A hallmark of Kent's style is the smooth transition between the thoughts of one character and another, a style of presenting multiple viewpoints not even attempted by most authors. While Kent is "second-rate," I don't agree with another reviewer that Parkinson is one of the best: his prose is wooden and his sailors seem to end up doing a lot of land soldiering.

Luis Espinal.

This book is a bilingual collection of the people's poems. Here are the voices of the everyday -- voices of hope, of pain, of yearning. Here are images of war and suffering, but also images of daily life in an extraordinary place. In Nicaragua, to call someone a poet is a high form of praise and respect. Within these pages, you can read the words of people who once were allowed no words at all, but who briefly, for a revolutionary moment, each earned the title of poet.

While Nicaragua may not have actually become a nation of poets, there was a time when that vision didn't seem so idealistic. This book is a vivid testament to that vision and that time.

At first I thought the book was great. It was written in a way that was easy to read. But I was confused as to why a lot of the code didn't work for me. I found out later, after reading other books that it was out of date and much of the html was totally obsolete or never developed. There were also many errors in the book.

The online "interactive" course is non-existent. I've noticed that in other waite group books as well. There is no mentor. I had submitted 10 questions (due to the many errors in the book) and have never received a response.

The waite group could have come up with some good material if they would spend more time paying attention to detail, editing properly, and living up to their advertisements and less time designing cool covers and gloating about how wonderful their books are.

I would not recommend any waite group books unless they are on sale at 1/2 price or more. Even then you have to take it with a grain of salt.

I've read most of this series and this one seemed off to me. The plot was not what bothered me. It was the characters that bothered me. What stood out to me from the beginning was the portrayal of Sam. In the show and in every book, he's always thrust into a life that he's never experienced (that's kind of the point), but when he's thrown into the role of a police officer and father, the writing seems to show that he's familiar with the roles. He jumps right into a fatherly role with the daughter and knows what to do as a police officer. I didn't buy this at all. Also, the conflict with the daughter, father and mother is pointless. Where the mother and daughter aren't getting along never goes anywhere; it's like it's there for decoration.

Then, Al's character seemed kind of wimpy. The writing made it seem like he was afraid of every little thing. The example I'm thinking of is when he's in the house with Sam looking for clues and he's itching to leave. It seemed like that followed throughout the book.

Well, this was the worst of the series so far. The others were more true to the characters than this one.

If you liked the Quantum Leap television series, read this book. You won't be disapointed!

In general, I think that, by the end of the book, most significant topics are covered adequately for an intro text. Projects are generally suitable for the material, and sometimes clever. (As usual, there are a few typos and ordinary errors, but anyone beyond the novice level will be able to spot them and run the code.) As of early March 2002, the code listings are available for download from the Sams website.

WEAKNESSES: Some of the chapters seem out of sequence. Chapter 5, "Application Architecture in .Net," belongs in a different book. There are a few slips, like using the "Set" keyword for object assignment in one of the listings. Another problem, resulting from Microsoft's waffling in the betas, is that the discussion on array dimensions reflects the early beta version, in which the array dimension is the number of elements (instead of the upper bound), rather than the release version (in which the dimension is the upper bound). While the book is a good start, it is by no means comprehensive. (You'll need to go to "Teach Yourself MORE VB.Net in 21 Days.") I think the most glaring weaknesses are the shortage of hands-on code in the first seven chapters, and the emphasis on console applications to illustrate early concepts. While console apps are expedient for an experienced programmer, it leaves novices wondering if they're studying the right language.

STRENGTHS: For a VB6 programmer moving to .Net, this is the first book I've seen that presents enough plain vanilla code to calm their .Net jitters. Most of the other texts, such as Dan Appleman's excellent book, "Moving to VB.Net" spend so much effort on the advanced features in .Net that an experienced programmer is led to believe that learning .Net is like having to learn Klingon syntax. Mackenzie and Sharkey show its kinder side. The last seven chapters are particularly well written. I should also add that this book seems better focused than its predecessor, "TY VB6 in 21 Days".

CONCLUSION: A fairly decent intro for experienced VB6 programmers. A novice can get through this, but it may burn quite a few calories.

I totally agree that the code samples are weak... I'm only on day three and have found examples that just simply DON'T do what the book says they will... But I'm still going to read it for the narrative, and then get another, more training oriented book for learning the IDE's ins and outs.

Perhaps now that R5 is just about here, and the development capabilities of Notes have been extended significantly, it's time for version 2 of the book.