IMAGOLOGIES is an antibook concerned with what it considers to be a necessary shift in the academic approach to media philosophy. According to the authors this shift is cultural, intellectual and philosophical. It calls for a restructuring of media function and capability within cyberspace, within the realm of the simulacrum and within the mediatrix.

IMAGOLOGIES looks at virtually every facet of the radical changes taking place within communications, from cyborgs and electronomics to hypertext and cyberwar. Its intellectual approach is both unorthodox and unsettling, yet within its pages are valuable perceptions which sometimes illustrate the current and future direction of electronic media.

Much of this production is innovative, timely and trendy. Still, there are journal correspondences here between the authors that I found much too tedious. And, at its worst, IMAGOLOGIES turns outdated techological terms into tired e-mail banters, capsulizes philosophical content into rampant sound bites, and visually distracts with graphical text and eye-catching geometries.

Everything about this work is designed to catch the eye. But it tries too hard to dazzle. Philosophical scholars and intellectuals may feel the need to look deeper, and may eventually interpret these markers as red flags when determining the overall validity of this antibook's rhetoric, and its final destiny within the narrow halls of academia.

Chapter tow, system architecture of SQL, give in depth knowledge of net-library, command parser, storage engine, lock manager, memory, cache and checkpoints, disk i/o, the default databases objects and system tables.
Chapter three, security, includes server logins, database users, server and database roles, database, statement and object permission, security using views and sp. The other 10 chapters are devides into the following capters;
Data structure, Distribution and transferring of data, Backup solutions, Restore, Monitoring and optimization, Automating SQL, Replication, Troubleshooting and understanding of TSQL.
I have used both Sybex and MS press book for my SQL certs. They provide a lot of lab simulations but they lack the in-depth knowledge needed to pass the exam.
There are some conflicting use of the two words SQL Server 7 and SQL 2000. I suppose the bad typo can bring some confusion while reading the book, but it is so obvious and are easy to spot. The typo mistakes forced me to give the book only 4 stars, but I will highly recommend this book to anyone who is dipping into the mcdba track and other SQL interested people out there.
This book along with Professional SQL Server 2000 Programming
by rob vieira, will make your life a lot easyer and provide you all the knowlege you can hadle for months to come.

Mr. Vail seems to rely on the information from people who have never worked for the Hammond Organ Company, and not the present Hammond Suzuki Company... the original Hammond Company. Plus he seems to lean towards personal judgements and opinions that seems to show a great amount of disdain towards the present products from Hammond Suzuki. I didn't think that a book such as this was about product reviews. I thought this book was about Hammond Organs and Leslie Speakers and giving TRUE accounts and information.

If you want product reviews, then save yourself the purchase price of this book and purchase back issues Keyboard Magazine.

Hal Leonard Publishing should be ashamed selling a product like this. Hal Leonard Publishing has, in the music industry, been noted for their accuracy and fantastic editing. This one slipped through the cracks.

Buy something else and don't waste your MONEY!

BITB is full of spelling, grammatical, technical and historical errors. Any info implied as technical should be taken with a grain of salt. Don't repeat to anyone who knows something about Hammonds/Leslies unless you want to embarrass yourself.

Overall, it's a fun book to read, really the only one in its class as of now. If you can get past the various errors, its almost campy/corny quality imitating a serious reference book becomes endearing.

In summary, if you know a great deal about Hammonds/Leslies, it's mostly scorn fodder, with maybe some useful nuggets in it. For the beginner, it is to be taken purely as entertainment and opinion, with no technical information worthy of being taken seriously.

A simple search of the 16-page index shows the problems. There are no entries for 'cookies' or 'refresh' (as in client-side pull refresh), and the FORM HTML tag has a total of 3 pages referenced (hardly enough room to describe how to write forms). So if you're looking for detailed technical material, this isn't the book for you.

This book is useful as a broad-reaching primer about the internet, newsgroups, VMRL and many other obscure (and outdated) topics. But I think you would still do better elsewhere.

I think the only reason this book sells is because people confuse this horrible book (HTML & CGI Unleashed) with a good book (HTML, Java, CGI, VRML, SGML Web Publishing Unleashed).

They cover the basics, but also do a great job on game theory and probablistic decision making. I had no economics before reading this, and found it clear and understandable even for the most abstruse concepts. Highly recommended.

What Perry attempts to cover he does well and flows from one topic to another smoothly. Style wise at times his writing reminds me of Schuon's - he has a penchant for being a obscurantist. In essence this work is a political meta-commentary on spirituality as found in Hinduism, Buddhism with a smattering of Islam and Neo-Platonic Christianity(as defined by Erigena not as understood by either the Catholic or Eastern Churches) and Taoism thrown in for good measure. He also tries to find common ground between them all and make the case that they are all talking about the same thing. In addition he tackles modernity and societal issues and lays out the problems as he sees it.

Problems:

Being a Perennialist Perry considers Judaism and Christianity as inferior spiritual paths and promotes Hinduism and Budhhism as superior ones. (Perennialists are generally followers of Sufism and Hinduism or Buddhism as Perennialism implicitly repudiates strict monotheism as understood by Jews and Christians). So if you are a Christian you will be offended by this book.

The book is also marred by Perry's fundamentalist beliefs about society . Perry attacks democracy, human rights as being untraditional and degenerate, churches for being active on social issues and especially Vatican II.(Vatican II is a favorite bugbear of Traditionalists along with Jung). Essentially anything post-reformation is bad. Engaging in historical revisionism and elitism he defends and even supports aristocracy and the divine right of kings as the best form of government! He claims that it is divinely ordained and uses scripture from various wisdom traditions to justify it. He even justifies Attila the Hun and Ghengis Khan as the wrath of god.

There is more than a bit of Manichean world hating stream of thought in his work. For him there is only the via negativa, the path of dealing with the pain of existence in order to gain release from life. There is no via positiva, the path of celebration and thanksgiving, no via creativa, the path of human creativity, no via transformativa, the path of creation renewed and mended. A truly hateful view life and creation to say the least.

His criticism of modernity is third rate(as he is Muslim living in Egypt). Writers like Lewis Mumford, Ellul, Theodore Roszak and Philip Sherrard have penned far better and thought out works than this one.

In Closing:

This book may have value for you if believe that inquistions, reducing women to chattel, theological fanaticism and priest kings are good for the world. Otherwise skip it as it is one of the most odious books written since Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged or Mein Kampf.

Skip it and get Hossein Nasr's Knowledge of the Sacred. Nasr actually knows what he writes about and neither does he insult the reader.

Also recommended: The Essential Writings of Frithjof Schuon, The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind by Huston Smith