Teach Yourself VISUALLY Guitar (Teach Yourself Visually)

Book Description

Do you learn faster by seeing and doing than by wading through tedious instructions? Then pick up a guitar and start strumming! Teach Yourself VISUALLY Guitar shows you the basics—photo by photo and note by note. You begin with basic chords and techniques and progress through suspensions, bass runs, hammer-ons, and barre chords. As you learn to read chord charts, tablature, and lead sheets, you can play any number of songs, from rock to folk to country. The chord chart and scale appendices are ready references for use long after you master the basics.

Concise two-page lessons show you all the steps to a skill and are ideal for quick review

Each skill, chord, or technique is clearly described
Detailed color photos demonstrate proper fingering and technique
Concise and understandable instructions accompany each photo
Helpful tips provide additional guidance

Download Description

With clear instructions and hundreds of photos, this is the only guide aspiring guitarists will need to make beautiful music Packed with step-by-step color photographs, this VISUAL guide shows the 14 million Americans playing guitar (or trying to) how to get started or take their playing to the next level, covering everything from purchasing a guitar and accessories to playing basic chords to mastering more advanced techniques. Charles Kim (Chicago, IL) teaches guitar, bass, songwriting, recording and music theory at Chicago's renowned Old Town School of Folk Music. A multifaceted musician and producer, he is also a composer and sound designer for film, TV, dance and theater companies.

Customer Reviews:

Good but typos will make you scream.......2007-09-17

Very well put together. Not enough info on guitar care. The pictures of the finger chord are ok, but you can not always tell exactly where the fingers are. A fret/string/dot chart would have been enough. An occational picture just to show the proper finger placement would be ok.

The biggest program is in the chord progression section there are typo's in the several of the chord charts. Very confusing. I'm glad I checked it out at my library. The book could have been so good if co-written with a several beginning enthusiasts to find out the missing connection.

Teach Yourself VISUALLY Bass Guitar (Teach Yourself Visually)

Average customer rating:

Teach Yourself VISUALLY Bass Guitar (Teach Yourself Visually)

Teach Yourself VISUALLY Bass Guitar (Teach Yourself Visually)
Ryan Williams , and Richard Hammond
Manufacturer: Visual
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Music | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Entertainment Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 0470048506

Book Description

Do you learn faster by seeing and doing than by wading through tedious instructions? Then pick up a bass guitar and start plucking! With Teach Yourself VISUALLY Bass Guitar, you'll quickly progress from playing notes to experimenting with plucking and slap-and-pop techniques. You'll learn about tuning, fretboard fingerings, alternate fingerings, down picking, palm muting, and more. The bass usually sets the tempo, so you'll learn basic note values plus common popular rhythms from straight rock to syncopated reggae. Downloadable MP3 files on wiley.com complement the book and let you hear exactly how things are supposed to sound as you play.

Concise two-page lessons show you all the steps to a skill and are ideal for quick review

Each skill or technique is defined and described
Step-by-step instructions accompany each photo
Detailed color photos demonstrate each step
Helpful tips provide additional guidance

Customer Reviews:

Teach Yourself VISUALLY Bass Guitar (Teach Yourself Visually).......2007-05-07

Exceptional book. Extremely easy to follow and is very methodical in explaining all the facet (to include reading the bass clef staff and scales) of learning to play the bass guitar.

Average customer rating:

Disorganized

Teach Yourself Visually Guitar
maranGraphics Development Group
Manufacturer: Visual
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Music | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

General | Self-Help | Health, Mind & Body | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 0764525816

Book Description

The guitar is one of the most popular musical instruments played today. Every style of music, from classical and country to rock and blues, can be played on the guitar. Teach Yourself VISUALLY Guitar will be a valuable resource to a wide range of readers-from people want to play a few songs around a campfire to those who aspire to become rock stars. This information-packed guide will cover all the basics of playing the guitar and reading music, but will also include more advanced guitar techniques. The book will also provide information about what to look for when purchasing a guitar or guitar accessories, and guitar maintenance and repair. Teach Yourself VISUALLY Guitar will feature full-color photographs of the tasks being covered, from playing chords to repairing a guitar, along with clear, step-by-step instructions. Useful tips will provide additional information and advice to help enhance the reader's guitar playing experience. Each Yourself VISUALLY Guitar will be packed with information useful to people who are picking up a guitar for the very first time. For more experienced guitar players , the book will provide a refresher course on the basics and the opportunity to add more advanced techniques to their repertoire.

Teach Yourself VISUALLY Guitar should include sections on:

The anatomy of a guitar and how guitars work.
How to tune a guitar.
Step-by-step instructions and full-color photographs illustrating how to play major and minor chords, barre chords and power chords.
Picking techniques.
Easy-to-follow instructions on basic guitar maintenance and repair.
An overview of guitar accessories, such as amps and effect pedals.
How to get rock, folk, classical or blues sounds from a guitar.
Instructions with accompanying photographs for performing advanced techniques, such as hammer-ons, pull-offs and string bending.
How to read music and chord diagrams.
Words and music for basic songs.

The Companion Website offers readers the audio for all the exercises, scales, and practice pieces in the book. Readers will be able to listen to examples of different techniques and effects such as hammer-opnes and slides. In addition, readers will find background music that they can play along with to exercise their newfound skills.

Customer Reviews:

Disorganized.......2005-01-15

The organization really threw me off. I thought that I would never get how to play the guitar but it turns out that the way things are ordered just confuses you. They mention notes once at the beginning and then later ask you to play small scales. Later on I see a page on the notes on the guitar. Everything is kind of randomly placed instead of a book that you can advance through from front to back.

It's a nice book besides that. Alittle rough around the edges, but still one of the decent guitar books out there.

Average customer rating:

Teach Yourself Visually Guitar
Ruth Maran
Manufacturer: Hungry Minds Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000J2SS6C

Average customer rating:

Teach Yourself Visually Guitar
Ruth Maran
Manufacturer: Hungry Minds Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000J2QARQ

Amazon.com

Pierre Levy takes a fresh look at the whole idea of what is virtual. He's responding to the widespread belief, and sometimes even panic, that a digital society with emphasis on virtual interactions is necessarily depersonalizing. He takes particular exception to the notion that "virtual" and "real" are opposites. Instead, Levy argues that virtuality is one of four modes of existence, the rest of which he describes as reality, possibility, and actuality. Each is defined in terms of its relationship with its environment.

In following Levy's world view, you may find that he interprets some or all of those terms in ways you're not used to, but the result is an interesting new approach to what it means to be part of an increasingly digital world. He examines the virtualization of several elements our society: the corporal body, text, the economy, language, technology, contracts, intelligence, subjects, and objects. What he finds is not a destruction of the personal so much as a transformation. Virtualization adds to, but does not replace, the real, the possible, and the actual. By understanding what virtualization means and involves, Levy believes that society will gain a greater variety of options for interaction in all areas. Becoming Virtual is a serious philosophical work, dense with ideas. It demands a lot from the reader, but rewards with an intriguing new perspective on inevitable social change. --Elizabeth Lewis

Customer Reviews:

A Must-Read.......2001-10-11

The word 'virtual' has had a fair amount of exercise in the last few decades, and it would be a pity if some were put off reading this wonderful book due to the misguided belief it may be populated with computer lingo and people with wetware engaged in simulated 'virtual' sex. Levy's understanding of the virtual extends far beyond information technology; he gives the concept a proper philosophical and even anthropological foundation, and even goes so far as to show that we have in fact always been virtual, and this is what has made us human.

Technology is probably what separates us from all other living creatures, or at least sophisticated technology, such as machines. Yes, other organisms utilise simple tools and what have you, but none of them are going to the moon in any sort of hurry. Levy's work is essentially about artifacts, be they software like language or symbols, or hardware like tools and machines. However, following on from the work of philosophers such as Deleuze and Serres, Levy is profoundly against the two common (mis)conceptions about them: that they 'dominate' us, or that they are simple tools in our hands, doing our bidding. Heidegger and his ilk were very keen on the domination idea, but that's only because they didn't really understand machines; sure, your VCR will seem to dominate you, if you can't work it, as many older people will tell you, but after a good dose of swearing and fumbling the usual result is a machine that just sits there doing nothing. Hardly despotism. Or you may have its measure, and say it's just a tool for capturing video images, for whatever purpose, and yet it changes the way you watch TV, capture memories of your kids, and the entire institutional set-up of the film industry. Quite a clever tool, that.

If you read this book (and you should), Levy will tell you that all artifacts, including less 'material' ones like language, virtualise our lives. That doesn't mean making them less real, the common usage of 'virtual'; it means problematising them, opening them up to possibilities. Making them MORE real. And this isn't naive techno-optimism, because not only are not all these possibilities not nice, but when you virtualise something you take on-board the requirements of the virtualising medium, which have to be met to keep it running, and you become entwined with the other people associated with these artifacts, such as video repair men. Technology can truly make you feel like a god, but it always needs to be fixed, and you have to undertake profound social relationships for it to happen at all (nobody builds an aircraft carrier alone in their backyard). Or take our oldest and most 'simple' artifact: language. Language, says Levy, virtualises 'real-time', by which he means our everyday interactions with other people. That's what it means to 'discuss' something, you take an immediate issue confronting two or more people, and you use language to open it up to different resolution paths which aren't immediately obvious. And again, this isn't artifact as god or slave: the language doesn't dominate you, although it has in-built constraints which you must adhere to if you want to be understood, and you can't just tell people what to do and see it happen, because not only are allowed meanings consensual or social, but also there is no direct causal link between utterance and action.

Levy explores the way we virtualise every aspect of our lives, from real-time interaction through language, to our actions through technology, and our social relations through institutions. And in each case the mechanism is the same: we create some artifact, more or less material, which allows us to shift what's at stake away from the immediate here-and-now and towards a problematic where new possibilities open up. And again Levy avoids simplistic determinism of any persuasion by emphasising that each of these artifacts simultaneously creates new social arrangements, and introduces new imperatives through the need for their upkeep. This is how the philosophy becomes anthropology, and why Levy says to be human IS to be virtual; it is our species that has taken these artifacts into our collectives, that has used the world to mediate our social lives. And the world extracts a price too, because artifacts impose requirements back upon us, if we want them to keep working, that is. The end of domination, either of artifact by human, or human by artifact.

This is Levy's most accessible book, in English, relatively free of the sometimes over-blown prose of Collective Intelligence. Like Bruno Latour, also an admirer of Serres and Deleuze, Levy allows us to see exactly how our technological, modern world is every bit as religious, barbaric, enlightened, enchanted, mystical or whatever as it has always been; you just have to understand artifacts. (It is also a tremendous asset for philosophy students who don't fully understand the scope of the Begsonian/Deleuzean 'virtual'.)

And as another reviewer has hinted, there's even theology in nuts and bolts, if you know where to look.

Virtually incomprehensible.......2001-07-25

This book is extremely heavy on the esoteric, philosophical lingo. As a virtual environment systems designer, I found it to be essentially useless. My guess is that it would be of value only to academicians and others not directly involved in the technological aspects of VE and other digital domains. Although I suspect there might have been some useful stuff here, the writing is too tangled to unravel. If you speak academese, you might fare better than I did.

Lévy gives us a new way of seeing culture........1998-09-17

This is one of those rare books that will re-wire many minds. Lévy gives us a new way of seeing culture. He achieves this by linking specific cultural activities, and thereby humankind, to a fundamental process that is outside place and time - the process of virtualisation.

That the book produces its profound cognitive effect in so few words is stunning. Part of the credit for this feat must go to the translator, Bononno.

'Becoming Virtual' in my view surpasses that other classic,'Understanding Computers and Cognition' by Winograd and Flores. Lévy depicts cognition and action as both social process, and process occurring within the individual. He introduces concepts sparingly and tellingly, illustrating them with examples reaching from the dawn of the human era to the present day.

A book that can be read at one sitting, but will demand to be picked up again many, many times in the years ahead.

Average customer rating:
Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age
Pierre; Bononno, Robert Levy
Manufacturer: Plenum Publishing Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OS9FR2

Book Description

** COMPLETELY UNAUTHORIZED **

Psychologists turn their attention to The Simpsons, one of America's most popular and beloved shows, in these essays that explore the functions and dysfunctions of the show's characters. Designed to appeal to both fans of the show and students of psychology, this unique blend of science and pop culture consists of essays by professional psychologists drawn from schools and clinical practices across the country. Each essay is designed to be accessible, thoughtful, and entertaining, while providing the reader with insights into both The Simpsons and the latest in psychological thought. Every major area of psychology is covered—from clinical psychology and cognition to abnormal and evolutionary psychology—while fresh views on eclectic show topics such as gambling addiction, pavlovian conditioning, family therapy, and lobotomies are explored.

Customer Reviews:

Like Watching an Itchy and Scratchy Episode.......2006-07-09

"The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people--that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature."
-- James Thurber

In the world of American television no other animated series, or any sitcom for that matter, has endured as long as "The Simpsons". What started out in 1987 as a few animated shorts featured on "The Tracey Ullman Show", "The Simpsons" quickly became an essential icon of American popular culture and has served as a prototype for future adult cartoon series to come such as "Family Guy", "King of the Hill", and "American Dad".

Perhaps one reason for Matt Groening's overwhelming success with the show's sixteen seasons is his ability to present relatable human truths and paradigms absurdly and to their exaggerated ends. The community of Springfield parodies modern American society in a humorous fashion. In part, that is the reason for the common name, "Springfield". Though the state in which Springfield exists is never established in the series, Springfield in reality can be found in thirty-four states throughout the United States in a way that suggests a reflection of common society as we know it to be.

Beyond the laughs and humor of the television show a deeper understanding of psychology can be applied in quite a creative way. This is the basis for the book, The Psychology of The Simpsons edited by Alan Brown, PhD. and Chris Logan. Nearly every aspect in psychology is covered in a compilation of essays written by credible experts in their respected fields. Topics range from the effects of alcoholism in Springfield to the application of the Big Five personality theory to a host of regularly featured characters.

On the surface a reader's first impression might be one of skepticism in the book's scientific merits as the subject matter is based on a fictional world. That notion is quickly dismissed in the first essay, "The Family Simpson: Like Looking in a Mirror?", which focuses on comparing the family for which the series is named with the traditional family structure in America. In brief, the Simpson family is made up a married heterosexual couple with three mixed-gendered children where the husband is the breadwinner and the wife is the homemaker . This sets the tone for the rest of the book. Before delving into the finer points of psychology the editors appear to have a desire to establish a credible relationship with the reader by making the case that we have more in common with this family and community than first meets the eye.

The true magic of this book is that it never lets the reader down. Just when a particular topic of psychology seems dry, and too over-analyzed, then comes an application from the show that makes sense of it all and leaving the reader wanting to be more of a fan of the show and psychology.

Casual viewers of the show will still get a kick out of the material presented but it is the diehard fans who will be the most entertained. Throughout much of the book many of the same episodes and situations are referenced in future essays. For a series with well over three hundred episodes, it is not quite clear whether the editors instructed the essayists to focus on a select few episodes and situations instead of the series as a whole or if it was pure coincidence as some instances throughout the series tend to have more merit in the field of psychology than others. In either case it can be rather annoying but is dealt with more easily each time the situation is referenced to in a different context of psychology. For example, a recurring reference is an episode in which it is discovered that Homer's cognitive deficiencies are a result of having a crayon stuck in the front of his brain and upon its removal Homer is actually found to be brilliant. Unfortunately he's brilliant to a fault where his family feels they no longer know him and he willingly reinserts the crayon to be "normal" once again. This episode is actually the basis for the most entertaining contribution to the book entitled, "Stupid Brain: Homer's Working Memory Odyssey". The format is a series of journal entries initially written by Homer chronicling his experiences after the removal of the crayon and is packed with an immense amount of information on the inner workings of the human brain. The latter part of his journal are his spoken words written verbatim by his daughter Lisa as Homer becomes too depressed over his newfound intelligence to write and has the crayon reinserted. It is easily understood the stark contrast the crayon had on his intelligence before and after. Of course, having a crayon stuck up in one's brain seems a bit unrealistic but the underlying information "Homer" gives in regards to the frontal and parietal lobe areas of the brain, memory development, and decision making seem to be deeply rooted in neuroscience and psychology.

Though not nearly as entertaining, the application of the Big Five personality theory to characters in The Simpsons is the most scientific and technical of any other essay presented within the work. In this analysis, thirteen heavy viewers of the show, varying greatly across their demographics, were asked to rate a list of twenty characters from the show based on the Big Five. David A. Kenny and Deidre T. Kenny pay exceptional attention to detail in the survey and are very thorough in their quantitative and qualitative observations . The results are well-presented in various tables, graphs, and statistical charts. It is easy for the average reader to get lost in the complexity of the data but the most interesting aspect is realizing the endearing quality that in spite of it all these statistics are based on a fictional cartoon show.

If the Simpsons series is an exaggeration of real life then the application of psychology to it is the medium to bring it back to reality. Or perhaps an alternative view can be considered: whereas psychology applied to the Simpsons is an exaggeration and real life is the only constant. Can it really be concluded without absurdity that Maggie, the Simpsons' baby, is "at serious risk for conduct problems and alcohol/substance abuse dependence later in life. "?

The places where this book fails are the same places where psychology fails. Psychology is not a perfect science nor are the Simpsons a perfect family. Somewhere between perfection and complete utter failure lie innumerable human variables to which science cannot predict or control. And although the writers of the series maintain creative control over the characters and their interactions with another, they cannot completely control the viewers' perception on the psychological state of their favorite fictional characters by comparing it to their own. What results is an endless game of cat-and-mouse or as the world of "The Simpsons" would have it, a gory episode of Itchy and Scratchy.

Book Description

.NET Windows Forms are a powerful technology for building a large class of applications for the Windows .NET platform. They offer nearly the same power and flexibility of classic Win32 development, but for a fraction of the effort. The programming model is lean and streamlined, and many of the tedious details that developers used to have to spend time on are now dealt with automatically by the platform. .NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell offers an accelerated introduction to this next-generation of rich user interface development. The book provides an all-inclusive guide for experienced programmers using the .NET Windows Forms platform to develop Windows applications, along with a compact but remarkably complete reference to the .NET Framework Class Library (FCL) Windows Forms namespaces and types. The authors present solid coverage of the fundamental building blocks, such as Controls, Forms, Menus, and GDI+, and enough detail to help you build your own fully featured reusable visual components so you can write visual component libraries as well as standalone applications. .NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell aims to provide not just the practical information and advice required to get programs working, but also to communicate the rationale behind the various parts of Windows Forms' design. The authors show how the thinking behind the framework enhances your productivity substantially. The new framework allows you to guess correctly what "the Right Way" to do things is a majority of the time, even if you've never tried what you're doing before. No more digging around in documentation for days to try to find the bit of information you need to use one particular feature. Anyone who is involved in user interface development will appreciate the ease of creation and expanded capabilities provided by .NET Windows Forms, as well as the in-depth focus and straight-forward approach this book brings. Included on CD is an add-in that will integrate the book's reference directly into the help files of Visual Studio .NET.

Customer Reviews:

This one isn't like the others..........2004-04-19

Databinding is handled later, and lots of interesting stuff I wasn't knowledgeable about came sooner. Bravo. This is a great book that will always be on my desk! (I'm a professional developer with walls of books by Microsoft on Wrox, primarily.)

A must read for any WinForms .NET Developer.......2004-03-02

This was the 3rd or 4th WinForms book I purchased. The others were good, but they were lacking in detail. This book does a great job in explaining 'under the cover' details. The authors do a good job explaining DataBinding, Controls, GDI+, Form, Menus, Inheritance and much more.
This is more than a resource book. The first half is devoted to getting you up and running with building WinForms apps. The 2nd half is an incredible reference, one I turn to almost daily.

If you plan to use or are using .NET WinForm, please, do yourself a big favor, buy this book and leave it on your desk

A must read for WinForms developers.......2004-03-01

This was the 3rd or 4th WinForms book I purchased. The others were good, but they were lacking in detail. This book does a great job in explaing 'under the cover' details. The authors do a good job explaining DataBinding, Controls, GDI+, Form, Menus, Inheritace and much more.

This is more than a resource book. The first half is devoted to getting you up and running with building WinForms apps. The 2nd half is an incredible reference, one I turn to almost daily.

If you plan to use or are using .NET WinForm, please, do yourself a big favor, buy this book and leave it on your desk.

An API Reference especially for DataGrid using ADO.net.......2003-09-17

The authors appear to go to great length for completeness in a companion reference for programmers creating DotNet Forms, an important new feature of the DotNet frameworks. We have been always looking for a capable web enabled report writer without integrating a third-party product, such as Crystal Reports for the Web. DotNet Forms promises in creating at least simple, yet dynamic, multi-paged reports without a whole lot of work.

DotNet provides for creating dynamic Excel-like forms for ASP.NET html. Additional form paging provides for DB presentation similar to Yahoo and eBay searches, which is a familiar and intuitive format. DotNet provides these DataGrid forms with the DotNet Forms API. The API architecture is listed in the last two-thirds of this book, which is an inch and a half thick.

While the authors claim to include a "very fast-paced" tutorial (p1) in the first third (313 pgs) of the book, the DataGrid portion is a mere 6 pages (p307-312), very steep indeed! I'd highly recommend its combined use with another MS Press book by Dino Esposito (0-7356-1578-0) which devotes about half of his book to DataGrid reports and code examples. Another is Jesse Liberty's O'Reilly book on VB.Net (0-596-00438-9) which has one chapter devoted to ADO.net (34pgs).

The publisher include a MS Visual Studio.Net Add-in on the accompanying CD which has the text of the book as integrated help files, 1.7MB MSI files for VS.Net 2K2 and 2K3. Appears a tad bit small? I have not tested the usefulness of the claimed dynamic integration of the O'Reilly Help files along with MS Help during coding process within VS. It appears that this is the initial product enhancement from this publisher. I wonder if an annotatable PDF file of the book would be more useful; at least this would be in a separate window. This tome was read at a local library.

At a local SQL Server Users Group meeting, a new technology that will embellish on the DataGrid and Forms was discussed and demoed. It is the forthcoming SQL Server 2K Reporting Services that will be a low/no cost add-on for SQL 2000 Server and authoring with a Visual Studio.Net 2003 download. It currently is in beta and will be released in 4Q03. It appears to be XML based and production reports can be rendered for browser, printer, PDF, and TIFF output. What a seemingly great idea.

Overall, this detailed 469-page reference on the DotNet Forms API appears needed for the programmer, although this is probably duplicates what's available on a MSDN subscription CD somewhere. The appendix includes another 69-page API term cross-reference and a 23-page index.

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books