This book was an easy read but did not seem to have very much in common with the environment expressed in the game upon which it is based. The game seems to show the native Nali as being a very religious culture, and yet in the book this aspect is not even mentioned once. I never got the sense that this was an alien race on an alien world. For all intents and purposes, the Nali could have just been four-armed pacifistic humans on an alternate Earth.

The book goes in great with the atmosphere of the game. It gives the game player with some extra story to accompany the game. It might not be the best book I have read, but it is among the best out of books that were written for games.

This was a fascinating story. The book was a very quick read. Even though I did'nt know about the chapters being switched ahead of time (and that was a bit confusing for a few minutes), when I read the following chapter I knew exactly what had happened. I reccomend this book for anyone that enjoys a quick moving, high-action sci-fi story. Good work guys and keep em coming.

I can't believe anyone would like this book. I agree with others who said the dialogue drags, adds nothing to the plot, and seems as if it was a high school student's first attempt to write. This is not worth the time. The characters and plot are underdeveloped and there is nothing to keep you hanging on.

The cottage I rented on my vacation held a copy of "Charming Lily" in it's very full bookcases. Why did I chose this over the great library in the Summer vacation house?
I knew the name Fern Michaels vaguely, and I had never read any of her books before. I figured it would be a light, easy to read and follow book that I could read in the five days I was there.

Fern Michaels, I quote, "likes to write about strong women". The "Lily" of the title is a woman of small stature(from her description) but large on determination. I don't know about strength. The end of the story doesn't make her out to be such a strong woman. his is the one and only book I will read by Michaels just because of her quote because I don't agree with her at all that Lily was a strong woman. She was a kind hearted, and broken hearted woman who buckles under loves strap.

Lily is stood up at the altar by the male romantic lead in the story, Matt Starr(a perfect male romantic lead name), she vows never to get involved again and moves on. Her and Sadie, her best friend since childhood, both embark on careers as Survival Camp Counselors. Matt is among one of the group Lily is leading in the beginning of the story, and it's been a few years since he blew her off at the altar.
The get involved again, and chaos ensues. Matt is kidnapped by three brothers who sound like something out of a gangster movie. He is saved after days of real "survival" by Lily, Sadie, and Matt's best friend, Dennis. Eventually it all ends tragically happy, like most romance novels. A charm called a "wish keeper" is worn around Lily's neck throughout most of the story, and she has the "seizures" that make her see the future and see things that are happening. That is how they all find Matt Starr. The secondary story aside from ooey gooey love kept me interested enough to keep reading.
Every character in the story gets what they eventually deserve depending on their circumstances throughout the story. It's a perfect book for people who like a nicely wrapped up ending, those that want closure are far below their reading level here. But at least you get form of closure.
The love story of this is very predictable, but like I said, it was light reading for summer vacation that was easy to get through in five days.

Recommended for vacation read!

Eileen Famiglietti

Lily Harper had been left at the alter by Matt Starr before. It took him a long time to convince her to give him a second chance. During their time apart Matt had built Digitech, a now famous software company. Dennis Wagner and Marcus Collins were his most trusted men. They had been with Matt since the beginning. Yet one of them was selling secrets to the competition. Marcus was trying to convince Matt it was Dennis. But Marcus was the one in major financial trouble and desperate for money despite the huge salary, bonuses, and company perks. As soon as the new software was announced, which would change the high-tech world, Matt would retire. He had only to marry Lily and fire one of his best friends. That was...until he was kidnapped!

When Matt did not show up for the wedding, Lily was left standing at the alter for the second time by the same man! She was deeply hurt until foul play became obvious. A necklace given to her (called a "Wish Keeper") was sending her short visions of Matt. The necklace and Matt's dog, Gracie, was the only hope Lily and her friends had of locating him.

Awesome story! Just a touch of the super natural (in the necklace) and combined with modern day computer geniuses...makes an excellent story for everyone! I could not bring myself to stop reading, so I finished it in less than a day! Be warned, don't start this one until you have plenty of reading time ahead of you! Highly recommended!

This book was a very detailed and interesting look into some of the most amazing military blunders in history. The author has obviously done his homework, and gives surprisingly intricate detail into each situation. He does tend to ramble on a little with his explanations, and injects a lot of theory based on the facts about why he thinks certain leaders didn't see things coming, but it's very substantiated. He also seems to hold a general dislike for the job that the United States and British intelligence services do. Maybe there's some hidden issues there.

Although this book would not rank among the unputdownables, it was interesting enough for me to read it from cover to cover over several days. The author has struck a balance between riveting story telling and details of who-did-what-when.

The title is a bit misleading as it was often not military intelligence per se that led to the blunders but the failure to appreciate or act on useful intelligence.

This is one the best books about military intelligence that I have read. Having spent many years working in the area, I find that most other books on the subject are written by outsiders who never quite fully understand what they are writing about, no matter how bright or well intentioned they may be. Few outsiders appreciate, for example, the details of the intelligence cycle, the multiple layers of intelligence collectors, the rivalries among collection agencies, the correct technical jargon, the practical effects on intelligence analysis of inter-agency battles for bigger budgets, etc.

Hughes-Wilson utilizes a case study approach. He analyzes nine different events or conflicts from World War II to the present. Having read about many of the conflicts before, I did not expect to learn much that was new. However, the author presented many new factual details about the events involving the Brits, in particular, that were fascinating. He was clearly a very informed observer and/or possible participant in many of the conflicts. His analysis of the American failure in Tet 1968 is one of the most incisive and dispassionate that I have read. He is no fan of official histories. He is blunt in his criticisms. His comments (actually a very minor part of his Pearl Harbor story)about the FBI's handling of Japanese and German espionage in WW II makes one seriously question the FBI's competence to work effectively as an intelligence organization at that time. But, then has anything really gotten better at the FBI?

Bottom line: As one other reviewer has commented, Hughes-Wilson's real message is that political considerations - whether those of a totalitarian regime or a democracy - often lead to what are called "intelligence blunders." His call for truly objective and independent intelligence collection, analysis and dissemination should be heeded, but it will probably be ignored. We will see more such blunders again.

The book starts with a strange 'Introduction to Programming' chapter, which is for people who don't know what a variable is (good thing _that's_ in a language reference book!) Meanwhile, there is no 'Introduction to VBScript' chapter. I found it very difficult to find simple information on syntax and keywords (just try to find anything on function return types or declaring arrays...) The main Appendix, which contains lots of valuable information, is organized randomly by arcane subjects (and there's no listing of the subjects) so it's difficult to find anything. It also seems to be lifted out of a VB book and contains things that aren't even supported in VBScript.

The range of topics covered is useful if you're trying to decide whether VBScript is right for your project . But if you're just trying to write Active Server Pages, I recommend skipping this book and getting 'Beginning ASP' by Wrox -- it uses VBScript exclusively and has a better introduction to the syntax and usage of the language.

Subs,procedures, and functions all covered in the book in Chapter 3.

"A reader" doesn't read much! I think Wrox and 1000's of other people who buy may noticed if Subs and Functions missing!

One of best books I buy. But I would like Appendix A (BEST VBScript reference ever!) to be alphabetical - easier to look up, but I love book anyway. I recommend to everyone.

I have read VBScript Programmer's Reference. I would to congratulate the team who put this book together. Its so well written I was programming within the day. Not just a "Hello World" program but a program of substance that opened files, validated them, wrote events in the event log etc.
The book is easy to follow and the short introduction to programming most useful for non-programmers like me and my team.
Unfortunately, for me, the book will lead to more work for me and my team of technical mainframe support staff converting mainframe legacy JCL to VBScript. I will be ordering two more copies of the book for my team and I am sure that they will gain much from it.
Even after a few days, members of staff from programming teams keep borrowing the book I am now forced to lie about its location (under my desk).
If I had a criticism I would say that Cscript should be covered in a little more detail, but its only minor point and I found the information I was looking for on the Web.

I bought 3 books on VBScript, the others are not bad books but they are written with a rocket scientist in mind and assume that the reader is competent in programming and modern scripting techniques. Thankfully your book saved the day and I actually enjoyed reading it. I get the impression that the team that put it together also enjoyed that task, it seems to come across in the text anyways.

Its a great book.

Better order this book and then get offline and do some quality parenting! Donna Rice Hughes goes far beyond breezy tips and will ground you in Internet basics, dangers, and solutions. Everything is cited and it's obvious that much research was done in order to create a book for parents who want their kids online--but safely.

An excellent guide for parents that displays a firm grasp of the complex technological, social, and legal issues involved. At the same time, Ms. Rice-Hughes is able to translate this information in a way that parents unfamiliar with technology can easily understand. Kids Online is packed with useful information and advice. No parent should let his or her child go on on-line without reading this book.

Donna Rice Hughes has produced a clear, concise volume of online basics and important advanced information which every parent needs to know.

Even those people who feel they're up on the internet should use this book as a refresher course. Those readers who believe they aren't "into" computers will also benefit from this book.

Parents who allow their kids to roam the web without the protection noted in this volume are letting them "play with fire".

The internet is here to stay and "Kids Online" in an indispensable resource ... insuring that families enjoy its most positive benefits.

This book is just gossip about two famous(or infamous) poets.Janet Malcolm elicits gossip from various people who came into contact with Sylvia Plath in some way.Most of these people wrote about Plath or were her neighbors for a while.They were not close to Sylvia. When she met them,Janet tells us what clothes these people wore, and in some cases, how they dished up a meal. There is no reliable information given about either poet.Janet tells us that interesting biography can't be objective. But really, she can't be objective because she is unashamedly in the pro Ted Hughes camp. If Janet wished to learn something about Sylvia and Ted she could have asked an astrologer. Then she would have found out that Sylvia was a Scorpio, and in Chinese astrology she was a monkey.A Scorpio monkey is a strange character. She can be obsessive, extremely secretive and perversely wilful. Janet would have be informwd that Sylvia's Sun was square with Saturn. This indicates a strict superego controlling the instincts.This inner conflict would boil over at times into destructive behavior. Ted,a Leo, had eight squares in his chart, showing much inner conflict. His Venus was afflicted, indicating self-indulgence, an unloving nature, and erratic behavior in love matters.There is in-built tension between a Scorpio and a Leo. Unless both parties compromise, their strong wills clash and turn the relationship into a battlefield. Ted's Mars is square to Sylvia's Venus, causing a hostile attitude towards her.His Mars is in her fourth house of the home, so his hostility would appear there.An astrologer could have told Janet this, and more on what made these two poets tick.If you like gossip about famous people, you'll find it in this book

To prospective readers: This is not a biography of Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes. The title is somewhat misleading. Author Janet Malcolm was drawn to the subject because her former classmate Ann Stevenson was taking a terrible drubbing for her (Stevenson's) biography of Sylvia Plath "Bitter Fame."

Malcolm went about interviewing Plath-Hughes sources, family and biographers. The world of biographers is a cruel and incestuous one, particularly if the subject still has living friends, enemies, and families. Stevenson, Malcolm believes, had no idea what she was getting into and was bombarded on all sides mainly because she was an outsider.

I was predisposed to enjoy the book because of my pleasure in Malcolm's writing. I like her no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners style. She is surgically precise in her judgments. Some readers this may find her intolerably high-handed, and if so, will end up annoyed.

Sylvia Plath is not an easy subject from any standpoint. Would she have had such fame if she had not killed herself at 32? If she had not been married to Ted Hughes? Will her poetry stand up? I think we are still too close to give definitive answers. I disagree that this book is strictly for biographers, academics or Plath-buffs. It has a strong appeal to the general reader who has some interest in poetry and expatriate American writers. I left the book with a better knowledge of the dynamics in which Plath spent her last years and strong sympathies for the enigmatic Mr. Hughes.

Ms. Malcolm could have used more structure in the book; I found myself flipping back and forth among the pages. Also, some of the statements need attribution. However, in Malcolm's defense, I don't think she planned this as a scholarly work, but more impressions of the closed world of biographers. It is not overly long, and I read it in one satisfied sitting.

If the intense animus that Janet Malcolm seems to inspire doesn't carry the day, this book should come to be seen as seminal an intellectual achievement as, say, "The Origins of Totalitarianism". Put simply, it is the final word on its subject - which is, of course, the act of biography, not Sylvia Plath or Ted Hughes.

That Malcolm presents herself as a major figure in the narrative, that she sides with Hughes against Plath (she says so in precisely those words; unlike every other book that addresses the Plath story, the agenda here is explicit, not veiled), is not merely apt but crucial. This, she argues convincingly, is what every biographer does - only usually with less self-awareness and honesty.

The point can't be stressed enough - especially as several reviewers here seem to have missed it. Malcolm is only interested in Plath and Hughes (both of whom are more compelling, in my opinion, for the doom-filled lives they led than for their sub-canonical verse) as an unusually illustrative example of the impossibility of "objective" biography. Was he a cruel philanderer? Or was she a neurotic harpy? Or both? Not only don't we know, Malcolm says, we *can't* know. Her argument, presented in crisp epigrammatic prose that is its own unique pleasure, seems to me unanswerable.

The book does not have the in-depth coverage that expert SQL users would expect. If you are a beginner then it may suit you just fine. There are not enough nuts and bolts for people like me who really need the complete reference book.

A very good book on Oracle8 administration, performance tuning, backup and recovery. Full of well organized useful information.

I am primarily a Solaris system admin who wants to learn more about the inside of Oracle and what it takes to keep it up and running. The O'Reilly titles were a major disappointment since most of their stuff usually rocks, but let's hope for better 2nd editions on those along with some good tutorial material. The Oracle Press titles are totally disorganized and a major embarassment! David Austin has put together a great book with Using Oracle 8, and if you have to suffer through NT (and thank God I don't), he has plenty of material on Oracle Enterprise Mgr (all of chapter 4). Then he moves on to the nitty gritty, with a Unix-oriented or at least generic "pure Oracle" approach. I have spent two weeks browsing and reading various Oracle books and good choices are hard to find. I strongly recommend Alomari's "Oracle8 and Unix Performance Tuning" as well.

I read this novel and i found it very interesting .Even from the title we feel the irony of the writer:there are "Great Expectations",but none of the heroes of the book can acomplish them . In fact irony in this novel may be considered a kind of intertext . The book presents a life turned upsidedown:Pip`s life changed completely from the moment he is held hills over head by the fugitive Magwitch . The main hero of the novel Pip,is a kind of prism :through his eyes we can see the action ,we see waht he sees , we understand what he understands ,from the point of view of a 5 years old boy .That is why the narrator is subjective ,as the central conscience of the novel is influenced by heroe`s emotions and opinions . The novel is also an irony of destiny : thus ,Mrs Havisham ,an excentric old woman ,half crazy , half excentric ,has a " broken heart " as she was left by her fiancee .Decided to revenge she finds herself guilty of agression against life as she uses the two childern ,Estella and Pip to acomplish her wild dark dreams .She teaches Estella to hate and hurt men ,first turning her into a frosty girl and later into an insensitive woman . The novel also presents the evolution of Pip.He is a poor boy ,but through hard work he becomes a rich man.In his evolution he was helped by his secret love for Estella ,but he is disappointed by her.In the end of the novel he prooves that he changed:when he meets Estella he doesn`t return to her .

I heard for a long time that Great Expectations was a very dull book, so I didn't read it until now. When I began reading it, I thought, all those people were wrong about this book! It was so interesting and I could hardly put it down! I thought the entire story was absolutely fantastic. The book made you really get into the characters. The part that I also enjoyed about it was that it wasn't just a cheesy romance novel. It had other things in it besides those about Estella and Pip. I was also very impressed becuase it wasn't a book that I could read in a couple days with no trouble. I actually had to think about it while I read it! Needless to say, this book was one of, if not THE best book I've ever read. I would recommend it to anyone, as a matter of fact I've inspired not only some of my friends to read it, but also my favorite English teacher who has never had the joy of reading it.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens is his gift to the world. This book is quite confusing at first but it all comes togethor in the end. Expectations is about a young boy named Pip who has been raised by his sister. By pure luck he is introduced to a rich elderly woman and a run away convict. You would never guess that these two people have anything to do with each other. The book is filled with many charectors and written in old english. If you like romance and mystery you'll love this book.

Tthe examples put the whole book to shame, there are countless errors within the example code that prevent it from running. Some of the facts they list aren't accurate. If you must read this book get it from your local library.

Some reviewers have mentioned that they found errors in the book. I'd like to point out that one of the key goals in creating Jepstone.net was to offer new releases of the example code as well as support forums for my books. Ideally, there shouldn't be any errors in a book, and I apologize for any that lurk in the pages. However, I'm committed to helping you: the forums give you an opportunity to let me know about any issues you have, and I promise that I will do everything I can to resolve them quickly.

with this book you'll get not only a simple to use database for unix/linux - it's much more : you'll get all the sources on cd-rom . But the good thing with this book is : introducions to HTML, PHP/FI, JAVA, ... and how to integrate mSQL in your webpages .

When I purchased this book, I was already familiar with the basics of multithreading and synchronization. My hope was a complete, authoritative manual to help me better develop technique and methodology. In the end I was satisfied that I had learned quite a bit from the authors, but this book is hardly a good value.

First of all, a reader with an extremely rudimentary understanding of multi-tasking will find nothing but review in the first five chapters (out of twelve) of the book. To be fair, the authors state in the preface: "If the reader is familiar with the fundamental C++ class types and the basic operation system concepts needed to understand threads, then the reader can skip Chapter 1 through 4." This is a bit of an understatement, in my opinion. If a reader understands at a basic level what a thread is and how it differs from a process, he or she will find nothing but (tedious) review in the first five chapters. Don't be fooled by the table of contents; any aparently interesting topics in the first five chapters will be covered in such shallow, abstract detail that you will probably get nothing from them. Additionally if you have done any experimentation with threads and understand basically what a mutex/semaphore/event/critical section is you can probably skip chapter six as well.

For me things did not really get interesting or informative until chapter seven at the earliest, maybe even chapter eight. From there on out I would consider the book to be pretty good. Some of it was a little out of place for a book on multithreading. For instance there is a long-winded CSci 101 explanation of what an interface class is at the beginning of chapter seven, which struck me as odd since this is well-covered territory in any OOP C++ book, and familiarity with C++ and OOP in general is a stated pre-condition for reading this book. As for the allegedly poor grammar, I can't honestly say mine is any better so I found it all strangely comforting.

In conclusion, much of this book will be review to the average reader. This fact combined with the high price tag does not make this book a good value. It is nice to have on the shelf because it is pretty comprehensive in content, but keep in mind that much of that content is so fundamentally basic to multithreading that you will find it in many of the more thorough general programming books. If you are looking for money well spent, this probably shouldn't be your choice.

This is the ultimate book for any experienced C++ programmer who is new to the field of multi-threaded application development. If you are the kind of guy who learns by writing or reading lines of code then this book is not for you but if you want a solid foundation to build future multi threaded applications then look no further. The authors take you through all the concepts and the philosophies behind robust multi-threaded application development. I wish the authors had not included any APIs from any specific platforms. The building blocks and the techniques are all that are needed and you get them in abundance in this book. That would have reduced the price of the book. All the same money well spent.

If you're doing Posix threads in OO and in C++, this book covers the intermediate concepts and builds to more advanced issues. Well thought out. Well designed. If you're doing (or going to do) a distributed, multiThreaded applications, you will thank God every day that you found this book before you started. Unless, of course, you wrote another book on Posix threads. I didn't so I did. :)