James R. Giles' critical essays on Hubert Selby, Jr.'s work are a most excellent guide for interested students. Upon reading Selby's novel Reqiuem for a Dream, I was fascinated with his style and content. I proceeded to read Last Exit to Brooklyn and Song of the Silent Snow. After finishing these novels, I decided it was time to research Selby in order to compile a research paper for an English class. My passion for Selby's intense and tragic literature led me to Giles' Understanding Hubert Selby Jr. Giles' criticism was the most complete and accurate analysis of Selby's work that I could find. The edition covered all of Selby's novels with a clear, crisp, and concise diction. Giles' insight into Selby's tempestuous mind supplied the chief source and companion to my own essay on Selby. I recommend Giles' most tremendous essays to any student who loves Hubert Selby's dark and antiheroic works. I have yet to find a better analysis of Selby's novels. Every dedicated English student should explore the wastelands of Selby's imaginations, and Giles' criticism is the most capable and reliable guide.

This may be the perfect book about open source software because it places open source within the context of business value and does not promote it as the great panacea that characterize the message of far too many books on the subject.

What I like is that, after providing an overview of open source, its history and proponents, the authors discuss how to analyze open source software within two major frameworks: the Zachman framework that was developed in 1987 and is popular today as an enterprise-wide information systems paradigm, and a newer framework called CATWOE. I'm new to the latter, but it is solid and is independent of open source. CATWOE stands for Clients, Actors, Transformations, World View, Owners and Environment.

The remainder of the book discusses aspects of open source as they relate to the CATWOE framework, which ensures that fair and complete treatments of the business and technical issues are given. I would have liked a more in-depth discussion of the legal issues and business risks that are associated with the GPL; however, that information is in a state of flux and is probably best gotten from daily news sources.

If you want to understand open source software development, especially as it relates to business value, this book is the one I recommend. The authors also have an associated web site (the URL is provided in the book).

Horowitz's book started an highly interesting and vital argument within the world music community: what is the 'selling' of superstar musicians doing to the music as consumers come to experience it? In his analysis of Toscanini's repackaging as a sort of cold warrior cultural hero and 'correct' conductor by NBC in the years after WWII, Horowitz shows us the start of the commodification of serious music as a palliative for the masses. If "Mozart makes you smarter" is a trade gimmick today, it owes its inception to the selling of Toscanini as the 'only conductor to faithfully follow the score'--which he was billed as, and which he assuredly did not.

Toscanini's career is summarized and his NBC recording analyzed extensively in this volume, and the dynamics of selling serious music to a middle-brow audience come in for thoughtful consideration. This book is a bracing tonic for the idolatry that has corrupted honest critical assessment of Toscanini in the years since his death. If you're one of the ones who heard the awful singing of "The Three Tenors" and wondered how such mannered stuff could be massaged into a hit record, this book explains the process from its start.

This is the book you really want to read before getting into the operating room. Tells you all sorts of things to watch out for, and what to do if they happen. Covers everything from aesthetic procedures to DCR's. After each section, several experts comment on the topic, so it's like getting multiple opinions in one place. Some sections assume you already know the surgical technique, whereas others give a fairly detailed description.

If you are writing software which must be internationalized, then there is no question that you need this book and you need Unicode. What ASCII is for the United States, Unicode is for the rest of the world. In this world (particularly this software world) of pontificating know-it-alls-who-don't, it is getting rarer and rarer to find complete compendiums of an entire domain of knowledge which can serve as the seminal reference for all successive work. This book is one of those rare seminal references which has in it the greatest quantity and greatest quality of wisdom and knowledge on the alphabets of the world for use in computer software.

From the perspective of domestic software developers within the United States, Unicode is essentially 7-bit ASCII in a 16-bit unsigned integer. In the immensely popular C and C++ languages Unicode strings behave like ASCII strings:
. Unicode 0/null terminates C/C++ strings, just like ASCII 0/null.
. Unicode has a type in ANSI Standard C and ISO Standard C++ (and ARM-defined C++): wchar_t. For C/C++ programmers, char=ASCII wchar_t=Unicode.
. Unicode has a plethora of standard string manipulation functions already standardized in ANSI Standard C and ISO Standard C++, usually substitute the str with wcs (e.g., strcpy=wcscpy, strcmp=wcscmp, strcat=wcscat) and substitute the char parameters with wchar_t parameters. Abracadabra, your software is well on its way to being able to have strings in any foreign language as well as English.
. Unicode characters are all the same size (16-bit), just like ASCII (8-bit).
. Unicode's first 127 values are essentially 7-bit ASCII values.
. Unicode completely eliminates all that darned "code page" baloney.
. Unicode completely solves all that "How do we stuff that odd foreign character into the printable characters on screen/paper?" problem.
. Unicode is an ISO standard which came from a defacto United States computer industry standard. It is not ivory tower; it is in common use.
. Unicode was developed with you the software engineer and programmer in mind from day one. Unicode was developed with C++'s/C's wchar_t in mind from day one. It all fits together with Unicode.
. Unicode is used as a supported string technology (or the only string technology) in: Java, C++, C, Windows NT, Novell Netware, Solaris, and numerous other computing environments.
. Unicode supports all alphabets in use in the world today, plus alphabet-less languages such as Chinese, as well as languages whose alphabets are still being formalized.
. Because Unicode characters are all the same size, Unicode characters are random-access in that one can access any character (pick a card, any card) and know by looking at its value what that character is. Other multi-byte character sets must be parsed sequentially from the beginning of the string to assure that one has detected what mode some escape sequence has shifted that portion of the string into.
. Unicode seeks to solve every defect of previous multi-byte character sets. Unicode is the fittest to survive. All other multi-byte character sets should be (and will be) abandoned.
. Unicode = exportable software world wide in the global economy. ASCII = limiting your market to the English-speaking minority of the world.
. Unicode = supporting the information systems of all of the foreign branch offices of your company. ASCII = crippling your information system so that it supports nothing more than the English-only offices.
. ASCII = string equivalent of the Year 2000 Problem. Unicode = the fix to language-crippled software.

(And we won't even discuss the obvious and total superiority of Unicode over EBCDIC!)

In short Unicode is good for the software industry. This book is the official reference for Unicode from the inventor of Unicode: The Unicode Consortium.

The views contained within this feedback is in no way associated with my employer nor any other organization.

United Mind Workers is a very stimulating and important book. It is the first book to discuss how to organize teachers and their work differently, and the first book to capture the attention of both major American teachers unions. Already widely influential, it seems destined to play a major role in the current reform movement. I highly recommend it to all interested in the improvement of American education. -- William Boyd, Penn State University

Unity Temple is a National Treasure and it is treated as such by Mr. Siry. His research is unrivlaed in Wright circles and his writing is clear and concise. All aspects of the design and execution are included and discussed in a complete manner.

One only wishes that there were more, large color photographs to parallel the excellent writing. Would there be a second eiition with them? If one is really interested in the subject and not just the images, this is the book for you.

A VMS power user will feel like a stranger in a strange land when first exploring the world of Unix. This book can be an indispensable guide for the VMS user forced to make this odyssey. More than just a foreign language phrase book, offering literal translations of VMS commands into Unix, it discusses and contrasts the basic philosophies behind each operating system. Understanding these fundamental differences will allow the newly transplated-to-Unix VMS user to exploit the strengths of this popular operating system rather than just feeling cheated out of the many powerful features of VMS that have no direct analog in Unix. For the power user, applications programmer, and system admin, all of the important topics are covered clearly and in sufficient detail.

The third edition adds valuable new information on VMS logical names, the Emacs text editor, and the Perl scripting language. It also has been given a new and much improved layout that makes it considerably easier to read then the previous editions. All in all, highly recommended!

This very readable book is very useful corrective to what's become the "standard" view of Wilde. It's especially good at exposing the weaknesses of Richard Ellman's now-standard biography of Wilde. For example, the claim that Wilde contracted (and later died of) syphillis is pretty much taken apart by Pearce.

Pearce has also very closely read Wilde's works, so he offers some very valuable readings of Wilde's writing in order to better understand Wilde's inner life--a life, according to Pearce, that was marked by inner loathing and a self-rebuffed desire to embrace the Church.

Ellman's book remains the standard biography in terms of prose quality (Ellman wrote with uncommon beauty and grace, and Ellman's enthusiasm for Wilde's work and personality is truly infectious). However, Pearce's book really should be must reading for all fans of Wilde's work. It doesn't merely trot out all the old information and anecdotes, but actually offers a fresh view of Wilde.

Another excellent book by Sir William Slim (check out Defeat Into Victory). This is a series of short stories drawn from Slim's own experience. Well written and interesting this book works well on many levels. The stories are great by themselves. They offer a fascinating view into some less well know campaigns. Each story has buried in it a valuable lesson in leadership. Should be included in any discussion on leadership (at least it should if it were in print).