You know, typically people don't make you pay to read their advertisements. This is an exception. Each of the self-serving articles in this book is followed by a 1-2 page advertisement for the author that, not surprising, offers a service to solve the problem outlined in the article. How convenient! This book is a glorified collection of vendor-sponsored white papers.

This book was a valuable resource. Many tid bits of info that can really make a big difference for your success.

Both books are of the female abduction/submission scenario. 4 Stars first half, ZERO stars for second. Olivia, the heroine of the first novel is actually well written and develops the character as well as a delivers a reasonably well written series of sexual vignettes, numerous bondage/discipline scenes and some real eroticism. The second novel (Lucy) is an execrable piece of trash, again dealing with the female abduction/submission scenario. This portion of the book utilizes the time "honored" scenario of "humiliate, beat, rape" and then the "beat the woman, then humiliate her" followed by the usual violent rapine scenes. This part of the book is trash, written poorly and only worth shredding. Personally, I tossed it in the trash.

This is two novels and some bonus excerpts for the price of one. The first novel--Olivia--rates five stars. It is a hardcore bondage, dominance and discipline novel that does a very good job of marrying the erotic with the literary, making it a very engaging read. Olivia is a suffragette in Victorian England who has pissed off the wrong powerful man, who takes it upon himself to teach Olivia that far from being his equal, she is actually suited only to be his pleasure slave. The capture, training, discipline and play scenes are all at a grippingly intense level, that is both hugely erotic and impossible to put down. Olivia's transition and acceptance, her emotional reactions to the experience and her balance between shame and arousal add a dimension to the novel that is both exciting and engaging.

The short excerpt between the two novels is badly written, unerotic, and unnecessary, but takes up very little space so is hardly worth mentioning.

The second novel, Lucy, is even more of a hardcore, heavy bondage and discipline novel than the first. Lucy is a hapless captive taken to be a love slave by ruthlessly cruel captors. Her emotional turmoil is less developed, and her transitions are disappointingly fake and shallow (particularly after the masterful, pun intended, emotional development we were treated to in Olivia). However, this novel makes up for poor writing with inventive scenes of pain, degradation, and creative bondage.

If bdsm is what you're into, you'll enjoy this double dose.

This book has an answer to most questions you could have regarding web site maintenance, although it is heavily biased towards configuring UNIX servers. Windows NT, for example, doesn't get much of a mention. Also, many of the examples are written in Perl which was a shame as I was more interested in CGI written with shell scripts.

Some topics do not go into enough detail. For example, the section on how to install two servers on a single machine, each responding to different domain names, tells you "what" to do but not "how" to do it.

Where the book does excel, however, is in describing the concepts of how the internet works.

The book's description on the back cover doesn't even match the content nor does the CD-ROM. It looks and reads like a thrown together blob of stuff ... can someone tell me where to find the durn spreadsheet widget .. its mentioned on the back cover but not in the index, the table of contents nor on the CD-ROM....

I don't recommend purchase lightly. I've been wearing out its pages for two weeks now, with occasional bouts of furrowed brows and impatient snorting. I've come, though, to a conclusion in which I'm confident: if you're a Tcl user, you should invest in *Tcl/Tk Tools*.

Why? Because you'll use it, and use it well. Almost everyone involved in Tcl has questions (so how do I really compile a Tcl script? How much does it take to do drag-and-drop and tool tips? Are the RDBMS extensions current with vendor features? ...) answered here. Simplify your life by putting these 650+ pages on your shelf.

What is *Tcl/Tk Tools*? It's a collection of descriptions of different popular extensions to Tcl and Tk. While lead author Harrison gives the impression they're written by "the extension authors themselves", there are a few exceptions to this pattern. The book is not written as a tutorial or introduction to Tcl, sagely pointing to John Ousterhout and Brent Welch's books for that role (although I've been thinking of experimenting with putting *Tcl/Tk Tools* in the hands of novices, to see what would happen. I suspect they'd survive in good shape).

*Tcl/Tk Tools* isn't exhaustive. It doesn't include several of my favorite extensions, including Scotty, NeoWebScript, stooop, tclMsql, the PlusPatches, ... It doesn't matter. If you care about only *one* of the extensions described here, you'll do well to have your own copy.

Harrison and his co-authors do a good job of hitting the target of telling "Here's the philosophy behind this package, and here are some examples of how to use it effectively" that he lays out in the Preface. While it's easy to move from one chapter to another, it's not at the expense of the authors and their personalities. D. Richard Hipp's thoughtful precision and De Clarke's care in engineering effective solutions come through, as do the assurance and lucidity those in the Tcl community expect of Don Libes. Less successful is the forward look that Harrison intended, toward "the plans the extension authors had for future enhancements and extensions." I assume this was in part a casualty of the realities of the publishing cycle; certainly many of the chapters appear to have been finished before the appearance a year ago of 7.6's betas.

Two unglamorous aspects of the book multiply its value: the index is sound (that's saying a lot for me; I have high standards in indexing), and Harrison's Chapter 17 on what he calls "Configuration Management" lays out much valuable wisdom that newcomers need to learn. Reading the latter is painful: it has all the important, tedious subjects ("Combining Extensions ...", command-line munging, ...) one wants--but without mention of Win* or loadable libraries! These frailties are inevitable when broadcasting on dead trees, of course. What's disappointing is that *Tcl/Tk Tools* doesn't go farther in joining the Internet Age: although a two-page Appendix lauds news:comp.lang.tcl and lists the FAQs and nine URLs (some of which have already moved, of course), and individual authors take it on themselves to provide appropriate references,
* it's not apparent that there is any page where Harrison and/or O'Reilly maintain errata, updates, new examples, funny animal GIFs, or any of the other resources readers might be expected to exploit--I couldn't find one at the URL the Preface gave, nor elsewhere at www.ora.com;
* some authors supply no e-mail addresses;
* some authors give references ("look in the archives") that will be inscrutable for those not already in the know; and
* there is wide variation in the quality of information authors give about extension prospects, bug lists (a particular sore point with me), mailing lists, and so on.
Understand, please, that I'm not labeling these moral faults; as on every project, the good engineering comes in deciding where to make the cuts, and what definite values to deliver. I personally look forward to seeing books that build a more dynamic relationship with online sources, and am simply noting that *Tcl/Tk Tools* doesn't achieve that standard.

The quality of production is high, higher even than the elevated expectations I have of O'Reilly. Typos, mistakes in word choice, and code errors seem to sum to around zero to five per chapter. Screen shots are judicious and illuminating, rather than gratuitously space-filling. The CD-ROM (with binaries for indeterminate but predictable releases of Solaris and Linux) does the little I asked of it.

Summary: whether you're a full-time Tcl-er or a greenhorn, you'll profit from having *Tcl/Tk Tools* at hand. Whenever you're in a pinch, there's a fair chance the Index and/or Table of Contents will quickly lead you to a useful datum. During more contemplative moments, you'll want to read the chapters in a connected fashion, and the accuracy and insight of the authors will make you glad that you do.

This was the first book I read on Tcl/TK (a mistake), but it was nonetheless helpful. I do refer it often. I particularly found the introduction to Expect useful.

polyphenylene ether to radical polymerizatio

Another piece of September 11th memorabilia. Put it next to recent editions of Nostradamus and the tarot cards.