The next round of plays (in a small print paperback format) produced in Britain with the grand playwright Jonathan Harvey. "Hushabye Mountain" is a play that seems better with repeated readings. In "Out in the Open", Harvey returns to the playful conflicts and creative characters that made "Beautiful Thing" such a delight. Ideal for actors and directors.

This is a collection of three of Jonathan Harvey's early plays in a small print paperback format. Few notes or extras but at least it puts the brilliant Harvey into more circulation. It is interesting to note the mixed focus of "Babies" and the dead-on sharp focus of "Beautiful Thing", the turning point in Harvey's career as a playwright. This volume is probably primarily intended for actors and directors.

For the legion of "Beautiful Thing" fans, this is the closest project to the theme of Harvey's earlier instant classic. There is much fun along the way and the character of Leah in "Beautiful Thing" has a delightful long lost sister spirit in this play. Essential for Jonathan Harvey play collections.

The book has a lot of hand waving but no concrete information on Python where it matters. For example there is no comparison of it with Perl. In fact they never say how the two can work.

Also the authors do not cover at all the Meta Object Protocol of Python or for example how it does virtual pointer-based interface inheritance. These are important concepts that a student of Python must know. Also missing is any information on the transmutation of objects under constraints.

All in all, way too elementary.

I was also a technical reviewer for the book, and really liked it. Even considering the price of the book, I think it's quite valuable, because it explains the basics of so many topics in a manner that makes sense. If you are new to programming and would like to try out different things to see what you might like, such as web programming, XML, designing windows (lowercase 'w') that will work on a variety of platforms, databases, sockets, etc., you may find that this book provides material you would otherwise look through a literal stack of books to find. No programming book is perfect, but I think this one is pretty good.

I provided technical review (I was one of many) for this book, but frankly I didn't enjoy it all that much. It does cover the material well, but the presentation is dry and the print (typeface) is unpleasant in my opinion.

As a textbook it would be quite effective; if they would reissue it in a clean, easy-to-read format (like an O'Reilly or New Riders book for instance) I'd rate it higher.

I pity anyone who buys this book. I can't believe that this book made it past the publisher's desk. I am in awe of the scatter-brained nature of its composure. I could only imagine an acceptable excuse would be if the writers were schizophrenic and lost their medication.
For instance, within the section dealing with Arrays, they jumped into accessing member functions via pointers, which makes no sense considering they hadn't even covered pointers or even classes for that matter. I started to wonder if they intended people to read the book from the back to the front.
I'm a fairly experienced programmer, and I'm blown away at the hackneyed approach they take toward the subject. The convention of sprinkling the text with words in bold face type was extremely distracting to the flow of reading. It would have been nice if they paid attention to quality instead of rushing this book on the shelves to beat competition.

The search continues for a Visual C++ .NET book that won't be a waste of my time and money.

this is a great book with huge materials and code examples about Ms Visual c++ .Net, especially in introducing Managed C++ codes. This book is a must for who wants directly using Ms Visual C++ .Net.