Even the biggest Paul Thomas Anderson fan will admit that his scripts don't read that well. He makes basic spelling mistakes and tends to run on with his incoherent, "realistic" monologues. His movies are salvaged by good actors, and his sense of sound and visual storytelling. In any event, this book is a big disappointment. If you're expecting something comparable to Newmarket's Magnolia script book or even Faber and Faber's Boogie Nights script book, think again. The gimmick here is that the multi-colored script revision pages are published, instead of a single draft. The result is only 90 pages and, since many of the pages are script revisions, some of the pages are half empty. Also, unlike the previously published PTA scripts, there's no introduction. Unlike the Magnolia script, there are no stills. Hell, there isn't even text on the back cover of the book. This is as bare-bones as script books come. As far as I can tell, PTA doesn't really care about his fans anymore. He's stopped recording commentaries, writing introductions, or soundtrack liner notes. At least he still makes good movies.

I love being able to read P.T. Anderson's shooting scripts. His films are fabulous. I believe one of the negative reviewers partially misses the point when harping on the misspellings, the rambling monologues and how PTA's scripts are saved by the actors. The whole point of a script is that it is the first rough draft -- the framework -- upon which a movie is built. Of course there are going to be improvements between the script and the final product. The reason to buy this, or any, shooting script is to see how the project evolved from script to screen. In the case of Punch-Drunk Love -- much more so than Boogie Nights or Magnolia -- it's fascinating to find that almost every important scene was tweaked, sometimes in a major way, before this wonderful film reached the screen. ... It's a great chance to get some insight into the stages of the creative process of one of America's finest directors. ... BOTTOM LINE: Does this book have all the bells and whistles of the Boogie Nights and Magnolia shooting scripts? NOPE. Is it essential for the PTA fan? YUP.

One of my new favorites, "Punch-Drunk Love" is a unique and spectacular story about a man who doesn't know how the face the world around him. That man is Barry Egan. He has seven sisters who have verbally abused him since he was little, causing him to, now all grown up, get into violent outbursts. Barry's a quiet and shy guy, but if his button is pushed things can get out of control. He meets Lena, a very strange and peculiar girl herself. Love falls upon these two, but Barry's even facing more problems after being blackmailed by a phone-sex operator. But when all else fails, he knows that he has a love in his life in this very oddball and dark comedy.

I'm glad they came out with a script version of the film that you can buy. Paul Thomas Anderson has written a magnificent picture that's so easy to relate to , it's scary. The stuff that occurs you can see happening in real life. It's realistic and surreal at the same time.

This is the shooting script, on blue, pink, and yellow colored pages that symbolize when the revisions were made. Technical terms such as camera angels are included as well since it is a shooting script. Even little changes are mentioned as well. I love the dialogue that was written and you can tell that P.T. had Sandler in mind for the part, because nobody else would've been able to pull it off. While it's not your typical comedy, I thought it was hilarious. It pretty much follows the movie, although some things aren't there or changed due to changes that occurred during the shooting. It's pretty much all there for the most part.

"Punch-Drunk Love: The Shooting Script" is a great purchase for anyone who loved the film. It may not had been the most popular movie to come out of 2002, but it's #2 on my list. The pages fly by with ease, and when you're done with it you want to read it again. I can't wait for this movie to come out on DVD. I'm counting the days. A spectacular script for a spectacular film.

This book was okay. It had a lot of useful information that helped me score a four on me AP History test. I found it tedious and borring to take all of the tests that the book offers. Just reading the review part of the book was very helpful because it has all of the history of the United States. The book was helpful but i would reccomend to look over the book before you buy it to make sure it is going to help.

To be honest, I was expecting a lot more from Berklee, and my expectations were probably unreasonable. I was expecting a more in-depth study of music theory and chord progressions, when what you end up with is a smattering of useful chords and simple lines to echo. The book is great for musicians that want to pick up a little keyboard on the side of their main instruments. However, for quasi-classically trained (Suzuki) pianists, the book is only an unneccessary reference (nice to have, but not essential). I'm planning on looking into the three-volume modern method from Berklee to see if it's more satisfactory (I'm betting that it will be).

An excellent way to review the material learned through a whole semester. Easy to read and very helpfull.

The book is a nice, quick way to cram all this information dealing with the AP american history exam. Its very much too the point, and doesn't add superfulous information. I would definatly buy it!

HTML, as a language, is platform independent, so even though this book is put together by Macworld - a magazine for Macintosh users, there's a lot to learn from this book. The only problem is that the floppy disk that comes along with it is of no use to PC users, which means you'll miss out on the software and example files on the floppy.

Having spent over 15 years on the Internet, and designed hundreds of web pages himself, Dave Taylor goes beyond teaching you the nuts and bolts of HTML to show you how to design and create useful, attractive webpages, and then publicise these pages.

After the customary introduction to the Web and HTML, the book slowly slips in HTML tags, organised very logically (unlike the Dummies book that forced them all together). Learning HTML in this step-by-step manner is less overwhelming, and a pleasant learning experience. Each of the chapters introducing different HTML tags has an easy-to-refer summary table to help you refresh your memory.

When you're sufficiently comfortable creating bare-bone text-only pages, the book helps you spruce up your pages with graphics, photographs, audio, and video. All this, while reminding you (and showing you how to) keep those pages shell-account-friendly.

There's an entire chapter dedicated to discussing search engines, and teaching you how to register with some of them, so that you'll be able to use that knowledge to your advantage when you start publicising your pages. This is followed by other ways and means to announce your site to the world.

The book briefly touches upon the more advanced elements of webpages - forms, imagemaps, and CGI scripting. And for those who plan to design full - blown sites instead of just arbit. webpages, the book ends with a very useful step-by-step guide to planning the entire site. Dave has also put together a list of common HTML mistakes that he's committed or been victim to, and has shown how to avoid those mistakes.

Now if only this book was available with software for the PC...

Largely unknown outside of his native Brazil where he is nothing short of a national icon, Alberto Santos-Dumont was a pioneer in both lighter and heavier than air flight. Paul Hoffman tells Santos-Dumont's story from his earliest days as a child experimenting with paper balloons to his final sad days, broken by the fact that the world credited the Wright Brothers with the first flight of a plane and the use of that invention in war. A lot of research clearly went into Wings of Madness and Hoffman has done a marvelous job of reporting on a nearly forgotten chapter and pioneer of aviation history.

For those who frown upon Dummies books, you should ease up a bit and give this one some serious thought. Perl for Dummies is strictly for beginners. When I say beginners, I mean people with absolutely no programming experience in any language. I compared this book to Learning Perl and found that Learning Perl is written primarily for seasoned non-Perl programmers who are trying to learn Perl for the first time. If you are like me, with no programming know how, this is a more appropriate beginning. It explains such simplicities as scalars, arrays, adding and removing list elements, conditionals, etc. It even goes (lightly) into CGI and regular expressions. It does so in a language which understands that the reader is a "dummy" when it comes to programming and most importantly, it keeps it simple. Simplicity is the primary teaching strategy when dealing with a topic at the novice level, and Perl for Dummies does this well. The weakness of this book is that it does not do a good job of teaching you how to install Perl from the CD provided. In fact, the instructions provided were downright wrong. I had to ask a Perl programmer how to install and run Perl programs on my Windows 98 system. Another weakness, if you can call it that with a book at this level, is that it lacks program examples which would allow me to see what exactly can Perl do in the real world, such as system administration in a UNIX environment. I recommend this book as the starting point, with Learning Perl and Elements of Programming Perl as your next logical step. After you have mastered these books should you go on the Programming Perl and the Perl Cookbook.

This really is the best book I know of for learning Perl, and I say that as someone who owns a very large pile of books on the subject. I first bought it when I started a year of full-time Perl programming, and it was the book that let me get up and running. Some years later, I *still* go back to it occasionally--there are some things that it just explains better than other books do. (In particular, it does a good job with some of the occasional dark corners of dereferencing arrays in complex data structures. If you know what that means: there's some weird syntax to this that this book gives very clear examples of. If you don't know what that means: trust me when I say that this book will tell you how to handle it without requiring that you completely understand why it's hard first, and that's a VERY good thing.)

If you're already an experienced programmer, you'll do fine reading the introductory material in Larry Wall et al.'s "Programming Perl," but whether you're an old hat at hacking or not, you'll get plenty out of this book. When you're up to speed, your next book should probably be "Programming Perl" or Nigel Chapman's "Perl: The Programmer's Companion."

I had literally zero programming experience in Perl, and only a little experience in another language when I bought this book. Fortunatley this book assumes that you know very little (if anything)about Perl (or programming for that matter). In my opinion, the ONLY way to learn a programming language is to start from the beginning and work your way to more advanced topics, and thats exactly what Perl for Dummies does. Even if you already know some Perl, the examples and quick references in this book are invaluable...a MUST on every Perl learners and programmers book-shelf.

Having had no prior knowledge of Paul Erdos and his work, I purchased this book on a whim. I enjoy biographies of interesting people and he certainly was one. The book is a biography for the most part but also contains much biographical anecdotes of other great mathematicians. I found these anecdotes to be very interesting and a good introduction to this group of interesting people. I find these brief descriptions interesting enough to pursue full biographies of some of these individuals. There is also much discussion of various mathematical principles and theories. While this may seem daunting, they are explained with amazing lucid language that any layperson may grasp even these most difficult mathematical laws. I found the book a great introduction to the world of mathematics and found myself more interested in math than I ever was before. It made me regret not taking calculus in college.

Being something of a 'lapsed' mathematician (long ago math major, long unused), I'm always interested in books that involve numbers and people who love numbers. I'm usually not fond of biographies, but I'd heard good things about this one and decided to give it a try. To my surprise and joy, it turned out to be more about numbers and math in general, than about those irritating details of a person's life that usually get in the way of a good read. I agree with one of the earlier reviews here that trying to write an entire book devoted just to Paul Erdos would probably have been futile -- his entire life was numbers. This book opens doors for people who aren't familiar with the various theories and offers some 'math surprises' for those of us who were familiar with math in a former life. I'm still puzzling over the tiling result. (Sorry, you'll have to read the book to find out what it was.) Loved it. Highly recommend it. Have so far purchased two copies as gifts and will likely purchase at least two more (I have a lot of math-oriented friends).

This is a wonderful book. Hoffman writes a series of vignettes about Paul Erdos, a giant of number theory. Erdos, who died in 1996, was as eccentric as he was brilliant. Though Erdos engaged in few activities outside of mathematics in his adult life, he lived as interesting a life as anyone's, in my opinion. The stories about Erdos and his fellow mathematicians are so entertaining and, in some cases, so genuinely uplifting or poignant, that I have read some of them five times. Also, the quotes and opinions from Erdos himself are very interesting and amusing. His ideas were certainly unconventional, but many of them are very insightful. "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers" does not provide the most systematic account of Erdos's life possible, but in its current format it is more enjoyable.

The writers of Cliff's AP books are usually great but here I feel they failed. Their AP Biology book was great as to resumming all learned about the subject but this one did not enumerate. It has basic people, events,and topics but no memory joggers. ;( for me I needed review of data rather than HOW to take the test.

I have to say that I expected more out of this book. History is my worst subject, so when I bought this I was hoping for way more review and in-depth explanation of different topics and time periods. I also thought the practice tests were too easy; I went in thinking that I'd do great on the multiple choice, and instead found myself guessing quite a bit. However, the tips for taking the exam were great, except their advice on the DBQ format; they were so convinced that the question would be worded a certain way that they didn't include any examples of other formats! Sure enough, the DBQ was worded completly different! Overall, I'd recommend this to someone who already has a firm grasp of US history, but not someone like me who needs a much more thourough review.

I am a history-buff, but before the AP exam, I needed confidence. So I took 2 practice tests and wrote some essays, and the result was a 5 on the AP exam. In June, before the SAT IIs, I took another exam from this book and that was my only preparation, because we did nothing in class. This book helped me get a 750 on the SAT II. However, there's not much "review" in this book. For review, I recommend the Princeton Review which some of my friends had. But buy this book too, b/c TPR has only one practice exam.