I used this text (and workbook) in massage school last year. While the text has its strengths and weaknesses, too often, key concepts were not explained clearly or in enough detail. In studying for the massage exam (NCTMB), I found it essential to use other books (e.g., an anatomy and physiology text) in order to have an understanding of some fundamental concepts that were either skipped or superficially discussed in the text. My expectation was that this book would be a good reference for using in my massage practice. Based upon my experience so far, it would need more details in many key areas in order for me to use it this way. Since school, I have rarely referred to it, and used it only occasionally in studying for the exam.

The books strengths are primarily in the extent of the material that it covers. I have not found any other single book that covers such a broad scope of information. And some of the information covered, I have not yet found anywhere else.

This book has a few weaknesses that if addressed, could make this THE text for massage. First, there tends to be a general lack of clarity in presentation; issues are often talked about rather than clearly stating what something is and how it fits in with the larger picture. I often had to reread sections several times (very frustrating) in order to understand what point the author was trying to convey. I noticed when reading a separate anatomy and physiology text (I bought one while I was in school), that concepts were explained in more detail, and one or two readings were sufficient. In this text, anatomy and physiology facts were often stated one after another and made into a paragraph, which made understanding difficult.

Second, there tended to be a lack of detail on key concepts. This was frustrating and motivated me to look for other sources that would give more detail. Surprisingly, this was even true in the area which describes the massage strokes and their usage. As a result, I recently purchased Mosby's Fundamentals of Therapeutic Massage (so far, looks good, but too early to tell yet).

I used this book to help me prepare for the NCETMB. It was especially helpful for draping techniques, massage techniques and massage theory. It has some anatomy and physiology information for the boards but it wasn't enough. I also used the following which is also available on amazon:
The Ultimate Study Guide for the National Certification Examination for Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork: Key Review Questions and Answers
(Vol 1) ISBN: 0971999643
(Vol 2) ISBN: 0971999651
(Vol 3) ISBN: 097199966X
The last three study guides are just great for the type of questions to prepare for on the national certification examination for therapeutic massage and bodywork. These study guides were very complete for all the topics being tested on the NCETMB.

This is not a "specialization" book. But it does give a good, comprehensive overview. If you're in a massage school, or you're one of those people who gives really good back rubs, then this book should make it to your "short list"

It goes over various parts of the body, methodologies and techniques, and problem areas. It has quizes at the end of each chapter. I found the areas on draping and assisting the client very useful.

It does NOT go into too much detail on hand techniques. But, let's face facts here, that's what the labs/practical part of massage school is for. You can only learn so much about massage by reading. If you haven't noticed, massage is a very "hands-on" job. :-) It DOES goes over the basic strokes/methods, but leaves the details to whatever class you're in.

If you're short on funds, and need to stretch your dollar, this is the book to get. I use it as a supplimental reference all the time.

Programming in the .NET environment provides insights and examples for using the latest enhancements provided by the .NET framework. The text is mostly language agnostic, though some of the code examples are in C#, but the concepts apply to all .NET enabled languages. I found most of the material dry, but necessary information to know, if you are planning on doing any sort of .NET application.

The book covers some fairly challenging concepts, but discusses them in a clear manner. Certain sections required prior knowledge. For example in one of the sections talked about Visual Studio's nmake.exe utility. I do not have much experience with nmake.exe and the authors assumed a prior understanding, so I had to go and read the Visual Studio documentation to learn about this command before I fully understood the rest of the section. Also, I found chapter 3 to be a bit difficult to understand without an understanding of COM/COBRA.

The book contains a wealth of knowledge, and if you are going to be doing a lot of .NET programming, knowing the material and having this book as a reference will be essential to you. The appendix chapters which discuss language-specifics and .NET proved to be a useful read to get to know the benefits of each language. This knowledge is useful to determine which tool is the right choice for any particular job.

This is one of the few books in the .NET development series from AWL that I have been a bit disappointed in. Certain sections are excellent, while others leave a little to be desired. You can defiantly tell that the chapters are written by different authors as they seem disjointed and some have a higher quality than others. Overall, I would say it is a good reference to have, but not really worth reading beginning to end.

A better title for this book would be 'An Insider's Guide to Why the .NET Framework Was Designed the Way It Was'. The authors are Microsoft developers who have been working on .NET for most of its existence. Because of their first hand knowledge of the Framework's evolution, they offer a perspective that is uniquely different than all the other .NET books out there. Covered are topics such as the design goals of C# (including an alarming story of how Microsoft considered modifying C++ rather than creating a new language), the internal discussions of the Visual Basic team regarding how that language would evolve, and the advantages/disadvantages of garbage collection versus deterministic finalization, and why garbage collection finally won out. There are even little known nuggets, such as why every .NET Framework executable contains the string "BSJB" (they are the initials of four of the original developers).

This book is filled with numerous examples of how .NET solves problems differently than other architectures such as CORBA, COM, and Java. It freely admits advantages others might have in certain areas but the authors clearly evangelize .NET as the best overall solution. It follows a consistent pattern when discussing concepts such as type systems, metadata, versioning, and security. First, it describes the core problem or challenge. Second, implementations by other languages/architectures are briefly discussed. Finally, a detailed explanation is given of how .NET offers the best solution, complete with clear examples.

Several topics are discussed that are skipped in other .NET books. Whether this is a good thing depends on your skill level and your interest in these topics. Experienced developers who are already proficient in .NET will appreciate the excellent discussion of the boxing of value types into reference types, how events and properties are implemented behind the scenes, and the line-by-line analysis of the Intermediate Language (IL) of a simple application.

While most examples are presented in C#, this book does not help one become proficient in it. The examples are given only to illustrate how the .NET Framework works, not any particular language.

What are clearly missing are chapters on creating web applications, web services, windows forms, and windows services. In other words, this book by itself only provides a small piece of the knowledge a developer must gain when learning .NET.

As a former Visual Basic developer, I am task-oriented. This is in contrast to being theory-oriented, which is how I think of C++ developers who spend an extra ten hours tweaking pointers (and tracking down memory leaks) to gain a ten percent speed increase in a procedure. Though I have converted to C#, I am still more interested in getting the job done quickly than understanding the internal details of the .NET engine.

I bring this up because this book is theory-based, and as such I found it lacking in information I could immediately apply to my programming projects. We are all stretched for time, and I would rather spend mine reading about techniques to solve business problems through real-world examples of forms and services, not learning why C# produces slightly different IL than VB.

That being said, this book has a place among developers who come from a Computer Science background, or who know C++ or Java inside and out, or who already know .NET very well and want to learn the core underpinnings. In this regard it does an excellent job and is well written and concise.

However, I only gave it three stars because I believe most developers could better spend their time with other books that offered more practical and applicable advice. Those books, such as Wrox's 'Professional C#' or Sams' 'ASP.NET Unleashed', teach just enough of the core underpinnings to keep a developer from shooting himself in the foot, yet focus most of the time on real world examples that are far more useful.

Do you want to know how .NET actually WORKS? If you weren't comfortable using C++ until you understood v-tables, then this is the book for you.

The co-authors are exactly the right people for this purpose. Brad Abrams was a .NET development lead; Mark Hammond implemented Python.NET; and Damien Watkins helped Monash University learn about .NET before starting his own .NET consulting company.

When I was one of Microsoft's Technical Evangelists for .NET, I invited Mark and Damien to participate with Brad in the design of the .NET Runtime back in 1999 -- along with the designers of other commerical and academic languages such as Smalltalk, Scheme, Eiffel, Haskell, Oberon, etc. -- to make sure that the .NET Runtime and CLR really could support different languages well. Their feedback made .NET more flexible, powerful, and useable. In this book, they explain not only HOW .NET works, but WHY. After all, these guys helped MAKE those decisions.

Some have said that only compiler writers targeting .NET would be interested in reading this book. I could not disagree more. At each level of abstraction above the silicon, more and more trade-offs must be made by those implementing the abstractions. If you don't understand the feature and performance trade-offs they made, then you're not going to be able to make good trade-offs yourself, when writing code that uses their abstractions. In an ideal world, all abstractions would be pure, involving no trade-offs; but .NET was designed for the real world, in which performance still matters. Do you write code for the real world, too? Then you NEED to read this book.

If you'd rather read the Kama Sutra than "Sex for Dummies," then order this book RIGHT NOW.

Reframing Paul in my opinion is a good book - not a 'nice' or 'comfortable' book, but one worth reading, especially if you aspire to having a "Berean" spirit -which implies a willingness to have your ideas about the New Testament (NT) and church challenged. But there is also comfort in this book - it gave shape to my increasing unease (over the last ~ 15 years) about the gap between what the NT seems to say - and what we do, and assert as 'biblical'. I no longer feel quite as alone.

But the book is not easy going in some places (unless you are skilled in reading Graeco-Roman philosophy/history). Someone suggested to me this reading plan: " Read chap 1, then 18, then skip 2-3 (or even 2-5), read the rest (feel free to skip around) and come back to the early ones last. They are important context setting, but a bit tough".

But where to from here? The book does not offer easy solutions. (As a former Australian Prime Minister said: "Life wasn't meant to be easy" ;-) By the way, I admired the author's transparency/willingness to be vulnerable. I think that adds to the book. A book read by humans - a book written by a human.

Mark Strom has written a critique of much current evangelical practice. He outlines the world Paul operated in, a world where elitism and abstraction ruled, he then shows how the apostle Paul challenged this world. His critique is that, ironically, much contemporary evangelical practice more closely resembles the world Paul was challenging than Paul himself. A challenge worth sitting up and listening to.

A daring book has appeared at a precipitous moment in history. Mark Strom's Reframing Paul rushes to the rescue of modern churches hopelessly lost in a postmodern world. With rare exception, that's every church! We are still trying to see that the baggage dragging us down is our own culture-a culture more dependent on the classical tradition than on the Judeo-Christian. Whenever religion gets too close to culture, tragic ignorance prevails. With breathtaking clarity, Mark Strom reveals this cultural blindness to Paul's true message. Reframing Paul is a beacon of hope for the future.

I bought mamy books and do not have time to write many reviews. But if I was really disappointed in a book, I want to write a review. There are many junk Java books in the market. This one is not better than them. The book even does not have a good example to show what a J2EE technology is. If you have money and just want to put a book on your book shelf to look up occasionally, you can consider this book.

Whilst I feel the book is excellant value for money and the Author has done a good job I would argue that some of the material in the book should have been excluded (to save a tree or two) e.g. Chapter 2,52 - 54 and included in appendix ? - but hey thats me trying to reduce the 1000 odd pages that I read !!.

Overall Comment - definately worth buying, but my advice is to allocate some "quiet" time to read and digest all the material - Not really for the beginner.

If you are searching for a reference manual that covers the basics about all the technologies involved in J2EE this is the book to buy. Keep in mind that it is impossible to cover Enterprise Java Beans,JSP,Servlets in detail in just one book. So if you're after a special thing like only EJB feel free to buy other books that cover only Enterprise Java Beans but otherwise this book is really worth its bucks simply because it introduces you to J2EE and afterwards you are able to understand what all those things are about.

Read one... you've read them all. Or at least... that's how it should be with "divine prophecies". If you want to make use of your brain again... go find a nice freethinkers book and rediscover your own powers of perception, skepticism, and intelligence.

The Bible part of this book is just like any other- and that is how it needs to be! On top of that though, this Bible contains devotionals, and a great index, and also a place where you can mark off the sections of the Bible once you've read them. I really recommend this one for any of you who are shopping for teenagers.

this bible is really great because of the little boxes that explain hard to understand things in the text, and also because it's NIV (new international version) so its in plain simple to understand english. if you go to a chistian school and need a good bible for class you should get this it explains everything so well only jesus himself could have said it better

This one's a really tough call. If you own Metal Gear Solid, and are stuck in a particular area, or need some tips getting past a boss, then look no further than this guide; this book gives a very precise walkthrough of the game. What it does fail to do, however, is provide DETAILED maps of each location, and reveal to players some things that can be found by backtracking (namely some pretty cool, yet unessential items). This is something to consider when considering a strategy guide for any game. In the case of MGS, there are 5 known published guides, but this one I feel does the best job in their organization and presentation of the material; there just wasn't enough of it, and not enough detail in what was there (for some players, at least). There was just too much of the game that was sparsely covered, or not covered at all (i.e. replay options, VR training mode). And if a book starts a section on pointless secrets, such as the hidden ghosts found in the game, it should be complete--after all, what are people spending their money on a guide for? But given the fact that few of the other guides even make mention of this, it's more trivial than the above-mentioned. On a positive note, the weapon, item, and tactics sections were very well presented, as reasons are given when, where, and why to use the specific pieces of equipment at your disposal. If deciding on a guide for this game, the one you choose depends on the type of guide you're looking for--if you're stuck and want a walkthrough and a more detailed instruction book, go for this one, hands down. But if you're willing to settle for a bit less organization, and thrive on more game detail, decent maps, background info, and other stuff, you'd most likely be better off with one of the official guides. It's your call.

If you have any problems with this game email me @ Butthead117@hotmail.com and trust me because I have finished this game roughly about five times once only getting stopped 9 times throughout the game so please email ME for help

I have not purchased this game yet but I've played the demo and it looks good I can't wait to get it.

The book is outdated, unclear in its focus, and makes assumptions for the reader. This book provides only a poor intro to Squeak and poorly touches up on OO principles. Liu's Smalltalk book is probably where one would want to start to get both worlds. Worst, this book is used at Ga Tech for a class titled "Objects and Design."

Also, all the previous book reviews on this page were reviews of Squeak and Alan Kay as opposed the book. So their 5 stars are misplaced.

This book is one of the early signs of the real computer revolution that is about to start, according to Alan Kay, a visionary from Disney, who, in essence, invented a computer world as we see it now. The book is about the language that is 3 times more productive than Java, and ported to 22 platforms. The language which domination is as inevitable as the dot-com crash. Mark is a member of the inner circle of Squeak development, so his knowledge of Squeak is superior. You will save yourself dozens of hours if you read this book. And this book just a pure fun to read. Get this book, it will change your thinking about computer programming forever.

As the author of several Smalltalk books myself, I tend to be a bit skeptical of new books about Smalltalk. But Mark Guzdial's excellent first book on the best Smalltalk implementation on the planet, Squeak, earns my highest respect. It is organized the way I suspect most people trying to learn a new language like such books organized. Rather than beginning with abstract concepts and then hoping you will be able to use those concepts to solve specific problems, Guzdial takes a practical, project-based approach.

This book does not purport to cover basic object-oriented design and programming paradigms but in fact it does at least an adequate job even for a relative beginner. It is clearly aimed at someone who has at least a smattering of programming training or experience, but you don't really need much to derive great value from the book.

It is true that since the book was released there is a newer version of Squeak, but the good news is that the author had the foresight to include on the accompanying CD-ROM the version of the language on which he relied to make the book examples work. I've been working with the newer version for some time but reverting to the older version for the purpose of the book wasn't difficult or painful.

I believe that Squeak IS the future of all kinds of computing and development, including the Internet/Web world, and it will behoove you to learn this wonderful language sooner than later. There is simply no better way to do that than to start with Guzdial's work. He's the prototypical teacher and the book is marvelous.

Quote taken from Language Dynamics Website under Testimonials: 'Language Dynamics courses are the only courses I know of that are truly dedicated to effective and immediate communication in the target language. Academic courses often reflect the literary interests of professors, many of whom never had the experience of learning the target language as a second language. With these courses, you can hit the streets after every lesson knowing you can say more than you could yesterday'.

I thought this was a particulary good Italian course. Like all Language Dynamics courses I have used, this was was very effective and extremely easy to understand and learn from.

This is by far the fast, the clearest and the easiest to use Italian course on the market and believe me, I have used quite a few. Anyone with half a brain would love this course because it makes learning Italian so fun, so fast, and so easy. Thank you Language Dynamics.

I guess this is what passes for a thoughtful review of the tax code for a liberal. I'm sure the author has no desire to give "tax breaks" to individuals any more than those greedy corporations. Besides attacking expense deductions as a "tax break," the class-warfare demagoguery always ignores the ultimate beneficiary of tax breaks to corporations, which are the company's workers and its stockholder. Oh yeah, the stockholders are just greedy rich people anyway, right?

Before the welfare reform bill of 1996, genuine welfare was about 130 billion dollars per year, including food stamps, AFDC, housing assistance, WIC, Head Start, Low-income energy assistance, JOBS, Legal Services corporation, Medicaid, SSI, Pell grants, and the EITC. Altruistic behavior, of course, enrages conservatives, along with legitimate concerns, such as the Department of Education losing 450 million dollars in a three year time frame.

Meanwhile, the rich are quietly gorging at the trough.

The authors discover that "wealthfare" -- the money we hand out to corporations and wealthy Montgomery Burns types -- is at LEAST 448 BILLION dollars a year. To ensure not being accused of "bias," they consistently use conservative figures, thus leaving the real number far greater.

Their presentation is effective. Well cited, they address the orgy of waste and fraud in the "neglected" Pentagon, Social Security inequities generated from Reagan's sneaky regressive mega-tax hike on working people, phony accelerated depreciations (e.g. the NEGATIVE tax rates many corporations get away with), the S&L bailout we're still paying for, subsidies to nuclear, mining, timber, gas, oil, aviation, handouts to the media giants, insurance loopholes, and much more! Quite a lot for such a little book. A job well done!

This IS the "pinko's" view of the tax code. After all, it's socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor....

The next time some smug nabob starts muttering under his/her breath about the drain on our economy caused by the proverbial 'welfare mother' (you know, the one that's driving the Cadillac), you can put em' in their place armed with the wealth of info contained in this short but well written little book.

As 'Take the Rich Off Welfare' aptly points out, welfare really does suck a lot of money from our treasury, but it's not the poor and needy in this country that benefits from this bonanza. As a matter of fact the word 'wealthfare' is more applicable, because that's who's really benefiting- the wealthy.

Very brief, but meticulously researched and with sources to back up every fact, 'Take the Rich off Welfare' is a great introduction to the big wide world of graft in America. If you've ever been curious about who has their foot in the back door of the treasury- check out this fine book.

While some of the content is okay, I often felt the information was incomplete. The chapter on LDAP is literally incomprehensible. After trying to read the LDAP chapter I completely gave up on the book and will try to find something better.

If networking is what you are looking to make a career out of, then you need to have a great understanding of TCP/IP and the entire protocol suite. You also need to have a reference manual that will provide this information to you.

This book is just short of the right book. One thing I found was some of the information was a little short of complete and a few typo errors in the book as well. I also found that the book states the level to be intermediate to advanced and I think it is more of the beginner to intermediate.

I found that the book does give a good overall explanation of TCP/IP and that there were some topics like firewalls that cover only about 9 pages and I think the information could have been expanded.

Overall the book does provide good information for the A+, Net+, CCNA and other first level exam certifications. I can also say that this book was great for a TCP/IP seminar I recently gave, but still some improvements are need to make this the go to manual.

TCP/IP Unleashed, Third Edition, explains the features and complexities of the TCP/IP protocol suite in a comprehensive, logical format. The book is designed for easy reference and incorporates step-by-step guidelines and configuration examples to enhance the reader's learning experience. Our expert authors walk through the fundamentals of TCP/IP before moving on to more challenging topics including naming and addressing, IPv6, routing, implementation, TCP/IP applications, and TCP/IP network administration. TCP/IP Unleashed has been revised to include the latest implementation information and real-world experiences, including configuring TCP/IP for Linux and Windows 2000 systems. User Level: Intermediate - Advanced, 1000 pages.