The CRYSTAL CHILDREN by Dr. Doreen Virtue is a fascinating look at the "next generation" of children coming to earth. Preceded by the Indigo Children, these Crystal children are pretty special and amazing, according to the first-hand accounts related by the parents and grandparents. Born totally psychic, sensitive, compassionate, empathic, loving, and kind, these children are able to constantly communicate with the angles and spirits around them, as well as the nature spirits. Again, the true stories presented in the book will astound you. Not all the children will present with all the abilities as related in the book, but clearly, most have many special and healing abilities. Filled with the utmost love and compassion, I do believe, as Dr. Virtue believes, these children are here to spread love, truth and compassion.

I felt that the book was a bit repetitive at times, which was not necessary, and I also found the first hand accounts of these children just fascinating. The book is a very quick read, as I did not want to put this book down, due to the amazing subject matter. While reading this book, I realized that several children I know are presenting with many of the attributes listed. Dr. Virtue also made sure to drive the point home that these children talk later in life, that they are NOT autistic, as society wants to put a "label" on them, but rather, they are observing and will talk when they are ready and usually in complete sentences. I also believe that it takes very aware and in-tune parents as well to raise these children. Most parents also relate that even though their children speak later in life, they have no trouble whatsoever in understanding them - telepathic communication.

Lovely, wonderful book - highly recommend it for those parents and teachers, whose lives are blessed by these special angels - just overlook the repetitiveness!

From the back...
It was love at first sight when Lisa Croft arrived in Crystal Creek. Cynthia, Virginia, and Lettie Mae figured they'd been blessed with the best mother's helper in the state of Texas. And Tony Rodriguez, the new veterinary assistant, was instantly smitten! J.T. alone knew the terrors of Lisa's past-a past that threatened the happiness and security of those he held dear. He foresaw Lisa's fate, and he aimed to meet it head-on.

My Opinion..
I am not exactly sure why the back of the book makes it seem like the story is about Lisa and Tony because it's really not. This is yet another story of Cynthia and J.T.. In every book that has Cynthia as the main character, she has some sort of life altering problem with J.T. In this book Cynthia feels that she is 'losing herself' and that J.T. does not treat her like a full partner in their marriage. Lisa is a focus at the beginning of the book because she is in trouble and J.T. rides to her rescue. Later Lisa comes to the McKinney ranch to help with Cynthia and J.T.'s daughter. Lisa runs into Tony three or four times and they exchange only a handful of words each time. I thought that there was a lot of potential for a good story there, but the author decided to concentrate on J.T and Cynthia. Besides dealing with the McKinney marriage problems in this book you also get pimps, prostitutes, UFO's, and a heavy dose of women's lib. I was disappointed with Cynthia's whining and J.T feeling like dirt, not to mention Lisa and Tony's story getting tossed into the background. I'm sorry but I don't think that this was such a great addition to the Crystal Creek series.

Reading this book created mixed feelings.

It is nice to see books of course in the very important
but relatively little studied case of mechanical properties
of solids and liquids (as oposed to elecrical properties).

The book starts promisingly by claiming a first priciples
discussion. However the discussions following are highly
incomplete (sketchy) with continuous references to
a previous book by the author. The level of detail
is dissapointing and the author seems to address experts
in his field rather than students.

I think you can safely go over this book; the Born Huang
book is much more complete and useful.

Overall, the book misses completely its educational purpose;
it might be useful to experts in the field, but then they
can always read a plethora of reviews in research journals
(for free).

I can't believe how stupid this book is.

There's no discernible plot whatsoever, the characters are dull and lifeless, and the ending definitely leaves the reader wanting more.

As if that isn't enough, the book is filled with a kind of technical gobbledy-gook that would put Argos to sleep.

For all his talk of superconductors and colloids, there could have been a lot more action. More explosions, car chases, etc. There's not a single kissing scene, even!

Avoid this colossal bore. Perhaps the DVD will be better.

This should have been an immensly interesting chapter in inorganic chemistry. But the author doesn't manage to deliver any overview, insight or 'mental discoveries' of new or old concepts. It becomes too much like listening to someone reading from a catalogue.
I appologice, this could have been written in a better way.

Since Crystal Reports has become more and more popular, there are more and more books out there on the subject. I had bought Peck's Complete Reference and thought this would be a good addition to that title. I was dead wrong.

The book tries to cover Crystal Reports 9, but they don't even use the most current version. And in the very first picture of a report in the book (when you are supposed to be looking at a Crystal Reports designer window) is wrong. It all just goes down hill from there.

Throughout the book there are screen shots that have been blown up to cover the entire page (filler?) The first few examples are off of multiple dBase files and the report is an old Crystal Reports that used to ship with the samples. Through the first few chapters, the author switches between these dBase files, the Northwind database, an old version of the Crystal sample database and the new version of the Crystal sample data.

On one of the pages he shows getting fields from the old database, on the facing page it is using the new database. It makes it impossible to follow what he is trying to accomplish. His writing style seems to be dumping every dialog out of Crystal Reports and copying what was in the help text.

And then when get to the coding section to find he is using Crystals "Report Designer Component" and has basically dumped the developer help text out to make the rest of the book. It is a wonder Crystal doesn't sue him for it. When trying to troubleshoot what little real code there is to be found in the book, I found out that Crystal doesn't actually recommend using the RDC for development anymore!

I should have known when I looked at the book on the shelf as the cover itself looked like an amateur attempt. That pretty much sums up the content as well.

Let me first say that I just spent ... for a copy of the ASP.NET pdf file that is available for free on various websites . How can Wrox charge for this information??? Its only eleven pages, and there is nothing new here. Here is an outline of what you get:
1. Demo of an existing ASP report
2. Do "Save As" to convert the report to ASP.NET (wow! what a revelation)
3. Show VB.NET code to open the report and login to a database.
4. Export the file.

What is here that justifies spending any money? Why does Wrox think we should pay for this document? I bought this because I thought Wrox would have done some good research and produce something that is worth reading. C'mon Wrox, you can do better than this. This would be funny if I didn't just throw away my money on it.

Anyway, if you're smart you'll just go and get it online. Its the same thing and most don't charge for it. By the way - can I get a refund???

The intention of this book is to provide a description of crystal structures for materials used in materials science and engineering and to emphasize relationships between structures and physical properties and to prepare the reader with the tools to design new materials with improved properties. The book is divided into 4 chapters covering the fundamentals of atoms and molecules, the fundamentals of crystallography, crystal structures, and structural changes of crystals. The intended audience consists of engineers and scientists who work on materials development. Chemists, physicists, and geologists may find useful material in descriptive crystallography and crystal structures, but no attempt has been made to cover other topics (e.g., synthetic chemistry, phase diagrams, nucleation kinetics, magnetic properties, etc.) that would be found in a solid state chemistry text.

Skip the first chapter entirely. Electronic structure and chemical bonding discussion is dated and and often wrong. Some material duplicates that found in physical and inorganic chemistry texts and virtually all such texts give a better exposition than is found here. Molecular orbital theory is presented in a confused and confusing fashion. A final section of this chapter deals with band theory; it contains an amazing number of errors in physics, grammar, and presentation. Readers would do better to go to a number of other books for a more modern, more correct, and clearer treatment of chemical bonding and electronic structure-property relationships.

The remaining chapters in this book are more worthwhile. The fundamentals of crystallography are ably presented. Here, and throughout the remainder of the text, analytical details in the text are supplemented with very good greyscale drawings that emphasize the geometrical aspects of the subject quite nicely. Point group and space group symmetries are presented in a mostly descriptive fashion, with only a brief foray into the more formal aspects of space group theory at the end of the chapter. Students who need more formal training will need to go further than the treatment given in this section. Chapter 3 presents basic crystal structures. This is fairly standard material and is covered in a much deeper and more systematic way in reference works such as Well's classic book, Structural Inorganic Chemistry. Nevertheless, modern graphics allow the reader to see any given structure in more than one way and the authors have often placed alternative presentations (ball-and-stick, polyhedra, space-filling) together in an especially effective way. This is undoubtedly the strongest pedagogical device in this book. The authors have clearly decided that each way of looking at the structure offers its own advantages and by combining modes of presentation they can exploit them all. In chapter 4, the text finishes with a mostly descriptive treatment of structural changes in crystals. Thermodynamic aspects are mentioned in places, though not emphasized. Also, symmetry is used to describe some changes, but readers are not taken through the rigorous physical aspects of the subject. What is imparted to the reader is some feeling for the range of crystal transformations possible and with the illustrations provided, the reader should be able to gain some genuine appreciation for the subject. The materials discussed in this last chapter are of decidedly mineralogical flavor - metallic systems are not discussed.

The English is atrocious. On page 95, for example, there are two inches of text below a figure. This text includes eleven sentences, all of which need some corrections or need to be completely rewritten. My eleven-year-old daughter correctly identified eight obvious errors in this passage in three minutes. In a five-minute random perusal of the text, I spotted the several misspellings and typographical errors that even a spell-checking program should have caught, including "structucral", "thermondymanics", and "primarilly" (sic). While the most egregious errors are concentrated in certain sections of the book, a few errors of grammatical construction find their way into most sections of the text.

Grossly overpriced for a book that suffers from such poor editing.

I read some Pink Parrots books years ago, and it scared me away from the series entirely! I think it was poorly written, and needed a little, spunk! I hated Pink Parrots, but if you're looking for something to read, well I guess you could try this!

Had pic's from Info Server 6.0 on the installation. Found numerous errors on many pages, not containing the correct information. Icons on the screen that are not in their book. Would have rated this a 0, but the option was not available