If you are looking for a book that teaches solid fundamentals and a good workout regimen, this is fine. However, if you already have some experience as a player and are looking for advanced tips and strategies, such as how to read blocks, using the wind on the serve, reading hitters, defensive positioning/strategies, advanced hand placement techniques, you will not find them here. Hopefully Karch will write another book going into these details.

This book is great for the beginner. It does not go in depth into strategy, reading hitters, positioning, etc... It does give GREAT tips on imporving your overall game, endurance, shot placement, et al. There is a bit of humor mixed into the fray, which adds the human touch.

When I bought this book i was a beginner. My serves were poor, sets average, kills average, blocks average, and passes were mediocre. After just a few weeks i had a great jump serve, monster kills, and incredible blocks. I love it.

If you are a beginner and want to improve quickly - this is for you. If you have been around a bit - you might find something useful in here but you probably already know this stuff. In depth strategy is lacking.

This book has great photos and a balanced overall approach to beach volleyball. It's got all the basics covered and the stories that are peppered throughout the book make for interesting reading. I would probably have liked to hear more about the players and matches of the past, but I think Karch wanted this to be an instructional book rather than one for entertainment. Still I would have preferred more opinions and insights into the players and strategies. I hope that Karch does a second edition with the new AVP and it's rules.

I thought this book was ok.

good stuff for a historical interested European, who himself is a descendent of a four century old family of soldiers. Quality of the printed paper is rather poor.

I could not put this book down. Mr. Farwell can certainly write. The Stonewall of his book comes across as a real person, warts and all. Jackson's mistakes are here along with his many victories. The author explodes a few myths, but objectively, and in the end deepens our understanding of the man and the general. There were two nits I did see in the book: The CSS Merrimac (really the Virginia); and the 1862 date for Chancellorsville. But these are minor. Read this book.

I hadn't used much C in a long time before needing it for a training class at work. Other than writing a few filters in C for the unix shell (which could have been done in Perl) I really hadn't written more than a couple hundred lines in a few years--as the saying goes, "use it or lose it". So I really needed a good way to brush up on the details of this elegant little language. Some C books are too clever; and it's confusing, and some are too over-simplified; and you miss crucial details. I found this book to be extremely well written, full of good detail and examples, and I felt that it served as a very good review of the language. It brought everything back into memory and even taught me some new things (like initializing automatic variables at the point of declaration with entire expressions including function calls instead of just direct assignment or const-like expressions). C is rapidly becoming a matter of antiquity, and "old school" language that probably *hurts* your resume more than helping it. However, because of Linux building with gcc, and the Solaris source code being released (with AT&T copyrights going back the Reagan/Gorbechev era!!) there is still reason why this cherished language still stands the test of time. OS X is based on FreeBSD, many browsers, interpreters and compilers are still written in C. In short, its still a major part of the world's computing infrastructure but gets ZERO respect in the commercial marketplace. However, unix programmers, legacy coders and hobbyists will still need to learn this language which is, to this day, indellibly burned in to the manual pages of unix. This book deserves to be remembered both as a good place to start, and a good place to brush up if you've fallen off the wagon for some time and need to get back on board.

I am a student writing a paper which I plan to hand in, the end of this month i.e. October 2002. I noticed that Dr. P. Sellapan's book, P. Sellapan, 1999, "Object-Oriented Programming Using Visual C++ Through Examples", First Edition, Federal Publications Sdn. Bhd., Selangor, page 6-9 - ISBN 983-58-0451-6 and his other book, P. Sellapan, 2001, "C++ Through Examples Include Object-Oriented Programming", Eight Edition, Federal Publications Sdn. Bhd., Selangor, page 177-178 - ISBN 967-914-746-0 have the same diagrams as Dr. Byron's book entitiled, "Schaum's Outlines - Programming With C", 1996, Second Edition on page 371-372. So can somebody tell me, which of the authors should I reference to? I am a bit confused as to whom I should reference to!

Easy to read, lots of examples, challenging exercise problems and programming assignments - you don't ask for much more. This book can be used as a textbook or as a supplement to another book on the C programming language.

You want C, you got C.

Eminent Victorian Soldiers is the perfect book for anyone interested in the British Officer class during Queen Victoria's reign. These generals were a quirky bunch, who ranged from coolly competent to tragically confident. The more famous soldiers, like Gordon, are given brief, but complete, biographies. But the real prize is the less famous soldiers, like Wood, are brought to light. This is done in a simple, while at the same time very informative, style. All of the soldiers are shown in their good and bad points, but most of all, they are shown as what they truly were: products of their times.

No footnotes, and all based on secondary research, but this book I found fun to read. The accounts of the 8 generals profiled are consistently interesting and this book makes for good light reading

This compendium biography presents a fine sketch of the eight prominent Victorian generals who commanded during the Little Wars of Queen Victoria. The often respressed and somewhat bizarre characteristics of these men seems typical of the Victorian mind-set. While they were certainly eccentric, these men personified the times they lived in and in their actions pursued the notion of the White Man's burden to civilize the dark regions of the world.

In the politcially correct times that we live in today perhaps some of these notions will appear offensive, but in order to appreciate these man we must understand the times they lived in and try not to impose our own values upon them. Indeed, many Victorians would find our social values today strange to comprehend as well. Byron Farwell specializes in the Victorian military experience and his writtings on this topic are always witty and informative.

The reader may find it surprising that homosexuality was present in several of these gentlemen, namely Charles Gordon and Hector Macdonald. Again, we can attribute this to the oddities of the age which repressed such feelings on the surface, thereby encouraging their lurkings behind the scenes. It is doubtful that any of them would have preferred to advertise their inclinations as seems to be the norm today. Homosexuality was more discreet then, and perhaps that was a good thing in a way.
The military life that these men pursued perhaps inclined them toward a different lifestyle as the compnay of women was often infrequent in far outposts.

The talents of these generals certainly expanded the British Empire and made it one of the great epochs of its day. Farwell has provided a worthy addition to Lytton Strachey's earlier work, "Eminent Victorians". The reader will find all sorts of interesting and amusing aspects of these Eminent Victorian Generals.

Re-read this book for an online English class. I had forgotten how well London was able to convey the message of how you should listen to those who are only trying to look out for your best interests. I even went so far as to turn up the heat in my house after reading this book!

Although at times this book becomes slightly boring, the overall effect makes it well worth reading. A multitude of stories are told throughout time, yet few truly well-told tales exist among them. These well-told tales are not only memorable, they also exhibit exceptional grammatical ingenuity. The extreme setting and vivid, descriptive adjectives, by a notable author, make this a remarkable piece of literature. A lone, rather unlikable man and his dog are portrayed throughout the story. This inhumane man, in ingnoring his elders, does himself great damage. As the temperature in the story lowers, the suspense rises considerably. The reader may find themself at the edge of their seat while reading, as the man, oblivious to the cold, continues to trudge on. This book ought to be read by everyone, for the theme of the story appears to be that oftentimes an animal's instincts prove to be far better than one human's supposed intellegence

I remember reading this in grammar school over and over, and recently reread it. I usually find this author boring but this one's a classic!

Hulsey manages to make a fascinating period of our history boring. His writing is plodding, and minor factual errors seem to have slipped through the editing process.

I was attracted to this book looking to expand my knowledge of a key historical figure, who three decades after he left the stage, is perhaps best recalled for the quote (perhaps apocryphal): "a billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon we're talking about real money."

Byron Hulsey's work is less a biography than a chronicle of Dirksen's long career in public life. Certainly, we are provided some basic details on his upbringing, personal life, and political campaigns. However, the overwhelming focus is on Senator Dirksen as a practitioner of "supra-partisan" politics, a term Hulsey coins to capture the period of political consensus and harmony that extended from the late 1950s through most of the 1960s. Hulsey depicts, time and again, how Dirksen, the Republican leader in the Senate, collaborated with the Democratic Kennedy and Johnson administrations to forge legislation and advance America's interests during the Cold War.

The election of Richard Nixon in 1968, Hulsey observes, ended the supra-partisan consensus, and ushered in a new period of acrimony and heated partisan division that continue to mark public life to this day. The ascension of a younger generation of legislators -- less deferential to the genteel traditions of the Senate -- and the aggressive Investigative Journalism ethic were contributing factors in the demise of supra-partisianship.

Fittingly, Hulsey observes, three major exponents of supra-partisanship passed from the public stage within a year of each other -- LBJ through retirement and Eisenhower and Dirksen through death.

This book opens a window on a bygone era, and will make for enjoyable reading for anyone interested in the workings of Washington, DC in the 1950s and 1960s.

This is a great book by a highly skilled and discerning author. Hulsey definitely brings 20th Century American politics back to life!

The prose here sparkles. Purple, in the best sense of the world. Ideas are bandied about left and right like badminton birdies. Themes are covered copiously. Wit and wisdom are abundant, brought out whenever the author needs it, like a samurai does with his sword. The pieces are all triumphs of economy, setting up their propositions and then quickly cutting to the punchline(s) before the reader becomes bored. Writing of this magnitude, especially when collected from such a fine variety of sources in one collection, is to be treasured and preserved. The superlatives for this book are immeasurable... except that it's not funny.

Oh, it's funny, alright. Just not the right kind of funny. "That was clever," you might say to yourself, after a romp through one of Garrison Keillor's prose pieces. "I wonder if I should chortle now? I think I shall... Chortle!" Or: "Look, mum: alliteration! How ingenious. I marvel at the textbook examples of Comedy found herein." It's humour of the head, as you can see, but rarely humour from the gut. The kind that causes an unexpected snort, embarrassing you in a room full of stranger. Or, the kind that promises a swift trip up the nasal passages for the mouthful of milk you just gulped. This is the kind of visceral humour that I expected. Alas, I did not get it.

Let me show you what I mean, by giving some examples of Head-Funny (not Gut-Funny) pieces: Polly Frost's 'Notes on My Conversations', in which the author imagines herself as a professional conversationalist; Thomas Meehan's 'Yma Dream', in which the author must disastrously introduce a series of guests at a party he is throwing (example: "Ilya, Ira, here's Yma, Ava, Oona. Ilya, Ira -- Ona, Ida, Abba, Ugo, Aga." You get the idea); Roger Angell's 'Ainmosni', in which the author devises a simple plan for curing insomnia: playing with well-known palindromes! ("A woman, a plan, a canal: Panamowa"); Bill Franzen's 'Hearing From Wayne', in which Wayne sends a postcard to Bill... from the afterlife. Don't get me wrong: I enjoyed all these pieces. Immensely. But the promised laughs didn't materialize. Instead, I got pieces that made me think, that made me ponder, that made me contemplate. But laugh? No. Not out loud, anyway (and frankly, an out-loud laugh is the only kind that counts).

I will admit, though, that there were isolated moments of gut-busting. Chet Williamson's 'Gandhi at the Bat', in which the The Mahatma pinch-hits for Red Ruffing. "C'mon, Moe!" Babe Ruth pleads. "Show 'em the old pepper!" To which Gandhi replies: "I will try, Mr. Baby!" Jack Handey's 'Stunned' is a surreal account of a man and his telescope, through which he has discovered conclusive evidence of life outside our own solar system (or has he?). Noah Baumbach's 'Keith Richards' Desert-Island Disks' takes said list, published in Pulse magazine, and imagines what would happen if Keef actually ended up on the island with only these disks (hint: he gets sick of "Tutti Frutti" pretty quickly). Anthony Lane's 'Looking Back in Hunger' is a wonderfully vitriolic look at cookbooks, and how they mess with our minds. Martin Amis' 'Tennis Personalities' proves in two scant pages why I think he is the only perfect writer working today (regular readers of this space will already know I think this way). And in the book's final section we get some perfectly precise verse, most notably from E.B. White, Dorothy Parker, and Ogden Nash.

In his introduction, David Remnick (or is it Henry Finder?) points out that "you might be ill-advised to read this book straight through" because, and here he quotes Russell Baker, "humour is funny when it sneaks up on you and takes you by surprise." Having come to the end of this anthology, I suspect they're right. Expectations can sometimes sap energy. Calling something "An Anthology of Humour Writing" might just wring the humour out of it. But I hope that the examples I've given above indicate that when the collection isn't funny, and it's rarely gut-bustingly funny, it is still highly worthwhile.

If I were teaching a course in 20th Century American Humor, "Fierce Pajamas" would be my textbook. It is simply the best collection of the best short pieces by the best humor writers of our times--Robert Benchley, James Thurber, E. B. White, Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, Groucho Marks, Steve Martin, Veronica Geng, Woody Allen, Ogden Nash, Martin Amis, John Updike, Mike Nichols, Garrison Keillor, Clarence Day, Frank "The Cliche Expert" Sullivan, Leonard (alias Mr. K*A*P*L*A*N) Ross--what more could one want? (Since you ask, dozens of other fine writers are represented in this unique collection.) Okay,there's not a single Abbott and Costello or Martin and Lewis routine in the whole book. But you knew that. This is wit,satire,irony--humor with an edge--not goofball slapstick. But anyone who can't get a belly laugh out of Steve Martin's "Changes in the Memory After Fifty", Ian Frazer's "Dating Your Mom", or David Owen's timely "What Happened to My Money?" should have his pulse checked. I've been sipping this rare, bubbly vintage for a month or so and am about to go back for seconds. Not only am I recommending it to my friends, I'm impoverishing myself sending copies to everyone I care about! Have a sip yourself.

"Fierce Pajamas" is an incredible collection of piece by some of the century's most famous humorists -- from Groucho Marx himself to SJ Perlman, Garrison Keillor, Thomas Meehan (who wrote the book to the musical "The Producers), Marshall Brickman, Woody Allen, Roy Blount, Christopher Buckley, Steve Martin, and more. Some of the pieces bring a smile, others a chuckle, and quite a few made me laugh out loud. Trawling through seventy-five years of The New Yorker, the editors (who contribute a terrifically smart and funny introduction) have come up with some real winners--and even the also-rans are worth the time. The perfect book for your bedside table... or bathroom.

This book was a disappointment. I think that with the recent comprehensive late 20th Century biographies, such as the recent ones about Rockefeller and Lindbergh and Nigel Hamilton's Reckless Youth, we have come to expect the biographer to do a thorough investigation and analysis of the circumstances that impacted the subject. While I do not expect a Freudian approach in every case (and would probably object to it if done expressly), I welcome gentle suggestions that link early events in the subject's life with the later, more well known, events. This analysis was missing from Whizzer (with the exception of the origins of his hatred for the press). The book reads as if it is a collection of on-line newspapers searches, ones that I could have done myself if NEXIS had newspapers dating back to the 30s. Didn't anybody keep a diary? Didn't anybody write letters? Didn't anybody have any introspective thoughts? To those who say that this type of analysis is not necessary for a judicial biography, I direct them to John Jeffrey's book about Powell, which I thought was very well done, and a good model for what a judicial biography can be.

Byron White began his long judicial career in dissent, resisting the rising tide of criminal procedure liberalism of the Warren Court, and ended it as the balance wheel of Rehnquist Court. In his 31 years on the Supreme Court, from 1962 to 1993, he was in the majority in 807 five-to-four decisions, more than any other justice in history, except for the wily William Brennan who served on the court for 34 years. White also has the signal distinction of being the only Democratic appointee to the Supreme Court since the end of World War II who profoundly disappointed his erstwhile partisan allies. Beyond the fact that White refused to "grow" his jurisprudence from its New Deal origins to accommodate the latest cultural avant-garde enthusiasms of the juridical left, little is known about White and his jurisprudence is widely misunderstood.

The litany of White's accomplishments and his early rise to the court serve to obscure the lines of his jurisprudence, which he never made an attempt to clarify. Hutchinson's principal accomplishment is to discern from the mass of White's opinions a sound jurisprudential framework obscured by bulk of White's output (1,275 opinions in 31 years), and in doing so refute the assertion that White was unpredictable.

Although White was popularly described as a conservative jurist, this confounds the term as it is used to describe a specific interpretive philosophy with the judicial tradition which White came to exemplify. Today judicial conservatism is virtually synonymous with "original meaning," the method of constitutional interpretation that holds that the Constitution means only what it was understood to mean by those whose assent made it law. This has certain implications, among them that the Congress's powers are limited to those enumerated, that the three branches of federal government and their powers are strictly separated, and that the states retain inviolable spheres of sovereignty. In this sense, White was not a conservative at all. Where, say, Justice Antonin Scalia would subscribe to these general notions, White would not. For instance, while Scalia believes that the law permitting the appointment of Independent Counsels violates the separation of powers doctrine (Morrison v. Olson), White sees it as a permissible experimentation with the form of government. And though Scalia believes that the powers of Congress are, however tangentially, limited (Lopez v. United States) and that the states retain areas of discretion where the Congress may not intrude (Printz v. United States), White views the powers of the Congress as essentially unlimited (Katzenbach v. McClung) and the states as retaining no sovereignty that the Congress is obliged to respect (Garcia v. San Antonio Metro. Transit Authority). Although Hutchinson views "New Deal liberal" and "pragmatist" as imperfect labels, his carefully wrought and insightful analysis of White's jurisprudence nonetheless establishes that they are fair and roughly approximate descriptions of Justice White.

In it's judicial aspect the New Deal generally sought to eliminate restrictions on the exercise of federal power. These breaks on government power were exemplified early in this century by an activist libertarian Supreme Court's invocation of natural rights and non-textual notions of substantive due process to strike economic regulation. Lochner v. New York, where the court struck down regulations on the working hours of bakers as a violation of their liberty to contract their labor, is perhaps the most famous bugbear of New Dealers. But restrictions also came in the form of the enumerated powers doctrine and in the form of early criminal procedure cases which, as Professor Akhil Reed Amar of Yale has noted, invoked natural law and private property rights, and thus restricted the government's policing powers. All of these, in one way or another, restricted federal action. Judges of New Deal era, then, had a distinctly negative ambition: To remove the restrictions on the exercise of federal power so that the Congress, acting with the Executive, could enact social reform.

The ambition of liberal judges changed, of course, with the rise of "the real Warren Court," which historian David P. Currie of the University of Chicago dates to the replacement of Justice Frankfurter by Arthur Goldberg late in 1962. "Willful judges," as Justice Scalia describes them, were no longer content with deferring to the overtly political branches, but were now eager to enact social reform themselves. The criminal procedure cases of the Warren Court were animated by the ideas that policing by the states was institutionally racist and that crime was a manifestation of disease, not evil, and should be addressed as a public health concern. Steeped in the New Deal idea of the judicial function, however, White largely dissented from Warren Court's innovations. He dissented from Miranda v Arizona, which mandated the now famous warnings to criminal suspects; prefiguring contemporary arguments, he wrote "there will not be a gain, but a loss, in human dignity" because under Miranda some criminals will be returned to the street to repeat their crimes.. White would also labor to limit the scope of rule excluding from trial illegally obtained evidence, and would dissent from Robinson v. California, where the court struck down a California statute criminalizing narcotics addiction. The court said that the state could not punish a person's "status" as an addict, only his conduct; White, sensibly enough, pointed out that addiction accrues through continuous willful behavior.

White was a pragmatist. He didn't believe that the provisions of the Bill of Rights had a "single meaning" or that constitutional provisions could be measured like the provisions of a deed, in "metes and bounds," but he was insistent that constitutional innovations be small and slow, and linked in a rational process. His father taught him that "You can't just stand on your rights all the time in a small town," and White had a lifetime aversion to "the angels of fashionable opinion," as Hutchinson memorably calls ideologues of various stripe. But White's contempt for philosophy could lead him astray. In Reitman v. Mulkey, White wrote the opinion of the court holding that California could not repeal a fair housing law because the repeal was motivated by animus toward minorities. In time, the case was precedent for the current Supreme Court's invalidation, in Romer v. Evans, of Colorado's attempt to deny homosexuals privileged legal status, and for a lower federal court to stay the implementation of California's Proposition 209, barring racial and sexual discrimination in state services. Pragmatism unguided by a philosophy lead White to judgments the long-term ill consequences of which he was not equipped to foresee.

However, White's small-step pragmatism and disdain for ideological enthusiasms kept him from joining most of the Warren and Burger Court's radical social agenda. Although he was willing to recognize, in Griswold v. Connecticut, a non-textual right to privacy permitting married couples access to contraception and even was willing to extend the right to non-married couples in Eisenstadt v. Baird, White famously and vigorously dissented from Roe v. Wade, privately telling people that he thought it was the only illegitimate decision the court made during his tenure. Perhaps just as upsetting to the votaries of judicial activism was White's majority opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick, which held that Georgia could constitutionally prohibit homosexual sodomy. White briskly dismissed the argument that homosexual activity was constitutionally protected: "[T]o claim that a right to engage in such conduct is 'deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition' or 'implicit in the concept of ordered liberty' is, at best, facetious."

In an sense, White was precisely the type of conservative -- one who slows progress, but does not reverse it; one who ratifies the past, whatever its content -- that liberals claim they want. Except for Roe, White would later vote to reaffirm precedent, on the basis of stare decisis, with which he had earlier disagreed. And yet, few modern justices -- except, perhaps, Justice Clarence Thomas -- have been the object of so much vitriol as White. When White retired in 1993, Jeffrey Rosen of the New Republic called White "a perfect cipher" and a "mediocrity," Bruce Ackerman of Yale said he was "out of his depth," and the New York Times' Tom Wicker called him the "bitterest legacy of the Kennedy Administration." The best Calvin Trillin, writing in The Nation, could say of White was "We count his loyalty to team a boon/The other side might well select a loon" -- this in backhanded praise that White retired during a Democratic administration. These facile slurs betray the mercurial enthusiasms of the age more than they carefully trace the lineaments of Justice White's jurisprudence and are therefore more reflective of their authors than White's jurisprudence.

In many ways White is entirely alien to today's culture, popular and lega

Hutchinson has written a fascinating contemporary biography of Justice White who is almost unique in his continued insistence on his privacy and personal dignity. Although the author eschews speculation as to White's family or personal life, one still gets a good sense of the man--his intelligence, tenacity, and just plain decency. At least as interesting are the times he lived in, and few lawyers or judges have shared the action and passion of their times more fully than Justice White--first on the gridiron, then in the classroom, in the world of affairs, and on the court. White had his shortcomings as a communicator and legal theorist, as Hutchinson aptly illustrates with the oral and written record. But would that our society had more such self-effacing, dedicated and excellent lawyers and public servants!

I listened to the Audio Cassette version of this book. Mr. Farwell provides an overview of the United States' participation in the war from the US's total lack of preparedness in the beginning to the large American Expeditionary Force (AEF) turning the tide at the end of the war.

Farwell spends a lot of time describing President Wilson's effort to manage the war, US troop strength and training, supply problems, the effect of the war on the home front, the difficulty of black soldiers and the view of the war through the eyes of common soldiers and not so common soldiers such as George Patton and Harry Truman.

Along the way, Farwell debunks several commonly held (at least to me) notions about the war, such as: the air war had no strategic effect on the outcome; Germany's U-Boat war caused big problems for US shipping before and during the war; and that the US had to rely on France for guns and Britain to ship the troops to Europe.

John Richmond provides wonderful narration throughout, including French accents where appropriate and providing the proper pronunciations to the French towns and villages.

All in all, a good primer, though not in-depth narration, for how the US fought WWI.

I listened to the Audio Cassette version of this book. Mr. Farwell provides an overview of the United States' participation in the war from the US's total lack of preparedness in the beginning to the large American Expeditionary Force (AEF) turning the tide at the end of the war.

Farwell spends a lot of time describing President Wilson's effort to manage the war, US troop strength and training, supply problems, the effect of the war on the home front, the difficulty of black soldiers and the view of the war through the eyes of common soldiers and not so common soldiers such as George Patton and Harry Truman.

Along the way, Farwell debunks several commonly held (at least to me) notions about the war, such as: the air war had no strategic effect on the outcome; Germany's U-Boat war caused big problems for US shipping before and during the war; and that the US had to rely on France for guns and Britain to ship the troops to Europe.

John Richmond provides wonderful narration throughout, including French accents where appropriate and providing the proper pronunciations to the French towns and villages.

All in all, a good primer, though not in-depth narration, for how the US fought WWI.

To someone who is already well-read on WWI, this book will probably be light fare. Actually, it is not a comprehensive overview of the entire war--it focuses exclusively on the U.S.'s brief (1917-18) entrance and participation in it. But for someone who is new to WWI--especially a young person--this is a very concise, readable, and engaging presentation which touches on a lot of the major issues that have so many people confused (i.e. what the war was really about, how it started, what its significance was in terms of the modernization/industrialization of warfare, and its short- and long-term effects on American society). Farwell also discusses the cultural upheavals (in pop culture and the arts, in race and gender relations) intertwined with the the conflict, and includes an interesting chapter on the role that American blacks and Indians played in the U.S. armed forces.

As an avid trader, I am always looking for insight into the market. One of the few writers that offers intelligent objective analysis of the market is Christopher Byron. He is willing to take on a difficult task of scolding companies that have had a high flying record, and that are termed by most as the "Must Have" stocks at the moment. His balanced analysis shows the flaws in the most favored of stocks.

Byron's greatest strength is in his use of exemplary writing. The difficult task of shifting through an annual report to find nuggets of truth and potential problems is a difficult task. Byron is a mine detector when he evaluates a stock for you. And he uses terminology that allows the novice reader to understand the most complicated of financial terms and equations.

I believe that the mark of a great writer is shown by the ability of a highly intelligent person to convey difficult concepts in a manner that the dumbest of people can understand. Byron is one of the few great personal finance writers of our time because even I, a great fool in the stock market, can understand what Byron is trying to explain to novice traders.

This book's list of financial web sites alone was worth the price of admission. Some usual suspects--yahoo, and thestreet.com--and many more that professional investors consult. The newbie investor may be a bit overwhelmed, but if you've graduated to knowing the difference between a market and limit order, you're probably ready and eager to use the Internet to help keep an eye on your money. There's a good appendix of Byron's favorite web sites at the back of the book, so no need to dog-ear the pages when you find Internet gold.

If you are at all serious about investing on your own, Deleteyourbroker.com is a must.

I've been actively trading for years and I have read all of the Fool books, Suze Orman, Rich Dad, et. al and this ranks right up there as one of the best. If you've never heard of Chris, I think he does a streaming show on MSNBC at Noon each day that you can check out. His style is his irreverant and inimitable.

You'll find yourself laughing and really learning how to uncover and decipher information from some of the more informative web sites like Edgar-Online and others.

Buy the book, you'll have no regrets