I only heard about the book after reading about him in USA Today about 3 years ago which blew me away because the only books I read about gay men were the Peter & Charlie Triology by the late Gordon Merrick. It was wonderful to read a book about a Black Man coming to terms with who he is in terms of his sexuality and although he as well as his first male lover Kelvin, Kyle his best friend not to mention the "women" in their life, JJ their friend, Nicole, Raymond's brief love interest as well as Candace Kelvin's wife who would die of AIDS have to deal with homophobia, racism as well the reluctant acceptance of parents, it is a wonderful book to read that dramatically changes people's attitudes about being gay. Although I have read all of Mr. Harris books, this one will still hold a special part in my heart because it was his first. Keep up the wonderful writing Mr. Harris!

These are the words that I would use to describe this novel. This book opens the invisible door of the invisible life to let the reader have a peek and see what is on the other side. I have known several gay people in my life and though I realized that things are hard for them, I never realized how complicated life can be for gay males. I never realized that there are so many undercover African-American gay men. From Harris' descriptions, some of these characters can be your brother, son, father, boyfriend, or husband and you would never even know it.

For those unfamiliar with the Invisible Life, Harris' novel is a creative and colorful eye-opener. When you finish a good piece of literary material you are supposed to walk away with something. If the novel doesn't change you or touch part of your soul that you never knew existed - it isn't a good novel. This one is.

This novel blends its cocoa colored characters, whose conflicting and powerful emotions keep the reader racing to finish pages, and the very real and painful lifestyle of the black male in America.

If you have never read any books about homosexuality or bisexuality, read this one. It will inform you and keep you entertained. The bible does prohibit homosexuality , but it also says love thy neighbor as thyself. The best way to begin to love someone is to understand them. If you want to really grow intellectually and spritually, read this book. It is one of the greats.

when i first picked up mr harris's book..."abide with me"...i never imagine how much i would enjoyed reading his books...it was deep soul searching as well as "invisible life" and i really enjoy reading it because understanding where a person who is sexually confused and trying to sort out their feelings is very deep about how they feel about his or hers sexuality and its not so taboo to let your feelings go about who you are attractive too.. i never thought that i would be so anxious to read more of mr harris's writings...mr harris really put his talent and knowledge and soul into this novel...im reading the next one "just as i am"...hoping that i will be able to connect more with his characters *VBS*

The description of the book has more meat than the book itself. This disappointing book is a 15 short chapter breeze through a multitude of subjects, and does not linger long on any single subject. There are some nice diagrams and ten thousand foot views crammed into 374 total pages (the page count vs. chapter count alone should indicate how superficial this book is). An example is the 21 pages devoted to weighty subjects encompassing project management tasks, configuration management, verification and validation, quality assurance, decisions and risks. Any one of the topics would have merited at least 20 page in a serious book on systems engineering. Useful to sales and marketing types who are selling systems engineering services, and executive management who might like a quick overview of systems engineering. This book is useless for technical professionals.

This book is a great introduction to the system engineering process. It might be lightweight for a practicing system engineer, but for an IT professional whose background is service delivery, production support and data center operations this book opened a whole new world.

An example of how this book opened my eyes is the way configuration management is explained, and how it fits within the system engineering process. IT professionals with my background are subject matter experts in change control; however, few of us (certainly myself) realize that change control is a subset of a much larger picture. Every part of system engineering it covered in sufficient detail to understand the basics. This understanding created, in my case, a desire to further research some areas in greater detail. Overall, seeing the process from a high-level view provided some unique insights about what is missing in IT management that can be filled by borrowing from our system engineering brothers and sisters.

I found this book valuable because I did not have to wade through a dry manual and sort out the details in order to get a big picture of system engineering. The brief, succinct chapters and excellent illustrations provided me with a coherent approach to my own job. In fact, I personally believe that applying system engineering principles to IT service delivery and operations management will significantly improve the IT profession. As such I highly recommend this book to my peers and anyone else who needs to see the big picture of the system engineering and how its principles can be related to their job.

Stevens' Systems Engineering looks at the place ofrequirements in a world which consists of complex systems in a highlycompetitive marketplace. This may be the commercial world or equally the military-industrial world in which systems must literally do battle with their rivals.

Stevens and his co-authors (two of them from the UK's Defence Evaluation and Research Agency) know that in this environment, many systems fail, very often because they were inadequately thought out, and often also because their development projects were poorly managed. Chapter 1 begins "The world is currently gripped by changes more intense and rapid than those triggered by the ndustrial revolution..." : we are at once swept into the rich, complex, and dangerous life of real system development.

For Stevens, the problem in systems engineering is complexity, and its mastery is, as the subtitle implies, the key to success. The design of complex systems demands hierarchy - of organisations, of projects, of contracts, of documents. Hierarchy implies interfaces: if you split a system into three, you probably create three interfaces between the component subsystems. Interfaces in turn imply specialisation: someone develops the hardware; someone else, the software. Similarly, someone (the customer) writes the requirements specification, while someone else (the developer) tries to meet those requirements. This, like the prime contractor - subcontractor relationship, consists of a customer and a supplier: the marketplace reaches right into the core of system engineering.

The book therefore covers a startling breadth of subjects, but always with the same practical vision and with the same conceptual tools. The first few chapters broadly follow the European Space Agency's now-classical PSS-05 software engineering standard life-cycle phases: user requirements, system requirements, architectural design, integration (of subsystems) and verification, management.

(Requirements are involved in every one of these phases.) Once the reader is grounded in the basics, the next chapter discusses how to tailor the simple life-cycle just presented. A tell-tale section entitled 'smaller systems' gives the game away: the systems in the authors' minds are a great deal larger than the PC 'systems' beloved of advertising copywriters.

The second part of the book (chapter 8 onwards) starts by looking at more realistic life-cycles, based on the management of risk: when is it sensible to go ahead with something? The answer is, when success can be assured even if the bad risks materialize. That can only be guaranteed if the risks have been quantified. Concepts of requirement priority and benefit, risk, and cost loom much larger in the marketplace than technical issues.

The remaining chapters examine management in multi-level projects (hierarchy again), software and systems, prototyping (to control risk), information modeling, projects and the enterprise, a chapter on how to improve and a summary.

Each chapter consists of a double-page title/table of contents, overlaid on some crisp pencil artwork on the theme of engineering progress (from Leonardo's hang-glider to an agile jet). The text is broken up by plenty of simple flow diagrams illustrating life-cycles, trade-offs, business processes and information models, as well as short summaries of what the most important system documents should contain. Key points are highlighted or bulleted within the text. The chapters end with a page or two of realistically tricky exercises: the answers cannot be coded in C.

The helpful appendices include a list of websites: Systems Engineering comes with its own website which contains pointers to several related sites, and itself includes 'proposed' answers to the exercises which end each chapter. Students will find the glossary helpful and comprehensive. There is an extensive list of very varied references, and a detailed index. This book is a carefully worked out description of the process of developing any large, complex, and risky system. The book can also be read as a polemic: an impassioned plea for the discipline to graduate from its narrow roots, whether in academia or in quality control. The concluding paragraphs make it clear that system engineering is a human process, a 'game' in which there are losers as well as winners, something that can be played well, and that absolutely must be played better to limit the risks and losses that are still all too common....

The book will be of interest to several quite different communities: in particular development managers, clients having large systems developed, and students of system and software engineering will all find much that is of interest here. The book may also be a useful supplement (or perhaps an antidote) to the academic perspective on RE. Everyone should have access to a copy.

This is a scholarly work and reads like a thesis - a bit dense, but well documented. The focus is on the intellectual underpinnings of the Transcendentalist movement in the mid 19th Century. With the name "Utopias", however, it seams lacking in a clearer treatment of Utopianism is general, or in influences from Thomas Moore, in specific. Perhaps that isn't considered relevent, but I would have liked to have seen it. None-the-less, an excellent source for research in this area of early intentional communities, which were truly the New Age movements of their time.

This is quite a scholarly work and reads like a thesis - a bit dense but well documented. The focus is in on the theory and intellectual aspects of Transcendentalism. Surprisingly little, however, on Utopianism in general, or influences of Thomas Moore in specific. I was living in Harvard MA, site of the Fruitlands, and found the book useful for research purposes.

It's not unusual that the guru of datawindows would write a book strictly on datawindows. The "Definitive Datawindows" book is a must have for any serious powerbuilder programmer. It covers basic information on datawindows and then Richard provides some extra tips to aid in extending the functionality of datawindows. I would recommend this book for powerbuilder programmers of any level. Hurry with your next book Richard, we're waiting!

If you are a PowerBuilder programmer, then the recent book entitled "The Definitive Datawindow" is certainly a must for you. Datawindow is considered the heart of PowerBuilder and this books explores it in a very minute detail. I have been programming in PowerBuilder for last 4 years and after reading this book, I realize how rudimentary my approach was. I wish I could have this book earlier. A significant portion of the book is covered with the introduction to RDBMS and SQL, so even the non PowerBuilder programmer can find this book useful. The author's style is simple and straight forward. The best thing about this book is that the author has made a great effort in putting all datawindow related material in a coherent way. I consider this book a jewel in datawindow techology. Lucky and wise are those who start their Powerbuilder journey with this book.

If you use PB, you need this book. You just don't know it yet. This book lays a world of simpler, much more effective, much more productive PB programming at your feet. It will pay for itself the first day you have it. You will stop beating your poor programmer brains out against datawindows, and turn them into your best tool for PB productivity.

Brooks has produced a world class reference. You can tell from reading it that the author and editing team have crafted an enduring desktop reference. I expect this book to be updated and republished for years.

You just cannot say enough about this work. It will save IT PB shops years of development time. It benefits the whole industry.

This book covers a lot of ground. It looks at disciplines, some info on the feeding restriction, some example characters and history and history and history and history. More than half of this book looks at the history of the clan. Much of the description of the clan is taught in terms of the history around the lesson learned by the clan. As history goes, this is well done, but if you are wanting a consice description of the clan you will not find it here.

This book seems like a guide to the busisness guy...BOY don't you remenber that you are a creature of the night? The history part of the book is poor conpared whith the other clanbooks and even whith the old one,the large part of the book explains the so call :ventrue society,something pretty booring after reading the same stuff in all the white wolf books that spell the word VENTRUE....guys.. the clan has a lot of potential for many things not ongly to be a large corporation owned by inmortals there are almost no new disciplines ,and one merit...the art wasn't great except shy's portraits and other ventrue of note could have been added...for such clan whith that much potential this book coul have been MUCH better

There is good material in the new edition of CLANBOOK VENTRUE including many of the new CLANBOOK series' standard features- clan disciplines explained, discipline variations given, a new merit, a sample brood, noteworthy Ventrue, player character templates, and MIND'S EYE THEATRE stats. There is exploration of Ventrue history (and its revision over the years) and detailed description of the clan's organization. The "Secret Masters" material from the original book seems to have been dropped, though- a problem only because of discontinuity with the Dark Ages Ventrue material in LIBELLUS SANGUINIS I.

The Sabbat material, although limited, is OK and includes territory shifts between Sabbat and Camarilla in the 19th century US. Templates include an antitribu follower of the Path of Power and the Inner Voice (no Honorable Accord, though) and a really mean anarch who could easily be Sabbat instead. (This installment's Sabbat typo is omission of the designation "antitribu" on the appropriate templates' sample character sheets.)

A major problem is that, like the original, this new book lacks specifics about the Ventrue weakness. Although it examines how Ventrue neonates develop their restricted feeding preferences and how preferences change, specific preferences are not listed either for the player character templates or the noteworthy Ventrue. (This is omitted in most VtM supplements, unfortunately- a notable exception being NEW ORLEANS BY NIGHT, if you can find it.) No examples of or guidelines for playable feeding preferences are discussed.

However, to be fair, there is helpful, practical discussion about how Ventrue establish and conceal their herds. (To offer more explicit advice: playable Ventrue characters generally require strong Herd ratings.) Also, except for the "Vitaephile", you can probably guess prey restrictions for the player character templates from their descriptions. Still, contrast this with the much clearer handling of derangements in the new CLANBOOK: MALKAVIAN.

Mr. Brooks is possibly the worst author I have ever read. The help files really were more helpful than this book was. He ought to go move to the Hedonism resort he reviewed a book on because the programing world could not possibly miss him if his wok is on the level of his writing.

This reference book restates most of the reference material available in the PFC online books. The reason for this (as stated in the book) is that back in PB 5 days, the online books were only available if the CD was in your drive. As of PB 6, the books can be installed on a hard drive. The PFC 6 features are only glanced at. The focus is on PFC 5 features. So if you're using PB 5/PFC 5, this book is great. Otherwise, it's not useful at all. I returned this book.

This book gives you what the PFC documentation does not. A detailed explanation of various internal workings that once followed, leads you to discover the things that make a library like the PFC work. Missing more overview and architectural discussion, but that is covered by the PFC Professional Reference. Together the 2 books provide what PFC developers need. A complete look at the PFC library.

A must-buy for serious PFC developers. Despite being an author of a competitive book, although I call it more complimentary than competitive, I would receommend this book to anyone.

Good job Rik.

This is somewhat a good overview of a particular way to attack the multi-sensor fusion problem. The authors always refer and somtimes present their own work on the subject.

However, this book gathers different parts of reference publications (which I did not have access to) and was misleading. For example, some algorithms were not fully explained and therefore hard to reproduce.

If you are looking for a thorough explanation of the key concepts, this is not the book because it presents three solutions, focusing on the authors'.

Brooks does not know how to write books. The 5 stars in other books of this author makes me think reviews are coming from himself. I saw the web page of the author and it's only too sample codes for beginners, and he wants to sell them !!!!

I agree with all those who rated this book below or equal to 2 stars.
I don't agree with the author.

His book is only good as a reference book for those who have mastered the contents( for example, the professors who have taught probability for their entire lives and take for granted that every line in the book is trivial. If it is indeed trivial, why bother to write a book! what is a textbook for?)

For my own experience, to follow this book, I have to read everything from Billingsley's textbook!

I completely agree with the readers from Madison and Chicago, I don't agree with the author.

I completely agree with the readers from Madison(Wisconsin) and (Chicago), I don't agree with the author.