Can ‘edumanga’ save us from our educational malaise? The Manga Guide to Biochemistry – #bookreview

The Manga Guide to Biochemistry
By Masaharu Takemura and Office Sawa, with illustrations by Kikuyaro
(No Starch Press, paperback, list price $24.95)

Biology and chemistry were never my top subjects, and my chances of becoming a biochemist are less than zero now, in this universe.

But even an old dog like me can learn a few biochemistry tricks with the help of manga, the smart, refreshing Japanese comic book alternative to turgid textbooks.

Indeed, many American high school and college students may now need all the manga they can get to help stem our worrisome national decline in science and mathematics scores. 

Since 2008, No Starch Press has been translating into English and publishing a series of Manga Guides originally from Japan. These offer entertaining comic introductions to tough subjects such as calculus, physics, molecular biology, and relativity.

The approach is known as ”educational manga” or “edumanga,” and many U.S. educators, reviewers and media outlets are praising it as a fresh hope for getting young students interested in tough subjects critical to America’s future.

This new volume from No Starch Press, The Manga Guide to Biochemistry,  dives into its tricky topics in a very engaging way. The comic’s young protagonist, a girl named Kumi, unlocks many of the secrets of healthy eating and, along the way, learns some of the key science of biochemistry. By going on and off fad diets, she begins to understand how the body metabolizes carbohydrates, lipids, and alcohol, and how mitochondria produce ATP, and how DNA is transcribed into RNA.

Kumi is helped in her quest by her brainy friend Nemoto, by Nemoto’s biochemistry professor, Dr. Kurosaka, and by Robocat, a friendly endoscopic robot.

(Trust me, when you are being endoscoped, you want everyone and everything to be friendly.)

No Starch Press publisher William Pollock has reported that the ”easily digestible” manga comic format is proving popular not only with ”college and high school students tired of dry textbooks” but also grabbing the attention of “younger readers interested in learning real math and science.”

Says Pollock:  ”The Manga Guides are great supplements to college-level courses, but we’ve also heard from parents whose nine- and ten-year-olds learned statistics and physics from these books. The story and comics almost hide the fact that readers are actually gaining solid technical knowledge.”

Not many comic books have kid characters dealing with topics such as the hyperbola of the Michaelis-Menten equation or the sigmoid curve of an allosteric enzyme. And not many comic books can help you  understand (if you don’t already know) the metabolism of substances such as carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and alcohol.

Actually, it’s very hard to hide the biochemistry when brainy Nemoto is intoning: “And if just a base and a pentose bond (without a phosphate), the result is called a nucleoside.”

But that’s okay. As the book says: “Whether you’re an amateur scientist, a medical student, or just curious about how your body turns cupcakes into energy, The Manga Guide to Biochemistry is your guide to understanding the science of life.”

Or, at least, it’s your guide to appreciating a valiant effort to make biochemistry more exciting, challenging and  understandable to kids, young  adults — and even aging grownups who often avoided tough subjects in school and now want and need some understanding of what was missed.

– Si Dunn

Programming Concurrency on the JVM – #java #programming #bookreview

Programming Concurrency on the JVM: Mastering Synchronization, STM, and Actors
By Venkat Subramaniam
(Pragmatic Bookshelf, paperback, list price $35.00)

“Faster!”

That’s the word pressuring many programmers today as modern multicore hardware makes it possible to perform numerous actions simultaneously.

“A concurrent program may download multiple files while performing computations and updating the database,” notes the author of this well-written introduction to programming concurrency on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

So speed increasingly is of the essence, but so is improving how well (and quickly) applications respond to users. 

In Programming Concurrency on the JVM, the focus is on introducing Java programmers to “three separate concurrency solutions—the modern Java JDK [Java Development Kit] concurrency model, the Software Transactional Model (STM), and the actor-based concurrency model.” And the goal is to help programmers learn the advantages and disadvantages of each and make the right choices for their applications.

The author states that “[t]here are three ways to avoid problems when writing concurrent programs:

• Synchronize properly.
• Don’t share state.
• Don’t mutate state.”

He explains that “[i]f we use the modern JDK currency API [application programming interface], we’ll have to put in significant effort to synchronize properly. STM makes synchronization implicit and greatly reduces the changes of error. The actor-based model, on the other hand, helps us avoid shared state. Avoiding mutable state is the secret weapon to winning concurrency battles.”

Programming Concurrency on the JVM is adequately illustrated and divided into five parts: Strategies for Concurrency, Modern Java/JDK Concurrency, Software Transactional Memory, Actor-Based Concurrency, and an epilogue focusing on making the right choices.

The book, the author stresses, is not for Java newcomers. It is for “experienced Java programmers who are interested in learning how to manage and make use of concurrency on the JVM, using languages such as Java Clojure, Groovy, JRuby, and Scala.”

Most of the code examples are in Java, but he includes some examples in Clojure, Groovy, JRuby, and Scala, as well. And he has made extra effort “to keep the syntactical nuances and the language-specific idioms to a minimum.”

He adds: “Programming concurrency is hard, yet the benefits it provides make all the troubles worthwhile.”

– Si Dunn

The Perfect Photo: 71 Tips from the Top – A compact, effective how-to guide – #photography #bookreview

The Perfect Photo: 71 Tips from the Top
By Elin Rantakrans and Tobias Hagberg
(Rocky Nook, paperback, list price $19.95 ; Kindle, list price $9.99) 

I used to teach beginning photography classes from books that were much bigger and thicker than this one, yet not as clear, succinct and inspiring in the areas of composition, lighting and editing.

The Perfect Photo: 71 Tips from the Top keeps its promise to show readers “the short and direct path to better photography.” It is a fine blend of good images and straightforward tips that can you can put to use quickly and effectively.

But the first thing you won’t do while following this book is start snapping pictures. The first two chapters’ tips focus on helping you decide what types of images you want to take (portraits, landscapes, wildlife, sports, etc.), selecting the right equipment to meet those desires, and learning to use the adjustments and features on your camera and lenses.

 In Chapter 3, “Capturing the Best Light,” you learn how work with different types of natural light, and in Chapter 4, nearly halfway through the 128-page book, you finally get to the elements of composition, such as perspective, using details, and telling a story.

Chapter 5 is titled “Impressive Landscapes,” and it does give some good tips and photographic examples. But inexplicably, it also contains instructions on, and examples of, how to get close enough to photograph insects and animals.

Chapter 6 is a good, concise tutorial on lighting and shooting individual and group portraits.

Chapter 7 covers capturing motion or the sense of motion using fast or slow shutter speeds and available light or flash.

Chapter 8, “Effective Use of Flash,” deals with topics such as bounce flash and avoiding red eye, plus using flash to minimize shadows in a daylight shot.

Chapter 9, “Starting Out in the Digital Darkroom,” gives a brief tutorial on how to back up, edit, enhance and store digital photographs and how to reduce picture file size for emailing.

The Perfect Photo will not transform you into the next Ansel Adams or Henri Cartier-Bresson. But, if you are still at the “smiley snaps” stage of digital photography, it is an excellent starting guide.

It can show you what you need to know – and what you need to have — to create better, more endearing and more enduring photographs.

– Si Dunn

QuickBooks 2012: The Missing Manual – Solid Focus on Pro Edition – #bookreview

QuickBooks 2012: The Missing Manual
By Bonnie Biafore
(O’Reilly, paperback, list price $34.99; Kindle, list price, $27.99)

 In late September, Intuit released the 2012 versions of its popular QuickBooks financial software. Just a month later, O’Reilly Media was hot on Intuit’s heels with QuickBooks 2012: The Missing Manual, a new entry in O’Reilly’s popular “The book that should have been in the box®” series.

Written by veteran author and project management consultant Bonnie Biafore, this new guidebook provides clear, well-illustrated, step-by-step instructions on how to use the Windows edition of QuickBooks 2012 Pro, the most popular version of Intuit’s product, particularly in small businesses.

The 734-page book also gives some basic how-to information and advice on accounting – enough to get you past some confusing stumbling blocks as you set up a business and its accounts, but not enough to substitute for real training in accounting and keeping books.

“QuickBooks isn’t hard to learn,” the author says. “Many of the features that you’re familiar with from other programs work just the same way in QuickBooks—windows, dialog boxes, drop-down lists, and keyboard shortcuts, to name a few. And with each new version, Intuit has added enhancements and new features to make your workflow smoother and faster. The challenge is knowing what to do according to accounting rules, and how to do it in QuickBooks.”

Two words of caution: This book does not cover non-USA versions of QuickBooks 2012 Pro. And, the author points out, “QuickBooks for Mac differs significantly from the Windows version, and unfortunately you won’t find help with the Mac version of the program in this book.”

QuickBooks 2012: The Missing Manual is divided into five parts containing a total of 26 chapters and two appendices.

Part One covers “Getting Started.” It starts with “Creating a Company File” and “Getting Around in QuickBooks” and advances to setting up accounts, customers, jobs, vendors, items, lists, and managing QuickBooks files.

Part Two’s focus is “Bookkeeping,” and its chapters covers everything from tracking mileage to paying for expenses, invoicing, managing accounts receivable, generating financial statements and performing end-of-year tasks.

“Managing Your Business” is the focus of Part Three. The chapters cover managing inventory, budgeting and planning, and working with reports.

“QuickBooks Power” is the title of Part Four. It covers using QuickBooks with online banking services, configuring preferences in QuickBooks to fit your company, integrating QuickBooks with other programs (Excel integration has been improved in QB 2012), customizing QuickBooks, and keeping QuickBooks data secure.

Part Five contains two appendices: “Installing QuickBooks” and “Help, Support, and Other Resources.”

The book does not contain a CD, but it provides a link where “every single Web address, practice file, and piece of downloadable software mentioned In this book is available….”

QuickBooks 2012 Pro, according to the author, “is the workhorse edition” of a software package that is available “in a gamut of editions, offering options for organizations at both ends of the small-business spectrum.”

Her book is good enough that it can help you get a small business set up and off the ground while you are learning the QuickBooks 2012 Pro. But if you don’t have some solid background in bookkeeping and accounting, do not try to rely on the software alone to save you. Get the training any way you can, as soon as you can. And then, once you can afford it, hire good people to help you with the bookkeeping and accounting, while you focus on the bigger picture, using QuickBooks 2012’s budgeting, planning, forecast, report, contact synchronization, lead tracking, and to-do list features.

One other caution: QuickBooks has a specialized edition specifically for nonprofit organizations. It is more expensive than the Pro package. So some people try to save money and use the Pro package to manage a small nonprofit. But there can be confusions involving some of the terminology, transactions and reports. In this book, Bonnie Biafore provides “notes and tips about tracking nonprofit finances with QuickBooks Pro (or plain QuickBooks Premier)” and modifying the program’s standard reports to meet government requirements.

By the way, QuickBooks 2012: The Missing Manual can be used to learn features in earlier versions of QuickBooks. Of course, doing so and seeing what’s missing may convince you to upgrade.

– Si Dunn

Buying the Right Photo Equipment – #photography #bookreview

Buying the Right Photo Equipment: 70 Tips from the Top
By Elin Rantakrans
(Rocky Nook, paperback, list price $19.95; Kindle, list price, $9.99)

You’ve been shooting snapshots of family and friends for a long time with a simple digital camera. Now you want to amp up your game and gather up the gear necessary to become a serious, dedicated, well-equipped photographer.

Where do you start?

You may be overwhelmed by the wealth of equipment choices, how-to articles and opinions available online. Indeed, you may buy a lot more more gear than you actually need, or you may gather the wrong stuff for the types of photographs you really want to take.

Spend some time first with this small but effective book by professional photographer and journalist Elin Rantakrans. Well focused and well written, Buying the Right Photo Equipment gives succinct explanations for why you need certain items, such as specialized filters or accessory flash units or certain lenses, to achieve particular effects.

Excellent photographs by the author and 14 other professional photographers illustrate the key points.

Not all of the recommended equipment is expensive. The book covers such topics as why you may need gray cards, viewfinder eyecups and spirit levels, as well as remote camera releases, portable reflectors and lens bags.

It also delves into underwater housings, studio flash setups, computer monitor calibration hardware and software, stitching software and photo printers, to name just a few. And it doesn’t ignore the big issues, such what types of lenses and lighting situations are best when shooting landscapes, architecture, portraits, wildlife, etc.

Buying the Right Photo Equipment won’t answer every question — and doesn’t try to. But it can make you better equipped to ask the right questions and make good, money-saving choices once you start your search for the right photographic gear. 

– Si Dunn

Treasure Hunter by W.C. Jameson – A memoir that’s a treasure itself – #nonfiction #bookreview

Treasure Hunter
By W.C. Jameson
(Seven Oaks Publishing, paperback, list price $14.95; Kindle, $2.99)

We’ve all had the great fantasy. We turn over a spade of dirt while doing some yard work and suddenly uncover Spanish doubloons or a rich cache of 19^th-century silver dollars or some long-lost loot buried by a famous outlaw.

W.C. Jameson’s name is now virtually synonymous with “buried treasure.” Of his 70-plus published books, more than 20 of them are focused on treasure hunting, lost treasures and lost mines in the United States and North America.

Jameson’s huge and diverse literary output includes books of poetry, plus books on outlaws, cooking and even writing itself. Yet many of his fans think of him as a master treasure hunter first.

His newest book, Treasure Hunter, is a treasure in itself: an adventure-packed memoir that recounts and reflects upon his five-plus decades of expeditions – sometimes successful, sometimes disastrous – to find and recover long-lost gold and silver artifacts.

In treasure hunting, Jameson points out, if the rattlesnakes, rock slides and cave-ins don’t get you, state and federal laws and private landowners likely will, especially if you don’t keep stay completely quiet about what you are doing and what you have found.

Indeed, he stresses, “Anonymity is a great ally for a professional treasure hunter.”

So, before you quit your office job, cash in your 401(K), dress up like Indiana Jones, and head off for the mountains or desert, Jameson urges you to plant some harsh realities very firmly in mind:

“It is important to understand that almost everything treasure recovery professionals do is illegal,” he warns. “Thus, the bizarre and unreasonable laws related to treasure recovery have turned honest, dedicated, and hard-working fortune hunters into outlaws. Announcing a discovery often leads to negative and unwanted developments, primarily the loss of any treasure that may have been found. As mentors explained to me years ago, the fewer people involved, the better. Silence is the byword.” 

Throughout most of his fortune hunting career, Jameson has worked only with a small group of partners, none of them identified in this book, except with names such as “Poet” and “Slade” and “Stanley.”

At one point in Treasure Hunter, after a complicated expedition ends in disaster and near-death experiences, “Poet” sums up the “glamour” of their many quests:

“This little trip reminds me of most of our expeditions. Lots of action, nothing goes as planned, we get shot at, and we come back empty-handed.”

But Jameson has had some successes in his long and often arduous career: “From a few of these excursions, my partners and I acquired enough wealth to pay off houses and purchase new vehicles. With some of the money, I paid college tuition for myself as well as for my children.”

And, despite his long career and advancing age, he remains “on the hunt” for more treasures, he says.

Not surprisingly, Jameson identifies library research as one of the toughest and most essential parts of treasure hunting. And the lands around certain “lost” treasures may be accessible only after paying bribes, dealing with unsavory characters, surviving potentially fatal double-crosses, dodging deadly snakes and being willing to risk cross-border smuggling.

If that sounds like exciting “adventure” to you, pay close attention to Jameson’s additional cautions:   

“The truth is,” he writes, “adventure was never an objective, merely a byproduct. Anyone who has ever been on a quest will tell you that adventure happens when plans go awry. The great explorer Roald Amundson once said, ‘An adventure is merely  an interruption of an explorer’s serious work and indicates bad planning.’ Our plans often turned out badly, which may give you some idea of our collective ability to arrange and organize a perfect expedition, to prepare for any and all contingencies.”

For some readers, the many quests described in Jameson’s book likely will fuel or refuel a passion to go out anyway and search and dig for riches. But, for many others of us, some of the armchair adventurers of the world, his book will provide entertaining hours of safe reading, absorbing escapism and comfortable daydreaming.

And that will be treasure enough.

– Si Dunn

MCPD Exam Ref 70-519 – for Microsoft.NET Framework 4 – #bookreview #Microsoft #software #MCPD

MCPD Exam Ref 70-519: Designing and Developing Web Applications Using Microsoft .NET Framework 4
By Tony Northrup
(Microsoft Press, list price $39.99, paperback)

Definitely consider this book if you are gearing up to get a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) certification in designing and developing web applications using Microsoft .NET Framework 4.

“The 70-591 certification exam tests your knowledge of designing and developing web applications,” the author notes.

He is a Microsoft consultant and author of more than 25 books on Windows and web development, networking, and security.

His 271-page exam reference guide has six chapters:

1. Designing the Application Architecture
2. Designing the User Experience
3. Designing Data Strategies and Structures
4. Designing Security Architecture and Implementation
5. Preparing for and Investigating Application Issues
6. Designing a Deployment Strategy

The exam reference guide also has a solid, well-detailed, 12-page index.

“This book covers every exam objective,” the author notes, “but it does not necessarily cover every exam question. Microsoft regularly adds new questions to the exam, making it impossible for this (or any) book to provide every answer. Instead, this book is designed to supplement your relevant independent study and real-world experience.”

It also is not all-inclusive. Tony Northrup recommends augmenting exam preparations “by using a combination of available study materials and courses. For example, you might use the Exam Ref and another study guide for your ‘at home’ preparation and take a Microsoft Official Curriculum course for classroom experience.”

The approach employed in this exam reference is high-level, and it assumes that the reader already has some web development experience. “[B]oth the exam and the book are so high-level that there is very little coding involved. In fact, most of the code samples this book provides simply illustrate higher-level concepts,” Northrup points out.

Microsoft states that “[s]uccessful candidates generally have three or more years of real-world experience.”

Exam Ref 70-519 is well-written and adequately illustrated. And the text is divided into many small, manageable chunks, with exam tips, objective summaries, objective review questions and their answers, and links to additional information.

Those who purchase Exam Ref 70-519 also receive a 15% exam discount coupon from Microsoft, positioned at the back of the book.

– Si Dunn

Effective Time Management, Using Microsoft Outlook – #bookreview

Effective Time Management: Using Microsoft Outlook to Organize Your
Work and Personal Life
By Lothar Seiwert and Holger Woeltje
(Microsoft Press, list price $29.99, paperback; digital list price $23.99, Kindle)

To be honest, I never have liked Microsoft Outlook.

My first frustrating and confusing experiences with Outlook several years ago left me convinced that I had absolutely no reason to quit using paper desktop calendars and separate email programs.

But after reading Effective Time Management: Using Microsoft Outlook to Organize Your Work and Personal Life, I have decided to put Outlook back on my PC. I am now giving it another chance to help me exert some semblance of control over the events, meetings and messages in my days and nights.

The book’s authors, Lothar Seiwert and Holger Woeltje, are “two highly experienced time management experts from Germany, the largest national economy in Europe.”

Effective Time Management is nicely organized and well written. It also has an adequate number of screen shots, tips and step-by-step lists to help you get a handle on Outlook, even if you are, like me, a newcomer to its latest version.

Their 248-page book is divided into seven chapters. And, while the focus is on using Outlook 2010 to help you improve your time management skills, the authors helpfully include how-to steps for Outlook 2003 and 2007, as well.

The chapters are:

1. How Not to Drown in the Email Flood
2. How to Work More Effectively with Tasks and Priorities
3. How to Gain More Time for What’s Essential with an Effective Week Planner
4. How to Make Your Daily Planning Work in Real Life
5. How to Schedule Meetings So They Are Convenient, Effective, and Fun
6. How to use OneNote for Writing Goals, Jotting Down Ideas, and Keeping Notes
7. How to Truly Benefit from This Book

The book’s one appendix is a list of recommended readings that deal with time management and keeping your productivity energy level high. And the 14-page index is well-detailed.

Seiwert and Woeltje recommend that you use Outlook to “plan your professional life and private life together…so that you avoid conflicting appointments…unless private planning is prohibited on your office computer or you don’t have access to it on the weekend or in the evening.”

They also recommend that you follow “the Kiesel Principle” so you can “gain more time for what matters most each week,” in your work life and your personal life.  “Take about 30 minutes to plan your week,” they explain. “Initially, it might take you longer, but after a few weeks, you will get used to it and it will become routine.”

It’s all about achieving a healthy balance in life – and using Microsoft Outlook to help you get there and stay there.

– Si Dunn

Here’s the book scaring me this Halloween: America the Vulnerable – #bookreview #data #security

Subtitled “Inside the New Threat Matrix of Digital Espionage, Crime, and Warfare,” America the Vulnerable is written by Joel Brenner, former inspector general at the National Security Agency.

Brenner has recent experience at the highest levels in national intelligence, counterintelligence and data security. And he has studied firsthand many of the threats and attacks against our national, corporate and personal interests.

“During my tenure in government,” he writes, “I came to understand how steeply new technology has tipped the balance in favor of those–from freelance hackers to Russian mobsters to terrorists to states like China and Iran–who want to learn the secrets we keep, whether for national, corporate, or personal security.” He adds: “The truth I saw was brutal and intense: Electronic thieves are stripping us blind.”

Everything from Social Security numbers to technological secrets that cost billions to develop are being taken — stolen from military and corporate data networks and individual computers, possibly including yours.

His book will leave you wide-eyed and wondering who is surreptitiously poking around inside your computer right at this moment and what they are taking or “borrowing” for sinister purposes.

 Likely the Chinese and the Iranians and Russian mobsters and others, including hackers, are in there or have been there recently.

And Brenner explains how you may be unknowingly helping them find and transfer sensitive and vital information, even when you do something seemingly innocuous as plugging in a thumb drive to your laptop.

You won’t need to watch any monster movies to get scared this Halloween. Brenner’s book or its Kindle version can give you a very serious case of chills and frights. 

– Si Dunn

The Art of R Programming: A Tour of Statistical Software Design – #programming #bookreview

The Art of R Programming: A Tour of Statistical Software Design
By Norman Matloff
(No Starch Press, list price $39.95, paperback)

What? You haven’t heard of R, the programming language?

“R is a scripting language for statistical data manipulation and analysis,” writes Norman Matloff, an experienced and widely published writer who is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis. He is also a former statistics professor.

R, he notes in this excellent overview of the programming language, has a rather complicated past.

“It was inspired by, and is mostly compatible with the statistical language S developed by AT&T. The name S, for statistics, was an allusion to another programming language with a one-letter name developed at AT&T—the famous C language. S later was sold to a small firm, which added a graphical user interface (GUI) and named the result S-plus.”

According to Matloff, “R has become more popular than S or S-plus, both because it’s free and because more people are contributing to it. R is sometimes called GNU S, to reflect its open source nature. (The GNU Project is a major collection of open source software.)”

So much for its history. Who uses R? A lot of people involved in statistics and data science. “It is widely used,” Matloff reports, “in every field where there is data—business, industry, government, medicine, academia, and so on.”

Here’s the good news about his good book. If you’ve never heard of R or if it’s something you’ve only recently considered trying, Matloff shows you how to get started quickly both in interactive mode and batch mode.

And you don’t begin by tiresomely displaying “Hello, world.” You start at the heart of R. You make a simple data set, which, in R parlance, is called a vector. You concatenate three numbers, in this case 1, 2 and 4.

“More precisely,” Matloff states, “we are concatenating three one-element vectors that consist of those numbers.” He adds: “It’s hard to imagine R code, or even an interactive R session, that doesn’t involve vectors.”

From there, his book smoothly delves into a wide range of R topics, including basic types, data structures, closures, recursion, anonymous functions, object-oriented programming, and interfacing R to other programming languages.

The Art of R Programming is rich with short, instructive code examples, including examples that initially have bugs but are corrected and given explanations for why the first try went awry.

The book’s marketing materials note that archaeologists use R to trace how ancient civilizations spread, and drug companies use it to try to figure out which medications are safe and effective. And actuaries use it, of course, to “assess financial risks and keep markets moving smoothly.”

But R can be used in much more commonplace settings, as well. You don’t have to know statistics, and you don’t have to be a professional programmer. You can be a beginner wanting to become expert. Or you can be, and remain, a hobbyist programmer.

R commands typically are submitted “by typing in a terminal window rather than clicking a mouse in a GUI, and most R users do not use a GUI,” Matloff cautions.

But: “This doesn’t mean that R doesn’t do graphics. On the contrary, it includes tools for producing graphics of great utility and beauty, but they are used for system output, such as plots, not for user input.”

Never fear, however. A number of free GUIs are available for R, and Matloff gives links to several.

Two appendices in Matloff’s book cover downloading, installing and running R. The place to begin is the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), where “thousands of user-written packages” are available. And there are “precompiled binaries for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X on CRAN,” Matloff points out.

No Starch Press, the book’s publisher, pledges that it delivers “the finest in geek entertainment.” Many readers likely will say this handsome, well-structured and well-written R overview meets that promise.

– Si Dunn