Judge Dee is an imperial magistrate who travels the country solving mysteries and murders. Not content merely to judge cases as they come to court, Judge Dee investigates crimes himself.

Now Chief Lord Justice, Judge Dee is sent undercover to the city of Canton. His job: to find out what happened to the Court Censor. Was he murdered or has he disappeared for other reasons? Dealing with practised and conniving Imperial Court intriguers, Dee finds the case complicated as a host of foreigners are involved including a mysterious Arab with a curved sword and an exotic belly dancer. Undaunted, and with the help of his officers, the loyal Tao Gan and Chiao Tai, Dee sets out to unravel the case.

Judge Dee was practising in the 7th century but the writer, Robert Van Gulik, was a Dutch diplomat living in China in the early 20th Century. Interested in Chinese history, he decided to write a series of detective novel based old Chinese stories. Beautifully written, each Judge Dee story is a pearl of literature. The English is beautiful yet modern, easy to read yet evocative of the China that existed over 20 centuries ago.

This book is part of Van Gulik's unique series of Judge Dee novels which chronicle the cases investigated by the famous magistrate of classical Chinese detective stories. A staple of the Judge Dee stories are the multi-layered plot and accurate historical details of ancient Chinese culture and practices and this book does not disappoint in both areas.

In this chapter of the series, Judge Dee is assigned to the city of Canton to investigate the disappearance and subsequent murder of a Chinese noble. Numerous side plots are thrown into the mix, involving a blind cricket-catcher and mysterious Arabian assassins. All of which the Judge slowly unravels using ingenuity and plain, old-fashioned deductive prowess which is the highlight of all the books in the series.

Frank Canton was sheriff of Buffalo, Wyoming in the 1880s and during the Johnson County War. Later he was a Deputy US Marshal in Oklahoma Territory, rising to high rank in Oklahoma law enforcement. He wrote an autobiography titled "Frontier Trails" that is a classic of western adventure about his life as a western lawman. Only, Frank Canton completely left out a significant part of his life history--his real name was Joe Horner and he was a convicted bank robber and murderer from Texas who had escaped from prison.

Alias Frank Canton fills in the blanks Canton left in his story, and does it very well. The reading was interesting and appeared to have been very well researched.

Most of the stuff on how to do low-level programming with assembler in DOS is course out of date, unless that's an area that's really interesting to you, perhaps you're a hobby programmer working in a DOS-enviroment (like me!), then this book will have extra vaule of course.

Otherwise, it's a useful book about computer animation in general, and is worth picking up for this information if you can find it at a second-hand store or on some site like e-bay.

Barber describes at great length the historical emergence of democracy in communities of the Swiss canton Graubuenden, tracing its origins back more than a thousand years. The book is writen in plain English although it is Barber's aim to fundamentally question the 'liberal constitutionalism' which today marks the household definition of democracy.

Barber argues that capitalism and wealth have eroded much of the basic conditions that he considers requirements for effective direct democratic participation. However, he also points out that the particular historical path has also show that direct democratic systems are adaptable to new circumstances.

The book is a good read for academics and students of democracy studies. It is also an interesting account of the Swiss democratic system giving much elaboration to institutions and procedures. Anybody interested in the historical emergence and present-day workings of direct democratic systems will enjoy this read.

The cases discussed in this book clearly highlighted relevant issues for any company involved in e-commerce. I work for a small manufacturing organization and while the discussions did not specifically deal directly with manufacturing organizations, I was able to identify items that pertained to our e-commerce applications. I have concluded that many e-commerce issues are common across dissimilar organizations and we can all learn from other companies' experiences. I recommend this book, regardless of expertise in the field.

I am scientist in University of Selçuk.This book is very helpful for image processing. But most detail can obtained with classification of remote sensing. A very study

This book is a waste of the readers time and money. Christensen travels to the Costa Rican rain forest with his family to settle the "frontier". He never gives an explinatoin as to why he decided to travel to the "frontier", only excuses and apologies to his many, many mistakes. Darryl Cole-Christensen hates the rainforest, he hated it from the day he arrived and he hates it to this day. His only interest in the rainforest is monetary, money drives this man and this book. I had to buy and read this book for my college course, you have a choice.

It is beautifully written--- the writer must also be a poet. The evocation of the forest, the air and the rain, the sweating labor of the horses and the men, the mud, all was done very well. The fine language combined with the author's humility made this an unusual book to come out of a backwoods experience. It is about farming on the frontier but it is also very much about his own growth!

A Place in the Rain Forest is not only the story of an adventure, but a journey of the spirit. I found myself listening to the sound of the rain falling in an untouched wilderness and walking with bare foot peasants as they came to settle a new land. Cole-Christensen had a tremendous insight to the character of the land,the people who live on it, and the consequences of their actions. It is a story for any one who has ever wondered what it would be like to go to a wilderness and become a settler.....

Why write a book about D3D RM. It's dead, Microsoft dropped it. Makes this book a big pass.

This book is an excellent introduction to 3D (and a 2D) programming for new comers (who know C++, of course!). If you have some experience in 3D programming, even in other 3D language, you will not learn many new things here. Although many of the fundamental issues of graphics programming are covered, it's far from covering 'everything- despite what the name implies.

The first few chapters are an introduction to 2D and 3D programming in theory. Some important issues are covered, and you're not bothered by too much mathematics, except some basic matrices manipulations. The next 1/3 of the book is devoted to 2D programming with DirectDraw. These parts are an important introduction and good basis for 3D programming.

Only the second half of the book is devoted for 3D programming, using DirectX's retrained mode. You might think that the retained mode is obsolete - but it's much more simple and easier to grasp and program than the immediate mode ' and it's similar to the basic implementations of OpenGL (the book covers this topic as well). So it's great for beginners, and will be a good basis for your next steps in 3D programming.
Among the issues covered here are textures, lighting, shadows, 3D animation techniques and more...

The book is well written, and most of the explanations and the code are easy to understand, even for the very beginner. It is NOT filled with tones of code which the CD already contains. It does quote some documentation of functions/structs, which are already in the help - but only the really important ones. One problem is that the examples all the way are pretty basic ' The most impressive one is to rotate/zoom a teapot' You can definitely gather all the info you learned and make a big sample application ' but the book should already have included one.

Although MS has halted work on D3DRM, and is instead working on Farenheit for the upcoming DX releases, ... It touches everything from history of video graphics, a review of WinAPI programming, 2d and 3d operations via DirectX.

However, if you already have an extensive background on DirectX , Inside DirectX by MS Press would serve a better reference for the newest release of DirectX.

Save your money. It's a shallow tutorial with no significant depth. Makes me wonder if these two authors actually even know Java.

Title says it all. The number of factual errors, typographical errors, incomplete statements, and misleading statements are amazing. Consider on page 267 where it states "If 0 is negative, or 1 is negative..." Far more dangerous than this obvious error are the ones that you don't recognize until you read the correct information elsewhere. Stay away from this book!

I used this to help me prepare for and pass the Sun exam. This is a good text for practicing many aspects of Java quickly. I found it to be a useful supplement to my library.

I have tried & or studied this entire book . Not one of the recipes was anything like what I have experieced at the many chinese restaurants I have patronized across this country .This is one of two cookbooks that I have ever gotten rid of in my life.

I found this cookbook to be very easy to use, and the recipes are authentic and well described.