Of all the craft books we own, this series is definitely our favorite! The projects are fun and the kids just love the pictures. When we're not actually doing the crafts, our daughter spends hours looking for the animals in the beautiful illustrations. We recommend this book (and Crafts for Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and All Seasons!) to anyone that wants to remember children songs from your youth and teach them to your kids!

Frederick Noad has done an excellent job of reviewing the studies/exercises available for classical guitarists and selecting this set of 100 from the studies published by Fernando Sor, Mauro Giuliani, and Matteo Carcassi. The studies are arranged in a progressively more difficult order, and Noad includes his comments on each as to what skills it seeks to develop, etc.

While I feel that the book deserves five stars, it is not without problems, specifically:

1. It is extraordinarily difficult to keep the book
open to the desired pages when it is on a music
stand; spiral-binding would have solved this. This
may seem like nit-picking, but it's an important
shortcoming given the purpose of the book.

2. Right-hand fingerings are given for only a few of
the pieces; in many cases, choice of the proper
right-hand pattern can make a huge difference in
the ease of performing a piece.

3. While Noad gives full left-hand fingerings, he
does not give diagrams of hand-positions to adopt
for a passage, with fingers in place for the next
few notes.

Even taking these into account, however, it remains, in my opinion, the best book of exercises available to any but the most advanced classical guitarist.

If you are going to have one classical guitar book, this may be it. The studies in this book are the "classics" that countless guitarist trained on (incluiding Segovia). After a few relatively easy studies, the book shifts into intermediate to advanced level work very quickly. Not a viable alternative for the first or even second year guitarist, but for the advancing guitarist, this book alone would provide years of developmental skill building as well as great music for the performance repertoire. It is sequential (graded). Contains all of Carcassi's and Sor's great studies, plus a sampling of Guiliani's-- graded from simple to advanced with 75% at the high intermediate level.

It is a real pleasure to have simple crafts for children with most materials on hand, and wonderful instructions and illustrations! I have enjoyed doing crafts with my sunday school class and the neighborhood children for many years,and Kathy Ross's books are amazing! Thank you Kathy! I wont stop until I own them all!

This book is great for kids between 6 and 12. I'm a brownie leader with 2 girls and these activities hold the interest of both younger and older children, small groups and large. We've made several of the projects at home and a few with the brownie troop. The ground hog puppet was especially liked by the Brownie troop. It's great for cold days when you can't get outdoors.

This book is not what I hope for. Although it has been out for a couple of years the author has not even aknowledged some of the major typos in the book (see O'Reilly web site).

Although nicely written in a style that can be fairly easily followed, it is missing a substantial amount of needed reference material. For example in the section on conditional statements it refers to boolean expressions. Nowhere does he provide a list of operators or build-in functions available. You either have to build your own incomplete list gleaned from his examples or go find a good reference book.

O'Reilly authors generally do a better job.

Focused too heavily on dynamically created XML being transformed to HTML.
I am interested in the power of XSL for transforming business data between disparate systems. Simple code examples from the web site often didn't work. No complex examples in the book.

I was very disappointed to find that the "XSLT Quick Reference" in Appendix C consists of syntax requirements straight from the W3C spec and single line references for where to look in the W3C spec for a "Quick Reference".

Example:

For

The "Quick Reference" provides the following ...

See XSLT specification section 5.6: "Overriding Template Rules."

Author does a nice job introducing XSLT and XPATH.

Andrea Dworkin's tell-all this is not. That's hardly surprising, given that Dworkin is one of the most maligned women in the world, and any details she shares about her life are likely to be met with suspicion at best. What is disappointing is that the book is presented as a memoir and is not. It is a series of episodic, highly selective anecdotes, presented in roughly chronological order but confusing as to subjective and objective significance. Somewhere in the puzzle there is a truly heartbreaking story--that of a brilliant, courageous, talented woman set on wrong turns early and with malice aforethought by a society that could only recognize intelligence in a woman as perversity and perversity as sexual. Even growing up in Camden, New Jersey, Dworkin's gifts were recognized by her teachers, but women teachers resented her and male teachers tried to seduce her. Dworkin's refusal to conform closed the usual paths of resistance to seduction: female chastity and lack of adventurousness. She went in the opposite extreme, experimenting sexually at an early age, valuing her independence but remaining essentially gullible, loving books and the male model of the social outcast, while at the same time picking up few practical skills. It never was spelled out to her that male bohemians survived because on the one hand, they didn't have to worry about rape, number two, no one would expect them to sell their bodies, and number three, they often knew how to use others to their advantage. By the time Dworkin began to figure it out, she had been through prostitution, several rapes, an abusive marriage, and sexual degradation by doctors in the Women's House of Detention in New York, which her testimony (as an antiwar prisoner) helped to bring down. She also had been through serious drug use and the political self-indulgence of much of the sixties, considering all authority, anywhere, as bad, thus refusing a young woman the authority and the help from authority that would allow her to take charge of her life.

Feminism did, and with a lot of help from her friends, Dworkin not only survived but transcended her background to become an original and tough-minded feminist writer. This is the most inspiring part of her story and reflects most positively upon radical feminism--now a smear word, but originally a way for women who had been left-wing radicals to distance themselves from the misogynism of the left while maintaining a progressive vision. Unfortunately, radical feminism quickly ran up against the same walls as sixties radicalism, fracturing into the exploration of consciousness and lifestyles on the one hand and on the other, a movement against sexual violence that accomplished certain positive goals while remaining self-divided politically. It was the latter which threw Andrea Dworkin into prominence, her imaginative verbal fury and personal anguish an unforgettable diversion from the difficult legal and social details of institutionalizing anti-rape politics, but too often a diversion to help in translating pain into practice. Reading between the lines, it is easy to see how her own best qualities played a role in making Dworkin the feminist equivalent of the "cool teacher": the magnetic, sympathetic personality of huge learning whose attractive extremism and lack of common sense threatens to overpower the young as they start living their own lives. Feminism is a young movement; feminists are by definition in need of mentors. Reading "Heartbreak," the overwhelming lack in Dworkin does not come across as being one of courage, social conscience, or integrity, but of even the most basic mentoring skills, however skinlessly keen her attention to others: it's an attention that is focused on her own sensitivity, her own attentiveness, her own compassion. Others are her mentors--Judith Malina, Grace Paley, Muriel Rukeyser, Huey Newton, and would-be Ginsberg and Goodman--but Dworkin overwhelms rather than guiding. Her ideals may be on the side of the angels; her self-absorption, however, verges on megalomania.

One suspects this is what happens to a brilliant person encouraged to be a mediocrity, and Dworkin's most stunning case in this book is not against pornography or pedophilia (her charge against most male mentors) or even Bill Clinton: it's against high school. The book is worth reading and buying for that. It's heartbreaking, but not quite as Andrea Dworkin intended: it's heartbreaking for the portrait of a near-genius who knows the truth about herself, grieves for it every day, and yet cannot quite escape being a caricature.

I heard about Andrea Dworkin's recent memoir in the Bennington Alumni magazine that I receive periodically. I had just recently become familiar with Andrea's work, and her activism/memoir intrigued me. I am a much more recent graduate of Bennington College, and I am currently an activist to increase awareness and to help end violence against women and children. I am also in the process of writing a memoir of my own healing from sexual child abuse and rape.

I thoroughly enjoyed Andrea's memoir. I feel that she expresses a healthy degree of outrage in response to the sexual abuse of women and children. In addition she is a very interesting person and the journey that lead her to be a feminist activist against sexual violence is fascinating. I also think it was very courageous of her to share her own experiences of rape, battery, and prostitution. I think that her experience will definitely help other women to not go into prostitution.

Andrea Dworkin uses every ounce of her outrage to listen, and to help end violence. Her outrage is for the world. She is honest about herself, doesn't compromise her principles, and she respects the influences in her life that helped her to be the person that she is.

"Heartbreak" is another important piece of work on the journey of our society towards awareness and non-violence.

I love Andrea Dworkin. Her books are so filled with rage and utter hatred that the most vile texts pale in comparison. This is the blistering manifesto of a soul that is bent on revenge and destruction of her enemies. Dworkin stews and boils in the flames of abuse, victimization and rejection that consume her wild imagination. Dworkin is out to roll over any man-folk and weaker female that stands in her way. Dworkin's MASSIVE intelect is focused like a super powered lazer beam on the very heart of the he-man patriarchy that has caused her so much pain and suffering. Dworkin's STEAMROLLERESQUE prose will send even the most macho he-devil a-runnin'. Dworkin ain't the BIG name in feminism for nothing.

As other reviewers said, there are tons of errors in this book. It did waste a lot of time. However, if you search most of the books on the market today, none of them (or I haven't found one yet) really talks about Java Web Services over JMS. This AXIS book is probably the only one that provides an example where an AXIS server and client can actually talk over JMS. Even though there are errors and the architecture design was not great, yet it should earn some credits on explaining how it is possible to develop and run AXIS over other transport protocols, such as JMS, than HTTP/Servlet only.

Trying to turn a legacy RMI application into a SOAP application will not happen if all you have is the Apache documentation.

This book is ESSENTIAL for anyone using AXIS for developing SOAP applications, especially trying to turn a legacy application to SOAP.

I found the book extremely well organized. It takes you from step 1 (installation, which has some catches to it) to the last step, holding your hand, explaining the details, explaining the rationale. And it does this efficiently. There are neither wasted words nor are there too few words.

I would have given this 4 1/2 stars if I could. I would have given it 5 stars had there been an index.

Although this book is written for AXIS beta one, it's still accurate for Beta two, just ignore all mention of the clutil.jar file and you've upgraded the book to beta two.

Request for next version: A section on debugging the code on the server side.

This book is a kick-starter for AXIS, a well build implementation.

Yes, indeed you can live with the 'man pages' documentations, but relatively faster results would be an uphill climb. And when you need to cut to the chase, you need this Bible. Not just that but all in one: Handbook, Architecture Reference, API Reference and Design Guide etc.

If you're already on the SOAP bandwagon, this book is organized to let you cruise through details like JMS implementation, interoperability with .NET C# etc
Significance of this proof is the author's choice to use an existing Web Service from Xmethods.org

To tweak AXIS itself, Custom Interfaces (mapping, deployment, serializers/deserializers etc) are explained in an exclusive chapter. You can work your own implementation by referring the samples and little changes to them, to suit your application needs.

The concepts are built up in a lucid manner, revolving around a minimalist source code without having different examples for each chapter. The objective of each chapter is thus kept in the forefront; each subsequent chapter improvises on the sample from the previous chapter.

In fact, the case study serves as a template for almost 100% of SOAPification of existing Enterprise Java Applications.

It would have been better to include some perceptive on best practices & notes-from-the-field suggestions, owing to the brand new technology.

Overall, a must read for all those looking for an Open Source based SOAP solution, be a Manager, IT Architect, Wannabe_Web_Service_programmer or just a bystander.