This book is one of the best guides to international civil litigation, which has become a complex area of law in Europe with the involvement of different sets of rules for jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments. While being perfectly capable of serving practioners as a quick reference, this book manages at the same time to be analytical and insightful.

This is fast becoming the definitive guide to the English private international law rules regarding civil jurisdiction and the recognition of foreign judgments. No lawyer wishing to understand the complexities of this area of English law should do without it. The treatment of the rules which apply perforce the Brussels and Lugano Conventions is especially lucid. Briggs is a masterful academic (and practising) lawyer.

This really is an excellent new book. People with allergies and or asthma need to find different ways to combat their allergies, besides just using more and more drugs. This book is full of many fine tips for reducing allergies in your house, where you work and play. I am an allergy researcher myself, and I do not know the authors of this book but I applaud them for this fine effort. I recommend it for anyone who has allergies and also for the family of those with allergies. This book will be worth every penny of its cost, in savings and improved lifestyle through less allergy. Do check it out. Thomas Leo Ogren, author of Allergy-Free Gardening

I have not had the opportunity to meet Peter Mathiessen, but I could relate to his mention of sitting and listening to Captain Rob's tales, because I, too, have had that privilege. The book, Cracker in the Glade, is a collection of his ledger and it is written in his conversational tone. It is a recount of how Captain Rob saw the evolution of the growth in population in south Florida and the consequential degredation of the environment as he knew it. He is not judgmental in his description, rather it is matter of fact. Just as he viewed the hardships of living in Florida in the early 1900's as matter of fact. The reader is left with the sense that he knows the history of the Collier County area, and the inhabitants that endured the hardships together. While they were separate families with their own trials, they were one as a family of pioneers in area that was as rife with dangers as it was beautiful in the pristene sense of the tropical paradise. Betty Briggs is to be complimented for her sharing of her grandfather with the rest of us, so that we, too can know the adventures and evolution of this part of the Everglades.

I got this from the library, and I have to say I'm glad I didn't buy it, because once I read it I had no use for it. It's not something you'd want to refer to in the future, unless maybe you were doing a research paper. I thought some of the explanations of the different preferences were interesting. But the writing style was dull. It was a very scholarly book, and thus not particularly readable. It came across as a textbook, which I wasn't expecting for some reason.

Written with exqusite care, Gifts Differing is one of those rare books to be pondered and reread. I first read it in 1980 when it first came out, and my copy is dog-eared and much underlined. It is not for casual reading, or a quick approach to finding out about one's personality type. Wanting to get Carl Jung's ideas of the psychological types out of the psychiatrist's office into general use, she wrote Gifts Differing to lay out the theory for general readers, with care and in detail. It is a classic, will never be "out of date," and I strongly recommend it for anyone who has been affected by her instrument, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and wants to go deeper into the ingenious theory she fleshed out from Jung's work.

This book reveals much about the birth of the Myers Briggs personality theory. First, readers can see that the theory has very practical origins. It was born out of observing personalities of MANY people. It was meant to be used in a very hands-on way. It was never meant to be a tool used only by psychologists. It was meant to be used by anyone who wants to understand self and others.

Another key point that emerges from this book is that differences are good. The theory does not treat personality traits as pathological, needing repair. On the contrary, the authors recognize that the varied types of personalities add unique, valuable qualities to the world.

There are other sources that explore this topic in a more detailed, scholarly way. However, this book sets the context for the origin and the intended use of the theory. Therefore, it is a must read for any student of personality.

For developers involved with web-based projects, whether it be an online store for electronic commerce or an Intranet site for accessing and modifying company data, the powerful blend of JavaServer Pages (JSP) and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technologies can really make life simple. Once you've mastered them, creating new components that encapsulate business logic, or new web interfaces to existing systems, is easy. The trick, for developers, is mastering the technologies.

Professional JSP is one way to get up to speed. Like many of the books published by Wrox Press, Professional JSP covers a specific technology in-depth, as well as the various ancillary topics relating to it such as databases, servlets, and XML. While not every developer will need every web technology covered by the book (and there are many), the book works both as a tutorial to cover the basics and a reference for technologies that you may encounter later.

Professional JSP starts by covering the basics of Java Server Pages, and how they relate to other web technologies. Embedded in HTML pages, JSP provides an easy mechanism for creating interactive web interfaces that draws on server-side components, known as Enterprise JavaBeans. While the presentation logic is written in JSP, the processing occurs within these JavaBean components. The book takes a balanced approach, covering both JSP and its syntax, as well as how to write and interact with JavaBeans to perform useful tasks, like accessing databases through JDBC and using other Java technologies. However, if you've read other Wrox titles, you may find there is some overlap in the topics covered.

One of the nice things about Professional JSP is that, in addition to covering theory, it goes further and examines practical applications of JSP, and issues for programmers like security and debugging. Like other titles in the Professional series, there are case studies of real projects using JSP and related technologies. My favorite would have to be the case study on porting Active Server Pages to JSP -- something that is extremely important for developers with "legacy" web systems. On the whole, Professional JSP is an excellent book for web developers wanting to get up to speed with Java Server Pages, web development, and Enterprise JavaBeans. However, developers with less of a web presentation focus and more of back-end server view may also want to consider the excellent Professional Java Server Programming title, which also covers JSP. -- David Reilly, reviewed for the Java Coffee Break

This is a book for programmers who have a solid background in servlets programming and some experience in JSP. For beginners and for people who wish to learn those techniques on a standalone machine, they will be better off with Hall's "core servlets & JSP" or Fields&Kolb's "web development & JSP".

The book consists of 20 chapters. The first 12 chapters discuss the various salient aspects of JSP and the rest ( about two third of the whole book) is devoted to case studies.

A. THE BOOK'S STRENGTH:

By adopting Tomcat as its main testing software, the editors of "Professional JSP" have assured that most of the code examples will work. This is a big improvement over the past wrox books.

There are some excellent chapters in the first part. The discussion on session tracking is a real gem although the author failed to make a showcase of the code examples. The chapter on JSP Architecture contains some of the clearest explaination on the techniques of redirecting, forwarding and requestdispatcher. The chapter on customtags is equally very well done. But my favorite is the chapter on Global Settings, the idea is so practical. I also like the idea of emphasizing the importance of authentication which showed in many chapters of the book.

The case studies will serve as an excellent reference. Its coverage ranges from (1) the front end of an insurance company (2) a good pictures website which use JSP to publish its data (3) Security with JNDI (4) a online store using LDAP and JSP (5) J@EE, EIBs and Customtags (6) Multimedia and JSP (7) Weather website with JSP, XSLT and WAP (8) Porting ASP to JSP.

2. BOOK'S WEAKNESS:

The book is a combined effort of many authours and its unevenness showed. The first three chapters to introduce to JSP are out of place and a real waste. The chapter on Dynamic GUIs is a great idea which turned into a joke: after showing the general diea how to do it, the author sent readers to his website to learn the rest(?). And the chapter on JDBC connectivity and Pooling is a big disappointment: most of the chapter devoted to get connection, create databse,editing it and make query; and the rest the author explained how to use his own pool manager package, PoolMan. This wouldn't be too bad if PoolMan worked, with Tomcat.

The richness of the case studies is also its weakness. Unless you are experienced and have the facilities, you can't test them all. These techniques become obsolete pretty quick.

Probably the strongest objection to the book is its price. Buy it for your company and share with your colleague.

This books lives up to its title in that it provides both real-world JSP techniques (through 7 very informative case studies chapters), as well as JSP background information that serves as a quick start guide. I rank it as one of the top 2 JSP books currently available (the other one is Web Development With JavaServer Pages by Messrs. Fields and Kolb).

After the JSP fundamentals are out of the way (which I am sure any JSP newcomer will appreciate and can benefit from), the book picks up pace with discussion on JDBC connection pooling, and the best practice for data access from JSP. Then comes the chapter on custom tags. My favorite chapters are the ones on debugging JSP's and implementing the MVC design pattern in JSP/servlets.

The case studies are very comprehensive and closely correlated to the earlier chapters. In one case study the design methodology is clearly explained with UML diagrams, which are very helpful to someone who is currently architecting an enterprise Java Web application. Other case studies cover such a wide area of topics such as JSP in combination with LDAP, EJB, XSL, and WAP.

For ASP developers, this books has two enormously useful chapters to get them started on JSP right away. One is a case study showing how to port an ASP app to JSP, and the other compares and contrasts the object model and syntax between ASP and JSP.

Having said all the above, this book does suffer from certain weaknesses. One is typical of any multi-author book, i.e., repeat of the same topic in different chapters. This is the case with JDBC, which shows up in both chapters 4 and 7. Another problem is the lack of the use of a standard servlet/JSP container, which will help new users to run all samples under the same software setting (although there is an appendix on setting up Tomcat server). Finally, a few chapters seem to be out of place in term of the logic flow of concept, such as the ones on dynamic GUI's and JNDI.

Finally, this book is still thin on heavy-duty J2EE topics, such as EJB, distributed transactions, message service, and interoperability with CORBA. This is why I consider it as an intermediate level book, not an advanced one. Hopefully we will see another Wrox book in the near future that addresses some of these issues.