Paul Allen is a fascinating guy, and this is his only biography. So it is worth reading. This is a well written, though a bit repetitive, short book that won't take long to read. The book retells what he has done, but without a lot of perspective.

Having finished the book, I have only partial answers to the two key questions:

1. What kind of guy is he? This is an unauthorized biography, so the author never got to know Paul Allen. The book gives plenty of anecdotes that hint at what he is like. But I still don't have a sense of who he is.

2. What has he accomplished? The book retells his life, but without perspective. It doesn't really attempt to answer the big question: If Paul Allen had simply kept his Microsoft shares, how would the technology revolution have been different? To what extent is he simply an observer, and to what extent is he a driving force?

How accurate is the book? I knew Paul back in high school (haven't seen him since) and the description of those years is fine. I can't judge the accuracy of the rest of the book, but it bothers me that the author says Paul lived off his Microsoft dividends, when in fact Microsoft has never (until very recently) issued dividends. I wonder how many other details are wrong.

Laura Rich pierces the Allen veil to show the man and the business he has built. This book demystifies the highly private billionaire, Paul Allen, and gives you a first rate look at his life from his upbringing in Seattle as a fledging computer geek, to founding the world's largest software company.
Rich touches on many unexplored angles about Allen's life from his quirky private nature, the roots of the passions that drive his investments; and the nature of his relationships to family, friends and colleagues.
An overall great look at one of the richest men in America.

I saw this book in the bookstore window and was curious. The only
thing I knew about Paul Allen was that he and Bill Gates founded
Microsoft. The book is a fascinating, insightful tale of a per-
plexing multi-billionaire who struggles to grasp the brass ring,
predict again the future of technology, and make it his own. The
author spotlights the reasons for Allen's myriad interests, as
well as, the conflicts between his self-perception as "an idea
man" and an inconsistent venture capitalist. I couldn't put
the book down. Its easy to read, carefully researched, highly
recommended.

TERRIBLE book! I have no respect for the authors. Even in 3rd edition, there is a mistake on about every other page and some of the formulas are even printed wrong! They keep a known error page on the web (bad) but there are many more (even worse).
The book is incredibly difficult to use because there are very few examples and of the few examples many steps are dropped and does not explain clearly where the formulas came from. As for the problems in the book, besides the fact that the answers in the back are often wrong, the authors often require formulas not mentioned in that particular section and sometimes not even in the chapter or the book itself! As for the text of the book, every chapter includes too much chatter on the background of the discovery and not enough words explaining the concepts themselves.
The worst book I have used and several students agree. Physics is hard but these guys make it harder. My advice: get a book from a good publisher with authors from good universities.

This textbook is extremely difficult to follow and doesn't flow very well. I had a difficult time trying to understand the concepts the author was trying to make without having to read it several times.

This is very well written and easy to follow. My required text was from Eisberg/Resnick and I hated it. This book is much better to read from. The problems are not quite as hard, but if you're learning modern physics and have any trouble then read the corresponding chapters or sections from this book and then go back to your required text. It will help make physics fun to learn again.

This is perhaps the worst introductory physics book I have encountered as a student. Many of the problems are poorly worded and the text does not contain sufficient information to perform many of the calculations. I would suggest learning from Schaum's Outline Series and low cost books (Dover publications) instead of this mockery.

This book is a good introduction to modern physics in terms of relativity, particle-wave theories, atomic theories, cosmology, etc. ...

this book is interesting for education in the university , this objetive is clearly ,respect to the physics in the earth ,

The writings of Ignatious Donnelly (1831-1901) are still relevant and his thinking still original. Lawyer, congressman from Minnesota, entrepreneur, music and art lover - he may have been the only Congressman at the time to use all his spare hours in Washington to explore the Library of Congress. He was a prodigious, voracious and consummate scholar. As a writer, he became an instant success with *Atlantis: The Antediluvian World*. This book was not, despite its title, some pseudo mystical bit of fluff. He had discovered physical evidence for the existence of the Golden Age (plants we now call tropical flourished within the present Arctic Circle for instance) as well as physical evidence for prehistoric cataclysm. He theorized that the earth's great deposits of sand, gravel and clay were not the result of glacial movements but were produced by the debris of a comet passing close to or striking the earth. The Golden Age as well as the Great Cataclysm (known in Scandinavia as Ragnarok) was remembered in myth and legend all over the world.

Donnelly uncovered evidence that the drift was sudden, the poles were not as they are now ("some terrible shock displaced them") and heat meeting cold caused a thick world-wide cloud cover (which caused the subsequent ice age). Modern science corroborates this - the mammoths and all flora and fauna perished suddenly. The sea boiled in great fjords, rocks melted, and clay and gravel rained down from the sky. A recent PBS documentary claimed it was either due to a comet or a volcano.

Donnelly theorized that it was a comet. He devotes a whole chapter to comets and their nature, particularly the Biela comet as it related to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. At the same moment in three different states (Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois) it was recorded that peculiar and devastating fires broke out. Even though history books STILL stick like fly paper to the Mrs.-O'Leary's-cow-kicked-a-lantern-in-the-barn story, heat intense enough to melt tons of pig iron couldn't have been caused by a barn fire.

Among other interesting conjectures, Donnelly thought that the Americas were the true ancient world (which ties in nicely with recent anthropological findings in North America proving quite conclusively that paleoindians didn't all come over the Bering Strait from Mongolia and Asia). He dug up Indian legends about a great conflagration and there is a fascinating passage about the book of Job being a chronicle of the great catastrophe.

As Paul Allen says in his 1971 introduction to the book, "He took no 'leads' from other authors or authorities in his investigation of these themes; he was a pioneer in the fullest and best sense of the word." This book is out of print now, but I bought it from Amazon.com only three or four years ago. Originally published in 1883, it is still worth reading in the 21st Century. I vote for yet another reprint.

pamhan99@aol.com

Characteristics of this book (and ratings out of 10). Note that all ratings and descriptions are in comparison to other books.

Difficulty of material: 8 (not necessarily a good thing for everyone), the book is more difficult than most freshman physics texts (calc-based), but there are some derivations that were left out or some were poor in explanation.

Examples: 5, the setup of the examples appear as though they would be excellent, and the setup was a good idea. However, Tipler did a poor job in his carrying out the explanation portion of the examples. Because of this, some of the examples are difficult to follow. This is probably the most important point of the book--examples are crucial to problem solving! Tipler's text doesn't stand up.

Problem Planning: 7, some of the problems have terrible setups, others are simply just vague. In one problem you have to assume a weight for the problem, although this was difficult to discern from the problem description. It was just confusing about how the problem should be approached. Tipler should have actually given the statement "assume a weight," instead of leaving it vague. Another problem had two different masses for answers. That is simply poor planning. The positive aspects of the problem set is that, at least for some colleges, the answers to all the problems can be found on the college's website. Also, there are lots of problems to work, and the conceptual problems are, for the most part, well done.

Compared to Other Books: I have 5 other physics books and this is by far the worst of them. Serway's or Young's books are FAR better. There is far more explanation and the problems are just as difficult (Serway's has even harder material in some aspects). The other texts contains more and better derivations (assuming you are looking for the hardest editions). Other books give much better material for the amount of money asked for.

If you must buy this book for class, I would recommend getting an additional used book (from an author other than Tipler) for reference. You may find you use other texts more than the assigned text because Tipler's text is poor. Also, problems on physics tests are usually from other books--so working problems in other books can only help test grades.

The first equation that you see in this book is that "Tipler= Quality"

At first, this seems a little pompous and presumptuous. But it is alas, oh so true. When I first started physics this year, I had no experience of calculus. I thought taking a physics course based in calc was going to be hard. I was wrong, as Tipler's explinations were so well done that I found the math to be easy. Although its true that most of my physics learning came from my high school teacher, the only thing he lectured on where things that came almost directly from Tipler. This was convinient if I didn't feel like taking extensive notes. By the end of the simester, I had mechanics mastered. With Tipler by my side, the biggest challenge in learning physics was overcoming my own lazyness.

This is the best physics book I have ever seen. The text is well written, the examples are great. What sets this book apart from other physics textbooks I have seen are these advantages. Examples are set up in columns so that on the left, it tells u whats going on in english and on the right, whats going on in math. There are great section summary pages and problem solving guides at the end of every chapter. The problems are each labeled with a difficulty, and they are creative problems. There are optional sections which you do not need to read but enhance what you are learning in lecture and reading. Overall, a great book.

This book is terribly disorganized, repetitive and has numerous
errors. Unfortunately, it seems to be one of only 2 books
available on this certification. The only chapter that was worth
reading was the one on JMS. The rest of the book was eminently
unreadable. I suggest reading "UML Distilled", the
Design Patterns book by Gamma et al, and a good book on EJBs,
messaging and JCA, instead of wasting time and effort over
this book.

This book reads as if it were written entirely between the hours of 2&5AM. It is more like an 11th hour paper one would write all night in college to barely make the deadline, than a well structured book that is written and rewritten to achieve its purpose. This is disturbing since the goal of reading it is to obtain a certification in software architecture, a discipline that demands quality execution to ensure success. The book is repeative across chapters, unstructured within any given chapter, poorly defines concepts and terms and generally frustrates the reader with obfuscated and needlessly complicated sentence structure. The content can be moderately useful if the reader has the patience to read and re-read passages when necessary. A heavily edited and refined second edition could succeed if the need to dwell on poorly written passages and definitions was totally eliminated. Proper grammar and spelling would be a nice touch too.

This study guide is the second book on SCEA available from the market.

It covers all the main topics for the SCEA 310-051 exams, with step-by-step instruction, and 2 sets of practice exercises. Chapters concentrate on the basic J2EE concepts, common architectures, legacy connectivity, EJB and its container model, protocols, applicability of J2EE, design patterns and messaging. Besides that, a J2EE case study is provided in the last chapter. The companion CD-ROM contains two sets of practice tests and a pdf-version of the study guide.

For a SCEA candidate, it is normally a challenge of using UML and J2EE together in the SCEA part 2. Unfortunately, this topic is missing in the book.

The J2EE case study chooses a real-life J2EE architecture, which involves legacy connectivity on Mainframe. This example is absolutely helpful on the SCEA part 2. However, it would be better if the authors could illustrate the pros and cons of specific design approaches.

Near 100 challenging practice questions are provided in the Mock Exam. They are closely modeling the format, tone, topics, and difficulty of the real exam.

Since it's the one of the only two books available, I suggest you go through this book. However, you should also learn the specific subjects from practice or from other corresponding books.

Read the Microsoft documentation instead. This book is a thinly disguised rip-off of the Microsoft documentation padded with examples of dubious value. In 590 pages this book manages to add no value or information beyond the original documentation. That's quite an achievement.

If you want to learn ISAPI...think again. This was "hot" 2 years ago...now it is all but dead.

ISAPI's big promise was better performance and memory usage...ironic that it has now fallen in favor to the biggest performance pig of all web applications...ASP. In an age of fast machines and small web apps, rapid development and ease of use wins out over performance.

ISAPI is hard to learn, harder to get right, unstable, bug ridden (if written in MFC) and surprisingly inflexible.

Look, you're a smart person. You want to do the right thing. You don't need to subject yourself to the torture of learning ISAPI. Only hard-core programmers who are tasked with writing a custom web app that is going to get some VERY heavy traffic should even bother with ISAPI.

So why did I give this book 4 stars? There are no good ISAPI books out there. This one has the most information in it and will allow you the best chance to actually develop something that works. Get this book and hit Genusa's (now dusty) ISAPI site. Also spend a lot of time in the Microsoft knowledge base...there are plenty of workarounds and bugs to learn about too.

Keep in mind that with ISAPI you had better be a damn good programmer. If your DLL ever crashes...bye bye web server. This is harder than you think if you are doing "serious" web programming which includes database access.

Smart managers will not allow mission-critical web apps to be developed in ISAPI by a web punk who has never done this before. Do everyone a favor and get a clue. There is a reason why nobody is doing this stuff anymore!

Game over. Go home and don't look back. Go off and learn ASP and Cold Fusion like a good little web programmer. You will have a marketable skill and will actually get things done.

ISAPI is Microsoft's approach to adding capabilities to web serving. There are only a few books that describe how to use ISAPI. This book is the best of them, because the author: 1) provides examples in both C and C++, and 2) compares ISAPI with CGI solutions. Unfortunately, ISAPI is a complicated subject, so more and shorter examples would help elucidate the reader.