I gotta buy this book for my class. I have some troubles with the topics inside. I agree that this is a good book but I gotta read from other sources to get more details. The author didn't make clear in many points. However, he covered all of the important topics. If you have some economic background, it would be your wonderful book, but for me it's not.

It is a good book. The author ,however, put "Figures and Graph" on the next page so that you have to turn pages back and forth most of the time to make senses. That will slow down your reading. Other than that you will enjoy reading the book.

Macroeconomics makes it easier to understand the very complex fundamentals of macroeconomics. It not only describes the different economic principles but also explaines them and examples are used frequently. Most chapters have at least a case study that shows how the ideas of the chapter can be applied to real-world episodes. The book consist of seven parts which cover different areas. The book provides information about unified development of core business cycle theory; new perspective on inflation, unemployment, growth and productivity and much more. What makes this book unique is that not only it deliver theories and concepts but also possible explanations to the central macroeconomic puzzles. I realy recomend this book.

The authors claim to be 'scientific', 'rational', 'empirical', 'economic' in their assessment of the public decision making process and the role of public choice, but there are clearly several normative value judgements embedded in their framework. In discussing their choice of optimal rules, the authors state that an assumption of their model is that all votes are considered equal, and that if this assumption is not valid then there model will fail to function properly. They continue in stating that this is not a very large constraint as one vote is only one vote whether or not the individual uses it or cares about it or not. However, a hundred pages later, the author's apply their model to representational democracy, an area where a very compelling argument can be made that all votes are not equal, yet they fail to address this fairly basic flaw in their thinking, or how it effects the functioning of their model. The authors also repeatedly give the same importance to the protection of property that they do to the protection of liberty, another normative assumption that influences their model, as they seem to egg the reader on in thinking that greater decision costs can be tolerated if the stake is Liberty and property. This piggy-backing of the property rights of the wealthy on the civil rights of the working class seems pretty disingenuous as the end result of this piggy-backing is that the workers get screwed while the rich are free to get richer. However the weakest aspect of the text from an 'empirical' perspective, is that the authors leave their definition of costs largely undefined. In other words they can, and indeed do, shift the 'contract locus' at will to ensure that a conservative ideology will prevail no matter the given situation. That the authors oppose the enlargement of government is clear, as is the fact they justify this position by advocating what they call personal liberty, which is in reality the protection of the private property of the few. Those may or may not be convincing arguments depending on the readers own perspective (and pocketbook). However, the authors do not claim to be offering a perspective. They are offering a 'calculus of consent', a scientific method by which to divine our political choices free of the nasty constraints of opinion and values. Put it this way, as passionate intellectual forefathers of slippery right wing rationalizations for greed and inequality, these authors score major points, as dispassionate scientists merely describing the way 'things are' they are merely majorly hilarious.

Some reviewers comment that this book has "a conservative bias." Nothing could be further from the truth. This book is written in the great classical-liberal tradition that motivated the American revolution and the drafting of America's 1787 Constitution. Buchanan and Tullock saw themselves as putting into modern economic language the insights and wisdom of James Madison and Co. The book does indeed counsel skepticism of big government, and it is no great fan of unlimited democracy. But the authors come to this position because they understand that even democratic governments can be tyrannical and that a depoliticized society -- governed largely by private property rights -- promises peace, prosperity, and cultural flourishing. Few books on economics are as original and insightful as is The Calculus of Consent -- and it remains as fresh in 1999 as it was when first published in 1962.

This is probably one of the most rewarding books anyone can read. If you care about government and what it does (or doesn't) do to (or for) you, read this book. It requires patience and concentration, but it's well worth the effort. The authors succeed in showing how it is wrong to assume that government has always the best of intentions. They put a human face on politics and explain with impressive reasoning why government and politics produce unreasonable outcomes. The explanatory power of this book is unmatched. Anyone who cares about what this country is and what it could be should read it. Despite what you may have heard, their agenda is not conservative, it is individualistic, treating each person with dignity. The outcomes may surprise you, but you can't help but be moved by the force of their logic.

This text is very insightful and wounderfully written, however, I would consider using this book solely for lectures and theory. There are very few examples and and many topics are simply glossed over. If you would like to have a great deal of "head knowledge" in regards to PowerBuilder, this is the text for you. If you are a hands on developer, this book will leave you stranded, smart, but stranded! If you have a need to go into a meeting knowing all the buzz-words and PowerBuilderees, buy this book.

If you want to develop systems for your clients, keep surfing!

The author did say that "this is not a tutorial", he's right, it's not a tutorial, it's not even a reference text. Save your money!

I almost did not buy this book. I read the reviews and the book received a pretty bad review from one reader. Fortunately I found it in the book store and took a look at it - I was impressed. This is a pratical book for experienced developers, not Sybase promotional literature. It covers a lot of advanced material (with examples) and the authors seem to speak from experience. I took a look at the reviews again an noticed the poor review was from a reader in public school. So I guess I you should not buy this book if you are learning PowerBuilder. I DO recommend the book for experienced developers.

There are in-depth chapters on distributed PowerBuilder applications and building multi-lingual applications. These two topics are of interest to me. The chapters walked me through all the steps to distribute an application and to make our application multi-lingual. There are a lot of samples and the code is really simple to follow. There is also a lot of coverage of other "Enterprise" issues.

With a book of this nature, it's hard separating an evaluation of the book from an evaluation of the technology itself -- so I won't try too hard. Yes, the book showed certain evidence of haste in editing and proofing but the errors and weaknesses are not of the type to cause an early adopter to stumble. For instance, there is no index but chapters are distinct enough so that it is easy to find the broad categories.

I eagerly picked up this book after attending a very impressive demo of Curl's capacities. Only skimming the two chapters on Object Oriented Programming, I concentrated on the other chapters most relevant to GUI developers of Web-based applications.

Being an ardent practitioner of the W3C's Cascading Style Sheets technology, I was a bit disappointed in Curl's implementation of styles, which seems clumsy and very limited, even considering the differences in syntax. The authors were very knowledgeable on HTML and CSS issues -- which made their reliance on tables for layout a bit disturbing. Does this indicate that Curl lacks equivalents for CSS positioning and layout properties -- or merely that the authors did not happen to see this as important enough to include in examples?

I was dissatisfied with the paucity of examples and the fact that these examples were not of the type of depth to glue the various parts of Curl together. There were some good examples involving 2-D and 3-D graphics which showed the technology to advantage. However, if your primary interest is in form-based Web applications, the examples were sketchy.

The book really needs to have context. Criticism of Java, HTML, JavaScript, etc. is not enough.
The authors must speak more directly to the questions:
{}Does the Web world need another proprietary, Java-like browser plug-in?
{}Does the Curl organization have what it takes to go against Microsoft's .NET, which has a similar architecture and revenue model?

Answer these questions and you not only have a good book, but a real cool winning tool.

Curl is an important new client-side web language that permits you to create web applications that have the same rich interactive power of local applications (Word, Excel) while reducing the complexity that arises from using multiple existing web languages.

This is currently the BEST Curl book on the market. Ok, it's currently the ONLY Curl book on the market, which makes it Good News/Bad News.

Good News: This book does a great job of providing Curl information and "how to" examples in more depth than the Curl manuals. All the major topics are covered, which makes this a good overall reference book. The graphics architecture section is particularly helpful, where the authors describe the overall graphics framework of Curl. This info would save any new user time when learning Curl.

Bad News: by targeting the early adopter, the book is timely, but shows some warts. Some sections still show and describe the last beta version of Curl. The last beta was mostly similar to the current version of Curl, but the small differences are occasionally distracting. The book also has a number of typos and the class descriptions in one table were copied directly from the (free) Curl manual. As most of the authors are from Curl Corporation, this is not plagiarism, but it is not new information either.

Overall, this book serves its purpose by being the first overall book on Curl. The book itself is a great way to learn Curl in conjunction with the Curl manuals. Despite its warts, it is well worth owning.

[Bruce Mount worked as one of the Technical Reviewers for this book. No, he didn't review the section with typos. :-)]

If you have never been to curls website and looked at this new web technology, you do not know what you are missing. In some ways, you can think of Curl as Flash on steroids, although you can do much more than the eye candy Macromedia is known for.

They call this book an early adopter book, but, since I think Curl is most likely going to go the way of Microsoft Agent, it is more a Bleeding Edge book. Unlike Microsoft Agent, however, I do think this technology is very useful.

So, what is Curl? Curl is a new OO technology for web UI development. In many ways, it is what Java promised, with applets, in its early days. The main difference here is Curl is designed to create dynamic, awe inspiring presentations (ala Flash) without a lot of work (once you learn the language, that is).

The book deals with Curl primarily as a UI development language. Through the chapters you will learn to work with 2d and 3d environments, multimedia and even dynamic client interaction. As with all Wrox books, there are plenty of code examples (all downloadable from the Wrox site).

I really love this book, although I wonder if the technology will ever really take off (Curl engine download is huge if you have a dialup).

The author's attempts to draw parallels between the career of Admiral Gordon and the fictional Horatio Hornblower generally are stretches. I thought he needed to reread the Hornblower books before making some of the comments he did. His list of similarities in their careers in the forward would be more effective if they were accurate for Hornblower. However, the dates for different ranks are wrong. He also equates Gordon's enlistment at 11 with Hornblower's joining at 17 as both being "mere boys in 1793." Hornblower was actually old for a new midshipman.

However, we should be grateful that this dubious premise sold the book, because Perrett has provided us with a very solid biography of a typical naval officer of this period. Gordon is not in the first rank of Napoleonic naval officers, but the variety of his experiences and actions shows the type of man who made the British navy great. With the skill of the true historian, Perrett has dug out details of long forgotten actions and campaigns. His style is readable, and he has an eye for the sort of detail that adds zest to a biography.

The life of Admiral Gordon is very interesting and the book is a pleasure to read. The comparisons between Gordon and Hornblower are not overdone, and even readers who are not Hornblower afficionados (like myself) will enjoy the book.

As a lifelong Hornblower/C.S.Forester fan, I read this book with some trepidation, but Perrett seems to be a fan as well. He proposes a new theory: that Forester created the character of Horatio Hornblower using the model of a real Royal Navy captain in the Napoleonic Wars : James Gordon (who eventually became an admiral). Perrett hangs most of the premise for his theory upon an apparent inconsistency in C.S. Forester's otherwise thorough nonfiction writing style. In Forester's NAVAL WAR OF 1812 (nonfiction),he barely mentions Captain Gordon's name, even though Gordon had had a brilliant and successful career. Perrett notes that Forester gives other brilliant naval officers full career write-ups, even including information on their families. This(in addition to a few other similarities in Hornblower's/Gordon's respective careers) has made Perrett feel that Forester was "hiding" Gordon, so to speak, so that future casual readers would not see the similarities between the real hero and the fictional one. This reader does not feel that there is quite enough evidence to support that theory, but the book is fascinating reading in its own right, and anyone who enjoys naval history will enjoy it. Gordon comes off as a brave, smart, and kind (but fair)captain, like Hornblower. But because we know so much about Hornblower's every thought,feeling, and motive (due to Forester's superb skills), Hornblower seems more real to me even than does Captain Gordon! Perrett, who has written at least 14 other books on military history, has however done a fine job himself, and Gordon's exploits are brought very much to life indeed. A very good read!

While this book is better than many of the other books written by ex-Rajneeshees, it is still a highly personalized account of the author's interactions with the Rajneesh movement. The author clearly has some sympathy for the Rajneeshees, but also sees their mistakes and criticizes their antagonistic attitudes towards the people of Oregon. Still, there are few details about how Rajneeshpuram was established or what happened to some of the major players after Rajneeshpuram collapsed.

I found this book to be endlessly fascinating.
Written by a research psychiatrist,it's an amazing document of the lengths people will go to in order to avoid taking responsibility for their own lives.
One has to admire the author James S. Gordon, for his integrity as a writer, as he seems to have at times totally lost himself in his subject matter, and yet retained his critical faculties until the end. He witnessed many others, however, who seemed to
lose all capacity for independent thought when in the presence of the man they referred to simply as "Bhagwan".
It is also interesting to be reading this book today, in light of the events that have been set in motion by the tragedy of
September 11th. While some of the Bhagwan's religious practices, bizzare though they were,might still have been tolerated
in a relatively open society such as ours, the actions he and his converts undertook in fighting governmental authority would
undoubtedly have been suppressed with lightning speed.
All in all,this is a fascinating and chilling testimonial to the frailty of the human psyche. Any reader who assumes that highly educated professionals ,including those in the psychiatric and medical fields, would be the least likely of us to succumb to mind control in the guise of spiritual growth might feel differently after reading this book.
One caveat, however: if you start this book, you yourself may fall victim to a kind of mind control. You may have a very hard time putting it down.

Amongst numerous hermeneutics Books in stores, this one is quite different from others.

Using the multidisciplinary approach, it starts with the historical perspective and canonical approach in the first two chapters. Each chapter also spends a good length for a detail and scholarly illustration of both approaches. The subsequent chapter discusses the theological perspective of Bible reading. In tackling the misconception that theology is unrelated to Bible reading, or even causes bad influence to Christian lives, Packer argues why these are not truth and illustrates how theology nurtures our Bible reading and rescues us from being lost when in the "forest" of the Bible.

The book then discusses Bible reading from a wider context, the sociological, postmodernism perpectives and finally back to context of the reader, the prespective of spirituality: a discussion on the act of Bible reading from a comprehensive context.

The book is an exellent one and the authors offer many sound points, especially the last three chapters. The authors successfully relates Bible reading in the culture of our modern/postmodern world and point out the blindspot of our culture and provide a new perspective using the good "old" truth of the Bible. For example, in the chapter of "postmodern truth", the writer first pointed out the blindspots of both modernism and postmodernism. The former treats the world as an engine, using the same way to extract what we want from the world thus becoming the "metanarrative" of others. The latter is too pessimistic that knowledge is only a construction and there is no truth. Using the fact that human being is only part of the creation, knowledge is not a human construct but a response to our world. As the creation, truth is comprehensible, although not ultimate, but still enough for us to communicate with the world. Moreover, our fallen human nature results that human being uses knowledge to the good as well as the bad. While the postmodernism holds the idea that knowledge only serves a purpose to obtain power to suspress/control others, we cannot ignore the other side of the truth as previously mentioned.

In view of readibility, I would give a relatively lower score. Probably, this is caused by the apporach it used. Although multidisciplinary approach gives many different perspectives on Bible reading, written from the hand of the scholars, it also demands the readers equipped with multidisciplinary basic background knowledge. For instance, the basic knowledge of postmodernism, existentialism, Marxism and so forth. In addition, a good basic theological knowledge is important to understand the points made by the readers or else it is very difficult to follow the points made by the author.

With all the interest in homeland security and continuity of operations (COOP), this book is an excellent and timely tool for experienced emergency management professionals. Recommended for anyone involved or interested in emergency management.

This book is easy to understand by a novice in CPA! After reading the book, I find that I am: - * able to draw out a project network using A-o-A and A-o-N method - to analysis the project to identify critical path, project time, floats. * able to understand the effects of cost, resources and uncertainty in activity times on the project and to analyse these. * able to analyse projects where there is uncertainty in structure and in the likely outcome of events

I hope you'll allow me to glow a bit about my former instructor. Soderholm singlehandedly turned me from a gaping pre-law undergrad to a lover of literature, for which I'll be ever thankful. As to the merits of his first published work, I must add my sincere praise. Soderholm's sleek skull fascinates as it parades on the page. Especially entertaining--and, I would hastily add, quite in keeping with the dynamics of his lecture style--is the extended etymology in the first chapter: of the relationships between "glamour" and "grammar" and the spells that have been woven throughout our culture of them--right up to the present day. Soderholm is a first-rate mind, hardened in the crucible of UVa's graduate English program, and finely sharpened on the anvil of endless conversations with his students and colleagues. I am stronger for having known him, and studied under him, and I enjoyed very much this romp through the tawdry legend of Byron.