For the most part, this is clone of his "Windows 95 Registry troubleshooting" book with some added information on remote registry editing and a few NT specific tips. That was very disappointing.

On it's own, however, it's a good first book for anyone who doesn't own any books on the Registry. Like the other books on this subject, it covers using RegEdit and RegEdt32 and gives you a pretty good overview of the registry. But, it lacks any kind of comprehensive list of registry settings, even on the CD. I also found the CD was missing a couple of files listed in the back of the book. While it also does a pretty good job of covering policies and some network settings, this isn't the best book available for network administrators.

The book is just a collection of very short stories written by Jack Jefford describing many of his adventures in Alaska. He lived a life very few of us could imagine, and it is mildly entertaining, but it comes across a bit too quaint. Only a die hard pilot and reader can enjoy this book, even though it is a very quick and easy read.

I have opted to use this book in a course on newswriting for various distribution channels but I am not as pleased with it as I anticipated. One of the first disappointments is that the accompanying classroom material promoted in the text is simply not available, and the publisher is not willing to say if it ever will be. The material included a video of some of the footage discussed in the text, and a promised web site, which was to keep current examples of good and bad writing available, with other goodies hinted at. Both promised to be great classroom tools to enhance understanding, but now I find myself having to try to explain why referenced examples in the text do not exist. The book, however, does a very solid job of providing an overview of several valuable concepts - most notably the idea that good writing is still at the core of communications, with delivery systems helping aim at specific audiences with specific interests and needs. The emphasis on content and accuracy, regardless of delivery, is strong throughout the book. The authors use two major news stories as illustrations across the chapters, which is nice to follow, but also a little confusing, since we don't have the video clips to support the discussions. The material is not damaged, though, and the principles are still communicated. It's not very detailed and I would like to have seen more specific advice given involving the distinctions between the writing styles themselves. The material is touched on, but not heavily addressed. That, however, would have lengthened the 225-page book and made it more intimitating that it needs to be. Perhaps in this era of exploring this issue of writing across the media, this brevity is the right approach. I know I'll have more success getting students to make it through this book than I do requiring them to wade through some other heftier texts I've tried. In all, it's a great first step. Now it's time for more detail and analysis. Who's game?

Its quiet good book for novices. Using this book we can learn how to create plug-ins and other things like how to install plug-ins, uses etc.,.

Blackaby's book won the prestigious Betty Trask Award (given annually for best debut novel by a British Commonwealth citizen under the age of 35, other winners include Alex Garland for The Beach, Zadie Smith for White Teeth, Hari Kunzru for The Impressionist, John Lanchester for The Debt to Pleasure, et al), so I had high expectations when I cracked its pages. It's essentially the story of a nebbish young man and his transition from college to happily married adult from 1984-94. Paul is a directionless but amiable cigarette addicted, chess-playing, math whiz who pales in the bright light of his charming, handsome, and rich roommate. But instead of taking the obvious route and creating an atmosphere of simmering jealousy or friction, Blackaby portrays their friendship as more of a client/patron one. And while they do get into a few adventures together, the story is really about Paul, his lack of get-up-and-go, and his love life. It's well written, entertaining, and populated by great characters (I especially like the mercurial mechanic Tony and the friendly local wineshop owners), but somehow I get the feeling that in six months I'll be hard pressed to remember anything about it. If I do, it might be this great passage: "Phil came from a moderately broken home and seemed et on passing his parent's achievement with room to spare. His marriage sounded like the end of a Who concert."

This book is a great book about the battle of the sexes. Thewriting style is similar to George Orwell's "Big Brother isWatching You". In this book, you will find a female presidentand sex & marriage outlawed! I would recommend this book to anyonewho enjoys a "good book". I enjoyed the author's politicalviews

Don't buy this book. Go buy "MySQL" by Michael Widenius (New Riders Publishing). It's the best MySQL book out there. The O'Reilly Netshell book by Yarger, Reeses, and King is second. This book is a *distant* third out of three.

I was shocked at the number of typos and other editing errors. I found many of the sections to be poorly glossed over. A good example would be db backups. The first, last and most important thing any DBA should know is how to backup data and restore that data.

The section on backups was cursory and lacking important details. --log-update was mentioned for incremental backups, but how/when the logs should be flushed wasn't metioned. I would have preferred to see an entire crontab, incremental+full backup sequence including a restore from one day or a restore of the entire data.

Another very light brushing over was optimization. At least one paragraph could have been spent to give the user ideas on how MySQL will benefit from putting logs, tables, and indices on multiple disks, rather than dismissing the reader to go research somewhere else. The auhor had another excellent opportunity to help the reader understand how queries are handled by a deeper discussion on optimizing the WHERE clause in queries. But this section received less than half a page and delt only with the unlikely situation of a single index being searched on.

The coverpage reads, "Learn the skills and conepts to *master* MYSQL...". This is a gross overstatement of what this book will give you. I would have sent it back to Amazon.com if working out the shipping wasn't such a pain. Not worth the money. You would better spend your time throwing playing cards in a hat.

This book is a good read. Sit down with it for a few days, and afterwards, you should know a great deal about MySQL. It covers everything in a very presentable fashion, and is pretty darn fluid. Something rare in technical books. In fact, this is probably the best book out there for MySQL.

Unfortunately, when it comes time for implementation, some parts are really bare. The normalization chapter is pretty short and cryptic, though it provides a good introduction to the subject. When it comes to looking up specifics, the warm fuzzy feeling from reading the book slowly melts away. Trying to look up specifics becomes a real hassle (e.g. creating relations between tables), and it doesn't go into great detail on more complex issues (e.g. installing MySQL).

This is a great introductory book. It's a nice read, and the language is good. This is not, however, a good reference manual. Despite that, I would still highly recommend this book.

This book doesnt waste time with all the little details and just talks about the major points. Want to be a MySQL guru? Then this books is NOT for you.
However, if you are know how to code and how to use flat files then this book is for you and will teach you how to code your scripts with the use of MySQL database.
Yes there are some typos like others pointed out but who uses the codes word for word from the book? You should know the basics of scripting language like Perl or PHP before buying this book. And you might want to buy a book about SQL.
This book isn't here to teach you Perl, PHP or SQL so making small errors in those codes shouldn't affect your buying decision.
This book teaches MySQL database nice and simply and I still use it as a referrence after 2 years of working with MySQL.

I bought this book mainly for it's 3D section, but also to learn about DirectX in general. I had hopes of writing a simple 3D game (maybe even a 2D one), however it quickly became apparent that the Author has probably never used DirectX for that purpose!! I honestly found myself wondering, "Why else would you use DirectX if not for programming games?"

I worked through a few of the lessons (attempting the 24 hour goal), however after the first few lessons, I just couldn't continue. The lessons were so damm boring. I mean - the whole point of DirectX is to bring games to life, if not games, then at least bring the screen to life! This Author killed any spirit I had to create a "laser gun battle while driving to a fight scene in my Hover-Ferrari dodging laser fire from monsters with laser-cannons grafted to their chests!"

Instead we get a [bad] picture of a two dimensional, badly drawn taxi, moving to the left of the screen slowly (but smoothly), while the background moved a little bit and a sound moved from one speaker to the other. I mean really!!!! I have not seen a game like that EVER in my life - except for something designed for toddlers whilst learning to tell the difference between a horsy and a cow! Granted, this particular topic was only a demonstration of some DirectX techniques, but I had to wonder in what kind of game I would use these techniques? It just wasn't interesting at all - completely boring beyond belief!

The most complex example in the book involved several textured buildings, with a single stationary car and a moving helicopter that you got to fly, except fly is the wrong word! It quickly became apparent that the Author doesn't know how to program the DirectX 3D stuff. When the helicopter rotated, the buildings changed shape! I was absolutely dumbfounded!

SAMS put their name to this book, but instead of that being a good thing, it's now a warning label when I go shopping. Obviously SAMS do not require a high standard for their books, or their Authors.

i borrowed this book from a friend, and must note that there are SEVERAL SEVERE errors in Hour 5 (i havent got past it now)

for instance, they modify the bitmap_surface function, yet do not disclose the new one, or how to modify the existing one to handle the RECT they've added... im not a new programmer, and i STILL cant get this working via the book...

This book has a lot of negitive reviews, I would like to point out some things. Unlike many of the other "beginner" books on DirectX (take Windows Game Programming for Dummies as an example). This book does make a great effort to attempt to cover all aspects of DirectX, and devotes much of it's text to Direct3D. Nost books only cover select topics, most are broken up to: DirectDraw, DirectSound and DirectPlay.. or just Direct3D, this book attempts to do all this in 24 hours.

The 24 hour bit can be a bit misunderstood. One can take it to mean a cover to cover read knowing nothing about topic or related topics in 24 hours (and this is very unrealistic) or one can assume the total reading time of the book will be 24 hours, this doesn't account for personal research and experimenting on the topics discussed.

The book does only touch on many of it's topics, it could not be part of the "24 hour" book series if it did not, and you can read this book in 24 hours, providing you also add in at least 4 hours of further research (though the DirectX SDK documentation and samples) and personal experimenting for each hour of read time, you CAN walk away learning quite a bit.

Learning DirectX takes effort and hard work, if you want a hand-holding book the ..for Dummies book I mention above is fantastic, if you want a good over-view of DirectX 7 that assumes you know what a computer is, what a compiler is, how to program in C++, etc... get this or some other more specialized book on DirectDraw or Direct3D.

Only 3 stars because there are some errors in the text and samples and it can be a bit misleading as most readers of the "24 hour" books may be expecting something a lot more stright-forward.

How Knowles has achieved any popularity at all is beyond me. His "reviews" are about as in-depth as listening to a conversation among third graders. His extent and knowledge about Hollywood is limited to what is told to him on the publicity tours offered to him by studios (please, don't be fooled by Knowles's constant attempts to label himself as an insider of the business).

Save your money and visit his website. A few viewings of his reviews there should tell you all you need to know.

How Knowles is taken seriously by anyone is beyond me. The man's knowledge of movies is limited to sitting on his couch and repeatedly watching "Soldier" so he can find new things to complain about. His obsession with Paul Andersen and venison is disturbing, and he constantly references these things in his book. Don't even ask about his writing style. Shoppers, if you're looking for inside information on the movie industry, it's probably not a good idea to look to a man whose only experience with Hollywood is renting videos at Blockbuster.

I picked up on the Harry Knowles phenomenon pretty late -- only about the time he started appearing with Roger Ebert. Since then, I've enjoyed reading his reviews both for their soap-opera quality about his life and his unbridled, geeky love of movies. His scatalogical "Battlefield Earth" review made me laugh out loud; his "Toy Story 2" review made me weep a little. He and Web site compatriot Moriarty keep me abreast of many of the films I care about.
So I ordered his book off the Amazon link from his Web site, and I finished it in about three days (this isn't heavy reading). I was troubled by the two co-authors -- why does someone who writes for a living need help? Nevertheless, the book is a reasonable facsimile of his singular writing voice. Essentially, the book is half-memoir, half-rant. The memoir part, especially the chapter about his bizarre, sad mother and grandmother, is fascinating. I just wish there had been more of it. He lets us in to how movies affected him in his childhood, but I wanted more detail. Maybe I wanted too much -- another "Ghost Light," Frank Rich's marvelous exploration of what it is to love theater. I did enjoy, however, the rundown of his Web site "spies," whom he cares a lot about and owes a lot to. His blow-by-blow account of the growth of his Web site is a little sketchy and self-congratulating.
The rest of the book is a jeremiad about the sorry state of Hollywood. The rant is long, windy and not all that original. What's more, his reviews undercut his arguments. In the book, he rails against badly plotted, unoriginal explosion-fests, yet he's liked some of the worst culprits -- "X-Men" for one. He does hit on one big factor -- how many people feel shut out of movies. I go through weeks during the summer when there simply isn't anything for me to see. I remember going to the movies with my parents when I was in elementary school to see big-screen epics that could entertain adults and kids -- "Lawrence of Arabia," "Ben-Hur," the original "Planet of the Apes." Now movies are either gross or dumb or both. Harry Knowles wants better movies, but I'm not sure we want the same better movies. Certainly there must be room for both of us.
So do I recommend the book? Sure, why not. It's fun spending three days inside Harry's head. For his next book, perhaps, I'd like to see him explore movie themes the way he does in the back -- his top 10 and bottom 10 movie lists are absorbing and insightful.

I'm quite certain that "five star" review was written by the book's author. Anyone that's played the game online would laugh at this book. For a *real* strategy guide you should definitely get Prima's book or Sybex's book. Sybex's book had substantial input from top gamers and Prima's book was entirely written by top gamers. Who's ever heard of this author? He writes books--he doesn't play games. Good grammar dude! Now go write a dictionary and leave us gamers alone.

I must say that I disagree entirely with others who have written a review for this strategy guide. I think that it's great that the author gave so much information on each civilization; that way you can become an expert in one area. His advise is great and it works, and he seems to know a lot about the game. I do, however, agree that he should have written more general tactics, but a lot of the general tactics he explains when writing about the civilizations. His walkthroughs for each campaign and scenario are fantastic and prescise, and if I were you I would buy this guide in an instant.

(By the way, I was about in the middle of between expert and novice when I bought this book.)

This is an awesome game for anyone who likes constant action...You advance trough the middle ages while making the best military you can. Then with your military you attack your enemy. I suggest this game to everyone. With more than 3000 players online, I think youll like it.It is an awesome gift for anyone.