This book was published in 1997 and doesn't cover recent versions of the program.

This book is very easy to use for someone with no web-page design experience. It walks you step by step through the process of design either from scratch or by templates. Pictures match to your screen images to help you follow the text and there are quizzes at the end of chapters for review. Although it's set-up for classroom instruction, almost anyone could use it independently!

Before discussing this book, let me caution readers that the book contains many examples of female nudes, a number of which are in overt sexual situations. This book would be at least "R" rated if it were a movie. Treat it accordingly. I saw nothing that was not in good taste, but people who wish to avoid such images should be forewarned. When originally published, some of these images were considered quite controversial.

The strength of this book is Helmut Newton's outstanding fashion photography. The weakness is that it is displayed in facsimiles from the magazines rather than as a collection of perfectly reproduced photographs. This approach allows you to see how the photographs work with the layouts and designs. Also, the poses and compositions (both strengths of Newton's) are very clear for your consideration. The actual images themselves are often reproduced very poorly, however, sometimes looking like something that came off of a bad copier.

Unlike many of the great photographers of the 20th century who saw themselves as artists first, Newton saw himself as existing primarily through publications. "I realized very early on that the most important factor would be to be published, with a by-line . . . ." This made him see the artistic life of his work as secondary. "If any of these photographs end up on gallery or museum walls or in the possession of collectors, well all the better . . . ." Think of him as the exact opposite of Ansel Adams in how he wants his work to be expressed and remembered.

This book contains more than 500 pages of color, and black and white images from over 3000 that Newton published through 1998. The examples come mostly from French Vogue (beginning in 1961), Queen, Jardin des Modes, British Vogue, Elle, Daily Telegraph Magazine, American Vogue, Nova, Marie Claire, Deutsche Vogue, Amica, Vanity Fair, Paris Match, Allure, and Stern. Most of the examples are from the 1960s and the 1970s.

Mr. Newton's style is very lively. His models have strong personalities, and usually dominate the scene. They are also active, creating an excitement that draws attention to them. For example, he has a great talent for capturing models as they start to fall into a swimming pool.

In many cases, suble humor adds to the picture, as with the swimming pool props. I especially liked the photographs where Mr. Newton appears in the photograph through his use of mirrors. Equally amusing were the photographs where the models photographed themselves using mirrors in the same way.

As sexual mores and tastes loosened up over the years, Mr. Newton's work became more playful and free. I also thought it worked better. I enjoyed the brief essays in the book in which he explained how his relations with editors affected his assignments and the style limitations which he had to observe.

Seeing these images made me hunger for a similar book filled with luscious, perfectly-reproduced images of just these photographs on large pages of great paper. Hopefully, a publisher will indulge me in the future. Now that will be a more than five-star book!

After enjoying the poses and compositions, I suggest you think about where in your life you may be presenting yourself or your ideas in ways that steal much of their power. How can you ovecome that tendency?

Put your best foot forward, whenever possible.

This retrospective shows Helmut's work as it appeared in numerous (mostly european) Vogue magazines. It's great to see how his photography was marketed through the decades. This collection is focused mostly on his 60's and 70's work.

These suggestions seem pretty good, only I think it would be better to have a book rather than a calendar. You can't remember all these stain removers and solutions to cleaning problems.

There are some things that I use and save from this daily tear off calendar, but some I don't. Thats okay, thats what you should expect. Thats realy good becuase my house isnt and wont be squeeky clean! I made the best investment of the month! Its so cheep! Its worth it!

To have a choice between three devoted and good - looking admirers is a reality that Anna knows. From ruggedly handsome long-time boyfriend Joel, sophisticated and insincere Peter, to muscular, flirty Kerry, Anna has the kind of love problems that most girls want. Her silly and embarassing antics leave the reader cringing as she begins to discover which man she really cares about

Anna is going away for the summer to Senaca Falls summer camp to be a senior counselor with her long time best friend Lucky. She's sad to leave her boyfriend Joel behind with her other friend Jackie, but can't wait to see what the summer will bring her. Rugged Kerry Halley is drop-dead gorgous and Anna is have second thoughts about Joel. She accepts an invitation from Kerry to go to the Fourth of July party and is really excited - that is until she get's a letter from her last summer crush, Peter, and a call from Joel both saying that there coming down there for the holiday weekend to see her. This major crisis of three boys in one weekend has Anna dumbstruck and she has no idea what to do! This book is a lot of laughs from lots of embarissing moments to suspense that makes you want to skip down a paragraph or two to see what happens. In the end of course she picks one and all is well. The only real problem that I saw in this book is the romantic seens - a little too much mush for reality and you might find your self rolling your eyes at some of the things the characters have say to each other. Still, it was a fun read and you just might enjoy it.

For developers involved with web-based projects, whether it be an online store for electronic commerce or an Intranet site for accessing and modifying company data, the powerful blend of JavaServer Pages (JSP) and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technologies can really make life simple. Once you've mastered them, creating new components that encapsulate business logic, or new web interfaces to existing systems, is easy. The trick, for developers, is mastering the technologies.

Professional JSP is one way to get up to speed. Like many of the books published by Wrox Press, Professional JSP covers a specific technology in-depth, as well as the various ancillary topics relating to it such as databases, servlets, and XML. While not every developer will need every web technology covered by the book (and there are many), the book works both as a tutorial to cover the basics and a reference for technologies that you may encounter later.

Professional JSP starts by covering the basics of Java Server Pages, and how they relate to other web technologies. Embedded in HTML pages, JSP provides an easy mechanism for creating interactive web interfaces that draws on server-side components, known as Enterprise JavaBeans. While the presentation logic is written in JSP, the processing occurs within these JavaBean components. The book takes a balanced approach, covering both JSP and its syntax, as well as how to write and interact with JavaBeans to perform useful tasks, like accessing databases through JDBC and using other Java technologies. However, if you've read other Wrox titles, you may find there is some overlap in the topics covered.

One of the nice things about Professional JSP is that, in addition to covering theory, it goes further and examines practical applications of JSP, and issues for programmers like security and debugging. Like other titles in the Professional series, there are case studies of real projects using JSP and related technologies. My favorite would have to be the case study on porting Active Server Pages to JSP -- something that is extremely important for developers with "legacy" web systems. On the whole, Professional JSP is an excellent book for web developers wanting to get up to speed with Java Server Pages, web development, and Enterprise JavaBeans. However, developers with less of a web presentation focus and more of back-end server view may also want to consider the excellent Professional Java Server Programming title, which also covers JSP. -- David Reilly, reviewed for the Java Coffee Break

This is a book for programmers who have a solid background in servlets programming and some experience in JSP. For beginners and for people who wish to learn those techniques on a standalone machine, they will be better off with Hall's "core servlets & JSP" or Fields&Kolb's "web development & JSP".

The book consists of 20 chapters. The first 12 chapters discuss the various salient aspects of JSP and the rest ( about two third of the whole book) is devoted to case studies.

A. THE BOOK'S STRENGTH:

By adopting Tomcat as its main testing software, the editors of "Professional JSP" have assured that most of the code examples will work. This is a big improvement over the past wrox books.

There are some excellent chapters in the first part. The discussion on session tracking is a real gem although the author failed to make a showcase of the code examples. The chapter on JSP Architecture contains some of the clearest explaination on the techniques of redirecting, forwarding and requestdispatcher. The chapter on customtags is equally very well done. But my favorite is the chapter on Global Settings, the idea is so practical. I also like the idea of emphasizing the importance of authentication which showed in many chapters of the book.

The case studies will serve as an excellent reference. Its coverage ranges from (1) the front end of an insurance company (2) a good pictures website which use JSP to publish its data (3) Security with JNDI (4) a online store using LDAP and JSP (5) J@EE, EIBs and Customtags (6) Multimedia and JSP (7) Weather website with JSP, XSLT and WAP (8) Porting ASP to JSP.

2. BOOK'S WEAKNESS:

The book is a combined effort of many authours and its unevenness showed. The first three chapters to introduce to JSP are out of place and a real waste. The chapter on Dynamic GUIs is a great idea which turned into a joke: after showing the general diea how to do it, the author sent readers to his website to learn the rest(?). And the chapter on JDBC connectivity and Pooling is a big disappointment: most of the chapter devoted to get connection, create databse,editing it and make query; and the rest the author explained how to use his own pool manager package, PoolMan. This wouldn't be too bad if PoolMan worked, with Tomcat.

The richness of the case studies is also its weakness. Unless you are experienced and have the facilities, you can't test them all. These techniques become obsolete pretty quick.

Probably the strongest objection to the book is its price. Buy it for your company and share with your colleague.

This book covers the chapters in a very structured way. It starts with a concise description of the JSP Basics with a detailed explanation of the concepts. It explains all the concepts in a very clear and simple words supported by an equally clear Comments and examples. Any body with a little of Java experience can become very familiar with the JSP syntax and concepts by reading first few chapters. It covers all the necessary JSP syntax for building a small web application to a very large distributed Application. It also explains about the way the JSP pages are processed by different web servers. For example it explains about the various methods available to maintain a persistence session and their merits and demerits. This is the first book in JSP series that explains not only the concepts of JSP and how effectively one can use them with the help of this book. It also covers various other topics like EJB, JNDI, JDBC, XML, XSLT and WML in very detailed way. Overall I feel this is the greatest JSP book ever published so far. I could build a simple and robust JSP Web application by reading the first few chapters in a short period of time.

I'm amazed! I started reading these reader comments hoping to get some insight into where these books are headed. Apparently no other reader has figured it out either. Even the people who said they liked it seemed to hit the nail right on the head: There is NO character development in this book.

The characters are dull and uninteresting. After a book and a half and some 700+ pages I had to admit that I just didn't CARE what happened to these people.

This book, more so than the first, is impossible to finish because if you lose interest and set it down for a few days (weeks, months while you read something more interesting)then pick it up again, you're completely lost because there is absolutely nothing memorable about the characters or the plot.

Sure Drake "Juggles plot lines and brings them neatly together" because in this world NOTHING makes sense, there's no cause and effect, the characters don't learn from their adventures, so he can just WRITE them back together. The books end when Drake stops writing, not when he's resolved some conflict.

Okay, his writing is clear, his ideas are fresh, inventive and fairly exciting, but basic writing techniques like story arch and character development seem to be lost on the author. Considering these are covered at length in nearly every basic creative writing class, book or magazine, one wonders how he's managed to avoid exposure to any of the above, or why he chose to ignore these basic concepts. A one-night class would do him wonders!

But then he's managed to get paid to write at lest 4 of these. Do us all a favor. Don't buy this book and maybe he'll stop writing them.

While the plot (orpahn boy is actually the long-lost king) is nothing new and most of the characters I've seen before, Drake's world-building is credible and the story hops along at an energetic pace and managed to keep me reading despite what I feel to be writing under par.

David Drake's style is replete with simile metaphor and analogy that most often is so verbose that the comparison is lost by the time I finish the sentence. The sentences themselves are clumsy and inarticulate and distract me from what is actually trying to be said. I fnd the characters to be mono-dimensional and seriously lacking in human motivation. The plotting flows like a role-playing game jumping from: scene-encounter enemy/situation-fight enemy/situation-learn piece of epic plotting-vanquish enemy/solve situation-be transported to next scene-repeat process with character number 2.

Despite all of it's flaws Queen of Demons was a marginal improvement on the first book in the series and I still read the whole thing so there must have been something about it that I liked enough to keep turning pages (though I am not sure what it is because every page kept reminding me that I was reading a story and never succeeded in "transporting me away from the mundane world" like when you see a movie with a famous actor and you are never sold on his character because you keep thinking "Oh, that's Brad Pitt"). I am not sure that I will bother to reed the next installment in the series, but I could get bored and buy it anyway for lack of anything better to read.

Quite a good read. Drake keeps the intest level high with more almost meetings between the struggling characters. Cashel gains a new companion. Garric begins to lead. (I'm not going to give away more than that) The story builds up to a final double confrantation that proves worth it. The hook for the next book is obvious, however I'm not an author so I can't complain.

This book is useful but don't expect a terse or concise explanation of the "development framework" known as ASP that is "so robust and extensible and powerful" that all of you who should even think of using other mere applications should give up all hope, because ASP "really has no disadvantages". If you despise Microsoft for being proprietary and counter to the free flow of code, then you might hate ASP. I got this book at a bargain bin for $6 and for that price it is worthwhile reading through the inflated and obsequious commercial promotional groveling that the author does to Microsoft ASP. The code presented has errors. The pace of the book is rather slow and the author does repeat concepts over and over. So, you skip a few paragraphs now and then. The obnoxious kowtowing to MS aside, it does provide a good overview, but again, if I had paid full price, I probably would not be happy. Caveat emptor. I would think there is better out there unless you can get this edition cheap.

If you are an ASP beginner, "Teach Yourself ASP in 24 Hours" may be a better start.

This book is poorly written. There is some useful code, but the author does a poor job at explaining what the code does. After reading the book you are bound to ask yourself, "What on earth did I just learn?" The answer: nothing. You will most likely need another book to start all over again.

This book is great, my website is much improved because of it but, in the coding examples there are many mistakes, After you read the book though you should be able to correct these. I also found it very simple to edit applications to create amazing databases and asp pages. I suggest this book for people who havde general knowledge of html. Check it out!

Unless you're doing simple JSPs this book is not for you. If you're already a java programmer and are familiar with servlets (at least in concept), this book probably isn't for you. If you're doing complex or industrial strength JSPs, this book is not for you.
First, the book actually teaches the wrong approach, in my opinion. One big criticism of JSPs is that they do not do a good job separating view (GUI, display) from business logic. They aren't good because you can embed java code in the JSP. The apache group hated this ability so much they went off and did some template engine stuff (worth looking at.. Velocity/Turbine projects). This book actually encourages embedding your biz logic in the JSP, thus making the web designers have to know java. In fact, the book has whole sections dedicated to nothing other than understanding Java. Another criticism is that the industry would like to have the folks that do the front end GUI (web designers) and the folks that do the back end business logic and complex tasks (the programmers) be as separate as possible. Engineers can't make things pretty and web designers write horrible code. Keep the two apart, but give them the tools to work together. This book doesn't even talk about that approach, or worse yet, does talk about it and presents its material as a good approach to do this. It's not!
The one good thing that JSPs have that can save it from this embedded java code, the custom JSP tags, is barely covered.. a cursory view at best, irresponsible documentation at worst.
Thus, instead of teaching something worthwhile, like the model-view-controller using JSP custom tags and the concept of trying to keep the java code OUT of the JSP, this book teaches bad practices. If all the author wanted to teach was what JSPs CAN do(not should do), it's an ok book.

After I had read the other reviews, I decided to write my own on this book. First, readers claiming that this book is insufficiant are wrong, because this one is a well-organized, and comprehensive book, and suitable for both beginners and advanced programmers and web designers. Also, I do not share the idea that this book does not explain everything. If you read the details in paragraphs, you can easily understand how the specific properties of JSP work. But the reason why I gave four stars is that the book is a little bit out-dated, I mean some of the new features of JSP (custom tags, etc.) are not included (maybe in later editions), but every book becomes out-dated in time. I am new at Java and related topics, but I am a very fast self-learner, and I examined other techs like ASP, and CGI (even wrote a library in Delphi), had the idea that Java is the best one. Last sentence: Buy this book!

I was fortunate in being able to look at this book while in manuscript, having been one of its tech reviewers. Mr. Pekowsky is a very gifted author and in addition, he really knows his stuff. He has a wonderful way of presenting technical matters in a crystalline-clear fashion.

The JSP material in the book covers the complete gamut from elementary (e.g., jsp at an html-ish level) through advanced (e.g., jsp accessing java beans). Throughout the book the discussion is motivated in the context of putting together a fictional, Slashdot-like "Java News Today" (JNT) Web site. Besides being a good teaching tool, the JNT examples should be useful for cut-and-paste use by readers.

I think good JSP's are pretty tough to write, and especially to debug. If you're interested in JSP programming, you'll need all the help you can get. This book will assist mightily.

I have tried several times to read this book. I even bought it on tape to listen to on the way to work. It is long and if your a fan of fantasy, you've seen it all before. The tapes were especially annoying. I didn't realize until tape three that you had to reajust the speakers to listen to that tape again. It was frustratuing, and the action was confusing. Sorry, I gave it my best. Try David Drakes "Dragon Lord" instead.

The only thing that made me finish this book is that I was in the middle of nowhere with no alternative fiction available.

Drake truly stunned me with his ability to write an entire book of which I have yet to figure out the plot. The story lacks depth and complexity; very little actually happens in this book, although there are many adventures. Unlike some of the critics, I did not think there was much orginality here; not even in the writing. It felt, and read, more like a children's adventure story than a true fantasy novel.

In addition, the characters are sadly lacking in depth, although I grudgingly have to admit I liked Cashel as the very normal country boy with unusual wizard talent (Nellie the sidekick sprite, on the other hand, got up my nose). Cashel begs to be explored more deeply, and perhaps this is done in the sequels. He is kind, thinks clearly (albeit slowly) and the reader can sympathise with his dispositions.

"Lord of the Isles", however, is missing an irresistable hero (or heroine) that the reader can commit to regardless of character flaws. In fact, characters with personalities is something that Drake omitted altogether.

I finished the book, which is about as much as I can say about it. I have no idea why the rest of the trilogy was written, let alone why anyone would want to read it. In truth, I don't even know why this book was printed. Perhaps Drake has a better reputation for his other books; unfortunately for him, this is the only one I've read.

My experience before this book with science fiction was the Hobbit series (when it first came out)! So, now that I've dated myself, let me say that I really enjoyed this book. It was left on an airplane by someone, and I picked it up because I had a long airport layover in front of me. I was truly surprised at how engaging the characters were. I liked how the author jumped around in parallel story lines. It kept my attention, though if I let a day or so go by without reading some, I usually had to refresh my memory of what the characters were facing. Since reading this book, I've read Queen of Demons, and I am about to start Servant of The Dragon. I guess now I would be considered a fan of David Drake's writing.

Contract Web Developer, UK

This is an excellent resource for applying and learning the ASP craft and it smoothly moves from beginner to advanced concepts while covering the key ground.

Four things make this book stand out from the crowd:

(1) It's an excellent introduction to HTML, VBScript,ADO and ASP and more advanced topics.

(2) It's clear and uses relevant examples

(3) It's comprehensive in it's coverage

(4) It smoothly moves from beginner to advanced material.

This book was written by a seasoned and certified developer and a regular contributor to the ASP/ VB community. And it shows: in the quality of the examples and the clear structure and layout of the book and code.

The section on ADO essentials (Chapter 10) is excellent, and I liked the section that discussed remotely connecting to a database and using DataLink files (pages 212 to 216 in my book). That's not mentioned in most books but it's vital if you intend to connect to a database such as SQL server over a LAN or external hosting service.

The script in this book is well structured, and uses a style familiar to VB programmers. That's invaluable when you actually put a site together, and want to debug and maintain your code.

This book is a good companion to 'Instant ASP Scripts' by McGrawHill. The latter is a 'cook book' with ready recipes for most of the core functions you'll need for a site. ASP Bible, helps structure the 'spaghetti code' of the former book, while rounding out the missing parts and providing the depth you'll need to enhance your site. The downloadable code samples from the book which are listed in the preface worked fine (after adjusting the code to reflect my local drive settings, DSN name etc).

Despite a few glitches in the commentary, there is plenty of good content and examples in this book. For best results use this with a 'cook-book' or 'application-ready.'

A good resource if you want a book that provides a practical walk through, and plenty of bite sized examples of what you'll need to know and use as a web developer.

This is an excellent resource for applying and learning the ASP craft and it smoothly moves from beginner to advanced concepts while covering the key ground.

Four things make this book stand out from the crowd:

(1) It's an excellent introduction to HTML, VBScript,ADO and ASP and more advanced topics.

(2) It's clear and uses relevant examples

(3) It's comprehensive in it's coverage

(4) It smoothly moves from beginner to advanced material.

This book was written by a seasoned and certified developer and a regular contributor to the ASP/ VB community. And it shows: in the quality of the examples and the clear structure and layout of the book and code.

The section on ADO essentials (Chapter 10) is excellent, and I liked the section that discussed remotely connecting to a database and using DataLink files (pages 212 to 216 in my book). That's not mentioned in most books but it's vital if you intend to connect to a database such as SQL server over a LAN or external hosting service.

The script in this book is well structured, and uses a style familiar to VB programmers. That's invaluable when you actually put a site together, and want to debug and maintain your code.

This book is a good companion to 'Instant ASP Scripts' by McGrawHill. The latter is a 'cook book' with ready recipes for most of the core functions you'll need for a site. ASP Bible, helps structure the 'spaghetti code' of the former book, while rounding out the missing parts and providing the depth you'll need to enhance your site. The downloadable code samples from the book which are listed in the preface worked fine (after adjusting the code to reflect my local drive settings, DSN name etc).

Despite a few glitches in the commentary, there is plenty of good content and examples in this book. For best results use this with a 'cook-book' or 'application-ready.'

A good resource if you want a book that provides a practical walk through, and plenty of bite sized examples of what you'll need to know and use as a web developer.

Web Developer, UK

This is an excellent resource for applying and learning the ASP craft and it smoothly moves from beginner to advanced concepts while covering the key ground.

Four things make this book stand out from the crowd:

(1) It's an excellent introduction to HTML, VBScript,ADO and ASP and more advanced topics.

(2) It's clear and uses relevant examples

(3) It's comprehensive in it's coverage

(4) It smoothly moves from beginner to advanced material.

This book was written by a seasoned and certified developer and a regular contributor to the ASP/ VB community. And it shows: in the quality of the examples and the clear structure and layout of the book and code.

The section on ADO essentials (Chapter 10) is excellent, and I liked the section that discussed remotely connecting to a database and using DataLink files (pages 212 to 216 in my book). That's not mentioned in most books but it's vital if you intend to connect to a database such as SQL server over a LAN or external hosting service.

The script in this book is well structured, and uses a style familiar to VB programmers. That's invaluable when you actually put a site together, and want to debug and maintain your code.

This book is a good companion to 'Instant ASP Scripts' by McGrawHill. The latter is a 'cook book' with ready recipes for most of the core functions you'll need for a site. ASP Bible, helps structure the 'spaghetti code' of the former book, while rounding out the missing parts and providing the depth you'll need to enhance your site. The downloadable code samples from the book which are listed in the preface worked fine (after adjusting the code to reflect my local drive settings, DSN name etc).

Despite a few glitches in the commentary, there is plenty of good content and examples in this book. For best results use this with a 'cook-book' or 'application-ready.'

A good resource if you want a book that provides a practical walk through, and plenty of bite sized examples of what you'll need to know and use as a web developer.