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Those who enjoyed the popular movie starring Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn based on this book will particularly enjoy the details that the movie had to leave out. Of the two, Boyce's story is the most tragic. He was highly intellegent with a potentially bright future, and secured a position at defense contractor TRW with a Top Secret security clearance because of his retired FBI agent father's connections. Lee, on the other hand, was a dropout and a drug dealer whose life was spiraling downward toward the inevitable bad conclusion. One of the astonishing facts revealed in the book is just how many second chances Lee squandered along the way. A child of less affluence would have ended up in prison long before he even had the chance to join Boyce in his spying.
Author/journalist Robert Lindsey is an excellent writer and he tells the story in such a way that it reads like a fiction thriller. Lindsey reports astonishing facts such as the incredibly lax security at TRW without editorial comment, letting the events speak for themselves. Lindsey's extensive interviews with all of the principals, including Boyce in particular, make for particularly compelling reading.
Overall, a well-written journalistic account of one of the most unfortunate of America's spy cases.
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Also to see first-hand the areas where the RAF bravely held off the Nazi air attacks, and the civilian wardens watched the skies and the shores, it made me very thankful for our friends across the Atlantic.
The Rough Guide was a critical part of this memorable vacation.
It is frank and factual, but also upbeat. You will save money, and time, reading it. but you'll also be prepared to savor the history of the place, and meet the helpful and friendly people who live there. We took our Rough Guide everywhere. It was like a trusted, and good-spirited English friend. And it will sit on the top of our day packs during our next trip there.
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This game is a modern game in the Modern World, not a D&D type of Fantasy. Vampires are real in this game, they live in all the major cities, they pull the strings of politics. They hide from Humanity though, because they fear discovery. Yet they have to interact with humans, because as Vampires they eternally need blood to survive and even more to power their dark powers.
Vampires are arranged into clans, 13 to be exact all created by Ancient founders. These clans are divided into three groups. The first is the Camarilla, most obsessed with secrecy and having 7 of the Vampire clans. The next is the Sabbat, a group of Vampires who believe they should rule humanity and arch-Rivals of the Camarilla. They only consist of two clans but their are other clan members who have decided to join. Finally their are 4 Independent clans who try to avoid keeping any alligence to anyone.
The Rules of this game are simple as well. All a person needs is a copy of the sheets, a pencil and maybe ten 10-sided dice. The rule system is rather simple and the game doesn't revolve around pointless hours of combat but story purposes. This adds more enjoyment to the game, if your interested in weaving a story.
The Vampire game is a good introduction to White-Wolf RPG's and it is not only an interesting play, it is an interesting read as well. I have bought many books just to read them, and even if you don't have a group, their is a huge online community.
My only complaint has to do with the long historic background in the book. Having studied history for a while in university, I find that the evolution of vampire through history section at the end of the volume doesn't really add anything, all they do is make a quick resume of all the different time period and adding the word vampire in it... not really necessary...
All in all it still a great book with magnificient illustration and a well written interesting content. I would recomend this game not only to RPG players but to vampire lovers everywhere !!!
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If you are used to using the C++ STL library you will feel right at home using this. (BTW this library works with MSVC 6.5)
BGL uses concept checking and property maps and a few other Boost approaches that aren't very well explored in the text. Granted, it's not a book about C++ programming in general (like "Modern C++ Design") but a bit more coverage of these key ideas would have been nice. Also, unlike the STL, several of the alogirithms are named by their canonical names instead of simply specifying their behavior and performance (e.g. names like dijkstra_visitor and bellman_visitor vs. list and map) . This means that library users may need to refer back to the text to figure out which algorithm they desire.
The choice to typeset all code in bold italic text was very unfortunate, but the use of C-Web to explain larger routines more than makes up for this.
The latter part of the book is a dry reference to BGL. More of the exploratory material would have been preferrable.
Overall, a great addition to my C++ library.
What strikes me the most is the accessibility - the introductions hit the right key immediately, so there's really no need to keep reference material at hand. The samples are equally good, and they're the right size to be easily transformed into solutions to related problems. The book currently rests on my bedside table, and only my favorites make it there...
The Boost Graph Library is powerful, and the BGL book is an excellent companion for graph-related studies or real-world graph problem solving.
Room for improvements:
* The index
* Even more samples (maybe not so elaborate in the text, could be on the CD)
Finally: I like the book a lot, and even if you're not "a graph person", chances are that you will be after reading the BGL book.
I highly recommend it!
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Paper stock is poor and some prints are a bit blurry.
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Too often, I get the feeling that authors that have been invited to contribute have simply re-worked a pre-existing project - and this all too often includes (the usual) hacks and workarounds which all of us use when faced with deadlines. Bits and pieces of Flash4 ActionScript creep in every now and again - and occassionally the authors seem to be entirely unaware of new methods introduced in Flash5 that make their workarounds obsolete (the onClipEvent for loaded data is one example - see Chapt 9 of this book to learn how to do it the *old* way).
Furthermore, the tutorials often lack focus - as though the editors can't decide where to pitch the level of instruction: so that some hard-core ActionScript is often mixed-in with superfluous detail about how to build the interface for the tutorial example.
Anyway, my advice if you really want to *learn* ActionScript for yourself - and also avoid the mistakes, hacks and workarounds that plague the Friends of Ed books - put Phillip Kerman's excellent "ActionScripting in Flash" together with Colin Moock's "ActionScript: The Definitive Guide" on your desk - you'll never look back.
Hats off !! to all those who made this book possible as this book is goin to be there for a long time to come.