This book is on par with many in the Dummie library. Too many times authors will rush to fill a need and forget the parameters of accurate reporting and authorship. I will not recommend this book to anyone unless you are prepared for a mountain of frustration especially when using the CD.

Since Macromedia bought Elemental Software, the creators of Drumbeat, I have been monitoring the Drumbeat forums. It seems that Macromedia has their hands full in supporting this product. There is no doubt that Drumbeat can be a killer application once the bugs are worked out and the product matures. ASP can be a complicated scripting language for which Drumbeat was meant to assist Web developers over the hurdles. The community is crying out for a first class book written on Drumbeat. You will not find it here.

Drumbeat 2000 is a great idea, but not a very mature product at the moment. Hopefully, Macromedia's acquisition will do good things - the support is already improved.

Domain knowledge of databases (Access & SQL or other ODBC-compliant), queries, etc., AND Active Server Pages (for Intermediate/Advanced Users) is required to effectively use DB2K. There are not many books/references available. This is what the Dummies book benefits from.

By the very fact that it is the first and only book (as of now) on a very powerful and complex tool, it deserves to be on every DB2K users bookshelf/desktop. It beats the manuals. There are a lot of visuals which really help in navigating through DB2K's extensive set of menus and dialog boxes.

Dummies books tend to oversimplify things, and this book is no different. However, The authors do try very hard to make DB as easy as possible for the newbie and cover a lot more ground than the documentation. The Dummies writing style and typography is just about tolerable, since we have nothing else to turn to.

Overall, a GOOD BOOK for BEGINNERS/INTERMEDIATE users. Advanced users should stay away. The CD does not contain any new Contracts/Interactions.

Why the 4 *? It's the first DB book. Goes further than the documentation.

Awaiting more Drumbeat books - well written, in-depth, well-designed books with lots of "How-To"s and case-studies from start to finish, step-by-step, which give complete details of constructing complex real-world web sites with Drumbeat & SQL Server.

MacroMedia's tech support has been less than enthusiastic and the eStore Drumbeat manuals are littered with costly typos. Given that, although this book does not cover the eStore version, it is still somewhat useful to have. It's typical Dummies series stuff--so you can skip the first 1/3 of it, it's way too basic. The rest is just rewording of the product manual but I still gleaned a few new tricks from it.

If your learning curve for this software has been lengthy, you may want to check it out. Otherwise, save your money and reread the manual.

It ought to be called tracking the bureaucratic enemy within. It might be a chronicle of the victory of necessity over bureaucratic inertia and turf wars, but it is as dull as a gray stone on a gray wall. There are loads of minutiae about personalities, dates, mistrust, etc. No doubt but that this is historical information ought to be recorded somewhere, but not where I might plunk down my money and buy it. There is next to nothing about technique or efficacy. Read the library's copy. This one is going back to the used book store (if they will take it back).

The title of Alan Harris Bath's book, The Triumph of Anglo-American Naval Intelligence: Tracking the Axis Enemy might better be How the Brits and Americans came to love each other and succeed inspite of themeselves. Fully the first half of the book focuses on the byzantine workings of three governments bordering on the Atlantic to coordinate their efforts and information: Canada, England and the United States. By way of perspective, it must be remembered that even in the interwar period, many American military planners still considered England the greatest single potential threat. The paradigm shift from foe to friend probably required a great deal of soul searching for the participants--it certainly required a great deal of tedious writing from the author of this book.

Bath in his final chapter, In Retrospect, provides a concise overview of the problems that faced the producers, handlers and users of strategic and operational intelligence. Obviously an experienced military intelligence professional, Bath summarizes many of the problems in military inteeligence, and gives the reader a good understanding of the complexities of coaltition and allied operational intelligence planning, gathering processing and dissemination.

In the absence of unclassified single volume works on the subject of naval intelligence in World War II, Bath's book is a necessary evil, but I would read only the introduction, Chapters 5 & 9, and the conclusion.