Meyer continues his version of Sherlock Holmes with a tale of Holmes' lost years after the "Moriarty Problem." Holmes becomes a violinist for the Paris Opera and through the intervention of Irene Adler, becomes involved in the strange case of the "opera ghost." There are many problems with this novel. Watson's presence is sorely missed and efforts to replace his role with characters from the opera are unsuccessful. Irene Adler's inclusion is an uneccessary distraction and is used soley to comment on Holmes' sexual repression. The case itself is so familiar to the reader that only the inclusion of Holmes changes the basic story, thus there are no surprises.(who doesn't know the basics of Laroux's Phantom?) This was a very disappointing sequel to Meyer's other Holmes' novels and wasn't owrth the wait.

I liked this book because it combined my two favourite characters: the phantom of the opera (Erik) and Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock stayed the remarkable genius that he is(even though he blundered miserbly sometimes-but,hey,YOU try to do better). But I was really disappointed with the treatment of Erik. Meyer calls him 'the creature' and makes him more insane than even in the original book! Personally, I the most appealling thing about Erik is that he IS a sympathetic character hopelessly in love with Christine Daae. This is why I 'liked' the Canary Trainer, not 'loved' it. (P.S.-Having Gaston Leroux as the music instucter was a creative touch)

But it's not as bad as all that. Nevertheless if you want to read Meyer's Holmes pastiches I'd recommend starting with the other two (_The Seven Per Cent Solution_ and _The West End Horror_). Meyer at his best is splendid.

If you do so, then be sure to ignore the misinformation in the Kirkus Reviews excerpt above. _The West End Horror_ has nothing to do with Jack the Ripper; it concerns a pair of grisly murders that take place in London's theater district. I assume the reviewer is thinking of Edward Hanna's _The Whitechapel Horrors_.

I had high hopes for this book that were quickly dashed by a number of glaring problems. Nick Eberstadt is a demographer/economist and he analyzes North Korea solely in these terms. If he were to write a book about North Korean economics, he would probably be capable of writing a masterpiece. As it is, he steps out of his well-troden field and attempts to predict the future of an entire country from a demographic/economic perspective. The hubris of Eberstadt's work is that he ventures to write about things he knows little to nothing about. ...In this book, Eberstadt simplifies North Korea into a one-sided demon bristing with weaponry and a declared enemy of the free world. While this may be true, it is difficult to take him seriously since he analyzes North Korea wholly from the outside. Curiously missing from his book is a history of the internal developments that allowed North Korea to survive even when the Communist Bloc states fell like dominoes in the 1980s.

korean peninsula was politically partitioned in 1950's korean war. korean war is often seen as democracy vs. communism, yet it is more correct to say christianity vs. non-christianity. us millitary was sent to korean peninsula to convert korean peninsula to christianity peninsula. all other wars that us millitary was involved in were from amreicans' desire to realize christianity world.

as long as christianity and related religions exist tragedies never end.

North Korea is regularly portrayed in the Western media as a lunatic colony running amuck on the world stage. While its strategies and tactics can be (sometimes purposely) baffling, the country is being run by extremely intelligent and very rationale people. However, it is the framework within which the North Korean leadership finds itself constrained in facing the rest of the world that leads to actions and decisions that appear from the outside as being irrational.

Making a great deal of sense of all of this is Nicholas Eberstadt's recently released book, The End of North Korea. Eberstandt is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Research and a visiting fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.

Last month (October 1999) the paperback version of this book appeared in its 175-page format. The original manuscript and charts were completed not quite a year ago so that the perspective is still quite timely. Why this is an important read is because the author skillfully lays out the historical and political context the North Korean leadership is calling the shots. The North Koreans' hidden agendas suddenly become much more visible by Eberstadt's well researched analysis. Actually the North Koreans have been remarkably blunt. The West has done a poor job of listening - more often than not we have just been reacting without recalling prior messages. What Pyongyang is demanding may not be what we wish to hear but they have been clear and consistent.

Upon reading this book, the zigzag patterns of Pyongyang now make a great deal more sense to me. I think any other reader, in government or in business, who is concerned about the current and near-future environment of the Korean peninsula would do well to invest a few hours in reading this well written text.

If you have more than 10 minutes Net experience and say, ooh, 3 minutes of coding html you can skip the first 200 or so pages. If you have a couple of days of Linux under your belt, you'll find that most of the remaining content can be found in the relevant man pages.

If you're about to join the Linux club you should note that the author used the Caldera distro, and he assumes you will too. So don't install RH/SuSE/whatever and expect to find his admin menu! He also assumes you'll have enough knowledge to fill in the gaps where he was obviously getting bored writing the book.

Sysadmin's should not look here.

Also includes one of those completely out of date CDs. Why oh why?

Suck! Yes it was really suck. If you want step by step instructions, you are better off buying other book. The CD-ROM was really really lousy because they have so little driver listing. I have installed RedHat Linux before, and it worked great with all software drivers available in their presented option (I tested this Caldera version because it offered 500MB disk space rather than 2Gbyte like RedHat.) I have all brandname hardware device and yet this Caldera does not have software driver for me to install. Ex: SoundBlaster from Creative Lab, now this is the basic standard sound card. How could this Caldera not support driver for this? see what I mean. So, If you got no name brand, you are in deep yogurt! I don't have money to throw away; so, I am really regretting buying this book. DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK!

The examples in the book regarding SSI do not indicate double quotes " around the commands. If you're not familiar with this (like I wasn't) you'll probably end up banging your head against the wall for weeks trying to figure out why SSI doesn't work.

Our company purchased this book so that we could localize a C# .net project. This book offered very few technical details about important parts of the process.

I found that the author wastes a great deal of space explaining concepts such as "The History of XML" and the basics of localization.

The most glaring omission is the lack of source code for a "functional" globalized application that demonstrates the concepts of satellite assemblies. The lack of source code is a glaring omission on the part of the publisher. In the end, I learned more from the WorldCalc SDK example than I did from this book.

Much of the book rehashes information available in the Visual Studio help documents.

I wish this book would have covered assembly tools such as ildasm. I, also, could not find mention of the all important Assembly Binding Log Viewer (FUSLOGVW.EXE).

This book was rushed to the market by the publisher. Hopefully, the topic will be addressed by another author who has more current information specific to actually working with .NET

I have a bit of background in localizaiton engineering and I also wrote a few .NET apps (definitely not a professional level, though). Still I got lost in this book and my time was wasted.

If you really try hard, you may get something out of this book, but you'll still be annoyed by Chapter 3 "Using Multiple Resource Files in VB 6". I thought I bought a .NET book. The casual writing style may also make you feel that the author is looking down on you.

I also have to say that this book often just lists the info in MSDN (classes, methods, one-by-one) If this book got 1000 pages, it MAY be acceptable (NO, in my opinion), but it got 300 pages and lists VB, C# code, tries to show a "full-fledged resource editor" in VB, C#, unnecessary VB6 info, and the general localization concepts. No room for useful information on .NET localization.

This is probably the only book that explains .Net internationalization/localization. This book MAY be helpful, but I recommend you try and only try the docs that come with .NET SDK and VS.NET.

The "About the Author" page shows the authors is a electrical engineer who knows "VB, C++ and now .NET", but doesn't show he has any experience in localizaiton. It makes perfect sense to me.

I was given this book by my boss because we were about to work on an internationalized application. She wanted us to consider doing it with Visual Studio .Net.

Unfortunately, it it did not work out that way. I agree with the other reviewers that the writing is quite good, its not that. The problem is that there is so very little there. There are too many things that this book simply does not cover. And this is from an expert?

I am now doing a lot of research: in MSDN, websites, newsgroups, and elsewhere. Things that should have been here in this book. I am really disappointed in APress for not making the author do the work here so I would not have to.

Shortly, this is probably most useless computer programming book ever. On the other hand it is a perfect example how to waste 400+ pages without saying anything. Some chapters like multiplayer game programming, explanation of A* or fuzzy logic clearly show that author have no clue about game programming. Regarding Palm OS, there is no single advance topic covered; (Actually they are in the contents summary).
AVOID at all cost !

I should have believed the two readers who rated this book with
2 stars. I'm not sure if they found the same errors that I have
found below but I don't think my debug-ROMs on POSE with all
debug options turned on lied to me.

I bought the book based on its Table of Contents. What a fool
I've been!

I tested the first example Chapter3.prc and it gave the
following error after I tapped any of the launchers :

"Found 3 memory leaks for Chapter3(unknown version) Information

concering the leaks can be found in the log file."

Chapter4.prc ran ok.

Chapter6.prc's animated sheep application ran but again when I
tap any of the application launchers:

"Found 12 memory leaks for Chapter6(unknown version). Information
concerning the leaks can be found in the log file."

Chapter7.prc = "Found 31 memory leaks..."

Chapter8.prc ran but provided no way out. Tapping or pressing
the application launcher and hard buttons can't exit the program.

Chapter9's Elastic.prc & Inelastic.prc = "Found 13 memory leaks..."

Chapter10.prc = "Found 19 memory leaks..."

Chapter12.prc = "Chapter12(unknown version) called SysFatalAlert
with the message "DataMgr.c, Line 3362, Null dbID passed".

The book is hypocrital in the sense that it says to turn ON ALL
debugging options and yet I feel the author turned his OFF when
he developed the applications in the book.

Plus the makefile doesn't work using GCC! I assume the makefile
is specific to one of the proprietary tools he used.

I'll still read this book for the theory but I will definitely
write my own game engine. I can't trust his engine.

Next time, I won't buy books with reviews/ratings split two
ways. I wish I could return this book but I can't since
returning it to Amazon will be a costly excercise on my part.

This book does a good job of focusing on Palm OS game development at the Palm API level. It is true that this stuff can be collected anywhere on the Internet, but that would hold true for any other Palm book. If you think about it, the pending switch to the ARM processors makes many of the down and dirty discussions instantly irrelevant (Dragonball assembly will be emulated on the new platform where API functions have the luxury of being bridged to native ARM code). The author seemed to understand this, and thus filled the book with quite a bit of useful material.

I found his treatment of design to be particularly good. While the library that ships with the book is not perfect, it is extremely well designed and it shows. I found the example code to be a little rough (it lacks the polish of a commercially published title), but the libraries the author writes to drive it are very well written. He explains his design choices in detail and walks programmers through the process. In the end you are left with an understanding of the motivation for these libraries... very good indeed.

The chapters on Physics and AI are particular highlights. The author covers basic physics in a way I have not seen in other books. Instead of describing gimmics (like gravity wells) the author chooses to concentrate on kinematics and forces to actually describe the motion of objects in a game. This is a powerful concept, and one that I have already put to use in my Palm endeavors.

The AI chapter is nice, it describes several pathfinding algorithms and takes a stab at basic behavorial structuring. I found the discussion of "Environmental SI" to be very pointed and informative. This is the type of AI concept that seems absolutely ideal for the Palm platform. The chapter also introduces Fuzzy Set Theory and Fuzzy logic... I'm not sure why the author includes this, as it is not a terribly applicable concept for most Palm games... as best I can guess it is just something that the author finds "cool."

Another interesting thing I noticed about the book is that it has only small source code listings in it. I like this approach. Most game programming books consists of thousands and thousands of lines of source code listings which generally result in me flipping through lots and lots of pages to get to the discussion. While this greatly decreases the size of the book, it increases its utility ten fold. A lot of content is packed into this book... and I think it can benefit programmers of all levels.

If you can't tell, I liked this book. My only real complaint has to do with what the author left out. After reading this book you will have a strong foundation in the realm of Palm OS game programming. If you have previous game programming experience you will be good to go.. the book does a wonderful job of bridging the gap between desktop and handheld game programming. It would have been nice if this book had included a discussion on topics like special FX (particle systems, screen wipes, or blends) or other "cool" game programming tricks. These are useful topics, so if you are a novice game developer I reccomend picking up this book and another general game programming book to help develop these specialized game development skills.

Overall, I think this is a great book and I can't wait to see what the author does next:) The lessons you will learn in library design are worth the price of admission, but I can guarantee you will learn so much more.

Save your money. Don't let its small size fool you into buying it as a pocket guide or portable study guide. There are no stresses, conjugations, declinations, or key phrases. It is totally useless for any kind of translation work, because it leaves out many common words, and doesn't show the various dialects. TOTALLY USELESS!

This dictionary was a severe disappointment. The serbo-croat to english part does not indicate the position of stress in the serbo-croat words, not to mention the different kinds of toned stresses. The english-croat part does contain phonetic transcripts, however, so the book might be of some use to serbs and croats who are studying english. They may consider that the handy size compensates for the rather small vocabulary given.

This is easily the most useful book around - cheap, fits in the pocket and has most of the important words you need. Does exactly what it promises. If you want more, I'm afraid you'll have to fork out almost three times as much for its nearest competitor - or else buy a home in the former Republic (!).

Nothing the average 12yr.old or petshop "expert" doesnt already know. Very very basic stuff.

This book not only touches on the history,care and socialization importance of owning an AmStaff but shows some great pictures of AmStaffs in day to day activities. This book is one that should be used as a beginning tool when deciding if this might be the breed for you and the basics for responsible ownership

This book is basically one in a series, there are many just like it that focus on other breeds, and they all pretty much have the same text and pictures. They only devote a small percentage of the book to the specifics of the breed on the cover, the rest is general information that applies to almost all dogs such as health/dental care, breeding, training et c, all of which is generally useful, but if you want more specific detail and information on the coonhound, you won't find much here.

I was disappointed in this book. I wanted information that educated me on this particular breed's traits. Such as typical traits, behaviors and helpful raising tips. This book mostly contain information about dogs in general.

it is a good book it is entertaining.

This book is horrible. First it focuses on incorporating in Delaware, and gives you most of the necessary forms for that state as well as basic forms 40 other states (no explanation why 9 states were excluded). These forms and instructions are all downloadable from the states' Web sites anyway, so this book is pretty much useless.

The book also promotes the author's company, which charges very high fees for simple incorporating services.

If you need sample bylaws, etc, get them from "Small Business Kit for Dummies," which has much, much more useful information and many other forms you can use. Don't waste your money on this book like I did.

This book indeed concentrates on Delaware, but does offer incorporation procedures and fees for every state in the USA (as far as I could see, anyway). It's entirely adequate, if extremely lacking in the sort of explanatory babble that one might desire from such a book.

If you want to learn more about incorporation and what it means, look elsewhere. If you want a bare-bones incorporation guide that does cover the ground, is up-to-date and points to a company well-known for pioneering low-cost self-help incorporations, then this is a good book, and your money will have not been spent in vain.

The book is very informative and helpful, and gives the reader a good background on what is required to create a corporation. The weakness of the book is that it focuses on creating a corporation in the State of Delaware. And does not warn the reader of this until they begin reading the book. All the forms and information provided relate to creating a corporation in Delaware. If that is the objective of the reader, then this is a very useful book. If one is planning on creating a corporation in another state then this book may not be very useful.

Nicholas Best, Shame on you! I liked the book, except... You did not have the full names (middle names) of the presidents! Now thats weird. VaVoom SoKKo

I bought this book in hopes of learning information about the presidents other than the simple things. It basically is full of greatly detailed pictures, but only has a small paragraph on each president. It's very small to beat that (the book itself). So, If you are looking to find trivia this book is not the right choice. Otherwise, if you want a brief summary of each president, this book is good.

In this book, each president had two pages- 1 with their picture...the other with thier information. The pictures were really great, but the information was brief in content. If you're looking to learn something, this book would not help very much. Most of the text contained is already known by most people. It may be suitable for ten year olds, but for adults, it wouldn't be as interesting because all it contains is pictures and a short paragraph. Although, It would be a great book for kids, it just doesn't go good with "history buffs."