I was excited to find a book of children's fiction that featured Venice, Italy. The story is mediocre and contains violent scenes--I usually don't read stories with violent content to my children. The original Little Toot book contained no violence.

Little Toot the tugboat is driving around Venice while we learn of some unique aspects about life in Venice. The last thing we learn is that there are still special police who are in charge of watching and protecting the city from pirates. It states that there are no more pirates. Suddenly, though, there are pirates who arrive and begin stealing jewels and other treasures in the city. The police pursue the pirates and there are scenes of sword fighting, and gun fighting, with numerous scenes of bullets flying around the air. The police fail and while they are getting ready to sail away, Little Toot comes to the rescue. Oddly, after breathing in air from the glass blowing factory, he is able to puff out beautiful glass balls instead of smoke. The pirates want the glass balls, and in their greed, and as they try run after them, they ran right into the prison and were jailed. The message is that greed led to their undoing. Because Little Toot saved the day and was given a prize for his help, his favorite decoration in Venice, a candystick cane.

The text is extremely wordy with major portion as quotes. Lots of focus on why certain car technology features are not allowed or used. Read Technology of the F1 Car by Nigel Macknight for a far more concise insight into the 1998 F1 cars.

Ruthven's book on torture has some valuable insights. For example, Ruthven discloses that Jeremy Bentham defended torture in some circumstances. Bentham is sometimes given undeserved credit as a progressive force in Anglo-American jurisprudence, and it is good to see him taken down a peg here.

Still, Ruthven has his own blinders. He seems to be a Marxist of a sort. He presumes, then, that torture should be understood as a desperate effort by a ruling class to perpetuate its rule. When he deals with torture in the Soviet Union, he cannot bring himself to acknowledge that this was conducted by committed Marxists -- so he claims that it was really the remnant of pre-revolutionary superstitions that caused all the trouble. If they had been real Marxists, of course, they would all have been nice!

That variety of special pleading weakens the book throughout.

Man, you can find the information (the terrible brief information) about each of the drivers here in any cheap Internet web site!

Alan Henry is one of the greatest car racing newsman of all times. But sometimes he releases these cheaps books, made of photos and almost none text, just to get some easy money ( I guess ). THe result is this empty brief biography of F-1 world champions, that will serve only for beginners.

It's sad when an expert newsman like Alan Henry writes such a weak book about great F-1 champions. He can ( and indeed have !! ) write much better books than this one, where the photos save the day ...

Was not even a book it was a phamplet. It was of good quality with pictures and basic information, but I was disappointed.

I like the idea of "fold-out", roadmap-style basic histories. They are colorful, convenient and provide more than the basic facts but not enough for a full-length book. However, in this case I have to say I am not impressed. I have studied the Romanov and Anna Anderson stories for 25 years so it's easy for me to spot errors. Because the case of Anastasia is fraught with controversy, I am accustomed to finding errors in books, but this one takes the cake! I actually took a pen and marked through or corrected dozens of mistakes. They begin with Anastasia's last name, which was not Romanov, but Romanova. That may be hair-splitting to some, but it gets much worse. Here are just a few: 1. the book states that Anastasia and her sisters "tended to the sick and wounded" during WWI. This is not exactly true. Anastasia and her sister Maria were too young to be nurses. They sponsored a hospital but only visited there...there was no "tending." 2. The room where the Romanovs were supposedly shot was not a basement, yet this word is repeatedly used in the book. 3. The book states that Anderson could barely speak English. Not true. 4. The book states that Anderson had a son, whom she "named Alexei, after her brother", (the child was called Alexander, after the father), then goes on to gloss over what happened to the child and the husband, and without explaining how she got there, says she jumped into a Berlin canal (from Romania)because she was upset over the death of her husband!! This is outrageous. In a story such as Anderson's, writers need to be very careful to explain things thoroughly, offer other views and make certain to get what few absolute facts are available completely straight. The text is poorly written and provides very slight information about certain aspects of the Anderson story without providing details, motives or even completing the story! I have added this book to my collection, because of my strong interest in the subject, but I absolutely do not recommend this book to anyone new to the subject. I also think the publisher should consider a re-write.

After reading the GOF patterns book I felt I was ready to tackle on more patterns and bought this book. This book made me feel dumb for a while for after repeated readings I still couldn't understand what the author is talking about. Finally decided to research on what other people thought about this book. Glad to find mostly negative comments in this review section for it proves i'm not dumb.

This book epitomises so much of what is wrong in the software industry that I wonder if, in a sick kind of ironic way, that this is its only value?

It cashes in on buzzwords in the title but is full of errors and demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the material by the author.

There is nothing to redeem this book. It is an embarassment.

Around three years ago, I joked with a collegue of mine that a sure way to make a fortune would be to write a book which included the words "Java" and "Patterns" in the title. It would matter little, I argued, what the book contained. Just the title and a half-decent graphic on the front page would suffice.

It seems to me that both Mr Grand and his publishers Wiley are attempting to cash in on this very idea. The problem is that the joke was a bad one in the first place, and that it is now being made far too late in the day.

I hope that the software development community is sufficiently aware that it won't be taken in by this outrage.

A his book does not live up to its title. Has nothing to do with vistas or views. Merely a collection of simple building plans in no particular order and of littel interest beyond the ordinary.
Keep looking for other books out there.

Heed the warning of the other reviewer. Save your money. This has nothing to with homes with view. It's nothing more than than a sales tool for Home Planners home plans. It's the same thing you can pick up at any magazine store - "100 Home Plans." It just has a different title and a nice picture on the front. The home plans have nothing to do with homes with a view ... or even a decent selection of windows. You'll essentially pay for sales materials - bad materials at that.

I can hardly find the words to describe the depths of my disappointment in this book of home plans. They seem generic, dull, insipid and uninspired--completely at odds with the title "Grand Vistas." I would not recommend this book to anybody who really wants a home that takes advantage of a great view.

Living in Australia it is very difficult to obtain regency romances and it is therefore doubly disappointing when a book is as poorly written as this one.

It started well enough, with a tall misunderstood heroine and a clearly delineated hero, tantalisingly in absentia for several chapters. Small solecisms such as calling a lady of quality a 'bird of paradise' (slang for a courtesan), whilst annoying, are minor details. From there on it goes downhill.

Character development is minimal, unlikely situations abound and the continual bandying of bad-tempered words gives a disagreeable tone to the whole story. Oddly enough, considering that the heroine's flaw in the eyes of society is her height, another unlikeable character is continually ridiculed for her weight. Regencies need an underlying good humour and light touch to succeed and this one was tedious indeed. It went straight into the charity bin.

We purchased this book in preparation for a family snorkeling trip to the Bahamas Out Islands. We don't scuba dive, so we were specifically looking for snorkeling information. Since this book includes "Snorkeling" in its title, we assumed there would be some specific snorkeling info included.

We were very disappointed as the entire book is devoted to dive-sites. Including "snorkeling" in the book title is, we feel, false advertising. I'm not sure the word snorkeling is ever used any where inside the book aside from the title page.

Even for dive information, the book falls short. For instance, there are no maps or directions to indicate approximately where the dive sites are located or how to get to them.

I would not recommend this book. There must be other more informative, more comprehensive books on the subject. I wish I had remembered to return the book to Amazon.com within the alloted time period. For our purposes, it was a waste of money.

I recently ordered this book to help me troubleshoot an electrical problem with my 1997 Grand Prix. I am quite
disappointed with the quality of this book. It is printed on newprint paper (very low quality), and feels quite flimsy.
More importantly, since this book covers such a wide range of GM "W cars", it contains very little specific information to
help me with my problem. All in all I found this to be a waste of money.