I enjoyed this book quite a bit. Mostly I think it was the characterization, from dialog (reminds me of Robert B. Parker) to actually feeling the emotions of the various people in the story. I could feel their pain, their frustrations, their joy and happiness. Overall the plot moved well and the main character and supporting cast kept the story moving forward nicely.

The hero, Chris Walker, is someone I could identify with. After witnessing a brutal crime and escaping with his own life, he struggles in trying to figure out what to do. What he ends up doing and how he does it all is believable and quite satisfying. A friend had told me about this book and I was really glad she did. A fast and thoroughly enjoyable read for the summer (or anytime, just happens to be summer now). If you like mystery/crime thrillers, you should get this one.

I've read better, but it had some action in it. I would make the book longer and more excyting. I really like adventure, but this book didn't havemuch of it. I rated this book with a 3. I don't like killing animals. The author could have changed the beginning when the mother bear gets shot. They could have trapped her for the zoo or something. My favorate part of the book is when they find their father and the plane is about to fall, because it is excyting. I also like the setting, because the mountains are cool. I'm glad the author chose to write about a plane crash instesd of a car crash or something. A plane crash is mare excyting andit would interest more readers. If you like adventure stories this is the one for you.

This book Derserves an encore !!!! This book is a trubuite to american Lituare for Children NOTING and I mean NOTHING CAN TOP THIS WONDERFUL ALL TIME CLASSIC!

Alaska is a very good adventure book. It describes the courage of two city kids who move to alaska where their father has an airplane accident. They, Shawn and Jessie, take it upon themselves to rescue their father whose life is hanging on by a thread.

This book is not for advanced users wanting to learn more about V8 or its working as it deals very sparingly with V8.The book should rather be called "Outside Microstation V8 Looking In"

I pre-ordered this book since this is about the only V8 book out there. When I recieved it, the name was different than advertised but the ISBN number is correct. Apparently this is not a new book but an update to the old one. What a waste. Someone should fire the editor of the book because many of the things that have been updated like pictures do not match the text or vice versa. This book glances over all of the new V8 items instead of going into them in depth. This book is good for beginers using J (v7) but I don't recomend it for someone using v8. I have been using v8 since it came out and I must say this book taught me almost nothing that I didn't already know. There are many customization things I would like to know how to do and this book doesn't even mention this. Like another reviewer said, this isn't a cover all bases book like the many books available for Autocad. Most of those book are also twice as thick.
I had high hopes for this book since Frank Conforti works for or with Bentley and he has answered many questions on the bentley newsgroups. Apparently neither him nor anyone else has time to fully explain all of the added functionality of V8.

As a new user of Microstation (but already familiar with AutoCAD), I've found the book presented in logical order and in an understandable fashion. It has a simple step-by-step approach for studying. As I go through page-by-page, I'm gaining compentence in the use of this program.

The Confederate fighting man is the subject of these 11 very touching short stories written by the likes of F.Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. You don't have to be a Civil War fanatic or a Southerner to appreciate this book. You only have to love a well crafted story

EVERYTHING you need to know is broken down in an easy to read, organized, precise manner containing the most relevant needed information on a topic.

Clifford Scott has written a pretty good book on a pretty interesting figure: Lester Frank Ward (1841-1913), one of the first professional sociologists in the United States. Ward's influence went far beyond academic circles, making him an important figure of 20th Century American liberalism. //Lester Frank Ward grew up in extreme poverty in rural Illinois. His life took a turn for the better with the advent of the Civil War. Fighting for the Union, he was wounded, moved to Washington D.C., and got a relatively easy job as a government clerk. This position gave him the time to go to college and become a paleobotanist; for several years he classified plant fossils for the United States Geological Survey. At this point, he decided to study society from an evolutionary point of view. This decision ultimately made him famous--president of the American Sociological Association, the author of many books, and, according to one overwrought biographer (not Scott), "the American Aristotle." //Ward's two most important theories concern evolution and education. He argued that the "social darwinists" of his own time were wrong to assume that man was like every other animal, passively adapting to his environment or dying out. According to Ward, this passive evolution was "genetic" evolution. People did not have to rely on genetic evolution, because the human mind gives human beings the chance to change their environment for the better. This was planned, intelligent, "telic" evolution. And, because government was society's largest, most powerful institution, government had the greatest role to play in guiding society to a better future. An activist government, Ward argued, should guide society to new heights by helping all its members--especially its worst-off members. //Education was central to telic evolution. Ward wanted the state to make it easier for people to become educated, arguing that the distribution of political power in society is determined not by who owns property, but by who has more schooling. The upper classes have more power (and presumably serve as an impediment to telic evolution) because they keep poor people ignorant. //In retrospect, Ward's theories don't hold up well. Ward had a mania for weird classifications (different types of societies, different types of governments, etc.), and today many of these categorizations seem pretentious and just plain implausible. This is the fate of all armchair sociologists, but in Ward's case more than many others, one has the sense that he believed in his own ideas mainly because they bolstered his political agenda. //Scott emphasizes--though probably not enough--that Ward's political views were more influential than his social theories. From his days as a clerk in Washington (where he defended the rights of African Americans) to his old age in the Progressive Era, Ward was an early advocate of the welfare state, the regulatory state, and many of the ideas we now associate with liberalism and the Democratic Party. By the turn of the century, a generation of activists had latched on to his theories because they provided a "scientific" justification for social reform. At the end of LESTER FRANK WARD, Scott includes a letter from the young Frederic C. Howe, later to become a high-level New Deal bureaucrat. Howe thanked Ward for "the new interpretations you have given to life, to society, and to the role of men and women. . . . " While Howe overemphasized Ward's role, his statement contains a kernel of truth. Ward may have been a second-rate sociologist, but he was a first-rate ideologue, and insofar as society has evolved along the lines he advocated, Ward could take some credit, were he alive today at the ripe old age of 161.

Part 1 (6 chapters) - Absolutely a waste of time, not worth a read. And the code examples are not related to JWSDP.

Part 2 (6 chapters) - Discusses on SOAP, UDDI and WSDL. The code discusses using a Older version of Apache SOAP and Apache Axis. The code needs a complete rewrite.

Part 3 - Discusses on JAXP, JAXB, JAXR, JAXM and JAXRPC. Good introductions but the JAXB chapter is based on DTD (which is obsoleted in the latest specs). JAXM and JAXRPC chapters just reproduces the Sun JWSDP tutorial...not much value addition.

Part 4 - Security, WSFL, WSIF (based on IBM Specs) currently these specs are obsolete no further releases.

It might've been a good book during 2002. The code and content needs an update to the latest specs and SOAP implementations.

Just as I stated in the title, it's a great book to start you with. It's written in a clear and precise manner where you could learn the basics of Java Web Services and not be intimidated by it.

It is a good introductory book to web services standards like SOAP, WSDL and UDDI but also goes further and talks about topics like WSFL, WSIF which are not covered by all books on web services but are essential to any real business processes exposed as web services where flow control and service unit(s) choreagraphy is as important as the single unit service request/response. Java specifications relating to web services are also covered like JAXM and JAX-RPC. I wish more examples and code was given, perhaps even a chapter or two, for ebXML which may not be a part of web services standards but still uses SOAP and defines industry standards for business to business collaborations especially dealing with supply chain commerce issues.
I agree with a previous reviewer (John Sfikas) that this book alone isn't exactly an eye opener for experianced professionals who have been dabbling with all the tools mentioned in this book like Apache SOAP, Axis, WSTK, Tomcat, Jetty etc. and know the challenges facing B2B collaborations on the internet quite intimately, but this book combined with "Building Web Services with Java: Making Sense of XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI" will give a much needed practical grounding to start making sophisticated web services in the real world. I highly recommend getting both these books but be prepared to use your brain and further what is presented in these books to deploy web services satisfying your needs. They will certainly not amount to spoon feeding you a near solution to your collaboration problems.

I was really disappointed upon receiving this book, because it just does not deliver what the title promises, e.g. "definitive programs for runners of all ages and levels". And that promise is the only reason I bought it: like so many intermediate runners, I don't have a personal trainer and have lots of questions about my training routine. In the beginning, you just run; but after a year or so, you start wondering: am I training enough, what's the best combination of workouts (slow/fast; long/short etc.)in a given week, what types of workouts that make sense are there... So you can imagine how happy I was when I discovered a book with this title. But there is NOTHING in here to answer that type of question. It's a well-written how-to book, mainly for beginners with lots of injury tips and motivational stuff - but hey, that's in EVERY running book. So I guess it's okay - if you don't have the wrong expectations.

Since, like the author, I am a runner over the age of 50, I felt this book really provided valuable information on training. I especially liked the discussion on weight training. Bill encourages a moderate approach to lifting, which I agree is better than the more intensive weight training that seems to be the norm these days. I highly recommend this book to runners of all levels.

I found myself becoming extremely sleepy while reading this book. Scott Frank's constant state of heroin-induced ennui, combined with his complete lack of humor, made for a very soporific read. An exception to this is his tale of transporting heroin across the Mexican border and his subsequent encounter with a good-ol'-boy customs guard, who, after inspecting the tracks on Scott's arms, decides to let him go anyway. A palpable sense of self-absorption emanates from his writings. It works pretty well as a period piece of the late seventies heroin scene. Recommended for those who really, really like to read about heroin.

Scott Frank was "a boy who only wanted to dream." Marihuana didn't do the job, so he tried heroin. After a couple of years living as a junkie in a Tucson transient hotel (the Geronimo), he gave it up; and, twenty years later, published this slim and beautiful book of essays.

Most of the heroin literature I've read goes from bad (morality plays) to worse (junkies who seem to get high mainly on their own coolness). _Tales_ does not pretend to be anything but a bunch of stories, but I found it taught me more than any of its didactic cousins. If you want to know why Coleridge was so fond of his laudanum, you need this book. If you're the parent of a bright and inquisitive adolescent, and you're looking for an honest and effective way to make sure your child never ever goes near this stuff, you need it even more. _Tales from the Geronimo_ will probably never make the Stanford freshman reading list, but it is a true classic.

Let it be stated up front that this is a long, long book--one that ultimately does not reward the reader who makes it all the way to the end. Stone has attempted to craft work of ideas about faith and identity on the framework of a pseudo-millennial thriller (the book is set in 1992 or thereabouts), and the result fails in all areas. Firstly, there are a plethora of characters, very few of whom are developed into anything interesting, but almost all of whom have some odd background. Russian jazz club owners, Irish revolutionaries, rich Louisiana mystics, they're all here, along with the cliche cynical Western journalist to record it all. It's as if Stone wanted to create some sort of Graham Greenesque place where the flotsam and jetsam of the post-Cold War world have settled. One gets absolutely no sense that there are any ordinary people living in Israel or the Occupied Territories. Few people in this book speak like normal people, and everyone seems to be involved in some secretive group, cabal, or plot. That said, the thriller aspect of the book is a total disappointment, by the end it's hard to really care what happens. Indeed the best moments of tension come 200 pages earlier in a refugee camp on the Gaza Strip. Stone spends much more time on faith than he does actually creating any kind of interesting story, and that's where the book was a real bore for me. Much of the plot revolves around the semi-organized groups of religious weirdoes who are drawn to Jerusalem for obvious reasons. As an agnositc, it was very take any of the book's endless universalist, cabalistic, speechifing seriously. So many of the characters seem to be exceedingly childishly grasping and unthinking in their quest for spiritual enlightenment, that one is hard-pressed to care about them at all. And the central character's wrestling with his half-Jewishness is pretty stale stuff. His love affair with a jazz singer is telegraphed from miles away, proceeds enigmatically, and ends predictably. Why even bother? Indeed, much of the book seems to wander about to no purpose. Stone does provide detailed visual descriptions of people and places, but they never come alive, much like the book itself.

Robert Stone's Damascus Gate is a delightful mess. The basic plot line-a slowly uncovered plan to blow up the Temple Mount-is straightforward enough to serve as the main thoroughfare of the novel. But Stone takes the reader on so many winding side streets and dimly-lit alleys that he or she may soon feel like a lone tourist navigating through the maze of a medieval city in Europe. Stone stretches the thriller genre to its outer limits by stuffing his novel with the ambiguities of faith, the irrational polarities of Middle Eastern politics, and the mania of religion in Jerusalem. His novel, like its central character Christopher Lucas, draws very few conclusions about the surrounding enigmas.

If you are the kind of person who ventures off the main road, who seeks the mazes of ancient cities, who intentionally gets lost in the unfamiliar simply for the journey's sake, then you should read this book. The basic plot line is interesting enough, but it's the vivid mess of detours that make this book memorable.

Even though I was enthralled by Robert Stone's engrossing tale, I couldn't help stopping in my tracks time and again in order to re-read a passage and enjoy the sheer elegance of the author's style. Few authors can match this combination of storytelling skill, this amazing erudition and this control of the english language. If such a comparison means anything, I would suggest that Mr. Stone writes somewhat like a darker version of Robertson Davies. The book requires attention, but it generously rewards the reader who takes time to ponder the events as they unfold. The characters are richly described in nuanced tones, and the dialogues sound amazingly authentic. Highly recommended to everyone who loves a complex yarn dealing with difficult issues such as faith, fate, and the human condition. Definitely NOT recommended to action/adventure afficionadoes.