i bought this book , i thought it might teach me something about tennis , but it hardly did anything. it's not a very interesting book. it's boring and childish. if you are very small then it might help you.

The person in this book -C .Douglas is a great tennis player so he must have taken(P.douglas) his dads good tips, so why not give them a shot yourself!!!!!

I loved the concept of this book. I only wish I had read an excerpt before buying it. The choices are fine, even daring. However, instead of insight, the reader gets poorly written stream-of-consciousness ramblings that add up to nothing but the author's feeble attempt to justify his choices...some of which he hasn't even experienced himself. If you like trivia or history, do not buy this book. If you like an author who thinks he is hip, smart, and funny but is none of these things, go for it.

Everyone loves lists -- the best of, worst of, what's hot, what's not. We love to argue with the picks, think of what we would have added or deleted. Now Paul Williams has produced the ultimate thought-provoking list: The 20th Century Greatest Hits, a collection of forty essays comprising a unique "top 40" list of art worth remembering.

First things first. Paul Williams? you ask. No, not the chubby blonde-haired songster of the 70's, but Paul S. Williams who in 1966 at age 17 founded Crawdaddy! the first American rock magazine - precursor to Rolling Stone. He's been referred to as "legendary rock historian," "one of America's foremost writers of rock" and "our best rock journalist" by critics and musicians alike.

Williams is a prolific writer of "observation" books (some forty books in all, most available here on Amazon.com) that include insightful reviews of important musical artists that have influenced us over the past 30 years. He has written extensively about Bob Dylan (three books in print, with a fourth in the works.) He's also written about Neil Young and Brian Wilson and is the author of the best selling underground classic Das Energi. He's a keen observer; a mirror trying to reflect with crystal clarity what he hears and feels about not only music, but artistic events and those who create them.

"Great art, then, is not some objective phenomenon; it is an essentially subjective, and often profoundly spiritual, personal experience on the part of a person or many persons reading a book, listening to a recording, looking at a painting, watching a play or film..."

Williams has a way of touching your soul through his unique writing style and he's out done himself with this latest observation book. "It's a tease actually," he affirms because it's not a top 40 music review. It's a play on his own Rock and Roll: the 100 Best Singles, published in 1993. Only this book, The 20th Century Greatest Hits, is not limited to rock or even music. It's any work of art that he deemed memorable enough to make his "top 40" list of the century. He includes literature, music recordings, paintings and performing artists. In the book, he asks and answers the question "What is a unit of art?"

"...there are great artists whose works are performances before a live audience. I am a passionate appreciator of this type of art and have written a series of books about Bob Dylan as a performing artist in which I argue for the recognition of live performances, recorded or unrecorded, as works of art that can add up to a great and memorable body of work just as surely as artworks that endure as physical objects."

An odd mishmash of "art", you might think, when you first glance at The List and find Eleanor Roosevelt's Universal Declaration of Human Rights next to Winnie-the-Pooh and later followed by a concert performance of Umm Kulthum. Not to worry, once you read Williams' tantalizing and convincing arguments for their inclusion, you'll be thankful you found this gem.

The List also includes songs by the Beatles and Billie Holiday; works of Picasso and Matisse; books by Philip K Dick, Jack Kerouac and James Joyce; short stories of Borges and Sturgeon; a translation of The I-Ching; movies, poems, live performances and so much more.

"That's a primary purpose of the book is to talk about and to stimulate people to think about what art is and what that means to us personally," Williams says about his unusual selections. All I can say is, he's successful. He makes you want to run out and read, see or hear all of his choices. To me, that's a Real Hit! This collection deserves 5 stars for originality and expanding our view of what constitutes The 20th Century Greatest Hits.

Back in its heyday, the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series was one of the best, most exciting series for kids there was. Especially good were the ones by Edward Packard. His colleague R.A. Montgomery wrote less successful efforts. This one displays his fondness for negative and often arbitrary endings, as well as for a sort of new agey bizarreness. Ace illustrator Grainger is always good, though I wonder to think that anyone would ever pay for a hardcover of this light text, when a paperback would do.

The Abominable Snowman is a great book.You have to find a yeti to proove that he really exists.On your way you'll find a friend to come along.But you never know what will happen next.You have to choose your own advenure.You could find the yeti and become rich and famous, or you find a city you will live in.Or you get scared before you even find the yeti and return back home.

A good book to have on the shelf- will stimulate the thinking of intermediate level Access developers onto greater things.

Nice chapters dedicated to using Access 2002 as a front end to SQL Server and Oracle. If you are planning to do that, by all means this book is a great guide. Also, the first couple of chapters about application development are great for those developers who must spend as much time in the corporate board room pitching their ideas to computer illiterate bosses as they do with actual programming.

BUT: In several places in the book, the authors make reference to the 'CD included with the book.' Well guess what? There is none, but if you want to learn about and use Active X controls through the use of working examples, you will have to look elsewhere.

Most painful is that the authors tantalize you with nice definitions and screenshots of ActiveX controls, and then tell the readers that they should "See this chapter's application on the book's CD-ROM for code examples." ARG! No examples makes learning this stuff really tough!

If you don't care about Active X, or already know your stuff, then you won't be missing anything. Presumably though, you are purchasing this book precisly BECAUSE you want to learn this stuff. The lack of CD hurts especially when the authors omitted printed details from the book, fully expecting those details to appear in CD form.

I don't fault the authors. I fault Sams Publishing. On the bright side, the lack of Active X examples is the only major sore part in this otherwise useful intermediate guide.

The first 100 pages where realy great for all kind of developers.
It's not just for Access people.
Missing the CD and there are some copying from the 2000 version.
Still an importent book

This book has an excellent chapter on injections. The rest of the book contains things you can typically find in your user's manual. If you are interested in knowing every single aspect of the GC, this would be a good book. If you are just trying to get the GC up and running with a new compound, this may not be your best bet. Too much information and not enough time to absorb it all.

Analytical gas chromatography, second edition is an excellent reference book for those of us who take gas chromatography seriously, not as a fringe technology, nor learn enough to get by. The second edition was substantially revised from the first edition. Very up to date information with insights on why things appears in certain way. Chapter 5, variables in the gas chromatographic process, and chapter 6 (subsection 9), optimizing operational parameters for specific columns, and chapter 8 on selective tuning are very useful and invaluable.

This was a bit hysterical, and I think it doesn't have an imprimatur or nihil obstat for a reason. Fr. Trinchard lays out concepts of the "diabolic feminine," "divine masculine," and vice versa, and rails on about the insuffiency of the current liturgy. As an orthodox Catholic I wouldn't recommend it.

This is an honest and profoundly disturbing assessment of those forces and people committed to the destruction of the Church from within. Fr. Trinchard is one of the brightest and the best, formerly a scientist with studies in philosophy, he is a deeply courageous, well informed and faithful Catholic priest.His most notable other book, "God's Word," (Christopher Publishing, Hanover, MA)is a profound criticism of the way that American liberal scripture scholarship has chained the Bible to their own imaginary interpretations, which change from year to year, and which only the inner elite of scholars pretend to understand. Before coming into the Catholic Church I had long and close association with many of the very ideas and people Father Trinchard is speaking about, so I know from personal experience that what he speaks is true. The true story of the destruction of the Church from within, which is what Fr. Trinchard reveals, is such a shocking truth as to be almost unbelievable to the average Catholic in the pews.Therefore, this is a book for serious people who really seek to know God and do His will. This will not be a worthwhile book for those who just like to talk about scandals.

This book is a BASIC book for optometrists who want to dabble in low vision. It is not for the low vision specialist! I found a lot of the information to be useful, but there are better books available.

A seasoned "specialist" is not going to buy this book (i.e. retina specialist does not go out and buy a text book on retina, but rather searches out more current and complex research articles). As a general practitioner, I found this book to be an excellant resource for those who would like to become low vision specialists. It gives the "nuts and bolts" approach; everything from low vision exam and training forms to equipment, treatment options, and low vision optics. In addition, the appendices list many low vision resources, related organizations, and optical reference tables. There is a growing need for low vision services and this book is one step towards enabling many optometrists to meet those needs.

This book is a clear and well-written introduction to the latest version of Microsoft's Active Server Pages. It is written how technical books should be written: no messing about, no unnecessary repetition, and a lot of material covered clearly in just over 400 pages.

A clear target audience (experienced ASP and VB6 developers), and clear objectives help - the book's intention is clearly to communicate the essentials, and the practitioner will then get more detail from other sources.

The book clearly presents the VB.NET language, the new ASP architecture, how to develop using server-side and user controls, and supporting technologies such as Web Services and ADO.NET. However, there are some omissions. For example, the book states that you can't raise standard events from User Controls, not only is this possible, but the standard MSDN documentation has a very simple example of how to do so.

If I have a major complaint, it's that the book was not developed around Visual Studio. Instead the examples are mainly pure text, similar to old server pages. This has two drawbacks: it fails to support the new paradigm of web development which Microsoft have finally raised above hacking with a copy of notepad; and it's sometimes difficult to relate the text-only examples to code generated by the Visual Studio design tools, and vice-versa.

Another weakness is shared with many other books on web-based development, especially in the Microsoft arena, with very little focus on how to properly structure code and solution components. I have had to resort to Java-based architectural pattern books, and I think there's a major gap in the market here.

This won't be the only book you'll buy on .NET: I also purchased "VB.NET for Developers" by Franklin, and "the Visual Basic Programmer's Guide to the .NET Framework Class Library" by Powers & Snell, both in the same series from Sams. However, I can recommend it as a good clear introduction to ASP.NET, which doesn't require you to read thousands of pages.

This book does a great job in providing you with a little information and then an example to try it out, a little more information and then another example to practice it. The theory and practicals are very well balanced. One thing I DON'T like in a book is too many words and theory and not enough examples.

I've read through 3 other books so far and this one has the best gradient on learning a new technology.
Why not 5 stars? With any new technology such as this there are many new technical words introduced. In order to fully grasp a subject you must know what the words mean. Authors should define the new words at the first occurance in a book AND provide a glossary at the back as a reference to these new words. Very, very few books do this. So I just define the words myself and write the definitions in the book.

But, overall I enjoyed this book very much. It's a smaller size than the rest making it very portable. All the examples are in VB.NET too (in case you're wondering).

This book contains many great looking color pictures of this river in upstate New York. Just by looking at those pictures is enough to motivate people to pay a visit to this river. It also has many useful information about fishing condition and fishing stores along this river. However, this book is strictly a "flyfishing" book, and the author exhibited strong bias against non-flyfishing fishermen; this can be a negative factor for non-flyfishing people. The other thing is that it doesn't show the access points along the river; this reduces the usefulness of this book.

I enjoy fishing this fine river every year and this book covered the water well without giving all the secrets away. This book will get any level of fly fisher on there way to learning and fishing the water the runs thru the high peaks. Read this book then go north in NY, be safe and enjoy this fine river. Please catch and release.

this story really borrows too much from the Alien movies. Humans infected with the DNA of alien life forms, and theyare doomed from the moment that they become infected. The X-Men should have just destroyed them and that would be the end of it. Instead we are treated toanother X-Men story which is just as bad as the Onslaught saga, if not worse then it.

I just got the Claremont/Silvestri/Ostrander/Hitch Brood Trade paperback.

CLaremont's is a good 3 issue arc and I can see how it both gives info on the story as well as boosts the sales for the ostrander/hitch 2 part brood issues/stories inside.

Ostrander is a good writer, i had his whole run on the Suicide Squad (where he got saddled with a bad artists) but though he has enthusiasm for the X-Men and a nice twist/new addition to the Brood mythos---the story lacks a bit in the characterization of the X-Men. And also in the inventiveness in their fight against the Brood.

You would think with Cyclops and Storm on the team there would've been some more original teamwork than "CHARGE!".

The story itself was good as a quandry of what to do but I felt that the Brood were beat not too easily but without the X-Men really putting their backs into it. The nice thing about a Claremont X-Men fight is that it's dog dirty and spreads out a bit and strategy is involved having that in the first part of the trade kinda upstaged the second part---it would've been nice if the first meeting with them was included as well. Especially with Tigra joining the X-Men and the [demise] of Colossus and then the space fight. I would've paid some more for the complete Brood arc to be included. Also the New X-Men arc with Ghost Rider was cool too, should've been added.

This story is a link for several story lines. It shows Madiline Pryor's meeting with demon kind, Wolverine's not so slow slip into the animal, and brood, brood, brood! There is a lot of history given on this annoying species.

The truly excellent part of this story, however, is the fight for morality. Should the x-men just slaughter the brood without mercy? Or should they explore the distant posibility that the people the Brood have taken can be saved? Even if it's possible to save the hosts, do they have the right to risk the world while trying to save them knowing that a fertile queen could infect everyone?

This book is well worth reading!!