This is another one of the books that gives a heads up to a college kid about to enter the corporate world. It works you through a bunch of exercises to see which career you would like, as if you had a choice between careers in the modern job market and every career leads to an executive track. This sets the prospective college kids' expectations too high, misses on the relevant advice of getting internships before graduating, and is useless to anyone who knows what they want to do, anyone out of college a few years, and anybody fresh out of college looking for a career grade salaried position for anything over six months, they are liable to hrow this book down in disguist!

I wasn't sure what to expect when I found this book, and it offered no pleasant surprises. It is a collection of mostly dull, tedious, and repetitive essays. There is very little real meat here, just pages and pages of nice writing and many of the same points repeated. This is certainly not worth reading even for the occasional interesting parts.

This book takes what many would consider a mid level drug dealer and the search for him across the world - hence the "Marco Polo" tag. Well the villain here is not that bad so it is hard to get excited about the chase. He is no choirboy to be sure, but he is not a Pablo Escobar either. The detail of the police tactics used is interesting. The disappointing thing to me was the detail of how disjointed law enforcement is in the western world, nobody wants to work with any other countries? The book is ok and you can probably guess what happens in the end. If you are interested in this type of story, Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden is far better and more up to date.

Maybe it would have been clever if the author wasn't just cranking out reasons for hating every brand-name school in thr country. I don't think throwing in six top-ten lists should count as 60 individual reasons - that's cheating. Too many dumb blonde jokes in there.

You are probably like me, thinking that you would never need a general reference book on the Internet. You've been around from the start, before there was even elm, and you know your way around a Unix prompt. But really, how long has it been since you had to use elm and the vi editor? Now that you've got Eudora to handle your email, and you've been following each successive release of Netscape Navigator to play with JAVA and VRML, chances are that it's been a few years since you had to stare at a % and type a command. I know because I've been there--my company sent me to Santa Fe, New Mexico for two weeks on a job assignment and I was adrift without my PPP connection. I found Zuma's Electronic Cafe, an Internet cafe (a place where you can rent time on a computer with an Internet connection), but to check my mail at my home system I was forced to rely on telnet. I remembered how to get connected, and I remembered how to run elm, but as soon as I went to reply to a message and got thrown into a character based editor, I had to admit that I was stumped. Was it CTRL-C to exit, or the ESC key?

That's where a book like Paul E. Hoffman's The Internet Instant Reference: Third Edition [1] can come in handy. Hoffman covers those little known commands for the remaining popular character-based software for dealing with the Internet, programs like ee, elm, ftp, lynx, nn, rn, tin, and vi, along with a brief history of the creation of the Internet, the bodies that "govern" it, and coverage of every major Internet focus. While a lot of this will be unnecessary for long-time users, newcomers could benefit greatly from having a single reference source to check for some of the more esoteric aspects of the system.

The Internet Instant Reference is thoroughly researched. Hoffman even surprised me with some of the "governing body" information (I had not known that there as a "Internet Monthly Report" that covered the discussion of standards and forecasts for Internet growth, security, and stability). And, like any great reference work, it is as easy to read for the beginning user as it provides needed information for the experienced.

There's likely to come a time when a book like this will be unnecessary, given the trend on the Internet to more graphic-based programs that have help for users built-in to the applications themselves. Until that time, however, The Internet Instant Reference can help rescue from the forgotten terrors of the Unix prompt.

Overall it is a well-organized book. It gives a basic understanding of the practical error-correcting codes and the mathatical principles that they rely on. It answers question like how digital information are transfer. My only reservation to totally recommending this book is the price. It is very expensive probably due to the volume they are able to sell. It is a book for senior undergraduate or possibly first year grad school so you won't see it as often as your 1st year Calculus Text. I also had a difficult time locating this book because the publisher print in low volume. So if you must buy this book, buy it early.

Table of Contents:

Introduction and Fundamentals, Finite Fields, Linear Codes, Some Special Linear Codes, Cyclic Codes, BCH Codes and Bounds for Cyclic Codes, Error Correction Techniques and Digital Audio Recording.

This book could have its' title changed to "An Introduction to Dimensional Instruments". It deals mainly with dimensional tools and has very little information about calibration. I bought this book for the calibration information and found nothing of use. This would be an excellent title for someone who wanted to know the tools used in a dimensional lab, and information they report.

Eventhough the introduction chapter of the book looks very promising, because it refers to some of the construction industry difficults/needs in achivieng consistent quality and customer satisfaction; when you read the contents there is no practical examples of "how to do it/implement it" in this sector. In general, it is another good interpretation of the ISO 9000 standars, it explains what do the requirements means and the basic implementation steps, but if you already know the standars and you are looking for help in the implementation process at a CONSTRUCTION company...this is too basic and it would hardly help to "land" the standar at your company. Also, for someone who is not familiar with the ISO 9000 group of standars, the book is difficult to follow, because it mix different standars requirements (ISO 9004-1,ISO 9004-2) instead of focusing in the basic requirements (then it would be ISO 9001) you need to implement a quality assurance system and then the other requirements you would need (i.e. ISO 9004) to improve your quality assurance system.

Im sorry to tell that the book has no continuity in its examples, makin reference to programs that doesnt even exist in the cd rom, it just cover the must important subjects in a superficial way, leaving the user on his own most of times. Some of the cd rom examples doesnt work at all... I cant recomend this book, is just a lost of time and money.

When I set out to get a book covering the People's War in Nepal, I quickly found that since the initiation of the war is only six years old and media sources have been finding it unimportant to American audiences, there wasn't much analytical literature on the subject. After finding plenty of different sources about the war online but no leads on books, I went to Amazon.com and found a book called Kew, The Nepal Maoist strain by Paul Ryder Ryan. It was the only book I could find that even mentioned the subject, so I ordered it from Amazon and waited. When I read through the book I found to my dismay that instead of a reliable information source it was instead a cheesy spy novel. I read the whole thing anyway just to get a sense of background. The novel is written in a style sometimes referred to as "faction," where the plot is constructed out of historical events and newspaper clippings but the notable events are entirely fabricated. The story starts out with a good deal of background about Nepal, and gives insight into why they might be fighting. The main character is an American woman who is fighting on the side of the rebels. Her father and brother come looking for her along with some CIA agents. Unfortunately, the connection to any basis in reality goes out the window when the author basically insinuates that Prachanda is Corrupt and is sleeping with all his female cadres. He also conjectures that the Chinese are supplying the rebels with weapons in exchange for transporting bio-weapons to the United States. This is information that contradicted everything I found in my other research. One thing to note was it includes the Revolutionary Worker's interview with Com. Prachanda in its entirety without giving credit to the reporter. It also has a photo of a Nepalese revolutionary taken by the Onesto on the cover. I contacted the RW about this and they were thankful for the information.
It is depresing that in such a promising book the author would settle for the generic anti-communist pro-american line, The ending is reeks of a Deus Ex. Suddenly, and without any explanation communism is a failed ideology and every one in the book simply understands this without question. To observe a similar trend watch Enemy at the Gates. It is such an outlandish thing to do to paint communist characters in a posative light in such works of fiction that every character we are supposed to like, already understands along with us that communism is wrong. What a waste.