I found this book at a used-book store in Wisconsin and bought it solely for one of its newer stories -- the original Ender's Game novella, by Orson Scott Card -- later turned into an award-winning novel. However, in reading the other stories, I found that some of the other stories are quite good. The authors are your basic sci-fi group -- Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, etc. -- and some newer ones, like Card. The stories themselves are good science fiction, if not particularly deep -- none of them really stick with you as 'great literature', some of them -- like the Asimov story -- have a gimmick that can carry the story well. Generally this is an anthology for those who are already fans of science fiction war stories -- a small population, but one who would enjoy this book.

its a wonderful book for new glass painters, glass painting is really easy for the person who has read this book.

I was really looking for a book on real accounts of ghosts in New England. I used to have a book like that, but loaned it to an ex-friend.

I really did however enjoy reading this particular book, even though it was not exactly what I was looking for.

I would recommend this book to anyone that like to read ghost stories.

If you are looking for a solid text book in the field of Political Geography, Mr. Glassner book is the one for you. Easy to read and well organized, a novice will get a lot out of this book. I would also recommend this book for those in the fields of Political Science, Economics and History for it lays out the fundamentals, of a significant school of thought, in 18th and 19th C Europe early state-relations. But, if you already understand the basics of Political Geography and are looking to expand your understanding of the origin, its under lying philosophy or the actors who developed and played a substantial role in the development of this subject -- save your money. For the serious students of Political Geography there are a couple of chapters that may be of interest to you but, only a few and it's not worth the money.
But what I truly believe is the best part of the book is the reference section at the end of each chapter. There is a wealth of information in the reference section for the student of Political Geography, which can prove to be invaluable when doing research.

Olympic contests between the Soviet bloc and America were often exploited for propaganda purposes, the outcome of an athletic event supposedly saying something significant about the victor's country. This 1984 anthology, from the height of the Cold War, has several stories built around that notion.

Tom Sullivan's "The Mickey Mouse Olympics" and Nicholas V. Yermakov's "A Glint of Gold" both feature Soviet and American Olympic athletes genetically modified for their events. Sullivan plays the notion for genuine laughs. Yermakov's story is much more serious and shows the price the competitors pay as propaganda pawns. He also works in a defection subplot.

Walter F. Moudy's "The Survivor" abandons all together the notion of mere symbolic combat in the Olympics. In his future, the USSR and USA each put 100 man combat teams into the arena, and they don't come out till one side is annihilated. It's all televised, of course. Moudy is not content to just do a story of future gladiatorial matches. He also delves into what the combat conditioning does to the soldier, what kind of person it produces. It isn't idle speculation, either, because all the survivors of an Olympic War Game get to do whatever they want with no legal sanctions. It's one of the highpoints of the anthology.

Not all of the stories deal with future Olympics; the general theme is competition.

In the case of the dentist in Piers Anthony "Getting Through University", basis for his novel PROSTHO PLUS, the competition is to get accepted to galactic University, School of Dentistry. Anthony creates an entertaining story out of the complexities of dentistry on the galaxy's aliens.

Other highpoints are Norman Spinrad's "The National Pastime", "The Wind from the Sun" by Arthur C. Clarke, and "Prose Bowl" from the team of Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg. Spinrad's story tells of the invention of Combat Football and its fans very violent enthusiasm for it. It's a 1973 story but hasn't dated that much, especially since wrestling promoters now talk of starting their own football league. Clarke's story combines hard science and melancholy in a solar sail race. Also titled "Sunjammer", it was probably the first story to use the idea of solar sails. "Prose Bowl" makes hack writing into an hilarious spectator sport, but it also says some serious things about writers and their audiences.

On the decidely low end of the anthology are Jack Vance's "The Kokod Warriors", about aliens who fight elaborate combats and the humans who bet on them, and Charles Nuetzel's "A Day for Dying", one of those stories with a decadent society of televised bloodsports and an unconvincing revolution to topple it. George Alec Effinger's "From Downtown at the Buzzer", about some aliens fascination with basketball, is marred by a vague ending.

In the entertaining-but-nothing-special category are the rest of the anthology's works. George R.R. Martin's "Run to Starlight" has aliens playing football against humans. The aliens turn out to have a more realistic view of the games' ultimate significance than the humans. Bob Shaw's "Dream Fighter" is another one of those stories where combatants assault each other mentally with horrifying symbols. Suzette Haden Elgin's "For the Sake of Grace" is a feminist story about a poetry contest on a world with an Arab-type culture and the young girl who dares to enter it despite the horrifying consequences of failing. Robert Sheckley's "The People Trap" is a witty, grim tale of a race for land in an overpopulated world. "Why Johnny Can't Speed" by Alan Dean Foster is another combat on the highways story. It was possibly a response to Harlan Ellison's classic "Along the Scenic Route". "Nothing in the Rules" by L. Sprague de Camp is about the chaos caused by a mermaid entering a swimming match. "The Olympians" by Mike Resnick is not, despite the title, a future Olympics tale. The Olympians are an elite group of humans who specialize in humiliating aliens in athletic competitions.

There are enough good stories here to justify taking a look at this anthology.

I am a little bit disapointed by this book. The section "How to paint" is too short and the explanations are not sufficient, especially for beginners : only the very easy techniques are explained (water, salt) with no step by step illustrations. However, the 10 projects are nice and easy enough to make.

Robots in Judgment was editor Asimov's preferred title for this anthology since the stories cover more ground than just robot detectives.

Oh, there are robot detectives here all right. Asimov's famous human and robot detective team of Lije Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw are here for their only short story appearance, "Mirror Image." The murderous mobile law enforcer of Ron Goulart's "Into the Shop" captures the same criminal -- again and again. A robotic Sherlock Holmes, his Cockney-rhyming robot dog, and a Watson of mysterious origins investigate the case of a possibly mad industrialist on a future greenhouse Earth in Edward Wellen's "Voiceover".

Wellen also gives us an interesting, proto-cyberpunk story, "Finger of Fate", with its hard-boiled, if immobile, computer who prowls databases and public records to solve his cases. The machines of Harry Harrison's "Arm of the Law" and Harlan Ellison's and Ben Bova's "Brillo" are not exactly detectives but robot cops, and each must deal with police corruption and the difference between theoretical law enforcement and carrying a badge in the real world of humans. "Brillo" also deals with bluecollar fears of being replaced by machines. The tin stars of Larry Niven's famous "Cloak of Anarchy" supervise a Free Park where anything except physical violence goes -- until an artist decides to put his political ideas into effect and disable them. Stephen R. Donaldson's "Animal Lover" is a cyborg federal cop sent to investigate a hunting preserve with an oddly high body count of hunters.

Stories that don't feature robotic investigators and law enforcers are Christopher Anvil's tedious "The King's Legions", a tale of political machinations and a nearly-magical, sentient spaceship. Technological innovations since its original publication date of 1963 make Larry Eisenberg's "The Fastest Draw" a fully realistic story. In it, a man obsessively tries to make his fast draw competitions with a gunfighter simulcra more realistic. Harry Harrison's "The Powers of Observation" is a predictable but involving tale of espionage and androids in a Cold War Yugoslavia. "Faithfully Yours" by Lou Tabakow, about a convict fleeing some implacable retribution, is flawed by an irrelevant beginning and an ending that stops at the point where things get interesting. The strength of Donald Wismer's "Safe Harbor" is undercut by the rather unbelievable motivation of a central character who opts out of a world largely automated and administered with the help of "bugs", skull implants that monitor health and track their users in case they need emergency aid. Henry Slesar's "Examination Day" is famous but doesn't really work. Its surprise ending is probably there to make a satirical point but about what, exactly, is unclear.

Robert Sheckley's "The Cruel Equations", though, is a clever and funny story about an inflexible guard robot and the man who has forgotten his password but must pass by it -- or die on a desert world.

Not every story is perfect but, with the exception of Slesar's and Anvil's, they're all worth reading, and readers should, especially with the Wellen stories, find some overlooked gems here.

This book is very brief and provides little detailed information of IPSec. While the content is technically correct, much of the technology is not included, or breezed over. And what is explained is not as in-depth as I was expecting. An example is that Phase 1 Agressive Mode was not even mentioned! Remote access concepts consume three pages and remote user support is the fastest growing aspect of VPNs right now (that will change, of course). This book is pure academia in that the authors are obviously familiar with the IBM solutions and with the IPSec RFCs, but that's where it stops. This book contains little insight and reflects the RFCs verbatum. Examples of deployment concepts were limited and gave the impression that the authors had little experience implementing VPNs. This is not to say that the book contains incorrect information, but resemble a "perfect world" atmosphere. While the standards provide a means to build the designs in the book, many vendor implementations do not support them, as of yet. I am writing this poor review because it came highly recommended by a VPN developer. Ironically, compared to many books on IPSec, this one still provides ample detail in easy to read verbiage that should please any technical novice. Anyone who is experienced with VPNs and wants to advance themselves with the technology, this book is a good start, but there is much, much more than meets the eye when reading this book.

The book gave decent technical detail but did not flow well - too choppy for me. Also, the book was very IBM centric. It should have been titled - Excerpts of Virtual Private Networking and IBM Sales Guide.

This is a technically rich book for understanding VPN architectures. If you are interested in packet structures, tunnel options, negotiation processes, design considerations, and VPN algorithms, this is a good book for you. Although the non-technical audience might be put off by the technical depth, a systems engineer will be delighted. If you want to know how IKE is negotiated - and where to put your firewalls - buy this book. If you want to know more about the business advantages of VPNs, plus good technical information, look up Dave Kosiur's Building and Managing Virtual Private Networks.

This is the worst book I've ever read!

First of all, there is nothing advanced in this book! Each chapter tries to cover one aspect/tech with 75% basic features. The other 25% usually is sample codes which you may not be interested at all.

There are many chapters which should not be in this book. For example, the chapter covers "Visual C++ with SQL server" is full of ODBC API functions, nothing specific about SQL Server 7. Another chapter for "Microsoft COM/DCOM" is nothing but a bad whitepaper for COM/DCOM. You can get a lot better idea of COM/DCOM by reading the white paper by Don Box. And the list goes on...

This book has 13 authors - 1 from Canada, 1 from Australia, the other 11 are from at least 9 states of US! I don't think it's possible for readers to expect a consistent style/content from a book like this.

It does cover, or tries to cover, "integrating SQL Server 7 with VB, Transact-SQL, Visual C++, Visual InterDev, legacy system data from Oracle, Sybase, and Access", as stated by the editor/authors. With 30 pages on each topic, full of basic features/introduction, maybe a couple of tricks, it does not "offer depth and breadth of coverage not found in any other book on the market" (as stated by editor/authors) at all!

I believe the only usage, if any, of this book is for beginners to get an idea of some of the technologies people are using with SQL Server.

The authors claim in the preface that the book covers undocumented facts and tips for SQL Server 7. Nothing could be farther from truth considering that the book is not even up to date in coverage of the newer areas. Microsoft's strategic direction for data access is going to be OLE-DB(Object linking and embedding database, as the book says!!), yet they devote more than 150 pages to the drab ODBC.

The boook is very good to beginners. Without source code, reader is hard to practice.

Decades ago sci-fi grandmaster Isaac Asimov noted the similarity between detective stories (whodunit?) and science fiction "puzzle" stories (how do you solve the problem?). Avoiding some of the obvious pitfalls, he began to write stories that contain elements of both of these popular genres. But of the various stories in this collection, only Larry Niven's "ARM" really lives up to the title, combining the imagination of science fiction with the action and drama of a detective story. Asimov's "The Singing Bell" comes close, and shows off the master's skill with "puzzle" stories, but the armchair detective doesn't really lend itself to exciting reading and would be a serious disappointment to fans who expect some action. As for the rest, only Poul Anderson's "The Martian Crown Jewels" and "Time Exposures" by Wilson Tucker are bona fide sci-fi detective stories, and both are eminently forgettable. Donald Westlake's "The Winner", Robert Silverberg's "Getting Across", and Philip K. Dick's "War Games" are all very good science fiction stories, indeed are the highlights of the collection, but there are no detectives in them. Perhaps the most memorable sci-fi detective is Philip Jose Farmer's Herr Ralph Von Wau Wau, the intelligent canine of "A Scarletin Study", a humorous send up of the whole cross-genre concept. In sum, while perhaps the blame lies more with the form than with the editing, this book fails to deliver what it promises; the overall collection isn't that strong as "just" science fiction, and the advertised combination of sci-fi and private detective fiction never really coalesces. Readers interested in this idea would do better to pick up one of Asimov's many fine collections.

I thought the book was very good describing the plot, storyline, and characters. However, the book was pretty easy to predict. It's whole storyline was old and boring. The absence of twists and any new developments killed any suspense. Overall the story gets a 3 out of 5.