Humphrey the Hugganite is a delightful book written specifically for children from 3-8, but I have given the book along with the stuffed Humphrey to older children -- even a great grandmother of 82 wanted one just for her own. This book impresses upon children the importance of showing affection, i.e., Hugs. It is well written and beautifully illustrated. The stuffed Humphrey is a must to go along with the book. He is so soft that children will want to snuggle up to him at night. I would recommend this book for your children or grandchildren.

My kids can't get enough of Humphrey. I bought the book first and read it to my two daughters. They loved the story and don't want to hear any other story at bedtime. Then I bought the stuffed animal, and now they sleep with Humphrey every night. My wife and I both agree that Humphrey the Hugganite is a book that all children should have. A hug goes a long way with Humphrey! I recommend buying this book without any reservations. Very cute story.

If you want to see and read about Austin's history, this is the book for you. The book covers Austin's story from its inception in the late 1830s to the mid-1980s. Overall, I learned how Austin evolved into the city it now is.

Having just read Steven Saylor's "A Twist at the End" and visited the O. Henry Museum, I was most interested in Austin's history during the last two decades of the 19th century. Readers wanting to know more about other parts of the city's history will find that the text and graphical content puts each stage of Austin's development into a useful perspective.

I learned...and thoroughly enjoyed the process.

As someone who lived in Prague, I can say that this is the real thing. With enough tourist-y information to get newcomers started, The Rough Guide goes off the beaten path--offering tidbits of off-the-wall history and an insider's look at the city's best kept secrets. An added bonus--reviews of, honestly, the best restaurants, bars and clubs in the city--not a single tourist trap or cliche among them. A must read for visitors to the city!

This is my favorite beginning Esperanto book. The vocabulary choices are good, with more difficult words being introduced in a logical manner (not all at once!) The excercises are at a good gradient - not too hard -- and the words a new Esperantist would need are introduced early on.

Within just a few days I was able to correspond with Esperanto speakers from all over the world.

I highly recommend the language and this book!

I'd normally not want to simply add another "Oh this is a great book" to the list of reviews that is already here, but honestly Richardson deserves the praise.

While the book largely tries to be three things at once it is successful to a good degree. The first part of the book is a good overview of the "language problem" and Esperanto's solution to is. It's also a good (but increasingly dated) overview of Esperanto culture and resources.

The second part of the book is a reasonable 10-lesson section on Esperanto itself. it does a good job at this for its size by immediately integrating the reading of dialog at the end of every lesson.

Finally, the most unique part of the book is its last part: a small Esperanto reading anthology that allows you to immediately try your new found skill.

If you're interested in Esperanto in any capacity (save hard linguistics, perhaps) this book is your first stop. Get it.

I've tried other books before, but this is the esperanto teacher that I was actually able to complete. There's a history of the Esperanto Movement, ten lessons, lots of reading material and an esperanto-english dictionary (in that order). I found the book exactly what *I* needed in order to learn basic esperanto. If you're a beginner, then this is the book for you.

This book isn't really what I was expecting. I was wanting a book that would show how to do everyday, necessary calcs, how to properly stake various objects, etc. What I got was a book that taught me how to set up and level an instrument, proper communication techniques, comments on schedules, etc. The two redeeming values of this book is the section on checks you can do to your instuments, and slopestaking.

I have been working in the field as a chief engineer for 5 years, and have read this book from cover to cover. I would advise any new layout man/woman who plans on starting a career in the field to obtain a copy, and by all means issue these to your rodmen. You will find a drastic improvement on work skills and habbits, and less rework. C.J. Finn

I have used this text to teach surveying to Construction Management students who need to only know the basics of construction surveying and layout on the jobsite. I have found this book to be easy for construction students to use and take with them to industry. I look forward to the next edition.

This book is an excellent "do-it-yourself" CGI reference, but it has a few minor flaws that prevent it from being the ultimate Perl book.

First, this book is not intended to teach Perl or CGI scripting. Any novice would encounter serious difficulty trying to piece together the code fragments that make up this book.

Second, an experienced Perl programmer may find that the "code fragment" approach to creating general functions often requires extraneous code and added complexity. Still, the incredible comprehensiveness of the book make it a useful reference for generating new ideas and new approaches.

If you already have a basic Perl book, this book would make a great addition, helping to problem-solve more complex dynamic web page requirements.

This book is clear, well-organized, and has many useful examples, but the authors did not check their examples on Windows 95 systems. For instance, and this is not a minor point, they say that you can run command lines under DOS in the same way you can under Unix. Not true! Even something as simple as perl -e 'print "hello";' will not work. Because of this, the book would be far more useful for those working on Unix systems than for those using Windows. I am not sure if there is a better book available, but "Perl 5 Unleashed" does have the correct information on command lines.

This book covers the more popular and usefull areas of Perl. The book contains great examples of how to use/do various things within Perl. Also all examples are real-world based. This is my most used Perl book in my collection, by far

John McGinley of the Sacramento Poetry Center reviewed "My Shepherd" by David Humphreys in the March issue of Poetry Now, 1998 writing, "David calls his style of writing "roller coaster collage" and I tend to agree. Reading him is quite a ride. Some of his poems, like "Firestone Library" and "Magpie" are so comfortable and familiar that you feel as if you might have helped write them. Others, like "Six Way Bypass Over Coffee At The Bookstore" are so tense and painful that you finish the poem with a sense of relief that it wasn't you who had to live through that particular experience. He'll relate the wild conversations of children at play and inventory the absurdities of their discarded and jumbled toys in "Several Obscurities" and then take you off to some equally odd adult universe in his "Space Cowboy". He does quick-witted satire in "So?" (Subterfuge Satire): "I feel like the programmed ignition of a personal singularity, big bang cosmic robotic spot-weld, titanic collision with the fog as well as the iceberg, becoming the event" and then he comes up with heartfelt lines like those in "She Is There": "Watching her as she leans on the swing she looks off at the roses and I see that she has taken on the dimensions of her life at school which has drawn shadows along her edges so that a flat surface no longer contains her." There is much more in this book that makes it well worth reading. Whatever you do, buy a copy of it and share it with others. This is a strong voice indeed!"

While the idea behind the Friends of Ed series is admirable and useful - that is, to cover the broad and expansive areas of Flash development that are not so well documented elsewhere - the books so far have been spoiled by the inconsistent quality of their ActionScript.

Too often, I get the feeling that authors that have been invited to contribute have simply re-worked a pre-existing project - and this all too often includes (the usual) hacks and workarounds which all of us use when faced with deadlines. Bits and pieces of Flash4 ActionScript creep in every now and again - and occassionally the authors seem to be entirely unaware of new methods introduced in Flash5 that make their workarounds obsolete (the onClipEvent for loaded data is one example - see Chapt 9 of this book to learn how to do it the *old* way).

Furthermore, the tutorials often lack focus - as though the editors can't decide where to pitch the level of instruction: so that some hard-core ActionScript is often mixed-in with superfluous detail about how to build the interface for the tutorial example.

Anyway, my advice if you really want to *learn* ActionScript for yourself - and also avoid the mistakes, hacks and workarounds that plague the Friends of Ed books - put Phillip Kerman's excellent "ActionScripting in Flash" together with Colin Moock's "ActionScript: The Definitive Guide" on your desk - you'll never look back.

If you are a newbie,......their are other alternatives that will get your feet wet, but if you are a practicing Flash developer and have a firm understanding of ActionScript...this book will inspire you to build real dynamic Flash apps. It touches on Flash Javascript methods, Flash and textfiles and goes into server side middleware solutions like, CGI,Perl and PHP. It also introduces you to database integration. This book gives you real world solutions, which maybe a bit elementary, but overall it lays the foundation for you. I found this book to be inspiring and to be the book which pushed me to learn CGI,PERL,PHP and MySQL. If your looking to build real dynamic/interactive Flash applications or websites this is the book.

I've bought numerous books on Flash and the Dynamic Scripting that can be intermingled with Flash.... Flash 5 ActionScript F/X and Design, Flash 4 Creative Web Animation, and different Wrox books on ASP, ASP databases, and ADO. This book ties ALL of them together. It explains motion scripting for beginners, and then it shows how to import variables from ASP, PHP, Perl, and Cold Fusion. These 1000+ pages contain EVERYTHING you want to know about Flash, it it with out a doubt, THE BEST FLASH BOOK EVER CREATED!!!! It even branches out Flash to other programs like Dreamweaver UltraDev and Generator, it explains how to display information from databases using Flash Turbine. If you read this book, you will be a master at Flash.

David H. Miller's claim to have interviewed oodles of Indian survivors of the Custer fight is bogus. Most of the factual Indian material in the book is freely lifted from interviews recorded by other people such as Stanley Vestal. Even the Indian "portraits" which Miller supposedly did from life appear to have been done from photographs. It is significant that Miller waited until the last Indian survivor had died in 1955 before publishing. Like his spiritual descendent, Dee Brown, Miller writes nonsense while leaning on the works of more reputable authors...

His "original" material is sheer nonsense, like his contention that Custer committed suicide and that the powder burns were somehow "wiped away" by cover-up officers -- and that Custer's body was taken away on the Far West rather than buried on the field. (Oddly enough, he also claims that Custer got shot crossing the river...)

I have not yet read the book but am now ordering it. I noticed that a couple of the reviews from readers questioned the validity of the book. It is absolutely authenic. I was the Millers banker in 1981 when they lived in Rancho Santa Fe, Ca. and I visited their home on 2 occasins. Mr. Miller has a fascinating background which does include living with the indians and seeking out those who had fought Custer approximately 50 years prior to his painting their busts.His home was full of Indian artifacts which he refused to sell because they had been given to him and had special meaning. Mr. Miller was also employed on the sets of several cowboy movies as an Indian expert. He was about 75 years old in 1981 and I have lost total contact with him. I just want readers of this book to know that it is the real thing.

Having read several differing accounts of the battle at Little Big Horn, I find that no one, not even the Indians know what happened that day. Mr. Miller has done his best to present the views of the Indians who fought at the battle as factually as possible. I have not read a recent printing, (my book was printed in 1965, 208 pages counting lists of Indians interviewed or mentioned and the Officers of the 7th Cavalry). I have not been able to find anything in this book, or in any other books to make me believe that Mr. Miller has done anything other than present the facts as best as he could, and I highly recomend this book for anyone interested in the truth about what happened June 25, 1876.

I bought this book for my trip to Kenya Uganda and Tanzania. I thought that I might want to travel to Ethiopia or down to Zambia and Zimbabwe....this guide is much too condensed to be helpful, and most travelers I met hated this guide and would borrow or end up buying the LP East Africa guide. You would be much better off buying a regional guide rather then this monster. Just the weight of the book alone isn't worth carrying around with you. I actually ended up ripping this book to shreads and keeping only about ten pages of it then buying the more in depth East Africa Guide.

Don't get me wrong, I love the lonely planet guides. Just not this one. I can whole heartedly recomment the East Africa guide and the Trekking East Africa guide.

This book, "Africa on a Shoestring, 9th Ed" has a broad coverage; although its chapters are not as detailed as many tourists would expect them to be.
Again, this book would have been of better psychic value, had its authors showed confidence in the sections they dealt with. Its 'information' became a wet blanket for me. Many readers who intend to visit African countries are likey to be discouraged by its relentless pessimistic approach. Its outlook is more critical than 'touristical'. The general impression is this: "something good may not come out of Africa". That is shameful! The term "bush-taxi", which was used over and over again, in lieu of a more cordial 'local-taxi' sounds offensive.
I think that if written (or revised) without assumptive bias, this book would be of better quality and value to its users.

Africa is large, and it's hard or impossible to concentrate so much information and advice into one book. Yet, Lonely Planet - as always - managed to do this with great muster. Unless you have time and money to buy the many LP guides to single regions and countries of Africa, this is the book you want before you even plan of visiting the black continent !