Koncocoo

Best Agricultural Insecticides & Pesticides

Texas Bug Book: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Texas Bug Book is your complete guide for identifying and organically controlling all of the most common Texas insects. HOWARD GARRETT is a landscape architect, certified arborist, horticulturist, and organic practitioner in Dallas.
Reviews
"The contents of the book are fine, but the book itself is huge."
"I bought this book for my Mom - she loves it and has really enjoyed reading about all the insects and how they can be beneficial."
"My landscape design customers rely on me to correctly diagnose and treat their pest problems."
"For those interested in organic gardening, this book is extremely helpful."
"I don't know...but now that I have the Texas Bug Book I can easily identify most any bug I find."
"As a recent transfer to Texas with an aversion to bugs, I refer to this book often to identify creepy crawlers I've seen around the property."
"great book - photos give excellent description."
"Great resource for organic gardeners."
Find Best Price at Amazon
Stochastic Processes: Theory for Applications
This definitive textbook provides a solid introduction to discrete and continuous stochastic processes, tackling a complex field in a way that instils a deep understanding of the relevant mathematical principles, and develops an intuitive grasp of the way these principles can be applied to modelling real-world systems. This definitive textbook provides a solid introduction to stochastic processes, covering both theory and applications.
Reviews
"(The author frequently even tells you what the goal of the exercise is -- this has motivated me to pursue 'unassigned problems' that I otherwise wouldn't have done.)."
"The book is a combination of the material from two MIT courses: (6.262) Discrete Stochastic Process and (6.432) Stochastic Processes, Detection, and Estimation."
"The best intro to stochastic processes available, bar none [and I have seen a lot of them] - also a companion to his GREAT, FREE course on the MIT Open Course website."
"The book covers puts emphasis on the application side of stochastic process."
Find Best Price at Amazon
Texas Snakes: A Field Guide (Texas Natural History Guides™)
Texas Snakes: A Field Guide has all the resources you need to identify snakes in the wild and in your yard: JAMES R. DIXON is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences at Texas A&M University.
Reviews
"Very informative book!"
"informative, good pictures, really helps you identify."
"Best series of TX field guides there is!"
"Glad to have this reference on hand."
"Excellent book, exactly what I was looking for."
"Must go fro the front all the way to the back a page at a time."
Find Best Price at Amazon

Best Stochastic Modeling

Doing Data Science: Straight Talk from the Frontline
Doing Data Science is collaboration between course instructor Rachel Schutt, Senior VP of Data Science at News Corp, and data science consultant Cathy O’Neil, a senior data scientist at Johnson Research Labs, who attended and blogged about the course. Rachel Schutt is the Senior Vice President for Data Science at News Corp. She earned a PhD in Statistics from Columbia University, and was a statistician at Google Research for several years. She holds several pending patents based on her work at Google, where she helped build user-facing products by prototyping algorithms and building models to understand user behavior.
Reviews
"The book Doing Data Science not only explains what data science is but also provides a broad overview of methods and techniques that one must master in order to call one self a data scientist. However it is not to be considered as a text book about data science but more as a broad introduction to a number of topics in data science. I had for some time been looking for a book that could be used as a follow-up reading on topics in data science. The book begins with a chapter about what data science is all about is followed by four chapters on topics like statistical inference, explanatory data analysis, various machine learning algorithms, linear and logistic regression, and Naive Bayes. I really enjoyed the examination of time stamped data, the Kaggle Model, feature selection, and case-attribute data versus social network data. Data visualization is an integral part of data science for communication results. Topics that I did not found covered in any other book about data science. However the chapter about epidemiology is not about using data science in epidemiology but 'just' about using data science to evaluate the methods used in epidemiology. Personally I would prefer more details about the actual data science topics like e.g. extracting meaning from data and social network analysis and less focus on math. I really like the idea about having a lot of different people present various topics in data science and the book is well written and contains lots of useful resources for further studies of data science."
"Great text that provides a very informative overview of topics in Data Science."
"The books is fairly dated, a lot of the exercises have broken links/outdated code."
"The book is well written and provides good insights into how to form a foundational core to further one's education and experience in data analysis and visualization."
"However, the presentation of material makes it difficult for a student to quickly follow."
"I make my living working with businesses to help them build their analytic capabilities in sales and marketing, by working on real opportunities and generalizing lessons from specific experiences and results. But what I have learned is that if you push these past use as points of departure, and force them as points of arrival, results and learning suffer."
Find Best Price at Amazon

Best Digestive Organ Diseases

My Story of Survival: The ultimate low-reactive diet for allergies, gut problems, food intolerances and chemical sensitivities.
Her diet contains no gluten, eggs, sugar, fructose, grains, flours, nuts, seeds, meat, beans, soy, and no legumes. The author's One Size Fits All diet has a lot in common with the FODMAP diet plan which was developed by Sue Shepherd PhD and Peter Gibson MD, and is considered a revolutionary plan for managing IBS and other digestive disorders. Foreword by Health Practitioner Writingthis foreword to Mimi Emmanuel's little book has been challenging to mepersonally, as I felt I could not possibly endorse the concept of eating onlyten foods to obtain all the nutrients necessary for sustaining life.
Reviews
"Even though she is married to a doctor, there didn't appear to be answers for her inoperable ruptured appendix and septicemia; she also had an intolerance to antibiotics, allergies, and was chemically sensitive to a lot of standard fare."
"This is an honest-to-goodness real story of one woman's grit and self-determination when faced with an over-whelming medical conundrum as to why her body was on revolt. I especially like her "useful facts" that she places throughout the book to not only make her case as to nutritional needs, but they also spark a deeper interest for further study and personal application."
"Having suffered food sensitivities for a number of years, I found Mimi's story inspirational."
"I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to read an amazing and inspiring survival story based on nutrition, perseverance and faith, and/or for others needing encouragement and dietary options while struggling with food and chemical intolerance."
"An Interesting and compelling true story of how one person was able to find a workable diet despite many food intolerances."
"Excellent TRUE story of someone taking control of their life to affect positive change."
"I believe that people who have fought through their crises are inspired or 'In Spirit' as Dr Wayne Dyre would say. Every time I try to fathom what she went through when her body started to react to everything including water, I feel really uneasy and scared. But if you are like me who can eat anything in the world including Rhinoceros' skin, read the book for the information on food in general for understanding the health benefits."
"After suffering for many years with illnesses, some too difficult to cure, Mimi took her life into her own hands and discovered by eating only ten foods she was able to allow her body to rid itself of many of the problems it endured."
Find Best Price at Amazon

Best Water Quality & Treatment

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition
"The definitive work on the West's water crisis." "Essential background reading for anyone who cares about the drought ravaging the West and the region's prospects for changing course before it is too late." Resiner captures Western water history in Cinemascope and Technicolor. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, it spans our century-long effort to moisten the arid West. Anyone thinking of moving west of the hundredth meridian should read this book before they call their real estate agent." "A revealing, absorbing, often amusing and alarming report on where billions of [taxpayers'] dollars have gone-- and where a lot more are going .
Reviews
"This is a timeless work detailing the history of water wealth and distribution in the West."
"Man this book is encyclopedic, with all that implies."
"While the editing causes some revisiting of projects ant times, this book gives a clear picture of the technical, economic, political, and bureaucratic forces surrounding the largest group of public works in American history."
"I recommend this book to anyone wanting to understand the history of the water "crisis" or has the least bit of interest in our nation's history!"
"It is not a perfect work: the author occasionally allows his passion to overwhelm his recounting of the facts, and it detracts from both his case and the flow of the book."
"It's easy to call all cities in the American West "cancers", and state or imply how and how much the West should've been settled, based on 20/20 hindsight and without thought for where settlers could've gone if every inch West of the 100th meridian had been settled only by a very limited number of environmentally prophetic, conscientious stewards."
"Between this book and the "King of California" a very concise history of water in the lands west of the Mississippi and then west of Sierra Nevada Mountains is painted and highlighted with political and bureaucratic bumbling that has lead to the "crisis" that lives on today."
"Although written in 1986, revised and updated in 1993, it is a useful source of history and a means of understanding how we got ourselves into the difficulties we are now facing."
Find Best Price at Amazon

Best Environmental Pollution Engineering

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
The Geography of Nowhere traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where every place is like no place in particular, where the cities are dead zones and the countryside is a wasteland of cartoon architecture and parking lots. Kunstler, who writes ably, casts a very wide net: he finds the roots of American individualism in pre-colonial property ownership, decries the abstracting influence of modernism on city architecture and slams road-builder Robert Moses to support his contention that suburbia is a social environment without soul.
Reviews
"My first intro to Kunstler was watching his equally informative speech on Americas urban design nightmares on You.Tube TED talks. My awakening began in the early 2000 when I got a job working housing construction then later landscaping and later again installing storm doors and windows."
"The part that I loved, first of all, is that there is a new forward in here from 2013-2014. Other than that, this book was so interesting!"
"A lot of text is devoted to New York (both the city and upstate), and it also covers several other places, including but not limited to Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Disney World."
"Everything you sensed was wrong with our environment, our homes, our public spaces is lucidly explained here, along with plenty of solutions."
"The book is light on data, heavy on rhetoric, but hammers its point home through anecdotes, allegory, and turns of phrase that make the read analyze what, exactly, they see in these suburban (and some urban) same places."
"Politicians, developers, planners of the pre-New Urbanism era, Big SpOil, and captains of industry all get skewered, and rightly so...to know how to proceed with the future, it's essential to understand who goofed in the past, and what the motivations were. Many of the chapters end in amusing and venomous rants, some of which left me pumping my fist in the air and engaging my treadmill to expire the energy. As I indicated previously, this is essential to anyone interested in the arts of city planning...for those of you out there jobs related to the planning field, the content in here is a great way to have a more informed approach to land use recommendations, planning policy, and engage better in heated discussion during those painful public hearings...or just impress the director and commissioners over lunch."
Find Best Price at Amazon

Best Groundwater & Flood Control

Water Supply and Pollution Control (8th Edition)
This book provides practicing engineers with water-based environment engineering from theory to practice by presenting the principles of water treatment, wastewater treatment, water reuse, water quality, and overviews of regulations regarding pollution control and drinking water quality. Paul A. Chadik is Associate Professor and Associate Chairman of the department of environmental engineering sciences at the University of Florida.
Reviews
"Very helpful in my engineering classes."
"Cheaper than buying local."
"Thought the book was used, it looked fairly new!"
"This book is a good book if you like to work with the FPS system i.e. not MKS system of units."
Find Best Price at Amazon

Best Waste Management

Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Life by Reducing Your Waste
Part inspirational story of Bea Johnson (the “Priestess of Waste-Free Living”) and how she transformed her family’s life for the better by reducing their waste to an astonishing one liter per year; part practical, step-by-step guide that gives readers tools and tips to diminish their footprint and simplify their lives. It compels us to recognize that our heedlessly wasteful ways are not gateways to prosperity and convenience, but barriers to a good life and a healthy planet. Zero Waste Home will make a difference.” (Paul Hawken, author of Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial RevolutionReviews
"When I tried this stuff I did not hold myself to all of her standards and I knew that these ideas would never take over in my home. When I got rid of all my excess in 2011 I made 2,500$ by selling it off on Amazon and got a notable tax deduction for all the donations. When I bought flour sack clothes I did with the intention of saving "some money" but I "knew" we'd always need paper towels. The joke was on me since it just struck me a few months back that the last paper towels I bought was in 2011. Our utilities actually decreased because I had our city come pick up our second garbage can that we no longer needed. A friend of mine just bought one and for the past week I've been getting texts almost every morning when he shaves "OMG WHY DID THEY EVER INVENT DISPOSABLES!!" We tell our kids to clean their rooms and yet when they say it's done we still check the closets and under the bed to make sure they didn't stuff anything there."
"Love love love this book."
"Especially like the reciepes and all the tips on how to tackle peoples reactions.The book has inspiered me to make less waste."
"I've read some of the other "zero waste and minimalist" books but they have proven to be sub-par."
"This book has changed the way I think about my home."
"I have not been able to stop reading this book!!"
"This is a very helpful and inspiring book."
"You might think Bea is extreme in her waste reduction, but don't miss the point."
Find Best Price at Amazon