This book was a real disappointment. I was expecting some sound advice on motivation and instead got poems and cutesy verse. Full of pictures of him strutting his well-defined bod, it took me 10 minutes to read the entire book.

A lot of fitness books try to give you dry and boring information on fitness. What I particularly like about this book is that the author combined the physical and the spiritual to come up with what I think is an incredible work that makes me want to crawl under my covers in front of the fireplace with a cup of tea and lose myself in his words. To sum this book up, I would have to say that it is definitely poetry in motion. Buy it! Read it! You won't regret it... that much I gaurantee!

I went out and got Home Theater for Everyone (Harley), Build Your Home Theater in a Weekend (Bruyn/Karabian), The Complete Idiot's Guide to Home Theater Systems (Miller), Use Your PC to Build An Incredible Home Theater System (Farkas and Govier), and Home Theater for Dummies (Briere and Hurley). (I've posted this review in each of the books).

There's a clear difference among these books, and approaches. In order, I would get these books:

1. (tie) Home Theater for Everyone; Home Theater for Dummies. This surprised me. I've heard a lot about Harley's book and it is great. It's getting dated though, and some stuff was simply way over my head for what I'm going to do with my home theater. But it's one of those books you have to read even if you don't understand a lot of it (and mind you, I've got seven computers in my house, a 100Meg LAN, multiple wireless systems, etc...I'm not scared of technical stuff.) It's not so much not understanding it, as much as it is that a lot of it while important to a magazine editor such as Harley, it's not something that you're going to use in putting in your home theater.

Home Theater for Dummies surprised me. I must say, I found it incredibly well researched, practical, and more homey and less academic than Harley's book. I think the title would keep a lot of the HT mags from reviewing it, thinking it beneath them. And the authors clearly know how to have fun (they have sections on how to create your own drive-in and another on bathroom theater.) They cover home theater PCs and Windows XP Media Center PCs, as well as wireless projectors -- so this is truly up to day at publication time because these are relatively new things. (Harley's book does not even mention HTPCs and gives relatively small coverage to personal video recorders (PVRs) which HT for Dummies covers well. I'd say just get this book, but no one would believe me.

3. User Your PC To Build An Incredible Home Theater System. This is a niche book for the techies that like to build their own PCs. Sort of like me :-) I found it knowledgeable and fun, but like I said, you would not buy this book to build a home theater.

4. The Complete Idiots Guide to Home Theater Systems. I liked this book's coverage of budgets and little facts in the book. However there was nothing on HTPCs, the pricing is already dated, and there was nothing in it not covered in Home Theater for Dummies. So if I have to choose between being a Dummy or an Idiot, I'd say I'm a Dummy.

5. Build Your Home Theater In A Weekend. This was basically a waste of money. It was a nice effort, but outclassed by the competition above. It's not worth a longer review.

If you are looking to put a home theater in your home, I'd recommend Harley and Briere/Hurley. Briere/Hurley also wrote Smart Homes for Dummies which they referenced in the HT book -- I'm getting that now, because it basically tells me how to extend my home theater all over the house. Since I spent a lot of money on my home theater, I'm betting, based on HT4Dummies, that their book is worth the price.

My two cents.

It's difficult to up to date on such a fast hanging market, but this book does a very good job.

Having decided to plunge anew in the world of TV (now no longer just TV it seems but home cinema), I found the amount of new jargon and abbreviations overwhelming coming from a salesperson. I found this an excellent guide to understanding the basics and getting a firmer idea of what I really needed.

Yes, this is a most interesting, yet ultimately arcane and outdated work. Clinical Depression is a muddy area, wherein the biological and psychological often overlap. The fact is, a normally healthy and happy woman can descend into a severe postpartum depression, and depressive disorders often run in families. Something is genetically amiss, and to relegate the treatment of this illness to philosphers and psychoanalysts exclusively is a painful and unkind step back into the Dark Ages. Nevertheless, there is some value to this book, yet it needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

Dr. Hassoun is smart, compassionate, and well-read. He can keep lots of ideas going simultaneously. In this substantial slim book he draws from literature (Proust, Tsvetaeva, Dostoyevsky, Christa Wolf, Kafka, Primo Levi, etc.), history, psychoanalytic studies, especially the works of Jacques Lacan. His own clinical practice informs his observations. He is a French medical doctor, and a Lacanian psychoanalyst - and in this book you must wrap your mind around Lacanian standards such as the Other - defined in a footnote on p. 25 as "that who internally represents all the wealth of signifiers (yet who can nevertheless be imagined as relay for the first Other, the mother)." His thoughts on substance abuse, addiction, eating disorders as they relate to mourning and melancholy are presented well. A main point is that depression and melancholy can't be "cured" with anything quick or pharmaceutical. Dr. Hassoun ranges far and wide in the service of his treatise; he quotes (among others) Thomas Mann, Andre Breton, Cocteau, St. John of the Cross, and his interesting patients - fluidly and appropriately. Not for the lazy reader. The Lacanian linguistic acrobatics are hard for the uninitiated. This good book requires readerly effort, and is worth it.

I can't express how dissapointed I was with the quality of this book. As a qualified window cleaner I expected at least one section on the use of squee gee's and possibly some free detergent samples. Please amend this in future issues.

This books can be heartily recommended as a comprehensive, clear and relatively compact companion to Windows 95 for the beginning to intermediate reader. There are, among others, well written chapters on installing and configuring hardware/software, the internet,and network computing .Particularly helpful is the final section of the book on "Troubleshooting Windows 95 Problems",which discusses common problems and how they might be remedied. The book is however not exhaustive, with the absence of topics like "Netscape" and "Internet Mail" (" Windows Messaging" is discussed ) being two slight weaknesses.The instances of incompleteness are however, well compensated for by the compactness of the book and the authors focus on the most important issues. Probably the greatest strength of the book is its clear and logical structure, which makes its very useful as a quick reference source.

There are many errors in this book, but it is still half-decent overall. Check out Tomasi's communications books.

Althought there are some good things on here, be aware that the CD-ROM is merely a demo of transitions and such (that have huge ads on them). I really kind of felt like the book was just so they could hook you on their special effects and sell those. Not a lot of new things in the book if you are an advanced user. Many of the neat effects they list can only be achieved by purchasing those programs.

It has some good ideas for beginners or intermediates, but if you are more advanced, keep looking...and if you find a good book on PowerPoint that has some great advanced ideas, e-mail me!

This book has an answer to most questions you could have regarding web site maintenance, although it is heavily biased towards configuring UNIX servers. Windows NT, for example, doesn't get much of a mention. Also, many of the examples are written in Perl which was a shame as I was more interested in CGI written with shell scripts.

Some topics do not go into enough detail. For example, the section on how to install two servers on a single machine, each responding to different domain names, tells you "what" to do but not "how" to do it.

Where the book does excel, however, is in describing the concepts of how the internet works.

Nicely organized without the hoo-hah of "how to" with gobs of screen shots. My reference point was a little SQL Server and a lot of data base experience. I understood what they were saying. The authors speak technical English. They make the appropriate assumptions about what you should know about SQL Server before you open the book.

This is not a reference book (others are probably better) nor a book for beginners, although newbies might use this as a starting point. This book does not go into SQL syntax (others have done this better)...

Not enough clarity was given on "new features" of SQL server. No reference was made to specific technet articles, but URL's were prominent.

This was my first read on a SQL server book; so my rating of 4 stars might up or down. What I found most interesting was the last ten pages of the book, which were summaries of the "Landmark Series". The series looks good, maybe even very good. That's all.

This book was not written as an in depth manual for SQL Server 7.0. It was written to cover certain topics that are usually not covered very well in other books.

I have been using SQL 6.5 for some time and am in the process of upgrading to 7.0 (and already have on some servers). I found this book very enlightening, well written, and concise. Not a lot of hooplah.

The only drawback was I found myself wishing that this author would write an in depth book about SQL 7.0.

I really don't know what the previous reviewers are talking about. As a former Oracle DBA (one who is interested in the internals) this book gives the reader a great deal of information regarding the architecture of SQL Server 7.0. It is not a 'click here to do this' type of book. You do have to have a reasonable understanding of what a computer is to comprehend most of it. It is always on my desk and I give it a buy recommendation.

Not very readable, didn't find it interesting, after going through the first part of the book i put it somewhere and never bothered to completely read it.

Citing the backcover: "Incisive, Opinonated Coverage of Applications That Have Captured the IT World's Attention".
Let's translate this: "Superficial Enumeration of Applications".
This book does not provide any deeper information about P2P applications. Also the section about business models is not well founded and does not provide any helpful information. I was really disappointed!