I've read the first three volumes of this most extensive and thoroughly researched monumental biography. I can't wait to read this final fourth volume. I have found only two faults, so far. The author delves into great detail and depth about all of the master's music. This should be welcome reading to those unfamiliar with certain neglected works. However, he allows too much of his own personal opinion to taint his descriptions of certain works (certainly stemming from his British egotistical, "know-it-all" background). I don't fault him personally, as much as recognize his country of origin in every paragraph! One perfect example is his total dismissal of the Piano Sonata in G, as being one of the dullest works Tchaikovsky composed. Having performed the work myself, and heard such exciting performances as those of Richter, and others, I can only assume Brown's only knowledge of the piece is from hearing a "dull" British pianist's performance. But, for me, the more unforgivable fault is the author's inability to come to terms with Tchaikovsky's homosexuality. Mr. Brown obviously has difficulty with this topic, and refers to it as "Tchaikovsky's condition." Mr. Brown really belongs to Tchaikovsky's era (he's way out of touch) in terms of his ability to understand it. Too bad, as it really casts a shadow over this otherwise outstanding series. I'm quite convinced that Tchaikovsky should be held up as a hero for his ability to acknowledge his sexual orientation to the extent he could in such an oppresive environment! Also, remember that the Soviets for years suppressed any homosexual references in Tchaikovsky's letters and writings. Thus, he actually did acknowledge it to a far greater extent then was previously known. His stature should gain by this. He was a remarkable man deserving everyone's respect and admiration for the hours of pleasure he has brought to the world!

We've been using this book as our text in an Engineering Management class at Santa Clara University. Brown provides a good survey of management techniques such as Theory X and Theory Y and principles such as the Peter Principle, Parkinson's Law, and Deming's 14 obligations of management.

Focusing primarily on the challenges of managing technical professionals, the author projects Theory Y into the age of flat flexible organizations. His discussions of informal organizations and concepts such as authentic (bottom-up) authority are interesting, but he seems to avoid anecdotal reasoning. This seems to be deliberate, but sometimes leads to redundant writing with lots of opinions rather than real life examples.

If the author revises this book by adding more examples to illustrate his points, I might change my rating to 5 stars.

This book is supposed to be a compilation of 15 stories, told firsthand, of desperate survival in the Old Southwest. Many of the stories are well known: the Goliad Massacre, the Donner Party, Mountain Meadows, Little Bighorn, Wyatt Earp in Tombstone, and Pat Garrett tracking down Billy the Kid.

Other stories are quite obscure but nonetheless very interesting reading: Fremont's Colorado Expedition, Oatman Girls captivity, Crabb's Expedition to Sonora, James White's drift through the Grand Canyon, the Camp Grant Massacre, chasing Geronimo through the Sierra Madre, a grizzly bear attack, a man's survival along the Gulf of California when his expedition collapses, and Villa's raid on Columbus, New Mexico.

Each story is preceded by the editors' offering a brief two or three page setup and/or historical perspective.

The book is a highly entertaining read in general, but naturally, in a book of this type, some stories are more interesting than others. This makes one question the selection the editors made for their 15 stories. Certainly Wyatt Earp's account of his days in Tombstone has been worn out and done to death. There's no new information here. Similarly Edward Godfrey's account of Little Bighorn is a bit stale given the mountain of material available on this subject. Pat Garrett can barely write a coherent paragraph, and most people interested in Western history already know well his tale about Billy the Kid.

The conclusion one inevitably draws is that the editors seem much more interested in finding FIRSTHAND accounts rather than other Old West survival stories that have no firsthand narrative, yet may be more compelling. Why leave out the Battle of Beecher's Island for example? Or the Battle of Adobe Walls, or John Colter's encounter with the Blackfeet etc. etc.

The book also lacks maps. It has exactly three, all of which are quite poor. One of them is nothing more than a small map of the western USA with dots to show you in general where each story occurred.

Nevertheless, the book provides entertaining light reading especially in the lesser known accounts.

A very good illustrated book, plenty of informations about all the signs you could find in a wood, a beach, a street.. Just open the book and you'll be able to find out which species of bird flown on your garden, which one eat your loved flowers... Very nice and veru useful!

Vampire bats, like few other animals, capture our attention for both pragmatic and aesthetic reasons, and this readable little book does justice to the animal itself as well as human interest in them. I especially like the love-hate balance that Dave Brown manages so nicely in his presentation and personal recollections, pointing up all the beauties of this unique little mammal while at the same time the horrors of the blook-sucking life style, both bat and human. Brown proves to be not only a good student of the biology of wildlife but also of humans, which makes this book a must for anyone interested in how nature affects human culture and societies, and vice versa.

This book has very good instructions and examples on how to use Visual Age for Java and develop Servlets, JSP, EJB, etc. The problem is the organization of the book and its relationship to what's on the CDs and when to look at 'what' is terrible.

The initial chapters' titles (1 - 4) do not describe what is actually included in the chapter.

If you are a designer, developer or application programmer and just want to know what you need to know to get the job done, you will be reading a lot of unnecessary information that will do more to scare you off and overload an already overly difficult set of development tools.

Skip to chapter 5, (see page 226 to learn how to install the case study, and do it [also load Visual Age]). Then proceed from there. Starting with Chapter 5, read all of each chapter THEN go back and do the examples from the case study.

This can be a valuable book if you need to learn how to develop systems using J2EE, you just need to work at it (i.e., how to read this book)!

I've been doing Internet development for years and have been waiting for a book that describes Websphere application development thoroughly. The only worthwhile resource until this book was IBM's redbook "Servlet and JSP Programming with IBM WebSphere Studio and VisualAge for Java" which I rate as 4 stars. This book, however, describes a recommended approach for application development using the IBM toolset. It shows you how to install and configure the WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Studio, and VisualAge for Java with its WebSphere Test Environment. It shows you how to develop servlets and JSPs in VAJ, how to test them using VAJ WebSphere Test Environment, and how to deploy on the WebSphere Application Server. All this information in one place. If that weren't enough, the author then provides architectural recommendations showing an effective and maintainable way to build a J2EE site using JSP, servlets, and EJBs. He even references design patterns from the Gamma book and everything. This book and the IBM Redbook together are must haves for serious J2EE developers using IBM technologies.

I had the good fortune to be given a pre-release version of this book. I have found it a great guide for coming up to speed on WebSphere 3.5 and VisualAge for Java 3.5 and for understanding the design and architecture issues of J2EE. As a consultant, I will highly recommend this book to any of my clients using WebSphere. I will also encourage clients using J2EE with other tools to read the technology and design chapters of this book.

The book's core value goes far beyond the WebSphere and VisualAge specific content to provide application architecture and design guidance for J2EE applications. The book winds it's way through the complexity of J2EE to highlight the key issues and choices in designing a JSP, Servlet, and EJB application. It provides clear examples of various complexities that can provide a starting point for developing your applications. Of particular value are discussions on when to use EJBs, scaling considerations in handling client session, and design patterns for multi-tiered applications.

The book provides clear, concise introductions to the key technologies you need to build J2EE applications: HTTP, Servlets, JSP, client session management, JDBC, and EJB. It teaches the reader how to use the key aspects of VisualAge and WebSphere to build applications. The authors made excellent choices on which aspects of VisualAge and WebSphere to focus on.

No one developing WebSphere applications should be without this book!

This book is a complete waste of money. I'd give it a negative number of stars if I could. What's so bad about it then? It is simply a beginners guide to aquarium keeping (and not a very good one at that) with a few mentions of discus thrown in to make it sound as if it is a discus book.

The photographs are OK as far as photography goes, but most of the fish pictured are poor specimens including the malformed discus pictured on the cover. Many of the photos are re-used in different parts of the book, occasionally in reverse as if there was an attempt to disguise the fact that the pictures were being re-used. The captions have nothing to do with the photos. There is a picture of a fish with holes in it's head and another of a fish with early stages of fin rot, but neither of these pictures are used in the section on diseases and the captions do not point out these defects. There is no identification of the strains being pictured and virtually no photos of wild specimens to help in identifying the 2 species and 5 subspecies that are briefly described in the text.

There is a section on the history of the discus, but important names such as Jack Wattley, Carrol Friswold, and Gene Wolfsheimer are conspicuous by their absence.

A lot of the information is redundant and contradictory. For example on page 39 we find "One way to estimate which size heater your aquarium will need is to allow 5 watts per gallon. For example, a 55-gallon aquarium would need a heater that is at least 275 watts". Meanwhile, on page 54 we read "A heater should supply 2 watts per gallon. So, a 55-gallon aquarium would need at least a 110-watt heater". Now which do think the authors would have you use? Of course they also don't mention that nobody actually manufactures heaters of those wattages (they can readily be found in 25, 50, 75, 100, 125, 150, 200, 250 and 300 watts).

On the whole, this is one of those books that seems to regurgitate a bunch of stuff that has become "standard knowledge" in the aquarium hobby, without really knowing why these things have become so (or the science behind it). On page 80 in a side box on bare tank set-ups, we are admonished that these are "less cozy for your fish", whatever that is supposed to mean. I doubt that "coziness" is anything we can measure or the fish can give us feedback on in the same way that they behave if their water is too warm.

On page 47 there is an extremely poor and misleading diagram of the nitrogen cyle. It implies that the major source of ammonia in the aquarium is the fungal and bacterial decomposition of fish "wastes" (feces?). The major source of ammonia is: it is directly exhaled into the water from fishes gills. There is also no mention of the relationship of pH to ammonia ionization, which is critical to be aware of in the low pH of a discus tank, particularly with regards to water changes and the usually accompanying rise in pH.

There are a lot of other points I could raise, but time constraints prevent me. In summary, this book is a complete waste of money. Just about any book would be better, but if price is a concern the T. Giovanetti book is far better in this price range. I haven't seen M. Sweeney's discus book, but I have seen other things she has written and although I don't really care for her, even her book has got to be better than this one. Even better, spend a little extra and get something by B. Degen, J. Wattley, or J. Quarles. With the price of discus being what it is, if you can afford to keep them, you can afford one of the better books.

I saw this book when i went to the internet to do research on some information about keeping discus.At that time i was planning to own one but have no experience with discus and know very little about tropical fish which i thought only need air supply to survive.Many people on the net said this book was good and is very useful when it comes to problems with the discus so i went to buy it.I learnt many new things about it like heaters,different filtrations,UV lights,tank water like pH,ammonia,hardness and nitrites and nitrates.It was really useful even in the diseases section where they tell us how to deal with sickness of the fish.But overall it was really not that good as it did not go into detail about chillers and heaters and also some websites it listed at the back of the book have already closed.
These are some bad points so i only gave 3 stars but it is really worth buying for a beginner.

This book is another good intro guide or first book for beginners getting into Discus keeping. It outlines all the basic requirments for keeping the fish healthy. Although this book covers lots of topics, but I find some of them lack the necessary depth to be helpful to seasoned hobbyist (ie. breeding, raising the young). If your looking to buy a second Discus book, try "Degen Discus Book" by Degen. Overall 4 Stars because as a intro book it cost too much compare to others. "Discus Fish" by Thomas A. Giovanetti has the same info, if not more, and it costs much less!

I truly enjoyed this read. It may help to listen to the audio cassette beforehand. I find Thoreau inspirational. Many times you step back and realize how beautiful all of life's intricacies are, how wonderful life truly is & how lucky we are. Thoreau has embraced every minute detail of natural life, as it was meant to be & has successfully captured it in print. I love the fact that each line is a "novel" in itself. I loved the book and listen to the audio cassette often. Buy it, buy it, buy it.

They can't appreciate this book due to the fact that they live in a world of pop trash. Im only 19 and I like it, it's one of the best books I've ever read (besides Waterland). No author describes images and scenery as well as Thoreau, at least that I've read, and his dislike for society is well argued. So, if you're one of those MTV-watching, mall loving, stylish-car- driving, conforming, TV junkies, or an educated uppity know-it-all than this book isn't for you.

I read this book about every five years or so in
order to take inventory of my personal life. Soon
I find myself forgetting about DVD players and software
applications and begin to focus upon bringing
my life much more in tune with the harmonics of
nature. Thoreau has the ability to cut through the
messages of nonstop consummerism and force the reader to
evaluate the cutural norms of greed and individualism.
Why is it so hard to accept that man is of this planet
and we must learn how to balance our species goals and
desires with those of the other species of life which
inhabit this biosphere?

My first reaction to this book was how cheap it was made. Not that it would affect content, but it does make me question it. The author's brief bios were on the front and back inside covers. The one of the back had about a word on each line cut out.

I mention the authors' biographies because it makes me think there may be an agenda here rather than an objective biography of one of our presidential candidates.

Vocabulary alone lets you know that the authors do not like Gore in the least. Many of the facts, and they are facts, can easily be compared to those in other biographies. We know that Al Gore did these things. Personally, I don't find this different from any other politician, but the authors want to push you to anger at the thought of Gore in office. I get the feeling that if it was any Democrat, these guys would write just as much with just as much anger.

If you like to read extreme views, this will certainly whet your appetite. If you are looking to make an informed decision, give this one a skip. After reading, you know get the feeling like you should wash your hands.

While other books have sought to document the life of Al Gore from
purely biographical vantages, this authoritative and occasionally
slapstick work provides deeper insight into Prince Albert and thus
deserves recognition. There is a blend of personal and political
insights offered by the authors. And there are plenty of annotated
footnotes, just ones that some of the reviewers and more liberal
liberals chide as being weak or apocryphal. ...

Lastly, the book portrays a
conniving politician who flip-flopped on issues like abortion for
political gain(e.g., for the VP nod in 1992). (The Congressional
Record is a primary source, yes?)

I heartily recommend this book for
liberals(for education) and for conservatives (for edification).

I just read this book recently (summer of 2001). Its main purpose was to prepare you for the 2000 election and what we'd be getting if Al Gore won the presidential election. As I was reading it, however, Gore has tentatively hinted another run in '04. Bearing that in mind, I still think this book is informative and necessary to all who might consider voting for Gore and any who might still wish he became the president last election.
Many had imagined Gore to be the better half of the Clinton/Gore team. He certainly projected that wholesome image that Clinton could never pull off. However, this book looks beneath his veneer of respectability and exposes his shady land dealing and utter hypocrisy when it comes to the environment.
As it says in the forward, Bossie and Brown strive to be as accurate as is humanly possible. I am greatful to these two men for giving a history of Gore's life for me, as I knew little of his past.
Get yourself a copy of this book, it is very informative.

It bothers me to no end to read the negative reviews of this book. Maybe it's because the book is labeled from "casual" to "expert" user. I knew absolutely nothing about web publishing and HTML coding and found this extremely easy to read and follow. Unfortunately there were probably a few people in the "advanced" bracket who needed to slam this book because it did not cover what they expected. It gave me a solid basis for HTML and Dynamic HTML coding and was a great introduction to Java and CGI. When an author has to cover so many subjects related to HTML he's bound to skim over the more advanced applications. Being almost 1000 pages, it does a sterling job. By the way, the CD has a great HTML editor on it!

As a beginner I found the book a tremendous resource into HTML and Web page authoring. I do not believe the book is intended to be an exhaustive reference on every topic but wants to focus on normal day to day concerns. After reading the book I now feel extremely comfortable on all Web issues and recommend the text highly.

Easy and fun to read and learn basics of HTML and well beyond. Logically organized so it works well both for self-instruction and as a reference.