I bought this book because I wanted to learn a little bit more about how teachers could teach various personality types. I'm not a teacher, I'm a parent. I was concerned that my child's personality was at the heart of her apparent behavioral issues in kindergarten.

This book is terrific. It highlighted the various personality types, their needs and patterns in the classroom. More importantly, it armed me with some specific strategies I plan to take to her teacher.

I highly recommend it not just for teachers but for parents looking for insights into how their children learn.

Hats off to Dr. Bradley, whose interpretive, integrative, and deductive abilities are obviously surging, at this early point in his career. Never before have I read anything about De Maistre that pierced so painfully, to the point of seeing his logic as it applies to us all. It made me proud, and ashamed. Compelling.

I love the book! It's very useful and perfect for my situation as a non-experienced PR student. It would be better though if the author published another edition ready because I'd buy it for sure!

i need the book cntain every thing about organic chemistey and broplem and its solvent

This book is an excellent introduction to the parallels between Christianity (and specifically, Catholic Christianity) and the world of Middle Earth. However, I was somewhat saddened by its lack of real depth: it skims over a lot of material in its 6 chapters, but doesn't stop to cover many things in detail.

I especially would have loved to have more parallels drawn between characters in the Silmarillion and Christianity, such as the female Valar Aratar, each of whom bears a trait of the Blessed Virgin Mary: Nienna, Lady of Sorrows; Varda, Queen of the Stars (and therefore Heavens); Yavanna, Queen of the Earth. Such things would have added greatly to my enjoyment of this book, and I think to its value. Also wonderful would have been a chapter on Beren and Lúthien and their descendants Aragorn and Arwen, though as it's rather short - the actual text, excluding foreword and glossaries, is only slightly over 130 pages - this book obviously hasn't the room to attend to everything.

However, its somewhat concise format aside, this book should prove of interest to all Tolkienphiles, as it has some very fascinating quotes from Tolkien and his contemporaries on philosophy, the place of religion in our world, and the march of modernity. I give it 4 of 5 stars because it could have delved much deeper into its subject material: perhaps a series could be published?

I found this book fascinating, beautiful, and moving. Mr. Birzer has done a credible job of analyzing and interpreting "The Lord of the Rings" and The "Simarillion" for those of us interested in Tolkien's writings. The reader leaves Sanctifying Myth with a better understanding of the main characters--specifically Gandalf, Frodo, Sam, Faramir, and Aragorn.

I especially liked the depiction of Sam Gangee as the true hero of "The Lord of the Rings." Frodo is important, of course, but he remains somewhat in the abstract as "The Ringbearer" or "The Hero on a Great Quest." I instinctively liked Sam and admired the qualities of loyalty, honesty, common sense, and affectionate humor which Sam displayed throughout all three parts of LOTR.

Gandalf is also explained very well as the saintly emissary of Eru/Iluvatar/God-a Christlike figure "dying" and coming back to life to serve Middle Earth with new powers.

I think Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth is profound and very relevant to our time of secularism, Islamic Jihad, moral distintegration, and crumbling traditional morals.

I hope everyone gets a chance to read this book.

I read the reviews below, and the one from the "English undergraduate at the evangelical Gordon College" caught my eye. Of course, he/she's an undergraduate. How else could one explain their lack of ability to read genius? Reading Milton, Chaucer, etc., is no less troublesome than reading Tolkein, but he/she labels him with bad prose.

I think he doesn't like him because he's Catholic, plain and simple.

Mr. Birzer, however, focuses on this master of the English language and his work, and does an excellent job. Tolkein has been critically lauded not for his association with Lewis, but because of his own artistry. I'd recommend Birzer's book for anyone who wants to truly understand this classic writer.

[Perhaps our evangelical friend would be more happy reading such "excellent" (cough) pieces of fiction (cough) as the expertly written "Left Behind(cough)" series? ;)]

I am not questioning the amount of effort that has gone into the book, but some foundations upon which the book makes many of its claims are fundamentally flawed. For example, it is widely accepted (and has been conclusively proven) within the Oracle community that worrying about cache hit ratios, multiple extents, etc is a flawed methodology for tuning an Oracle database which will serves simply to misguide the novice.

Leave this book on the shelf...

In his book, Rich has merged his many years of Oracle performance tuning expertise with advanced insider techniques in an easy-to-understand way. Hundreds practical topics, undocumented references, experts tips and real life examples have made this book a must have for DBA's and any Oracle performance tuning personnel.

This book covers the tuning tips and techniques in using newest features in Oracle 8i as well as the original features in Oracle 7 or 8. As Rich's first sentence indicates, "Oracle is a symphony and you are the conductor, with an opportunity to create a world class performance", his book will help you to achieve this opportunity and to become a great tuning conductor of Oracle performance.

The first chapter of the book serves as highlight notes, which sets up five quick goals to instantly improve performance. Through the rest chapters of his entire book, readers will gain detail tuning knowledge about disk I/O, init.ora parameters, OEM, Explain Plan, table joins, hints, PL/SQL, parallel query, using V$ views, accessing x$ tables, new features and many more tips and techniques for reaching the best performance. After reading this book, be sure to share your thoughts with others in your review.

I was happy with this book and it can help u find orcale tuning problems and find results fast.

Every time I want to try something somewhat obscure and don't want to dig through the Oracle on-line manuals, I have found a quick, easy-to-read piece of sample code in this book. Excellent choice for the experienced Oracle developer's reference book.

One of the best books I have bought for Oracle PL/SQL. Well worth the money. I have been a developer for 5 years now. Thank you for the insightful and examples that actually make sense AND work.

Very well drafted for a beginner/intermediate level PL/SQL developer.

Highly recommend it.

The book is easily worth the price and is an excellent reference volume. It provides standards for best practices for developers of PL/SQL applications, from naming conventions to commenting the source code. This is something that every Oracle developer and DBA should read and try to apply to their environments. The book covers many of the new features of Oracle8i and provides ample examples. The one complaint I have, and it was echoed by some of my associates, was that their was no disk or CD accompanying the book. The authors refer to the examples by file name but there is no disk or CD to get the files from. Presumedly, the examples are available from the Oracle Press Osborne web site. But a disk should have been included for those users who may not have access to the internet.

Aside from this, the book is excellent reading for DBAs and developers and is crammed with information. It includes a history of Oracle and PL/SQL that some may not be aware of, as well as the major features of each version of PL/SQL, from version 1.0 through 8.1. For me it was a brief trip down memory lane, for I cut my teeth on version 1.0 of PL/SQL. The index could be improved a little for better cross referencing, but the coverage of Oracle topics is first rate.

As a DBA and developer, I found the book invaluable and it is one of the books that I recommend to clients and associates. (Here's a tip: Tell your associates to get their own copy.) The book is written in a near conversational tone and far from the dry, antiseptic tone of Oracle's own manuals. Maybe Oracle should get the TUSC guys to write their manuals. The books is nothing less than what I have come to expect from the people at TUSC.

I found this book to be very helpful and informative

I have been a fan of Mr Howard for nearly 12 years now, which in my opinion, makes me a bit of a connoisseur, and frankly this book was a bit of a disappointment. Undoubtedly the contributing writers are well-respected and immensely able but their writing lacked the Howardian flavour I have come to love. Ghor's sudden personality shifts are hard to follow and the various ideas in the story lack sufficient depth. This book is not the way Mr Howard would have written it. Nevertheless, this should be read because the original idea belonged to the great REH.

Ghor is a nice blend of Conan and the Cthulhu Mythos together. Abandoned as a child because of a deformity, Ghor is adopted by a pack of wolves. Raised by them, he adopts the ways of the wolf, yet when he meets up with humanity joins them. Constantly struggling with his wolf upbringing and his human surroundings, Ghor becomes a mighty war hero wherever he goes.

This is an excellent adventure book that takes a Conan like hero and plots him against all sorts of evil (and good), including some Cthulhu creations as well.

Originally Ghor was an unfinished story by Conan creator Robert Howard. Upon finding this unfinished story, a magazine decided to finish it. What they did was have a different chapter every month written by a different top fantasy writer. It made the reading interesting.

While most of the chapters were great. Some were excellent. Unfortunately there were a couple chapters that I just wanted to get through to reach the next writers' chapter. Overall a really good read.

I WAS VERY SUPRISED ABOUT HOW WELL THIS STORY CAME OFF. THE VARIUOS WRITERS DID AN EXCELLENT JOB IN WRITING AN EXCITING BOOK THAT FLOWED SMOOTHLY. IT DID NOT COME OFF AS A SERIES OF SHORT STORIES. THIS IS AN EXCELLENT BOOK FOR ROBERT E. HOWARD FANS, AND FANS OF FANTASY IN GENERAL.

The book wastes too much time with webalchemy. It is a bad idea to build your development strategy on a tool that is not supported by a major vendor. Oracle products are moving forward too quickly to depend on a tool that probably will not keep pace. Using this book as a reference is difficullt at best. Examples are too complicated for use in presenting a new topic. The author should use the 'hello world' concept that so many other authors do. Prospective buyers should say 'goodbye book'. I have as yet been unable to discover a good reference book for OAS.

Granted, there is a lot of good information in this text, however, it's presented in a format that is neither intuative or flowing. Even the examples are overly complicated, almost like the author(s) are attempting to obscure the very point that needs to be made w/ extraneous code. It's a same that the documentation on this subject so poor.

I am fairly new to the IT World, specially the Web technology. This book gave me a clear understanding of the Web concepts. The book is written very meticulously. The explanations are very clear and to the point with very good examples. Truly, it is a Toolkit Reference and can be used to develop any kind of Oracle Web Application. The book covers all topics from the Installation of the Oracle Web Server to the Development of Oracle Web Applications.

I am using this book very extensively at my office and home. I very highly recommend this book and would purchase all the books written by the author.