My daughter brought this book home and the title made me curious, so I read it. The storyline of this book is disjointed, the content is utterly ridiculous and serves only to insult the intelligence of young readers. Under the guise of fiction/mystery literature this book is laden with occult symbolisms aimed directly at the unsuspecting minds of young children . All in all, I find this to be more appropriate reading for 5th grade and up.

The name of this book is Dragons Don't Cook Pizza and the authors are Debbie Dadey and Marcia Jones.

The book was awesome! Even though it's for kids younger kids than I am, I still read it.
The best part in the book is when they all work together to figure out the riddle.
The worst part was when Eddie didn't think that Dragons existed.

This book was cool, funny and exciting.
I hope whoever likes to read picks out this book and enjoys it, because it's worth your while.

Four third grade kids named Howie,Melody,Eddie,and Liza. They always have a mystery to solve. There are lots of books in this series. They are all good. In this book, the 3rd grade class went on a field trip to a bakery. They think something is very fishy. They come back that night and tryed to figure out the case out. Is the man who cooks the pizza a dragon? I like these books because they are mysteries and you get relly exited about the mystery.

I just read 3 home-based business books and found value in two of them. This one was the exception. Anyone who doesn't already possess the common-sense presented in this book would have trouble succeeding in any home-based venture. I guarantee you the author has never succeeded at a home based business. Do not waste your money on this book.

Don't waste your time reading this book. It's nothing but obvious common sense -- a total waste of time and money!

I reviewed over 12 business books and picked this one! I think women/Mother have different sets of motivations, concerns, and dilemmas than men. This book really talks about the approach that are much more familiar or relating to me as women/mother. There are a lot of good business books are out there, but this book helped me to focus and to make decisions, becuase it addresses my questions in a much more personal ways than other books did. The writer also list various people's answers which can be pros or cons of certain aspect of starting business. It gives you a good understanding of how it's like to run business while you are taking a role of a super mom or wife!

I am writing a book on tree-sitters protecting trees in the Pacific Northwest.
FACT (from 3 yrs. of observation) None I've seen are paid.

FACT (from revered scientist Jerry Franklin) Old-growth ecosystms are far more diverse than tree plantations.

FACT (From any high school level Earth sceince textbook) Trees help clean polluted air.

FACT (From the New York Times) Since 1980, asthma is up 74% in children. (Becuase of air pollution.)

Well, either I'm yet another brainwashed tree-hugger, or perhaps Mr. Bailey is just trying to make money selling a book full of bull.

This book lays bare what the hardcore environmental movement is really about:MONEY first and foremost and a religion as well.Bailey provides generous quotes so that you can see for yourself just what the new Marxists have in store should they ever ascend to power.As you read the rantings of the wackos and money and power mad lunatics it is abundantly clear that they will deny themselves no tyranny in remaking the world in their own image,should they ever get the chance.The apocalyptic tone taken by the environmentalists is no accident.The more greedy and money hungry leaders of environmentalist organizations realize that the public is not very astute when it comes to science;so it only becomes a matter of getting out the dire predictions courtesy of press conferences and hearings with state and national legislatures to spread whatever disaster scenario they've thought of that week.The media and scientific bodies don't come out unscathed either.Bailey shows a righteous indignation that so many claims of the environmental movement go unchallenged by the mainstream press.And many scientists come out looking like individuals more concerned with getting more grant money than actually engaging in hard science and reporting unbiased facts.This book will outrage and perhaps even shock you.If you do read this expose of the seemy and despicable goings on and the unsavory elements that comprise it you will not watch the news or take the scientists word at face value ever again.This book should be required reading at every high school and college in America.Hopefully a great number of people will read it and pass the word around.

johngalt@worldnet.att.net from Richland, WA USA and ehusman@zianet.com both have written reviews that are better than what I might add, except to say that we really need books like Ecoscam~The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse that shows reliable stats and isn't the Chicken Little the sky is falling hype that the environmantal scammers put out. At least read it so you can see there are two sides to every issue.

I'm an artificial intelligence person, and I bought this book to keep up-to-date with what popularizers are saying about my field. Now I wish I hadn't--it's too depressing. James Bailey got caught up in the promise of the wave of trendy data-driven learning algorithms like neural networks and genetic algorithms, and the purpose of the book is to gush about them. There's no attempt to place these methods in the broader context of artificial intelligence as a whole, and no recognition of their weaknesses. The book randomly names these methods the "new intermaths" and analyzes them historically as a radical breakthrough from the traditional sequential, numeric, data-poor human reasoning into the brave new world of parallel, non-numeric, data-rich silicon reckoning. He's partly right about that, but I think it's a coincidence; the book's argument is so muddled that it doesn't reach any convincing conclusion.

Bailey's ruminations bear rereading now that five years have passed since their first appearance. We have survived the advent of the new Millennium, and we have found once again that, after the divine afflatus, human intellect reigns supreme in the cosmos.

This is not to say that Bailey's postulations have no merit. The advances of the computer age, particularly in the still-infant and arcane discipline of artificial intelligence, continue to fascinate us and to challenge us. Yet even with the burgeoning networks and the increasingly powerful integration of humanity and its machines, the surprises offered by the observations of the young and young-in-spirit still outdo those of scientific teams. I suspect that pattern, as old as civilization, will prevail.

The chapter in this book that most demands reflection-and rereading-is Chapter 17, where Henry David Thoreau is pitted against the myriad forces of the information age. As early as 1978 I was criticized by my literary colleagues for teaching the metaphysician of Walden Pond. At the time, I was working with Dr. Louis Uhle of USC on patterns of word usage in Renaissance English (primarily dramatic) texts as a scientific measure of authorship attribution. Yet Thoreau offered my students access not to data, but to genius, and that, not data, intrigued them.

Another colleague from the life sciences took his students to the college lawns to look as if for the first time at the patterns of dandelion blossoms, evoking the kinds of questions that not much later spawned Chaos Theory. My maths colleagues, intrigued with what I was doing with language, proceeded to AI, and my psychology colleagues drifted off to work some of the same ideas in formulating new network designs at Bell Labs.

Bailey's own accounts of elementary school children discerning the grounds for identifying a species that had remained unperceived by the "experts" reminds me of those halcyon days-before I also drifted into "line and circle" problem solving of the probabilistic kind. We had no idea we were participating in a revolution of thought, and perhaps that was just as well.

A metaphor Bailey uses in After Thought, particularly in Chapter 17, is that of understanding the behavior of rivers, and I think he was trying to suggest something about the elusive construct of Nature, which, if we should only drop our preconceptions and listen, would always surprise us. The Mississippi, like the Nile (or the Yangtze, for that matter), remains a keen scientific concern, but offers no easy understanding.

Yes, we have the potential to engage in collaborative enterprises involving computers and networks around the globe-the greatest parallel processing enterprise, in size and scale of any age. The question is, how much closer to essential truths this endeavor brings us?

Bailey would have us understand that we are about to transcend the time of maths as we know them and that we shall reach a new plateau of pattern recognition that renders the schema of ancient Babylon, the thinking of Kepler and even the cogitation of the Sante Fe Institute fellows obsolete. Perhaps, but, then again, perhaps not. The leaps of genius have outrun the numbers throughout history, however the scientific elite have formulated them. Our experts propose; Nature disposes otherwise. The human intellect itself has been found far more powerful than the sum of all the crunching power of all the machines in being or under consideration-working individually or working together.

Two cautions to Bailey's line of reasoning-for its determinism seems to partake of the confining features of Newton's laws, which he claims to eschew. First, no true scientist ever deceives himself or herself that absolutes are inviolate. Second, the very open inquiry at the root of the scientific method-even among the ancient Greeks-has never really surrendered to the rigors of numbers.

We fall between the pattern that has broken and the patterns that we sense as possible in Chaos every time. Taken that way, we can all still engage in our common task of understanding taking the fruits of our data looms as yet another set of features against which we try to move from apprehension to comprehension, the latter of which we approach as that dark and all-transforming glass of eternity.

Bailey does an excellent job of combining computer theory with history, mathematics, economics and philosophy. I can only guess that the people who gave it a single star must have had difficulty with Bailey's style which, at times, requires a measure of diligence to locate the point.

As I read my way towards the end of this book via the iffy prose of the first two chapters, the obvious filches from other sources ( Forbidden Planet, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and Blade Runner ) complete with scene descriptions and dialogue, the Twains' cheesy repartee, and the contradictions between this story and the originals, I considered Roy Batty's final line with respect to R.W.B: "Time to die," or perhaps even more appropriately: 'A CURSE upon Master Clark Ashton Smith and all his heirs, who thought to pick my brain and slip away, false fleeting agent of my old enemies. Upon him the Long Death, the paramental agony! When he strays back as all men do. The fulcrum (0) and the Cipher (A) shall be here, at his beloved 607 Rhodes. I'll be at rest in my appointed spot (1) under the Bishop's seat, the heaviest ashes that he ever felt....' ( Fritz Leiber: Our Lady of Darkness.)

In the last couple of pages the contradictions were resolved by the use of a, 'draught of forgetfulness,' provided by Sheelba - which was a relief. But the story really had nothing new as regards the core ideas, which were mainly derived from, The Cloud of Hate, Ill Met in Lankhmar, and The Price of Pain - Ease. A lot of descriptive detail was introduced, yet no more effective than the original in conveying the layout of Lankhmar - a city plan would be of considerable help, if one exists.

There are some good sections in this book: The Silver Eel and The Tower of Koh - Vombi chapters, in which R.W.B's own writing style works very well, a viable alternative to F.L's. Generally, however, the writing is insufficiently polished, lending a somewhat plodding quality with over worded sentences, and the inclusion of redundant background detail. Realistically, its all an exercise in raking over, and adding a different perspective to what would be better left alone.

At heart, Robin Wayne Bailey is serious about Fritz's work, but would be better employed writng a Fafhrd, Gray Mouser like series of his own. And White-Wolf and the Estate of Fritz Leiber would be doing a better service to themselves, their customers, and the memory of Fritz Leiber, by keeping the original work - IN PRINT.

If you like Sword & Sorcery, even if you have never read Leiber, you will enjoy this book. If you have read Leiber, you'll enjoy it even more.

Usually when an author tries to step into someone else's shoes (series), the fit is not exact. Being a fan of Leiber's Fafhrd & Gray Mouser, I was a little worried Bailey would disappoint me. He didn't. Swords Against the Shadowland has all the adventure of the original series, all the action. Bailey's style is not quite the same as Leiber but he did not try to force it to be. Instead he created a strong story worthy of the series rather than a pale copy of it (a fault many authors fall prey to in trying to continue someone else's series). He did his homework and included links to previous stories, the character's backgrounds, and Lankhmar itself. What emerges is a Fafhrd & Gray Mouser tale that can rest on the shelf with the others with no shame.

The book is good enough it could stand on its own, but by being part of a series I like it is that much more enjoyable. I eagerly await any more, confident Bailey will do right by Leiber's duo.

I anxiously awaited this book, but with a bit of fear. Leiber's Lankmar novels have long been favorites of mine and I feared what a different author might do. Originally Leiber and Bailey were to work on this one together, but Leiber passed away shortly after they signed the contract.

Bailey surprised me be capturing Leiber's "flavor" while making the story much more meaningfull to people of the '90s.

This is a must read for fans of Leiber's Lankmar stories and a great place to start fot someone that has never read the series. Leiber would be proud.

This book was not very good. Initially, like alot of software books, the author's smug comments were not irritating. By the end of the book they were unnerving. The biggest beef I had with this text was that the author does not offer sufficient explanations for the code examples. He assumes you can just read it and then understand it. Also, in several chapters rather than presenting the facts then illustrating them in a complex example he does exactly the opposite! This did nothing but serve to confuse the issue.

The author's goal is commendable: attempt to be brief and too the point. However, unfortunately this book suffers due to little or no supporting narrative to accompany the code.

The book reminds me of a professor who is teaching a beginning class but assumes you can figure out the details on your own. The professor forgets that you don't know the details yet and its his job to give them to you.

I did not like this book.

As a computer science student learning data structures, I found this book to be incredibly confusing for a beginner. The examples provided are not explained well. The reader is often left to guess and fill in details. It seems like many important details were left out. If you were to try his examples using a compiler, they would never work because the author omits to tell you some important piece of info. Pieces of code appear to be just thrown in without adequate explanation of how they relate to other code. I was thouroughly frustrated with this book.

I like this book because it gives a concise presentation of the material, and contains lots of good exercises. It does contain some bad mistakes, however (such as a complete misunderstanding of what is meant by tail recursion and false statements about Java). Possibly there is also too much unexplained code.

I chanced upon this book as a result of meeting with Dr. Bailey. It is the most informative and comprehensive book on health that I have had the opportunity to read. I happily recommend this book to friends all of the time and they recommend it to their friends.

I loved the way it covered emotional and spiritual health from a non-religious perspective.

This is the greatest book of all time! Dr. Bailey really does know what he is talking about! I believe that he is the smartest man alive, and should win every award pertaining to writing. The man is a genius! I never thought a foot doctor could know so much!

Sincerely, Albert J. Liar

In this book, Daughter of the Sea, the book was not interesting at all, and I would give it no stars if the computer would have went that low. It's pretty much about a woman named Janice, and her husband, Munroe, that find a baby and keep it as thier own and hope that no one finds out about it.They live on a ship that they also make thier living off of fishing and selling the fish they catch. This book is very fictional, since there is no way you could find a living baby on the shore, and expect to keep it. And there is no way to make a good living selling fish. This book was not one of my favorites. Taking into consideration I don't have any favorites, and I don't care for a subject about people living on a ship and keeping a baby. There is no way this book should have gotton a overall rating of four stars, but the no stars has my vote.

This book is abit wierd, and confusing to me. It's definitly not the best book you would want to pick for Lit Circles (people in elementary school knows what it is, *it's like a project*) This is how the story goes: It all started when there was this terrible storm hitting Hamna Voe, the island where it took place, Munroe Jaffery is still out in the sea trying to fish. He notices that the storm was coming and try to get back to the land, but when he finds out he couldn't, he got drifted into the selkie rocks. There he found a baby, just right under the water, he brought it home to his worried wife, Jannet, and made it their own baby and saying it to everyone that she's their's. They named her Gioga, that was the present name of the Sea Princess who saved a man's life. Eilean a.k.a the crab woman, knew that the baby wasn't theirs and told them that "they'll" come back for her. Jannet didn't believe her at first but she got creeped out by it. Years later, a man called Hill Marliner came and said that he was there to collect his child back, Jannet refused, Hill Marliner gave a month's supply of fish to Munroe (as Hill is the lord of the sea, he controls everything in there) who didn't know it was a reward. Jannet didn't give the baby to the strange man, so he left and came back years later. Jannet didn't tell Munroe about this. Hill Marliner cam back, this time he gave them a purse full of gold coins, Jannet still refused. But during these moments, Gioga became close to Eilean who told her tales of the sea. Jannet got worried, so she sent Gioga away to her cousin's house, which was in a valley where you can't hear or even see the sea. And everyday Gioga became to want the sea more and more. Later on the island, Hill Marliner came back again for the third and final time, this time he got shot and killed by Jannet, who was blinded by her love for the child that she became confused and killed a man. The seals wanted revenge, so they destroyed everything on the beach that the men owned and went away. The sea became rough, but they all knew the only way to get it to calm and get their main source of food back was to get Gioga here on the island again. So a boat with Munroe and Harris(Gioga's friend), led by Eilean to get Gioga back, than the three waves came: Wave of tears, Wave of milk and Wave of Blood, and Harris did what he was told, to his the Wave of blood with the harpoon straight in the heart of the wave. With that done, it was a sacrifice, Eilean was gone... dead... They rescued Gioga and went back to the island, there, Harris did what Eilean told him to do and showed Gioga her seal skin. Later, Gioga cried 7 tears into the sea for all the 7 horrible things that had been done. In the end, she slipped into her seal skin and went into the sea.

A great fable based upon many of the Selkie legends from different lands. A childless couple raise as their own a baby girl the husband found one night floating in the sea during a storm. Munroe suspects right away that this child is one of the Selkies (seal-people) but keeps the secret from his wife Jannet. But when a mysterious stranger returns years later asking for the return of his child, the desperate woman tries to hide the child - and brings upon her village the anger of the sea and the seal people. Finally their daughter must chose for herself whether to return to the sea, or stay with the people she has grown to love as her parents. A great addition to lovers of tales of the Selkie.

The other reviewers' negative comments are mostly on track. The book is not all that well organized. It is an absolute necessity if you are going to develop RPMs, however. The man pages are really incomplete, so you need the book to do what the man pages should have done. The book provides more than man pages would have, since it includes many examples.

I find with the latest versions of RPM that the book is getting obsolete. The syntax of the .rpmrc file has changed. Important rpm version variables such as EPOCH are not documented. One must also read the source code to develop RPMS and RPM tools.

I would give this book a B+ for when it was originally published, but it only gets a C+ today because it is getting obsolete. Red Hat should produce a 2nd edition and spend a little effort organizing it.

At least the current version actually contains much technical information. Let's hope it doesn't degenerate into a non-technical book in some future edition.

The maximum rpm book is full of detailed information on how to make the spec file work for you, demistifying what many people see as a difficult thing to create.

Not only is the spec file well detailed, but the book explains how to write a good spec file- not just any spec file- taking into consideration the fact that people will want to build your source rpm on other platforms and other linux distributions.

Now, if only the people out there wriying rpm spec files would follow the guidelines so clearly outlined in the book.... (sigh)

The other reviews puzzle me---I was able to get any and all information out of this book I needed. I read it yesterday and today am creating relatively complicated RPMs with subpackages. I find the book to be well laid out and the index to be comprehensive and helpful. If you want to learn all about RPM, this is an excellent book. Despite being a couple of years old, this book didn't appear to have any out of date information; I don't think RPM has changed enough in the past few years to make this book obsolete.

This book accomplishes what it set out to do, explain how to use RPM and build packages, and it does a fine job.

Ronald Bailey’s dumbed down “Earth Report” is nothing more than vulgar anthropocentrism marketed as feel-good ecology neatly packaged for the McMasses. Actually, even the title of the book is a misnomer. While Bailey’s book is a “report” of sorts, at no point does the author seem to express a sincere or grounded interest in the “earth”.

Perhaps the book's greatest flaw, aside from the curiously misinterpreted statistics and erroneous conclusions, is its perverse avoidance of addressing the spiritual and philosophical issues logically raised when considering mankind’s roll in the natural world. While the book does a good job of inundating readers with all sorts of statistics and corporate-sponsored meditations, Bailey refuses, in a rather disturbingly determined sort of way, to pose the “larger questions”. The result is a book that too often feels intentionally rushed and suspiciously simple.

In Bailey’s worldview nature is a tangible commodity with a value that can fluctuate (...). “Ecology” is seen only as a tool to better manage natural assets to meet corporate and economic needs. This “nature as product” ideology has been practiced by capitalist entities since the industrial revolution, but Bailey’s attempt to bring it to the masses, and the simplistic manner of his presentation presents a new and dangerous trend. Bailey even insists that we should judge a species as “good” or “bad” depending on its relative worth to mankind. For example, Bailey believes that North American white-tail deer are, “dangerous mammals” and “killers” because they have the audacity to stray onto roads and highways where they often cause serious accidents when struck by fast-moving cars and trucks. Not only do these deer/vehicle collisions cause human fatalities, they ALSO result in over 1 billion dollars worth of insurance claims annually. To Bailey this represents a prime example of poor asset management (the deer of course being the poorly managed asset). Bailey never once considers that the massive deer overpopulation (which has logically increased the risk of deer/vehicle collisions) may have something to do with reduced deer habitat and the almost complete annihilation of the white-tail deer’s natural predators (courtesy of mankind).

Bailey’s disarmingly pronounced hubris in “Earth Report” is matched only by his inane insistence that there aren’t even any real ecological issues at all (at least in the “green” sense)! Counter arguments are seen as radical and suspicious.

The technocrat-friendly ideas presented by Ronald Bailey in “Earth Report” are not only arrogant and misguided, they are downright dangerous. Bailey’s subtle and consistent suggestion that all is really well in the world, may just cost us that, the world.

TANSTAAFL - It's just that simple.

This acronym, meaning "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch" is at the heart of this book- understanding and embracing it not as a phylosophy, but as a law of the universe.

Earth Report contributors understand that there is absolutely nothing in this world that comes without some cost. This understanding helps them make suggestions that encourage using laws of supply and demand to improve our economy.

Overfishing: There is always a cost to fishing. When no one is responsible for absorbing the costs of fishing, the cost is in the fish resources- populations of fish dwindle and we run out of the supply. But if someone has a vested interest in a fishing area, they can pass the cost onto the human economy. Their profits ensure that the area remains sustainable. Healthy fish need a healthy environment. Would you let someone dump toxic waste into your private fishery? Of course not.

Environment: This old topic has been hashed over again and again- usually with people arguing about whether or not humans are responsible for warming. But beyond this is the compelling argument of, "WHo Cares!" What is the cost of trying to stop HUMAN caused global warming? Huge. But we know that in the past, the earth has warmed even more without our help. If we pay the cost to stop human global warming, and natural global warming (or even worse- cooling) occurs, will our crippled economy be able to handle it? Most likely not. There is a real and dangerous cost to limiting our economy- one that this book points out when comparing the affects of natural disasters on robust economies versus weak ones. Any guess which one is more apt to deal with natural disasters?

This book is one sided, and presents one point of view. Read it along with the other information out there and I think you will be well on your way to forming your own opinions.

"Earth Report 2000" was written by ten scientists, each with excellent credentials, each writing on a different environmental topic. Here are the ten section titles:

1. Population, Food and Income
2. Pesticides: Increasing Food Supplies While Preserving Biodiversity
3. Global Warming
4. The Coming Age of Abundance
5. Causes and Prevention of Cancer
6. Forests
7. Conserving Biodiversity
8. Water Options
9. Rescuing the Oceans
10. Global Air Quality

It's a tour-de-force of all the important environmental concerns, and paints a much more optimistic scenario than we hear from some environmentalists and politicians. The book was edited by Ronald Bailey, who has also written on the subject in his book,"Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocolypse."

Ron Bailey was formerly producer of a national PBS series called "Technopolitics." His style is confrontational and expresses more than just skepticism. He points out various statements of some politicians and more extreme environmentalists that suggest they are willing to resort to deception to gain public support for an anti-growth environmental program aimed at the goal of a more egalitarian society. He may be a little TOO confrontational for some readers, but exposure to his points seems to me to be essential for ANYONE to reach an informed view about the environment. I srongly recomment it!!!