Finite Automata and Push-Down Automata for the reader to understand what the rest of the book is based on. I've read Cohen's Introduction to Computer Theory, which is dedicated solely to this material and I still had some trouble. With an instructor in a class to walk through the things, it should be doable. But, for a person reading the book on his own, ugh.
- All of Section III: Alternative Programming Models, seems to depart from the format of the rest of the book (as noted in the Preface) where the author talks about the concepts and then how the different languages implement them. Instead, he focuses on the languages themselves and almost seems to be trying to cram a primer into his text. Since the section seems to be a special case, it wouldn't be so bad except that the languages covered are a bit out of the mainstream and so that degree of depth gets pretty unreadable at times. Again, with a professor around, things would be better.
- At a more pedagogical level, the author has a tendency to merely explain what his example Figures are doing in general terms. The problem is that a lot of the code/pseudocode involves fairly advanced structures in several languages (many of which most people won't have run across). It would have made things a lot easier if he had walked his way through each of those Figures line-by-line and explained what each line did. Once again, this wouldn't be that much of a problem in a normal teaching environment since a professor could do it.
Other than those three things, this is a very good and readable book. I rate it at four stars out of five.
Excellent coverage of language concepts.......2007-05-04
This is among my favorite computer science books. I read the first edition straight through from cover to cover, even though I had some prior knowledge of the subject. I have since purchased the second edition, which exceeds the high standards set by the first edition. Scott's book would have made the programming languages course I took as an undergraduate much more enlightening, had it existed at the time.
Great book........2006-11-10
As a software engineer, I tend to be picky about my books, but this one is very in depth and a good read. You will learn a lot about different programming languages, and why certain languages are better than others for solving different types of prroblems.
Probably the best book in the "Survey of Programming Languages" genre.......2006-02-24
Every good programmer should know more than one programming language, that much is almost a consensus. But more than that, every programmer should educate himself about programming languages in general, what they mean and how they work. It's important to know at least the major programming paradigms, because they form the "mental model" of computation that is available to a programmer in a language from that paradigm.
And then it's always illustrative to know about the differences in many common languages, to see where different decisions have been made and what are the consequences. To know that certain legacy languages (e.g. C, Fortran) have features that were not designed because they were the "best" option (for some definition of best), but because the design was constrained by what technology was currently available.
This knowledge is not only required of compiler writers. It should be required of every good programmer. Compiler writers, of course, must know this, and probably in more detail. But Scott's book is a good resource about programming languages, in a level of detail that I believe adequate for all programmers.
There are two main kinds of books on programming languages: they are "survey" and "implementation".
Survey books show how things work in a lot of languages, comparing them along the way. Often the comparison gets down to small details that can affect the meaning, or semantics, of similar programs written in these languages. These books contain one individual chapter for every major topic, and inside such a chapter all languages are compared in relation to the topic. For example, one such chapter covers "subroutines" and then compare a host of different languages on how they implement subroutines.
Implementation books are different: they show how to implement many language features, usually by presenting code for interpreters and compilers. The reader doesn't learn that Ada permits nested subroutines, but instead how nested subroutines really work and how to implement them in a language, for example. A very good book of this kind is "Essentials of Programming Languages" by Friedman, Wand & Haynes.
I normally prefer the implementation books. I'm not really interested if Standard Pascal permits functions to be passed as parameters or not; if I do need to write a Standard Pascal compiler I'll look for a reference manual. I much prefer to know how to implement functions as parameters, and be done with it. Comparing minutiae about extant programming languages can sometimes be very enlightening, and sometimes be mostly dull.
Scott's book, however, really shines because it mixes feature descriptions and implementation details in the presentation. It does the usual routine of comparing a lot of different languages, most of the time the more popular ones like C++ and Java, but it then shows how the implementations differ because of differences in features. The book strikes a good balance between "language design" and "implementation" approaches, although it is clearly slanted towards design, and so more of a traditional "survey" book.
It wins over other survey books by including implementation information about almost every topic, and by the clear writing and style. Also, most survey books concentrate on mainstream imperative languages (nowadays C++, Java, C#) and leave other paradigms to chapters at the end. Scott's book is a bit better in this respect: the presentation often includes Common Lisp, Scheme and Standard ML in the comparisons. There are separate chapters about functional and logic programming too, but considerations about functional programming are spread in the whole book. This is important because paradigms change, and a good programmer must be able to adapt.
It's a good reference for language implementors and good education for most programmers. I look forward to the next editions.
Outstanding introduction to programming languages and their compilers.......2006-02-07
Over the years the Dragon Book has become the de facto standard for introducing compilers and related topics at universities. This is very unfortunate because "Programming Language Pragmatics" is in a completely different league and should be the one used instead. It gives the student (or the self taught) a complete and through overview of parsing, grammar, automata theory and other key language constructs. What really differentiates this book from others (and most notably the (in)famous "Dragon Book") is that it does so in a easy to understand manner and with lots of well written examples.
Many people find compiler and language theory to be dark magic, and it would be wrong not to acknowledge that these subjects are considerably harder than say creating a web page in PHP or writing a small Java/C# program. But much of the confusion also stems from the long history of porly written books which all have lacked explaining key areas or assumed that the readers just know some obscure CS topics beforehand. This book does not travel down that road, it is well written, contains both simple and advanced examples and is simply a delightful read.
Books:
- Singing Cowboy Stars/Book and Cd
- Stars and Masculinities in Spanish Cinema: From Banderas to Bardem (Oxford Studies in Modern European Culture)
- Steve Irwin: The Incredible Life of the Crocodile Hunter
- Storm of the Century: An Original Screenplay
- Sweethearts of the Sage: Biographies and Filmographies of 258 Actresses Appearing in Western Movies
- The Art of Ratatouille
- The Blue and the Gray on the Silver Screen: More Than Eighty Years of Civil War Movies
- The Cinema of Britain and Ireland (24 Frames)
- The Cognitive Semiotics of Film
- The Comedy World of Stan Laurel/Centennial Edition
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