I just made it back from Oregon and a limited visit to several of the many sites listed. The book was copyrighted in 1998 so it's five years old at this writing. I'll take a star off the rating for age. I found several sites listed were now closed. Oregon is growing along with the rest of the west. The author has done a commendable job in detailing locations. If I had two wishes it would be that both the Gem trail guides and the Falcon guides be updated at least every four years. and that the authors include GPS coordinates for the main turn-off and starting collecting point in the site descriptions. If I was traveling a long distance to collect I would call the local rockshops to verify the desired site(s) were still open.

We haven't lived in Oregon all that long and having a guide that will shorten our search is very helpful. Gem Trails is very accurate with easy to follow maps and many colorful pictures that help to enhance the experience. We checked out areas that are close to our residence and we were not disspointed. We are anxious to explore further.

Holland's book is the best available for those who plan to visit American lighthouses. It is the most comprensive guide available, featuring directions to each lighthouse and a little blurb about each one. What it does not have is great pictures. Most are quite small and all are in black and white.

While there are other guides to American lighthouses, F. Ross Holland has presented the history behind most of the lighthouses he describes in a state-by-state guide. Perhaps more than half of the photos show the lighthouses in 'olden times' (with all photos in black & white.) (See his other book "Lighthouses" for beautiful color photos.)

While this book doesn't contain driving instructions or location details, it is an important book on the subject. Recommended for anyone wanting to know the story behind the lighthouse.

This is simple. I got through it in an afternoon. I'm a singer songwriter from Kentucky and got my head around what I need to do. Also, kind of funny--in a good way.

This book is a very interesting and informative book on how to put together a band. My band has gotten a lot of information from this book. If you are a band just starting out or want to start a band, this book is a great reference.

I was interested in the above review until I noticed it comes from the New York town that the publisher hails from. A coincidence? Possibly--but what else is in Armonk besides M.E. Sharpe?

Far exceeding the author's objective--to present a primer on the state and causes of income inequality in the US-this work by an eminent scholar addresses in masterful fashion the many factors related to these issues in a style comprehensible to both the public and experts. Ryscavage presents not only his own prestigious studies but also summarizes and aluates the major works of others. His study provides a strong bridge over the disconnect between economists' views and popular conceptions that ascribe income inequality to corporate greed, soaring profits, deregulation, waning power of unions, and the demise of the so-called social contract between workers and employers. Instead, the author examines relevant measures showing and causing income disparity. ... A must purchase for economic and public policy collections. All libraries. Choice

Devoted to the work of Victorian-era Bowery photographer Charles Eisenmann, this book is a reprinting of an edition published in the 1970's. I can't compare the two editions, but this one (put out by ECW Press) contains a number of essays about Eisenmann's working methods, Victorian photographic conventions, etc., and 87 plates accompanied by biographies of the performers depicted, except in the case of several unknowns.

I applaud Mr. Mitchell and ECW Press for reviving this project, but I wish the book were better researched and included a fuller range of Eisenmann's work. The photographs are quite nicely reproduced and exceptionally clear. But I wonder why -- out of a collection numbering 500 images -- some of these photos made the cut and others did not. The author includes multiple images of some performers when a single example would have done just as well. Sometimes less is more, and deleting the extraneous shots would have allowed for inclusion of more interesting subjects.

I guess we'll have to wait for someone else to publish a definitive catalogue of Chas. Eisenmann's freak portraits. In the meantime, this book is worth owning, despite my reservations.

If you are interested in freaks, then I would suggest that you buy this book. It has lots of pictures with discriptions. It's a really good book.

I mostly agreed with Eric Ma. There are some areas that Wrox needs to review the whole process of publishing Java-related books. Here are some drawbacks that I can draw from reading recent Java-related books:

(1) Repeated Contents: Materials about Servlet, JSP, EJB, JNDI, JDBC, XML, etc are repeated over and over many books. This could waste time, money, and papers for both Wrox and readers.

(2)Books or Articles?: I asked myself: is Wrox publishing books or articles? Each book is written by many authors and the book's flow is inconsistent. The assessment that it is not a book but a collection of articles may partially true. It is true that a book if written by a team of authors could speed up the process of releasing it, but if Wrox editors and coordinators have to do their better jobs.

I suggest that Wrox should review its strategy of publishing books to avoid the repeating of materials over and over and thus bring down the cost associated with publishing the books. The final result is: readers and publisher will both save time and money. Otherwise, readers will loose their belief with Wrox.

For the past 2 years Wrox has been publishing books dedicated to Windows-based data access (ADO etc.), but the same cannot be said about their Java/database collection. Although you find chapters on JDBC scattered all-over almost all server-side Java related books by Wrox, there was no single volume from them that teaches JDBC first, and then show how it is used by the newer dependent technologies, until this book arrived. After looking through this book, I must say the authors and editors have done a rather commendable job.

Why do I make the above conclusion? Let me give you my general impression of the book first. A theme repeated in several of my recent reviews on books from Wrox is about the problem in coherence associated with multi-author books. Well, having more than a dozen of authors for a single book seems to be a fact of life (for books from Wrox at least) now, as the publication cycle gets shorter. I was rather surprised to find out that the organization and coherence is very good in this book, i.e., there is very little overlap among chapters. Also, this books uses JDBC cleverly to tie other pieces of J2EE together, making smooth transitions from one chapter to another. If you want to know, this factor alone prompted me to add an extra star to the overall rating of the book.

Let's now run down the chapters of this book quickly. The first 115 pages deals object-oriented and database modeling, and can be skipped by any "Professional" developer. Then after your obligatory intro to JDBC API, the next chapter covers the JDBC 2.0 optional package. This is the best treatment of this topic I have seen. Then another chapter is all about SQLJ, another first. The effort of having a chapter on database performance should be lauded, where connection pooling, prepared statements and stored procedures usage are demoed. The reminder of the book is about applying JDBC in various J2EE components, such as JSP, servlets, EJB, JMS, and XML. For this part of the book, even though I accept the fact the proper stage has to be set for each one of them, I still don't believe the book found the right balance between focusing on JDBC and showing what these other technologies are about. A large number of pages are used to teach basic JNDI, servlets, JSP's, and EJB's stuff (remember there is already a book on J2EE from Wrox!). Therefore, it is up to the reader to discover the real nuggets of gold hidden in this pile, which are far and in between in places. I found that some critical issues are not highlighted or details are lacking, such as how to use connection pooling/data sources in servlets, JSP's, and EJB's, the threading issues related to sharing database connections, and good database practices in BMP EJB's. However, the one thing I cannot complain about is that the book did not forget to teach the transaction aspect of EJB with a good depth (there is a short ans sweet chapter on using JTA/JTS inside EJB). There is also a chapter on the brand-new JDO framework, even though the spec is still in a state of flux. Finally, there are 4 case study chapters in the book - although the design and implementation are limited in scope and as a whole those samples do not teach all you need to do know about enterprise scale J2EE system development, they do provide a flavor of how JDBC is used in real world, together with setting up Tomcat, JRun, Orion, and WebLogic to access MS SQL Server and Oracle databases.

Now my overall take of this book. For VB/SQL and pure back-end PL/SQL developers who are eager to jump on the Java express train and need a suitable platform (especially for the ones who learn best from playing with actual code), I recommend this book as one of several you should own. Compared to other JDBC books from say O'Reilly and Sun's JDBC Tutorial, this book is the most up-to-date, contains the most source code, and has the broadest coverage of related topics. But keep in mind some of the advanced topics such as EJB and JMS can be intimidating for new-comers. On the other side of the coin, people who are advanced in various server-side Java technologies are unlikely to benefit a great deal from this book and should look elsewhere for info (for example Wrox's J2EE and upcoming EJB titles).

I'd be kinder with the stars if the title were "Learn Database Administration using SQL-DMO". But I am already clear about that. The only reason I went with 3 was that some of the scripts are indeed useful. But what I was looking for was a good succint overview of SQL-DMO. Rather than focus on the SQL-DMO object model and how best to employ it, the book is a series of tasks DBA's might typically want to accomplish with example code. What I needed was answers to how do you know to use such and such method over some other alternative. Or even a discussion on the pros and cons of techniques employed woud have been more helpful.

I had to do some SQL DMO scripting and could not figure out how to do it using MDSN, so I purchased Wrox's book and found it to be merely a re-write of online docs.

Then I discovered this book and was so overjoyed to find some authors who had actually taken the time to write useful code samples and to go well beyond where MSDN leaves off.

Their code is very well laid out and designed. They have taken the time and care to turn out a quality product.

i love erotic phtography but i have to say this is not the greatest example for such a book.

the book show a veraity of phtographers with good CV and information, which's always nice to now, it's printed very well and is in really good quality and design. from that angle i have to say - it's better them most books i came across, my problems withit are mostly with editing and choice of photos. the book's sepearted in 4 diffrent chategories which i didn't see much diffrence between, most photos could appeare in all chapters (dadicated to - fetishwear, diciplane, bondage and extream play)., i would much rather have it seperated to artist rather then those sections. also a lot of those photos seem cheap to me, a lot of the models are playboy material (so not my kind of woman) and there's far too much skin and latex rather then anything interesting artisticly.

it's a good turn-on book, too bad it's shallow and not intelectualy stimulating as well as physicly.

This anthology is a solid collection of work from the best photographers working in the field of erotica today. The editor did a great job of pulling together a wide variety of styles, and the resulting the book is a real pleasure, full of pleasant surprises. I was introduced to quite a few photographers that are completely new to me, and there isn't a weak or dull photo in the book. It is very well printed too, with quality paper that makes the pictures really pop, and a solid binding that looks to hold up for years. And based on the comments of my friends, I think the book holds a strong appeal for both men and women. Strongly recommended!

This book offers a number of ways adults can interact with children to improve everyone's sanity. The anecdotes are engaging, the ideas intriguing. Also, this book is very well written.

I don't think anyone yet has written a book that covers satisfactory discipline for ALL children, but this will definitely help with MOST of them!

Ms Mitchell presents a four step plan for the adult to use as they address a situation, a way of thinking and acting before approaching the child and during the interaction. These mandates are ANTICIPATE, HESITATE, INVESTIGATE and COMMUNICATE. Ms Mitchell explains these clearly and concisely. She uses many anecdotes and examples to explain her theories and to suggest alternative parental responses. Through the examples, she encourages the adult to think about their own initial "gut" reaction and how using her format, one might come up with a different, more effective response to the child. She also gives a comment at the end of each case to summarize the issue. She gives some very good concrete suggestions which are helpful and insightful. Ms Mitchell helps parents understand how their words and behaviors are received by the child, how it sounds to them and how it feels, both at the time it occurs as well as the cumulative effect. My only criticism is that there may be too many anecdotes. Often they flow one right after the other and the summary is brief, without more than one reframing of the situation. Overall, I felt she covered a large array of issues and situations and was consistent in her approach to each situation, keeping true to her mandates.

Unfortunately, I was unable to get through this book. It seemed to offer practical advice, but was too heady to absorb. I found that Sisters of the Yam and Willow Weep for Me were better reads. Perhaps I will pick it up and try to get through it again one day, but not any time soon.

This book is defintely a blessing to me and hopefully to many others. It has let me know I am no the only one depressed. It also let me see how and why and when depression comes on. I am a Full believer that I am a child of God but I still get depressed and can relate a lot to all the sisters stories in the book, especially Elaine and Ranee. I felt like something was wrong with me because I was having problems with depression as a christian. But I have learned that I am not exempted from this feeling. I now know how to deal with my depression. There are some things I am going to start to do now after reading this book. Like taking hot baths more,instead of showers. Listening to mealow music more. Meditating on good things. Of course praying more. Get a massage. Talk more openly to my therapist. It is good to know I am not alone in this state of mind.