When Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" first opened at the local multiplex it played to an audience of twenty. As we left the cinema, each member of the audience wore a mask of what can only be described as haunting, horrified bliss. There was a sense of excitement that we had witnessed a fresh and dangerous talent but also a certain unease - the rules had been changed and the crime genre would never really be safe and comfortable again. Readers of Sean Burke's debut novel "Deadwater" are in for a similar treat.

The premise of the novel is simple. A young prostitute is murdered and the next morning Jack Farissey, an alcoholic self-medicating pharmacist, wakes up covered in blood and unable to remember a thing about the previous night. In a conventional thriller Farissey would be one step ahead of the police, desperate to prove his innocence before the handcuffs were slapped on but this is a novel that rarely chooses the obvious path. The police, led by detective Hargest, have little or no interest in the truth. They are pursuing a different kind of justice and begin a relentless campaign to frame local gangsters, the Baja brothers, for the murder. Things are complicated when Jack's wife Victoria returns and joins the Baja's defence team. Although the plot twists and turns like a Russian gymnast on speed, the reader though frequently breathless is never left behind. There is a lyrical despair to the writing and a depth of characterisation one doesn't find often in thrillers but this is more than just a thriller, it is a deep and penetrating look into the soul of the marginal, disenfranchised and desperate inhabitants of Butetown, an area of Cardiff which makes the mean streets of New York look like EuroDisney. Imagine "Heart of Darkness" written by Raymond Chandler and set in Cardiff and it becomes possible to glean some idea of a book that is doomed, haunting and unforgettable; a book that makes the darkness seem bright in comparison. "Deadwater" is a novel that is both literary and gripping and, in Sean Burke, readers of James Lee Burke, Ian Rankin and James Elroy have found another name to put on their shelves.

If your idea of love is limited to visions of puppies and balloons, The Thing About Love Is... probably not for you. In Polyphony Press' first effort, the heavy topic of love is tackled in gritty, gutsy pieces that cut to core of this complex emotion. Sometimes it's bliss, sometimes it's bizarre, and quite often it hurts, but regardless of its form, love is always intriguing. This anthology is in keeping with that notion. With a variety of styles and voices, the works featured here are unanimous in their ability to draw the reader in and keep him hooked. It is truly a great read that may challenge one's personal definition of love. Call it an enjoyable experiment in mind expansion!

It's difficult to find an anthology that has as much stopping power as this one. Reading it, I was impressed not only by the diversity of the authorial voices, but also by their veracity. Each story, poem and play seems to have come straight from the gut. What's more, the contributing writers help to remove our blinders; particularly when it comes to matters of the heart. Love, they argue, is nothing less than a battlefield on which each of us daily chances victory or defeat.Those seeking to enter the contest fully armed would do well to buy this book.

Anthologies are not my usual choice of reading material, but as this was recommended to me, I decided to give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised. While I could not relate to some of the pieces here, I enjoyed the underlying topic immensely. The poetry, drama, and short stories were a good blend. The Thing About Love Is... an enjoyable and fast read, but has a peculiar lingering effect that required that I return to it for further exploration. It's a perfect book to read from the relative comfort and safety of your best chair, where you know that you can dip into the joy and angst of love and for once, walk away unscathed.

I really don't know how the previous 5 reviews gave this book 5 stars. I was really excited about this book when I first read the reviews, and now here I am only a few chapters in and already thinking about dumping it altogether. This book has so many flaws for its size, the biggest of which was the codes. I am no Perl expert, but could find my way around in a decent size program. However, no examples I have tried so far in the book actually worked, and some of these are just 10-20 lines long. I am completely new to LWP, I guess like anyone who would buy this book, so it's hard for me to see what the author is doing. The explanation of the code didn't help much either. As oppose to explaining the steps, he just said "the code below does this". And it's pretty obvious little or no editing has gone into this book. If you do buy this book, you'll probably want to make a trip to the Errata page at the Oreilly website. The amount of typos, printing errors, warnings and grammatical mistakes found by readers and editors listed on this page rivals the usuable content of the book itself. You know what, I have spent way too much on this book already.....

If you are unfamiliar with LWP and web scraping, or HTML parsing using tokens and trees, I strongly recommend this book. It's the best *introduction* to these topics I've been able to find. Sean's style is clear and concise-just what I expect from an O'Reilly book.

To get the most out of this book, you'll want to be familiar with Object Oriented programming in Perl, because (with the exception of LWP::Simple) all the modules discussed in this book use objects.

Also, don't expect the LWP sample code in the book to work correctly. Many of the sites that the scripts try to "scrape" have changed their layout since this book was published, braking the scripts. This isn't a problem though, because the samples Sean provides are very short and clear, so it's not necessary to run them in order to figure out how they work.

Disclaimer: The author is an online-type-friend and I used to work with the author of the foreword. I even got my copy for free.

If the above hasn't totally disqualified me from commenting, I just wanted to note some things most reviewers have ignored.

The book is an excellent resource for two kinds of people.

Many people scan technical books looking for little scripts and thingies; a few lines changed and BOOM! They have the program they always wanted. Sean provides those in abundance.

It is also a good resource for a complete novice to learn about the hodgepodge of technologies we call the web - the ... wire protocol, markup languages, tree-based parsers, and encodings, to name just a few. The author is an expert in all of these, but has restrained himself to provide just enough information to get a programmer going. I was impressed time and again with how he manages to give the reader exactly enough knowledge to get their tasks done, with short but accurate explanations and pointers on where to learn more.

Best of all, this is a funny technical book. Usually if a technical book has pretensions to humor, it jabs you in the arm repeatedly with lots of groaner puns and dumb cartoons, in order to fill the space between bland code sections. But Sean has sprinkled the *code sections* with his dada sense of humor, which also highlights the difference between mere placeholder data and the concept being illustrated. And then the text gets right back to the point.

This is a slim work (242 pages, no thicker than my thumb) but packs a lot of value for your money. So buy it already.

My only criticism is that it is exclusively focused on consuming services on the web - like downloading TV listings and so on. But you can use everything Sean talks about to also *publish* information; for instance, making some nifty Perl-based thing to update your online journal from MS Word or something. Or to aggregate information that's out there, and feed it back onto the web. Nevertheless, if you've got half a brain it will be obvious how to do this stuff once you've absorbed everything you'll get from this book.