Was so helpful. A must have for those who really care about where their relationship is heading.

Savor every word as if your relationship depended on it.

The New Intimcay is an easy-to-read book full of insightful tools and relevant stories that will assist partners in creating and maintaining REALISTIC and LOVING interactions. It helps couples to understand, learn from and even enjoy the differences that occur in all relationships. Although geared towards couples, anyone can benefit from the information presented in this book.

I'm a CNE since Version 3.X. I have took a lot of test reading only the White book and practice. The results: I had to take test twice even three times before passing it. For the NW5 Update, I took the course and read the white book twice, but I also bought this book. The results: Passed the first time!! It's incredible how this books wraps all you need to know in order to pass the test. It is easy to read and give you clues of what to pay special attention. If you are studing for the update test, this is the only book you will have to read (you will need hands-on, as well).

I originally got my CNE back in 1994 - the 3.11 days. That was the last time Novell came out with a CCR (Continuing Certification Requirement) - the update to 4.11. That was the only test I flunked the first time and squeaked by the second time. Now I'm working in an NT environment and haven't even touched a Novell server in over a year. Needless to say, the latest CCR had me worried. I wanted to keep my CNE, but didn't want to spend thousands of dollars learning a NOS I'd probably never use. I decided to get Clarke Notes only and sink or swim. I'm happy to say I passed the test on the first try after two days reading and studying this book. Thanks, David! Now if we could only talk him in to developing a Windows 2000 curriculum.

The book is very easy to read and the author has even put in material to make it fun to read. If you want your professional reading to be as dry as a bone, that feature may jolt you. The book is a good general reference for NW 5 and not just for test-takers. However, the prospective test-taker should look at Appendix B. It provides the Novell test objectives and give the reference to the pages in the book where each objective is covered. If you've gone over the official text so many times that you're about blind, this explains the same things (plus more) in a very clear manner.

This book can be purcahsed from Steven F Austin State University for about 50 dollars. Their number is 936-468-2011. Hope this helps.

This is one of the best books I have ever read on white tailed deer. Full of great information for both hunters and managers. Any serious hunter should have this book. I spent many weeks sourcing a copy of this book book and it was well worth the effort. I hope for the sake of the rest of you out their that this book goes back into print.

Dr. Kroll is considered one of the foremost whitetail experts in the nation and provides practical, well researched advise in a well thought out and entertaining manner. This is not a book that provides short-cuts on how to bag a monster in three easy steps but instead a book that will provide the tools to be a better hunter and manager. You will simply not find a better book on the subject. As a side note, Dr. Kroll heads the Whitetail Institute for Sthphen F. Austin University in Texas and they may be a source for those of you who have had a difficult time locating the book.

With the other two books in this series, James does an excellent job of conveying many of the lessons of large software project management and software design in a series of short, accessible anecdotes which can be easily digested by someone who is just coming to the field, or who doesn't have the time and focus to really digest Brooks ("The Mythical Man-month") or Demarco/Lister ("Peopleware"). This set is concise and to-the-point, and a must have for the new project manager or project lead.

This is an excellent book, I've enjoyed every single line on it. Simply great.

The book covers all the various aspects of programming, from design to coding, management, etc.. in a concise and funny way.

Each and every sentence is an invitation to further meditation and reasoning about its subject.

An intensive, thought provoking text, and a must read for any computer scientist.

The wise programmer is told about the Tao and follows it. The averate programmer is told about the Tao and searches for it. The foolish programmer is told about the Tao and laughs at it.

If it were not for laugher there would be no Tao.

(chapter 1.4)

Everyone seems to be reviewing this by quoting it - I couldn't help it either, because this is such a great book, you can't help wanting to relay the wisdom in it. I show it to as many people as I can - the foolish ones laugh. The smart ones laugh too, but they hopefully learn something...

Ahhh Paris. As a graduate student fortunate to be studying in Paris, I found myself falling into the dull routine of class and studying. I was failing to appreciate one of the prettiest cities on earth. This book opened my eyes to the multitude of interesting "trucs" around me in the Latin Quarter. Although some of the stories are more interesting than others, there is genuinely something for everyone's taste in this book. I now often study at the "Deux Magots" cafe due to its history and popularity with Jean Paul Sartres and Simone de Beauvoir that I read about. This book is wonderful for anyone interested in Paris, wanting to take a mental journey there, or a seasoned traveller who thinks they already know Paris. Anyone armed with "Paris Traveler's Tales" can discover the "Joie de Vivre" en Paris!

You can read this book before going to Paris, after going to Paris, or just to dream about Paris. Of the 5 different Travelers' Tales Guides I have read, this is the best. The writing quality is good, and there is a surprising diversity in viewpoints and experiences represented. It is as if the magic of Pairs inspired the editor's best effort. The essays/excerpts/stories cover such a variety of topics, from carousels to strippers to Napoleon to the French historical angst, that one really gets an insight into French mind and culture. If you have any interest in Paris, you will find this book entertaining and enlightening.

"çà, c'est paris"! is a popular french song from WWII period. Parisians sang it when Paris was delivered by US and french troops. This is the song I started whislting when I read the first pages and table of contents of this book. It's good to read paris guide books where you're not obliged to go through 50 pages of historical descriptions before you understand what paris is all about. This book is not dull. It is well documented even if this documentation has nothing to do with "classical" culture. It belongs to a tradition in French publishing business: collection of essays written by famous writers about a specific place. In this case, I do not know the writers (I am french)and am not influenced by their past works. One could imagine to publish the same kind of books with texts from Victor Hugo, Ernst Hemmingway and other famous writers.

Complete, easy-to-follow, well-organized. The two Prima Guides credited to Elizabeth Hollinger and James Ratkos, ("Pokemon Master Pokedex" and the "Pokemon Gold & Silver" Strategy Guide), are in a separate class from the other Prima Guides, which are visually eye-catching, but less complete and harder to follow. (I have not yet seen Elizabeth Hollinger's "Crystal" Strategy Guide.) **PARENTS**: The Prima Guides are EXCELLENT learning tools, teaching children how to use reference materials independently. When my son was younger, I would read the instructions to him as he went along. Now an avid reader, my 7-year-old flips back and forth between his Prima Guides, plotting strategy, discovering information, confirming what he suspects to be true. EXCELLENT!!!

This 'book' is very useful and fun to read. I have used it in many battles where it seemed like I was going to lose, but with it, I won!

I liked this book because it really helps a lot. If you have to go on the internet to find Pokemon answers here is your guide! If you spend a lot of time on the computer to look for info on Pokemon this would be a good book! It has more Information than the Internet.

I found this book very interesting I learned a lot about Reggie White. I wish that he was still with the Green Bay Packers. I am a huge Green Bay Packer fan. This book had a lot of interesting stuff in it. For example I never knew that one of his favorite players growing up was O.J. Simpson. Reggie said in the book that O.J. Simpson was like a moving target for defensive linemen; he said, that was one of the reasons that he wanted to play defensive end. I also learned that he really liked his coach Buddy Ryan when he played with the Philadelphia Eagles ,and when Buddy Ryan got fired Reggie couldn't figure out why he got fired; he said Buddy Ryan was a good coach. Reggie also talked about his church getting burned. He also talked about his friend and teammate Jerome Brown who was killed a car accident and he thought he was a really great person and he said he misses him. I learned a lot from reading this book. This book is one of my favorite books that I read. I would recommend this book to every Green Bay Packer fan.

This was a great book because it shared with me how profesesional athletes deal with the same things that us normal, every day Joe-Schmoes have to deal with. It was interesting how he dealed with his church getting burned down and how he was frustrated with the authorities, just as I am.

really awesome book, cool pics in the middle!! exciting life to read about. im a big GB fan, ad was sad when he retired, but am constantly impressed by his faith. God bless Reggie!!

PS im glad u finally got a superbowl !!!

Romancing the Room is a fun book filled with anecdotes, but I feel that the true value of this book is the confidence that the reader can develop when following Wagstaffe's advice. Public speaking is a challenge, but with Romancing the Room, one can develop the art of public speaking and basic communication to any person/people. As a college student in South Bend, I am often faced with the task of presenting my work to fellow classmates. Wagstaffe has helped me earn the A+ that I was looking for. Help yourself develop confidence, public speaking ability, and charisma with Romancing the Room, by James Wagstaffe.

I read Romancing the Room right before a big job interview - I stuck to a few guidelines - listen, don't apologize, identify with your audience, and be engaging. Needless to say this was probably the best interview of my life and yes I did get the job.
This book is as entertaining to read as it is useful. The autor's use of anecdotes are well placed and poignant - not to mention humorous. I would recommend this book to anyone who is afraid to give presentations, controlling a room full of people, dealing with their family, or just wants to be entertained. I hope there is a sequel!

This book offers step by step help for those who are just plain not good at or afraid of public speaking. It helped me give a toast at a birthday party for a good friend which was well received. I don't think I would have even attempted it without having read this book. Also learn how to communicate more effectively with family members and co-workers. It's full of great tips for learning the skill of cocktail party conversation. People will like and remember YOU if you apply the skills in this book. The book is built on personal experience and useful for students, spouses, and employees who find themselves in all kids of unfamiliar or uncomfortable social situations. Also clearly and concisely written by someone who knows how to teach.

Apart from the in-your-face writing style, this little book is all about who Joy Boy encounters in New York - his roommates, the girls his libido latches on to, the booze he imbibes, the cuisine he obsesses with, the drugs he narrowly misses, the mayhem he causes & the misadventures he gallops into.

Did I like ON THE ORIGINS OF JOY BOY'S CHASM? Not exactly. It is witty, & I found myself chuckling here & there. It is rather like an endlessly looping rerun of some snortingly amusing New York sitcom. It is also a catalog of brand names - I can't remember a novel with so many.

If you're young, you talk a-mile-a-minute & like your characters to do the same; if you yearn for the zany - then this one's for you! Enjoy!

In Joy Boy's Chasm we find that the disenchanted editor has met with dot-com hysteria as surfers, lonely messengers and free-wheeling, soul-searching crackers somehow all come together to occupy the same space in a wildly believable New York fashion, weaving nothing less than an hilarious, over-the-top, comic tale whose roots we find in the following: Breaking up is hard to do but harder, still, perhaps, is growing up.

The episodic novel takes place in Manhattan late in the fall of 1998, as the author states in his energy-driven prologue in where he also states that the reader would do better to throw the book on the ground, stomp on it, soak it in charcoal lighter fluid and set it on fire than they would to continue reading. A perfectly crafted take-away -- you have no choice but to continue on once you read this.

My most enjoyable and positive comment, other than the uncompromisingly witty repertoire that fills the pages and the carefully created (albeit madcap) plot, is that it is great to have an author who can take a risk with a unique perspective on the post-college, pre-marriage life by not littering the pages with the drugs, booze and sexcapades that one inevitably finds in most mainstream media treating the subject. Characters who unwittingly widen the rift between the now and where they are trying to get to by the all-too-common, tired and cliche literary method of filling their idle time with stimulants and depressants are a dime a dozen. Leaven's characters, while hardly free from the gravitational pull of the consumer-creating machine of our time (and how apropos to find the setting late-1998 Manhattan, where this machine was never before in such full force), are truly in search of a better life, a better way, a better time, though some of the characters do not completetely refrain from the previously-mentioned void-filling methods.

The author, after recommending that the reader burn the book and go save a squirrel instead, promises total enlightenment to the reader who dares to continue on. Perhaps it was the nostialgic rush that came over me in the closing words that, dare I say perfectly?, encapsulated not only the narrative but also the tumult inherent in this period of our lives for most of us, but the author's prescient prediction did ring partly true in that I did feel that I understood this period of my life a bit better than before reading the novel (and also that I could laugh more about it). And for this, but more so for the complete and captivating entertainment that he delivers, Leaven has my vote. A fresh, new voice and a pleasure to read.

As a woman, I can tell you that this book is not just for men! I found the characters endearing, the plot madcap but delivered in such a way as to be surprisingly believable, and the dialogue sharp, perceptive and consistently funny. This really is a great book and a true page-turner. I received it for Christmas and didn't put it down until leftovers!

The book contains:

a) An overview of evolutionary programming techniques.

b) An exposition of the argument that intelligent behavior has a large social component in addition to a genetically determined component.

c) The presentation of an optimisation technique whereby a swarm of possible solutions fly through a problem space and base their search trajectories not only on personal experience but also on the experiences of the group. ie- There is a social component to the search of the problem space.

The presentation of (a) and (b) was quite good and readable. The presentation of (c) I found to be a little bit unclear. The algorithm is quite simple, and can be expressed succinctly, but I ended up having to go to secondary sources (web site and PSO C code) to understand exactly what they were doing. The title of the book seems to suggest the swarm develops an emergent property of intelligence. This is over-reach, and is probably not an interpretation that the authors would place on the PSO algorithm. The PSO algorithm is an interesting numeric optimisation technique, and it seems to be a more organic approach to developing neural network weights than techniques like back-propagation of errors.

Overall, a good book that I would recommend. Points off for not being clearer in explaining the algorithm details.

My original motivation for reading Swarm Intelligence was a desire to learn about the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm -- in particular, to learn how to implement it in a Java program. To the credit of its authors, what I found in Swarm Intelligence was far more than that. The authors have taken on the rather daunting task of presenting a new paradigm -- a new way of thinking about mind and intelligence -- and they have succeeded.

PSO, itself, is deceptively simple. The heart of the algorithm can be written in a single line of code. Understanding the basis for its approach to intelligence isn't difficult, either. The authors begin their explanation using the old parable about the blind men and the elephant. You are most likely familiar with the story. In summary form, it is about a group of blind men standing around an elephant each declaring "what an elephant is like" based upon which part of the elephant they are touching -- and elephant is like: a wall (side); a tree trunk (leg); a hose (trunk); a fan (ear); and so on.

What is wrong with this story, the authors point out, is its implicit assumption that these blind men are also deaf. If not, as they each announced their impressions the individuals, as a group, would discover much more about what an elephant is. The significance here is easily missed. The capabilities of a group emerge from the individuals immersed in it. The group can do more (see more, discover more, experiment more) than the individuals from which it emerges and, by virtue of their immersion in it, the individuals benefit (and in turn, the group then benefits as it now emerges from these "benefited" individuals).

The authors view this emergent/immergent "cycle" as the driving force behind mind and intelligence. In contrast to the normal (phenomenological) view of mind as an internal, private "thing that thinks," the authors assert that mind is something requiring sociality. To put it bluntly (and the authors do), in the absence of social immersion there is no mind; mind is social. The majority of the book is focused on this: why it's true, how it's true and how it is implemented in the PSO algorithm.

It is easy to see how the book might have ended up a long philosophical argument. It isn't. Instead, the authors present a nicely written history of efforts to achieve "computational intelligence" (a much better phrase than the more familiar "artificial intelligence") including great summaries of evolutionary approaches, fuzzy logic, neural nets and artificial life. Along the way they point out recent advances in psychology and sociology. The net effect is that they don't need to argue their point. By the end of this part of the book the importance of sociality has become rather obvious. If you are interested in sociology, psychology, engineering and/or computer science you will enjoy this part of the book immensely, learn a lot and find a wealth of references to additional sources of information.

The second part of the book presents the PSO algorithm, compares its performance with other methodologies (in addition to being simpler to understand and implement, it's an order of magnitude faster when applied to certain problems -- training neural nets, for example), demonstrates how it is applied to some "real life" problems and discusses some implications of (and speculations about) the approach. As with the first part of the book, the presentation is clear, concise and informative. There is, though, indications here that the PSO approach is rather new (young). There isn't enough experience with PSO yet to give this part of the book the same feeling of depth one gets from the first part.

It's worth noting that the presentation (and description) of the PSO algorithm is done in mathematical terms. I would have much preferred a programming approach (using pseudo code) not because the math is too difficult (it's not) but because I haven't been "immersed in a mathematically minded social group" for many years. The almost exclusive use of Greek letters for symbols (variables) made reading difficult. Not only are they visually unfamiliar, I don't know their pronunciations (to illustrate the difficulty by way of analogy, consider the difference between reading "y equals b times x plus z" and "xgt equals kqj times yxf plus ktv"). I ended up rewriting the formulas in more familiar terms (using the text to figure out what the symbols represent when necessary) before I felt that I understood them.

Mentioning my problem with the math is not meant to criticize but to suggest that the book could have been made accessible to more people had it also contained a more readable (and retainable) form of the algorithm, perhaps in an appendix. A good analogy of the PSO approach (more detailed than the "blind men" story) would also have been helpful. The only real criticism I have of the book's content is a minor one. Being as it is focused on the social requirements for mind, it tends to overlook the degree of individuality required to make PSO work. The algorithm, itself, has variables which control the expression of individuality and without which it could not work (at least not well), but this flipside to the social nature of the algorithm is never discussed as such. PSO works well precisely because it maintains the rather chaotic balance between the effects of sociality and individuality. The book presents a rather one-sided view of this balance.

An aside for programmers: There is a companion site (of sorts) on the web for the book through which you can download Visual Basic and C source code of PSO implementations. There is also a Java applet which demonstrates PSO applied to a number of test functions but the source code for it is not available. There will also be an open source Java implementation as soon as I can make one available.

This book is fantastic!
It consists of two parts. In the first part, the main ideas behind Evolutionary Computation and social behavior are tangibly described. A brief review of the most known evolutionary computation algorithms is provided and social behavior modeling issues are reported to prepare the reader for the second part.

The second part is devoted to the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm and its applications. Both binary and real variants of PSO are considered and several theoretical aspects are investigated. The book closes reporting several applications and insightful conclusions.

Perhaps the best book on collective intelligence and PSO.