I love all of Nick Park's characters in his movies I absolutly love the character Gromit because he aks so civilized. I also enjoy Wallace's loving,care free,and sometimes comical moods.

I love this Bible - I make sure this is the Bible our church gets for our graduation gifts for the seniors every year - it's also the Bible I bought my wife. The print is clear, and it's a durable Bible with lots of accurate notes.

This study Bible is one of the best versions out there. It is very easy to follow and understand. It has outlines and footnotes that allow you to apply each verse to everyday life.

I am a Seminary student and have gone through many study bibles. However, this work by W.A. Criswell is by far the best in the business.

I found this book to be a solid roundup of good practices within automated software testing.

It doesn't provide any startling new techniques, but makes a good job of explaining the common pitfalls that are usually encountered when trying to automate testcases, and provides good advice for how to get the best out of commercial tools such as the one available from julianjones.com.

The writing style can be a bit dry, and there are times when the thought of reading 500 pages can be a bit daunting.

All things considered, highly recommended.

I bought this book because I was new to software quality assurance, yet placed in charge of an automated testing effort. This book clearly encapsulates years of experience -- you can almost feel the pain the authors must have experienced as they learned these lessons the hard way! I have already avoided making a number of mistakes.

The authors organized the material effectively and wrote it in a way that promotes skimming and scanning. By reading the first few sentences of a section, you will know whether you are interested in the section. If you're not interested, skip to the next section. The authors even occasionally tell you what sections you can skip should that material not apply to your situation.

These skimming and scanning aids are important because the text itself is frequently unexciting and cumbersome. There's not much to do about the former -- nuts and bolts are hard to make exciting. I hope, however, that the authors will consider a good edit for more vigorous writing should they update this book for a second edition.

Anyone who claims to be a Principle or Senior Software QA Engineer, or a QA Automation Engineer, but has never read or used this book should be convicted of professional malpractice.

Absolutely the best current reference book on why and how to analyze, architect, design and construct verification and validation vehicles that dramatically improve the probability of software defect detection - both manually and through later automation. Said vehicles can be easily audited and inspected to improve positive and negative software behavior coverage and equivalence classes. But most important, this great book describes how intelligently devised manual vehicles can be used to automatically drive future software builds and release regression assessments (to achieve automated regression testing).

Describes everything that the software test tool vendors refuse to tell buyers, but what every software QA professional must know (in spite of the vendors).

This book is simply a breath of fresh air.

It is a virtual bible to positive and negative software behavior verification and validation. My only displeasure is that the authors choose to continue to use obsolete terminology: specifically testing. Software testing is not what this book is about. This book is about how to create and achieve highly effective software behavior verification and validation.

Software QA professionals must clearly move way beyond ad hoc testing, because the need today is far greater than ancient testing paradigms. The need is for intelligently designed, architected, constructed frameworks that enable software behavior and performance verification and validation, whether performed manually, automatically, or through agents such as monkeys and oracles.

I have not finish the book yet, but it is a good book so far. The book is about a young girl named Heidi who was batized when she was very young, and her mother's sister, Dete took her to the swiss alpes were Heidi's grandfather lives. Her grandfather doesn't like to go down the mountain were he lives to vist people nor he likes to talk to anyone. When Heidi comes she meets a boy named Peter, who take care of all the goats inculeding the grandfather's two goats. Then after awalie her aunt Dete comes to talk her to Frankfurt were Dete lives and one of her workers family member a tweleve year old girl is in a weelchair and wants someone about her age to be her friend and playmate.

The book Heidi is a book about an orphan girl, who has lived with her aunt after her Heidi's mother dies. Aunt Deet, (Heidi's aunt) dicides that Heidi should go live with her uncle. Many people dispised the uncle. But when Heidi goes up to the Alm, the uncle becomes very delecate. He becomes very attached to Heidi.
The book is very detailed and it needed a good ending. It was indeed a very good ending. I think that anyone who want to sit down and read a relaxing book, that book should be Heidi!

A while back when I was in my 30's (never mind how long ago that was!) I was sick with the flu, and I found a copy of HEIDI, so I crawled into a nice warm bed and re-read the book -- as an adult.

What insight into human nature! And as an adult I appreciated the dry, understated humor. I also appreciated the spiritual insights -- that God will give us what we desire, but sometims uses circumstances we don't like to teach us truths that we couldn't learn otherwise.

When I was a girl I was often turned off by what was called "good reading," but for some reason, I enjoyed Heidi and it never seemed sappy or corny.

Very much worth reading!

Someone is kidnapping negro women in 1871 Philadelphia. Wilton McCleary is assigned to find out what's going on. He uncovers layer after layer of corruption in the police, government and elsewhere. He falls in love with a beautiful woman of color, a medical student. Is she involved with the disappeared?

This was an engrossing novel. A little gorey but it seems historically accurate. Very fast read.

The books in this series (The Killing Breed, The Resurrectionist, and The Black Maria) are fantastic. When do we get to hear more tales of Wilton McCleary? Hello?

I read the first book in this series some time ago, and anxiously awaited the follow-up. This book does not disappoint. The way Mark Graham melds actual history with a deep mystery is superb. This book is not for the faint of heart. If you really don't want to know what life was like in the late 1800's in Philedelphia, don't read this book. If you can't face the racism and rampant corruption in civic positions that occurred then, also don't read this book. This book is meant to make us feel uncomfortable in our complacency. This book has it all, racial tension, corruption, murder, phsycotic criminals, and even a little love mixed in. McCleary is a tough, but honest cop with a uniquely human and vulnerable side. He has to face his own demons as he deals with real-life ones. This is a great series.
Some of the grammar and English is not of the highest order, but I found that I did not mind and the story helped me overlook this.

This is a story of a girl's relationship with her dog as she grows into adolescence. It accurately portrays the change in the relationship, and the girls' reaction to the death of her dog at the end.

I find it to be very realistic, without being graphic. It is sensitive and touching, but not overbearing. My 5 year old daughter is enamored of this book, and I know that she gets more out of it as she reads it over time.

Murphy and Kate is a bittersweet story about the relationship between a girl and her dog. The story begins when Kate is a toddler and Murphy is a puppy. It shows how the relationship grows as they both grow older, to the end when Murphy dies of old age. The story is realistic, and handles the death of Murphy in a gentle way. Anyone who has lost a pet they loved, can relate to this book.

This book adds an interesting perspective on the origins of our modern Solar-based Zodiac. This book focuses on the knowledge of the ancient Sumerians, the culture that was the first to observe and record the patterns of the stars and their affects on human kind. For any serious student of any form of Astrology, this book has the key to understanding the unification/similarity of them all. If interested in the roots this is a good book to start with.

This book is very interesting and was pretty accurate about a person's personality based on his Zodiac sign.The method of ascertaining one's sign is unique.I enjoyed this book so much that I am searching for a replacement for the copy I lost four years back.I will strongly recommend this book for anyone who is after some really original and applicable astrological knowledge.

This review compares the Rough Guides Portugal (9th ed.) with Lonely Planet Portugal (2nd ed.).

We just returned from 2.5 weeks in Portugal. This was our first trip to Portugal and we took and used extensively the Portugal books from Lonely Planet and Rough Guide. We didn't visit the Algarve or Alentejo, concentrating on Lisbon and north.

Both books were good, but overall we preferred the Rough Guide book. It was better organized and more up to date. It's writing was more incisive, lively, and witty.

Here are some details as I saw them:

LP maps often covered a wider area and had more detail than the RG maps, but they were in smaller type and often difficult to read. On more than one occassion a cab driver pulled out his spectacles to read the LP map.

Rough Guide had more up to date phone numbers. LP did not have the up to date area codes (the leading 0 has been changed to a 2). In addition, for many properties in the north they had a 5 digit phone number, when now they are all six. More disturbingly, they have no update on their website for either the corrected area code or phone numbers. In fact, there was no Portugal update to the guide at all. (I'm not talking of the 'unverified travelers' reports.)

LP provided more detailed information about the nitty-gritty details of traveling, e.g., money, trains, internet access, etc.

RG presented the towns around Aveiro better. It was through it that we learned of Sao Jacinto, Torreira, and so on. These were not indexed in LP. We didn't discover that LP had some information on them until much later because it was more hidden in the Aveiro section. Since we had already decided to not stay in Aveiro we didn't think to look there. Although they were also in the Aveiro section of RG, they had their own headings and were also indexed.

Similarly, RG highlighted Belmonte in the mountains. This town was interesting in itself and also in that it now holds one of Portugal's largest remaining Jewish communities and its new synogogue. Jews had previously worshipped secretly in a town house until 1974, now replaced by the new building. (I'm writing this using a mouse pad I purchased at the Belmonte castle for $1.50 with images of columns from the Mosteiro da Batalha!)

I also preferred RG's treatment of Parque Natural da Serra da Estrela and of Parque Natural de Montesinho.

We used several recommendations for restaurants and accommodations from the books. Their batting averages were about the same: good but not great. One African dance club listed in both books was now a female stip place, as my wife discovered when seeing if the cab had taken us to the right address. (I was waiting in the cab.) I felt they were generally too generous in their evaluation of hotels and restaurants.

Both books had several failings common to them and to other guide books that we've used.

Nearly all the accommodations and restaurants are in tourist areas. We were fortunate to stay in Lisbon in a residential district. It was comforting to leave in the morning and not be surrounded by hordes of fellow tourists. Similarly, we were the only obvious tourists in the local restaurants, some of which were excellent. Nor were we out in the sticks where a car was required. We were right off the #28 tram line, recommended as the best tram to ride simply for riding it in both books.

Several other times during the trip we stayed and ate outside the centro area. In some cases a car would have been needed, but we were only several km out of center. In any case, I think both books should offer more 'out of centro' possibilities, especially when transportation is available.

LP is out front in saying that its reviewers do not stay at all the hotels or eat at all the restaurants they list. I would like it if the reviews would be initialized with the reviewers initials for the ones that they personally tried. This would also allow us to see and evaluate each reviewer's tastes and standards as our trip progressed, not to mention to see which places they really tried. One LP writer (not an author of this book) in discussing restaurants wrote: "As one of those LP writers I can tell you that it is not physically possible to eat even a 'little bit of a meal' in each of those restaurants :-) What we all tend to do is eat at a broad cross-section within the norms of natural eating times and visit the other restaurants and talk to the owner or even the diners if it can be done discretely. In the same vein we don't sleep at every hotel!"

Talk to the owners! Now there's something for an unbiased, disinterested evaluation!

Both books are oriented to train travelers, but they should have some more info on driving too, which is not expensive. For example, neither had a mileage chart between major cities and, more importantly, neither had a chart of expected driving times. Using the 'N' roads which look like major highways can take quite a bit of time because they are mostly two lane roads, often twisty and hilly, and can have a lot of SLOW truck traffic. You'd probably be better off driving on the back roads, both for time and scenery, and for that small village, local feel. But you'd never know it from these books. This complaint isn't restricted to just LP and RG, of course.

In addition, both books were quite short on history, culture and demographics. How religious are the Portuguese? (We were asked on several occassions whether we were 'religioso'.) What is the median and mean income of each of the areas (even of Portugal as a whole) and how does this compare to the rest of western Europe. What are contemporary middle-class Portuguese characteristics?

It wouldn't have taken more than an additional 10 or 15 pages for such information, and it would have made our trip more meaningful.

In sum, again, both guides were good with room for improvement, with our preferring the Rough Guide overall.

I have been to Portugal countless times and just like the country itself, the Rough Guide to Portugal never ceases to amaze me. This book is the perfect guide - light enough to carry around in a purse and yet absolutely comprehensive. All regions of Portugal are covered, even small villages are described if they have something of interest. And the way places are described is what makes this book so good - the writing is so witty, so apt, that I find myself rereading sections just for the chuckle. The guide includes tons of maps, precise directions, prices for museums, transportation, hotels, restaurants. The directions are oriented towards non drivers - that is, if you are relying on public transportation or your own two feet to get you around Portugal, then this book is excellent. The recommendations are always right on target and I have always found the information to be accurate. There are no color photographs in my edition which doesn't detract at all from the book. However, the new edition does have some nice pictures.

So, my advice to you dear reader is: Visit Portugal - and take your Rough Guide with you!

This book really sparked the interest of my preschooler (age three). He enjoys rhyming books and was very interested at the different activities of this baby (who is actually an older toddler). Pretty, soft pictures made it enjoyable to read aloud each night. I recommend for any new baby gift, as the rhyming words would make a soothing story for an infant and the child will grow with the book.

My daughter, age 21 months, loves this book. The illustrations are beautiful and reinforce loving family relationships. The rhyming story is just the right length for a toddler.

This book provides an excellent tutorial on JDBC 2.0 core features and standard extensions. In particular, the chapters on standard extensions (XA, connection pooling,...) provide unique step-by-step descriptions/examples that offer a top-down view of these features.

This is a comprehensive guide to all aspects of JDBC. It pretty much succeeds in being all things to all people. The chapters are verbose and well thought out - as befits a tutorial book - and each one is rounded off with a comprehensive guide to all the relevant JDBC API calls - as you would expect from a reference book.

The example's are a little lightweight but nevertheless they work and they do illustrate the points being made in the text.

I bought this book about a month ago to get me up to speed on Java's take on SQL and now find that, in addition to showing me the Java, I know twice as much about SQL as I did before.

Well recommended.

If you look for a good book on JDBC 2.0, this is "the" book. The book is complete, in fact, it covers both jdbc1.0 and 2.0. All topics are explained expertly with style and depth, and in a very accesible way so that beginners can understand. All the codes are clearly written to prove all the main points discussed in the book. This book is the best both for learning jdbc and a reference.

Since not all the features in JDBC2.0 have been adopted by vendors, this book will remain as "the" reference for many years to come.