This is the book one should have who is doing something or anything in VHDL. Previously I had two books but those were filled with unnecessary explaination and nonsense examples. This book explain the facts to the point with plenty of examples. I think that it best for the startup and also for the experienced peoples for their reference.

This book is an excellent showcase of superior/exemplary CD package design. Stefan Sagmeister writes a superb introduction explaining how CD package design should be approached. A must have book if you're into graphic design or CD packaging.

I especially enjoy learning about the custums and it is a great book.

This well-designed and convenient guide is best used in conjunction with a more traditional guidebook to Zurich. The authors clearly had practicality uppermost in their minds and are meticulous in providing details (door widths, number of stairs, etc). It's perfect for cross-referencing restaurants, museums, or other places of interest in order to best plan a hassle-free trip for disabled visitors. The 30 pages of maps were especially helpful in pinpointing destinations. Though I was only in Zurich for a short time, I imagine this guide would also be very helpful for anyone planning a longer stay or already living in Zurich. In fact, I'd bet some natives of the city would discover places they might not have ventured to for fear of inaccessibility! Though it might be necessary for non-German speakers to switch back and forth for the standard expression translations at first, that can turn into a bonus- learning certain phrases and words in German makes getting around that much easier. My only complaint: there should have been more of the wonderful photographs the editors scattered throughout the book. They are exceptional- and exceptionally reproduced. For their next book, I suggest a picture book of Zurich- a perfect souvenir of the city this guidebook has helped open up for exploration.

Stefan Rudnicki has done a wonderful job transforming Julian Mitchell's screenplay into a very satisfactory novel about the life of Oscar Wilde. The Samuelson produced movie was superb, and here the novel is able to add a different level of depth by interspersing quotes and pieces of poetry by Wilde throughout the story line.

Granted, the story is not as complete as a full biography (Richard Ellman's is particularly thorough -- if somewhat dry) but it is told with such wit, humor and tragedy as to providing a most enchanting diversion. Highly Recommended, especially to those who are looking for good entertainment rather than mere scholarly facts and literary commentary.

it is a Fabulous book especially if you love the X Files.

the book can not be summed up in a review it is so amazing that it is beyond words. The only way to get the atmospheric feeling that pertrudes from this book is to read it yourself. Ethereal, otherworldly and punctuated by Miran Kim's mysterious paintings.

Strangely, I read Ender's Game out of sequence in it's series. For some reason I started with "Speaker for the Dead", which is the sequel, and then went back to read the first novel. Speaker for the Dead is a great book but does not stand alone. Its story is only completed by the remaining books in the series. Ender's Game however, is just as good and is also self contained.

Originally, the novel started out as a short story, (or novella), called Ender's War. Card re-wrote much of it, fleshing out the story, and in so doing created one of the finest works of science fiction in existance. I haven't met anyone who has read it without being impressed. Like all of Card's books, it is difficult to put down, teaches us something about ourselves, makes us cry and it makes us cheer. Card is always good but with Ender's Game, he is perfect.

The title character, Ender Wiggin, is a young boy who's whole life has been lived under the stigma of being a third child. In a world where population control is the only means of racial survival, he is the exception that proves the rule. His very existance was only granted because the government felt his genes and upbringing might produce the perfect strategist against an implacable enemy.

The "Buggers" almost wiped out the entire human race, last time they visited. The government is certain these insect like creatures will not stop when they next decide to come. And so, it is necessary to create a military genius, trained in every way possible, hardened to fear and remorse, and knowing that there will be no second chance at success. The fact that this person is a small boy, must not keep them from performing their duty.

Ender's Game tells the story of what that boy's life is like. It is not a light tale and no punches are pulled. Even so, I would recommend it to anyone over ten years old. Simply because it does not shy away from the consequences of even brutal acts and so, it has the power to open our eyes to the meaning of responsibility. Please read this book... we all should.

For those that are up on their reading of Card's work, you may want to buy his latest; Ender's Shadow. It revisits the War school from the point of view of Ender's most worthy student, Bean. We get to see all those dramatic moments again but not as we remember them.

Having never been a fan of sci-fi, I was more than a little iffy about undertaking Ender's Game. Since it is usually considered "classic" sci-fi, I decided to be open-minded and give it a shot. I'm incredibly glad that I did, because this book was nothing short of touching.

Ender Wiggin grows up in a futuristic society where families can only have an allotted number of children, and the Wiggins's just happen to be allowed to produce three incredible geniuses. At the age of 6, Ender enters a battle school where he will be conditioned and trained to be the greatest of intergalactic commanders, destined to save the world from the latest and largest alien attack that Earth has ever seen. The fate of the world lies in the hands of a boy genius with hopes, dreams, and a family that he must leave behind to fulfill his duty.

Card does an exquisite job tapping into Ender's young, but extraordinarily advanced mind. There is a mixture of childhood longing and ageless maturity that makes Ender a tragic and inspiring hero. With surprises at every turn, breathtaking tension, and heart-wrenching characters, Ender's Game can stand proudly as a classic far above any labels that might be tacked to it.

I enjoy science fiction. I like the situations and possibilities that one can only find in the genre. That said, 'Ender's Game' is striking. Having just finished it today, it is easily one of the top ten books I have ever read. It has all the trappings of sci-fi yes... space travel, techno-gizmo, other planets, aliens, future societies. But it is in the end a human story. Ender is destined to be the savior for the human race. He begins the story at six years old, the third child in an age where population control results in a two child maximum. His brother and sister had the ability, but it must be him that will have the personality. He is humanity's last hope, and Card takes us on the journey through his eyes, though his heart.

I look to books for entertainment in a form that music and books can't give me. An enjoyable, quick read. But Ender's story caused me to rethink alot of my opinions about alot of things. To question my beliefs about meaning in my life, even. For Ender to make it, he will have to endure a terrible life... one of isolation, lonelyiness, despair. There are many people, important people, who are interested in him. But no one to comfort him, befriend him, confide with him. What the military puts him through would be considered criminal by today's standards. He is denied a childhood, and barred from any type of postive emotion attachment.

There is a reason that this book has still has such a following nearly twenty years after it was first published. By the time it nears 40, I am sure it will have taken it's place among '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,' '1984,' 'Stranger in a Strange Land,' 'Rendezvous with Rama,' 'Farenheight 451,' 'Foundation,' and 'Dune.'

As a living room player of Scrabble who only drags out the board about ten times a year or so, I have only a passing interest in the game itself-however I am fascinated by subcultures of all kinds, and the kooky word of competitive Scrabble was just too alluring to pass up. For the most part Fatsis succeeded in writing a compelling and vivid story of the game and its lovers, while detailing his own growing obsession/addiction to it. His feat of juggling Scrabble's corporate and sociological history, basic and high strategic theory, arcana, intimate portraits of top players, along with his own amazing rise to expert level rating, is what makes the narrative successful and compelling to even the non-Scrabble players.

There are a couple of caveats to this endorsement. Casual players such as myself must accept that Scrabble played at the competitive level described in Fatsis's account is almost a completely deferent game from what gets played in living rooms amongst family members. First of all, it's generally one on one, with a 25-minute timer. Secondly-and most importantly-the words played with often bear little relation to standard English as you and I know it. Indeed, as his lengthy discussion of the compilation of the official Scrabble dictionary makes clear, almost no word is too obsolete or archaic, and no transliteration too ridiculous to play. Oh yeah, and by the way, the rest of the world uses the British version dictionary with about 20,000 other words. In other words, looking at an expert level Scrabble board can often be like looking at gibberish. Once one gets over this, one learns along with Fatsis that the only way to get into the upper ranks of the Scrabble world is to memorize words... for years...

Of course, how you memorize the words matters, and Fatsis makes sure to explain how a number of the top players accomplish this (hint, you need 4-10 free hours a day, which might explain why so many top Scrabble players don't hold down regular jobs). Along with sheer memorization is anagramming, which trains one to pick words out of jumbled letters, and then there's all the strategy involved in managing the rack (ie. your tiles), the board, and soforth. This naturally drifts into the realm of probability and game theory and such, which gets rather detailed and may not hold the attention of some readers (although I quite liked these discussions).

The book could have done better in cutting the history of tedious and petty feuds between top players and Scrabble management and corporate ownership. They don't bring anything to the story other than to emphasize the pettiness of maladjusted adults and a desire on Fatsis's part to leave no stone unturned. It's amazing enough that he makes us care about a number of social misfits who find solace and meaning in their Scrabble obsessions, there's no need to push the envelope and quote their lengthy e-mail flames to oneanother. The book's other main weakness is it's treatment of women. Fatsis quickly gets in with a number of the guys devoting chapters to a number of them, but he only spends three pages talking to the top women players! It's an area in which his journalistic training seems to have failed him, since there are a number of interesting difference between woman and men players that he only skims the surface of. It's as if in dealing with his own efforts to claw his way up the ratings and hang with his buddies, he didn't have the energy left to deal with the women. Still, these are relatively minor quibbles for what is a mostly fascinating window into an oddball subculture.

The author, an otherwise reputable sports reporter and writer, spent two years devoting his life to Scrabble in order to document the obsession, eccentricity, and passion found in the world of competitive Scrabble. Fatsis talks about the history of the game and how the tournaments were born, but the real star of this book is the game itself, and the expert players. He introduces us to the quirky oddballs, I mean esteemed luminaries, who form the upper echelons of Scrabble playing: the uptight, meditating and self-affirming expert who comes across as arrogant; the affable and possibly hypochondriac Joel, nick-named "G.I. Joel," as in Gastro-Intentinal, for obvious and unfortunate reasons; the unemployable African-American quasi-activist, ever complaining about the Man; the neurotic, pill-popping Matt, also unemployable. Fatsis acknowledges that he's highlighted the eccentric characters among the experts and only breifly touched upon the many "normal" expert players, and why not? It makes for more interesting reading. Interesting, too, is the game as it's played by experts: a different game indeed from drawing-room amateurs' bouts. The words are archaic to the point of unrecognizability: two-letter words like AA and SH also abound, allowing for players to lay tiles atop or below other words instead of intersecting them in the familiar way. The only way to become an expert (a goal Fatsis soon becomes literally obsessed with) is to memorize reams of these words; many players are only vaguely familiar with their meanings, if at all. They know only whether the words are acceptable in the official word list. It comes to a point where the letters are, as one expert puts it, "scoring tools:" they may as well be colors, or shapes that you arrange in memorized patterns. And in a way, that's strange and sad, for isn't Scrabble a game of active word power, not rote memorization of thousands of letter strings? In any case, a fascinating look into a world of obsession, written in a clear, intelligent, and honest style. Hard to put down.

This book is a must read for anyone who has ever become addicted to any kind of puzzle. Fatsis lives the life of a scrabble addict for 3 years, studying word lists, memorizing 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 letter words, developing his talent for anagramming (they key to a top scrabble player). Perhaps more interesting are his brief bios of scrabble luminaries, an odd but somehow endearing bunch who are totally devoted to the game. For novices like me, the strategy and intricacy of the games played are mind-boggling. I don't think I've ever scored a bingo in years of casual playing, but good scrabble players score several EACH GAME! Of course they also follow odd lexicons of scrabble words -- many don't quite know what the words mean although they know whether it's a word or not. In fact, most living room players wouldn't even recognize half the words on the board, no less be able to calculate the odds of returning a letter for a better "rack." Fatsis did a great job describing his own obsession, his own rise (and sometimes fall) and his ability to play with the big boys. I loved it from start to finish.

The Art of War is a military classic, written around 400 BC. However, because the maxims contained in the book are so succinct and universal, this is still a useful book for understanding and waging war today. The central themes are to attack where the enemy is weak, deceive the enemy into attacking you on your terms (not his), and the use of espionage to confuse the enemy while gathering information for your own use.

This book is a classical, scholarly translation. I cannot comment on the accuracy of the translation, as I do not read Chinese. However, the translator sprinkles the text with footnotes to explain why he has chosen certain phrases that do not directly translate, and offers alternative explanations from other translators. Therefore, you get a good feel for what Sun Tzu originally meant, especially through the critical inclusion of selected commentaries. In addition, there is an introduction by the author on the history and background of the text, which are useful. There are also some comments on the influence the text has had, especially on Mao Tse-tung and on the Imperial Japanese forces through World War II.

Therefore, I certainly recommend this translation for a first-time reader such as myself.

Sun Tzu "The Art of War" was excellent. This book is a great book on strategy. Whether you command a nations army, war games or a moderen business. If the reader uses some of these war tactics and strategies in the modern world, they may find it easy to relate. Thus it is easy to relate to this book. Even rivals in sports and entertainment can be outwitted by the wisdom in this book. It also adds examples of some actions, which show how these sayings and writings apply to the real world.

So no matter what you were looking for in this book, whether it be business, sports, war games, or actual wars, you can be sure to learn more on how to best deal with the situation through the strategies in this book.

The book is timeless....and should be required reading for all persons.

This is a wonderful treatise on strategic thought. For whatever reason, Sun Tzu wrote in such a way as to let his text be as applicable today as it was 2400 years ago. Political, business, and military leaders would be well served by reading this book. It is obviously not just a book on warfare. Very little, in fact, is dedicated to actual battle. Sun Tzu argues that in order to win you must win before the battle actually takes place. You must put in place winning strategies to weaken your enemy's position and bolster yours. So Sun Tzu can state, without disrespect to his ancestors: "Anciently those called skilled in war conquered an enemy easily conquered." This text must have been amazingly practical when it was written (even more than now) because there are lots of anecdotes and tactics that ancient military leaders would have found very useful. Even now, these examples are incredible useful for modern day readers.