I'm building a sailboat, and being new to sailing, I was hoping this book would give me a fairly basic overview to rigging. Instead, this book is more a discussion for the intermediate or advanced sailor, who already understands rigging however is looking for a general discussion of best practices.

I doubt this book would be of much use to the novice.

I have a fairly large collection of sailing books, and this is one of the few that has become worn from use. I guess I've probably read the whole book at least five times, reading and re-reading various chapters as questions occur to me. The book is surprisingly readable, given what could be an overly technical or difficult subject area. It's a very practical little guide book. For anyone who is thinking about, or trying to understand, the rigging of small sailboats (I mean, say, under 100 feet), this is a very good book to have. Highly recommended. Mark Lane

Very good photographs and reviews inside, but there's a lack of technical drawings to give us a better understanding of the projects.

If you're looking for ideas or examples of modern office interior design, then this book is a must have. Many full page color photos highlighting furniture, lighting, floors, desks, and tables as they actually are used. Text is concise and easy to read.

This book will not give you ideas on how to train for a marathon. Unless you are ready to run 12-14 miles this Saturday for your first long run it is not for you. The training guide show a 12-14 mile Saturday run the first week. Great advice for the beginners Joe.

This is a guide for you to fill out your miles as you run them not really a training program. It has very little substance on training and advice that is helpful to anyone getting ready for their first couple marathons.

The only good news is I bought it used on Amazon.com for $. If you want it you can have it for free, it will not help you. If you want a running diary to put your miles in their is a new thing called a calendar that you can put them in.

...and I am working on my fourth. I find the journal format to be very helpful, as well as the weekly workout assignments, articles, tips and recommendations. The three different training plans make this workable for different levels of runners. Although this book might not be ideal for an absolute beginner, it is a good one for the average runner who wants a simple, realistic way to prepare for a marathon without having to turn his or her life over to training.

I recieved this book as a gift shortly after committing to run a marathon with the Leukemia Society. I had little background and the idea of running 26.2 miles seemed daunting, at best. After an introduction that gave me the basics and helped make be a believer, I began to follow the schedule. The daily tips were great. I looked forward to writing in the book each night and checking out what was in store for me the next day. The variety of workouts made it a pleasure to follow, and the science seemed sound. Most of all, it worked! I followed the plan again a 2 years later and had a great time at the Disneyworld Marathon. In fact, I'm buying a copy today for my wife, to help her with her first marathon!

For developers involved with web-based projects, whether it be an online store for electronic commerce or an Intranet site for accessing and modifying company data, the powerful blend of JavaServer Pages (JSP) and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technologies can really make life simple. Once you've mastered them, creating new components that encapsulate business logic, or new web interfaces to existing systems, is easy. The trick, for developers, is mastering the technologies.

Professional JSP is one way to get up to speed. Like many of the books published by Wrox Press, Professional JSP covers a specific technology in-depth, as well as the various ancillary topics relating to it such as databases, servlets, and XML. While not every developer will need every web technology covered by the book (and there are many), the book works both as a tutorial to cover the basics and a reference for technologies that you may encounter later.

Professional JSP starts by covering the basics of Java Server Pages, and how they relate to other web technologies. Embedded in HTML pages, JSP provides an easy mechanism for creating interactive web interfaces that draws on server-side components, known as Enterprise JavaBeans. While the presentation logic is written in JSP, the processing occurs within these JavaBean components. The book takes a balanced approach, covering both JSP and its syntax, as well as how to write and interact with JavaBeans to perform useful tasks, like accessing databases through JDBC and using other Java technologies. However, if you've read other Wrox titles, you may find there is some overlap in the topics covered.

One of the nice things about Professional JSP is that, in addition to covering theory, it goes further and examines practical applications of JSP, and issues for programmers like security and debugging. Like other titles in the Professional series, there are case studies of real projects using JSP and related technologies. My favorite would have to be the case study on porting Active Server Pages to JSP -- something that is extremely important for developers with "legacy" web systems. On the whole, Professional JSP is an excellent book for web developers wanting to get up to speed with Java Server Pages, web development, and Enterprise JavaBeans. However, developers with less of a web presentation focus and more of back-end server view may also want to consider the excellent Professional Java Server Programming title, which also covers JSP. -- David Reilly, reviewed for the Java Coffee Break

This is a book for programmers who have a solid background in servlets programming and some experience in JSP. For beginners and for people who wish to learn those techniques on a standalone machine, they will be better off with Hall's "core servlets & JSP" or Fields&Kolb's "web development & JSP".

The book consists of 20 chapters. The first 12 chapters discuss the various salient aspects of JSP and the rest ( about two third of the whole book) is devoted to case studies.

A. THE BOOK'S STRENGTH:

By adopting Tomcat as its main testing software, the editors of "Professional JSP" have assured that most of the code examples will work. This is a big improvement over the past wrox books.

There are some excellent chapters in the first part. The discussion on session tracking is a real gem although the author failed to make a showcase of the code examples. The chapter on JSP Architecture contains some of the clearest explaination on the techniques of redirecting, forwarding and requestdispatcher. The chapter on customtags is equally very well done. But my favorite is the chapter on Global Settings, the idea is so practical. I also like the idea of emphasizing the importance of authentication which showed in many chapters of the book.

The case studies will serve as an excellent reference. Its coverage ranges from (1) the front end of an insurance company (2) a good pictures website which use JSP to publish its data (3) Security with JNDI (4) a online store using LDAP and JSP (5) J@EE, EIBs and Customtags (6) Multimedia and JSP (7) Weather website with JSP, XSLT and WAP (8) Porting ASP to JSP.

2. BOOK'S WEAKNESS:

The book is a combined effort of many authours and its unevenness showed. The first three chapters to introduce to JSP are out of place and a real waste. The chapter on Dynamic GUIs is a great idea which turned into a joke: after showing the general diea how to do it, the author sent readers to his website to learn the rest(?). And the chapter on JDBC connectivity and Pooling is a big disappointment: most of the chapter devoted to get connection, create databse,editing it and make query; and the rest the author explained how to use his own pool manager package, PoolMan. This wouldn't be too bad if PoolMan worked, with Tomcat.

The richness of the case studies is also its weakness. Unless you are experienced and have the facilities, you can't test them all. These techniques become obsolete pretty quick.

Probably the strongest objection to the book is its price. Buy it for your company and share with your colleague.

This book covers the chapters in a very structured way. It starts with a concise description of the JSP Basics with a detailed explanation of the concepts. It explains all the concepts in a very clear and simple words supported by an equally clear Comments and examples. Any body with a little of Java experience can become very familiar with the JSP syntax and concepts by reading first few chapters. It covers all the necessary JSP syntax for building a small web application to a very large distributed Application. It also explains about the way the JSP pages are processed by different web servers. For example it explains about the various methods available to maintain a persistence session and their merits and demerits. This is the first book in JSP series that explains not only the concepts of JSP and how effectively one can use them with the help of this book. It also covers various other topics like EJB, JNDI, JDBC, XML, XSLT and WML in very detailed way. Overall I feel this is the greatest JSP book ever published so far. I could build a simple and robust JSP Web application by reading the first few chapters in a short period of time.

I am a sophomore in highschool and am learning Latin from this book. Let me just tell you, THERE MUST BE AN EASIER WAY TO LEARN LATIN!! I took Spanish for two years and thought it was boring, so I thought I'd take a more challenging class, well lets call it bitter sweet justice because this is unbelievably hard. Right now I'm trying to translate the part about the Gaulic wars, and that is honestly the most confusing, gramatically incorrect, and boring piece of work I've ever tried to read, much less translate. So I recomend you look for an easier book.

I am taking Latin 3 now out of this series. It is, in my opinion too hard, and not explained in an easily understood manner. I am a good student, I won two gold medals in the National Latin Exam, but I still find this book very hard. I agree with leigh.

This was my Latin book in high school for the second half of year 2 and year 3. I have very fond memories of the class (my first foreign language class), and learned quite a bit about grammar. I still remember some of the lessons.

The book is good. It is not always clear, and tries to explain things on the level of a high-school student. There are times that a linguistic explanation would be much simpler, but it's a school text book.

The second book seems a bit more rushed than the first. Much more grammatical "nitty-gritty" is in the second book. I think the author assumes a level of familiarity after one works through the first book, and picks up the pace a bit. Sometimes this leaves things a bit "less than excellently" described. However, overall, I think the book did a good job. I was very happy to find the series so I could start re-learning Latin (eventually...).

This is not an espionage thriller as the cover and title of this book would have you beleive. The vast majority of the content in this book is about how two people working in the CIA fall in love with each other and how they are so excited being around one another. I for one, and i think most people would agree, think that someone who would buy this book would be interested in the CIA and the history of the cold war. This book has nearly nothing to do with either of those subjects! Their are some good parts to this book but they are overshadowed by a love story. This book would be better catogorized as a romance novel!

Having retired after 29.5 years in the CIA, I found SPY DUST a fascinating read in one sitting. It reveals the Agency indeed has "Mission Impossible" capabilities equal to those dreamed up by thriller genre authors who lack the personal experience of Antonio and Jonna. I was a bit upset by the negative tone of some of the reviews here, from people who obviously had been so influenced by trashy fiction they were unable to recognize "the real thing" when they saw it.

Antonio and Jonna were highly-specialized technicians supporting the operations of other case officers, operations whose complexity often requires the orchestrated participation of dozens of other Agency officers, and coordination with many different "desks" at Headquarters and field stations in other countries. In this sense, during their careers they probably enjoyed a higher level of job satisfaction than most case officers, who have the difficult, mostly frustrating task of finding and recruiting foreigners to spy for them. Most thriller authors have no idea of the amount of planning and preparation these real operations involve, and how easily things can go wrong. SPY DUST is a welcome eye-opener in this regard.

Because of their specialization, Antonio and Jonna contributed to more interesting operations every year than most case officers see in a lifetime. My hat is off to their obvious expertise, and I fully understand (which some reviewers did not) why they were unable to include more nitty-gritty details on exactly how some of their amazing technical tricks were performed.

Former CIA employees find a realistic true-life book such as SPY DUST extremely difficult to write, because it must be cleared (some would say censored) by the CIA Publications Review Board. Despite that, it is amazing how much informative detail and "been there, done that" personal experience the authors were able to reveal.

I never met the authors while we were all still "on the job," but SPY DUST has given me a deeper appreciation of their technical colleagues I encountered overseas.

Spy star retired CIA agent Antonio Mendez and his wife Jonna (also a retired CIA agent) provide an intriguing look at a key mission during the last years of the Cold War. The couple explains in alternating chapters how their separate missions starting in the mid-1980s converge into saving the lives of American moles inside the KGB. If nothing was done, the plants would have eventually fallen victim to the danger caused by the actions of Soviet moles (American traitors) inside the CIA.

What makes this spy chiller even more exciting besides the true espionage thriller angle is that it reads like the spy duo falls in love with one another as their two projects commingle. Their feelings add depth to a true adventure that already feels more exciting than most espionage novels. The spots where the writing team conjecture and fill the gap of someone else's efforts seem weaker than the insider thrill when the writers talk directly about themselves. This book is a winner for the genre audience and will do a lot more to sell clandestine operations than donning the cone of secrecy demanded under the guise of homeland security by the Attorney General.

Harriet Klausner

Information in this book was never accurate. The U.S. Goverment and Isreal has since released information refuting the claims of Jonathan Pollard. Reading this book is a waste of time.

Craig Pollard is undoubtly the best spy that ever lived. This book is a wonderful documentation of this very true story. The best part of the book is about the Russian archrival spy Leslee.

As a collection of factual information concerning the arrest and imprisonment of Jonathan and Anne Pollard, it is the only truthful account of the Pollard Affair. Not a single word of this book which was copied without attribution by authors such as Wolf Blitzer and Alan Dershowitz and falsely elaborated on has ever been challenged as inaccurate. Yet it reads like a novel, allowing the reader to make his or her own judgements about the facts of the case. It was intended as a white paper, rather than a book, to give media an unimpeachable and totally accurate account, so that their reporting would be balanced against the combined secret services disinformation offices, who were busy feeding media representatives totally manufactured and false stories about the Pollards. It was published as a book, rather than being distributed to media as a white paper because it was more economical to do so. Thus in reading this as a white paper for which it was intended, the reader can gain an insight on how the media is manipulated by powerful professionals working for the government, powerful companies, and others able to pay for and manufacture news.

Okay, somebody tell me why an author would want to take a reader through almost 500 pages of a book and then coyingly tell them at the end, "I'm not going to resolve this book...you do it for me!" I had just encountered this in Stephen Dobyns' "Boy in the Water," and frankly, I'm tired of spending time with could have been a very good book only to get ripped off at the end. Peter Straub is a great writer, no doubt. "Ghost Story" and "Floating Dragon" are two of my favorite tales of horror. "Mr. X" is a fascinating rollercoaster ride; I admit it's intricacies and complexities are well-constructed and ultimately fascinating. The characters are interesting, although sometimes I feel Straub is playing with us again and making us fill in some of the missing blanks. Why were the Dunstans cursed? Who cursed them? Is there really a Ned or a Robert? Are they one and the same? What is it with the monster baby at the end? And what do the final two pages really mean? Many of the customer reviews agree with me in many ways; the ones who rave about it obviously read something more in the book than me. Perhaps Mr. Straub is planning a sequel or two: "Mr. Y" and "Mr. Z". If so, please resolve your book and stop letting your literary genius swell your head so bad that you forgot who made you popular in the first place---US!

I began reading Peter Straub books with the book "Ghost Story". I read it because my mother told me it was ultimately frightening, and I found that she was correct. It was intricate, and the plot was well done, but most, the characters were well developed and pleasing. After I finished that one, I began to read his books one after the other, and what I found was that his "Under Venus" through "Shadowland" age was his shining moments. Each one of the books in that period was almost as pleasing as "Ghost Story". However, the few books following that, "Koko", and "Mystery" for example, lost what makes Straub so intriguing: his excellent writing style. These books were enjoyable, though not as pleasing to the senses. Lately, with "The Throat" and most of all by far, "The Hellfire Club", Peter Straub lost everything going for him, and sank to the levels of Dean Koontz, with overly described gore and rape, etc. However, "Mr. X" finally puts an end to that. The book, I found, stands up right beside his earlier books, "Ghost Story" and "If You Could See Me Now" being his best. The character is well thought, likeable, human. The plot is simple and pieced together orderly, one of the things he lost in later books. The writing style is so fluent and beautiful that I finally enjoy one of his books. This book is for those of you who prefer the adult, mature, thought-provoking Straub, and is a good starting place for any curious, new Straub readers. This book is not for those of you who are looking for simple, "book candy", not requiring much thought or vocabulary. This book is for those of you looking to read difficult, well-written fiction.

After four mystery-thrillers ("Koko", "Mystery", "The Throat", and "The Hellfire Club"), "Mr. X" marks Peter's return to the domain of supernatural/psychological horror. This is one of his best horror books, second only to "Shadowland". The dialogue is flawless, the characters are as real as one could ask for, and the horror itself is subtle and surreal. The story is about an Illinois family whose members manifest strange powers. It's about a particular member of this dynasty -- Ned Dunstan -- and his doppleganger twin. It's about the twins' disturbed father who knows that he is the center of the world, and his purpose is to kill. It's about Ned Dunstan, at long last, returning home to Illinois and coming to terms with his bizarre heritage.

In a way, "Mr. X" combines features of the author's later mystery-thrillers and earlier horror books. Straub is a first-rate writer who refuses to supply us with Harlequin-horror. He towers above authors like Stephen King and Clive Barker. He makes authors like Dean Koontz and John Saul unworthy of mention.

I was initially exhilarated to read that there would be a last novel forthcoming from one of my favorite authors, Lawrence Sanders, and his terrific and entertaining "Discreet Inquiries" sleuth, Archy. The book is actually authored by Vincent Lardo.

This book is a tremendous disappointment. After reading it, I would rather the Archy McNally series was left alone as Lawrence Sanders' legacy to millions of spellbound, laughing readers.

I'm sure that Vincent Lardo found the offer to continue Sanders' very lucrative McNally series more than he could resist. At the same time, though, the writing isn't anywhere near the level of Sanders'. Mr. Sanders' obvious love for the nutty characters that populate McNally novels (and his painstaking descriptions of Archy's culinary feasts and sartorial misdeeds,) isn't anywhere to be found. The endearing personality traits of our hero Archy are gone, along with the man who created them.

If you want a fantastic read, pick up any of the McNally series, but don't bother with this one.

Like other readers, I found this book lacking "something". I knew Sanders had passed away, but thought this was perhaps a final manuscript. When I finally looked onto the copyright page I realized that the family had hired another author to continue the series.

The book was good enough, but the mystery was only all right (pretty simple to figure out early on - plus some parts that were a little hard to take - like not many people ever noticing the birth of a son took place twelve months after the death of the father when the plaques mentioning the birth/death dates were right beside one another!)

The characters, however were great. I love all of Saunders' series stories and thought the Archy Mcnally books were exceptional.

This book is worth reading if you are a fan or want a good story, although I would recommend any of the others, written by Sanders, first.

I do hope that the family of Sanders does continue with these books, however I think it would be fair to fans of the series to note on the book's cover that it is actually written by another.

I throughly enjoyed McNally's Dilemma, even if it wasn't written by the great Lawrence Sanders. Maybe it was the fact that I was looking forward to more of Sanders' work since I first read 'The First Deadly Sin', in high school, circa 1973. I do agree that the publisher (G.P Putnam's Sons) should have used Vincent Lardo's name on the cover as one reviewer suggested, with characters created by Lawrence Sanders or similar wording. I did not feel cheated, as I closely read all credits and acknowledgements before I start to read any book anyway. I thought Mr. Lardo captured the free-spirit of Archy beautifully. Like all of the Archy series, it was a fun read. I do hope Putnam publishes more in the series, but give the real author, Vincent Lardo, the credit. Hopefully, there is a final book of Mr. Sanders still waiting to be published! Lawrence Sanders, you will be missed! Buy McNally's Dilemma, it's worth it. Many thanks to Amazon.com, your service is outstanding! Three days after placing my order, McNally's Dilemma was at my doorstep, packaged perfectly, and in mint condition! Hollywood types: cast Ryan Stiles as Archy McNally & Danny Bonaduce as Binky Watrous!