I had an idea for a novel with the title "Chameleon" and we I saw this one by Diehl I thought it could interest me. The author has done his homework judging by his detailed description of weapons used by assasins, ocean oil rigs, Japanese culture and political events from the Vietnam era. Yet the novel failed to amaze me because is nothing more than one detail description after another of either events or situations that happened before, and so, only true spy novel fans will be able to digest- without a stomachache- the plot and development in this novel. I believe that just like there are rules for writing, Mr. Diehl should realize that there are things that just don't work on paper like the scene where a briefcase with a hidden gun fires several rounds into a bad guy- we can't hear the shot, nor can we see the reaction of those in the room, and none of us knows how it sounds when a skull is hit by bullets-plus don't you think that the kidnappers would have seized the briefcase at the entrance?
Diehl goes into detailed explanations describing 2 characters only to have them die after a brief romantic encounter and we wonder why. I couldn't relate to anyone in this novel and some of the procedures that the spies/assassins used seemed from old movies, like when Spettro (Ghost) knocks in the door and asks the contact for a light and the ciggarette shows S.P.E.T.T.R.O. on it's side as he takes a puff. One would think that being in the spy/killer-for-hire business you'd know better than to open your door to a stranger and then stand so close to him.
The motives of some of the characters seem irrational and disorganized. Then the author goes on and on explaining the background of a former officer, and talks about things that happened so long ago that even Baby boomers will go "huh?". Unless you're a historian you won't know what his talking about. This style of writing probably was a hit back in the sixties but it sounds dated now. Less detail and more momentum would have saved this book.

I find most of Diehl's entertaining and riveting. Chameleon is no exception. Diehl has a fascination with disguise techniques used by experts. In "The Hunt" aka "27", he uses the theme well. In "Primal Fear", he does not use physical changes through makeup and artifacts, but still bases the entire book on the deception of a brilliant, but evil man.

I found this book to be a good read and while not a classic, it was very entertaining.

My second favorite next to Thai Horse. My review on Thai Horse is shown on the posting.

Kurtz coined the word "eupraxophy" to distinguish Secular Humanism from belief systems usually considered "religions." Eupraxophy accepts the best ethical principles of historical philosophies and religions, but disentangles them from the superstitions of theism (e.g., Christianity), while combining them with the pursuit of rigorous philosophical and scientific inquiry, which is missing in Eastern ethical systems like Confucianism and Buddhism.

Critics have complained that "eupraxophy" is hard to pronounce, and in his later writings Kurtz has been spelling it with an extra "s," as in "eupraxsophy." But I don't see why its pronounciation with the original spelling is any harder than pronouncing "saxophone." This book is a significant contribution to our understanding and classification of worldviews, though it could benefit from a discussion of more recent eupraxophies like Objectivism and Transhumanism.

You think this book is harsh on theists? Attend a conference where Kurtz is speaking. I guarantee you'll find Eupraxophy a pleasant and considerate view against theism! Kurtz tends to verge on believer -- believing there is no god, instead of simply not believing in one. This is a thin line, but many non-theists find themselves stepping over it inadvertently. This book is pretty centered and deals more in line with reasonable assumptions, though not exactly. There is a good deal of philosophical and religious history that I found quite interesting. Kurtz and I are like-minded when he avoids absolutism, but he can be very ornery sometimes. Theists beware: you will probably either not understand these concepts, or just get really, really angry.

Living Without Religion is a book that sincerely made me look at a lot of misbeliefs I was raised to believe as a child. A lot of people think that if human beings do not believe in some phantom deity to keep us in line, society will drift into anarchy and chaos. This simply is not true (Look at Western Europe & Australia today!). You really can live a great life without religion,Which many people do, and Paul Kurtz explains exactly how to do so.

This is the worst networking book I have ever read. There is nothing worthwhile in the book. In fact the authors best advice is to go and take the Novell certified courses. If I had the time to do that I wouldn't have bought the book!

I'm amazed at the glowing reviews I've read on this page. This book was a complete waste of my time. It offers no test preparation whatsoever, so prospective CNEs should shop elsewhere. The first 8 chapters of the book are space-wasting drivel that have nothing to do with learning this OS or preparing for these tests. The chapters that claim to cover specific tests instead seem to cover the more obscure facets of NetWare. I have passed 4 of the 6 tests needed to become a CNE and I have done so without any assistance from this book. I suggest people read the CNE Study Guide for NetWare 5 by David James Clarke which is admittedly very corny and reads like an advertisement for Novell at times but is still packed with way more usable information than this book has. This book was a big disappointment.

The only thing in computer that remains constant is the fact that nothing remains constant. Novell's latest NetWare 5 is the perfect example. The changes for this operating system show how everyone is getting smarter and passing the certification exams get harder. Where do you turn for help?

John Paul Mueller has put together a book that is called All-In-One and the name says it all. This book covers the Netware 5 CNA and CNE objectives with clarity, detail and subject knowledge like no other book on the market today.

In over 850 pages you'll also get information on Netware 3 and Netware 4 test objectives. Mueller makes easy work of passing and you'll find more information packed into the pages, giving one of the most complete editions going today.

Included is a cd-rom with study questions and fun test that I really enjoyed. Also there is "jeopardy" style game without Alex, this makes the learning process easier and more books should be using this method of training. For those needing to pass and those interested in the subject this is your book.

am I supposed to do with a fony Tarot application. I toatlly agree with the previous reviews. TO much hassel. I am getting into some flash application development, for which I got the taste after working my way through Friends of Ed's Dynamic Content Studion, which, by the way, is an EXCELLENT book....

but this....c'mon

As Flash might finally emerge from experimental eye-catching gimmick to become the next generation front end for high commercial, dynamic web applications, this book really sets the wrong tone (explaining more about Tarot than XML does not match the book's title, right?).

Although writing the first four chapters must have been fun for the authors - for us, the readers, its just painful. Long and rather vague, XML is described from many angles without getting on a level where you really would know where to start in a practical sense. So when you really have to know about XML, or just need some reference, this book is most probably not for you.

Chapter 5, trying to compensate for the lengthy introduction, finally presents the XML object in warp speed. (If you are new to the subject, statements like "it would be so much easier if objects could be made directly from objects instead of having to remember its class" are more confusing than helpful, reflect bad style and do not really sell the idea behind object oriented programming).

Chapters 6 to 10 are not that bad when showing how XML shuffles the tarot cards. Still it might be too cloudy for beginners as the authors just lack focus.

The Rest of the book (XML Sockets, Perl Scripting, mySQL, PHP) gives you some ideas for the next books to buy, but definitively offer nothing you can start to do real business with.

In a nutshell: When having read this book you will know what XML is on a high level and how you deal with it once it sits within your flash movie. But this is not what XML was primarily made for.
When having read this book you still will not have much of a clue from where you will get interesting, business relevant XML data and how to make your flash application talk to the professional world of high end, high paid real world applications. Neither is there much help about dealing with end to end responsibilities. (test, debug, tune end to end transactions from Flash front-end, via web- and application servers down to databases and vice versa).

For my taste this book still remains with the classic, design oriented flash programmer rather than to finally extend Flash's scope into the realm of serious application development. The book's focus is ways too much on how XML is used internally within flash, rather than to make XML do what it was designed for: standardized communication across new and existing systems and new (web) services. Otherwise you might really ask yourself, what all the fuzz about XML really is.

As I have already said: do not polish your Porsch in your garage, take it out , learn to drive and experience the real world!

last week I bought the book , and till now it looks SO gerat

Finebum is seriously misdirecting his aggression here. While all the world (or at least some of Alabama) cherishes his lovable smirk, he's crying on the inside, and it's not over UGA (though the Dawgs beat both Bama teams on their campuses this year). No, it's over the nasty little bald man he sees smirking back at him every morning while he's brushing his toothies. Imagine how tough it'd be to begin every day of your life with a humbling experience like that.

He comes closer to catharsis in his sequel "I Hate Georgia Tech!", as he must see more than a glimmer of himself amongst the nerds.

Too bad there's not a zero stars rating, because this book irredeemably STINKS. This book is only good for orange rednecks, gator trash, or pesky Tech geeks. It's not even good enough to give as a gag gift. It ought to be printed on recycled paper because I wouldn't chop down the scraggliest, ugliest tree in the world to make a single page for this waste of space.

No planes are taking off! This is a great book for anyone who has all their teeth and hates Georgia. It isn't good for the less intelluctual people (Georgia fans) Because they probably can't read it,if they could they would love it.

As you read this review, please know that I am scientifically trained (electrical engineer with much quantum machanics under his belt) and theologically trained (M.Div. from seminary). This book is but one from a group of so-called creation-scientists. As a minister/scientist, I have to say this book, and others like it, are really, really bad science and bad theology. I believe that science and theology must go together - and that they very well do together in a beautiful and meaningful way. But to do that, one has to have a mature enough faith to realize that the Bible is not a record of scientific fact - the Bible is TRUTH, but not FACT, and there's a big difference between the two. This book is unimaginably wrong. The author attempts to show us that the Earth is actually less than 10,000 years old. This wouldn't be so bad, but the author is also a professor (of psychology) who teaches at an instution of higher learning (Wichita State University at the time he wrote this book). This is simply appalling - he has to go through some absolutely bizarre and circuitous routes to "prove" his point. These are scientific shennanigans that any junior high science student would be able to pick up on as just plain wrong. I am saddened that Christians are out there who are so literally married to the idea that the earth (and the universe) can't be more than about 5,700 years old that they re-arrange and re-number scientifically valid data to "prove" their point. There is absolutely nothing theologically wrong with admitting that the earth is billions of years old, and that the universe is even older than that. Please stop trying to force science to fit some misinterpreted Biblical claim (a claim which the Bible doesn't even make, which anyone who reads the Bible closely will realize). There is some truly valid science and theology being done, especially from the Center for Theology and Natural Science at the Pacific School of Religion. If you want theological science, go there - their scientists are able to see and interpret scientific data in the way that it must be interpreted, and are not clouded by forcing data to fit a Biblical model which doesn't even exist to begin with.

Read this book if you are interested in what the creation-scientists are doing. But don't read it becuase you are looking for scientific method and process. It ain't that at all. This book serves only to further make Christians look like a bunch of blind, dogmatic, uncreative charlatans to their non-Christian peers.

This books discusses scientific issues; moon dust, the speed of light, etc., in layman's terms, which expose evidence pointing t a young planet. It also cites the evolutionary Counter-Arguments. Very readable. Inserts one scripture verse in the introduction, but book nothing of a 'religious' book, it is purely science and reason.

This book is one of the best books I have read in my life. I just read this book a couple of months ago, and I think it was great. Mr. Ackerman points out the flaws in the evolution theory and explains everything very clearly. I recommend Christians to read and to give this book away to unsaved family and friends as a witnessing tool.

This book does not have any real-world examples. The specifications mentioned in this book are also dated. The content in this book is a little dated. For a current book on Web Services check out Java Web Services Architecture published by Morgan Kaufman.

This book has a random collection of topics. I cannot believe a publisher actually published it. It discusses DTDs and XSLTs in great detail while completely ignoring XML Schemas and SOAP basics. I absolutely decided to return the book when I found a section discussing viruses - specifically the ILOVEYOU virus. If Amazon provided a way to give this a negative rating, I would gladly do so.

I bought this book on high hopes as it is from Deitel and Deitel. But I am not impressed...and I am wondering hou could they name it as for "experience programmers". I would say, this book is for Novice programmers.

The first 6 chapters are very very XML basics not related to Web services. And the rest of chapters shows up with a simple example with no complexity and surprisingly the code did'nt work with latest JWSDP download from sun site. It looks like the code needs an update.

Chapter 12 to 14 does not address any practical reality and the case studies Chapter 14-16 are not well illustrated and the code did'nt work for me.

Yes, writing a global history is an impossible task. However, there are varying degrees to which you can succeed. David Reynolds comes up short with his book titled "One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945".

Reynolds' main theme is that, while advances in telecommunications have made communication easier and faster to all points of the globe, the world is not converging into a monocultural monster. Reynolds' believes quite the opposite is happening. Mass communication and increased education have aided the fragmentation of empires like the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and France. The western European withdrawal from empire and the collapse of totalitarian regimes in eastern Europe have created many new states and allowed the rising consciousness of formerly suppressed ethnic identities.

Reynolds supports his thesis well but, aside from a few disgruntled French farmers, anyone with the requisite intelligence to even read a book such as this already knows it. Reynolds portrays his theme as if it were reinventing contemporary conceptions of the world when in fact all he is doing is reinforcing what any educated person already knows.

Regarding the actual history that Reynolds writes, he does well up until about 1980. The closer he gets to the year 2000, the more Reynolds gets wrong. He seems to have a particularly difficult time explaining the American scene since roughly the Ford administration. Two egregious mistakes he makes are blaming America's deficits on the Reagan tax cuts and claiming that Clinton was impeached for his sexual improprieties. What caused the large deficits of the 1980s was not Reagan's tax cuts but his inability to reign in (or his indifference to) excessive Congressional spending. Furthermore, Bill Clinton was impeached for having committed perjury and suborning others to do so too. I doubt the leaders of the impeachment push would have gone after Clinton for infidelity considering most of them were guilty of that same character flaw thereby making themselves obvious targets of public ridicule.

At least Reynolds does acknowledge that his interpretation is open to discussion. He has the sense to know that any history of such a recent period will not be definitively written for some years to come and it likely won't be beholden to this one.

Admirable in its goal and ambitious in its scope, David Reynolds' One World Divisible offers a truly global history of world events since 1945. Overall, it is a decent summary of the period (if 700 pages can be termed a summary) and could easily and confidently be used as a textbook for almost any modern history course, either as the central text or as a complement (I read it in class focusing on the Cold War). It touches on events in all parts of the world and also on social, economic, political, cultural, and technological trends. Reynolds does a particularly good job of chronicling the years of revolution 1989-1991, when so much was happening in so many different places.

However, for all its utility and detail, Reynolds' political opinions appear far too often--enough that it detracts from the book. Certain words and phrases (such as family values) receive the scornful, mocking quotation marks that academics often use. The tobacco industry is attacked. The American gun lobby is also criticized, and their positions result from a "selective reading of the Second Amendment." The Reagan administration, among other things, is termed "fanatically antigreen." "Many" senior Republicans who sought to impeach Clinton were also adulterers. Samuel Huntington is reduced to an opponent of multiculturalism. Margaret Thatcher responded to the Falklands crisis not only with resolution but also "relish." Vietnam protesters were "dignified."

I am also not quite convinced that his linking of various fundamentalisms (the American Christian Right with Islamic fundamentalists, for example) is appropriate or accurate. And his paean to series editor Paul Kennedy was a bit overdone. Beyond the political bias and some minor flaws of analysis, the book functions fairly well at least as a timeline and also as a generally cohesive picture of the past 50 years.

It is hard to believe but this breakthrough is a tangible reality. Full of in-deapth research, it covers a wide range of fledging issues in a humourous style. I enjoyed reading it.

for the promising title, I bought the book immediately after the release. I hoped to find much about the web technologies, esp. JSP applications, but found only 50 pages telling the same thing with the help files. Again waiting for another release of JDeveloper for a new book.. I think the book is specially written for the Developer users for the migration, it has far missing topics..

The flow of topics is not so good. Chapter 2 was out of place. Choice of examples was also not good. It does not Cover EJB or CORBA objects only covers BC4J. Hands on trials will allow you to deploy and test specific examples, but you dont gain enough knowledge from the experiment to be comfortable with JDeveloper.

The book provides a good overview of the JDeveloper product including some of the future direction. It is primarilly made up of exercises which walk you through using the most important feature of JDeveloper, the BC4J wizards. The main reason for using JDeveloper is as an Oracle database web application tool and this introduces the overall concepts. While the book is pretty basic on coverage of web techniques (book on JDeveloper not web), it still covers many concepts through the exercises.

It is SIGNIFICANTLY better than last JDeveloper book which was useless.