Grondahl's biography of Corning compares to the great biographies of Robert Caro--about Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson. Authoritative, full of passion, insightful, and great story well told. Highly recommended!

This is book was my first introduction to O'Reilly's cookbook series. It provides solutions to some of the most common challenged faced by the particular subject being covered (in this case MySQL). I thoroughly enjoyed it and was quiet impressed with it. Too many technical books simply introduce the concept without relating it to real world applications.

This particular book introduces all of the most basic concepts of database manipulation (table creation, data insertion, data deletion, data update). As well as writing simple and advanced SQL statements to retrieve data. It approaches database design using 4 of the most popular languages (Perl, PHP, Python and Java). These are only a few of the many possible languages which can be used to manipulate a MySQL database.

MySQL cookbook touches on a variety of different topics which I don't have the space or time to cover in detail, but here is a list of them:

* Handeling duplicates
* MySQL on the Web
* Processing Web input with MySQL
* Using MySQL-based Web Session Management

One of my favorite topics covered in the book is the idea of storing binary data such as images within a database. Although not ideal for most cases (unless you need fast access to a vast array of images), just the idea of it has a certain kewlness effect.

Well, overall I give it 4 out of 5 stars. It needs to touch slightly more on the basic concepts of databases, and it can become the only book you'll ever need for MySQL.

If you are interested in this author, stick with the non-fiction or fiction based on his international experiences.

One pet peeve I have with futurists is their depiction of the Earth as an environmental disaster as hordes of free-roaming sub-humans terrify the countryside. YET, scientific progress seems to continue unabated. That aside, this tale is a gem!! From the genius teenager to the searching mom to the innocent gal - from locale to locale - Theroux has assembled a cast and story that resonates long after one finished the last words.

Innocence in all its many forms is an underlying theme with almost every major character - from the mom to the son to the roamers to the gal and even to the long lost (?) male donor - involved in some type of sudden awarenenss that the world is not as benign as they once thought. The coming of age of the young teenager is perfect in its perplexity and complexity.

Get this book and lock the door!!

This book, like so much of Theroux, can be read strictly for fun or delved into for deeper meaning. All in all, another very satisfying fiction from one of our best contemporary writers.

The value of this book lies in its cultural scope. How intriguing to note that water maidens play a significant role in the folk lore of such diverse cultures! And how interesting to see how these creatures vary from country to country (for they are not all mermaids as the title would suggest). Readers will discover an added bonus in Howell's artwork, which enhances the cultural flavor of each tale to great effect.

However, each tale is written in a sparse, folk tale style--flat characters and settings with little descriptive embellishments. For this reason I would recommend this book mainly to those who love mermaids and other sea creatures, rather than to those who just looking for a good story. But recommend it I do, for it is a fine collection.

Paul Revere was a multifarious man displaying many talents as the book points out. Well written, flowing narrative, being easily readable and well documented are just a few of the wonderful traits that the author brings to the reader. It's enjoyable to read and you feel like your right there seeing everything transpire right before your eyes. That's a talent raely found in writing and no wonder this book won a Pulitzer Prize in history.

This book is well worth reading and gives the reader a good foundation as to what life was like for people from 1735 - 1818. As well, this should be one of the books used in our schools for teaching American History. The author really brings out a love for her subject in this book.

The only major problem I found with OH NO IT ISN'T! is that it drags, quite heavily in parts. It's trying to be light and frothy, but it never seemed to be quite as light as it wants to be. A secondary (and mostly serious) subplot keeps pulling the action out of fluffville and grounding the entire book so that it never goes quite as far as it could have. Frivolity is quite a difficult concept to successfully pull off, and I don't think that Paul Cornell totally succeeded. Certainly there are some remarkably fun pieces, and I was entertained throughout much of the book. But too much lightheartedness can become tedious, and I found the secondary plot to be mostly distracting. There are times when the story is neither one thing nor the other. Had Paul Magrs written this same story he probably would have left out most of the real world portions (including the shaky ending) and moved the plot along faster. And I probably would have enjoyed that version more than this one.

Now, I'm quite willing to concede the possibility that I had less than ideal reading conditions here. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I was unable to read the story in the larger chunks that it was probably best suited for. Breaking it down into smaller pieces and reading only short sections a day can only have hurt this overall experience. While initially I had been very enthusiastic about the story, pulling the book out for the third day of Benny still locked in panto-land with no clue as to how to escape began to require more and more effort on my part. The longer the panto scenes went on, the less desire I felt to pick up the book again. Nothing seemed to be happening other than pop culture references and word plays. Obviously, that's the nature of the medium here, but while an actual panto performance doesn't go on for a terribly long amount of time, the same thing in a book requires a greater investment of time from the audience. The jokes and the puns do manage to liven those sections, but there were many moments where it felt like an uphill battle.

OH NO IT ISN'T! can be quite a lot of fun, if you're in the mood for an odd sort of romp through panto-land. Many of the jokes are devastatingly funny, and there are numerous pop culture references to keep one amused, from the Marx Brothers to Pulp. As a light and frothy adventurous frolic, it mostly works. Had the plot moved a bit faster, I probably wouldn't have ended up being as bored by the middle section, but perhaps looking for a quick storyline in a panto is a fruitless task. On the other hand, it's quite possible that panto is just one of those genres that doesn't translate well to the novel format.