Appearance
The Birth of Dirt: Origins of Mountain Biking
Biking is a great source of exercise, and for some, a great source of adventure. "The Birth of Dirt: Origins of Mountain Biking" is Frank J. Berto's journey to track down the origins of adventurous biking and the bike created to facilitate that purpose. With plenty of full color and black and white photographs tracing the history of the mountain bike, it's intriguing to see the progression of the bike variation. "The Birth of Dirt" is highly recommended to anyone who wants to know the origins of their favorite hobby.
The Birth of Dirt: Origins of Mountain Biking
I read a Berto story in Mountain Bike magazine regarding the history of the mountain bike, so when I saw this book, I had to pick it up. It's a great read with all the usual suspects (Breeze, Fisher, Ritchey, Sinyard...), and as an avid mountain biker, factoid freak, and history buff, this book answered a lot of questions about the origins of the mountain bike. Living in Mountain View, CA, it's great to be able to ride the trails (at least the one's still open) where the mountain bike was born.
The Birth of Dirt: Origins of Mountain Biking
The article I read about the book is from the local county paper, The Independent Journal dated feb 6,1999. The author is interviewed and the conclusions are discussed openly.It is a great format for the book because each of the men going for the inventor of the mountain title are interviewed and quoted. I went to high school with the real inventor and hung with them. Read the book to see who it was.
Technical drawing
.: edit, June 30 2007 :.New rating: 3 starsI wrote the original review in 2005, after several hours of trying to decipher this book and find misplaced information within it so as to complete a class assignment. Discovering that one of its specific textual errors made my specific task impossible, I wrote the following.If Amazon let me increase my rating, at this point I would, but I maintain that it is unpolished and desperately under-edited..: end edit :.As a freshman engineering major, I have been compelled to use Technical Drawing for a graphics course. This has been a profoundly frustrating experience. It seems that the authors, in their zeal to attain unto the dry, lifeless style characteristic of most professional engineering publications, also unintentionally created a text which is superlatively unclear.I am recurrently astonished at the utter incomprehensibility of entire paragraphs. I will read a section, cynically assert that it communicates nothing, read it over a dozen more times, show it to others who in turn read it a dozen times, only to have my first conclusion affirmed.There are extremely blatant contradictions.Terms are used at the beginning of a chapter and not defined until the end.It speaks voluminously about how critical it is to follow the prescribed techniques, only to devote less-than-the-bare-minimum amount of space to the actual descriptions of those techniques.The review questions are frequently unrelated to the content they are supposed to be reinforcing, or are simply placed in the wrong chapter.This (expensive!) book is a conspicuous example of "writing by committee." Technical Drawing may well be a decent-enough reference book - useful if you need a reminder about material you already know - but expect to get angry at it, especially if you're learning the information for the first time.
Technical drawing
This book is loaded with technical information for the dratsman and designer. A must have for anyone who is in the mechanical technology field.
Technical drawing
This text was the basic drafting manual that I used during my technical education; its use did not end with school, however, since I refer to it frequently in my occupation. It tells everything that needs to be explained and described in the general drawing problems that might be encountered in industrial practice. It contains excellent descriptions and illustrations for: Drawing Threads, Fasteners & Springs Geometric Constructions Clear, Concise instructions in using Drafting Instruments, (before the time of Computer Aided Drafting & Desing, in any case). An Excellent overview of the Industrial Design & Development Process, (which I wish my supervisors would read). Sectional Drawing. This book is to drafting what Machinery's Handbook, of the Industrial Press, is to the metal working industries. There are a variety of Drafting Textbooks available, but none are incrementally better, let alone drasticaly better.