If it were larger, this would be a great Coffee Table Book on Wayang. Nice Photographs, pleasant to flip through, but not meant for reading on a scholarly level. Already the Title is most unfortunate, and is indicative of the lack of respect, knowledge and sensitivity Mr. Irvine has for the subject. He has really only reviewed most of the exisiting Literature on Wayang and has rearranged it in this Book. This makes for a fair, but unreliable introduction. There are no new insights, no new research and no assessments here. It is not too bad when he reviews Wayang, but when he writes on the Subject of Epic Literature, the Ramyana and Mahabharata, which constitue almost all of the Plays of Wayang, then he is totally out of his element. He obviously has little knowledge of the Indian Epics and it shows. I am still pleased the Book was published because it contains many fine illustrations. This Book is for looking, not reading, like the Style Books of Interior Design.

The book was very academic. It did not tell history as I. Garland Penn saw it. Eventhough I found the book to be very informative and important African American history book I wish the authours had written some more things about Penn's personal life, his family and descendants.

The author covers a lot of theory and practical circuits in the book, in excruciating detail. My hat is off to the depth of the mathematical derivations. If this book had color illustrations and explanations that are more qualitative in nature, this would be a five star book. I hope the author considers doing it over in color and with qualitative explantions thay will demystify Op Amp Operation.

the computaional equaions introduced are quiet useful, but usually the values are not exact, one can not match them to the standard values tabulated in therodynamic tables and charts.

When I ordered this book, I expected this book to include information and advice specifically for North Americans. Despite the fact that it is very informative and packed with helpful notes on records to search including one chapter on "Early (pre 1700) England research", I was in for a disappointment since it was mostly information for the general researcher. I guess I expected more on sources a North American could use for England research. Unfortunately, that was not the case over all. Due to this limitation, I believe a more suitable title would have dropped the reference to North Americans and just stuck with a general title.

Despite this limitation, I would still recommend this book for general research and not specific to North American residents.

This book has examples, BUT the most important part of an example will be skipped with a symbol of "...".

That is really annoying. If you are a beginner programmer or you don't know C, this book is not for you.

I am a college student and i needed to find the book but not the price in which the school sold it for i found this book. This gave me great functions, each to understand coding and allowed me to succeed in my class. I got a A I suggest using this book.

Not too long ago I wrote about another VB book, the one we had for our first VB class at Scottsdale Community College, in Arizona (Programming With Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0, by Diane Zak): talk about a bad book! Now, for the VBII class we're using this one. I have to agree that the evolution of the topics is not the best there can be (i.e. there is a jump between somewhat unrelated topics), but saying that it's the worst book or that you should not buy, etc. are not statements that do justice to the book, in my opinion.

The one thing I found about the book that I'm very happy with is the step-by-step way in which it presents the topics covered, no assumptions made. Plus the companion CD it comes with contains ALL the samples discussed in the book, which make things easy at the time of figuring out components of a program that are not visible from the code alone, because they are set within the Properties of an Object.

All in all I am taking away one star because of the way in which it's organized, as I mentioned before, but each topic covered is done in a very clear way, which leaves the programmer with no doubts about it.

This book will make you work!

Won't spoon feed you the information, more like a graduate level course: concepts are given, but you must apply it. If you are willing to put in some effort it provides a good foundation in advanced topics of VB 6.0.

Note:Recommend installing service pack 3 and using oledb 4.0 rather than 3.5.1. Found 1 database problem where the oledb 3.5.1 connection would crash the program, changing to the oledb 4.0 solved the problem. All the example programs thus far have compiled an run without a problem with SP3 loaded.

Good: Covers advanced topics like ADO,SQL,Toolbars, Active X, API calls,intro to the internet,trees and many other useful subjects. Assumes you know the basics already- NOT for someone just starting out in VB- so it doesn't waste a lot of time and pages reviewing what one should have learned in an introductory course or book. Has chapter review questions, practical problems which help re-inforce the material in the chapter. Complete example problems on the companion CD.

Possibly a problem : A good instructor would be a help. Does use code snippets which some may find inconvenient. Looking at the complete listing on the companion CD compensates for this. At times presentation can be somewhat brief. It really helps to take a concept open a new project, and play with the ideas presented as well as working problems.

Ms. Littleton's review correctly points out that many of the code examples are "snippets". On the other hand, there are complete code listings, listings of class modules, and so on. If you've ever tried to read a programming book containing code listings that go on ad nauseum, you know how distracting that can be. Authors use code snippets to focus your attention on parts of a program that are essential, and not waste time looking at redundant code. The book's enclosed CD contains the complete source for many programs, including ADO/SQL database applications, ActiveX components, and a dynamic HTML application. I definitely think that it's a good idea to learn advanced Visual Basic with the help of an instructor. There are numerous tricks and traps that are difficult to enumerate even in the most detailed book. --Kip Irvine

This book might work if you want to go fast down some mad stretches of 1 and 101, but I would suggest the tried and true 'Bicycling the Pacific Coast' and maps form the ACA ... I get the feeling that Lonely Planet drove down the road taking notes, instead of biking it with any sense of adventure or even safety. For instance, LP's route up through Longview/Kelso is extremely dangerous. No shoulder and bad traffic make this section of the ride awful (not to mention that one could skip the town totally anyway).
'Bicycling the Pacific Coast' may be old, but the daily rides and hike/bike campsites are very nice. It's a great way to meet people too, as most people on the road tended to use this book.
The ACA maps have great detours off the main highways (which turned out to be some of the best sections of our ride). I think they cost something like [money] a map, but it's worth it. The maps fold into 30-mile sections and aside from a few tiny errors they were the most reliable route guides we had.
The only time the LP guide did come in handy was when it came time to actually stay in some of the bigger cities along the way. Occasionally the restaurant and accommodation listings came in handy, but we had much better luck asking around.

I would not recommend this book to anyone (except maybe to the neighbor's dog, to chew on). While the story idea seems good on paper and I was looking forward to learning a little bit about Mormonism, this book falls spectacularly flat.

The main problem is that this book refers too often to events that happened in other books in the series. The author does not explain events and characters that must have happened in previous books and the reader is left confused as to what is going on.

As for the Mormonism, it is not explained well at all in the book. I didn't really learn a thing, except Mormons can't drink caffiene. The religion did come up in the story, but nothing was explained. The reader is expected to know it all already.

Also, the book is dry and uninteresting. I had to force myself to finish it as it did not get better with time. The characters kept finding new leads to their mysteries, but it was not explained how they found these people. It seems as if major details were left out (for example, why they decided to dig where they did) and other parts were not explained at all. I can think of many other things you could better waste your time on.

Although the author has obviously done a great deal of research, she seems unable to decide whether to present historical data or historical fiction. This books also slides into a mass of quoted letters at the end, as if the author tired of having to interpret and decipher. Many excellent facts, but you do need to search for them