Of the roughly 15 certification study guides (for various certifications) that I read over the last 4 months, this one is by far the worst!! This book reads like it was written by a committee and then not edited at all. The organization is atrocious, the book is riddled with typographical, grammatical and technical errors - several per page - and the technial information presented that is needed to pass the exam is incomplete. For example, the tables that list the specifications for the different SCSI standards is simply incomplete. Also, this book is a perfect example of why sophisticated desktop publishing tools do not belong in the hands of amateurs: the book is over-designed to the point that the layout and design in many places is very distracting. After having taken the exam, I seriously doubt that I could have passed it if I would have relied on this book alone.

This book is poorly organized and redundant. The book just seems to babble on and on going over the same misinformation. The organization of the book is horrible, and the visual appeal of the book is simply non-existent.

I think the book gives only cursory information regarding the Operating System aspects of the test. If you don't know the basics of Netware, Windows and Linux, you aren't going to learn them with this book. If you don't know the hardware aspect, the book contains a great deal of information, but it would help if that information were organized and accurate. I think I'm pretty forgiving when it comes to Certification books, but this one was pretty bad. If the Exam Cram had been available when I purchased this, I would have never bought this one. As it is, I wasted $50.

The practice exams provided on the CD seem to be a bit more accurate and usable than the text, but the CD is hardly worth the price paid for this book. If your method of study is to sit and run through practice tests over and over I guess this book might actually work for you. It's a typical CompTIA exam, so it's not very difficult at all, but I don't think book is going to help anyone prepare, it didn't do much of anything for me.

This book, while not perfect, does provide the information you need to pass the Server+ exams. Server+, unlike the A+, is a tough exam- you really need to be looking at a couple of resources, AND have hands-on experience.

Well, good old Pat's at it again. To apply the term "historian" to him is like describing the Klu Klux Klan as liberal.

His over simplistic atititudes towards Irish nationalism is an affront to the 6 million people who inhabit this island.

This was clearly written for the Irish-American, romantic armchair Noraid supporting nationalist movement which pontificate over a situation over three thousand miles away that they simply are incapable of understanding.Thus they rely on Pat for what they perceive to be the TRUTH as they wish it to be.

If it was left to people like Pat, it would be assumed that the assassination of JFK was a Protestant Unionist plot.

Tim Pat Coogan is one of the most widely read living Irish historians. His books on the IRA and the Troubles are standards, and his critical biography of de Valera has probably forever changed the way Ireland's largest-looming political figure will be seen. Unfortunately, "Wherever Green Is Worn" does not match Coogan's best work. It is sprawling and lacks focus, and this cannot entirely be his fault; despite the book's merits, I can't help but feel that it is ultimately just another rushed attempt by his publishers to cash in on the popularity of Irish culture.

The chief and indisputable strength of "Wherever Green Is Worn" is its ground-breaking sweep. Nobody has attempted this universal an examination of the Irish diaspora, and this becomes both an unassailable strength of Coogan's work and a dangerous pitfall, as I'll explain later. Suffice it to say, for now, that this book is a useful first word on the topic and will hopefully provoke more thorough and concentrated historiographies to fill in gaps and tell the story with more critical focus.

And now, to pickier stuff, because it's crucially symptomatic of the overall way in which Coogan's newest contribution has suffered from the inattentiveness of his publishers at St. Martin's, who really owed their author a better editor than he got.
1) First, there are numerous typos and grammatical errors in the book, with the greatest concentration in the initial pages.
2) Slightly more embarrassing is the misspelling of gratuitous foreign phrases, like the italicized French "trahison des clercs," which Coogan spells two different ways in the course of the book; if you have to throw high-falutin' French phrases around, you really want to get them right.
3) Then, there are errors in the Irish (and I find this more troubling because, as a language working to reassert itself, Irish does not need to be misused in major publications like this one) when in an endnote Coogan inexplicably renders the Irish for "kiss my arse" ("póg mo thóin") as "pogue mo tuin." (I pointed this out in amazement to a friend from Co. Kildare, and his response was, "Of course Coogan doesn't know Irish, he's a Dub!")
4) The discursive tangents are another thing a good editor could have attenuated. Do we need to know that the author's luggage was once lost in Boston, unless there's a point to the story or, at the very least, a punchline? Do such digressions explain why "Wherever Green Is Worn" is swollen out to almost 800 pages?
5) Finally, the page references are dodgy, as if the editors didn't track the changes in pagination through the successive drafts of the book. We are told, on page 386, that Coogan will discuss the nineteenth-century Fenian incursions into British Canadian territory on pages 408-410, but that's not the case. The discussion comes on 390, and Coogan's maps of his own book are useless, most likely thanks to careless editing that failed to account for numbering shifts during production.

This is not even to mention the occasionally chauvinistic posture that peeks out in discussions of women in "Wherever Green Is Worn." "Caroline Marland may have the looks of a top model, but she is Managing Director of Guardian News Ltd," Coogan writes on 129, and I wish this were the only time such a remark were let through (it happens several times in the book). No matter how unnecessary it is, no matter how irrelevant to the topic at hand, we are never spared the observation of an attractive woman.

These are fairly petty criticisms. However, what all of this indicates to me is that nobody took very much time preparing or proofing the manuscript of "Wherever Green Is Worn," and this shows through, painfully. Coogan admits in the introduction that he was compelled by his publishers to write no less than three other books (the better ones on Collins, de Valera, and the Troubles) while researching "Wherever Green Is Worn," and this goes a long way toward explaining why the book feels disjunctive and lacks any cohesion; in fact, many of its most powerful moments are precisely those in which Coogan is able to draw from his more sustained research into de Valera and the Troubles, recontextualized to foreground their impact on the diasporic Irish. As it is, individual episodes are instructive and entertaining, anecdotal though they often are. It's just the bigger picture that feels blurry.

And, ultimately, the question that organizes this book is left disappointingly unanswered: Who are the "Irish diaspora" mentioned in the title? Those who, born in Ireland, later emigrated? Those who were born abroad to Irish parents? Those who, so-called "plastic Paddies" like myself, have an Irish passport but were born and raised outside of Ireland? One of the problems in this book is that EVERYBODY'S IRISH. Because Irishness becomes in "Wherever Green Is Worn" (which turns out to be, well, everywhere) far too broad a concept, it loses any real value as a category. A tighter definition of the driving motif behind Coogan's study would have lent this book much more focus and power.

Coogan takes on possibly his most adventurous project, as he traces the path of Irish immigrants throughout the world. As always, Tim Pat is thorough and his journalistic syle is very readable. The information contained in "Wherever Green is Worn" is fascinating. Anyone who picks up this book, no matter how much you know about the history of Ireland, will learn something new.

Count Saint Germain seems to have been a truly interesting and mysterious person who deserves a good, honest, thoroughly researched biography. This book is none of those things. In the blurb above this review you will see that they are using the 'gold and violet' cover as a selling point, which I find humorously--almost touchingly--simpleminded. There are spelling mistakes and errors of fact (such as wrong dates) all over the place, and the authors refuse to look at any story concerning Saint Germain with the least bit of scepticism. Thus we are told that Francis Bacon and Christopher Columbus were actually Saint Germain, and that as, Sir Francis Bacon, Saint Germain wrote all of Shakespeare's plays. The silliness never stops! Then we are told that the secret of immortality lies in starving yourself for forty days, after which your hair and teeth will fall out; a few hours later they will grow back, and after that you'll be immortal. (Don't try this at home, kids!) So I'm afraid I cannot recommend this book. The one star is for the gold and violet cover, which is mighty purty.