In the book The Fear Place by Pillips Reginal,Doug is a boy who is left alone at the family campsite. Doug's family are all naturalists and they have to clean up a lot.

If you like books with adventure and fear you should read this book. This book has so much adveture and scary parts in it. I think kids ages 4-12 would enjoy reading this book.

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! :)

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.

Whether you want to make money or just get the best deal available, you will benefit greatly from this exceptionally well written guidebook. Ordering this book today will save you precious time and money. JUST DO IT!

Chrissa Jennings is a thirteen year old confused teenager. Why her father left her three years ago is still a question to her. She has failed to talk to her mother because she just wouldn't understand, so she is sent to her grandmother's out in the country. Maybe this will be where Chrissa can find the answers to her questions, instead she finds out a whole lot more than she bargained for. Will she be able to find out the real truth while trying to help someone close to her?

This book was definitely by far one of the best books I have ever read. The characters were so real and fun filled that it was hard for me to ever put the book down. Every page had something new and exciting in it. For example when Chrissa was walking home from school down the dirt road to her grandmother's a white Buick came at her at almost fifty miles an hour as if they were trying to kill her. When she told her grandmother she thought it was Sister Harmony's nephew she was thought to be a liar. Also this book has so many twists and turns that you never know what is actually the truth until the end. For example when Chrissa is talking to Sister Harmony's nephew she almost thought that it was her father, but since her grandmother is holding something back you never find out who and where her father is until the very end. This book is very interesting and well written and very realistic because all the events that take place could actually happen.

This book was a awesome book! Its not one of the books that you have to read for a little bit and then get into it the excitement starts in the first chapter and ends in the last line of the book! Ice is on of those books that when reading it, it actually feels like you are with the characters in the book while everything is happening. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves to read a fun filled book, can't put down, exciting book. This book is such a fantastic book and anyone who reads it will enjoy it!

The Good -- At 192 pages, this is a very comprehensive guide. It's organized in much the same way as the D&D Gazetteer, only in much greater detail. While a lot of this material (especially the history of the Flanaess) has been covered previously, the country descriptions make up the heart of the book. You get at least a full page for each country, breaking down the cities, religions, politics, economy and more. Want the stats for the head of one of the noble houses of Ahlissa? It's here. Wondering how many orcs live in the Pomarj? No problem. The section on Greyhawk's pantheon of gods is equally in-depth, expanding on the information in the Player's Handbook. I also thought including the color heraldry for each country was a nice touch. The world map is essentially a larger version of the D&D Gazetteer map, only with hexes and more cities indicated. Good, but not great.

The Bad -- There's more here on the organizations of the Flanaess than in the D&D Gazetteer, but nowhere near enough as far as I'm concerned. For example, I figured the Knights of the Hart would be treated like a prestige class. However, there are no guidelines or prerequisites for characters to join such groups. It simply says they're actively searching for new members. While this may be covered in an upcoming product, it should be here.

The Ugly -- I have mixed feelings about Wizards of the Coast turning over Greyhawk to the RPGA. Putting the campaign world in the hands of players is a good thing. (After all, players sustained Greyhawk while TSR was neglecting it.) At the same time, it seems like some details are being reserved for the Living Greyhawk campaign. And that's not for everyone. Greyhawk adventures once made up the heart of D&D. I'd hate to see such a rich product line dry up completely.

If you like campaigning in the world of Greyhawk, this is probably an essential buy. Taken as a whole, it's extremely well-done and deserves a strong recommendation. We'll just have to see if there's more to come.

The world of Greyhawk is presented in all of its varying shades of "grey" glory. From Ahlissa to Zief; all of the political factions, organized lands, forests, rivers, lakes, mountains, and islands are incredibly detailed--while still allowing the DM ample room to manipulate/develop the game world to his/her hearts content. (Admittedly a difficult thing to balance, but the authors pull it off!) There are also mysteries and adventure ideas mentioned within each entry to help the game master generate ideas for their own campaigns.

It is true that some of the information in the book may be repeated from older sources. However, it is also true that unless you care to spend tons of money on ebay buying up out-of-print titles, you'll never get this much solid Greyhawk information complied into such a well presented and organized package.

Lastly, many of the authors of the book have been THE backbone to the Greyhawk community on the 'net over the years. They are in no small way responsible for helping to keep Greyhawk alive during the difficult TSR years.

It's great to see their hard work and love for the Greyhawk setting (over the years) come to print media with such style and grace.

M. Schroeder

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

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.

This book solves all those problems. Anyone new to C# or just object oriented programming, can learn from this book.

The way that Karli eases you into the concepts and describes what each line of code does is extremely helpful.

This book is probably NOT for the Intermediate to Advanced programmer as Karli covers a lot of basic programming concepts. However, It also is a great primer for anyone wanting exposure to the language.

The only other book which even comes close to this is C# By Herb Schildt. Which is another exceptionally good book for beginners, though it does not touch the wide range of topics as Beg.C#
With this book Wrox is back in form.
Simply put... An Amazing Achievement....

I like the hands-on style of explaining things. The author does not give you wooden definitions but talks in a practical manner. e.g. "A constructor is block of code that executes when you use the new keyword to create an instance of a class." I ve never read such a clear and to the point explanation of a constructor before. The text is full of tips and established practices that I found particularly helpfull.

The negative is that lots of things are not explained. The logic and whys behind some of the code are simply missing, which is a shame since the author is a skillful one. This book could easily get a 5 star rating if it were not for this. I d actually give 3,5.

I haven't read other books on OOP and .NET but I think this one is worth its money.

The Good

I chose this book for a class in object-oriented programming that I gave in November 2002. For the most part, I was very pleased with this book, and the feedback I received about it from my students was positive as well. The author did a good job of explaining the concepts clearly and concisely, and most of the book is dedicated to the step-by-step completion of hands-on exercises. For this particular class, I relied on the book for most of the instruction and hands-on portions, and I found that this book worked very well for a one week long class. I personally thought that it was very useful to have both Visual Basic and C# examples side-by-side in the book. However, I did notice that when typing in the labs from the book, students often would type the VB code instead of the C# (C# was the language used for this particular class).

The fact that the examples all worked and were very clearly explained in the text both were huge positives for me. If I were teaching the class over again, I think I would definitely choose this book once more. If I were a student looking to learn object-oriented programming by example, then this would be a good book to pick up. If I wanted to learn more about the design and theory behind of OOP, another book would probably be a better choice.

The Less Good

There were only a few things about this book that I didn't care for or that I received negative feedback from students on. The first one isn't the book's fault at all, and that is the fact that all of the examples are for windows forms. As an ASP.NET programmer myself, I would have preferred to have seen the book use ASP.NET for more of its examples. This was a very minor complaint, however. Also, although I very much liked the support for both VB and C#, I think that something should be done within the text to ensure that the C# and VB code samples are set apart more obviously. Many students were confused by this and would end up looking at or even typing in the wrong code for examples because the VB and C# code was interspersed without much visual separation.

The single biggest complain I received from students about the text was that the examples were very difficult to relate to. These were IT workers with experience building ASP and VB applications, and they were disappointed by the samples because they did not correspond to anything that they could see themselves writing in the workplace. The bank account samples were the exception to this, and were well-received, but the card games and vector algebra applications ended up detracting from students' abilities to grasp the concepts involved because they were too busy trying to figure out what the game or mathematical program was doing. A greater focus on business problem domain examples would have helped many of my students, I think, to relate to the topics being described by the examples.