An Excellent reference - based on good research work, some of it carried out by Dr. Luis Coin Cuenca of the
University of Cadiz. I first read it in February 1993 and still refer to it now and again.
It covers earlier European voyages to the Americas, Vikings but NOT St Brendan's Irish voyage to Greenland etc, circa 570 AD.
Nor to speak does it cover the undiscoverd maps or puertolanos passed down from generation to generation of the Basque Cod fishing grounds located between Iceland and North America.
It also covers Colon's earlier voyages along the coast Africa and northern Europe and the very interesting clues that existed of another continent in the west atlantique. Interestingly it
does mention a mysterious map or puertolano in the initial voyage.

However it is Eurocentric and neglects to mention the great Arab explorers nor the voyages of Asian (Chineese, Polyanesian and ? Australian aborigines- whose remains were found in-Cien Fuegos-Chile & Brazil 3 years ago) to the North American continent.

Other interesting tales of discovery are 'the Adventures of Ibn Battuta' by ross Dunn ISBN: 0520067436
and the voyages of discovery of 'Pytheas the Greek' by Barry Cunliffe ISBN: 0713995092

Naoise@nkoh.demon.co.uk

As a business user in publishing who's just upgraded to Windows XP I found this book excellent. It's mercifully free of jargon and provides a comprehensive guide how to get maximum use out of XP. XP is fast - but it's significantly different in appearance to previous versions of Windows. I'd recommend this guide to the general home XP user as well. It supplies all the basic info you'd expect - creating folders and files, printing, internet use, shortcuts, using the explorer bars - as well as some you might not (eg. how to customize XP for a user with a disability). For the business traveller there's a helpful section on how to use XP on a laptop, including tips on how to specify new dialing rules, use a calling card and encrypt folders.

As someone who in the past has struggled even with one of the Dummies guides I found this book very straightforward as it cuts its way through the jungle of faxing, blocking or routing messages, security settings and conferencing with Net Meeting. Not to mention how to set up a distribution list or a Newsgroup account.

The section on Administrative Tools Demystified is very useful. As the authors point out, data has an inherent tendency to fragment and no user, no matter how expert, can avoid this problem. The advice on checking for disk errors and defragmenting files is lucid and to the point. With this guide every XP user should be able to optimize their system for peak performance.

The book has a pretty neutral tone (unlike the sometimes irritatingly folksy tone of the Dummies series), though a dry wit sometimes surfaces. The section on what the authors' call XP's plumbing aims to supply "all the information you need to appear very knowledgeable the next time that bad-tempered tech-support guy barks his questions at you".

A final section is devoted specifically to business projects. Topics include setting up a small network, working with a client/server network and last but not least troubleshooting system problems and errors (including guidelines for setting up a diaster recovery plan). A useful glossary defines terms like "Ethernet address" and explains enigmatic acronyms (IAB, IANA, ICANN, ICS, IETF etc).

For business users this is definitely the authoritative guide to XP Professional but XP Home users should find it useful too since it also covers features like Media Player and Movie Maker, printing photos, protection from viruses, working with floppy disks, and all those other things which the home PC user is likely to use.

This story about Christopher Columbus is told through the eyes of a fictional cabin boy. The book also includes notes from the author and photographer who retraced Columbus' route, bringing the story to life.

This book is simple to follow and to learn from, it was just like following the dots from a childs book! This book sits on my desk and is within arms reach for me to use if I need it. The netMeeting part was my main reason for buying this book, however it has proven to me, to be a much needed asset in my growing computer book collection.

This book is a great book if you're starting out UNIX, which it was for me. However, it doesn't show you much in the way of UNIX's programming enviroments for other languages (C, C++, etc.). But because of the really nice reference that this book supplies, it'll most likely stay on my shelf for a very long time.

And one more note - the author tends to be biased towards SCO Unix (now part of Caldera) and will, from time to time, incorporate SCO-only commands.

This book, I have found, is not especially conducive to reading straight through. However it serves my purposes as a refence tool quite well. The last 500 pages are nothing but explanations of the [most] commands available in UNIX. There are very few examples in this area of the book though. Overall, page for page, I think you'll find this book gives you the most quantitative and qualitative information for your buck.

This is the first computer book ever to make me cheerful reading it. The book proceeds slowly and carefully through the essentials of Unix. No flummery, no witchcraft.

Everyone with a MS-DOS background who is starting out into Linux , as I am, should start with this book.

A concise and clear introduction to the interstellar medium. Chapters 5 to 7 on radiatively excited regions and gas dynamics are particularly well written (half the book). The rest of the book is perhaps too concise to cover adequately topics such as dust properties and star formation.

This book by K.K. Dyson (a British scholar hailing from India, I understand) is an analysis of the attitudes, opinions and lifestyles of British men and women in India from the period of Clive's rule in India to just before the Mutiny. Why start at 1765? I am not really sure, except that this might have been the starting point of one of the diarists and memoirists.

The book draws upon some famous British figures - Reginald Heber, Bishop of Calcutta and a minor poet; Eliza Fay, a contemporary of Warren Hastings; and Richard Burton, the travellor, author, and so forth. There are diaries and memoirs kept by military men, by administrators, by their wives, and by clergymen. There is considerably more material available post-1818, than for the period before then.

This review will confine itself to a general description. The book is not divided into time periods (as far as I could tell) but by the diarists and memoirists and the time they spent in India. Thus Fay comes early in the book, Heber in the middle, and Burton towards the end. Dyson does try to break up each section by analyzing not just the authors' impressions of India (the sights, the festivals, the people) but also their attitudes towards Indians and the growing Eurasian community. Some of this comes across more clearly than others, because of the nature of the material available.

The semi-chronological nature of the book allows the casual reader to understand how British views of India changed across time. However, this same method of analysis means that the views of different memoirists across time cannot be contrasted on a particular subject. For example, how did Eliza Fay's attitudes towards the status of native (Indian) women compare to the attitudes of male memoirists in the same period, or in a different period? That is not really addressed in this book, although Dyson does provide biographical sketches of the principal memoirists selected with some reference to their background, their education, and their expectations of India. [The attitudes of young society ladies visiting a relative in India was very different from the attitudes of a missionary's wife].

One problem I had with this book was a failure to provide an appendix listing all the major diarists and memoirists whose materials were used, together with biographical sketches. Given that Dyson provided two other appendices (of extracts from memoirs, letters and diaries), I might be asking too much. But this would have helped understand why some diarists were chosen and others omitted, and which diarists or memoirists made an impact on the reader back in England via publication.

I was expecting a how-to book, with discussions of topics and tips on interesting things to do, including examples. What I got was an A to Z listing of words/phrases with their definitifions. As long as you know what to look up, it is useful. If you have no idea, this book is not for you.

Not knowing a whole lot about networking, I had the the urge to learn some more. A bid mistake to pick this title up ,i.e., Novell's Dictionary of Networking (Inside Story (San Jose, Calif.).) by Peter John Dyson. The book in question is way technical and it could have been written in russian or greek since I would have understood it just as well.