Colorado Nature Almanac: A Month-By-Month Guide to the State's Wildlife and Wild Places

Customer Reviews:

How can a book like this be missed..........1999-02-19

Shows nature both from its natural side as also the vividness of imagination.

Book Description

Baseball Hacks isn't your typical baseball book--it's a book about how to watch, research, and understand baseball. It's an instruction manual for the free baseball databases. It's a cookbook for baseball research. Every part of this book is designed to teach baseball fans how to do something. In short, it's a how-to book--one that will increase your enjoyment and knowledge of the game.

So much of the way baseball is played today hinges upon interpreting statistical data. Players are acquired based on their performance in statistical categories that ownership deems most important. Managers make in-game decisions based not on instincts, but on probability - how a particular batter might fare against left-handed pitching, for instance.

The goal of this unique book is to show fans all the baseball-related stuff that they can do for free (or close to free). Just as open source projects have made great software freely available, collaborative projects such as Retrosheet and Baseball DataBank have made great data freely available. You can use these data sources to research your favorite players, win your fantasy league, or appreciate the game of baseball even more than you do now.

Baseball Hacks shows how easy it is to get data, process it, and use it to truly understand baseball. The book lists a number of sources for current and historical baseball data, and explains how to load it into a database for analysis. It then introduces several powerful statistical tools for understanding data and forecasting results.

For the uninitiated baseball fan, author Joseph Adler walks readers through the core statistical categories for hitters (batting average, on-base percentage, etc.), pitchers (earned run average, strikeout-to-walk ratio, etc.), and fielders (putouts, errors, etc.). He then extrapolates upon these numbers to examine more advanced data groups like career averages, team stats, season-by-season comparisons, and more. Whether you're a mathematician, scientist, or season-ticket holder to your favorite team, Baseball Hacks is sure to have something for you.

Advance praise for Baseball Hacks:

"Baseball Hacks is the best book ever written for understanding and practicing baseball analytics. A must-read for baseball professionals and enthusiasts alike."

-- Ari Kaplan, database consultant to the Montreal Expos, San Diego Padres, and Baltimore Orioles

"The game was born in the 19th century, but the passion for its analysis continues to grow into the 21st. In Baseball Hacks, Joe Adler not only demonstrates that the latest data-mining technologies have useful application to the study of baseball statistics, he also teaches the reader how to do the analysis himself, arming the dedicated baseball fan with tools to take his understanding of the game to a higher level."

-- Mark E. Johnson, Ph.D., Founder, SportMetrika, Inc. and Baseball Analyst for the 2004 St. Louis Cardinals

Customer Reviews:

Tips & Tools For Analyzing Baseball Data.......2007-02-25

This book takes a fairly different approach to baseball statistics. The author goes thru and explains most all of the newer statistics. The real meat of this work is teaching the reader how to build his or her own data bases free of charge by importing information from various websites. My sense is that to really benefit from the data base aspects the reader must have a pretty good acumen for dealing with computer programing. Even though the author provides precise step by step help with codes. Still, I would say most baseball fans who enjoy statistics will benefit from this.

Baseball/Computer Nerds Unite!.......2007-01-19

This book is uniquely geared toward the database-literate and technology-literate baseball fan. The author shows all kinds of ways to gather free baseball statistics over the Internet, load them into databases, and then to build reports and queries against them. If this sounds even vaguely interesting to you, this book will entertain you for hours - and it might help you with your fantasy baseball picks, too.

The book contains 75 hacks to help you acquire and analyze baseball statistics. O'Reilly publishes a whole series of hacks books and in this context, a hack is basically a solution to a problem. It is an idea or piece of code that can be used to further your understanding and knowledge of baseball. If you follow the daily baseball box scores, review historical statistics, or play fantasy baseball, you will definitely enjoy these hacks.

If you are a new baseball fan that likes the game but is befuddled by all the terms and statistics thrown around, Baseball Hacks can help. Even some long-term baseball fans don't understand things like slugging average, OPS, or DIPS. But Baseball Hacks explains them and how to derive them.

If you are an open source proponent, and a baseball fan, you'll definitely want to take advantage of hack #10, which shows you how to get a MySQL database of player and team statistics. Rather use Microsoft Access? You'll want hack #9.

Really. Baseball Hacks is a great book for the database/baseball nerd in all of us. If you are looking for a way to merge your profession with a hobby, look no further than picking up a copy of Baseball Hacks.

NOT for programming novices.......2007-01-07

I recently purchased this book hoping to be able to apply some of my recent work-related statistics training to baseball stats. It promises step-by-step instructions that 'anyone' can follow. While the instructions are step-by-step, if you have no computer experience outside of Windows (like me) you will almost certainly be frustrated very early on.

My first hiccup was in hack #10, step 4, in which the author jumps to using Unix commands without mentioning that fact. Fortunately, I have a friend familiar with both Unix and MySQL who was able to get me through that particular hack by installing a GUI and importing the files through it. For those who are stumped on that particular step, jump to hack #18, install a GUI, and import the DataBank files as a script using the Query Editor.

I haven't proceeded much farther in the book, largely because I can already see the frustration to come from fumbling my way through Perl. The author gives very rudimentary instructions in the language, followed by more 'easy to use' scripts. The problem is the scripts are based on filenames and information that is more than a year out of date. This will require editing the scripts, something a programming illiterate such as myself will find challenging at best.

So after all these complaints, why did I still rate the book a 3? Because I'm trying to be fair. I've read through the rest of the book without trying to apply anything, and if you are at least familiar with MySQL, Unix, and Perl you'll probably get a lot out of it. The tools presented appear to be very powerful. Also, since I'm familiar with Access, the hacks for using it have been helpful. Unfortunately, the instructions in the book assume a basic level of programming knowledge on the part of the reader, despite the author's contention that they do not. If you can't tell a Unix prompt from a DOS prompt, this book is not the answer to your stat-processing prayers.

How to watch, research, and understand baseball.......2007-01-04

This book's purpose is to show you all the baseball-related stuff that you can do free of charge or close to free. Just as open source projects such as Linux, MySQL, Open Office, and R have made great software freely available, collaborative projects such as Retrosheet and Baseball DataBank have made great data freely available. This book shows you how to take advantage of these data sources to research your favorite players, to win your fantasy league, or just to appreciate the game of baseball even more. Many of the hacks in this book deal with statistics, and others will require that you install a baseball database. The following is the table of contents:

Chapter 1, Basics of Baseball - some easy hacks showing how to watch and score baseball games, and how to find some simple baseball data on the Web.
Hack 1. Score a Baseball Game
Hack 2. Make a Box Score from a Score Sheet
Hack 3. Keep Score, Project Scoresheet-Style
Hack 4. Follow Pitches During a Game
Hack 5. Follow the Game Online
Hack 6. Add Baseball Searches to Firefox
Hack 7. Find Images of Stadiums

Chapter 2, Baseball Games from Past Years - shows you where to get databases of career statistics and introduces some tools that you'll find helpful in working with this data.
Hack 8. Get and Install MySQL
Hack 9. Get an Access Database of Player and Team Statistics
Hack 10. Get a MySQL Database of Player and Team Statistics
Hack 11. Make Your Own Stats Book
Hack 12. Get Perl
Hack 13. Learn Perl
Hack 14. Get Historical Play-by-Play Data
Hack 15. Make Box Scores or Database Tables from Play-by-Play Data with Retrosheet Tools
Hack 16. Use SQL to Explore Game Data
Hack 17. Use Microsoft Access to Run SQL Queries
Hack 18. Get a GUI for MySQL
Hack 19. Move Data from a Database to Excel
Hack 20. Load Baseball Data into MySQL
Hack 21. Load Retrosheet Game Logs
Hack 22. Make a Historical Play-by-Play Database
Hack 23. Use Regular Expressions to Identify Events

Chapter 3, Stats from the Current Season - how to get data on current baseball games. It's easy to get data on old games because they're already in databases. It's hard to get data on this year's games because you have to scrape it off the Web. This chapter shows you how.
Hack 24. Use Microsoft Excel Web Queries to Get Stats
Hack 25. Spider Baseball Sites for Data
Hack 26. Discover How Live Score Applications Work
Hack 27. Keep Your Stats Database Up-to-Date
Hack 28. Get Recent Play-by-Play Data
Hack 29. Find Data on Hit Locations

Chapter 4, Visualize Baseball Statistics - R is a free data analysis and visualization tool. This chapter introduces R and shows you a lot of cool tricks that you can use to analyze baseball data with R.
Hack 30. Plot Histograms in Excel
Hack 31. Get R and R Packages
Hack 32. Analyze Baseball with R
Hack 33. Access Databases Directly from Excel or R
Hack 34. Load Text Files into R
Hack 35. Compare Teams and Players with Lattices
Hack 36. Compare Teams Using Chernoff Faces
Hack 37. Plot Spray Charts
Hack 38. Chart Team Stats in Real Time
Hack 39. Slice and Dice Teams with Cubes

Chapter 5, Formulas - Formulas have a special place in baseball history. Many baseball writers have spent months or years searching for the perfect formula to measure some aspect of the game. This chapter covers a few of the most popular formulas.
Hack 40. Measure Batting with Batting Average
Hack 41. Measure Batting with On-Base Percentage
Hack 42. Measure Batting with SLG
Hack 43. Measure Batting with OPS
Hack 44. Measure Power with ISO
Hack 45. Measure Batting with Runs Created
Hack 46. Measure Batting with Linear Weights
Hack 47. Measure Pitching with ERA
Hack 48. Measure Pitching with WHIP
Hack 49. Measure Pitching with Linear Weights
Hack 50. Measure Defense with Defensive Efficiency
Hack 51. Measure Pitching with DIPS
Hack 52. Measure Base Running Through EqBR
Hack 53. Measure Fielding with Fielding Percentage
Hack 54. Measure Fielding with Range Factor
Hack 55. Measure Fielding with Linear Weights
Hack 56. Measure Park Effects
Hack 57. Calculate Fan Save Value
Hack 58. Calculate Save Value

Chapter 6, Sabermetric Thinking - discusses many baseball problems, some classic and some new.
Hack 60. Calculate Expected Runs
Hack 61. Calculate an Expected Hits Matrix
Hack 62. Look for Evidence of Platoon Effects
Hack 63. Significant Number of At Bats
Hack 64. Find Clutch Players
Hack 65. Calculate Expected Number of Wins
Hack 66. Measure Hits by Pitch Count
Hack 67. OBP, SLG, and Scoring Runs
Hack 68. Measure Skill Versus Luck
Hack 69. Odds of the Best Team Winning the World Series
Hack 70. Top 10 Bargain Outfielders
Hack 71. Fitting Game Scores to a Strength Model

Chapter 7, The Bullpen - comprises a few random topics that didn't fit anywhere else: fantasy baseball, widgets, and other sports.
Hack 72. Start or Join a Fantasy League
Hack 73. Draft Your Fantasy Team
Hack 74. Make a Scoreboard Widget
Hack 75. Analyze Other Sports

Appendix A, Where to Learn More Stuff
Appendix B, Abbreviations

Great For Baseball, Statistics Afficiandos.......2006-10-06

If you are a lover of the game of baseball and your enjoy playing with #s, this is the perfect book for you. Better suited to be called Tips/Tricks instead of Hacks, this book is great for hobbyists/enthusiasts of the game, and/or sports betters who are looking to get an edge that noone else has!!

Full of 75 tips, this book delves deep into the numbers behind the game, and truly helps you understand what makes baseball such an enjoyable and different game from all other professional sports. Unlike other leagues that last months and months, baseball truly is a GRIND that lasts most of the year. It's a game truly enjoyed and understood through number-crunching, and if you like the "accounting side" of sports, pick up this book today!!

Using Excel, writing code, statistical analysis, and just plain number loving, if you want to learn to get more out of the game you love, pick up this book today for a fun, enjoyable read!!

**** RECOMMENDED

Book Description

This book is the first comprehensive cruising guide for the enormously popular "circle trip" from Manhattan to Lake Ontario and back through Lake Champlain, providing boaters with mile-by-mile descriptions and detailed information on more than 300 anchorages and marinas located along the way. The text also contains important information on shoaling, commercial traffic, weather, locks and bridges, and more. Comprehensive ratings for beauty, interest, and available facilities help boaters decide itineraries, and custom chartlets guide boaters into busy mariners and secluded anchorages alike. Throughout, the Rumseys act as personal tour guides, detailing the region's rich history of pointing out what there is to see and do.

Customer Reviews:

Might be good for some people.......1999-07-08

Recently I brought a 36 foot boat from Whitby, Ontario through the Canal System, down the Hudson, through Hell Gate to Long Island Sound. I thought this book would be my bible, but found almost no useful information. The book is written entirely from the perspective of going up river, and is very hard to follow if you're going down. Much of the information is already out of date - several times when we tried to follow its advise, the marina or docking area it decribed was non-existent. Other facilities are ignored. For example, Whitby, which has two large marinas was not mentioned. The discussion of going the through locks was rather limited, though probably helpful to the small boat owner. There were very few pictures - certainly not enough to show what the canals are like. Also, the book stopped (actually started) at the Battery without mention of Hell Gate, which must be of interest to a significant number of readers. I suppose this book would be helpful to a power boater looking for the next restaurant, but it was a major disappointment to me.

Book Description

Shaw is trying to outrun his father's ghost. (RL4.2)

Customer Reviews:

Match this book to the right reader!.......2003-02-27

Part of a series of "hi/lo" books for teen readers, THE HEMINGWAY TRADITION is short, intense and packed with incident. Sixteen-year-old Shaw moves to Winnipeg after the suicide of his writer father. Although Shaw's father killed himself as a result of depression and despair over his own homosexuality, Shaw reads this as his father's ultimate rejection. Shaw's own love of writing is tainted as a result. At the new school a friendship with a Pakistani student, a conflict defending his friend from violent bigots, a new romance and a chance to use his writing talents to draw attention to injustice, all drive Shaw's journey to emotional recovery and acceptance.

A decent read, decently written, but so slim and "easy" it's hard to recommend it even to younger teens: The subject matter, honestly handled, is really more to the taste of older readers (say grades 8-10). For those teens, however, who are reading at an elementary school level, and who find even a short story rather daunting, this is just the ticket, and would make an excellent (and entertaining) building block with which to develop their reading skills.

Book Description

The volume of collected short stories and vignettes In Our Time was Ernest Hemingway's first commercial publication. Its appearance in 1925 launched the full-fledged literary career of this century's most famous American fiction writer. And while other later works of Hemingway have eclipsed In Our Time's fame, none of Hemingway's subsequent works would again carry the degree of experimentation found in this distinctly modernist masterwork. Modernism and Tradition in Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time: A Guide for Students and Readers is a well-paced, lucidly written handbook intended to guide university students and teaching faculty towards a better understanding of this complex work. It provides a reading of each story and vignette, while simultaneously stressing the status of In Our Time as a discrete volume. Included are discussions of the book's biographical and historical background, and considerations of Hemingway's prose style, theories of writing, formal achievements, his literary mentors and influences, and the relation between In Our Time and his later works.Matthew C. Stewart is Associate Professor of Humanities and Rhetoric at Boston University.

Customer Reviews:

Readable, enjoyable, helpful.......2001-08-08

I always liked Hemingway's work, including many of the stories in In Our Time. Hemingway is much deeper than some might think, and I always thought I was missing a good deal especially in his short stories. This book helped me to understand the relationships between the stories and the little vignettes. It also discussed historical background that was interesting, and it pointed out elements of the stories that I had not thought of. It helped me to see many things that were going on in the stories, some of which I sensed were there but couldn't put my finger on exactly. I read this book because I am interested in Hemingway. I also think students and teachers would find it helpful. Some teachers keep teaching Hemingway the same old way, and this book would help them with new ideas. This is not stuffy academic criticism, but a creative work in which the author communicates interesting ideas in a clear way with his reader.

Average customer rating:

Sloppy Joe's: The tradition continues
Carol Shaughnessy
Manufacturer: Market Share Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Henpecked to heroism: placing Rip Van Winkle and Francis Macomber in the American renegade tradition.: An article from: The Hemingway Review

Average customer rating:

Henpecked to heroism: placing Rip Van Winkle and Francis Macomber in the American renegade tradition.: An article from: The Hemingway Review
Susan M. Catalano
Manufacturer: Ernest Hemingway Foundation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

Book Description

This digital document is an article from The Hemingway Review, published by Ernest Hemingway Foundation on March 22, 1998. The length of the article is 2669 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the supplier: Ernest Hemingway's Francis Macomber and Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle are not archetypal characters of the American renegade spirit. Despite weakness and compliance to their dictatorial wives, they transcend their henpecked existences. These henpecked anti-heroes, although lacking renegade spirit, remain distinctly American.

Citation Details
Title: Henpecked to heroism: placing Rip Van Winkle and Francis Macomber in the American renegade tradition.
Author: Susan M. Catalano
Publication: The Hemingway Review (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 1998
Publisher: Ernest Hemingway Foundation
Volume: v17 Issue: n2 Page: p111(7)

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway's In Our Time: A Guide for Students and Readers.(Review) (book review): An article from: The Hemingway Review

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Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway's In Our Time: A Guide for Students and Readers.(Review) (book review): An article from: The Hemingway Review
Steven M. Lane
Manufacturer: Ernest Hemingway Foundation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

Book Description

This digital document is an article from The Hemingway Review, published by Ernest Hemingway Foundation on March 22, 2001. The length of the article is 920 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway's In Our Time: A Guide for Students and Readers.(Review) (book review)
Author: Steven M. Lane
Publication: The Hemingway Review (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 2001
Publisher: Ernest Hemingway Foundation
Volume: 20 Issue: 2 Page: 110

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Tradition and the individual bullfighter: the lost legacy of the matador in Hemingway's "The Capital of the World".(Critical Essay): An article from: The Hemingway Review

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Tradition and the individual bullfighter: the lost legacy of the matador in Hemingway's "The Capital of the World".(Critical Essay): An article from: The Hemingway Review
Emily Hoffman
Manufacturer: Ernest Hemingway Foundation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

Book Description

This digital document is an article from The Hemingway Review, published by Ernest Hemingway Foundation on September 22, 2004. The length of the article is 6676 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Tradition and the individual bullfighter: the lost legacy of the matador in Hemingway's "The Capital of the World".(Critical Essay)
Author: Emily Hoffman
Publication: The Hemingway Review (Refereed)
Date: September 22, 2004
Publisher: Ernest Hemingway Foundation
Volume: 24 Issue: 1 Page: 90(17)

Article Type: Critical Essay

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Three voices of the American tradition: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway

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Three voices of the American tradition: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway
Thomas Frederic Marshall
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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