This is a lovely book, but it's a children's book: I bet the publishers simply wanted to widen the possible market by playing down that aspect. I understand that Louis de Bernieres is more than halfway through his next "grown-up" novel and has just been having some interim fun with Red Dog. Why not? I certainly enjoyed reading it and appreciated the stylish drawings. It's an elegant package.

This book is brilliant. I read it for our regular book discussion group and think it is the best book I have read for a long time.

Red Dog is a great character, and is just how you imagine a great dog should be. The stories are amazing, and make you want a dog just like him.

It is sad in parts, but that shows how good the book is; that it makes you cry as well as laugh.

I wish Louis de Bernieres had written more like this. I will just have to settle for reading Red Dog again.....and again.....and again!!!...

Red Dog by Louis de Bernieres is an absolute gem. I have come to the conclusion that in the big picture of our existence as humans the only thing that means anything is our capacity to love and how we treat each other. We are living in a difficult time of unspeakable human cruelty and greed. This book reminds me that not all humans are horrible, some actually "get it" and that we are indeed lucky when we can share our lives with dogs and other animals. They teach goodness by example, something we humans should take more notice of. I recommend this book highly; keep a box of tissues nearby.

The information inside the Robot Wars Technical Manual is superb. It's got the background of each house bot as well an imaginary story about each one.
BUT and it's a big but, the book is made so poorly that its pages are falling out after only a few days. Every time we open the book the spine splits and a page comes loose. We've had to stick it all back together with tape. We expect better quality for this price.

This is a must have for the fan of the Robot Wars tv show or one who wants to build a robot for competition. Lots of great ideas and alot of photos.

I haven't read this book, infact I'm entering this contest so I could get the money to buy this book. But a friend who has read this book stats this is a very good book and if you want to build a robot this could really help. I took his advice becuase he never let me down before. I fliped through the pages and their is a some diagrams to help you out if your a picture person. This is really my friend rating this book 5 stars. But as I hear it is a very good book.

This is a wonderfully inventive book about numbers for children -- but you'll be disappointed if you buy it as your child's FIRST numbers book.

The book consists of number exercises that are just too sophisticated for a typical pre-schooler. My three-year-old loves the book but is interested in the colorful illustrations and the idea of numbers, not the actual questions that the book poses. He just isn't ready for its brain teasers that require the child to scrutinize the page for clues to the answers!

Your child may find the book charming because it features the same adorable rabbits in Alan Baker's series, but don't expect too much interaction early on.

My 2 1/2 year old loves this book. We have many other number books that she likes, but this book is her favorite. She knew how to count before I bought this book and now she really owns the concept of counting things out. The questions and concepts in this book are wonderful and creative. It is a challenging book. She has learned a lot from it. I highly recommend this book for toddlers who like to count and be challenged.

Benjamin's Balloon by Alan Baker is a children's book about a hamster who blows up a balloon which carries him away. He flies into snow and finds himself far away from home. After failing to fly home in an airplane he makes out of snow, he decides to make something else. The large, detailed illustrations put the reader close enough to the action to be a part of Benjamin's adventure. With the illustrations, the reader not only becomes best friends with a hamster with glasses, but also does everything from flying away with the balloon to landing in the snow as a wet hairball. This is a fun and humorous book for all ages.

This book is a popular history about the gladiatorial games in ancient Rome. As such, it has no footnotes and limited sources. Still, Baker does a pretty good job of giving a concise account of this fascinating aspect of ancient history. Various chapters cover such things as different types of gladiators, emperors who fought in the arena, and the Spartacus slave revolt. The book ends with an examination of why the gladiatorial games ended (Christianity, in a nutshell). The highpoint of the book is a fictional account of a day at the games under the emperor Commodus. Did this guy write the screenplay to the movie Gladiator? I don't think so, but he is obviously influenced by that film.

What should become apparent as this book unfolds is the changing nature of the games and spectacles. The munera, or gladiatorial contests, originally began as a funeral ritual. During the Republic, the religious implications of these contests increasingly became politicized. Temporary theaters were constructed so people could recline and watch. The sponsors of these contests were increasingly magistrates and others who wanted to curry favor with the masses. The number of fighters also increased as the years went by. It was with the installation of Augustus that the games became codified in political terms. Augustus passed legislation concerning seating in the arena and took over many of the aspects concerning the games. Menageries holding animals used for exhibitions and executions were owned by the emperors, as were the gladiatorial schools housing the fighters. Other officials were banned for the most part from sponsoring games, although provincials were allowed to do so under strict supervision from Rome. Those officials who were allowed to hold games were held to strict limits so as not to upstage the emperor. Marcus Aurelius went so far as to construct a price schedule for the games. Officials could hold games, but the money amounts required were way below what the emperor could spend. This allowed the emperors to keep a tight check on potential rivals to the throne.

Even with this concern over the games, it is highly unlikely anyone but the emperor could have afforded the kind of spectacles some of the rulers put on. Some emperors staged enormous recreations of naval battles on artificial lakes involving thousands of fighters. Not only was this highly entertaining, the battles provided a political basis for imperial rule. Augustus, for instance, came to power after the battle at Actium. Recreations of these sorts of battles reinforced his power. The gladiatorial games also accomplished this; gladiators fought in the dress of conquered peoples. This showed the subservience of these peoples to the power of Rome.

Baker has written an entertaining, if somewhat melodramatic account of the games. Problems emerge when sensationalism is dwelled upon. The accounts of Caligula are a good example. Baker borrows heavily from Suetonius in this section. While most of the stories of Caligula's depravity are entertaining, many have nothing to do with the arena. Also, Suetonius wrote his accounts under the auspices of Hadrian, some time after Caligula's rule. It may have been in the interests of the time to paint these earlier emperors in a harsh light. Keep these things in mind while reading the book. Overall, Baker does a good job and the book is entertaining.

This is an outstanding tome about the bloody combats known as gladiatoral games. Far from being comprised of just paired male combatants that most people think, the author shows that the games often had groups of men fighting against other groups, women fighting against dwarves, animals fighting against animals, men fighting against animals, etc. Detailed is the fact that even though gladiators were considered lowest of the low by Rome's citizenry, they were schizophrenically idolized by Rome's men and women to a point that freeborn men sometimes voluntarily joined the gladiator ranks and freeborn women would leave much wealth in order to run away with the fighters. Although the book would be better if it was footnoted, this can be overlooked because of the reading quality.

For a good read on the savagery that was the gladiatoral arena, this book is one to get. Readers, though, should be advised that some of the imagery conjured up is quite harsh.

For a readable book with no footnotes, Baker's THE GLADIATOR is surprisingly detailed. Pretty much everything you could want to know about the Roman gladiators - who they were, why they fought, how they were perceived by others, what kinds of weapons and fighting styles they used, what kinds of elaborate setups they fought in, where the whole practice came from and how it developed - is contained within this book, as well as a little more information than you probably wanted to know about Roman public executions. The finale of THE GLADIATOR is a horrifying fictional chapter describing what a typical day at the Roman games might have been like - definitely not for the faint-hearted, but it makes one very happy to be living in better times.

"The Knight" traces the evolution of an institution that played a key role in the formation of Western culture. Knights evolved from the early mounted warriors of which Charlemagne's cavalry was the archetype. They were powerful factors in the internecine struggles between European kingdoms as well as in the great Crusades. The influence of knights as members of an aristocratic elite persisted into recent history. The fact that West Point training was an expected activity of aristocratic men in the antebellum US South speaks to the widespread influence of knighthood.
Baker's accounts are imminently readable although they are not "searing". One of the most arresting aspects of the book is the contemporary account of jousts and tournaments. The casual descriptions of encounters that often were blood curdling speak to a very different mindset regarding deadly games during medieval times. Baker covers the first crusade, which shows the merciless treatment of "infidels" by Christian warriors. Baker's discussion of the monk knights, the Templars and the Hospitallars, provides a marvelous opportunity to explore the evolution of the pacifist religion of St. Paul into the militant movement of Pope Urban II. Unfortunately, the book is too short to explore this fascinating twist in history that remains with us to the present. "The Knight" leans toward the style and organization of a traditional academic treatise rather than the more gripping "popular histories". Despite these limitations, the book is a good overview for anyone wanting to learn something of the evolution of modern warriors.

By Bill Marsano. In a time of J-DAMS, MOABs and other expressions of remote-control super-power warfare, the notion of the medieval knight will seem quaint at best to many readers. On the other hand, the knight the decisive weapon on the battlefields of his time. Through generations of movies, comic books and fairy tale the knight has come down to us as a purely romantic figure. Alan Baker is here with this small book to rescue these great warriors from their bubblegum image.

This is a brief book, really no more than an essay for the entry-level history student, but enjoyable and informative nonetheless. Bakers gives us a clear-eyed view of how knights developed into an elite warrior class; how they trained and were armed; how they staged elaborate mock-combats--just as the Romans did in the Colosseum--to keep their skills sharp and their reputations high. For a taste of real warfare, Baker takes us through a well-organized history of the First Crusade.

This book is designed to whet your appetite, not satisfy it. It does the job well: Most readers will, I think, be eager to go deeper into the day of old when knights were bold.--Bill Marsano is a long-time enthusiast of military affairs.

This is the worst java book I've ever read. The book is unorganized and the content is not suitable for the beginner at all.

The companion CD-ROM is useless.

If the authors would like to publish the new version for JDK 1.2, there will be a lot of works they need to get accomplished.

Simple words from me.... Don't buy this book.

Covers alot of fancy staff but has a great lack of contents. It seems like the author has rushed through the book just to fill it out with the Java 1.1 features and forgot to describe the import basics behind the language. There's now way you're gonna be a Java guru by reading this book!

It is very thorough. Almost everything important about java is in there including JDBC, JNI, Java Beans, Servlets, security management, even the specification of the virtual machine and most is explained well understandble. It is the best java book I ever saw!