I count myself among Robbe-Grillet's admirers, but this collection of six early stories really isn't the ideal place to begin if you're unfamiliar with his work. Robbe-Grillet's method is, in part, to replace psychological analysis (a hallmark of French literature) with objective visual description. His work is often hauntingly ambiguous precisely because the author refuses to impose, at least overtly, any kind of meaning on his narrative, or allow us to enter his characters' minds. He simply writes scenes--and let the reader make of it what he will.

In "Snapshots," though, the author generally comes up empty. I just don't know what to think of these stories, which present the reader with a simple sequence of events, elaborately detailed, and then stop. One can pick them apart and find more to them than might be immediately clear, but there isn't much here worth dwelling on. "The Secret Room" is probably the best of an undistinguished lot.

Perhaps the author needed to write these little exercises before he could go on to bigger and better things. I'd advise the interested reader to skip the stories and go straight to the novels, in which Robbe-Grillet's peculiar talent displays itself more fully.

Having just read Peter Nadas' "A Lovely Tale of Photography", I had to reread Robbe-Grillet's "Shapshots". Why? Because they both tell stories based on visual description. The traits they have in common, the points at which they diverge are a fascinating comparison.

I don't mean to imply you must have read Nadas to enjoy Robbe-Grillet. Robbe-Grillet is very consistent in his objective observer technique - the senses which are most subjective - taste, smell and touch are all but absent in Snapshots. Some of the shapshots such as The Dressmaker's Dummy tend to require mental gymnastics to visualize the scene precisely as described. Others such as The Way Back are easier to visualize and provide an implied plot line.

This short book is well worth the time to read - either for enjoyment or for a reminder of what was avante-garde 50 years ago.

robe-grillets use of "transmedial" dialogue gives the book an unearthly realism not uncommon with pynchons earlier works---ooh la la baby

Although the reviews of the restaurants are overall on the target, this guide has a MAJOR flaw -- it is not updated very frequently. This edition, for instance, was last modified back in 1997. Many of its recommendations have moved, closed down, or changed business hours. Another problem is that the book does not make it easy to find any of the restaurants. For some reason, the names of the (allegedly) nearest metro stop are given for the shops, but not for the restaurants. The bottom line is: I don't recommend using this book as your primary source.

Gayot's Paris offers a French perspective on the City of Light. Most French people I know consider the Gualt-Millau guides the most accurate and up-to-date availabe - notwithstanding Michelin. GM says their guides "...distinguish the truly superlative from the merely overrated" - an extremely useful service in my experience. The restaurant and hotel listings are concise and dead accurate and the shopping notes are great too. Nightlife and sightseeing are very well covered and the critical appraisals of places and sights is particularly helpful. This is a very useful book for the selective traveler, and was especially helpful in sorting-through the mind-numbingly endless possibilities Paris offers.

Although packed with good information, this text was just too big to fit in a ward coat, and held too much information to be utilized effectively, unlike other books in the series. There are better quick-review resources out there for use on the wards.

The book contains concise information for USMLE step 2 preparation. Even though it is priced on the higher side, it seems to be worth the money you put into it. For those who want to review their med school stuff quickly and completely this is a good buy. Especially useful for FMGs.

Structuralism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, and every other "post" have made this work a bit obsolete. Although I sympathize with his desire to let the object "just be," he seems doomed to failure. Don't get me wrong, I love his novels but this bit of theorizing just doesn't hold up, though it gets 3 stars for being thought provoking and straddling the modern and postmodern.

Here is a collection of critical essays about the so-called New Novel, the quite frankly bizarre genre that sent shockwaves through the French literary community back in the '50s, as interpreted by one of its foremost practitioners. Anyone who found themselves gazing blankly at the pages of Robbe-Grillet's "Jealousy" will at least get a general idea of the New Novel from this book.

As yet another literary technique based on the idea that we mere mortals cannot know anything for certain, the New Novel restricts itself to elaborate physical description (usually visual), disregards characterization in the traditional sense, and ignores symbolism altogether (because objects MEAN nothing, they just ARE). It also plays havoc with the linear time-schemes of conventional novels; if you're familiar with the jumping-back-and-forth plot of "Pulp Fiction" (or if you've seen the notorious art-house film "Last Year at Marienbad," which Robbe-Grillet wrote) then you're already aware of one of the New Novel's most distinguishing features. In sum, it tends to be deeply ambiguous and not a little confusing.

Luckily for Robbe-Grillet, he's honest enough not to set himself up as a dogmatic theoretician. The definition of the New Novel, he claims, must be open-ended; the theory must interpret the fiction, not the other way around. Fair enough, I'd say. I think he's correct in claiming that novelists today can no longer write like the naturalists of the 19th Century; but I also doubt--as he optimistically says at one point--that we'll ever come to view the techniques of the New Novel as a "normal" form of fiction, against which other novels will be compared. The New Novel is just too WEIRD and, unlike, say, the novels of Flaubert, it is difficult to approach it unless you're already familiar with the theories and philosophical ideas it operates under. But then, theories of literature must always take a back seat to literature itself, which is why the curious reader might be better off tackling Robbe-Grillet's fiction first.

"For a New Novel" can be safely ignored by the general reader, but it's worth a look for fans of the French avant-garde.

Aimed at the vacationer or business traveller, the strength of this guide is its guided walks/day trip itineraries...and in for a place whose coastline and skyline is forever changing, not to mention its complete change of sovreignty, the more up to date your guidebook the better!

I found the guide to be quite good and conveniently compact. My one criticism is that information for a given area is in several different places in the book. For example, there is a section on Wan Chai as a tour, another for Wan Chai at night, another section under excursions, and then Wan Chai restaurants are listed in a fourth section, altho some are included in the previous sections. This made for a lot of page flipping back and forth. This should all be consolidated into one section on Wan Chai. I thought the info was very good, just a lot of page flipping ("Now, where did I see that?")

Christian Gouriéroux is maybe the best French econometrician. In particular, his last discovery, the indirect inference, seems to be a very clever way of solving the problem of highly complicated likelihood functions. But in this book, only 4 pages are dedicated to present the subject, and they are filled with over complicated mathematical formulas and a very short explanation. The notations are extremely complicated for economists (at least for myself) and, if you don't have a very solid mathematical background, you'll feel lost from the beginning until the last one. Nor undergraduate economics students neither graduate applied econometricians should feel comfortable with the style of the book. I guess only professional researchers are aimed by this book. It's rather disappointing, because the array of subjects are very interesting and the author is a great econometrician.

A truly wonderful book. If you like simulation-based methods or you are just interested in learning about the frontier in econometrics, buy this book. You are not going to find a better introduction or a clearer description of issues

Pictures, that take about half of the book, are really beautiful, interesting and informative. But the text size is so small, so tiny, that I consider it to be an insult to my common sense. I was thinking about buying others book from this series but now I am not sure I will do that.

This book has two advantages : first, it is so magnificently illustrated that it will be a pleasure to your eyes and second, its text is well writen and provides good information about Judaism and its symbols, although mostly at a beginner's level.

I do have a quite large library on the topic, but after I read it, I decided I had to buy a copy, for this book is really a must have for everyone interested in Judaism.

This book was agonizing to read, every turn of the page inflicted pain on my sensitive green eyes. Robbe-Grillet seems to be going out of his way to write extremely boring, dead prose (think Camus, Flaubert, or Delillo). The characters are flatter than unleavened bread, and the "mystery" i couldn't even bring myself to care about. Objectivity in life and in novels is often as dull as anything. To the devil with the "new novel"!

I read this many years ago after borrowing it from a friend and had to buy it now to own it and re-read it. My friend read it for a class and came to love it. He told me about and I found the plot intriquing. It's more than that. It's fascinating! Robbe-Grillet writes in such an unusual style which you soon grab on to, and then it pulls you in. As another reviewer said, take nothing for granted. Everything is important. If you like trite stories with no plot aside from the "been there done that" type, then don't buy this. You'll probably hate it. But if you enjoy being captivated by a story, and want a story and plot line to take you somewhere, this is it. This is a story which requires you to think. The story and the plot fold in and on themselves and becomes tangled, but then unfolds and reveals the brilliant mind of the author. A literary masterpiece!

The narration and elaborate descirptions in this book lure the reader in more and more. You cannot let one single aspect of the narration escape you, it's too important to the impact of the ending. There is also a plot within a plot in this book; the unfolding of events is extremely well done. I couldn't put it down because as the reader, you feel more omnicient than the characters and can't wait to see the final outcome.

Imagine someone throwing all the pieces of an automatic transmission on a table and now suggesting they've explained how to build, use and repair an AT. That's how this book is written.

If you don't already know everything about UML, what it is and how to use it, forget this book. You'll never learn it here. The writing is full-press academic. For example, here is the author's definition of Associations: "An association symbolizes a piece of information with a lifecycle that is non-negligible in comparison to the general dynamics of object intances of associated classes." Wow, that really makes it clear! I especially like how he uses the term he is trying to define INSIDE the definition.

Here's another example: Anyone who has tried to decipher a UML diagram knows the UML notation has many types of arrows with multiples of meanings. The author uses them without ever giving a definition, and in fact, nowhere in the book is a table describing the notation.

I tried to sell this book to my local Half-Priced Books store. They didn't want it. 'Nuff said.

Well, having just read Booch's book I still highly rate 'Instant UML'. I think that the title pretty much describes the contents. Its a great text to "dip into", and answer immediate questions you have about the UML and its application. I personally like it because its concise, to the point, and is illustrated with a ton of useful examples. I guess that it is really aimed at designers who have a reasonable amount of OO analysis / design experience - as an introductory text...well I'm not too sure. I recently passed a copy of this book to a technically savvy manager who had little OO experience, but found it fairly accessible - and said that it helped him gain a useful grasp on the fundamentals.

Its pretty well written (even after been translated from its original French), the examples are good, as I've already said, and it seems sensibly organized. Four stars is pretty fair I think. Is it better than the Booch book? In my opinion, probably not - simply due to the fact that the Booch book was written by one of the designers of UML, so you get that valuable insider view - but thats for another review :)

Bottom line : I really liked Instant UML, if you have money to spend on more than one UML book, its virtues are probably well worth a personal or company purchase.

A fairly experienced software developer with no previous knowledge of UML may find it the best introduction to the subject. Just as WROX promise, there is no trivial introduction, no attempts at teaching the reader what he/she already knows, and then repeating it four times.

It's concise and to the point, unlike practically all other books on the subject of systems analysis and design, that I had in my hands. At the same time, it manages to give the reader a very clear idea of the concepts behind the pictures. I find the quality of presentation on par with Stroustup's ARM and a few other classics.

This book assumes the reader already knows a lot about systems analysis, but nothing about UML. If this description fits you, it's for you. If you look for an introductory text about systems analysis or OOP, you might need another resource.

Microsoft require you a score of 705 to pass the 70-73 exam, and this book cover 80% -- 90% material of the test. Which means if you read this book very thoughtfully, you will pass, however, if you want to get a score higer than 900, you'd better have more real world experience or to read other related books.

This book is very good organized and well written. Chap 4(connectivity), chap 5(Running Applications), and Chap 6(Monitoring and Optimization) are the most beautiful part of the book. Chap5 can truly help you understand how to run applications on NT, this chapter does a better job than the MOC(Microsoft Official Curriculum). This book also does a good job on explaining the ' File delete Child' conception(page 189).

This book has very little typos which are inevitable and acceptable. For example, in page 203, table 3.15, if you want to change permissions of a printer, you must have Full control permissions, however, table 3.15 shows that you only need have Mana! ge documents permission, not Full control permission.

Another example, in page 397, table 6.12, the stop icon and information icon are misplaced.

Very few questions offered in this book are not designed well(most of them are designed carefully). For example, in page 142, question no.1 and no.2 need to be re-designed more carefully.

In page 230, the answer to question 12 should be B, not A, be careful.

After all, this is a very good training guide, and it did help me to prepare for the 70-73 exam(passed with 980).

I'd like to recommend this book to you.

Rui-Di Chu (FREDDY)

PS: This is not the only book I use to prepare for the 70-73 exam. I attended the class, read MOC, and an Exam Guide from QUE.

This book offers an excellent review of the material you will need to know to pass the NT Workstation exam. However, it will not stand on it's own as a comprehensive study guide. Use it to reinforce what you have already learned through other books or classes. Then take the test.

The CD that comes with this book is very helpful if you don't have a lot of access to monkey with the actual operating system. Besides the usual test engine (which lets you review by specifying as few or many objective catagories as you care) it also has a "flash card" program that is very unique. I know opinions vary easily in certification book circles but I am finding the content and layout to be very accessable.