As a female-student pilot myself, at 43 and a University student, I have been researching women from across the globe who were yearning to be pilots in the 1930s to the 1950s. I found this book to be informative and inspiring. With so many obstacles against her one of which would never be considered these days, nationality, Bessie only tried harder and determination won through! Reminds me of two Australian books I have recently read namely, 'Pioneer Aviator The Remarkable life of Lores Bonney' by Terry Gwynn-Jones and My God! It's A Woman autobiography by Nancy Bird.

I too have found that this book is full of 'issues' that make learning ODEs not only a chore, but next to impossible. The problems presented in the book make little sense to anyone except for the profs. If you are planning on teaching an ODE course with this book, I beg you to reconsider your choice of books for the sake of your students.

This book is undeniably the worst math book I have ever used. While the authors and student editors are undoubtedly more comfortable with the subject matter and are intelligent people, I found the text to be uncomprehensible by people that didn't already understand the material.

If you are a student in an ODE course, I would recommend using another text. You may sleep better.

This book's clear writing style, fantastic use of illustrations and examples, and good chapter organization make it the best differential equations book I've used.

I can understand a first time student might have problems with this book. The text isn't perfect. It requires a professor to help guide the student along. But one shouldn't expect to learn a rich and demanding subject like differential equations alone.

I hated it. it was a bunch of BULL$H1T

This was the third game strategy book I got (after Master of Magic and Master of Orion II). I was seriously disappointed. In other Prima books there is a wealth of material about how the game resolves conflicts/battles, conducts it's turn, etc. Tables of data and statistics, which while sometimes dry, were often useful and insightful. In this one there was a "walk-through" (and a few tables) with little material about what was happening behind the scenes and what strategies there were to deal with it. It was almost like an Adventure or RPG guide rather than a strategy guide. Very disappointing especially given some of the other (very good) work Terry Coleman has done.

Containing an excellent tutorial of the early missions, this guide takes the novice gently through to the truly tough later missions. Although maps and step-by-step walkthroughs are not provided for the later continents the book tells you what to expect. Treasure tables are *REALLY* nice and the places to find heroes are very useful as well. Excellent guide, a must-have if you love FG.

... Evidence is a word that is seldom used with any accuracy in this book, yet another conspiracy theory written by someone who got no closer to the EVIDENCE than many of his fellow writers of conspiracies.
I would not recommend this book to anyone who has a genuine interest in the FACTS behind the act of atrocity.

This book shows the extent to which our 'Public Servants' go to cover their criminal enterprises. These cranks that attempt to dis-credit those who expose criminal activity by government employees as conspiracy freaks are they themselves complicite in these Federal crimes. Conspiracy or not, these people are a deeply infiltrated cancer in the US Government.

Trail is another excellent case study of the unlimited arrogance, deceit, and duplicity in Washington D.C. Its value is reflected in the price of used copies... and the efforts to kill public interest in the book. The hardest message to communicate is the extent of arrogance, deceit, and duplicity in our own government because we have been taught from an early age of how wonderful our elected leaders are. Well, the truth is out there, but you have to search to find it. Trail of the Octopus is an excellent example. Another very good book is the Boys on the Tracks. There is no end of good examples in the efforts to get the truth out respecting the government's abandonment of missing American POWs from the top on down. See Betrayed by Douglass, which has a listing of 25 plus other books and videos on this subject, all with a consistent message respecting the absence of honor and principles at the highest levels in our government.

Do I need to say more? Buy it or don't that's not my business

I bought this book as a Christmas present for a friend, but enjoyed it so much I kept it for myself and bought her another copy. I plan to give a copy of it to my best friend when she's my maid of honor at my wedding.

I have not read this book. The title, however, indicates that the author doesn't know much paleontology. Pterodactyls are NOT dinosaurs. I teach a class on dinosaurs/historical geology at my local community college. I am constantly having to clear up misinformation like this from students. Books like this spread misinformation.

I did read through this book and it states that pterodactylus is not a dinosaur, but rather a pterosaur. I think the other reviewer was mislead by the series title (New Dinosaur Collection). I discovered that this was not a dinosaur when two second graders came to the library to do a report. The teacher had assigned "dinosaurs," so I naturally looked in dinosaur dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc. I did find that it's not a dinosaur, but this book was one of the few that was really helpful in explaining the distinctions.

I have a special place in my heart for the Ed Wood film "Plan 9 From Outer Space" -- this cult classic is fun to watch precisely because it is so bad. Now we have "Drum Major" which, if anything, is so bad that it surpasses "Plan 9" as truly bad art.

Reading the first few chapters I found it difficult to decide if the author's style (i.e., lack thereof, including typographical and grammatical errors) was intentional or not. It became unrelentingly clear however that the author was ignorant of many of the rudiments of writing and that as a reader I would have to simply deal with his tortured text.

These problems aside, another larger problem loomed: the plot. "Unconvincing" is a kind way to put it; "insulting" to the reader another. I err on the side of honesty and lean towards the latter. If the protagonist Estenio Morales is a "drum major" for human rights then I can name a number of other thugs who can likewise lay claim to the same title. The author claims to have an insight on Latin culture but it appears that this insight is one of reinforcing stereotypes.

I notice that a few of the "positive" reviews state that the novel "reads like a watching movie"... like "Plan 9" for instance?

Not even close.

There is NO WAY that 8 out of 12 book club members could have liked this book! Our book club received an unsolicited copy to review. We take these submissions seriously. One of our members read it, and brought it to our monthly meeting HOWLING about how awful it was! We read many, MANY sections out loud--each more ridiculous than the last. Don't tell me there can be differing opinions on this. If you're a person who loves reading and/or literature, it is impossible to consider this in the same noun-group. There are innumerable misspellings, hugely awful grammar (not meant to connote "local color," just bad editing), insanely cartoonish characters and a plot wrought from a 3rd grader's small-world imagination. There are many wonderful Latin American and Cuban books out there that should be read. Don't waste your time on this sophomoric drivel.

Please note, I HAD to give it one star to submit this review. It doesn't deserve even that.

One of my fellow book club members lent me a copy to read and I must say that parts of the book were so bad, sometimes I just had to laugh out loud. The idea for the plot is not bad, though - maybe the author can re-publish it after running a grammar check on it and getting rid of his weak attempts to sound "ethnic" (like spelling kill 'keel', which I found annoying).

The reason I'm giving this 2 stars is (1) for the effort and (2) there were a few parts that were OK [Estenio's journal, for example)

This is a very moderate book which does not have the ability to captivate the attention of most readers. It is of a not very impressive collection. A better book would be one on the Mottahedeh Collection, which is a much larger and better documented collection of Chinese Export.

This book is very "dry," and it's hard to get through one chapter without yawning a few times. However, you do learn a lot. I do not recommend this book if you're reading it "just for fun!"

This book is a cut-n-paste from numerous other Sybex books. Skip it! Buy the other books ... this one jumps all over the map, often referring to other books or chapters ahead in the current book. Very annoying and a difficult way to learn!

This was my first XML book. Reason? It's two inches thick and the most inexpensive I could find. Only after I bought it did I realize that it's an anthology of snippets from other Sybex titles. That's the reason they can sell it at a lower price (apart from the fact that it uses newsprint). Also the reason why I couldn't find the author's name on the cover!

As for quality it's good enough for XML newbies (like me). The basics are all there in the first few chapters. It covers a lot of ground including namespaces, DTDs, schemas, and other stuff I haven't even begun reading.

It even includes practically everything you need to know to author in XHTML, which is practically nil if you already are HTML savvy. Advice to the HTML-aware designers: Don't get gypped into purchasing XHTML books. Invest your hard earned money in XML titles instead, preferably from O'Reilly. Me, biased?

After reading the first hundred pages and grasping the main concepts you can begin authoring in XML (usually with some help from other XML books). If you want to see your XML files rendered by a browser you'll have to get Netscape 6.x or better yet whatever the current Mozilla build is... I don't recommend Opera not even the latest version (6.01) since its CSS support is not as complete. Moreover, Opera processes JavaScript codes approximately a hundred times slower! than Internet Explorer. As for IE my version IE5.5 only displays the XML parse tree.

ATTENTION! There's one unforgivable blunder by the Sybex editors: They've included XHTML chapters from its _Mastering XHMTL_ without having them properly reviewed! Even as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has deprecated (a euphemism meaning on death row and marked for execution without a shred of hope for amnesty or pardon)) a good number of (X)HTML elements the book still continues to promote their use by teaching readers how to implement them. Although time and again the authors say use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is recommended they merely pay lip service to their own tips and tell beginners how to set color using bgcolor, font faces using the font element, etc, rather than devote those same pages to introductory CSS. This totally defeats the purpose of XML and the objectives of W3C.

To those who are just about to step into world of web design and those who are switching from HTML to XHMTL: Go for XHTML Strict immediately and use CSS exclusively to instruct browsers how to render your pages. That's the correct way to do it. A properly marked up document should *not* contain instructions for its presentation (e.g. display on your monitor).

To Sybex: Pull this edition out and get those XHTML chapters revised immediately! You're teaching beginners how to start off on the wrong foot!

Written poorly. This book is not for everyone. The author of the first chapter refers mercilessly to later chapters over and over again, defining introductory concepts using advanced terms. How many times the phrase "you need to remember this now, but we will not cover it until chapter 10, 11, 13" whatever occurs.

My mind was shattered on the examples, which use inside computer-humor as examples (tags named foo, foobar, etc) of xml tags. How about using something the average reader can relate to, such as "textcolor" or perhaps "smallfont?" Oh no, all we get is random.tag, foobar, and other touchstones which are useless to a reader not part of the subculture.

I really wish I had not purchased this book. I give it two stars because I think it will be later as a reference once I have actually learned XML. Until then, this book will remain in a box, and if I could, I would return it for another book.