Very similar in content and structure to Ortho's Complete Guide to Vegtables. The difference comes in the experience the writer has growing and maitaining the various plants. I find using both books gives different perspectives for growing and caretaking of plants but conatins the same basic information. For instance the Ortho book has better Garden Setup and maintenance data, and raw data on the various gardening aspects like fertilizer and pest eradiction. The Burpee book focuses on plant and cultivar details a little better. The book is filled with plenty high quality pictures of plants and their fruits using multiple pictures of various cultivars within plant families.
The book is geared for both beginners in gardening and the handy do it yourselfer types. Chapters progress you through the steps from site selection and plant selection to harvesting, crop rotating and soil conditioning over winter and indoor greenhouse seed starting. The book also contains references to various cultivars within vegtable species, so a beginner gardener could not only successfully select and grow well know vegtables, but could also grow and use the odd often hard to find fresh herbs.
I consistently flip between both this book and Ortho's book. I find using them in this manner makes the information extracted complimentary and thorough.

This was my first gardening book purchase and 40+ gardening books later, I still LOVE it. Ever since I my first Burpee catalog came in the mail I've fallen in love with the company and their product. This book will help the novice to the experienced gardener care and harvest a complete range of vegetables. I feel guilty if I drag it out to the garden since this almost a "coffee table" book. The descriptions and pictures give great hope to what your garden can and will be with guidence from this book.

This book could easily be worth $50 and it would be worth the investment. I've been a gardener for a number of years, and out of the entire bookshelf of gardening books that i own, this book, hands down, is far more comprehensive than all of them put together. The first section of the book, a complete book in intself, will teach you just about everything you ever wanted to know about almost every aspect of gardening, and is comprehensive enough that if you learned it all you would be well on your way to becoming a master gardener. The second section, the plant portraits, gives you more information about each vegatable and herb in your garden than you could ever dream of knowing about, and more information than you would even be able to find. Like tomatoes? there are almost eight pages dedicated to them alone. The entire book is filled with beautiful color photographs, and it is packed with tons of hard-core information. Not like the "fluff" and tons of meaningless words without any content that practically all the other books are filled with. Recently i have moved to all hydroponics, and most of the rest of my gardening books are now about worthless to me, however this book is still prooving to be an invaluable source of information. The only thing this book does not cover very well is insects and plant diseases, although it still does quite a bit better than most gardening books do. Of course, if it did, this book would probably be over 700 pages long, "complete vegatable and herb gardener" style. The book "The organic gardeners handbook of natural insect and disease control" is a very good book on this subject. Spend the money and get both of these books. You wont need anything else.

I hope a lot of people in Minneapolis - and the rest of the country and world - read this book. Not only is it the fascinating story about a leading honest citizen of my fair city, it offers all of us an example of a man who maintained his Victorian morals and sense of honor despite the many hurdles he had to jump to make IDS the company it became. From the U.S. Post Office to charlatans to a personal and professional betrayal, John Tappan gave his life-blood to his company in the hopes that its services would relieve the debt of his clients and help them save for their futures.

He was also a strong environmentalist, clearly never forgetting that his youth spent in the wilderness of frontier America shaped him morally and spiritually, and that even though the concept of "survival of the fittest" applies to all of us one must never forget perserverance, courage and loyalty to family, friends, and business clients if one is to succeed and maintain one's moral compass.

He also was able to forgive his clients' weaknesses and helped them improve their lives. If only that happened today!

Any business public relations firm should read this book and read what customer service and loyalty should be all about - and anyone interested in a unique American Renaissance man should order this book for themselves, family members and friends. They won't be disappointed.

Excellent book. I really enjoyed it. It gave me a new understanding of the history of American Financial industry. I encourage other people who have dealing with the financial markets to read this book.

It is a compelling history of Investors Syndicate, covering the formative years of 1894 - 1925. Equally fascinating is the biographical material on and quotes from the correspondence of John Elliott Tappan, the company's founder. I highly recommend it.
Glenn - CFO World Class Flowers

This book is very informative and can be easily related to those w/ no jazz training! Billy Barnard was also an excelent teacher... along with his help on this book!

This is the most accurate, user-friendly intro to jazz. It focuses on the music, not the personal lives of the musicians. It explains, patiently and systematically, in luminously clear prose, what jazz is and how to get the most out of listening to it. It details the origins of jazz as well as the distinguishing characteristics of all the major styles: Dixieland, Swing, Bebop, Cool, Hard Bop, "Free Jazz" and Avant-Garde of the 60s and 70s, and Jazz-Rock Fusion. It profiles 144 musicians' contributions (their sources, their styles, and lists of the others they influenced) and provides classification of more than 1000 other musicians, in easy-to-understand categories. Strategies for locating the best albums for all the top musicians. Optional CD of historic recordings is available. Optional CD of narrated demonstrations of the jazz instruments, song forms and methods that jazz musicians use to make their music is also available. Loaded with instrument sketches and photos of key musicians in action, this is America's most widely-used intro to jazz and has been translated into 5 foreign languages. Its author is an award-winning researcher and jazz musician who has travelled to South America, The Caribbean and Africa, as well as all the jazz centers of America. His work is so down-to-earth and practical that it has been adopted for use in jazz appreciation and jazz history courses at more than 500 high schools and colleges.

This is my first in depth study on Jazz in America. My first musical interests as a teenager were jazz, classical, and Bob Dylan. I began listening to Miles Davis, Al Hirt, Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane in the early sixties. They were followed by Bob Dylan, and, in 1967, my last year in the Army, Bay Area bands. An avid tape collector, I got reintroduced to jazz in the last few years as I have returned to those roots and sought some information about the origins of jazz, as well as the key players in the United States. Gridley's book was found at a used book store, alas, without the cassettes. I have longed for the cassettes, so that I could hear the music he references in his text. This IS a text book. I found it challenging, not having any musical knowledge. I still am in over my head on the musical descriptions, but the chapters are logically broken down into the origins of jazz in New Orleans, early jazz, bop, hard bop, Chicago style jazz, west coast jazz, etc. Gridley clearly knows his players. He shows the progressions of players and followers and has special designations for some of the more modern jazz players in my time frame -- Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Charlie Parkery, John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Ornette Coleman, Art Blakey, etc. And he also references some of the newer men or groups on the jazz scene, including Sun Ra, Weather Report, Mahavishnu Orchestra. I saw the latter play in the late sixties. Gridley's description, for instance, of Mahavishnu's kinetic energy of those years is apt. I personally left that show wired to the max, convinced I could never endure anything like that again. I am sure that this book is associated with college level music courses that are meant for musically inclined students who want to go deeper into the genre. And this book, in my opinion, is so well written, with such a deep glossary, such vivid musical descriptions of the various sounds produced by different musicians and groups, that I am convinced it would be a maximum value for such a student. I will most likely shell out the full price so that I can grab the cassettes. I believe that this book, coupled with the cassettes, will allow me to go much deeper into my own personal revival of American Jazz. I would STRONGLY recommend this book for novices and college level students who are interested in jazz at a more professional level. Organizationally, the book is right on. Plenty of charts that describe the various "roots" of American jazz as they coalesced in New Orleans. And Gridley makes a point that sounds valid in saying that not all those various "roots" were African-American. I am grateful I found this gem in the half-priced book store and will surely purchase the original in the near future. I think you will like this one if you are approaching jazz at both an afficionado and technical level. Good reading!

This is one of the books where I have to force myself to stop reading as one interesting a paragraph follows the next. The first few chapters give a general overview of the basic subsystems and how they work together. The information described in these chapters are taken as a basis for the following chapters that each discuss one subsystem.

For a general overview of how a subsystem works the first few pages of a chapter give you the general idea. If you want to know more the chapters will then go deeper.

The book will NOT tell you how to program NT but rather introduce you to the concepts that are working 'under the hood'.

Shortcommings: Sometimes terms are used at the beginning of a chapter that are defined somewhere in the middle of a chapter or in another chapter further into the book. Also the network subsystem is not described at all.

A lot of OS internal type of books talk and talk, even though most of them are indeed technically superb. But Inside Windows NT is special in that the author knows humans have to practice to learn. After you read a few pages, you come to an Experiment section and see what comes on screen if you do this and that. For non-systems programmer like me, this may be the only book to satisfy my curiosity to know more about Windows NT.

David Solomon's long-awaited update to Helen Custer's original survey of the Microsoft Windows NT operating system is an excellent guide to the internals of the operating system for programmers, systems administrators, and other computer professionals. At 500+ pages, it is chock full of great information about NT that is simply unavailable from any other source. Profusely illustrated and full of very good examples. Custer's original "Inside Windows NT" book was always long on self-congratulations (she apparently was the official "historian" of the project), but short on the kinds of detail that makes hackers drool. It was also written to NT version 3, and is now considerably out to date. Solomon's revision is a total rewrite that remedies this situation. The book is current on NT 4.0, and even contains a good chapter on upcoming changes in NT 5.0. This book definitely belongs on any Windows NT programmer's bookshelf. Solomon writes in the introduction that he was given access to NT source code, and he demonstrates how to use the kernel debugger to decipher what is happening inside the operating system. Even so, he manages to keep the presentation lively and informative. He also reports he had access to the NT developers themselves to review what he had written, which guarentees the accuracy of the book. In several areas I found concise explanations of features that other less well-connected authors and experts had written either in a vague or contradictory way. I am very grateful for Solomon's book clearing up the confusion in these areas.

Brit Cult was impressive, but not quite my cup of tea. I had hoped it would be an all-around Anglophile guide covering the past 30 years of British culture and society. What it does do (and does so very well) is talk about musical and artistic trends in the U.K. during that periods. Thus we hear about all the many breakout trends in music that followed punk, and even the drug scene that accompanied it (3 pages on Ecstasy alone). There are, however, no entries for "Falklands," "Margaret Thatcher," or "Poll Tax."

If you already have a pretty good idea of what recent British pop music, art and literature is like, this book is a good investment. If not, it may be of limited usefulness.