School continues to be one of the most traumatizing/wonderful experiences of my life. This book talks about school from all angles .. highly recommended.

This collection includes some of the best poems of our time--all related to school. The pain and poignancy of school-age experiences in the classroom, on the playground, or on the athletic field, are captured in this volume with the resonance of shared life. The names of teachers--Mrs. Krikorian, Mrs. Smythe, and the rest--bring back our own teachers' faces and even their "sausage arms." Teachers themselves speak here as well, with humor, sadness, or a sense of loss about the classrooms of children they have known. This volume, with work by our best contemporary poets, is a must-read for anyone who teaches or learns or who has ever been in school.

There's something most of us find fascinating about the lineages of persons of note, whether they're royalty, U.S. presidents, movie stars, military leaders, or literary and historical figures like Pocahontas and Louisa May Alcott. The Virginia ancestry of the Queen Mother is relatively well known, as are the New England cousins of the late Princess of Wales and the Duchess of York -- but did you know Elvis Presley, Jimmy Carter, and Jesse Helms are all collaterally related? Roberts is probably the leading expert at this sort of thing, especially when it comes to uncovering surprising connections, like the British royal descent of Karl Marx's wife (whose grandmother was Scottish), and he carefully lays out examples of what might be called "genealogical evolution," demonstating that genealogy really is inclusive, not exclusive. Many British, European, and American contemporaries are much more closely related than we often realize. There are also a number of descents contributed by guest columnists which maintain the same high standard of documentation.

but not something that I was looking for. Don't have real life examples in detail.......

Much of Advanced Macromedia ColdFusion 5 Application Development will be a discussion of technologies and ideas with examples to demonstrate specific techniques. Advanced Macromedia ColdFusion 5 Application Development will also contain case studies to illustrate real-world examples of specific topics. ColdFusion 5 is a massive upgrade, and it adds lots of new features, including some designed specifically for advanced and power users. Advanced Macromedia ColdFusion 5 Application Development will address these issues and technologies, including: using clustering and fail-over technologies to ensure server uptime, using the new archive and restore features. server monitor and benchmarking, creating secure applications and integrating with existing security system, extending ColdFusion using COM/DCOM, CORBA, and the ColdFusion C and Delphi API's, using the Java integration options, customizing and modifying the client environment, writing custom tags and functions, ISP ColdFusion hosting issues, and working with XML and XSL. User Level: Advanced, 600pp

Within 1 chapter, I was already able to increase performance and get a quality return from this book. A must for every Cold Fusion Developer. It's part 2 of the Cold Fusion Bible!

It's true that it's currently the only ASP+ book but it's great nonetheless. I was waiting with great expectation it's release at Amazon since I'm plugged to their ASPToday web site.

This book is worth 5 stars because of the following:

It came out barely after MS announced it but contains a lot of information about the subject.

MS has work with the writers to make sure the content will be right.

It is well-written by known ASP programmers (and writers).

The content is get-to-the-point on current ASP issues and how ASP+ will fix this.

Show ASP+ coding with both VB7 & C#.

There is a lot more information than the ASPToday's articles so that the book is more than handy.

Written well enough for newcomers to understand it, but I would strongly suggest having ASP experience before-hand. Remember it's a PREVIEW and it means that it's good for people who wants to know it advance where MS is going with ASP.

Although I am a little late I'd like to add my review for those of you who are planning to purchase this book. I think it is a nice pioneering review for ASP+. (ASP.NET). A lot has been said about .NET, the only thing I'd like to add that this book was probably the first one to be published about the .NET platform even before the name was .NET. So the info in the book is still relevant but the names have changed a little bit. If you are interested in learning the .NET platform get a more recent source other wise to learn ASP.NET I believe it is a good choice. I'll give it 5 points mainly because the examples are written in c# which is a nice change. If you'd prefer VB there are still enough examples.

This is a great book (as to be expected from Alex Homer) for beginning to understand .Net and ASP+. It doesn't go into the .Net framework in too much detail but explains how ASP has progressed to ASP+ and ADO to ADO+. A must read for any ASP devloper who wants to move to .Net

Murasaki star system contains a duo of inhabitable planets that orbit each other: Genji - a high-gravity world with a dense, soupy atmosphere; and Chujo - an arid, wintry world of canyons and wind-swept plains. Neither is perfect for humans - on Genji they must wear pressure suits in addition to getting used to gravity levels half-again as high as on Earth; Chujo is more forgiving, though it can be intensely cold. Both planets serve home to sapient races: the Ihrdizu of Genji - low-tech amphibians that congregate in small villages; and the humanoids of Chujo - aloof, mysterious beings that ignore the humans entirely. It is here that the first manned interstellar expeditions will arrive, bearing humans of all frames of mind - Earthlings and off-worlders, atheists and philosophers, mystics and iconoclasts...

Instead of being a collaborative novel, "Murasaki" is a mixed bag of science fiction stories that share a setting, each written by a different award-winning author. Mind the fact that the only interesting part is the fairly in-depth world-creation notes (included as appendices), and that the stories are pathetically shallow and lead virtually nowhere...

...That is precisely what I though about this "science fiction novel in six parts" prior to reading the last two parts, which are so refreshingly, profoundly excellent that I almost wept with awe. A mystery of interplanetary proportions is suddenly built up and then revealed in flying colors.

It's really a pity that the rest of Murasaki doesn't follow suit.

I became interested in this book after reading Otherness by David Brin. One of the short stories in Otherness is actually a chapter in Murasaki. The book itself is has a very intruiging storyline and I enjoyed reading much of it. The only problam I had was the mental transition I had to make with each chapter of the book, as they are all written by different authors.

All in all, I would definitely recommend this book for anyone who likes the work of Brin, Bear, Anderson, Pohl, Kress etc etc etc.. They all wrote parts of it.

A good read.