John Wooden is an amazing person. So much can be learned from the man. In that light, this is an intersting book. Since the "author" obviously can't write (His intro is painful proof of that), he took the smart approach of conducting interviews and then collecting them all in this book. The approach gives a multi-dimensional look at this amazing person.

For that much, I recommend the book.

On the other hand, the execution of the book itself is a complete embarassement. Rinky dinky type setting and spelling errors literally every other page are a joke. How could the people behind this book release it with so many spelling errors? It's worse than a fourth grade paper. One gets the feeling that the author is totally disorganized, couldn't get his act together, and then finally pushed this product out the door on his own dime. To make matters worse, he's a lawyer.

Well, we shouldn't be too hard of the guy. He did deliver an interesting tome - and we'll forgive him for representing the reprehensible Yoko Ono.

A grand spanking good time

Frankly, I have no idea how many people are both willing and able to read more than 500 pages about a retired basketball coach. So, at the outset, permit me to suggest that the length of this book becomes relevant only if you have no interest in human greatness. Yes, Wooden was probably the greatest basketball coach (if not the greatest coach) who ever lived but, for me, he is infinitely more interesting as a fellow human being, albeit one who possesses exceptional qualities of character. His "Pyramid of Success" is only secondarily a "guide" to success in athletic competition. Its greater value (as his former players unanimously attest) is derived from its relevance to virtually all areas of human experience. Johnson organizes his material within seven chapters:

John Wooden's Legendary Achievements

Biography of John Wooden

The Official Pyramid of Success Lecture

Opening Interview with John Wooden

Woodenisms, Maxisms, and Poems

Interviews, Reflections, and Comments

Closing Interviews with John Wooden

For me, the interviews are most interesting. Almost all of the names of those interviewed are unfamiliar to me but throughout their observations, there are recurrent themes: Wooden was kind and thoughtful but a strict disciplinarian, prepared for each practice as well as for each game with meticulous care, was highly competitive, had non-negotiable personal values, was most proud of his role as a teacher, viewed unsportsmanlike conduct with contempt, and never EVER offered an alibi after a rare defeat. Most people do not know that he was an outstanding high school and college player, and, that he toiled in anonymity at U.C.L.A. for many years before his teams began to win national championships.

Many years ago while I was head coach of the varsity basketball team at a New England boarding school, I attended a clinic in Boston. Coach Wooden was the featured speaker. After dinner with friends, I returned to my hotel and saw him seated alone in the coffee shop. I approached him, introduced myself, and thanked him for all I learned from his presentation. He invited me to join him and then, for about 30 minutes, asked me about my team, our competition, and what my basic strategies were for offense and defense. I indicated that I was having some problems with the full-court zone press. He used several napkins to diagram a solution to the problems. I thanked him, we shook hands, and I went up to my room. Two weeks later, I received in the mail a handwritten note from him wishing our team well, accompanied by a single sheet on which "The Pyramid of Power" was illustrated.

John Wooden was a great human being long before his teams at U.C.L.A. began to win national championships and he remains a great man in the years following his retirement. No doubt age has taken its toll on his body but, as recent television interviews suggest, his mind is as sharp as ever. Also unchanged is his heart, one which is filled with love for basketball, of course, but all also for all the people whose lives he has touched (and whose lives have touched his) along the way.

This book isn't primarily about coaching basketball although, for those of us who love the game, it provides an abundance of information otherwise unavailable. Rather, it is about an extraordinary man who has always been an avid student and, in the best sense of the word, continues to be an outstanding teacher. He has nourished so many other lives. This book affords the unique opportunity to have him nourish yours.

I truly would like to recommend "Sacrificed Sheriff" more strongly. It provides a wealth of factual information about John Behan, the Sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona, when the city of Tombstone reached its pinnacle of fame as the site of the so-called Gunfight at the OK Corral and the surrounding events. Behan's reputation, as Bob Alexander vehemently protests, has long been assailed through innuendo and an unfairly selective use of evidence, painting him as a weak and corrupt opponent of Wyatt Earp and his brothers. In Alexander, Behan has at last found a very sympathetic biographer, perhaps a biographer too sympathetic to objectively view the historical questions involved. While Alexander repeatedly (and rightly) protests the negative assumptions and interpretations of evidence used in the past against Sheriff Behan by various writers, Alexander himself falls into the same trap, seemingly never missing an opportunity to paint Wyatt Earp in the darkest colors, repeating sketchy rumors and always promoting the most negative answer to any question.

I confess a particular personal aversion to some stylistic choices made by Alexander, most notably the lavish use of italicized words and exclamation points throughout his text. Reading this, I could not help but feel that the author is displaying an unseemly indignant petulance not at all appropriate for anyone attempting an objective history. In the end, I think that Mr. Alexander has eroded the effectiveness of his own book by such devices and through a blatant display of partisanship in his unceasing attacks upon Wyatt Earp at every opportunity (extending to creating such opportunities even where the narrative text about Behan, supposedly the focus of the book, does not logically involve Earp at all). At times, Alexander seems to confuse the opinions of earlier authors of an "anti-Earp" bent with actual evidence, citing with relish almost anything unflattering ever written about the man whom popular history has chosen, instead of Sheriff Behan, to be at the center of Tombstone's story. I believe that "Sacrificed Sheriff" would have benefited greatly from a strong editor who would have toned down Mr. Alexander's all too evident antipathy towards Wyatt Earp and kept the book's focus more clearly on its supposed central subject.

Do I encourage persons interested in the controversies surrounding Tombstone in its glory days to read Alexander's book? Yes, I do. But I caution them to read it for the facts given about John Behan's life rather than for the interpretations the author makes about Behan's opponents.

The "Sacrificed Sheriff" is an excellent and well documented read. It provides a wealth of factual information about John Behan, the Sheriff of Cochise County, AZ. Behan's reputation, has too long been outright lies and innuendos. The footnotes in this text indicate it is well researched and make for easy confirmation of Alexander's story, unlike the so called auto-biographies of Wyatt, Virgil and Josephine Earp. Behan is nothing less than a partiot who served his country well while the Earps were seeking personal wealth and self-agrandized fame. You should read all the Earp texts before delving into this factual account of Arizona history.-Bill McLennan, San Antonio, TX

I'm a student of Bullion and I found his book just as captivating as his lectures. The book is a very telling personal account of exactly how LBJ was. This book is by no means an autobiography of Johnson. However it does go into detail regarding Bullion's personal encounters with LBJ and his father's professional relationship with the former president. I enjoyed the detailed accounts of Bullion spending time at the LBJ ranch and getting to know the wildlife there. I especially liked the way the Bullion described Johnson's physcial prowess and how Johnson used it against his friends and opponents. This naked account of Johnson by no means glorifies his stay in office nor his rise to power.

Many wrox books are great, but this one was a disappointment. As an "classic ASP" developer I found the examples unhelpful and impractical, the information spread out, the request and response object - used constantly in classic ASP - were so poorly explained I still have no idea how they function in ASP.net. I am sure that ASP.NET has many important benefits that make it superior to Classic ASP, but after reading almost 600 pages (!) I feel I do not understand how to achieve the same result I can easily get in Classic ASP. Not recommended.

I wanted to create a simple web application with this book that would allow for authenticated users to add content and allow non-authenticated users to simply view content. The book was perfect for setting up the the database connections, and web forms. The book fell on its face with security. The concepts were included and some examples were included, but there was no information about user roles when using forms based authentication. One feature I think most ASP.Net applications are going to have is authentication so I found it distressing that it was given such incomplete coverage. To get more information you need to look at one of two other Wrox books - Beginning Web Programming with Visual Basic.Net and Visual Studio.Net, or ASP.Net Security. The first book covers mostly the same information as this book, but goes into more detail on security. It too though is not complete. With the inclusion of about five more pages in this book it would have been complete from my viewpoint.

First of all, a good number of my undergraduates like this book as it introduces the bare bones required to get something up and running quite quickly. The downside of the book, from my persusal of it, is that it is less even than it could be, or perhaps should be. In many chapters (especially the crucial early ones) examples are often introduced and developed before their key constructs are properly explained. This is simply confusing to naive readers and highly irritating. For instance, the earliest ASP.net script uses "asp:label" without explaining the syntax or semantics for a another few dozen pages.

Unfortunately this is a bit of trend throughout the book and at the very least makes it frustrating. However, once you allow for this, (and it's a big allowance to make) the book is very handy.

It has bundles of scripts that anyone involved in web work will find interesting and useful. You can quibble with some of these (the login scripting for example) contra other books such as Professional ASP.NET, but I suspect this is a byproduct of committee authorship.

The book is clearly aimed at the learner so don't expect Enterprise quality insights into server management. Given the huge range of architectures and technologies available to the developer, producing any 'true' learner book is a considerable challenge. If you need a book for coursework alone, then this will probably meet most of your needs. If you earn your living with the .NET and its companions, then you need some supplementary texts.

I'm a computer engineering student and have been studying this book for 3 months and I've concluded that it's impossble to learn from. In almost all of the examples, the author skip steps that are vital for students who have never analyzed circuits in such detail before. The reading is difficult to understand, even after reading each chapter two or three times. It's as if the authors wrote this text to impress their colleages. I'm fortunate that my professor explains the material faily well. I'm definitely going to sell this book back at the end of the semister and use the money to invest in a useful circuits text. I highly recommend you do not buy this book, I wish I never did.

Take my suggestion: "Don't ever buy this book". I am a second year student and my school use this book as a text for Introduction to EE. Since my instructor is so bad in explanation, at the very beginning, I thought, I could rely on this text for understanding. I HAVE READ EVERY SINGLE WORD IN THE FIRST TWO CHAPTERS AND REPEATED SO MANY TIMES AND STILL, I DON'T COMPLETELY UNDERSTAND THINGS. Very vey hard to follow. If you don't believe what I said, read it yourself before buying it.

This book is extremly difficult to learn from. The material that is covered is not explained very well for someone just starting out. There may be one of two reasons for this, either the authors know the subject matter so well they lost touch with the basics or they more or less wrote the book to impress their peers.