Materials, Structures, and Standards: All the Details Architects Need to Know But Can Never Find

Average customer rating:

Only very basic information, not intended for professionals!

a must reference for recent grads

great summary reference

Good...For It's Purpose

Great Reference tool

Materials, Structures, and Standards: All the Details Architects Need to Know But Can Never Find
Julia McMorrough
Manufacturer: Rockport Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Turtleback

General | Architecture | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books
Reference | Architecture | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books
Architectural Standards | Architecture | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books
General | Commercial | Graphic Design | Design & Decorative Arts | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
General | Design & Decorative Arts | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
General | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 1592531938

Book Description

Most architectural standards references contain thousands of pages of details-overwhelmingly more than architects need to know to know on any given day. Now there is a place where architects can find vital information essential to planning and executing architectural projects of all shapes and sizes-in a format that is small enough to carry anywhere. Materials, Structures, and Standards distills the data provided in standard architectural volumes and offers and easy-to-use reference for the most indispensable-and most requested-types of architectural information.

Part 1, "Building an Architectural Project," addresses basic geometry, architectural drawing types, AutoCAD guidelines, building codes, accessibility issues, structural and mechanical systems, conventional building components, and sustainable design. Part 2, "Materials," provides a detailed catalog of wood, masonry and brick, metals, concrete, and interior finishes. Also included are an illustrated glossary of architectural terms and a cross-referenced guide to the most helpful books, organizations, and websites.

Customer Reviews:

Only very basic information, not intended for professionals!.......2007-04-28

I am a licensed architect, and have been in professional practice now for 15 years. I thought this book was going to offer me some of the common reference tables I need, or perhaps some of the general ADA measurements that must be exact, but it fell well short of my expectations.

It's not really suitable for anyone in the design profession, and I think much of the book is littered with detailing and CAD standards that are not necessary for your normal do-it-yourselfer or home builder. I think it may be appropriate for architecture students, however, it really does not have sufficient information to instruct students, and much of the material selection information and detailing is flat elementary.

a must reference for recent grads .......2007-03-25

This guide contains basic knowledge for getting up to speed quickly in preparing design and construction documents. It is a time saver. This guide is specially useful for those who have just graduated and working at a firm. I reference this book at least once a day. It is also priced reasonably for the architects budget.

great summary reference.......2007-03-13

this little book is great for all the minor everyday details, rules and standards you can never remember precisely, and are usually scattered across several different (large and expensive) reference sets. while in no way replacing these volumes, it certainly minimizes your time spent paging through them, or going online - - a highly recommended desktop reference.

Good...For It's Purpose.......2007-03-13

Although it did have a lot of useful information, it was nothing you couldn't find on the internet. It was written in "textbook" style, and didn't have much besides the facts.

Great Reference tool.......2007-01-12

This book is a great quick reference tool. It has all of the essentials you need in the design field and very easy to read and access QUICKLY!

Customer Reviews:

Well Done!!.......2003-07-16

Well written and incredible drawings. Anybody who likes to move around in something with a motor will love this book. Of course most kids who love cars grow up into adults who love cars. I enjoyed this book as much as my 13 year old son.

Excellent!.......2003-07-16

This is a great little book. Like a lot of guys, I love fast cars and this book was a pleasure to read and study with. Lots of practice and my techniques have improved greatly. This book is well worth the modest cover price.

i wish i could give it zero stars!!.......2001-09-13

Just with all of Hart's books this book cover is misleading.You look at the cover and think I'm really going to learn something and you read the book and get disappointed.He only shows the finnished step.He doesn't show the steps on how to get to the finnished step.Instead of describing how he draws it he gives you a history on each car.I'm sorry but telling a person the car history doesn't show them how to draw the car.I'm starting to think that Hart's books aren't very good.

How to Draw Fast Cars, Monster Trucks and Fighter Jets

Average customer rating:

How to Draw Fast Cars, Monster Trucks and Fighter Jets
Christopher Hart
Manufacturer: Tandem Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Study & Teaching | Reference | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

General | Instructional & How-To | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Drawing | Instructional & How-To | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

General | Drawing | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Book Description

"A must-have book for all photographers."
--John Shaw, johnshawphoto.com

If you're serious about digital photography, you know that taking a great photo is only the beginning. You want to share your polished images with the widest possible audience. This means you need to optimize images for different mediums--print, the Web, slideshows--and draw people to your work.

Learn how to do so with digital-imaging experts Jon Canfield and Tim Grey. Combining practical know-how with inspiring examples, they'll teach how you to take control of your output. They introduce the technologies and techniques you need to attain the best results for any medium and they reveal tips for attracting viewers. By the time you finish this book, you'll be able to get your photographs the attention they deserve.

Customer Reviews:

Useful Book.......2006-03-16

This is the fourth Tim Gray book and second Jon Canfield book I have bought and read. While this book treats many of its various subjects in much less detail as Tim and Jon do in their other books I still found it useful. The section on creating digital slideshows was particularly helpful and all of the other subject matter is covered at least a summary level, providing good review and synopsis of the more detailed treatments in their other books.

Very Basic.......2005-10-25

This is an excellent book for anyone needing the basic on producing web content or printed media. However, I found it not up to the standards I have come to expect from Tim Grey. It borrows from a lot of his other work and does go into great detail on how to produce web files or printed media. It falls well short of providing content on Showing and Selling Images. While there is certainly an art to these two processes, I had hoped to see some examples of how to incorporate these into my current procedures. There really was no content on these subjects.

Great book for the beginning to intermediate photographer wanting to improve their product. Falls well short of useful content for the more advanced photographer.

Doesn't deliver the level of content and information required.......2005-10-17

This book was a huge disappointment. It's content is weak in almost all sections with much of the information available from either the Internet or you local photo lab. I didn't find it very useful at all and I'm even tempted to send it back.

The book is pretty much broken up into the three section as described in the book's title. The first part brushes over optimising your workspace - calibrating your monitor - and selecting a printer and then basic printing output. Things most people know already.

The second goes into a bit more depth regarding getting your pics on the web: registering a domain name, selecting a hosting company, etc. Information you'll find better provided by a quick search in any web search engine. However, one of my main gripes is that it reads like a magazine review of 3rd party programs you should buy to help with the web authoring in html. In fact it advises using Macromedia Dreamweaver. A program which cost more than 500 USD. Now, I understand that writing html sounds complicated to the novice but you would - honestly - be better served and save some money from learning a bit from any basic html/web authoring book(any of the O'Reilly books are well recommended) Creating a basic html web gallery is not complicated.

The final part of the book continues on the team of glossing over the subject. It briefly mentions approaching galleries and selling on the Interent. I was expecting so much more from ths section but I really didn't learn much more than I knew already.

I find it hard to believe that one of the reviews here gives this book 5 stars yet points out some of the same failings of the book as me. The book has good intentions but just doesn't deliver the level of content and information required to make really useful.

Missed my target.......2005-09-29

I really thought the book would be more geared to professional photographers and workflow, etc. with regard to digital photos. Much more space was spent on website building, which I would have expected from a website book, not a book titled as a digital photographer's guide. Did I get $30 worth of information? Probably, but I would have liked more information on digital workflow, file management, professional lab tips, etc. as a professional photographer making the move from film to digital.

More than just selling..........2005-09-23

When I found Photo Finish listed in Outdoor Photographer I thought it would help me with selling my photos. I didn't realize the amount of material it covers in helping prepare to sell. Not only does it cover the actual preparation of the photo, it will take you through a complete web site construction in order for you to place you images on the Internet. It also covers a lot of material in between. I find Photo Finish to be a resource that I return to frequently as a text in hand as I proceed with various photography projects.

Book Description

A striking visual parable of war.

Customer Reviews:

Haunting in its simplicity.......2002-05-29

"Combusion" is part "The Thin Red Line," part "All Quiet On the Western Front," part Vietnam War, and part altogether something else. This is a short graphic novel with no words and a compelling message that we need to question what leads us to war and violence. Full of thought provoking symbolism, "Combustion" is worth its small price tag and more.

Average customer rating:

Trying to find balance in an unbalanced life

Suturing the severed

Not up to the subject

Mark Twain & 19th Century American Culture

A comprehensive evocation of a much-loved icon

The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography
Fred Kaplan
Manufacturer: Doubleday
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Authors | Arts & Literature | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
Journalists | Professionals & Academics | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
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Mark Twain: A Life

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ASIN: 0385477155
Release Date: 2003-10-21

Book Description

One of our most distinguished biographers offers a bold, revisionist view of the inimitable Mark Twain.

Mark Twain invented American literature. His humor, his fearless evocation of how ordinary people live and speak, his ferocious social criticism, all make him the progenitor of a truly national literature. And his extraordinary books—including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Gilded Age, Innocents Abroad, Life on the Mississippi—were drawn from his extraordinary life. Based on original research, including access to previously unpublished correspondence, The Singular Mark Twain presents the first fully integrated portrait of this great American icon.

Few Americans, let alone American writers, lived such a large and eventful life. From his idyllic Hannibal, Missouri, childhood to his days as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, from his wildcat-mining life in the Nevada territory to his reporting job in wide-open Barbary Coast San Francisco, Twain’s early life was one of restless adventure. He traveled the world, and his dispatches to the United States made him famous, and wealthy.

With maturity and success, Twain grew tremendously as an artist and as a social critic. Fred Kaplan shows definitively that Twain’s ferociously progressive ideas about race informed all his later works and absolve him from absurd charges of racism laid in recent years. Kaplan also details the darker side of Twain’s story—the illnesses and death that plagued his family and darkened his vision, his almost comically terrible business sense that lost him his great fortune, and his paranoid sensitivity to slights and betrayals.

No American writer is more appealing, funnier, or more universally admired than Mark Twain. The Singular Mark Twain brings him to life as never before. Like the bestselling books of H.W. Brands, David McCullough, and Edmund Morris, The Singular Mark Twain is a masterful blend of history and biography, at once erudite, eye-opening, and highly entertaining.

Customer Reviews:

Trying to find balance in an unbalanced life.......2005-02-23

Trying to reconcile the public perception of Mark Twain, the jovial raconteur and "Great American Author", with the significantly flawed Samuel Clemens, a particularly inept businessman who may have squandered his greatest gift in his endless pursuit of "easy money," is a difficult task. Kaplan does an admirable job working to heal this dichotomy; he sticks to focusing on Clemens the man, with all his qualities for good or ill. Kaplan does fine work developing the reader's understanding of how Twain's early years of wandering created the necessity of Twain the writer. The gradual evolution of Mark Twain is an interesting and at times riveting tale and Kaplan supplies all the details needed to experience this transition. As Twain ages and his focus shifts from writing to his pursuit of financial success at the level of America's richest men, Kaplan maintains his ability to tell Twain's story in an interesting fashion, but Twain's life becomes less interesting. Bogged down in bad business decisions and family health issues Twain becomes someone the reader will find less patience with. Kaplan does have some difficulty here, with choices that occasionally lead to judgmental writing. Phrases like "his flawed best," "He would shamelessly upstage anyone," and mentions of his self-centered nature and megalomania make their appearances periodically. Kaplan is particularly harsh when considering Twain in his final years when his daughter's influence was significant on an old man who was ill and afraid of losing any more family. But there is an overall sense that Kaplan is just showing an actuality based on his research.
The book does come up a little short when discussing Twain's literary output. Kaplan makes judgments on what was significant, but there definitely needed to be a more complete look at Twain's output and discussion of the literary merits of his work. It may have added a number of pages to the work, but I felt twain's work needed a closer examination, perhaps at the expense of some of the financial minutiae of Twain's bad business decisions. Overall Kaplan does an excellent job of examining Twain the man; I just wish a bit more time had been spent on Twain the writer.

Suturing the severed.......2004-08-14

Several years ago Justin Kaplan sundered Sam Clemens and Mark Twain. It was an almost iconoclastic "psychological" study, typical of the times and thus immensely popular. It changed sharply the image of Clemens held by most Twain readers. Which one were they reading? Now Fred Kaplan has attempted to suture the parts and bring us a fresh picture of a whole man. Using new material and thorough analysis, Kaplan has produced a enduring biography of America's greatest writer. This study is comprehensive in scope and ably presented for long-time Twain aficionados. Newcomers to Clemens' work may be staggered by the wealth of information.

Pseudonyms were common among 19th Century journalists, Clemens' starting point in his writing career. Kaplan demonstrates that the detachment Clemens enjoyed as a "reporter" was transformed into a strong, unified character in his later writing. Factual works outlining his travel experiences later took second place to his fiction. While these books still carried the "Twain" banner, Kaplan shows it as an enlargement of his image, not a branching off. Fiction also enabled Twain to incorporate his linguistic attainments to a degree unmatched in his day. His portrayal of Mississippi Valley patois often led to critics labeling him "common", but Kaplan counters that Twain had a more comprehensive view of his fellow Americans than did most of his contemporaries.

Most contemporary readers of Twain were captivated by his humour, which was innovative and spirited. Kaplan, while recognising Twain's the appeal to his audience, gives little further acknowledgement to this aspect. Why, we wonder, did Twain, whose life was long beset by tragedies and the struggle for financial stability, continue to write with his unique form of wit. Even the latest works Twain produced were lively presentations, often heavy with irony. Kaplan relates this, but offers no explanation for its tenacity. Even Twain's inspired soliloquy of Belgium's King Leopold was laced with Mississippi Valley expressions. Reading any of the writings from Twain's long career, the light touch is always present, but it seems to slip by Kaplan with but scant notice.

Kaplan deals well, however, with Twain's serious side. Finances, in almost overwhelming detail, dominate the book. The problems with family - illness stalked the Clemens clan for decades - are thoroughly related. How many of these ills might be related to their economic plight? Twain saw firm links, described fully, but the biographer declines to judge their validity. Kaplan is stronger in description than in analysis. While this keeps him detached, the reader is offered few insights. No diagnosis of any of the family's illnesses intrude on the narrative. Kaplan also follows Twain's travels in detail, but the background panorama remains subtly hidden. A thorough knowledge of world events is a clear prerequisite for reading this life in context. The result is a straightforward relation of Twain's life, readable, thorough in personal details, but fails to place those intimacies within a broader scene.

The book will be welcomed by academics and those already well versed in Twain's life. Kaplan successfully refutes the claim that Clemens and Twain were separate personas, Twain shedding the intrusions of Clemens' financial worries or family illness when taking up his pen. Beyond that, Kaplan offers only descriptions of that background to Twain's successful writing career. A fine book, but limited in scope.
[stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Not up to the subject.......2004-06-02

I read about 200 pages of this, and quit when I realized that what was most interesting about the book was trying to figure out how the author managed to make Mark Twain, of all people, seem so tedious. The reader is often told how funny Twain was, but rarely given an example. The relationship of detail to big picture is shaky and inconstant. Get this from a library and skim it, but spend your time and money on Twain's own writings.

Mark Twain & 19th Century American Culture.......2004-02-14

The Singular Mark Twain by Fred Kaplan builds an intimate relationship for readers with the itinerant journalist who became one of America's most prolific authors, most humorous commentators and most entertaining public speakers. Kaplan arranges Twain's experiences, his relationships and his attitudes into a foundation beneath his extraordinary literary output. The result is a fascinating history of 19th century American culture.

Kaplan seeks to establish Twain as the American literary figure who looms above all others. He also shows him as an often irascible curmudgeon who frequently outraged people with whom he found fault. Like many creative giants, Twain didn't suffer fools gladly and employed his talent for sarcasm and satire to skewer self-righteous politicians, remorseless racists, hypocritical churchmen and many others, regardless of their status.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens' childhood in Florida, Missouri and later in Hannibal on the Mississippi River was spent in wild, imaginative play with a multi-ethnic neighborhood of kids all of ages. Sam's father, John Marshall Clemens, was a stern, physically unwell attorney and unlucky land speculator who died when Sam was 11 and of whom he was later to say, "My own knowledge of him amounted to little more than an introduction." His mother smothered frail Sam from infancy with love and helped him fight health problems with homeopathic remedies. Fire and brimstone sermons at Hannibal's Old Ship of Zion church were a regular feature of young Sam's week. In fact, Kaplan says Sam heard a steady litany at church and at home that "Satan was real, and he visited Hannibal often."

Sam spent his childhood summers at his aunt and uncle's farm near Florida where he found subsequent literary inspiration from adventures with his nine cousins and storytelling by his uncle's oldest slave, Uncle Dan'l. "I can see the white and black children grouped on the hearth, with light playing on their faces ... and I can feel again the creepy joy which quivered through me when the time for the ghost story was reached." Back in Hannibal, Sam harvested more memories from a gang of friends like Tom Blankenship who Twain described as "ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he was as good a heart as ever any boy had. His liberties were totally unrestricted ... We liked him; we enjoyed his society. And as his society was forbidden us by our parents ... we sought and got more of his society than of any other boy's."

After his father died, Jane Clemens apprenticed 11-year-old Sam as a printer's devil to the publisher of the Hannibal Gazette to help earn money for the family. His young entry into the labor force undoubtedly affected his character, contributing to his driving ambition, extraordinary productivity and the sarcasm that seasoned much of his writing.

Another local paper, the Hannibal Journal, was offered for sale after many residents left town to escape a yellow fever outbreak and headed for the gold rush in California. Sam's older brother Orion borrowed $500 from a local farmer, bought the paper and hired Sam at $3.50 a week. Sam never saw a penny. The Journal failed after four years, partly because of a poor economy and partly because it wasn't very good. Sam described his brother, his editor and his boss as "full of blessed egotism and placid self-importance ... (who) wrote with impressive flatulence and soaring confidence upon the vastest subjects."

Armed with a concise style and a valise full of satire, Sam spent several years chasing work as a travel writer in St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Keokuk, Iowa, Carson City, Nevada, San Francisco, Hawaii and back in New York. Building fame along the way, Sam continued to harvest themes for subsequent stories. Especially fertile were the ideas Sam hatched from 1857 to 1861 while working as a pilot on Mississippi riverboats between St. Louis and New Orleans and writing articles for the New Orleans Picayune.

Twain shared his weak constitution with Olivia Langdon, daughter of a wealthy Elmira, New York businessman with whose family he stayed on a weekend visit to Elmira in August, 1868. He was smitten with Livy and probably also by her father's wealth. Their February, 1870, marriage sparked the genesis of Mark Twain's most famous work. He recalled telling Livy as a two-day-old bridegroom how "The old life has swept before me like a panorama; the old days have trooped by in their old glory, again; the old faces have looked out of the mists of the past."

From the late 1870s to the early 1890s, Twain came to fancy himself an astute money manager. Amidst that delusion, he dedicated much of his considerable wealth to speculative investments that evaporated in the 1893 depression. Twain's financial losses coincided with his evolution away from any semblance of Christian commitment. His antipathy toward organized religion is reflected in his irritation with George Washington Cable, an anti-slavery New Orleans writer and avowed Christian with whom he partnered on a lecture tour promoting Huckleberry Finn. "Mind you, I like him; he is pleasant company ... but in him & his person I have learned to hate all religions. He has taught me to abhor & detest the Sabbath-day & hunt up new & troublesome ways to dishonor it."

Because his life was so rich in such an exciting era and because so much of his work is autobiographical, Mark Twain is a fascinating character. Along with his intellectual brilliance, prodigious output and skillful self-promotion, Kaplan also shows us many of Twain's human frailties, including his addiction to tobacco, his affinity for Scotch whiskey and his brittle temper. If there is a criticism of Kaplan's work, it occasionally crosses the line between valid interpretation and unnecessary minutiae. In any case, The Singular Mark Twain is a tour de force that weaves Mark Twain's remarkable life and times into his brilliant work. It is a most interesting read.

A comprehensive evocation of a much-loved icon.......2004-02-12

Fred Kaplan's perceptive and entertaining biography of America's premier writer brings to life not only the familiar Mark Twain the humorist and man of letters, but all of his other manifold aspects (or "selves," as the author liked to call them, perceiving himself as the plural Mark Twain) as well: the versatile riverboat pilot, panner for gold, and inventor of mucilage; the devoted family man who (like all successful men, according to Dwight David Eisenhower) had married above his station and remained faithful and passionately affectionate to a loving, responsive woman who joined him in defying Victorian strictures to the extent of occasionally holding hands in public, and who, like Abigail Adams, shared his professional life, reading and vetting everything he wrote, and also raised and disciplined their daughters, managed the household, tolerated and sometimes even enjoyed his profanity, and to a degree came to share his indifference to religion; the self-made writer who won acceptance into the highest ranks of the nation's literary, cultural, political, and professional life; the world traveler who became widely venerated abroad; the impulsive, chronically unsuccessful businessman who lost a fortune investing in printing "compositors" and hairpins but rebuffed an invitation to purchase shares in the nascent telecommunications industry; the political liberal, who loved "Negro" culture and often sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" and, in bereft moments, Stephen Foster's "Why Do The Beautiful Die," and who deplored actual slavery in America, virtual slavery in the Belgian Congo, feudalism in Russia, anti-Semitism in Austria, and aggrandizement in religious institutions; the sensualist who admired the unselfconscious naturalness of uninhibited peoples in Hawaii, Fiji, and Nicaragua; the iconoclast who believed that Jesus was born but not raised and would never return to a randomly cruel world in which one incarnation was sufficient for anyone, and who agreed with an overheard slave's prayer, "Come yo'self, Lord, an' doan be sendin' yo' son, 'cause this ain't no time fo' chillun"; and the survivor, who saw his infant son and eventually his fragile wife succumb to heart disease, a daughter to meningitis, and a second daughter to epilepsy, leaving only a third daughter to survive him - and, even more sadly, although unknown to him, one whose own daughter was to commit suicide at age fifty-four, ending the line, and lending retrospective pathos to his geriatric admiration and acculturation of bright young girls as ersatz granddaughters.

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