Joe Tom Davis is probably the most respected Texas Historian alive today. The stories he tells are bigger than life characters who in one way or another have affected Texas. His writing style is clear and consice without errors. His books are a joy to read over and over.

This book is a wonderful read, true to the diary of William Van Davis and illustrated with well reserached side stories and photos. The author did an amazing job of research and it is a must have for any true student of the Civil War or lover of the history of Mississippi.

This book is basically a manual for Unicode 3.0. It is not a light read but well worth the price and then some just for the glyphs from all of the various scripts that Unicode supports.

At 1040 large (8.5 x 11) pages it is the ultimate guide to unicode. With information on scripts and glyphs I had no idea even existed.

However if you are just getting started with Unicode I would recomend you get Unicode a Primer written by Tony Graham from M&T books. If you understand or feel you are starting to understand Unicode then The Unicode Standard Version 3.0 is the best comprehensive reference on the subject out today.

Consider it an overview of the developing UNICODE standard. As such, it will serve the engineer working on software in English and many other European countries rather well. It will be a good _starting_ _point_ for engineers developing software for other languages.

This book is essential for software engineers, at least for the next ten years or so. All programmers should understand characters, and UNICODE is the best we have for now. Even if you don't need it in your personal library, you need it in your company or school library.

The standard is flawed, as all real standards are, but it is a functioning standard, and it should be sufficient for many purposes for the near future.

The book itself is fairly well laid out, contains an introduction to character handling problems and methods for most of the major languages in use in our present world as well as tables of basic images for all code points. Be aware that these are _only_ basic images. For most internationalization purposes, be prepared for more research. (And please share your results.)

**** Finally, UNICODE is _not_ a 16 bit code. ****

(This is well explained in the book.) It just turned out that there really are over 50,000 Han characters. (Mojikyo records more than 90,000.) UNICODE can be encoded in an eight-bit or 16-bit expanding method or a 32-bit non-expanding method. The expanding methods can be _cleanly_ parsed, frontwards, backwards, and from the middle, which is a significant improvement over previous methods.

Some of the material in the book is available at the UNICODE consortium's site, but the book is easier to read anyway. One complaint I have about the included CD is that the music track gets in the way of reading the transform files on my iBook.

This is not just a reference for computer people, but for anyone interested in alphabets, symbols and character sets.

Central to the book, taking up the larger part of it, are the tables of the characters themselves, printed large with annotations and cross-references. If you enjoy the lure of strange symbols and curious writing systems then browsing these will occupy delightful hours.

For the Latin alphabet alone there are pages of accented letters and extended Latin alphabet characters used in particular languages or places or traditions: Pan-Turkic "oi", African clicks and other African sounds, obsolete letters from Old English and Old Norse, an "ou" digraph used only in Huron/Algonquin languages in Quebec, and many others, particularly those used for phonetic/phonemic transcriptions.

The Greek character set includes archaic letters and additional letters used in Coptic.

Character sets carried over from previous editions with additions and corrections are Cyrillic (with many national characters), Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Arabic (again many national and dialect characters), the most common Hindu scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam), Tibetan, Thai, Lao, Hangul, Bopomofo, Japanese Katakana and Hiragana, capped by the enormous Han character set containing over 27,000 of the most commonly used ideographs in Chinese/Japanese/Korean writing. Then there are the symbols: mathematical/logical (including lots of arrows), technical, geometrical, and pictographic. You'll find astrological/zodiacal signs, chess pieces, I-Ching trigrams, Roman numerals not commonly known, and much more.

Scripts appearing for the first time this release are Syriac, Ethiopic, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Cherookee, Runes, Ogham, Yi, Mongolian, Sinhala, Thaana, Khmer, Myanmar, complete Braille patterns, and keyboard character sets. And yes, there are public domain/shareware fonts available on the web that support these with their new Unicode values.

There are very good (and not always brief) descriptions of the various scripts and of the special symbol sets. Rounding out the book are some involved, turgid (necessarily so) technical articles on composition, character properties, implementation guidelines, and combining characters, providing rules to use the character properties tables on the CD that accompanies the book. After all, this is the complete official, definitive Unicode standard.

Of course this version, 3.0, is already out-of-date. But updates and corrections are easily available from the official Unicode website where data for 3.1 Beta appears as I write this. My book bulges with interleaved additions and changes. And that's very good. Many standards have died or been superceded because the organizations behind them did not keep up with users' needs or the information was not easily accessible.

Caveats?

The notes on actual uses of the characters could be more extensive, particularly on Latin extended characters. More variants of some glyphs should be shown, as in previous editions, if only in the notations.

Some character names are clumsy or inaccurate (occasionly noted in the book), because of necessity to be compatible with ISO/IEC 10646 and with earlier versions of the Unicode standard. For example, many character names begin with "LEFT" rather than "OPENING" or "RIGHT" rather than "CLOSING" though the same character code is to be used for a mirrored version of the character in right-to-left scripts where "LEFT" and "RIGHT" then become incorrect. And sample this humorous quotation from page 298: "Despite its name, U+0043 SCRIPT CAPITAL LETTER P is neither script nor capital--it is uniquely the Weierstrass elliptic function derived from a calligraphic lowercase p."

This comprehensive book of quilt patterns using the stained glass window designs of Frank Lloyd Wright is a treasure. As a quilter and stained glass craftswoman, this book is a dream come true. The extensive explanations which accompany each design are easy to understand; the step-by-step illustrations make these complicated designs feasible for anyone. These deceptively simple-looking geometric designs make beautiful quilts (I've seen them in quilt shows), wallhangings, windowcoverings or they could be used to try your hand at stained glass. Jackie Robinson really did her homework, and her resulting book is one I use often.

Countdown to Armageddon is a great resource for those studying the end-times. It's best use is as a reference. These distinguished men of God have taken each aspect of the last days and have have exegeted the corresponding passages biblically.

Prophecy is a wonderful, yet dangerous pursuit. If interpreted literally, it inspires, informs, and motivates the believer to greater work for God. If taken out of context and used as the foundation for a life-ministry, can get lead to wild and crazy interpretations that lead well-meaning believers on useless wild-goose chase for the latest and greatest nugget.

This book does the former. It presents biblical prophecy clearly and accurately. It doesn't fantasize or read between the lines of Scripture. It would be a great text for a college prophecy course.

It's great to see insight from pre-tribulation, pre-millenial, dispensationalists. I believe as do most conservative bible belivers, that this is the only true way to read Scripture.

This is the best video of Bible Prophecy concerning the endtime in which we live right now. It not only shows us how past Old Testament prophecies have been fulfilled but also lets us know WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW CONCERNING THE IRAQ WAR AND THE DEFINITE RISE OF THE ANTICHRIST.
AN ABSOLUTE MUST BUY!!!

This book takes 4 of the finest experts and in simple language and wonderful word pictures explains the Book of Revelation that I have come across. I am in a comprehensive study of Revelation for which this book has been a tremendous tool yet it also reads like a story. This book can be used as a witnessing tool because of the easy read and again as a wonderful navigation tool through the past, present and future description Apostle Paul gives us from his devine experience.

After reading the book, I found a clearer picture about mass customization. Mass customization is now widely used by many businesses, but we may not know how it operates!
In this book, it tells you how you should change your business operation to mass customization step by step, also tell you 5 methods to customize your products or services. And these 5 methods are useful and practicable for designing how the business enter the market.
The stucture of the book is clear, give a full description on the development of the operation, from mass production to mass customization , and the pros and cons of those two operations, followed with the detail explanation on mass customization.
However, I think it's a bit outdated because all the things around us are mass customized and we do not have to decide whether we should change to customized operation or not, but to decide the degree of the customization.

What a refreshing book that is inendated with facts and research, yet the concepts have implementable steps to move your organization into the personalization future. Indeed this author "gets it" when it comes to the individualized services and products that every company should adopt.

At first glance this seems a reissue of Lightning in action, aircraft no.25, but that is NOT the case. It is a different book, by a different writer, with the same title and the same publisher, but published 14 years later. Since I own both books I ought to know. Though both are made within the same Squadron/Signal in action-formula, the contents differ enough to make it worthwhile to buy both books. Loads of photographs, splendid (color)artwork, and also very informative. This one has even 8 extra pages compared to the earlier title.

I don't understand this policy of Squadron/Signal, they should name this one "Lightning in action, Volume 2", I had to ask the shopowner where I bought my copy whether there was any difference between the two books with the same title and he assured me that when the numbers differ, the contents differ also. This not only applies to this plane, there are at least ten "doubles" within the renowned 'in action series', and they are all worth of buying that second copy.

The book is an excellent resource for the emergence of Texas art and artists. The history is accurate and detailed and color plates of selected art pieces is excellent. One drawback is that the book focuses too much on one individual and not enough on the individual artists. The book's strongest attribute is how it places the "Davis Competitions" or "Wildflower Competitions" in historical context with regard to Texas art in the early 20th century.