This book could have been written by Microsoft's PR group, since it so blatantly paints them as innocent coders just trying to better the world and makes no attempt to balance that position by exploring any dissenting opinions. The first few chapters are relatively interesting, covering some of the early internal development that's not widely covered elsewhere, but as soon as he gets near the antitrust stuff, Andrews is so pro-Microsoft that it's tough to believe what he's saying.

Bill Gates will like this book. It casts him in a very favourable light. Andrews is consistent - in any issues of argument between Microsoft and its competitors, be they Sun, AOL, Netscape, or a host of other companies, Microsoft is the benevolent company that only wants to do well and the competitors are out to get this well-intentioned, if lumbering, giant.

This book is biased. But such bias is inherent in the format of the work - an insider expose of the history of Microsoft. It is the breadth and depth of information that the author was able to gain for access to internal Microsoft emails and interviews with relevant parties that makes the book the interesting page-turner that it is. That is both the book's biggest weakness and it's greatest strength.

"How the Web Was Won" is filled with Internet Explorer icons. Everything from the cover to the chapter heading are decorated in the (in)famous blue 'e'. When reading this book one would expect that more of it would focus on the actual development of the browser. Instead, the development of the browser is relegated to a single chapter and the remainder of the book is a combination of armchair strategy analysis and a recount of previously published information relating to the so-called "Browser Wars".

Don't look to this book for an independent look at the browser wars. Don't look to this book for a view from the front lines of browser development. This is yet another history of Microsoft from the DOS days to the latest .NET initiative, all coloured by the lens of looking at all developments from the perspective of the internet.

I take notes when I read a book. Based on my notes, this is what I learned from this work:

* Recent events in technology have moved from technology being driven by war to more peaceful societal pursuits - Lockheed Martin vs. Microsoft * IBM failed on the desktop because its software design process was rigid - and that was necessary for "five 9s" reliability on servers

However, they didn't change to the desktop which needed innovation and iteration at the expense of reliability

Microsoft succeeded in supplanting IBM because it used fast iterations on its products to get shipping code at the expense of perfect code.

Microsoft has failed in moving from the desktop to the server-side internet where greater reliability (security, virus-protection) is needed at the expense of features

* NAFTA's chapt.11 charges that Canada Post can't use government-subsidised revenue to finance a business that competes with a private enterprise

Microsoft used Windows money in the browser fight against Netscape

These are my thoughts on this interesting and personable recount of already published information.

You've all heard of Billionaire Bill Gates and the Merry Men of Microsoft. The story, in light of the recent antitrust ruling, is a good bit of modern history. Although a little too heavy on the biographies of the players, the narraive is well paced and seemingly objective. This book is for all who are using Windows, those who hate it, and wonder all about the Redmond, Washington company and what goes on behind its walls. The story is basically that of Microsoft and how it was about to write off the Internet until it was forced to work with it- and did it so well that the Feds came in (and other companies) want to put a stop to it. Really, this book is well written and entertaining for all those who, like me, want to keep up with the history of this seemingly overnight phenomenon known as the Internet.

The phrases in this book work well and the phoenetic spelling isn't horrible, I just found it difficult to quickly find what I wanted to say. I found the two page "essential phrases" list in the back of my other travel guides more useful because you didn't have to flip a bunch of pages to get what you need. I was on a brief trip to Europe, this book may be more useful for longer trips.

This book is very useful to me because I travel to Europe every year and when I go there, it's difficult to get around the airports or the country itself. This little phrasebook has helped me to communicate with the other people in the countries I go to.

This book is mostly a collection of previously published material either from Games Workshop's out of print supplements or White Dwarf magazine. If you have both the Restless Dead and Warhammer Companion supplements, you will probably find that most of material here is lifted from the two books. For the new converts to the game, the contents are interesting and the varied mix of articles (from new rules to short adventures) would make it useful to any player or GM.

control is of course a branch of physics. Lately
there is an increased interest in the study of quantum control but classical control theory is much less vigorously study
(unfortunately in many ''physics'' depts today a large percentage of research involves nonphysics topics like biology,astronomy etc at the expense of other hard core physics subjects like classical control).

from the point of view of theoretical physics then, this is a highly dissapointing book. You wont find the insight which usually is the standard practice in theoretical physics. with the exception of the last chapter all other are too much descriptive with minimum insight into the hard core of physics, that is mathematics and with no explicit mechanics analysis.

Perhaps the book is wriiten for engineers which belong to another scientific culture than theoreetical physics. But then why is it published in the m series?

finally I need to congratulate SPRINGER for its ability to produce nice hardbound editions at rational prices. Publishers
like Cambridge for example could not even dream offering hardbound books at thse prices. I only hope that in the future Springer will publish something more fundamental in fluid dynamic control.

Primarily a history of an impressive project to analyse the layers of snow fall on the Greenland ice cap, the book suffers from lack of focus and from unfortunate efforts at being easily approachable and topical. It is strongest at revealing the influence of variation in earth's orbit on local Greenland (and nearby North American) climate, but even here the information is presented hurriedly and one comes away knowing little more of the various climaticaly significant orbital changes the data reveals.

At it's weakest point however, there is a sad attempt to relate the ice core data to global warming. This could be parodied as "there is no evidence of recent dramatic global warming in the ice core data, therefore global warming exists." To be kinder, the author feels "since I know global warming exists from other sources, the lack of data supporting global warming in my ice cores means this must be an entirely new sort of warming." There clearly is an easier explanation.

If you're interested in global warming and climate change, you're probably aware of how politicized the area has become, and how much hot air has been spewed by proponents and opponents of the idea that we humans are changing the climate, perhaps to a dangerous or catastrophic degree. In The Ice Chronicles, climatologist and arctic explorer Paul Mayewski and author Frank White bring cooler heads and cold, hard facts to the controversy.

The book, published in the fall of 2002, centers on the findings from the two-mile long ice core that Mayewski's team pulled from the center of the Greenland Ice Cap. This ice core, labeled GISP2, allowed scientists to track a wide range of climate variables in exquisite detail over the past 100,000 years. It produced many important findings that can help clarify the highly politicized climate controversy. The core reveals that Earth's climate is far from steady. Even without any contributions from manmade greenhouse gasses, ozone-depleting chemicals or particulates, regional and global conditions have swung from hot to cold and wet to dry many times, often with dramatic suddenness. Mayewski repeatedly makes the point that the climatologically calm, benign Holocene--the time period during which human civilization appeared and has developed--is a myth. The ten millennia or so since the end of the most recent ice age have been marked by two large global climate shifts, the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period, and many less drastic but still potent changes. He also presents intriguing evidence that some of these changes contributed to the downfall of several ancient civilizations, including the Mesopotamian Empire around 1200 BC, the Mayan Civilization around 900 AD, and the Norse colonies in Greenland around 1400 AD.

My only real criticism of the book is that it may present more of the nitty gritty history and findings of the GISP2 project than most readers want or need. Still, most of this is put into boxes which readers can dive into or skip as they choose.

While the research findings and their implications are fascinating, perhaps the most important contribution the authors make is their perspective. The data Mayewksi himself uncovered show that the climate is a complicated and sensitive system, pushed from regime to regime by a variety of natural forces. But Mayewski is equally clear that human activities, most notably the marked and well-documented increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses, have joined the party, and must be considered in order to understand current conditions or predict future climate change. And he is clear that unless we take sensible steps to reduce our impacts on the system, we risk not just global warming and whatever changes that would bring, but increased climactic instability and unpredictability. To the authors' credit, they attempt to bring some calm into the climate debates by propounding ten realistic, commonsense principles. The reflect that, "No matter what we do, the climate will change." But they also admonish, "We should strive more for climate predictability than control," and "If we cannot have global control of climate policy, we must at least have global cooperation."

The Ice Chronicles is well worth reading, both for the hard-won scientific facts it presents and explains so clearly, and for the constructive, down-to-earth perspective it provides.

Robert Adler, author of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation. (John Wiley & Sons, September 2002).

Read the Microsoft documentation instead. This book is a thinly disguised rip-off of the Microsoft documentation padded with examples of dubious value. In 590 pages this book manages to add no value or information beyond the original documentation. That's quite an achievement.

If you want to learn ISAPI...think again. This was "hot" 2 years ago...now it is all but dead.

ISAPI's big promise was better performance and memory usage...ironic that it has now fallen in favor to the biggest performance pig of all web applications...ASP. In an age of fast machines and small web apps, rapid development and ease of use wins out over performance.

ISAPI is hard to learn, harder to get right, unstable, bug ridden (if written in MFC) and surprisingly inflexible.

Look, you're a smart person. You want to do the right thing. You don't need to subject yourself to the torture of learning ISAPI. Only hard-core programmers who are tasked with writing a custom web app that is going to get some VERY heavy traffic should even bother with ISAPI.

So why did I give this book 4 stars? There are no good ISAPI books out there. This one has the most information in it and will allow you the best chance to actually develop something that works. Get this book and hit Genusa's (now dusty) ISAPI site. Also spend a lot of time in the Microsoft knowledge base...there are plenty of workarounds and bugs to learn about too.

Keep in mind that with ISAPI you had better be a damn good programmer. If your DLL ever crashes...bye bye web server. This is harder than you think if you are doing "serious" web programming which includes database access.

Smart managers will not allow mission-critical web apps to be developed in ISAPI by a web punk who has never done this before. Do everyone a favor and get a clue. There is a reason why nobody is doing this stuff anymore!

Game over. Go home and don't look back. Go off and learn ASP and Cold Fusion like a good little web programmer. You will have a marketable skill and will actually get things done.

ISAPI is Microsoft's approach to adding capabilities to web serving. There are only a few books that describe how to use ISAPI. This book is the best of them, because the author: 1) provides examples in both C and C++, and 2) compares ISAPI with CGI solutions. Unfortunately, ISAPI is a complicated subject, so more and shorter examples would help elucidate the reader.

This book attempts to explain the democratization of America by means of a Freudian psychological analysis of Andrew Jackson. The author undertakes this task because of his belief that Jackson was such a forceful personality that he became the model for an entire age of Americans. Rogin links Jackson's entire personality, his desire to remove the Indians, and his war on the Second U. S. Bank to a rage born of the dominance of his early years by women. It is entirely Freudian, and entirely naive. If you seek actual historical knowledge, look elsewhere. If you seek psychobabble in its purest, most nonsensical form, this is the book for you.

Rogin's book is an amalgamation of biography, history, and psychohistory. As biography, the book discusses the young Andrew Jackson, the trauma he underwent by being a posthumous child, and the death of his mother on the American frontier when he was fourteen. The book then explores Jackson's violent early manhood and his following career as a successful land speculator and local polititican. The book proceeds to examine Jackson's role in the War of 1812 and, most importantly in the Creek and Seminole Indian Wars. It follows this discussion with a treatment of Indian affairs during Jackson's Presidency as well as with a broader, though shorter discussion, of the nature of Jacksonian democracy and of Jackson's destruction of the Second Bank of the United States.

There is some good information and thought in the book. When the book focuses on telling the story of Jackson and his activities, it is good reading and, in the main, does not present an appealing picture of the United States's or Jackson's treatment of the Southeast Indians. Jackson's Indian Wars and subsequent removal policy come in for strong criticism. Rogin has interesting things to say about the conflicted character of American attitudes to the Indians and how these attitudes were both reflected and created by Jackson. It is also interesting to approach Jacksonian democracy from the perspective of Indian affairs. Rogovin's book was among the first to focus on Jackson's Indian policy in an attempt to understand Jacksonian America. Rogovin's judgments both on Jackson and more broadly, on the growth of democracy and industrialization in the United States, seem to me overly harsh.

The book is seriously marred by its attempts at psychohistory. There is a lot of second and third hand reliance on works by Freud, Erickson, Melanie Klien and other founders of psychoanalysis and a lengthy, unconvincing, attempt to apply Rogin's understanding of psychoanalysis to Jackson and to the American experience. It didn't work for me, to say the least. The book's overreliance on questionable psychohistory does lead me to be skeptical about much of the argument and conclusion of the book. The book is good at relating the literature of the day to Jacksonian America with some insightful comments about the work of Herman Melville. (Rogovin has also written a book about Melville).

There is something here worth knowing and saying about Jackson. Our Indian policy was indeed tragic and exacted a great human toll. The book though doesn't appreciate the difficult pressures in foreign and domestic affairs facing a young America. It is overly angry with the United States and too dependent on questionable psychologizing. The book shouldn' be anybody's sole source of information about Jacksonian America or Indian policy.

From the title, it appears that this book is supposed to be strictly about animals of the order "Pinnipedia," that is, animals that are flipper-footed. This order includes the true seals, sea lions, and walruses. The book starts off well enough with beautiful photographs and good descriptive text, but on page 63, Cleave inexplicably groups walruses and manatees together as if manatees also belong to this order. Manatees, while bearing perhaps a slight resemblance to walruses, are of the order "Sirenia" (manatees and dugongs) which are actually more closely related to elephants than to any marine mammal. Furthermore, while pinnipeds are piscivorous (fish-eating) and can spend part of their lives out of the water (i.e., on land or ice), manatees are herbivores and totally aquatic. The author does not point out these distinctions and thus this chapter is very misleading. Hopefully this will be remedied in any further printing of this book; in the meantime, anyone using this book as a reference should keep this in mind (indeed much more authoritative sources should be used instead such as Marianne Riedman's book "The Pinnipeds" or "The Sierra Club Handbook of Seals and Sirenians" by Reeves, et al).

Innacurate maps, poor accomodation listings and a lack of any addresses or directions makes this guide a nightmare. We threw it away a week into our trip!