The title is a referance to Churchills famous comments of the Battle of Britain. Kent is the man who made the free polish squadrons one of the best of the war. The book covers his life from his first flight in Canada to the post war years. His wit and humor make for some fun reading. Some of the things he did had quite an effect on the outcome of the Battle of Britain.

Opportunities in Purchasing offers a discussion of the transition in the field. The book describes the functions of the department, the importance of purchasing and the organization of companies. Described are purchasing positions and opportunities in the field. Included is changes to computerization, strategies, and centralization versus decentralization. Included is a University listing of purchasing programs, salary information and interviews with purchasing executives.

Excellent book. The author gives tons of useful techniques and methods and materials suggestions. He clearly knows what he's doing. The reason I only gave four stars is: there are sometimes alternate techniques, now available that are not mentioned. For example Rustall, or Modern Options "Instant Iron" and "Instant Rust." can be IMHO better ways to create the rust effects. But even so, the book is a must. It practically guarantees success if you pay attention.

The Park Guell was originally a real estate development in 1900s Barcelona. It was commissioned to the famous Catalonian architect, Antoni Gaudi, by Eusebi Guell. After they died, the park was reopened as a city park. The book explores the heavenly park built in "the manner of angels" by Gaudi.

I found myself asking why haven't I done that, or that would have closed the deal! It has helped me "understand" more, and to help me grow into a better speaker.

Among the web developers community there is a serious lack of knowledge related to databases, unfortunately many books on the subjects are dry and quite academic, so this book is especially welcomed. Compared to what's available on the market it's much more practical oriented and, even more important, focused on the web. Definitely a good book that could help the average web developer; there is just some redundancy, maybe because it was written by multiple authors, apart from this an excellent choice for people that prefer practice to theory

I have been using this book as a text for soil dynamics elective course. This book provides sound mathematical backing with relevant practical examples in each section. Students have found this book very useful as they can find examples followed by each derivation. Without hesitation, I would say that this is the only decent book available in the market for the first course in soil dynamics. I would, however, suggest the author to separate "geophysical soil exploration" section from the chapter that describes "Properties of dynamically loaded soil" to avoid confusion.

This is the book that tought me everything I know about QuickBasic. It was actually intended for BASIC but it works just as well with QBasic. The first few chapters don't apply to the computer world of today, but the rest you'll find quite enjoyable.

Rojiani does a really good job of taking you from knowing nothing about basic to advanced technique. I don't program for engineering purposes but I still found this book very helpful.

You will have to know something about computers to get through the book, but all out I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn BASIC or QuickBASIC.

I used this book as a textbook for my comparative programming languages course.

The book presents the various programming paradigms without getting into the details. It is useful reading for the 3rd year computing science student by putting programming into perspective and getting into the phylosophy behind some aspects of programming.

This is a review for four books into one review, all published by Marcel and likely released by them as a theme package: two by author J.Kent Crawford - The Project Management Maturity Model, and The Strategic Project Office and two by Frank Toney - The Superior Project Manager and The Superior Project Organization. The information Amazon posts is not the same as the books in terms of copyright and number of pages. My books all show a 2002 publication. Marcel has a fifth one coming out on managing multiple projects.

I do not understand why they charge so much, perhaps because they feel the audience is so limited they have to. The publisher will sell these and the one on multiple projects as a package for a substantial discount. My review below will be positive, but I also found myself irked at not only the high cost, but the duplication of content. Substantial content of each author is duplicated in his companion book. It would have not been a challenge with both authors to have merged the two books into one, and then better justifying the high price. While these four books are an important part of my reference library on project management, my four star rating is because of the cost of each book aggravated by the duplication of content.

Crawford's books are ideal for organizations wanting to adopt a project management maturity model. Their proprietary model mirrors PMI's PMBOK in terms of structure, but adds three important and valuable "special interest components" of Project Office, Management Oversight, and Professional Development. So, for an organization wanting to map their organization's project management maturity to the PMBOK, this model is exceptional well covered in a manner that by just reading the added competencies required at each higher maturity level, you get a sense of the enormous undertaking to increase one maturity level at a time. The three special interest components round out the model because the PMBOK is mostly about individual project best practices/methodologies, whereas Crawford wanted to add organizational issues to include Project Offices. Thus, organization's looking for guidance on their Project Office or PMO would find his two books very useful. The Maturity Model book has large font, is a small book, and mostly duplicated in the other book, but is ideal if you want a dedicated focus on just the maturity model mapped to PMBOK. His Project Office book has outstanding content for the many organizational issues and challenges, but also includes much of the maturity model in the other book. The content of The Strategic Project Office is outstanding, and covers the issues that plaque organizations in developing an environment for project success. If you have a budget for only one of his two, get the Strategic Project Office book.

Toney books offer specific best practices, and again, the content is duplicated to an incredible degree - whole blocks of paragraphs totally duplicated. They are just best practices on the other side of the coin, one for the organization, the other for the project manager. The best practices are highlighted in black boxes, with good content to explain why it is a best practice - so it is not just a listing, but in effect takes you on a journey of many best practices, giving them context to each other. Competency wheels explained in the beginning are potentially very valuable for an organization; I wish there was a tool for this, or added as a CD to justify the incredible cost. If you have a limited budget, the Superior Project Organization is probably the better choice.

Of the two authors, I would say Crawford has more in-depth content, and the cost is half. But as a series of four volumes, if you can get your organization to pay for these, they do make for an outstanding library, and are synergistic in their message. If I were charged with the challenge of taking an organization from a matrix to a strong matrix or project organization, I would clearly invest in all four books. But for individual reading, the cost is a major limitation.

In sum, I would recommend only spending the high cost is if you are focused on maturity modeling, identifying best practices, and trying to move an organization to be a project organization. These books are not a typical read about traditional project management practices, so it is not close to a PM HOW TO book. The books could also be used to study for the PMP, as the PMBOK is very dry reading, and these books would add a real-world context to the PMBOK framework.

For those on a mission within their organization, Creating an Environment for Successful Projects is a must read. This book does a better job of explaining why organization's struggle, but lacks a maturity model to do an assessment.