The book's description on the back cover doesn't even match the content nor does the CD-ROM. It looks and reads like a thrown together blob of stuff ... can someone tell me where to find the durn spreadsheet widget .. its mentioned on the back cover but not in the index, the table of contents nor on the CD-ROM....

I don't recommend purchase lightly. I've been wearing out its pages for two weeks now, with occasional bouts of furrowed brows and impatient snorting. I've come, though, to a conclusion in which I'm confident: if you're a Tcl user, you should invest in *Tcl/Tk Tools*.

Why? Because you'll use it, and use it well. Almost everyone involved in Tcl has questions (so how do I really compile a Tcl script? How much does it take to do drag-and-drop and tool tips? Are the RDBMS extensions current with vendor features? ...) answered here. Simplify your life by putting these 650+ pages on your shelf.

What is *Tcl/Tk Tools*? It's a collection of descriptions of different popular extensions to Tcl and Tk. While lead author Harrison gives the impression they're written by "the extension authors themselves", there are a few exceptions to this pattern. The book is not written as a tutorial or introduction to Tcl, sagely pointing to John Ousterhout and Brent Welch's books for that role (although I've been thinking of experimenting with putting *Tcl/Tk Tools* in the hands of novices, to see what would happen. I suspect they'd survive in good shape).

*Tcl/Tk Tools* isn't exhaustive. It doesn't include several of my favorite extensions, including Scotty, NeoWebScript, stooop, tclMsql, the PlusPatches, ... It doesn't matter. If you care about only *one* of the extensions described here, you'll do well to have your own copy.

Harrison and his co-authors do a good job of hitting the target of telling "Here's the philosophy behind this package, and here are some examples of how to use it effectively" that he lays out in the Preface. While it's easy to move from one chapter to another, it's not at the expense of the authors and their personalities. D. Richard Hipp's thoughtful precision and De Clarke's care in engineering effective solutions come through, as do the assurance and lucidity those in the Tcl community expect of Don Libes. Less successful is the forward look that Harrison intended, toward "the plans the extension authors had for future enhancements and extensions." I assume this was in part a casualty of the realities of the publishing cycle; certainly many of the chapters appear to have been finished before the appearance a year ago of 7.6's betas.

Two unglamorous aspects of the book multiply its value: the index is sound (that's saying a lot for me; I have high standards in indexing), and Harrison's Chapter 17 on what he calls "Configuration Management" lays out much valuable wisdom that newcomers need to learn. Reading the latter is painful: it has all the important, tedious subjects ("Combining Extensions ...", command-line munging, ...) one wants--but without mention of Win* or loadable libraries! These frailties are inevitable when broadcasting on dead trees, of course. What's disappointing is that *Tcl/Tk Tools* doesn't go farther in joining the Internet Age: although a two-page Appendix lauds news:comp.lang.tcl and lists the FAQs and nine URLs (some of which have already moved, of course), and individual authors take it on themselves to provide appropriate references,
* it's not apparent that there is any page where Harrison and/or O'Reilly maintain errata, updates, new examples, funny animal GIFs, or any of the other resources readers might be expected to exploit--I couldn't find one at the URL the Preface gave, nor elsewhere at www.ora.com;
* some authors supply no e-mail addresses;
* some authors give references ("look in the archives") that will be inscrutable for those not already in the know; and
* there is wide variation in the quality of information authors give about extension prospects, bug lists (a particular sore point with me), mailing lists, and so on.
Understand, please, that I'm not labeling these moral faults; as on every project, the good engineering comes in deciding where to make the cuts, and what definite values to deliver. I personally look forward to seeing books that build a more dynamic relationship with online sources, and am simply noting that *Tcl/Tk Tools* doesn't achieve that standard.

The quality of production is high, higher even than the elevated expectations I have of O'Reilly. Typos, mistakes in word choice, and code errors seem to sum to around zero to five per chapter. Screen shots are judicious and illuminating, rather than gratuitously space-filling. The CD-ROM (with binaries for indeterminate but predictable releases of Solaris and Linux) does the little I asked of it.

Summary: whether you're a full-time Tcl-er or a greenhorn, you'll profit from having *Tcl/Tk Tools* at hand. Whenever you're in a pinch, there's a fair chance the Index and/or Table of Contents will quickly lead you to a useful datum. During more contemplative moments, you'll want to read the chapters in a connected fashion, and the accuracy and insight of the authors will make you glad that you do.

This was the first book I read on Tcl/TK (a mistake), but it was nonetheless helpful. I do refer it often. I particularly found the introduction to Expect useful.

This book tries to give us a small hint of what the future may be. Arthur Clarke tries to describe the future as his creativity imagine. It was writen in 1986, but I read it in 1997, so some of book's predictions seems idiot to me. In my point of view, Arthur Clarke should focus on a story, not fortune-telling. Of course science ficcion must do some wild guess, but a good book is sustained by the plot, not the situation.

Arthur C. Clarke is one of the 20th century's greatest writers of fiction-certainly of science fiction-and, as many of us know, of accessible science writing. However, this book is not an essential piece of his canon. It's interesting, to be sure, some of Clarke's visions of the future are novel and worth thinking about. There are several noteworthy situations outlined, including a possible scenario for World War III (this scenario however, shows the hazards of prophecy... apparently Clarke failed to forsee the fall of the Berlin Wall, for Germany is still referred to here as "East" and "West".) A lot of the writing doesn't really sound like Clarke... especially the medical chapter, it comes off as a bit dry and boring in places, lacking his trademark wit. It almost seems as if these chapters and scenarios were written by someone else and merely edited by Clarke. I'm not knocking the book-it is interesting, nicely laid out, and very professional and highly ambitious in scope-but Clarke has SO MUCH superior material available that there's no reason for you to pick this up unless you've nearly exhausted his output.

I was looking for some good samples of Celtic Cross Stitch designs. And all I can say is... I didn't find them here. I didn't care for the designs, and the book is really skimpy - they re-use a lot of the same designs with various simple adjustments to make up for the lack of variety. I would NOT recommend this book at all for anyone who wants to do a Celtic project.

I was somewhat disappointed by the projects contained in this book. The title says "Over 40 small, exciting, and innovating projects" and strictly speaking that's true. However there are not that many designs. For instance, the first 4 projects use the same salmon design in different arrangements - with a celtic border, on a cushion, as a sachet and as a card. This is ingenious and useful but if you don't care for this particular design, there go 4 projects out of the book that you don't want to do. I would have liked to have seen more different designs instead of these multi-uses of the same design (the grapes design later on is also shown as a card, a sachet, a placemat, and a napkin, another 4 projects). That said, I still found patterns that I liked a lot and feel that on the whole the book was worth purchasing.

Because of the promise of the title I was greatly disappointed in the content. It records one mans journey of recovery after the suicide of his wife. It's focus is on his reentry into a new relationship. Unless this is your specific concern I would not recommend this book for anyone seeking depth of solace, understanding and healing in the aftermath of suicide. While I am sure the writing of it helped in the authors recovery it helped little in mine. Perhaps a more appropriate title would be "How I dealt with grief and dating and codependancy in the aftermath of my wifes suicide."

Clarke's book is another of those "good books, not bad, not great." Depending on what the reader is searching for, this could be great. The author does spend a significant amount of time on his codependency issues and his tales of trying to date after his wife's suicide, but all in all, it's not bad.

When your think of going clubbing with your friends, you usually don't think your routine would be any different than any other Saturday night. Vinny and Jasper were doing what they usually do on a Saturday night and unexpectantly, things went terribly wrong. Vinny and Jasper were swarmed by a enormous crowd on their way home. Jasper turned around, only to find that Vinny was nowhere to be found. Jasper and his friends became very worried but decided to go to the place they went to when they were drunk. When they found that Vinny wasn't there, they became even more worried. They notified Vinnys mother and she notifies his girlfriend. The worrying only gets worse. Vinny didn't come home Saturday night and didn't show up for work on Sunday, That's not like Vinny, so everyone was really puzzled as to what might have happened. Later on Sunday night, Vinny returns home and still thinks it's Saturday. he doesn't know what has happened to him and he is very confused. If I told you the rest, I would be giving away the ending, so I guess that just means your have to read the book. Personally, I think the book was boring and went very slowly. If the pacing would have been faster, the book would have kept my attention and I would have liked it more.

Saturday nights in Melbourne aren't just ordinary nights where you would just stay home and watch TV or do some homework, especially when you were nineteen. Well in Jasper's and Vinny's case Saturday night in Melbourne was a clubbing night. Where the coolest place to be was in King St where all the pubs and clubs were. Jasper and Vinny had been legally clubbing for a year now and where experienced in the area, not like when they first started clubbing at about the age of 17 and wore heaps of aftershave to make themselves older and mature. They knew the tricks of the trade, and which were the best clubs to go to and just how much aftershave to wear. But this Saturday night was no ordinary night. As vinny was getting ready to go out he had a starnge feeling that something was not quite right that night. On ordinary Saturday nights they would be out and return home a Jacks place at about 5 o'clock Sunday morning too drunk to go home so they found themselves commonly waking up at Jacks place on his couch with a hangover. No, this Saturday was different. Vinny didn't return home!

Jasper had just turned his back for a moment outside the hanging gardens club and his best mate Vinny has disappeared. He Had vanished in a street of lights and clubs and cars and crowds of teenagers going home. He was no where to be seen. That Sunday when Vinny did not return home or show up for work, his family and friends began to worry. By sunday afternoon Vinny was a missing person.

In this book "the lost day" Judith Clarke writes depicting Melbourne's saturday nightlife and the dangers behind all the glamor. The story is about a nineteen-year-old teenager who goes missing one Saturday after a night out in the clubs and pubs of Melbourne. It was no ones fault Vinny went missing that night , but no onw knew where he went . His family and friends showed their emotional and scared side and feared that Vinny wasn't going to return home at all and the possibility kept creeping into their minds that something terrible happened to him and that he could even be dead!

As world population grows, resources are strained and the activities of each human are more likely to impinge upon the happiness and sense of well-being of others. For example, one who consumes in excess of reasonable needs leaves a smaller store of resources for use by others; one who drives an SUV consumes more gasoline than necessary, raises the costs to others, pollutes with greenhouse gases, and increases the danger of injury to others without similar vehicles. To relieve the conflict arising from such abusive personal conduct, the moral and ethical values of humans must be reconsidered and revised, primarily to the following effect: Each person should refrain from all conduct objectionable to others.

So argues this author, who provides a handy list of revised moral values that he regards as mandatory if the future (as he sees it) is to be bright.

Though well-meaning, the book might as aptly have been entitled The Death of Personal Freedom and Individualism. Majoritarianism is often not very pretty in enforcing compliance with perceived "norms" by individuals. Friendly persuasion to change moral values from those commonly described as the Judeo-Christian ethic is suitable until a working plurality is attained so as to enact laws imposing the same values on all others. Then government enforcement will be entirely acceptable as a means to achieve full compliance.

For a contrasting worldview, one that examines the importance of individuality in achieving success in the long term quest of humanity for survival as a dominant species, consider "A General Theory of Acquisitivity - On Human Nature, Productivity and Survival" by Wayne Jett. That book considers the human desire to acquire "more" as a natural mechanism designed to allocate resources to the person most willing and able to use them efficiently. That natural mechanism has proven to be astoundingly powerful in producing economic growth and improved human condition when governments allow sufficient leeway for the mechanism to function. The central debate in public policy ought to be whether government is doing great harm to the long term prospects of humanity by impeding acquisitivity, the engine that feeds productivity and innovation.

"You can change the world. This book tells you how." These words on the back cover caught my interest. That's a pretty tall promise, I thought. If anything, recent events have left me feeling like the whole world is out of control and will not be set right in my lifetime.

Author Ervin Laszlo takes a look at major historic changes (like the Industrial Revolution) and comes to the conclusion that we are in middle of the next, brought on as industrial nation-states run smack into the challenges of globalization.

In an eerie foreshadowing of current events he warns that the world is more diverse than we think, and that much of it feels left behind as the western nations consume the earth's goods at breakneck speed. "Militant fundamentalism is an extreme expression of the resentment generated by these conditions," Laszlo says. And we have seen the results all to clearly.

With change inevitable, he predicts that keepers of tradition will become more resistant, bringing on the kind of Doomsday Scenarios favored by Science Fiction writers and survivalist cults: instability, uncertainty, discontent, conflict and violence. Meanwhile, the environment will continue to be ravaged by the haves and have-nots alike.

But Laszlo doesn't think the end of the world as we know it is inevitable. He really believes, and makes a good case for, the power of the individual. He uses reliable surveys to show that approximately 25% of the population in the United States and Western Europe espouse a holistic approach to life that really can turn the world around. The problem, he says, is they don't knew their own strength.

Laszlo speaks (and the book often presents itself as if it were a classroom lecture) in the moralistic tone of turn-of-the twentieth century reformers. It's refreshing to hear someone from the western world speak up against the excesses of a market-driven economy and recommend that we help our neighbors, take up a physical activity or hobby, or read a book. His motto is "think globally and act morally." Along the way he takes to task meat eaters, smokers, big business, fundamentalists, and organized labor while questioning patriotism, efficiency at any cost, and conspicuous consumption.

This book offers only brief discussions regarding all the material in the book. I purchased this book to learn how to use director, and create interactive web content. I am extremely disappointed with this book. I do not suggest it for anyone.

This book helped my page become a huge success (http://bioserv.hypermart.net) now my site gets 20,000 people a day just to see the shockwave! the book tell you absolutly everythin yoyu need to know great buy!

If you are looking for many small pictures with little detail for ideas, this is your book.

If you are looking for a source of instructional material with step-by-step or other detailed information on various methods of tile making and/or decorating, I STRONGLY suggest that you save your money & look elsewhere.

This book was a great disappointment to me & I found much more useful information in Giorgini's book, "Handmade Tiles."

After I got through the section on the history of tile...I don't understand why tile books all start with the same history lession, I found the book to be extremely informative and very well versed on a multitude of tile making and decorating applications. Thanks to Mr. Clark for sharing his knowledge.

Not much good can be said about this collection of essays, speeches and reminiscences from science fiction colossus Arthur C. Clarke. Only one piece of fiction is included: the short short "When the Twerms Came" which could be considered clever, perhaps even cute, but hardly memorable. Not surprisingly, most of the offerings deal with space, or space travel, or predictions about future technological developments (many of which involve space and space travel), with the predictable result that as one gets further into the book, the essays begin to have a vague familiarity about them. Moreover, this volume closes with a piece written in 1977, so most of the collection is 25 years old or older; as a result, much of this material is sorely dated, although Clarke tries to rectify this by revisiting each subject in his introductions. All that aside, it's probably safe to say that the essay is not really Clarke's strong suit. His greatest gifts are his encyclopedic knowledge of science and its history, his almost poetic descriptions of nature, and his rarely seen but always pointed sense of humor. Many of these pieces demonstrate the first of these qualities, but very few take advantage of the latter two, much to the book's detriment. Clarke is at his most eloquent when describing his adopted country, Sri Lanka, (once known as Serendip, thus the title), or when he's discussing his passion for the world under the sea. So much of Clarke's work is borderline philosophical that he rarely indulges himself in humor, but when he does, he is usually very effective with it. (Does anyone remember his Tales from the White Hart? A classic of science fiction humor.) In this volume, he pokes fun at his competition in "Introducing Isaac Asimov" and gives a fascinating account of life in Sri Lanka in "Servant Problem - Oriental Style", but the rest of the book is pretty dry reading. Even die-hard fans of Clarke's work will find very little to get excited about in this one.

Everyone knows Arthur C. Clarke as one of the best -- many would say THE best -- science fiction writer of all-time, but it is often forgotten nowadays that, at least up until the 1970's, Clarke was also one of the best and most prolific popularizers of science. Early in his career, before he ever really got into writing fiction per se, and certainly before he started writing novels, the majority of Clarke's output consisted of technical science pieces and popular science journalism. This collection of such pieces, which appeared in the last 70's, was one of his last of the kind before he began concentrating solely on novel writing and before he retired -- and came back -- and retired again... and so on (anyone who is a writer knows that a writer can never "retire".) The pieces themselves consist mostly of space articles (mainly projections of future society), a few articles about Clarke's home, Sri Lanka (once called Serendip, hence the title), a handful of speeches, autobiographical fragments, exactly one piece of fiction, and a smattering of various other types of articles. As the lifeblood of the book is a series of essays giving future projections for years that have now passed us by, it is easy to dismiss this book as dated, as most have; and, indeed, it will probably never again be in general circulation. However, there is a certain fascination about these articles when looked back upon with hindsight. It is always interesting to see where Clarke was dead-on (describing the internet in almost exact detail nearly 40 years ago, for instance), and where he was wholly off-target (predicting stellar conolization by the end of the 20th century). Few futurists have been as compelling -- and frequently accurate -- as Clarke, and these pieces always make for interesting reading. The two articles on Sri Lanka are very informative and make for great reading, infused with the love and admiration that Clarke obviously has for his home. These pieces, and some of the others, are of a very personal nature, which is quite unusual for the guarded and normally abstract Clarke -- quite a treat for long-time fans of the author who will probably never get an autobiography. His light piece about the perils of hiring domestic servants in the East is one of the most hilarous things I have ever read, reminding us once again that Clarke has a killer, if bone-dry, sense of humor that few other than his hard-core fans ever ackwnoledge. His classic diss "Introducing Isaac Asimov" is included here in full, as is the good Doctor's schintillating comeback. The one piece of fiction is a minor throwaway, and the remainder of the essays and speeches range from very good to moderate. The reason the book is not a superlative collection is because several of the essays are somewhat similar and, as always with a Clarke omnibus, many of them have been printed elsewhere. If you are a Clarke nut, you have probably already some, if not much of what is included here; if you are not, you will probably not even be interested. If you are that hard-core ACC reader, then it will be worth you while to track this long-out-of-print book down in order to read the pieces in it that are not available elsewhere. If you are a casual fan of his non-fiction writing, or a fan of his fiction and looking to get acquainted with the other side of Clarke, I highly reccommend the recent giant collection, "Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!" which collects the majority of Clarke's major essays into one large collection.

I am an instructor who teaches Novell Intranetware to students who don't have any previous computer experience, and they DETEST the book. I never noticed all the extra crap in it until they pointed it out to me. I spend most of my time pointing them to the EXCELLENT diagrams and charts, and steering them away from the text... It needs a re-write very very badly. I am going to recommend to my school that we change textbooks for this course.

I didn't log on to review this book but to search for another. I have to agree with most of the other reviewers. I haven't taken the exam yet because after going over and over this book I have no confidence that I can pass the exam. All the extra fluff was terribly distracting! I couldn't keep track of where he was going most of the time. I passed my MCSE self study in 4 months. So I don't think its just me. I going to try another author.

This book is an excellent source to study and prepare you to pass the CNA exam with a minimal amount of effort, it's just probably not going to be opened again after you pass the exam. A reference/resource kit for future use it's not. Do yourself a favor and spend a few extra bucks and get the CNE study guide. It has the same content and then some, and it's a great sidekick for reference on the job!