However, my enjoyment was marred at some points by some technical details, some mentioned by a previous reviewer. One glaring error I saw was in the HALO jump. Alexander refers to this jump as a HALO easily 10 or more times. HALO stands for "High Altitude Low Open". However, a jump that starts at 30,000 feet and opens chutes at 27,000 feet would NOT seem to fit that jump profile very well. Perhaps a better explanation would have been in order if this was a special type of "HALO" jump that doesn't have a "Low Open" component to it.

The book seems to suffer from the "everything but the kitchen sink" syndrome. I got the distinct impression the author was trying to give us the benefit of every clever plot idea he ever had in this book. It becomes needlessly bogged down in details and subplots, many of which get unceremonisouly dropped at the end. No doubt some of these will be picked up in future books, but it is all pretty overwhelming for one book.

Yet for all these details, the author didn't really get very deep into the ramifications for some of the actions that happenend in the book. I would have appreciated more information on the "fallout" of those events.

The hero also seems to suffer from the kitchen sink syndrome. Not only is he a top best covert op team leader and shooter, but he also the world's pre-eminent computer defense system designer and hacker. To me the character seemed a bit "James Bond"-ish in this respect.

I think a good editor would have helped provide the author more focus. But as I said, it was an enjoyable vacation read.

The characters are believable and I sometimes got the impression that they were based on actual knowledge of certain figures in government and the military. The "techno" parts of the technothriller, and by this I mean the way guns, planes, missiles, tanks, combat forces and the like are used in the plot, were extremely well-handled, and realistic. I didn't get the impression, the way I do with some authors who write these types of books, that Alexander had to look a lot of things up. There seemed to be a flow to the descriptions of battle, political intrigue and all the rest that went into the plot that moved easily and naturally and wasn't forced or contrived.

The concept of having an elite special operations force like the Snake Handlers trained specifically to covertly go into rogue states and take out weapons of mass destruction was to my knowledge never tried before Special Ops came out, and puts Alexander ahead of the curve, as was setting the special operation to neutralize North Korea's MRBM force against a backdrop of major theater conflict. In this regard Special Ops reminded me very favorably of the Tom Clancy-Larry Bond thriller Red Storm Rising. This realism was also evident in the parts of the book that went beyond the merely factual and delved into the uncharted realms of cyberwarfare, army-after-next technology and speed-of-light weaponry, such as ground-based combat lasers. While many of these aspects got pretty far out at times, the author always spun the narrative with a steady hand and sober judgment, so that they were well integrated into the plot and connected to actual advances in computer and military technology.

One concept that was central to the plot was a supercomputer network called SINDAS that had been given control of the SIOP or the single integrated operations plan to wage nuclear war. While the idea of a runaway mega-computer is not brand new (it reminded me of things like Billion Dollar Brain or the Forbin Project) Alexander took this plot element that hasn't been to my knowledge used in thrillers in years and served it up in an original, exciting and highly contemporary way. Again, it's possible that Alexander might have been privy to what was going on behind the scenes in military circles because just around the time the book was published there were news accounts of the United States and Russia making a joint initiative to computerize and coordinate some of their nuclear warfighting capabilities through a bilateral network. The possible outcome of this arrangement could eventually be a system like SINDAS.

My main criticism of the book concerns the many sub-plots and back-stories about some of the characters, especially the book's main character or hero, Ice Trencrom. I would have liked to have seen more of these tied up or resolved at the end of the book than was the case, but I did get the impression that Alexander was thinking along the lines of continuing and developing some of these plot threads in a forthcoming novel featuring the Snake Handlers. I did notice that there was some continuity between Special Ops and his previous technothriller, Shadow Down. Hopefully that's the case, because I'm ready to put down my money for another helping of Ice Trencrom and his hard-charging Snake Handlers anytime it hits the book stores.

Although there appears to be a liberal slant to whatever theology is presented in this work, I personally do not use a bible handbook to study theology, but only for a very general overview of the Bible. And in this respect, I believe that Zondervan's Bible Handbook is the best out there!

Given the brevity of the book, one can hardly expect a complete and systematic exposition of the views on the topic of immortality and reincarnation found in China, Tibet and India. Still, the work is so idiosyncratic and choppy that it will be of limited value for anyone seeking an introduction and overview of the teachings and insights offered by these diverse cultures. That is unfortunate, such a work is much needed.

Yet, with these limitation in mind, this work does offer some value for the discerning reader.

Boston in the future has been changed to the point of unrecognizability. The only port where aliens can trade with humans, fortunes beyond those of Bill Gates have been made, and the city rebuilt by simply gluing together all of the old buildings into one huge brick.

Beverly O'Mera is a "cubehunter" within this changed Boston- a private eye specializing in finding lost persons. She is called up by one of the most powerful women in Boston to find the woman's daughter who ran away. (Or did she?) O'Mera and her Phner partner, Akktri, get drawn into a widening conspiracy involving most of the powerful people of the new Boston.

The basic plot of the book is straight hard-bitten detective, well worn and with few surprises. Where the book really shines is the development of Akktri and the rest of the Phner. The Phner are one of the rarest things in SF: true aliens, not just humans in alien suits or one dimensional horror figures.

The Phner are beaver-like semi-aquatic aliens who appeared in Boston following losing their home planet in a war. They don't really live in the present and understand little human logic, but rather have a editic racial memory. To a Phner, nothing is truly real until it is dead or destroyed: only then can its "art" be fully appreciated and understood.

The book begins with both the author and O'Mera treating Akktri much as an intelligent dog. Akktri bounces around, following O'Mera, happy that she will give him "lobster-fish" when they find their quarry. As the story progresses, the impact of the bizarre (to human eyes) Phner understanding of reality begins to show more and more. Akktri is not a dog: not even human in the sense of having the same feelings or goals as a human would. As O'Mera begins to truly understand the Phner and what they can and want to do, she must question both her partnership and her friendship with the Phner.

The Future Boston developed by Smith has a lot of potential: there are numerous odd aliens and lots of bizarre history. Hopefully Smith will be able to realize Targives, popcorn aliens and the rest in future books as well as he has done the Phner in In the Cube

String theory in Bailin & Love is done in a similar fashion as the susy: lots of words without the messy calculation. B&L don't bother with conformal field theory at all and use basically the "old covariant quantization". Once again though, B&L is a great thing to be reading as a companion to Green Schwarz Witten or as a companion to Polchinski.

In the end, Bailin & Love is a great place to begin learning about supersymmetry and string theory. I read it after a year of quantum field theory and found it very quick and easy to read. Bailin & Love does a good job of getting the reader in a good position to read the more advanced texts (Wess & Bagger, Weinberg for susy and GSW and Polchinski for strings). Unfortunately, there are many typos in the equations. Corrections can be found at the author's page ...

I found STL, and this book, to be pretty complicated when I started. Basically the book is divided up with a chapter for each header file in the library, which I am now convinced is NOT the best way to teach someone the STL. Keeping in mind that I had absolutely zero knowledge of the STL prior to reading this book, it was understandably confusing at first. Iterators and allocators are explained long before containers, which sort of leaves them with no apparent applications. Mention is made that they will be used later, but it was really hard (at least for me) to understand and remember the how's without knowing the why's. When I finally got to the container section I found myself flipping back pretty regularly to the iterator and allocator sections to review because much of that earlier material I didn't absorb in the first read. A student must be diligent and read most of the book before it will start to make sense. This means if a reader is looking for a book that will just get them up and running with the STL, this probably isn't the one.

Despite the above paragraph, I was on the verge of giving this book five stars. The book is thorough and methodical, and if you have the time to read it (and do some of the questions, I found them helpful) you will probably be quite good with the STL by the end. The authors definitely know the subject material. I did not find much humor or funny anecdotes to make the reading pass quicker, but most of the book was really concise. Probably 150 pages or so spread throughout the book is the source code, so they had to keep editorializing to a minimum. I found the writing to be pretty clear and as easy to understand as possible, given the complexity of the subject matter. It took me awhile to read through the whole book, and even afterwards I was still a bit cloudy, but after a couple hours of banging around with some test programs it all clicked into place and I feel really confident that I learned the material well.

Now that I have a good understanding of the STL, this book is second to none as a reference. While laying out the book header by header is a detriment to the learning process, it is invaluable later on as a reference. In addition, a complete and functional version of the STL code is printed in each appropriate chapter of the book. After each section of code is found a few line summary of each class and method, again invaluable as a reference.

In conclusion, I would rate this book as a must-have if you are serious about learning (and *understanding*) the STL. For the pretty reasonable price you get a thorough book by authors who know what they are doing, and an excellent post-read reference that you will want to have on your shelf. The only bad part about the book was it could have been organized to make the first read a bit better (to the detriment of later reads), and it won't get you up and running with the STL as quick as some other books might. It is definitely one of my top three favorite books on the shelf at home.

It's hard to pin down exactly why, but this book was not quite as pleasurable a read as its predecessors. One of the reasons might be the typography: The use of underlining for emphasis of the actual makes the standards sections of the book unpleasant to read. There might be an issue of the subject: For all its power, there is not all that much interesting algorithmic stuff going on in the STL. Lastly, it seems that C++ template code as such, no matter how brilliantly written and how useful to the library client, is rather unpleasant to read-a somewhat sobering insight to a C++ aficionado as myself. As a result, the code that *was* algorithmically interesting was quite hard to understand-I would not recommend this book to somebody trying to learn about red-black trees, for instance.

If you buy just one book about the STL, buy Josuttis' _The Standard C++ Library_. If you want additional in-depth insight into the workings of the STL, and are willing to invest the time it takes to study the code, buy this book. I certainly never regretted reading it, and I hope that Plauger will update his implementation of the rest of the C++ library to publish a standard compliant version of the iostream and string libraries sometime in the future.

But, if you're serious about extending STL, especially if you want to write new container and iterator classes, this is *the* book you need.

Personally, I make use of the information provided in this book to write a 3D container class and a couple of highly complex 3D iterators for an academic study demanding high speed and reliability. I have other STL books like Austern's Genetic Programming and the STL or, Musser's STL Tutorial and Reference Guide which are both extremely good references for *using* STL. But, those books did not help me even a little bit when I was trying to write a 3D iterator. I believe, The C++ Standard Template Library is the only book around that's really meant for serious STL developers.

So, if you ever want to develop a new container with a fair amount of new features or a new iterator with fancy tricks, buy this book. But, If you're only after using STL and/or developing new algorithms, stick with Austern's Genetic Programming or some other similar book...