The story opens at the wedding of a Mafia don's granddaughter. One of the don's lieutenants, Charley Partanna is instantly smitten with a beautiful woman who appears unexpectedly at the wedding. She quickly disappears, and he tries to find her. His search leads him to California from New York. He finds that she is married, but separated. He falls deeply in love with her. Imagine his chagrin when he dispatches a crook who has stolen from his crime family . . . and the crook turns out to be the woman's estranged husband. What's worse, hundreds of thousands of dollars are still missing. Fortunately, it's insured. But that's not the point. You cannot let people steal from a crime family. What should Charley do now?

What obligation does Charley owe to the don? What does he owe to the don's family, the Prizzis? What does he owe to someone he loves? What does he owe to his own father (who also works for the Prizzis)? What does he owe to himself and his own sense of self respect?

The story is even more complicated by the overhanging debt of honor that the Prizzis owe to Charley. Earlier, another granddaughter had run off to live with another man while engaged to Charley. As a result, she is cut off from the family. She cannot be reconciled with her family until Charley finally marries. That will release that debt of honor.

Charley Partanna is a Don Quixote-like figure who is very concerned with what honor requires. Although the rest of the characters of often speak as though they do too, they really focus on what's best for their wealth and survival. But Charley overlays the concept of honor on them, despite the evidence to the contrary. This makes him a very appealing character for someone who is a remorseless contract killer, enforcer, kidnapper, and general on-call criminal. Perhaps Mr. Condon's message is that we can all aspire to the Heavens, no matter how debased our lives and sins are.

The realities of honor in these situations come down to sovereign power more than to any real codes of honor, in the sense that chivalry was a code of honor. The "deal" keeps changing, and Charley finds himself one minute on the same side as another person and then opposing that person in the next minute due to a ploy by someone else or changed circumstances.

The conclusion will strike you as unexpected in the extreme unless you think carefully about the title. The denouement is a neat resolution of the escalating conflicts brought on by the complication of Charley's falling in love with a woman whose interests are not the same as those of the Prizzis.

After you finish enjoying the story, I suggest that you think about what you own code of ethics would tell you to do if you had these sorts of conflicts in your life. Hopefully, such conflicts in loyalties will never occur. But such advance thinking can probably help you avoid misplacing your trust and support, should you run into these conflicts.

May you always seek out the honorable solution!

The book provides readers a clear discussion on the nature of uncertainty, how it affects the cost of a systems engineering project, and how probability methods are used to model, measure, and control risk from a systems engineering perspective. Readers benefit from the numerous mathematical and professional anecdotes, case discussions, results, observations, and interpretations found throughout the chapters.

The book contains 110 applied and theoretical exercises. It is an outstanding text for students in engineering and the related fields.

Overall, the volume stands on the cutting edge in its combination of academically responsible yet generally down-to-earth analyses. There's plenty to make one think, and plenty to equip the aspiring libertarian with intellectual weapons of a badly needed kind. By all means, read it. It won't be a quick read--it's high-density material--but it will repay the effort.

I didn't find the first two chapters particularly useful, but from the third onwards it was simply enlightening. Reading chapter 3 I finally understood what Cross Site Scripting attacks were, and made clear how important it is to know stuff (HTTP in particular) in if you are serious about security (and about system administration in general).

The chapter about configuring Apache in Jail was great, and so it was the chapter about mod_rewrite . In general, the whole book was fantastic, and explained so much about security and Apache. In general, I didn't think there was so much to know about security and Apache, until reading this book that showed them to me so clearly.

I would have liked more depth in some of the chapters (like "Logging", that is very interesting but probably not detailed enough), but overall this book was a great buy.

A colleague of mine is a very experienced system administrator and said that you would find out about all that stuff slowly, working and looking up stuff quite a lot. I found that this book put my on a different level, closer to a senior system administrator.

Good buy!

A book I think would be a great companion to this one would be "Peopleware", which explains how projects do not fail because of hardware or software management, but because of incorrect people management. The two books complement each other fairly well.

A journey through a mystery school, the greatest mystery school of all - earth.

The author was well chosen (by the Source), for it is a good read for anyone and covers many aspects of human life, giving many insights.

It is pointed out that a prophecy fails to serve it's purpose if it is fullfilled. The message is empowering and hopeful, throughout the book.

We may quickly realize our own power to shape destiny, a qualitative, genuinely revolutionary transformation awaits.

Without question this gift is of God for all to read.