A very informative book, for finding out information on Stars. The illustrations are excellent, a thumbs up to the illustrator, he should go far with his abilities. Keep up the good drawings.

This is a great book to sit back, relax and read. I found it to be a great stress reliever, and my time passed so quickly as I couldn't put the book down. Hope everyone enjoys this book as I did.

Are you one of those people who constantly forgets to send birthday cards to those you love? What about people you don't even know (the famous, near-famous, and infamous)? What about people who no are longer capable of celebrating their birthdays (i.e., the dearly departed--hey, it's the thought that counts). Yes, dates can be tricky to remember, especially if you find calendars and clocks to be offensive. THE BIRTHDAY DIRECTORY is your answer to all of these problems. It includes names, dates, and background information for thousands of people. Athletes, musicians, movie stars (adult and legit), writers, artists, and politicians are just some of the character types you will find between its covers. A large number of strange b&w illustrations have been added to spice things up. Entrees are listed by month, making it easy to see who was born on the same day as you. I was pleased to discover that Abe Vigoda (A.K.A. "Fish") and I share the same birthday. Abe Vigoda!!! Now, that's what I call trivia. Could anyone ask for more?

R. L. Crossland's novel is a thriller about a daring rescue attempt in the Siberia of the Stalinist gulag - a kind of Saving Private Ryan for the Cold War era, while ranging in space and time from Viet Nam to Algeria to the Sea of Japan. Most of these kinds of books are written by writers who do tremendous research, but admit that all their knowledge is book-learning. Crossland is a retired Navy SEAL officer, diver, parachutist, etc., so the story has an immediacy that comes from experience. It is also singularly intelligent. Even if you don't catch the classical references, the book will still captivate you.

A friend recommended this book to me, and it exceeded his praises. "Red Ice" is a combat story, an adventure, a thriller - altogether a first-rate read. Carefully plotted with strong, well-defined characters, it shimmers with an authenticity only those with actual experience in military special operations and the raw talent to vividly describe them can achieve. The author, R.L. Crossland, led special operations in Vietnam as a Navy SEAL officer, and his service there forms the basis for the hero of Red Ice, ex-SEAL officer Quillon Frazer.

The Vietnam war is over, and Frazer is living in Japan attempting to make the transition to peace by operating a diving business. He is jerked out of this new world by a well-known Russian dissident who fears for the life of a friend consigned to the Siberian gulag - the pre-Yeltsin gulag. He offers a fortune if Frazer can rescue this prisoner, rescue him from the very heart of Siberia. The plan is brazen, the objective seemingly impossible, the conditions brutal. There is no margin for error.

Frazer views the problem as presenting three distinct aspects - equally essential, interrelated, and all with their own unique difficulties. He must locate the prisoner, arrange transportation to and from a suitably near strike-point, and recruit and train the raiding party. Each of these is thoroughly explained and explored by Frazer, and the reader is capably guided through the respective netherworlds where such things are routinely considered.

To find the prisoner, Frazer negotiates the byzantine world of international intelligence and diplomacy, explaining his contacts in intriguing detail. His military planning and logistics are especially interesting, applied as they are to the harsh Siberian climate which is perfectly described. When the wind blows across the snow and ice you hear it in these pages. Frazer calls upon a coterie of acquaintances, a facinating variety of combat specialists, to assist him. He draws these people from the elite fringes of conventional military personnel, ranging from the French Foreign Legion to British Gurkha to Royal Marines and SEALS. To assemble a cohesive unit from these strong-willed, disparate types is among the many challenges Frazer faces. His success in doing so constitutes a worthwhile study in itself apart from the compelling story he tells. Each of these specialists carries his own story within him, and Crossland writes with the authority of one who has known such men. Their training is rigorous and designed both to prepare and to cull the unreliable.

Told in the first person, one gets to know Frazer's mind in great detail which further serves to give him a reality so often missing from war stories - where heroes often become mere caricatures, their stories cartoons. Not here. This is a gripping tale, suspenseful but unpretentious, written with a sure hand and a wonderful economy of expression. It is filled with riveting observations as cold and hard as the land Frazer must travel; for example, observing prisoners milling about two bonfires following an attack on the prison, Frazer notes that "In Siberia, holidays were where you found them."

There is nothing superfluous in this book, nothing to distract the reader from the adventure unfolding before him. Although Crossland is quite at home with the intricacies of military intelligence and covert operations, his narrative never descends to endless acronyms and needless detail as a substitute for action, good dialogue, and plot. Nor is all as straight forward as it seems - a final twist invigorates the entire tale, giving even a second reading additional appeal.

I heartily recommend Red Ice to anyone who enjoys a careful, tight plot, well-drawn, unusual characters, and the unique challenges of military special operations. It is a perfect fit with the great tradition of The Guns of Navarone. It's hard to put down, even harder to forget.

R. Richard Livorine

Storm Thorgerson is best known, of course, as the premiere album art designer with a 30-year association with Pink Floyd. If you became fond of his work because you're a PF fan, you don't want to miss this book just because Floyd art isn't the primary focus this time around. Storm's writing in Mind Over Matter was very entertaining, but in Eye of the Storm he's assumed an even more relaxed, personally revealing style. His character comes through more clearly, and he's a very engaging character indeed!

Among the book's features is an art concept that was originally intended for a Hey You 1994 concert video. He confesses that the Tree of Half Life concept didn't begin as Pink Floyd art. It tells more than his previous books about his talented associates, for example Keith Breeden (who is unfortunately now retired from the business).

The book is compelling entertainment, and it fills a gap for some of us who missed seeing his intriguing work for less famous bands than Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. My favorite at the moment is the Catherine Wheel art he selected for this book's cover.

Poems don't have to be square or rectangular, according to the conventions of word processing. They can assume any visage at the whim of the poet.

This playful little book is a compilation of some very ingenious shape poems. Putting pictures into poems and poems into pictures is the goal, and the result in this volume is an energetic and inventive collection.

It is bound to astound young and veteran readers who will want to try the medium out for themselves, and make their words rain, snow, or explode into a firework display across their page.

Seemed very shallow as though it was written for 1 purpose only, to sell. Nothing but a bunch of anecdotal stories that have aleady been recounted over and over again in your standard MBA program with a sampling of Public Speaking 101 class thrown in. Kind of like being invited to dinner, expecting a big t-bone steak and baked potato, and only getting salad. I think the author would approve of that imagery

The most effective leadership messages speak to people through three channels -- factual, emotional and symbolic, according to Crossland and Clarke. Their advice to build all three channels into your communication makes great sense. The book offers lots of practical ideas and engaging examples to help you do just that. It's everything I look for in a business book -- a useful concept, hands-on ideas for implementing it, and an accessible presentation. Great info, great value.

"The Leader's Voice" reveals how to change static communication and poor performance into dynamic communication for extraordinary results. A manager speaks to only ensure the job gets done. The leader's voice uses facts, emotions and symbols to motivate and create change. A leader carries out authenticity, and foresight to not only get the job done, but to also promote a willing to go the extra mile. Providing plenty of proven examples from leaders throughout history, with the ABC's of leadership, "The Leader's Voice" equips the reader with the necessary information to remove any obstacles preventing success.

Boyd and Crossland practice what they preach. Their written communication style is direct and to the point, with the determination to make a difference. Using the pictures to stir emotion, the various type fonts to personify symbols and the straight facts from the lives of other leaders immediately captured my attention. They did a fantastic job organizing the material and appealing to my creative core. I would recommend "The Leader's Voice" to anyone attempting to motivate a crowd of one to one hundred and one or more.

Now let me reflect . . .

I used to complain about my mother fixing so much tuna casserole. Her response, "There are alot of starving people in the world. You should be thankful we have food on the table." When my father knew I didn't feel as smart as my sister because of my grades, he would tell me, "You're intelligent. You just need to study a little longer." And when I cried after being hit by a car, my grandmother's words consoled me with, "If God looks over the sparrow, surely he'll take care of you." These voices addressed me with emotion. These voices encouraged me with facts. These voices motivated me with symbols. I now realize these are the voices of the leaders in my life.

I have read many Books on the topic of Visual Basic, this one being my first foray into VB.Net. This book contains the best compilation of exercises I have seen in a beginner's book. The explanations are thorough and clearly explained. In addition, the authors appear to go to great lengths to expose the reader to a wide variety of functions throughout the lessons. I will admit that the editing staff for this book might benefit from taking an English class or two, as some of the grammar in the book is painful to read. However, in spite of the ineptitude of the editing staff I think you will be hard pressed to find a better resource for learning VB.Net. This is a how to manual, not a literary work of art. While I have noticed the poor editing, it is not substantial enough to make me want to throw the book across the room (which I have done with some books in the past). I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who needs to get their feet wet with VB.Net.

I purchased this book 3 days ago and because of other commitments I have only read as far as Chapter 4. However in that short space of time, I did the right thing by myself and wrote every example out in the book so far (nothing beats learning by doing, at least as far as I am concerned). I must admit, having gone from a flat 0 in VB experience to now writing basic programs by myself without referring to any book or online help.

Even if the remainder of the book turns out to be [weak]), the info I have learnt already has made me very happy with the purchase.

I have not seen one error yet, everything works as shown and is explained so anyone can understand it.

If you are new to VB.Net or programming at all, buy this book. It is without doubt the best book I have ever seen on the subject of programming. This is my first Wrox book and it probably will not be the last if this is the quality of their products. This book Wrox! :)

I have spent a great deal of time browsing through a number of VB.Net books in a couple of my local bookstores. (Both have extensive technical book sections). This book caught my eye and I decided to browse through it. First off, I must say that in the bookstore I was "wowed" by quality of the content. After I got it home and started implementing the examples in the chapters, I can definitively say that this book is excellent.

My goal in my book search was to find a book that explained the VB.Net language as it pertained to the VB.Net development environment. I wanted a book that actually "showed" me how to navigate around the IDE while explaining nontrivial VB.Net concepts and examples, and discussing the language so that I would be able to write some programs after finishing it.

Some of the earlier chapters are geared to a beginning programmer (somewhat like me and even less so), yet the authors branch off and talk about relevant topics without falling off a limb. For example, in chapter 2 - "Writing Software", the authors discuss data types and give numerous examples of accessing the different properties of each. When they get the the Boolean datatype, they actually go into a juicy amount of detail about binary representations and even discuss binary math. Its just a few pages in length but it is darn appropriate and gives a nice overview into the topic at hand. However, they keep it moving and move on to the next appropriate topic with their usual clarity in writing.

I am now focusing on their chapter on "Building Objects" - chapter 4. I have to say that this chapter offers the clearest examples of classes that I have seen. Far too often I have read about classes in other books and have seen weird examples that had little to do with real life...often requiring a "suspension of reality" on behalf of the reader such that the reader was forced to make the leap from theory to reality. This book, on the other hand, shows me how to construct an object that I can actually relate to.

So far I have not found any errors, although they do list some (minor) errata in the Wrox website. But the fact that Wrox even *has* a comprehensive website proactively listing potential errata is yet another reason I am glad I bought this book from this publisher. By the way, I found their website and located the section related to this book in about 12 seconds. The quality is in the details, and obviously somebody at Wrox actually cared about the ease of finding information about their published material.

Like I said I am only on chapter 4, yet I have done a lot of "skimming" ahead and I eagerly await the topics in later chapters where I will learn how to build little Windows applications, make my own menus, handle errors, connect to a database, etc. Basically *all* the things I want to learn how to do. (Are they mind readers?)

Excellent work.

I have to admit, this book contains an impressive overview of all the Windows DNA technologies. As a reminder, DNA has been there for years and was working under NT4. It has been revamped with trumpets with a new name, .Net, with all those new services. The authors do have this in mind and they will tell you where .Net will be improving features.

I would recommend this book to anybody that wants to know what is Windows DNA/.Net (beside thinking it's everything that Microsoft is providing for developers!). Of course, you cannot have all those technologies into one book and expect the best coverage on all of them. Having that in mind, the authors create an incredible reference for developers that wants to upgrade to a more scalable & distributed environment as well as to take leverage of the new technologies that came with Windows 2000 (for developers that is).

The only thing that I have to mention (and I did to Wrox) was that I personnaly believe that this book, though the readers needs to have professional knowledge of development, would be better inside the Beginning series since this book serves as an overview reference of all those technologies. Wrox will undoubtfully then release multiple Professional books that will go further in those new technologies (such as doing COM+ events or asynchronous components, having XML Business Objects, etc.).

As a bottom line, most of the authors wrote in a confident programming style and it is a very interesting book to go through. ... But I can't wait for the .Net one!

This book comes in handy as a great reference for utilizing these technologies in the real world. If you're looking for a book that you can sit down and read cover to cover to understand the basics, this is not it. If you're an experienced developer who wants to dive into the guts of the technologies, then this is for you.

I recommend this book a chapter at a time (after reading the first 2 review chapters), in order to learn how to implement a technology (like MTS, MSMQ, etc) in the real world.

Windows DNA is an platform and methodology for Enterprise development. It is taking all of what Microsoft offers for industry : server software (SQL Server, Biztalk), development software (Visual Studio) and productivity software (Office, Viso) and making them tightly inter operatable to produce scaleable solutions that can be development very rapidly.

This book covers Microsoft DNA and does so very well. If you have been following the evolution of Microsoft's Enterprise development methodology and related technologies (MTS, COM, etc..) then you should flip though this one before buying to make sure it offers enough new information for your investment. Do this especially if you already have the Wrox title: Professional MTS/MSMQ and you have a good book on ASP or Visual Basic.

If however you are a beginner/intermediate level Visual Basic, ASP or VC++ developer and you want to expand you knowledge from how to build small-to mid-sized client-server or desktop applications to building scalable Enterprise solutions then this book is for you.

This is a huge book (just short of a thousand pages) and it's packed full of really useful information. It covers all the important parts of the .NET Framework Class Library - Win Forms, Web Forms, ADO.NET, XML, Web Services and more - as well as the syntax and new features of Visual Basic .NET.

With so much to cover the book has to keep up a decent pace, which means that the authors assume that you've got experience of working with Visual Basic 6. If you're new to programming then you'll want to look elsewhere.

For VB6 programmers this book is great value.

This book is for experienced developers who need to make the transition to VB.NET. It will also help programmers with previous knowledge of VB.NET who want to move up to the professional level.

The book begins with an introduction to the .NET Framework and common language RunTime(CLR). The CLR is responsible for managing the execution of code compiled for the .NET platform. The next few chapters focus on object oriented programming and how to derive classes from base classes using inheritance. Chapter 9 gives a detailed discussion on how error handling works in VB.NET by discussing the CLR exception handler in detail and the new Try...Catch...Finally structure. An entire chapter is devoted to multi-threading. You will learn how threads can be created, and the differences between multitasking and multi-threading. Chapter 16 discusses COM and .NET component interoperability, and the tools provided to help link the two technologies together. Chapter 18 gives detailed coverage of the ADO.NET data access technology. You will learn how to build flexible, fast, and scalable data access objects and applications.

The final chapters discuss building web applications with web forms, creating custom controls for Windows Forms and Web Forms, and finally, creating and consuming Web Services.

If you're an experienced VB developer and would like to make the transition to VB.NET, then this book is a must.

As someone who has spent over five years as a professional Visual Basic programmer I don't want to throw away all my knowledge when I move to VB.NET. Fortunately, this (big) book doesn't bother teaching you programming from scratch (you should definitely look elsewhere if you're a complete beginner) but will help you make sense of not only what's changed in the move from VB6 to VB.NET (a lot!) but also what you can take with you from VB6 (a surprisingly large amount actually). This means that you don't have to spend your time working through stuff like "this is a variable", "this is an if statement". Instead the book gets stuck into what makes the .NET Framework and Common Language Runtime tick - and explains how you can relate all of it to VB6.

The first third of the book serves as a reference to the VB.NET language - syntax, error handling, objects, inheritance, interfaces, and the differences between variables and types. While this means that you don't get to create many exciting applications early on it does mean that you have a thorough grounding in the essentials of the language.

Then the rest of the book takes a look at the most important features of .NET in turn: ADO.NET, XML, Windows Forms, Web Services, Data Binding, Remoting, Networking, Threading, Security, Web Forms, etc. You won't be an expert in any of these areas after you've read the book but you will have a much better idea of what VB.NET is capable of and how to get started using the advanced features of the .NET Framework Class Library.

Although there are a lot of authors that wrote on this book, which can spell trouble in my experience, the editors have managed to maintain a consistent voice throughout and there's surprisingly little overlap between chapters. Well worth the money.

I enjoyed the Matthew Reynolds? e-commerce book last year and thought that this guy will keep doing good books. I was wrong, this book is for kids under 10 or for someone who never learnt any programming language.

if you have a little experince in VB5 or VB6
Do Not Buy this book
it waste your time i will try to finish it in this week and g to better book .

This is the best book only for beginers in ((PROGRAMMING IN GENERAL))

I like the WROX series books a great deal. I like the fact that they have beginning, professional, and other books on the same subject. Their site publishes errata that you can write into your book before starting it.

But, then as I go through the book I find more typos, illogicalities, or wrong descriptions (such as telling you that you will see a particular screen upon hitting a certain menu and that is not the screen that you do see).

I started sending in errata, one chapter at a time and was duly told that they would be sent to the "editors". Well the "editors" seem to be a "black hole", because, since about 2-3 months ago, after starting sending in what I found, I have never heard back from WROX AND there are no new updates to the errata on their site.

Therefore, please note that some or many of your WROX books may or probably will not have up to date errata for them. I will also be sending in errata for Beginning ASP .NET Using Visual Basic .NET.

I'll report back as to how that errata process is working also.

I highly recommend this book, not only as an individual who has read it and found many helpful insights in effective ministry to the hurting, but also as someone who has used it personally in finding wholeness in my own life. This book offers hope to those who have been hurt and are hurting, because of past failures and overcoming hurts. It gives hope for the individual to return to wholeness and active living. I am trying to locate another copy of this book, so that I can pass it on to a friend, because of the helpful content.

This man has revealed his inner being to help set people free who are bound by sexual addiction. He bears it all, and instead of just saying that God has set him free, he takes you on his personal journey step by step to reveal how to obtain lasting victory. Excellent for anyone who is serious about being free or is committed to helping others get free.