I got this book as a present for my birthday. i agree with the other reviews, it wasn't very good.

The name seemed promising, but the backbone seemed to be missing. I thought many of the stories were re-hashed themes from more acclaimed authors. I hope this is a first effort by the author, and not the culmination of his talents. I would not recommend this book.

Wow! I have read many collections of short stories and if that is what interests you, this is the book to get. The imagination of this author is wild and presents the reader with nonstop fantasy intertwined with both routine and far-fetched scenarios. Some of the story lines are out there and stretch the boundaries of truth, but the way these stories are presented, in a humorous and in-your-face way, keeps you riveted! These stories are 50% horror (nothing graphic) and 50% Twilight-Zone-like plots laced with humor. Don't pass this one up!

Avoid books by this author, there's nothing natural about her books, she reccomends in her books using lye and such which is very dangerous. Lye can eat through skin. I've also read her beauty books and their not that great either, there's nothing natural about her books.

(...)

I found this book to be a valuable resource. I've made a few of the 'recipes' for cleaners in the book and they've all proven both effective and less irritating than some commercial products I've used. I have 3 sons, 2 of them still in diapers, and they all have extremely sensitive skin. Add to that a mildly brain damaged cats who tends to pee on things, and a book like this comes in quite handy. I think the author my have gone a bit out of her depth with some of the car cleaning recipes, and she does start to channel Martha Stewart a bit too much in some parts, but aside from those two shortcomings I thought this was a worthwhile addition to my reference shelf.

This book is for novice UNIX users, not for any IT professional! Save your money and get a better book that goes into more details.

I liked the conciseness of this book and the helpful, easy to read, format. It did go into too technical info a little bit, but a good read overall.

Casey Tefertiller who brought us a brilliant book on Wyatt Earp (The Life and Legend) in 1997 wrote an introduction to this book, knowing that it was written by two different people. Dodge was never undercover for Wells Fargo. There is not a shred of evidence of that. His widow said his Tombstone notes were burned so Lake faked the first half and now Tefertiller should have used terpentine to remove varnish and reveal truth. Another hoax a la .... Another demerit for a University Press.

I loved reading this book. I am not a western theme type reader and although I may be bias, it was a great book.

The last person was right. The font is HUGE and BOLD and there are hardly any names in it. Go to the bookstore and read it there, don't purchase it. It's not worth the money. Sorry Casey. And my name wasn't in it. Which makes it worthless to me.

This book is a huge disappointment. I ordered it after listening to the author on the radio. It sounded like a fun thing. But the author is obvously out for the almighty buck. The print is in 20 point type. You could read it across the room! Only 2-4 names appear on a page. Many common names, like Gordon, are missing, but you can find Jazzberry. I didn't know there was such a name as Jazzberry. Eight pages are devoted to a list of names coming out in the 2nd and 3rd editions. For the price of the book, I expected the author to have included all those names and more in the 1st edition. But no, this author is into selling T-shirts and mugs (literally for sell at the end of the book -15 to select from) Save your money. It just feels too much like a rip off to get any enjoyment out of it.

I participated in a phone interview with Casey and she described not only me to a "T" but she also gave me some future insight on my 1 yr old daughter! Casey is a warm and vivacious person - effervescent does not even come close to her exuberant demeaner - this I am certain is reflected in her book!

The guide was written before the game was complete - specifically the final level. Their comment is "As of press time the final encounter was still not complete, so we don't know exactly what waits on the other side of that portal..." Not exactly helpful. Nor would I call it "Complete" or "Perfect"

The maps and narrative are quest specific. Other areas where you might encounter creatures, houses, or items are left out. The maps are inconsistent in quality. Some are thorough and well marked. Others are missing the letters being referenced completely.

The creature, item, and spells appendix is not much more useful than finding it in the game and examining it. Reference to where the items might be found or made is not given. The narrative text does list items that can be forged, but a hint to the rest (i.e. high level boss chest in ch4 only) is missing.

Multiplayer is not covered at all.

Final: If you are really struggling with the early and mid portion of the game, you are probably better off looking online. If you want to mule your way through making sure you get every quest, this book has some limited value.

I'm obviously in the minority here; I didn't hate the book, nor did I find it worthy of a great review. I think the book is just so-so. It does the job giving you a point in the right direction, but sometimes, only barely.

I love NWN, and purchased this book to help slog through the different possible quests. I think that the asking price was too much for a magazine-ish glossy book.

Aside from the price, there were other things to disappoint. There were errors in the book (I'm guessing that the book was written before the game was finished). Also, the layout and organization is horrible. Columns of text are punctuated with screenshots and cartoon-ish. The maps in the book are not great, either.

On the other hand, the book does point you in the right direction, and I found myself flipping through it in order to save some time and rack up a few extra quests.

A good portion of the book lists out spells, weapons, skills, and monsters. These sections are easiest to read and most uniform, more so than the little book that comes with NWN.

For those of us who don't get dressed up and beat each other with wooden swords on the weekends (or know the newer DND rules), this book is helpful, if you can get past the gaudy, glossy, cluttered pages.

I definitley can't speak for the rest of the people who reveiwed this game guide but I found it to be informative and detailed. I'm new to the rpg gameing experience so people who have played rpg's for a while might dissagree, but on the whole I found the charachter descriptions to be very well written and useful.

The only major flaws I found were the lack of markings on some of the maps which gets confusing, but the weapon appendix and spell appendix was way better than I could've hoped for. I also plan on getting the world builders guide, and I can only hope that is's half as good as the adventure guide. :-)

This is a big DC crossover involving too many different titles. The two volumes attempt to collect stories involving Superman, Wonder Woman, Young Justice, and Impulse. A lot of back story seems missing and the artwork often looks like bad manga. I am really hating these kinds of crossovers, and reading these stories in this GN format is extremely confusing.

One of the staples to Supes personal history is the fact that he's held to standards that other superheroes might not be able to match ... until now. Reading Superman say the words, "I'm going to kill him," is perhaps the most startling revelation in the two-parter trade paperback OUR WORLDS AT WAR. Despite some negative reaction from a large part of the Super-fan base, OWAW is a good read but far from great. It presents a Superman that readers largely haven't seen before, one driven by a passionate instinct for revenge. While the books do possess some continuity issues, there are parts of the story important to our time: acts of terrorism, good surrendering to evil, the loss of life in times of war, etc. However, these two books do suffer from one crucial shortcoming that appears to be a growing trend in crossover / trade paperbacks, and that's the fact that the reader might be told of pivotal events several times from differing perspectives ... once from the Superman installment, once from the Young Justice installment, and once from a Wonder Woman installment. Whereas the end result should be interesting, it's far more confusing here, as some events toward the climax are reviewed slightly out-of-sequence. That said, a Darkseid story is always welcome at my house, and I enjoyed the pure escapism of a reasonably entertaining Superman story for what it was worth.

Would I recommend purchase? Erg. These two books are rather pricey for a story that isn't as tightly woven as it could've been. I would have rather seen the publishers create one volume, with a reasonable price, than two with a slightly higher than necessary pricetag. Damn capitalism. Damn commercialism. If you can get your hands on copies to borrow, I'd take that route first.

I'm giving this 3 stars, but this is a VERY GENEROUS 3 stars. The only reason I'm doing that is because the action is pretty good and there's a lot of it.

What is going on here? I know Superman doesn't quite have the resolve of Batman, but Superman is supposed to be the standard of the DC Universe. The one they turn to when all else fails. So why is he whining so much? Why is he neglecting Lois? Why is he so annoying? Who knows. They don't explain it to us.

It should be noted that there is a lot missing. Most of the DC Universe books touched upon this crossover & they can't all be included. However, that doesn't explain why the plot is so confusing. There are parts that are just cryptic.

There are some genuinely suspenseful parts, the subplot between Lex and his Brainiac'd daughter being the highlight.

Again, there's a lot of pretty good action (including a good slap 'em up between Supes & Darkseid). But what separates the guys who wrote this from the truly great writers is plot. And that is lacking here.

Pages 1 through 124 are absolutely useless as the errors and false-starts out-weigh the positives. I did like the monster details. They're good for when I'm putting my ideas on paper for pre-planning.

And it has a cool poster in back.

This book was terribly written and poorly organized. It's difficult to follow, the tips come in the wrong order, and the examples often don't work. In addition, the book doesn't go into enough detail explaining terms and how and why things work. If you're not already a programmer, the book won't help you to learn anything about module creation. As a tool for getting started creating modules (which it purports to be), it's an utter failure. The authors often refer to their own module that they created, which you can allegedly download and use as an example, but as of December 2002, it still was unavailable. The section on monsters at the end is pointless filler that belonged in the adventure book if anywhere (even the tips the books gives are geared toward fighting the monsters, not using them in your adventures)...This book was a terrible waste of money...

After creating a couple of modules and reading the book twice, my appraisal of this Versus World Guide book is that it leaves a lot to be desired.

Chapter 1 is great -- the introduction to the Toolset (and the sample module you create during that introduction) gives you a great overview, explains most of the gotchas, has good general advice, is clear and concise and well-illustrated.

Chapter 2 is fine as a general set of advice about how to plan a module.

Chapter 3 and the rest of the chapters are not nearly as good. They go through the rest of the toolset in a haphazard manner, with too many script examples that aren't explained well at all, and the book doesn't have any coherent overall plan of how to explain how things work. Individual sections, like on how the Journal works, are fine. But typically the book brushes over each option without enough detail to be useful.

The Monster appendix is fine.

The C Language introduction appendix is atrocious. I know scripting, and I've been programming since 1980, but I couldn't follow at all the structure of what they were trying to show. They were far too stuck on using unexplained NWN module concepts for their examples rather than showing you the nuts and bolts of the language and how a While loop or an If statement works (I was just looking for how NWN-C was different than normal C, and it wasn't helpful for that purpose at all). If I didn't already understand variables and control structures, this book would not have helped at all.

But by far its biggest crime is that it lacks an index. As an introduction it's tolerable. For a reference, it's useless.

This book is useless. No detailed information on how to do anything. Don't waste your money.

If you want to know why to Buy AIX 4.3, this book is for you. This book will give you all the reasons to buy AIX over other versions of UNIX or even other OS's. It is an AIX salesman's Bible. If you want to know anything about using AIX stay away from this book. No Useful information about Installing, Configuring, Using, or Administering AIX will be forthcoming. The Authors took the approach that AIX will take care of everything for you so you don't need to know anything, in which case you don't need this book. "the AIX Survival Guide" has been a much better reference for AIX. I purchased this book because it directly referenced version 4.3, which I am using, and thought it would be of the most use. It's Contents mentioned several things that weren't around when many of other AIX Books were written. 64Bit Systems and, Y2K to mention a few. All you really learn is that AIX handles these things, which would be assumed for any modern OS. If work hadn't paid for this book I would have returned it.

This is a very simplistic book containing mostly pictures of the SMIT GUI, and pointers to other resources on AIX. Every third sentence has a "cute" remark and an explanation point. I read it in about 25 minutes and will be returning it. In no way will this book enlighten you on AIX or systems administration.

Reasonable overview of the process required to build a data warehouse...however, most topics are given only light treatment. There are better books than this on data warehousing.