The authors could do with some refresher courses -- they seem really over the hill!

I also looked at the walkthroughs of the various campaigns and senarios and these seem to be lacking some depth. If you are looking for anything earth shattering in this guide book in the walkthroughs don't bother. If your looking for unit stats to be accurate and informative you had better just look at the data the game gives you.

My overall ratting is a 1 and would not recommend this book to anyone who loves this game.

In the index of the book, you can find chapters suchs as: Cell-Phone-Class Devices; the physcal layer, the logical layer, the cognitive layer etc. The same goes for PDAs, pager-based systems and so on. It seems very interesting...

... until you read the text. For example, the book tells us that the Cell-phone class device has a logical layer that "is really a tiny PC, with small amounts of 'main' memory..." This is so rude, oversimplified metaphor, that it is more misleading than anything else! This book is full of such oversimplified descriptions or lists of obviousnesses.

Big disappointment.

Don't buy it if you can resist the title.

"Use emulators" - How does the author think these kind of apps are developed? Of course one must use emulators to get anything working!

The "new PCD specific heuristics": "Safety - does your device/system irradiate your users with unsafe amounts of microwave energy?" For crying out loud! I'll have to watch out not to radiate other people (by using radiating XHTML code :)! Other heuristics are not any better or more useful.. And a lot of the book is the same old Nielsen related stuff (why here - again?)..

Well, a bit angry review I guess. Just seems that there's really no point in this book..

This means that if you are already familiar with constraint programming, GAs and NNs, it is understandable. Otherwise forget it.

It might be useful if you want to programme your first version and to use this as a starting point, but the examples are very basic and not much more than a rough prototype.

This book is so poorly written, named, and editted, I actually lost faith in IDG Books as well as its authors. The book appears to be "Stuff I found on the web that I thought was cool".

Any CGI information is hidden in between endless entries on HTML, SGML, how the web first came about, or whatever; punctuaited by countless URLs to "interesting" sites with CGI content. Unfortunately, I found many of these URLs to be outdated. Worse, much of the meagar information actually on CGI turned out to be factually incorrect. (see use of "+" and space in input encoding)

All examples used in the book are in Perl. If you do not know Perl cold, and you intend to use this book as a learning tool, expect to spend a significant amount of time to studying that language. You will need to pick up a Perl primer as well since this book is not usefull as one.

The CD was highly disappointing The information on it is limited, and the packages are difficult to unpack and use. My UNIX (Solaris 2.5.1) workstation could read the CD directories but could not actually access the files in them. I had to open the CD on my PC, FTP the files across the LAN to my UNIX workstation and then un-tar them there.

Possibly the worst experience I had came when I sent a list of errors and issues to IDG Books and the authors. The response that I received from them unilaterally dismissed my concerns and was followed by a vague attempt to justify the original text.

This book almost seems to be beefed up to pass the dreaded "weight test". If you are looking for a book to explain CGI in an organized and succint manner, run away from this book. This is the only book that has ever moved me to write to a publisher to ask for a refund.

The only redeeming value of the book is that the CD is very shiny. 8-)

With a book on CGI, I want CGI, not whole sections on HTML validation tools. Thus, by the time the authors roll around to a discussion on CGI (and it comes across as a muddled discussion indeed), I discouragedly chucked the thing onto my (growing) pile of bad book investments.

In addition, the bundled CD-ROM disc totally blows! It is about as poorly formatted and badly laid out as I've ever seen. Files are wholly unidentifiable--until you open them and try to find out what the program is.

In overview, change the title to "Web Bible." If you're starting from the ground up, this book definitely touches base on everything one needs to know. But if you're looking solely for a CGI informatorium--take a pass.

Either way, as a Web rookie or veteran, if you buy this book, be prepared to use the CD as a drink coaster.

--W. Campbell, Encino, Calif., USA