I've long been of a mind that the most interesting question in regard to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is the one they never asked us in class : was it
right to kill him? As always in Shakespeare, it's possible to read the play in several ways, but the final verdict seems to be that the assassins were
not justified, not least because in replacing one tyranny they unleashed a worse. This message--the wisdom of erring on the side of
stability--would have been particularly resonant in Shakespeare's own day, when religious conflicts, foreign invasion, and wars of dynastic
succession were still recent memories and/or active concerns. Brutus, then, though in some ways a tragic hero, is ultimately too passive a character
to really command our loyalty and affection. And if Caesar and Marc Anthony don't fare much better, we are left to conclude that things would
have been better had the established order, even an imperfect order, been allowed to endure.

Spring ahead just a few decades from Shakespeare's time though, and the moral of the story becomes problematic. By the middle of the 17th
Century, we are entered upon the Age of Revolutions in the English-Speaking World, and intellectual justification must be found for the series of
events that would see Protestants and Parliaments and Colonists overthrow and even execute their kings. Little wonder then that Joseph Addison's
terrific, but largely forgotten, play Cato was such a favorite of the 18th Century and particularly of the Founding Fathers.

It too tells the story of a tragic hero's resistance to Caesar, but has none of the ambiguity of Shakespeare. Marcus Porcius Cato--variously styled
Cato of Utica or Cato the Younger--was a Stoic, renowned for his incorruptibility and his intractable devotion to republican principals, the very
principals that Caesar trampled upon when he set himself up as a dictator. Having long opposed Caesar's ambitions, and having alienated many by
his inflexibility, Cato was essentially exiled from Rome, along with Pompey. After Pompey's defeat at Pharsalus, Cato went to Africa where he
was allied with Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio. After Caesar defeated Scipio at Thapsus, Cato killed himself, rather than submit to the
man he abhorred.

Where Shakespeare gave us a Brutus who was too ambivalent about his own actions and too much affected by events for us to take him to heart as
a hero, Joseph Addison rendered his Cato as an achingly noble and uncompromising character, one who may not appeal to modern tastes (of
course, we're all moderate in all things now, and a fanaticism, even for freedom, is distasteful in polite society), but who was seized upon as a
paragon of unyielding republican virtue by men like George Washington. In fact, when we consider the nobility of Washington's own action (for
example during the Newburgh conspiracy) and the emphasis he placed on preserving his own honor, it seems fair to speculate that the republic we
have inherited was handed down to us in some measure by Cato and Addison.

The play is filled with quotable lines, like :

A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty
Is worth a whole eternity in bondage.

In one passage we hear the foreshadowing of Nathan Hale :

What a pity is it
That we can die but once to save our country!

When Cato determines to kill himself he says :

Justice gives way to force: the conquered world
Is Caesar's: Cato has no business in it.

And Lucius, a Senate colleague pronounces upon Cato's death :

From hence, let fierce contending nations know
What dire effects from civil discord flow.
'Tis this that shakes our country with alarms,
And gives up Rome a prey to Roman arms,
Produces fraud, and cruelty, and strife,
And robs the guilty world of Cato's life.

Sure, it's old-fashioned, both in sentiment and language; how many statesmen still believe in honor at all, let alone in dying to preserve their own.
But it's immensely enjoyable and worth knowing if for no other reason than to understand one of the cultural influences that shaped Washington.
If we wish to comprehend how he, unlike so many other men in similar position, was able to resist the temptations of power and to instead remain
the guarantor of the republic, perhaps it is necessary for us to know Cato.

GRADE : A+

I picked this book up after traveling along the Chief Joseph highway in Utah. It is a well written depiction of the events and travesties of the Nez Perce. It also somewhat lets the reader see that although a great leader, Joseph was not perfect and that there are some who do not believe he was a great a leader as he was depicted in history. Overall, a well researched book which gives the reader an inside view to the thoughts and actions of Chief Joseph and other leaders of the Northwest Native American tribes.

At first glance, this book seems excellent because it describes Win32 with a lot of details. The biggest problem is that, the code in the book and the one on the CD-ROM are not the same. For example, while the book describes raw Win32 wonderfully, all of the code on the CD-ROM is 100% Microsoft Visual C++ biased. Just to start, all classes use the MSVC naming convention; of course, that's not a big deal. The real problem is that ALL examples were written using MFC. For example, the combo boxes, list boxes, edit, property sheets, etc, use MFC objects and their code is not transferrable.
This book was supposed to let people using any Windows compatible compiler to use its code. But the code doesn't work. All the manipulations of controls highly rely on how MFC implements them. Therefore, if you are using MSVC and are a Microsoft fanatic, like the authors, this is a good book. If you are using another compiler, you will be extremely disappointed. What a shame? There are not enough books on the subject. The only one I can recommend is Windows 98 Programming (which is out of print, unfortunately).

Anyone who currently programs in the Win32 environment or wants to learn how to do so needs this book. It exhaustively details the thousands of widgets (i.e. functions, manifest constants, structures, etc) that make up Win32, and provides detailed intellegent discussions of the concepts behind those widgets. These discussions are conducted in excellent English. The examples are mostly in 'C' with some 'C++'.

As a consequence this book is not for beginners. You must have a firm grasp of 'C' in order to follow the thread of the model program which is developed in the book. Since this is some of the most difficult programming imaginable, it is not a good place to start learning 'C'.

Some of the conceptual discussions are outstanding. I particularly liked the section on coordinate transformations. I had orginally consulted Windows "Help" and Petzold trying to get a handle on this elusive and difficult subject. I found that the explanation in this book was by far the most accessable and exhaustive.

The index is particularly well arranged and useful, and add immeasurably to the utility of the book.

This book is unique in its structure, in that it serves as both a reference and a teaching guide simultaneously. If one merely needs to refresh the memory or one encounters a new concept that need elaboration, this book will almost certainly fill the bill in the most efficient way possible.

I will use this book for many years to come, and wish that I had known about it earlier as it would have saved me an enormous amount of labor.

It is one of those rare computer books that is written for the ages, rather than the current release of the software.

(the author of this review is a software engineer of over 30 years experience, most of it non-Windows)

I am an experienced software engineer with a Unix/X Window System background and needed to get up to speed on the Win32 API without being coddled like a child or taught how to program. I looked at Win32 books for several months before I found this book on the shelf.

I like the organization of the book which starts with the core of a well-behaved Win32 application and moves on to bigger and better things with each chapter. I learned many good Win32 programming habits, such as the proper use of Unicode and , proper message loop structuring, and so-on from this book. These lessons in Win32 programming were learned the hard way (from the school of hard knocks also called "experience") by the authors so that I didn't have to suffer the same torturous fate.

The authors start with the core of a Win32 application and then move through the core GDI objects: device contexts, fonts, windows, etc. Then they proceed to examine all the common controls one by one with an exhaustive reference of all their messages.

Along the way, the authors point out places where porting from Win16 to Win32 might be a problem, as well as pointing out known bugs in the MSDN documentation and the Win32 implementation, referencing knowledge base articles for more detail. I also found the advice for those transitioning from a unix background helpful.

This might not be the best book for a beginner that has never written a GUI application before, but if you're familiar with the basics of event driven GUI applications from other window systems (AmigaOS, BeOS, MacOS or X Window System), then this book will teach you what you need to know about Win32 without wasting your time explaining things that you already know and understand.

If you are a complete beginner, you might be better off with a different book to start with, but still might enjoy this book as a reference once you've got the basics down. When I asked around on usenet about Win32 books, many people suggested Richter's book. I looked at Richter's book many times but it just didn't move me to buy it because I wanted a book that was a more exhaustive reference and one that didn't assume I was a beginner programmer.

Several people said "Yeah, I learned from Richter, but /Win32 Programming/ is the book I keep on the shelf. Once I read through Richter, I didn't use it anymore." Another factor is that /Win32 Programming/ is hardback, which makes it stand up to lots of use on a day-to-day basis.

This book was on the required reading for my English Graduate School Comprehensive Exams in the area on Literary Criticism. Brian Mcrea thoroughly repeats his same point several times within this text almost to the level of a reader's perplexity with his obsessive observations concerning the change in the world between the seventeeth to the eighteenth century literary styles and the postmodern era up until our current time. Certainly it is not surprising news to any English graduate student that Addison and Steele are no longer the literary icons for journalistic and literary practices used in the late 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. For forty dollars, however, you get alot of repetition of Mcrea's observations on this "phenomenom."

This book is a good source of information by the author as objective member of a university English Department in the fragmented postmodern modern world of today. Professional expectations and specialized suject areas now dominate the scene for graduate studies and new professors. McCrea relates the loss of interest in the public literary style Addision and Steel as members of the current literary canon and critical reviews which have dwindled to significanty none at all in periodicals since 1957. He traces the history of the canon back to the seventeenth century London and proceeds to Saussaure and Derrida as the leaders in the study of the new literary criticism and its canon in the twentieth and tweny-first century. Most of his comments are of interest historically and socially in respect to literature and its ever growing but selective group of isolated critics who only entertain a narrow and main focus of study. Is Derrida right, wrong, or both? This question gets a bit confusing in the last chapter on the New York mutes who are "signing" as they communicate enthuisiastically inside a restaurant as McCrea and his children watch. Is Derrida wrong, or is writing insubordinated by a system of signs that do not indicate the signified? Read this book for McCrea's comments that may initiate some questions of your own questions concerning the democratization of literature by the postmodern critics and new English Department professionalism.