This is the worst book on programming I've ever bought. Even though the author does tell the reader that this book isn't intended as a "teach yourself"-book one expects a book on programming to be somehow divided into well defined areas, each showing a part of the whole idea. This book switches from reference style to programming-by-example style all mixed up with a couple of bad flow charts. I regret buying it and advise others from doing it.

There are several places in the language description (for example, the rules on static method overriding and inner classes) where this book is either vague, misleading, or occasionally flat-out wrong. "Java Language Reference" might provide a nice introduction to the language's syntax, but it does not make a good Java language reference.

I'm a little surprised by the other reviews. I have found over the last year this to be an authorative source for the Java Language Specification. I go to other books when I want to know about the various Java packages but this is the one I got to when I want to know about the Java langauge semantics and syntax.

kaffir boy was a good book but this one was just terrible. like one of the previous reviewers said, it's full of self-promotion and pats on the back. mark's ego must have just blown out of proportion after the success of kaffir boy. now, that's he's married a white woman, he's got it all apparently. i certainly feel no sympathy for him after reading this book.

i saw the man speak at a college and let me tell you, he is even more arrogant in person than he is on page.

After having read Kaffir Boy, Mark Mathabane's eye-opening account of township life under apartheid, I was looking forward to his insights into US race relations (as the dust jacket promises). Unfortunately, this book contains virtually none. It is a big bore, so full of self-congratulation for having beat the odds, for being so open minded, for being so well-read, for being such a wonderful writer, etc. that by page fifty my interest was replaced by irritation. The relentlessly stilted nature of his prose does not help (he crams in so many SAT-words, it's as though he were trying to fulfil a quota). Finally, he seems to think the Acknowledgements section too confining, so he peppers his mundane descriptions of moving from this city to that with mentions of every nice person he ever met in the past ten years. Thumbs down.

I agree with the previous reviewer that this was a big disappointment. After reading the amazing book Miriam's Song, I was looking forward to Mark's own story. Upon his arrival in America, he enters college under a tennis scholarship. Continually disappointed with his college choices, he changes schools three times within the first year and a half. He is unable to make the tennis teams and is voted off a soccer team by his teammates. Likely because of cultural differences, Mark has many difficulties making friends. He comes across as a self-serving egoist. He's not a sympathetic central figure for a book.

Likable tennis star Stan Smith emerges as the behind-the-scenes hero. Mark repeatedly approaches Stan and his wife for more money, first for college and later for grad school. (This does not add to Mark's appeal.) Though Stan and his family live frugally, they continue to provide Mark with money and introductions to their personal friends.

Despite my dissatisfaction, I still look forward to reading Mark's Kaffir Boy. However, I will think twice before reading his other books in which I was previously interested (about the interracial relationship with his wife and the book about his grandmother/mother/sister).

If you've read other books of Mark's, you need to read this as part of his story. If you haven't read any of his books yet, I wouldn't recommend starting with this one.

I was looking at a great reference book to go far inside MacOS X....
NetInfo is talked about only half a page !
I just have it on my library and will never open it again... :-/

I find the book informative and well written, but this is not for power users. It contains beginner information and how to use popular 3rd party utilities. The book lacks depth, and Unix shell is in an appendix. If you are looking for a book to explore the unix side of Mac OS X, look elsewhere. If you are looking on how to set up your user environment and are looking for some possible shareware or 3rd party utilities to enhance your use of OS X, then this is for you.

This book is targeted to the wrong audience. It is an intermediate book. I say skip it.

Buy Mac OS X Unleashed

This is a good book for any user of Mac OS X. It can be very basic in its instructions and descriptions, but can also prove to be a good reference book for the more advanced user. It you are a complete UNIX nerd, skip it and buy a UNIX specific book. This book should answer many of your OS X questions.

The AI techniques presented were overly simplistic, and the examples were somewhere near useless(especially when they were supposed to be geared towards agent intelligence). The VR section seemed to be missing. There was a simplistic 3D app in OpenGL, but no discussion on agents using upper(or lower for that matter) level AI to interact in a VR environ. Save your money.

The author wastes about half of the book with code dumps and oversized diagrams. He barely attempts to explain the theory, which is crammed into one chapter. The examples are useless and get little explanation.

This book takes about 2 hours to breeze through. The author spends about as much time on how to write OOP code as he does the AI concepts. If I wanted lessons in OOP, I'd buy a book about OOP. This book was supposed to be about AI! Also, he spends very little time explaining the theory of ai. Statements like "It does not make sense to use crossover operations to evolve the population for recurrent neural networks" are never qualified with an explanation. The reader never gets a sense of why he should be doing what the author describes. Rather than explain anything, the author just sites his other publications. Very poor. This is the real kicker: practically half of the book is dedicated to code dumps or space wasting Booch diagrams. The code dumps aren't even accompanied by anything meaningful, just things like, the constructor initializes the data. If I wanted to see the code in print, I'll use my own printer, thank you.

One would think that 300 pages discussing science theory would have some substance but this book could have been edited down to an eight page magazine article with little loss of content. And not a "heavy" magazine for scientists but a "popular" type magazine. I forced myself to stay with it hoping that the author would eventually get serious but the book stayed chatty and anecdotal to the end. According to the bio Mr. Ward is a science writer for the BBC and I did get the feeling of a TV narration purposely kept light in order not to scare off any viewers.

I found myself rereading series of pages because I had the feeling that I had missed something and then finding that I hadn't missed a thing, there was simply no content to retain. This happened repeatedly and made this book a real chore to finish and ultimately unrewarding. A shame too because the premises Mr. Ward teases the reader with are intriguing but the book fails miserably to live up to the promises made on the dust cover. Budding authors should seek out his agent however, that individual is well worth his fee!

British journalist Mark Ward's exposition of the theory of Universality and self-organized criticality (SOC) is little more than breathless hype purporting to show that fractal patterns and SOC are present in virtually every aspect of the biological and physical world. While this may or may not be true, Ward's largely anecdotal presentation, with its at times almost-mystical (although nonreligious) tone, unfortunately arouses the suspicion that the theory rests on a shaky scientific foundation. It should also not be too much to expect that a book devoted to the theory of Universality actually give an explicit definition of Universality, which Ward consistently fails to do. The book is introductory and nontechnical, so it is perhaps unfair to expect him to give a solid theoretical foundation to the theory, but the reader is left with an uneasy feeling that the gentleman "doth protest too much." Those interested in chaos theory, emergent phenomona, and SOC would do much better to read the books of Stuart Kauffmann and John Holland or the older nontechnical classic "Chaos: Making a New Science" by James Gleick.

The book is also plagued with numerous factual errors. (His reference to Beethoven's Eroica Symphony as a late work, produced in the same general period as the Ninth Symphony and the Diabelli Variations, has been cited in another review.) Additionally, Mr. Ward's writing style and his many lapses in grammar, syntax, and punctuation make the book irritating to read and make one wish that a good editor had taken the manuscript firmly in hand. Awkward shifts in tense within a single sentence, lack of subject-verb agreement, and Mr. Ward's apparent disdain for commas make what is actually a simple book a chore to read.

Science has opened the windows to the cold light of agnosticism by pushing back religion and diminishing the power of dogma. Universality in turn, shows that we are intimately connected to he universe in a most liberating sense. Universality emphasizes the interconnections between the elements of a system, whether these are the neurons in the brain or the droplets of water in a cloud. It also demonstrates that there is always a cause and that correlations can persist over very long spatial or temporal distances. The rise of universality is a result of the intellectual revolution started by chaos mathematics. In other words, universality is about the invisible force in the universe that is ubiquitous but still nameless, a force of order that is extremely powerful yet gentle. Ward examines the theories of universality, how they fit into a quest to discover the workings of the universe. He explores their possible limitations and considers what we can do with this new knowledge. He looks at the work of scientists Leo Kadanoff, Kenneth Wilson, Benoit Mandelbrot, Gene Stanley and Per Bak. The most interesting sections to me are those on the role of fractal patterns in our concept of beauty, fractals in the music of Bach and Beethoven and in Phil Thompson's work "Organised Chaos" of 1998 (which is based on the Mandelbrot set) and the determinable rhythms in finance and economics. Although modern physics is revealing more and more about particles (the very small) and the universe (the very large), it has not been focused on revealing much about the mundane and our everyday lives. Universality does this, in demonstrating how our bodies, our behaviour and nature are intimately connected. All of these different systems share a common principle, a single dynamic and a universal affinity. The author does not go into detailed discussions and theorising, for which I am grateful, as the text remains accessible enough for the general reader. What the book does reveal provides enough food for thought at this stage. The book includes portraits of the above-mentioned scientists, pictures of fractal patterns in leaves and lungs and migrating antelope, plus the fractal patterns in a work by Jackson Pollock. I recommend this book to all who are interested in cosmology, chaos theory and the golden mean (sacred geometry).

This is a horrible book. I don't recommend it at all. The 79th New York "Highlanders" were mostly consisted of Irish immigrants and normal New Yorkers. Only 300 actual Scott's were in the unit. They never wore kilts/ trousers etc. Photos from the time period actually show this to be false about the kilt wearing. The stupidest mistake yet in the book, is how he refers to "lieutenant" Todd, when in actuality Todd only reached the rank of Sergeant. His misleading info is a horrible glance at this great unit. I'm ashamed to say I bought the book thinking it was historically accurate...only to find is was the worst book ever written. For a true glimpse at the 79th, get Sgt. Todd's book.

I was truly disappointed in this book. It is filled with inaccuracies, and frequently presents the author's assumptions and predispositions as fact, without sufficient documentation to back up his claims.

The book is terribly biased towards providing "documentation" for those who wish to portray the 79th as a bunch of Celtic yahoos, when the original 79th was nothing of the sort. He consistently ignores the decidedly non-Scottish ethnic majority of the regiment. Again and again, he seems more determined to put a Scottish spin on the regiment, rather than contibute any worthwhile historical research on it.

The only good thing that can be said of the book is that some of the photos are rather interesting. Unfortunately, he also published many modern drawings and sketches without indicating that they are not contemporary to the Civil War, or made by members of the regiment.

It is highly disappointing, as I hoped that the book would not be yet another ex! ample of the usual nonsense and drivel written about this fine regiment. As another reviewer commented, see Todd's regimental history for a real look at this highly honored regiment.

McKnight's "Blue Bonnet's O'er the Border" fell well short of this reader's expectations. First, it is woefully brief: the text of the book is but 163 pages, at least 40 of which are occupied by illustrations or maps. As any student of the Civil War knows, a mere 120 to 130 pages is not nearly enough to cover the exploits of a three-year volunteer regiment. Second, the work is full of factual errors and misleading statements, too numerous to recount here. Two exaples stand out in my mind. Clearly, the author, a 79th New York reenactor and self-proclaimed Scottish enthusiast, has used this book to prove the Scottish identity of the members of the 79th New York. To do so, he has taken liberties with historical fact. For instance, the regiment, contrary to McKnight's claims, was not comprised predominently of Scots. Though at the core of the regiment were the Scottish members of the prewar 79th New York State Militia, these 300 men were eventually equalled--or even outnumbered--in the unit by Irish immigrants. The book is also advertised as the first history of this colorful regiment. It is not. 79th New York veteran William Todd published a history of the regiment in 1886. Unlike McKnight's flimsy book, Todd's work is refreshingly candid, objective, and thorough. If you really want to learn about the 79th New York, track down a copy of Todd's regimental history.

What the authors of this book desperately needed was an editor. This book is a mess. There is no sense of flow. There is no attempt by the authors to explain a topic and then delve further into it building upon what they show us. Instead we get detail. We are told Cocoon is made up of these frameworks and these frameworks use these design patterns and are made up of these pieces which are made up of these pieces. And in the end we know no more than when we started. We are told Cocoon contains these Java classes and are given a sentence explaining each one. We are given lists of SAX classes with no clear explanation of why we should be interested. There are lots of tables and lists and charts that explain nothing. The book never gives a clear explanation of what Cocoon does or how Java fits into Cocoon. The chapter on LogicSheets is a perfect example. There are thirty three tables in this chapter going page after page with no clear explanation of what the tables mean. Then the example at the end of the chapter is so trivial as to be meaningless. In fact, the examples throughout the book are much too simplistic and don't demonstrate the power of Cocoon. There is no question that an enormous amount of research went into this book. It's a shame that the authors weren't able to present that research in a useful way.

Six months ago, as no Cocoon book existed yet, this thin volume could have been interesting, but with the release of Moczar and Aston it is simply not worth the money anymore.

It is often rather superficial and is packed with questionnable fillers à la Wrox: one really wonders why the authors and the publisher felt compelled to include useless 'introductions' to css, xhtml and xsl (and more) in a book on cocoon!

When I originally saw this book, I was intrigued by an alternative way of presenting this fairly complicated material and the seemingly relevant examples. I felt that it was generally incomplete and scattered.

Take the section on custom Generators, for example. The example is derived from an example is a previous book written by another Sybex book on XML and JSP, so it seemed like a nice comparison with an alternative technology. The introduction to the example discusses the dynamics of a branching survey and why a custom Generator is sometimes necessary. Unfortunately, the example doesn't follow through on the promise or the lesson. The example code that I downloaded from the website turned out to be incomplete and inconsistent with the book. Although I eventually got the example running, the end result wasn't compelling enough for me to understand the purpose for writing the custom Generator in the first place.

I was dissapointed and frustrated with this book. For those trying to learn about Cocoon I would suggest Zeigeler and Langham's New Riders book (Cocoon: Building XML Applications).

I picked this up in a bookstore for my English Composition CLEP test, and got through four pages, finding three typographical errors in the example questions--before I realized that they were unintentional. Unacceptable, for sure.

This book has too many typographical errors. I used 3 books,Cracking the Clep(Princeton),Clep English composition(Comex),and Barrons. The first two are GREAT books that provide the background(nuts and bolts)needed to pass the english test. Barrons has plenty of sample questions,but lacks english grammar review material. I would not recommend this book to anyone.

I bought this book as an impulse at a book store, wanting to CLEP the English Composition exam. Unfortunatly, this book is riddled with technical errors throughout. I took the initial exam, missing several questions like I suspected. But the reason I missed some of the questions was because the answers were wrong. At page 62, I had seen enough errors to make me want to return this book. Don't buy it, try something else.

I will give a fair warning and say that the following review is quite harsh, but I will try to be as fair as possible.

Okay, on the plus side this book has beautiful photos almost too beautiful to have in a working kitchen. Some of the pictures are so artful one asks the question of what is the picture's purpose? For many of the photos are not instructional photos that show techniques or states of the food except as finished product.

Design --

It is a outsized volume that is perfect for the coffee table but maybe a bit unwieldy in a book holder. The size I am sure, was determined by the photo layout and not the recipes for they occupy very little space.

The layout is of ingredients listed way on the bottom with instructions for the recipe not quite center with the use of a lot of white space and very artistic photos of something that may not be related to the dish. All thisdone on glossy paper.

Problems --

Poorly edited: The book forgets steps in the use of ingredients and has the unique distinction of having an editor who did not bother providing temperature setting equivalents for UK oven markings. So it is not geared for the American kitchen at all. What does Mark # mean for your temperature specific oven? Good guessing is required or a reference. The writer or editor might have tried to do the simple modification of providing both English and degree settings for the recipes. It shows a lack of care.

The Recipes --

I will grant that this is supposed to be 'NEW' Vietnamese cuisine but I find the book making way too many changes and tradeoffs to have it termed Vietnamese except in the broadest sense. An example is the use of butter in recipes e.g., beef and chicken stock. Also, the recipes may require more than what your average thrifty Vietnamese grandma might use such as, veal bones and 10 egg whites to clarify the stock.

The chicken broth/stock was pretty thin in the making just the use of chicken wings which creates a thinner less full broth which may shortchange the strength of broth based dishes. More traditional recipes would actually use a whole chicken to provide fuller flavor and maximize the thriftiness of having a chicken cooked at the same time for another dish.

Vietnamese cooking already has French influences and has chosen and discarded based on what is appropriate so I found it a bit disconcerting that some recipes seem to go very French in technique and then shift to what I term, (fast) cooking where trade-offs are made for unclear reasons. I guess what I am saying is that the vision of the book and its recipes were unclear.

The recipes seem to be a marriage of alot of French technique with some Vietnamese spicing. But is it THE torch of a new direction in Vietnamese cuisine? I hope not because it would be robbed of a depth of flavor and boldness of vision.

My recommendation is do not get this book if you are a serious cook or even a novice for the recipes are more complicated than the novice needs while the serious cook will gain nothing useful from the volume in either background, technique or flavor that is not already in their repetoire.

As a Vietnamese-American, I want to learn more about preparing and cooking Vietnamese cuisines. Along with Mai Pham's "Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table," I bought this book because of its beautiful images of Vietnamese food. These images evoke childhood memories.
As soon as I finished skimming through the book, I was quite devastated that I didn't recognize anything as Vietnamese cuisines. All these recipes are practically French, New Age, or fusion hosh-posh. Yes! I am a purist when it comes to international cuisines.
Furthermore, the recipes are so difficult to follow. It seems that Mr. Read is so obessesive over the glossy photos that he forgets include complete instructions.
I donated the book to the local public library.

Although I agree with some of the criticisms raised about this cookbook, I think the harsh reviews are excessive. Indeed, the ingredient lay-out (in a line at the bottom of the page) is poor, and there are some errors in editing. And I can't say anything about its Vietnamese authenticity (I will trust those who wrote earlier reviews--that it is poor). However, all of the dishes I have tried so far have been wonderfully easy to make and absolutely delicious to eat. I'll admit I haven't made even a quarter of the recipes included (yet!), but I have enjoyed and expect I will continue to enjoy cooking from this book and being inspired to do so by its interesting dishes and beautful visual pictures.

I agree. This is rated 1 star.

This is a bad book. Money are not well spent. I wonder who rated more than 3 stars.

The author provides some models and assemblies on a 3.5" floppy. These files are required for 75% of the instruction. The files on my disk were corrupt and unusable, therefore rendering both the software and book useless.