Oonawassee Summer is a fabulous book! My fourth grade students simply loved it! It is chalked full of knowledge about Florida and life on the river. My students' related with the book's two young characters,Addie and Tanner. They loved the sense of adventure and all the mystery and suspense. A definite must read for children ages 8-12. You will never feel the same about dangling your feet off a pier into murky river water again.

As a Florida native having spent some time on the rivers in the backwoods, I re-lived the sights, sounds, smells and excitment of discovering Florida's natural treasures with Addie and Tanner at Uncle Henry's bait shop on the Oonawasee! Melissa Fourney captures with lucious details the same kinds of people and places I remember from my childhood visits to the river. Her story gives life to the REAL Florida which is rapidly disappearing. Teachers will love the story's vivid descriptions for classroom reading, along with the wonderful illustrated glossary of fabulous Florida facts!

In Oonawassee Summer, Addie and Tanner (two twelve-year-old cousins) are spending the summer with their grandma and great-uncle on the backs of the Oonawassee River in Southern Florida. That is where they engage in exploration, discovery, and find intrigue and adventure. Although the river is fictional, Melissa Forney's fun and engaging novel is enhanced with a wealth of factual information about jon boats, river otters, cypress trees, herons, alligators, cast nets, and other fascinating details of life in southern Florida. Highly recommended reading for boys and girls ages 8 to 12.

In the tradition of Are You My Mother, one of those picaresque journeys of home and identity that young children adore. Scott Beck is a gifted artist and his books are treasures.

What a great book. The poor little bird is scared to fly, but not afraid to try numerous other things. An enchanting story, very nicely illustrated, and a good lesson. Sometimes we need other people to tell us that we are brave enough to try the things we are scared of. My 2 and 1/2 year old loves the story, and we enjoy reading it to her...over & over again.

In a beautifully illustrated book, Scott Beck has created an endearing character with a great big fear. Rather than worrying about it, Pepito works his way around his fear never realizing the true bravery that involves. All children will enjoy watching this little bird solve his problem.

The drawings are adorable, the text sweetly simple, and the story easy enough for even the youngest to understand. It is a quick, happy book- perfect for when a child crawls upon your lap and asks you to read him a story.

This book is a must for perl programmers. Throughout the book, the authors develop 46 "Perls of Wisdom". These guidelines will help you write code with fewer bugs and help you fix bugs when they do come up - and they will! I tend to enjoy software books with a little humor to them, and this one fits the bill. Here are the highlights from the book:

Ch. 1-

Gives some background on the perl language and good tips on accessing the documentation for various parts of perl on various platforms.

Ch. 2-

Kind of a touchy/feely chapter; however, there is wisdom in it. It helps you understand how your attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors affect your code. Don't skip it.

Ch. 3-

This chapter gives you some good advice on how to avoid bugs in your program. One of these is documentation. I've found that documenting something makes you think about things you otherwise might not have.

Ch. 4-

Gives some common sources of bugs in perl including syntax, precedence, and regular expressions.

Ch. 5-

How to get formatted printouts of variables in your using Data::Dumper. This is a step up from print statements, and is easy to use.

Ch. 6-

Includes good information on testing your code and the perl modules available to assit you in test harnesses and coverage tests.

Ch. 7-

This is the gem of the book. It is a step by step guide to using the perl debugger. If reading man pages makes your head hurt, you will find this tutorial much more user friendly.

Ch. 8-

An excellent chapter on interpreting the syntax error reports that perl spits out.

Ch. 9-

The runtime exception counterpart to the previous chapter. It contains a discussion of perl exception handling vs. that of java or c++.

Ch. 10-

This chapter deals with the tough topic of code that compiles and runs, but gives the wrong answer. It gives techinques for seeing how perl interpreted your code.

Ch. 11-

This chapter gives you advice for improving performance using the Benchmark module.

Ch. 12-

A nice comparison to other languages. If you are fluent in another programming language, it is helpful to know how the it compares to perl.

The examples in this book are what make it the most useful. They show you how to use various perl modules to make your code better. Being new to the language, I wasn't even aware that some of these modules existed. Unless you are a perl master already, you should find plenty of useful information in Perl Debugged.

I'm tremendously pleased with Perl Debugged. It's half a book about Perl debugging, and half a book with more general advice, all pleasantly blended together. Peter and Ed take you on an unrivaled tour of the ups and downs of Perl debugging. It's sort of like Effective Perl Programming's "Debugging" chapter except hugely and brilliantly expanded. It's comprehensive and imaginative without being pedantic. It covers the Perl debugger (of course), it covers the different types of errors you'll encounter in Perl programs, it covers debugging strategies, and (very important) it covers the always-icky topic of debugging CGI programs. And some other topics ....

Even experienced Perl programmers will enjoy reading this book. You may think you've seen it all but I guarantee you that you haven't seen all of the examples of weirdness featured herein. It reminds me of Kon and Bal's debugging "brainteasers" in Apple's now defunct Develop magazine.

I *highly* recommend Perl Debugged to anyone at the beginning or intermediate stage in Perl programming, particularly to programmers who have less than 2-4 years of debugging experience in general. An experienced programmer, on the other hand, will want to buy a copy (copies?) to browse and then hand to his junior co-worker(s) with stern instructions to "read first, code later." (Reminds me of the time I bought Bugs in Writing.)

Apparently the authors have a way with words. The prose is unusually good--not just by the standards of technical books--colorful, extremely clear, and enjoyable to read. (The illustrations by Peter's sister-in-law are great.) About the only thing that "bugs" me is the authors' use of "semantical" in preference to "semantic."

Fun book, of 3 perl metabooks (others Hall/Schwartz Efficient Perl (everybody shd read) and Brown's Debugging Perl (I haven't read much) ). There's "35 best hackers", good bibliographies/TOC index could be more detailed) and the 1st 100 pages had me thinking authors were watching my perl screwups over my shoulder. One wish list item: more info on vim, gnu/xemacs (getting syntax coloring/tabbing right on NT, compiling .els)

$1MM Question: can these books keep perl growing? Python,ruby don't seem to need these debugging/dev practices books.

Another question: can any books on perl/python stay up to date? Since this came out: komodo (you are trying to get your boss to pay $250 subscription, aren't you?), Visual perl/python, python DBI, 3 or 4 more Oreillys, etc. etc.

Marsha Hayles has crafted a book that children will enjoy as a read-along tale. She tells the story of Tabitha, also known as Tabby, who lives on a farm. Tabby has a pet horse that she teaches a trick to; the horse in turn has a pet cow, the cow has a pet pig, and so on throughout the farm.

The text of the story flows along easily for children to understand. They will enjoy imitating the sounds the animals make as each pet learns a trick. Scott Nash's illustrations, while cartoonish at times, are vivid, large, and colorful, as well as engaging. The pictures complement that story and are sure to draw children into the tale and follow along. "Pet of a Pet" should be a welcome storytime entry, but due to its sometimes-wordy text should be at the beginning of the program. For this reason the 4 to 6 age range is the recommended target.

As a first grade teacher in an urban setting I find that I'm constantly preaching the merits of treating each other with love and respect, well I'm happy to report that I've found a great book that gets my point across in a much more effective way. Pet of a Pet by Marsha Hayles (Penguin Putnam Publishers)is a delightful kid friendly read that my students embraced.

This book is funny, clever, creative and inspirational. It sends a message of love that is sometimes hard to find these days.

This is a great book for kids who love, and are loved by, their pets. There's a running joke in this circle of pets that the "owners" reveal themselves in how they see their pets. That might be a thought-provoking lesson on the nature of love, but in this tale it just becomes all fun and silliness. That said, my nieces and nephew love it. The pattern of the words and story is great for beginning readers. And for the adults who will be reading it to them again and again, there are extra details in the word play and pictures to keep us going.

Phase Two
by Dr. C. Scott Littleton
Arlington, VA:The Invisible College Press, LLC, 2002. 294 pp., [$$$]

While *UFO Magazine does not usually review fiction, we are persuaded to do so when an exceptional novel crosses the editor's desk. In the case of *Phase Two by Dr. C. Scott Littleton, Professor Emeritus, Occidental College, we again make an exception. The novel is that fascinating.
*Phase Two is an extrapolation of what may lie behind years and years of abduction accounts and the likely long-range goals of our alien "visitors." Written with the "eye" of the anthropologist that he is, the novel shows vast familiarity with human accounts of gods and goddesses, myths and legends and what may be behind these fantastic stories.
Professor Culley Wisdom begins his journey while living the life of an expatriate in Japan, having left a failed academic career behind in southern California. Before his departure, Wisdom had been an untenured professor of anthropology in a small liberal arts college in the San Gabriel Valley suburbs. One evening while investigating some thousand-year-old native American ruins in the Mojave Desert, Wisdom became the victim of a UFO abduction. His experience, involving a sexual encounter with an exotic human/hybrid female, threw Wisdom's life into a tailspin. Unable to assimilate the experience, Professor Wisdom not only talked about his encounter, he wrote what would become a bestselling book about it, which the Dean of his college found unacceptable. Wisdom lost his teaching position, then his wife left him. Unable to secure anything else in American academia, he traveled to Japan and found himself teaching English to Japanese businessmen.
Ten years after his abduction, Wisdom finds himself face to face with the alien female who caused him to undergo such a life shattering experience. While heading to work, Wisdom encounters her in a Japanese train station, then follows her to a small coffee shop where she assures him he was not dreaming the past experience. This seemingly young woman is actually a 120-year-old hybrid of alien/human DNA, and her name is Qaazi Qann-gaa. As Wisdom is about to learn, she conceived a male child during the sexual encounter, and he is presently living in an underground base on one of the several alien installations on planet Earth.
But there is much more.
Qaazi Qann-gaa is very unhappy with the way things are conducted by her alien masters, called the Clan. The Alien Raj, it seems, is deeply conservative and locked into its long term project, in Phase One. This phase of an extremely long-range plan involves harvesting DNA and other covert goals. Phase Two, which has not yet been implemented, concerns opening limited contact between members of the Clan and humanity. Qaazi intends to try to speed things along by initiating Phase Two herself, with the help of her human paramour.
Things are not quite so rosy, however. Even the Alien Raj has its problems, because there is another competitive alien faction present on planet Earth. The faction represented by Qaazi Qann-gaa hails from the Pleiades. The second faction, called SESO, comes from Zeta Reticulus and is vying with the Clan to exploit the planet. As Wisdom is about to find out, a vast war was fought between these two alien cultures thousands of years ago, a war that took place right here on Earth. While peace now reigns between these two powers, covert warfare has not ceased.
The third ingredient to enter this mix is the elusive American intelligence agency known as MJ-12. Formed after the UFO crash that took place in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, the group is trying to make some sense out of the alien presence on planet Earth. They are aware and have very limited contact with both factions. They are hampered, however, by humans' comparatively limited technology, and find themselves constantly trying to play "catch up." The scene is set for a very compelling story.

As Professor Wisdom discovers while deep in one alien facility, the Clan has been present on Earth for a very long time. Inside the base he discovers a museum of sorts, called the Museum of Time. "It was housed in a series of artificial caves carved from the bedrock directly beneath the Central Plaza, and included a seemingly endless number of brightly illuminated, diorama-like exhibits that span over twelve thousand years of human history," Littleton writes.
"Every race and region of Earth was represented several times over, as was almost every culture that has existed since the first contingent of Pleiadians arrived at the end of the last Ice Age. . . . There were at least ten ancient Egyptian scenes. Some were of simple peasants frozen in the act of threshing grain or planting crops . . . There were scenes depicting the building of the Great Wall of China and the Pyramid of the Sun at Teothuacan in Southern Mexico. Another large group of scenes depicted the daily life in both ancient Athens and ancient Rome; still others devoted to medieval European castles and monasteries . . . " And as Wisdom discovers, the humans placed in these dioramas are actually real humans from those times-seen in quiet suspended animation! Oh, those pesky ETs!
Over the years one thing might be said with absolute certainty about the UFO phenomenon--no one really knows what the actual facts are. After decades speculating on something as esoteric as alien abduction, we are no closer to the truth now than we were at the beginning. What is satisfying about *Phase Two is that Littleton's plot line could be close to the answer. The author, a scholarly scrutinizer of the Alien Raj, has paid close attention to the contradictions and confusion inherent in phenomenon's behavior, but still is able to weave disparate data points into a logical whole. While at present simply do not know, there's a kind of comfort in reading an engrossing but credible fictional rendering of this huge mystery which hangs over humanity like an eternal albatross.--Don Ecker

What was most interesting to me about Phase Two was its integration of detail, speculation, and ethnographic fact. UFO lore is now so systematized, wide-reaching, and detailed that it rivals the sacred stories of ancient cultures. Littleton's grasp of the nuances of this information puts his novel on the level of classic contemporary mythology. He effectively creates larger-than-life characters, and we get a very thought-provoking way to think about what's out there in the UFO research and rumor community.

In a way, it doesn't matter if you believe or don't believe. In fact, after reading the book several weeks ago, I find that I am still thinking about it. For a while I thought about the characters and how both humans and aliens were being duped and set-up. This was familiar to me, a moral drama that I've lived many times. But after a while I began to see how deeply--at some level--I had accepted the story as if it were real, and it didn't matter if it were or were not. It was a little like my reactions to my religion. I "feel," and I accept the feeling, but I can't say that I "believe" any particular text. I have a much expanded understanding of dimensionality after reading Phase Two. The book is an easy and engaging read--but it is much deeper than it appears.

Littleton is an internationally acknowledged anthropologist, and he does not write about that which he does not know firsthand--whether that be traditional Japanese Zen ritual (he was a Fulbright scholar) or quantum physics, speculations about gravity, and non-locality (professions and topics cultivated by his close friends). His command of data and detail makes for a story that puts pieces of UFOlogy into places in the mind that are easy to retrieve and easy to snap together.

Now that he is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Occidental College, Scott Littleton is even more fearless than he was throughout all his years mentoring students and advising us, when we studied "primitives," that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (Arthur C. Clarke).

I've had the pleasure of reading an advance copy of PHASE TWO, and I loved it! Littleton has captured the feel of both the alien abduction scene and the extent to which there are rebels among the aliens who want to co-exist with us humans. An excellent sci-fi book! Highly recommedned!

I have read this book and there are two authors in this book, Marlene Aguilar who is a Filipino and Larry Bortles who is an American. Marlene Aguilar is very more knowledgeable about the Philippines and has done her share in preparing the manuscript for the book. I wonder why her name was not included in the authors list. If there is a way this could be rectified, I hope her name will be put in the list.

PLS.SHOW CUSI PAINTING ON SALE. NOT THE ONE HAS BEEN SOL

i like to see more of rafael cusi drawings

THIS REQUEST FROM JUN MEDIN

As a person who enjoy life in Taiwan, I am fascinated with the book, especially with the title story. It is simply amazing. Poignant and precise. Also so tasteful. Must-read for people who have loved, known, stayed in Taiwan.

Russ Leong's story collection (finally!!!) is a treat. The title story is especially attractive to me, a person from Taipei City, Taiwan. (Oh yes, Taipei is Sodom in the story) With a poet's sensibility, Leong knows to present the sexuality in Taipei in 1970s in a sensual and pensive fashion. Readers interested in CRYSTAL BOYS and NOTES FROM A DESOLATE MAN should not miss this title story. Also, another story "Geography One" is very compelling.

For readers like myself who have searched out literary quarterlies published in the United States over the last fifteen years, it was a great joy to discover the appearance of this long overdue collection of short stories by Russell Charles Leong. While living in San Francisco in the early '90s, I discovered Leong's writing in a literary quarterly. That story altered the way I viewed the suburban landscape of Los Angeles. It was also one of the finest stories I had read on the experience of lost love. Therefore, I was thrilled to find it as the second story in this collection. The story is "Geography One." Not only is it a must read, it is also an indicator of one of the themes, in this case loss, that underlies this collection. The title story "Phoenix Eyes," equally pungent, also explores the silent devastation of loss. In this case, a loss that can't be properly expressed as a result of cultural constraints imposed by the main character's former lover's family. The emotional scope of these stories is to broad to be forced cleanly into any ethnic or sexual niche. These are stories written by an important and long under-recognized American writer. And as such, one who deserves a wider readership. While this is his first collection of fiction, I can only hope it is not the last. As this collection affirms his talent, this reader hopes Mr Leong follows it with an equally long-overdue memoir or novel.

Several years ago, while attending Emery-Riddle Aeronautical University, this book was used as our textbook for Aviation Law. To this day, anytime I get on the subject of Aviation Law, I recommend this book to anyone who holds an FAA certificate. I'm a Maintenance Supervisor for a major airline and have suggested it to my employees who have found themselves in less than desirable situations involving enforcement actions. They always come back to me with the same comment; "I wish I had read this book before I got into trouble." Learn from their mistakes - read the book before you NEED the book. It's short and to the point, you won't be sorry!

Now in a completed updated, revised and expanded second edition, Scott Hamilton's Practical Aviation Law provides complete, competent course for self-study or undergraduate study on how the legal system works with respect to aviation activities. With entertaining examples of aviation law in action, all of the recent changes to date in statutory and regulatory law are clarified, including international law. Practical Aviation Law is soundly recommended as a quick reference guide for aviation managers, private and professional aviators, flight cres, airline personnel, aircraft owners, air traffic controllers, air safety investigators, and the non-specialist general reader involved in aviation as a profession or hobby.

I'm a pilot not a lawyer and I have no connection with the author or the company. This excellent book explains in easy to understand language how the aviation legal system works (and doesn't work). The book tells you what steps to take or more importantly, not to take when dealing with the FAA or other aviation related parties. All pilots should read this book to learn how to protect your license.

The subtitle of this book, A Handbook for Researchers and Practitioners, too narrowly defines the audience for Armstrong's new reference. Principles of Forecasting is, in fact, an indispensable resource for managers and professionals of every ilk. Forecasting is an integral part of decisions that we make and that are made for us. To be good decision makers and citizens we owe it to ourselves and others both to make our forecasts explicit and to examine the quality of those forecasts. This book gives the guidance to ensure that best practices are followed and to judge forecast quality after the fact

Principles of Forecasting is not a book that you will find in airport bookstores. It is not a popular management title that dishes-up the latest buzzwords. On the contrary, this book will give you knowledge to examine critically the fashions and fads, as well as the received wisdom, of management. And yet, despite being a serious work, the book is a joy to read at length, or to browse. I suspect many decision makers will tend to do the latter.

The Forecasting Dictionary is part of Principles of Forecasting and is a good place to start some directed browsing. For example, experienced decision makers will often rely on their intuition, even for important decisions. Is that a good idea? The Forecasting Dictionary has an entry for "intuition" that tells us, "... it is difficult to find published studies in which intuition is superior to structured judgment". Highlighted terms, such as "structured judgment" in the preceding passage, indicate that there is a separate Dictionary entry for the term. By following the highlighted terms and the references to the body of the book which are included in Dictionary entries, one can quickly pick up a useful understanding of a topic. Some entries are very detailed.

Following the intuition entry to the entry on structured judgement, one finds "role playing" as an approach to imposing structure on a forecasting problem. Role-play forecasting for conflict situations happens to be an interest of mine. There is a chapter on role-playing in Principles of Forecasting that provides evidence that the outcomes of role-plays by students, and other non- representative role-players, provide accurate forecasts of decisions in real conflicts. This is counter-intuitive given that the conflicts examined involved generals, chief executives, directors, and union leaders among others. Moreover, unaided judgment tends to do poorly by comparison. This has important implications for strategy development - after all, what use is a strategy that fails to forecast accurately how other parties will behave?

I keep my copy of Principles of Forecasting handy, refer to it often, and learn something new every time I do so. How many books could one say that of? A precious few. Congratulations to the authors on a unique and valuable work well executed.

Principles of Forecasting is not a collection of articles describing basic forecasting methods. Instead, 40 authors have used a common format of identifying if-then principles and the support for those principles. Some other common formats of the chapters are: (1) limitations (2) implications for practitioners (3) implications for researchers.

The final chapter of this book contains 139 forecasting principles...

An example of a forecasting principle is: “13.25 Use multiple measures of accuracy”. A primary use for such principles would be as checklists for software developers, researchers, and practitioners to be sure that their work is complete to this level of detail. These are important general principles. Forecasters will need to use other references for the details of forecasting methods.

The Web site for this book is a very valuable resource for forecasters. Some of the resources are: (1) forecasting dictionary [Enter a forecasting term and the Web site returns a definition.] (2) links to forecasting software sites (3) links to forecasting books and reviews (3) links to bibliographies, abstracts, and (for subscribers) full text papers (4) links to conferences on forecasting (5) links to Web sites related to forecasting.

Throughout my career, it seemed every five years or so, I briefly strayed from risk analysis into a closely related field, such as weather reporting or stock picking, just to see what others were doing. Most recently, I won a jackpot in return for the effort. I read J.Scott Armstrong's "Principles of Forecasting: A Handbook for Researchers and Practitioners."

Risk analysis has dealt more with subjects like natural and technological disasters. Business forecasting resembled risk analysis in several ways, but over the years, enterprise and capital markets accumulated much more extensive data. Social scientists studied the process of (and procedures for) forecasting with financial data intensively. Small wonder, as poor forecasting often led to costly disasters.

The authors wrote the Handbook in clear, coherent prose. It assembled 29 articles by 40 leading experts into an excellent book with 18 chapters. Armstrong, the editor (and clearly the instigator) created a hierarchical framework that described the relationships between different kinds of forecasting information, beginning with either judgmental or statistical sources. "Principles of Forecasting" illustrated this framework in an often repeated diagram.

The framework contributed to a coherent structure. Each chapter described one compartment within the framework. Each had an introduction that described the limitations and uses of a source of data used by forecasters. Each article also started with an abstract. Thus, a reader could quickly survey all of forecasting by skimming through the Handbook and reading either the article abstracts or the chapter introductions.

Instead of reading the text sequentially, the framework and the Handbook's structure also allowed finding a specific article (or a topic of interest within an article) quickly, yet staying oriented to the overall subject. Thus, "Principles of Forecasting" served a handy reference text. The organization and a competent index sped this application.

Many articles were excellent. None were less than very good. The articles concentrated on principles within subdomains of forecasting, which the Handbook emphasized by setting the principles apart in bullet format and bold text. The articles had a common format, which included two useful implication sections, separately for practitioners and for researchers. The articles also had overall summaries, and references to the literature. The authors edited each other's articles, which imposed both high quality and consistency on the Handbook. In addition, an extensive group of outside experts reviewed the articles. This huge effort showed in both dense information content and readability of the articles.

Similarly, the Handbook contained a separate and marvelous "Forecasting Dictionary" toward the end, which allowed quick reference to (and understanding of) separate ideas involved in competent forecasting. In another separate section toward the end of the Handbook, a "Forecasting Standards Checklist" gathered all of the principles from the separate articles and condensed them into a very useful guide.

"Principles of Forecasting" appeared comprehensive in its coverage. The authors wrote it as an explanation of a field, instead of a group of individual articles about related subjects. An introduction and a summary at the beginning and end of the book, also helped orient me to the overall subject of forecasting and to the need for principles. I thought that the Handbook reflected the consistent objective of a group of experts to interpret and explain forecasting. So, I will recommend it as a textbook for classroom use.

"Principles of Forecasting" is not for everyone. It is an expert text. However, for persons involved in (or hoping to become involved in) forecasting or its allied and subsidiary fields, such risk analysis or econometrics, it will prove indispensable.