Funny, but not as interesting as the other book (Camel 1913-63).

good overall price guide for three years ago but the same items are listed to many times. could have put thousands of other items into the book and still used the same amount of space. there are so many more camel collectibles now, especially with joe dead, but NOT FORGOTTEN!

I bought "Master the Catholic High School Entrance Exams - 2002" for my 8th grader.

I have found an average 1% error rate in the two HSPT exams - totally unacceptable. I expect zero defects in a book like this - not a good example to set to young people.

Very disappointing!

I used this for preparation for a Catholic School entrance exam, and it was wonderful. The exam that I got was identical in format and although the exact numbers and subjects used in the actual test were different, the basic type of questions were the same as on the test. I highly reccomend this, or the most recent one for you. Good Luck!

This book, though it is a very artistic "interpretation", it bears no resemblance in form or function to the Tao Te Ching. There has been an attempt by the author to make this philosophy seem relevant to the modern world and in the process of doing this much of the symbolism and beauty that was in the original work has been lost. The Tao Te Ching posseses a powerful, wide reaching message of peace and teaches a peaceful way of life, this "poetic rewriting" instead tries to explain to us the underlying principles in the Tao Te Ching but fail to do this and it come across as a much more superficial way of explaining something completely different

This is by no means a translation, so the idea of it being a Daoist work is irrelevent. It is, in fact, a writing of Constructive Living - based on the method of psychotherapy by Morita Masatake - using the Dao De Jing as a template. The book provides simple and sound wisdom for breaking through unrealistic thinking that gets in the way of allowing a more natural way of life and less suffering caused by obsession, compulsive behaviour, and other manifestations of held back thoughts and feelings. Another book using the Dao De Jing as a template that I highly recommend is Haven Treviño's The Tao of Healing.

Too often, a "Christian" mystery isn't Christian at all. It may include a clergyman sleuth or a church setting, but the Christian faith has no bearing on anyone's conduct. Happily, that is not true here.

A new 'tec for me is Fr. Mark Townsend, the creation of Jesuit priest Brad Reynolds. In A RITUAL DEATH, he has taken some vacation time to visit his grandparents in LaConner, Washington. LaConner is a beautiful retirement community on land rented from the Swinomish Indians.

The Swinomishes' long-standing resentment of their more prosperous white tenants appears to have boiled over into murder. The victim is Fr. Mark's grandfather's best friend. The prime suspect is the husband of Grandmother Townsend's cleaning woman. The family and the races are divided over the guilt of Greg Patsy, a salmon fisherman and Swinomish activist. The Patsy family, especially daughter Jesse, engage Fr. Mark's sympathies, particularly since he senses the motives for this murder are more complex than a dispute between two fishermen.

Against his father's wishes (and those of his his associate pastor holding the fort back home), Fr. Mark and his new-found Swinomish allies discover the smuggling history of the Skagit Valley continues with new forms of contraband.

Guided by the words of St. Ignatius and his own heart, Fr. Mark believably fumbles his way to a surprising solution. The supporting characters are vivid, as is the setting. I welcome Fr. Reynolds to the band of authors whose new titles I eagerly anticipate.

We may never face murder, but this Christian "detective" can teach us how to apply our faith in situations of stress and fear. Not bad for "light" reading!

Kathleen T. Choi HAWAII CATHOLIC HERALD

A Jesuit priest visitiing a Northwest Indian Reservation? The opportunites for an interesting and compelling background to this novel are clear: a cultural diversity, a mysterious Indian clan and its death and adulhood rituals, the economic tenuousness of a commercial fishing reservation, and the prejudices and distances of the inhabitants of smalltown America. No matter how exotic the background, the plot of the novel contains some comfortingly familiar techniques: murder, greed and economic pillage, drugs, smuggling, hidden treasure, a precocious child, mistaken identity, and successful unravelling of the mystery through common sense and deductive reasoning. It all combines in an interesting way to spend your mystery-reading time: A Ritual Death is well written and set in a fascinating place and culture. With all of that going for it, this novel does just fine, even without any new plot angles.

The primary focus of this third installment of the Robotech Art books is the art and planned storyline of the failed series, Robotech II: the Sentinels. For an "art" book, this one is rich in text. However, if you are a die hard Robotech fan, this is the only reliable source of information concerning the series and its development (or lack thereof). I for one recommend it if you want to round out your Robotech collection.

Seldom does a book tell a story about failure rather than success, and it's even more rare when the book's writer was major player who was involved in the failure. It's something I've almost never seen in my study of documentary literature.

Set between the original series' first and second acts, and featuring the first act's main characters, ROBOTECH II: THE SENTINELS was an ambitious attempt to further expand the mythos of the Robotech anime series. Art 3, penned by series producer/writer Carl Macek, is a chronicle of what went into the production of this series, as well as the economics, creative differences, and politics that led to its downfall. There's also the story of the salvaging The Sentinels... where the four episodes that were completed were re-worked into a feature-length video release.

Included are the synopses of the completed episodes, as well as the general story of The Sentinels as it would have unfolded. Although not quite as extensively illustrated as its two predecessors, Art 3 does contain 'Bios' and renderings of the characters, as well as general descriptions of the vehicles and equipment seen in the series.

The Sentinels, however, was not the only aborted attempt to add to the Robotech saga. ART 3 also recounts the making of Robotech: The Untold Story, a feature film that never saw wide theatrical or video release. A synopsis of the film is included.

Although I highly recommend this book to the many Robotech completists out there, I'd better give you fair warning: Art 3 has long since gone out of print, and is next to impossible to find. If you ever do come across one at a reasonable price and in decent condition, consider yourself very fortunate...

And the bereaved mother started to sit on a bench awaiting her daughter's reappearance year after year. This IBSEN's scene might be okay for a Broadway play but highly unlikely for a believable reading. I was fooled by Reynolds for his latest wonderful "PLAYERS" and trying to cover up all of his old works, but could only find disappointments so far in this one and "FRANKLIN'S CROSSING". Both resulted in a bad taste

In a beautiful and deceptive way, Reynolds uses the disappearance of a daughter to introduce the reader into a world that is moved, disrupted and changed by the human heart. By the end of the story, it didn't even matter what happened to the daughter. I only had room in my heart for Ezra the sheriff, Imma the strange mother taking vigil on the courthouse bench, and the haunting yet silent love between the two. And Imma losing her daughter only to find her purpose in life . . . storytelling at its finest!

I'm going to have to confess that I bought this book because of its title. I like to read and review vampire books, and believe that having some background knowledge can add some interest to a review. So I pulled the book down from the shelf, turned to one of the few pages in the book that actually contained the word vampire, and bought it. It was only when I started to reed it at home that I discovered that its real title is 'Magical Acts, Rites and Beliefs in Subcarpathian Rus.' The current title is an invention of either the translator's or the publisher. So, starting right out, the book loses a star for pretending it is what it is not.

What is it? Petr Bogatyrev was a Russian ethnologist who should have been better known than he is. He was born in 1893 and died in 1971. Among his other accomplishments besides this book is his translation into Russian of Hasek's 'Good Soldier Svejk.' He spent his early academic life studying the folklore and customs of Czechoslovakia, eventually earning an honorary Doctor of Philology for this book. He pursued his career in Russia upon returning, but eventually fell victim to the Stalinist fervor of the times and spent most of his life in obscurity. To our loss, since 'Magical Rites...' reveals a keen and interesting mind.

Bogatyrev was an exponent of the synchronic method of ethnography, which he came upon in his linguistic studies. In it's essence it was a rebellion against historical ethnography which attempts to trace backward from contemporary studies to discover the original myths and legends as they existed in some prehistorical period of cultural unity. Instead, Bogatyrev believed we should try to study the present legends and belief systems in context in order to understand their contemporary significance. This allows us to understand the 'magical' mechanisms underlying folk practices, categorize them appropriately, and recognize the sources of variation and commonality. This method reminds me most of Mircea Eliade, who uses a similar approach in 'Shamanism' in 1951, albeit with much greater success.

The flaw in this method is that the reader is often confronted with a massive catalog of facts, without the kind of organization that makes it easy to see the forest rather than get lost in the trees. Only in isolated paragraphs do we find discussions which gradually bring the material together into a conceptual whole. Often the message is disappointingly trivial. Bogatyrev spends a great deal of time and effort rediscovering Frazer's principals of magic; the law of similarity and the law of contact. But he never muses on his inability to discover examples of the law of opposition, and so leaves his findings in question, or at least, lacking in depth.

Since catalogs of Subcarpathian folklore are not common, the book's intrinsic value is greater than it's expository worth as a demonstration of methodology. That it belongs on the shelves of ethnographers is without doubt. The exposition is well written. The book is organized into a methodological introduction followed by a large section organized according to the folk calendar. Subsequent chapters discuss births and baptism, weddings, funerals, finally ending with apparitions and supernatural beings. In no case, however, should you by this in the hope of discovering anything relevant to vampires. They are most definitely not what Bogatyrev was interested in.

This book was originally published in French in 1929 with a title that translates as: Magical Acts, Rites, and Beliefs in Subcarpathian Rus'. The title Vampires in the Carpathians was added for this 1998 English translation and is really misleading. The last two chapters: "Funerals" and "Apparitions and Supernatural Beings" do make passing references to vampires, but focus mostly on other spirits. So if you are looking for a book on vampires, look elsewhere. What little is said about vampires will be only of interest to the serious scholar who needs to know every possible reference in the literature. The original title, which is the current subtitle, is a much more accurate description of what this book is about. However, Bogatyrev spends over 35 pages talking about his research methodology which he calls the synchronic method. Unless this is what you really want to learn about, I advise you skip the Introduction and Conclusion. His methodology is that he tells us what the ritual means to the people performing it at that time. He does not try to draw inferences back in time or determine origins. He just "tells it like it is" or, in this case, as it was back in the 1920's. What results is very unsatisfying. He tells you a ritual and what it means in village X, then tells you that in village Y they do the same thing, but have no idea why. Then, he relates that in village Z they don't do this at all. He goes through the whole religious calendar relating quaint old customs attached to each religious holiday, then does the same for rituals attached to births, weddings and funerals. We owe this author a debt of gratitude for documenting this snapshot of Carpathian village life. English-speaking folklore scholars will be glad to have access to this work and Americans of Rusyn descent may finally understand what crazy rituals and customs drove their grandparents to leave this rustic corner of Central Europe for the USA and Canada. On the plus side, this is an excellent translation and the biography of Bogatyrev is engaging. Not for any but the most dedicated readers.

This book is a treasure trove of folklore and customs of the Carpathian Rus. Following the service cycle of the Orthodox Church, the authors discuss the various folk customs asscoaited with each feast as well as marriag, death, etc. The probable origins and variations are discussed as is the intention of the act. It's a great read, but a bit heavy, being written in full blown academic style. For anyone interested in the small t traditions of these people, it is invaluable.

What a SUCK-FEST! This is the worst book I've read in a long time. The (unlucky) 13 authors seem only slightly concerned with plot continuity, and the result is like a novel with every third page torn out. Characters come and go, and come back again for no apparent reason, other than to satisfy the authors' self-indulgent egos. In particular, the chapters by Elmore Leonard and Vicki Hendricks were appallingly bad. Hendricks ignores all the preceeding chapters and suddenly changes the eponymous manatee from an aquatic pinhead into some amalgam of Lassie and the Hardy Boys. In a later chapter Carl Hiaasen openly mocks this sudden swerve in character. (Tip: avoid books where one co-author ridicules another co-author's writing) Elmore Leonard contributes a time capsule that might have been hip 25 years ago, with a black character refering to someone as a "cat", and in the very next sentence actually using the phase "shuck and jive". I am very happy I checked this book out of the library, instead of squandering 22.95 on this train wreck of a book

OK, thirteen of Miami's favorite writers are sitting around a campfire (this isn't a joke). Dave Barry kicks off a story involving a couple hit men, a manatee, a 102-year-old woman and a box containing the head of Fidel Castro, and passes it to the writer to the left. The next eleven writers circle the story around the campfire in an attempt to blend this motley cast of characters (and heads) into the literary equivalent of a refreshing Miami Beach smoothee.

Throwing in monkey wrenches, stranger characters and even more heads-in-boxes in the process, they mostly succeed in creating a wholly unbelievable, extremely offbeat and wildly entertaining mystery. Poor Carl Hiassen (of Striptease fame) is challenged with tying up all the loose ends without playing the Demi Moore card, and succeeds in delivering an ending as strange as a manatee is large.

Above all an interesting experiment, Naked Came the Manatee is also an entertaining quick read.

Booger is the answer to the walls talking. Suspend belief and enter the world of a manatee that thinks, feels and reasons like us. He becomes involved in a mystery not as a victim, but as a participant in important events. The concept of a manatee detective aiding the likes of Brit Montero in solving the case of the Castro heads is only exceeded by the writing of this by the many different writers, from Dave Barry to Carl Hiaasen. No mystery should be this much fun

This book is not based on Visual Studio.Net Final Release!

I have read the book front to back including introduction page. I just realized that the book was based on beta 2 of Visual Studio.Net, too late for a refund. Anyway, I went on to read it and found out that the book was not very much organised as tons of '...we'll discuss this on chapter xx ... ' appear no less than 5 times in a single chapter (on some chapters). Mispelled words also are catching enough to say that this book was in a hurry to be printed.

If you're looking for a book that covers thorough details on window forms and web form control howtos, this wouldn't give you enough detail on those topics. Web Services is equally a mere introduction, with about two pages of discussion on UDDI as well as WSDL. Not much on ADO.Net and XML.

I should have borrowed this book instead and skim through it or should have bought it for 20 bucks less. Besides, it's already outdated. I hope the same authors would come up with a second edition that has richer detail...and send me a free copy.

I was planning on buying this book and noticed the out of print note on the Wrox site. Not exactly sure what out of print means.
Looks like other books based on the betas say out of print on the Wrox site.
If this book was released in August 2001 then it should have been based on the beta. They might plan on releasing an updated version.

I'd say this is the best Professional VB.NET book so far. I like the the ADO.NET part and VB control part of this book. Better than O'really ASP and VB book.

I use this book in a two-semester class on Numerical Analysis that I teach at Chapman University. I like the book. It starts with root-finding and interpolation algorithms, progresses to numerical estimates of derivatives and integrals. Each section is typically accompanied by the relevant algorithm(s) in pseudo-code, which I find easily translate to C or C++. Examples in Maple are given, and I've used MATLAB as well in conjunction with the book.

I rated the book with 4 stars instead of 5 for minor reasons. For example, I think a clearer description of Gaussian Quadriture could be presented, and there are other Quadriture methods that could be presented (Chebychev, Laguerre). Rational polynomial interpolation should be included as a topic. The chapters on numerical solution of differential equations are particularly good. The text developes Runge-Kutta (2nd and 4th orders) and shows how RK is used to solve systems of ODEs or higher-order DEs by introducing intermediate variables. Algorithm 5.7 (page 320) is an implementation of the solution of 'm' linear DEs that is quite simple if one uses function pointers.

The chapters on linear algebra are quite good as are the sections on approximation.

One feature of the text I find helpful is the "real world" engineering problems that are included.

This is a numerical analysis book written from a mathematician's point of view, and requires from the reader a good background in calculus and linear algebra.

Even though the book has an initial chapter ("mathematical preliminaries"), reading this chapter is not enough if the student has not a good previous mathematical knowledge.

The book introduces modern approximation techniques and explains how, why and when these techniques are expected to work, and allows the reader to understand why one algorithm works better than other for a given problem.

The text contains many examples as well as application problems in various areas of science and engineering.

The book uses Maple as the standard software for symbolic and approximate calculus, even though Mathematica and Derive are mentioned too and could be used instead with small modifications.

The original English edition (7th edition) includes a CD-ROM with all the algorithms, expressed in different formats (C, Fortran, Pascal, Maple, Mathematica and MATLAB), although the Spanish translation (edited by Thomson Learning) does not include the CD-ROM. However, there is an Internet address in which the CD-ROM contents can be accessed.

To conclude, the book is a good text that requires a mathematical background from the reader and covers a broad range of modern approximation techniques. It is not a mere numerical methods cookbook, but a text that analyzes and applies the numerical methods instead.

Anyone who thinks this book is too difficult and/or requires a Ph.D. in mathematics has simply never learned any math, such as calculus and linear algebra. In that case, it's indeed easier to simply buy software that implements all the necessary numerical algorithms. This book is not a set of instructions for using a calculator, it is a book for an intelligent reader who thinks creatively and wants to understand the logic behind classical numerical methods.

Very transparent, clear, and straight to the point this book is all I needed to quickly learn about the Gaussian quadrature and understanding both the algorithm itself as well as WHY IT WORKS AND DOES SO EFFICIENTLY. Please disregard the previous author's review, as its poisonous tone alone should suggest that he is trying to blame his own mathematical deficiencies upon the authors of this very worthwhile text.