Wow, a page-filling 5.5-by-5.5 photograph of a Krups propeller mill dominates page 74. Wait, there's more: on page 116 you'll find an equally imposing photograph of a Krups steam-operated coffee maker. (There's no need for a pump, it's so clever.)

This book, essentially worthless to those interested in espresso, is completely oblivious to some famous ways of making coffee. There is no mention of café cubano and there is no mention of the traditional ways to prepare the famous Hungarian dupla....

Well, I can honestly say this book has been a God send for me. I knew absolutely nothing about Coffee before this book and drank mostly instant. I got a taste for "real" coffee by frequenting the odd Coffee House with friends. I wanted to know how I could make a delicious drink like those I purchased. Thanks to this book - I now can! This is a very interesting read and takes the reader right through from growing the beans to serving. I have since purchased an Expresso machine and my friends LOVE to have coffee at my house. I am still learning and I have received other tips to improve my brew from other books but I owe my initial success to this book. GREAT for an absolute beginner and I suspect interesting to the more experienced. Thanks Corby! I'm no longer Tea Total :-)

My husband and I both enjoyed reading Joy of Coffee, and the suggestions for improving our coffee life were interesting and helpful. Kummer's prose makes us smile, but I tried making his recipe for mocha brownies and found them, well, awful--thin and sticky little bars with ground coffee residue on top. I wondered if something was incorrect about the directions, proportions or the ingredients in the recipe. I'd love a response if anyone knows. Thanks.

What to do if you're trying to make something as stupid and boring as the bible into something that a poor gullible child will accept? This is the problem faced by the authors, and they do a half-way decent job of presenting bible idiocy as something partly entertaining as a comic book. Should be useful for gullible, brainwashed parents attempting to produce gullible, brainwashed children. Start them with Santa, and if they believe that, move on to the bible in comic book form.

Great idea with uneven results. Some superb art in places, but not always as an appropriate counterpoint to the accompanying Scriptures. The parts that do succeed are worth the cover price alone.

This book was well received by me and my teenagers. There needs to be more artistic interpretations like this that tackle scripture. Not every translation done in this book is accurate to the Word of God but every piece is brilliant in its own right. Bravo! Encore!

Michael Crichton said of Henry James: "I hate Henry James. His stuff reads like a first draft." For a pop writer, was Crichton ever right!!! Henry James is incapable of getting to the point. Reading Henry James is like swimming through a pool filled with peanut butter, when all you want is to swim through crystal water.

Taking Michael Crichton's word on Henry James is sort of like listening to Gary Coleman criticizing Olivier, or Milli (or Vanilli) carping about Mozart.

First of all, in the above non-review, the reader assumes we "want to be swimming through crystal water," whatever that means. Well, I've swum through enough crystal water, and come away after the read with nothing. James's industrial strength extra chunky peanut butter sticks with me long after I've put it down. "The Beast in the Jungle" OR "The Jolly Corner," two novellas, eclipse and obliterate the entire body of Crichton's work. Simple as that.

"The Velvet Glove" is a great find - the limousine ride stuck in my mind. "The Birthplace" is a riot, too. Try them-

It's a great idea! One book, twelve chapters, twelve celebrated authors. It's a book about being seven years old where all of the lead characters are seven.
Judy Blume, Roald Dahl, Beverly Cleary, James Howe, Ann M. Martin, Patricia MacLachlan, Betty Horvath, Johanna Hurwitz, Suzt Kline, Susan Wojciechowski, Dick King-Smith, and Miriam Cohen all contribute a chapter to this book by sharing one of the chapters of of a completed book. The story lines focus on a seven year old facing one of life's challenges or going through change. James takes a wild ride on a peach. Billy isn't sure he wants pink to remain his favorite color. Emma and Zachery are baby-sat by their childless aunt and uncle. Sophie will go for her first riding lesson. Karen is a "two-two." Nora isn't sure she likes her new neighbor. Bernice lost her tooth down the drain. Ramona worries about her father. Freddy plays the lead in the school play. Song Lee faces her fear of public speaking. Jasper is a burgeoning hero. And Jacob has writer's block.
This book does a good job of giving the reader an opportunity to be introduced to these books and authors. Though each book can easily stand on its own, when compiled as such, they seem to lose their strength. Topics that are great in individual works become melodramatic in this format.
Since nothing new had to be written to package this product, it seems clear that the publisher has little to lose here. One wonders whether the decision to publish this book was made by an editor or marketing director. Was there a need for this book, or simply a market for it?

This is an excellent way to get a taste of a lot of different books at once. While some of the stories are well-known classics, there are enough lesser-known ones to keep it interesting. We liked some of the excerpts so much that we read the entire book. It's a fun 7th birthday present!

This book is a collection of 12 chapters from various books that might interest a seven year old---like a music sampler. None offer a complete story, but they were meaty enough for my seven year old daughter to want to pursue reading some of the books. A good way to introduce a child to some new material. I wasn't too excited about the idea of paying for excerpts, but the reader appreciated the opportunity to "look before she bought"!

I have many of Martin's other books and I found this one is not worth reading. It has very flowery language, poor composition and lacks depth in the subject matter.

Martin does a disservice to the Internet and to his readers. Bottom line - avoid at all costs. Sorry.

This book is interesting from several different perspectives, however its primary aim is to help senior managers think about the impact of IT and the internet on their organizational culture. Yet, it is also fasinating for business historians and students to see how one of the top management thinkers of our time viewed the internet back in _1996_!

While the precise notions about the emerging internet seem well dated, the concepts and perspectives the author provides about the impact of IT and the internet on organizational culture are as fresh as ever. This is important reading for those students and practitioners in organizational behavior and improvement - and for managers and leaders with the same concern.

If you can rise about the charmingly and insightfully dated notions about the internet circa 1996, this remains an important book!

Provided an in-depth discussion of trends in the information technology industry and their impact on organizational culture. The book is a little dated. However, the topics are very insightful.

I've read 100 pages into the book so far, and I would have to say it is not that amazing. The book basically runs through a project that they did using XP and they share their stories and experiences. The project they talk about is very typical to most websites (a way to register, login, get a forgotten password, etc.)

I was very surprised to see that the project was estimated at 25 days. Even some functions like creating one table was estimated to take 4 hours. It seemed that the developers were not very capable individuals, or perhaps they simply expected an incompetent crowd to be reading the book. There is actual proof of my claim too since even taking their 4 hours to make the table, they had still forgetton to create the 'password' attribute within the table. They realized this when they tested their code. Leaving out those architectural details are we?

I also did not agree with the book's statements in not considering architectural details - in fact none were considered at all, even when it came down to iteration planning. I know this is an element of the XP methodology, but some of their reasons for not doing a model indicated that they didn't understand the problem enough. The only valid reason I found for not planning for future change was that the customer may not request the features required by the more robust architecture. That is valid, but let's think about repeat business. Let's assume they come back in a year's time to make those changes and you'll probably be thanking yourself you did make it scalable. It's less time for you and your staff and less you have to charge your client. Everyone is much happier.

Another instance of terrible design is on page 103. They used an Adapter pattern (found in the GoF book) to adapt a method from their database class to another class with the identical name for the method. Well, as far as I know, that is NOT why you use the Adapter pattern. Adapter is used when you have an API that doesn't follow an interface used throughout the application. Programmer's use the Adapter to make an interface conform to a new one. Well, in using the Adapter in the book's example, they are merely delegating a task, not adapting an unfamiliar interface. Even worse - What was the method called? - findUserByEmail() found inside the Database connection object (connecting and closing the DBMS). Why is it there? No architecture thinking done at all! It should have been placed in a UserFactory or User Data Access Object class in the first place (the book refers to it as its User class). They would have avoided this problem (and misuse of a pattern) altogether.

One more thing about architecture. There was a case where they had made 2 servlets, both containing almost identical code. With XP's refactoring, they had created a base class and inherited appropriately. After restructuring their test cases and refactoring several times, they finally got it right. Wouldn't a solid design have been better? The book states that up-front design is bad. Well, I know the point of XP is to not follow a hardcore design document for the entire project because you realize that customer requirements are voltatile. But, shouldn't we at least come up with a smaller design document for each iteration? I mean, it's not practical for a customer to interrupt an interation - in fact it's a rule the customer cannot do according to this book. I still say, if you are not going to plan your system, at least plan the architecture for a 'subset' of the system - i.e. in each iteration plan.

Even after reviewing the code, I thought some elementary coders were at work. There was a part in the book where they either had to convert some pages from ASP to JSP if they wanted the banner to be the same, but they could have simply encapsulated the banner into a file and included it in both the ASP and JSP versions, saving their estimated implementation time of 5 days.

The book has it's morals, but the project is by far too small to be a true testiment to the success of XP. This kind of project could have easily been done by one competent person sitting at their machine for 2 days, and I do believe it would have been done much better architecturally as well. There is no design pattern work, no architecture and clearly reading their programming flaws and decision making failures, no wonder they estimated a completion date of 25 days.

I gather that XP is still good for projects with much greater complexity than this registration system, but the book does a bad job explaining that. It seems XP is good for programmers that need other support to compensate for their lack of ability to be a good programmer - I know that is not true when it comes to pair programming, but this book isn't doing a good job of convincing me otherwise.

I haven't read any of the other XP books - but stay away from this one unless you want to read bad software designs and coding examples, non-realistic programming errors, and poorly made decisions. It's not XP that would have helped this team, a new set of programmers and architects would have done better.

If you simply want to learn about XP, stay away from this book.

If you want to learn about failures on projects and actually learn something, read the Mythical Man Month.

If you want to spend [price], throw it into lottery tickets, you'll learn about 'wasting money' and how to better spend it.

If you need to learn XP.... try another XP book in the series.

This is good book if you've already learned the basic theory of eXtreme Programming, and want to see XP in practice from a developer's point of view. You won't learn the theory from this book, but you will watch as pairs of programmers works with their customer to prioritize and estimate stories, and as the pairs proceed through the work, making mistakes as they go, and recovering from them. The focus is on planning, unit testing, and refactoring.

The application they've taken on is simple, but non-trivial. It helps to know Java and be familiar with the JUnit testing framework, and have familiarity with servlets. I picked up a couple of useful testing techniques from their examples.

As a developer who has used XP in a somewhat patchwork fashion, I've been looking forward to this book for some time. My interest was mostly driven by an article "Uncle Bob" Martin co-wrote a few months back about a pair-programming development episode in which the pair wrote a small program to score bowling games. The article was written as a dialogue between the two programmers and was very well done.

Once again, they have used a real project (actually in production on the Object Mentor website) to illustrate what development under XP is really like.

This book has been written in the style of the other books in the XP series: it is brief, conversational in tone, and to the point. It departs from the other books in the series by including quite a few pages of code. It's also reasonable to say that the authors are assuming the reader is somewhat familiar with XP, and I'd say it is a companion piece to the XP explained book by Kent Beck (or perhaps the extremeprogramming.org website).

I imagine the authors agonized over how much detail to go into with this book. The purpose of the book is to illustrate XP in practice (not to teach servlet programming), and I'd say the level of detail they went into is just about right -- they describe their experience over the course of a one-week iteration, down to the level of their daily tasks and the interactions (even one verbatim dialogue) with their client. The authors do an exceptional job of describing the *is* of XP without being pedantic or cute, which has been a significant flaw in a lot of the XP advocacy I've seen on the web.

The book is well written, and the code is good...I only saw one technical error. Overall, an excellent book. More than ever, it makes me want to try a "pure" XP approach on one small project to see if I can really make a go of it.

There was not one moment when I was reading this book that I wasn't aware I was reading a book. The potential was there, the historical and scientific ducks were all in their rows, but a near-total lack of storytelling ability on the part of the author turned it into a textbook with dialogue.

As each character is introduced, everything screeches to a stop while a brief bio is provided. As each decision arrives, once again, a halt is called while relevant past experiences are recounted and the particular character's reasoning is explained. Very little of the characters' personalities is revealed through their words, thoughts, or deeds -- just neatly-printed signs hung around their necks by the author.

In short, if reading detailed microbiology experiments is your cup of tea, then this book is for you. If not, don't bother.

Put simply, a quick read with little or no suspense. Divine Blood begins with a priest from France who finds a shroud and brings it to the University of Arizona to have it tested. The results found after extensive testing by the lab date it back to the time that Jesus Christ may have died. Soon, the media paints a portrait that the shroud is the same that was used to wrap up Jesus Christ and all hell breaks loose-sorta of. This is where the story falls apart. The author combines three or four sub-plots trying to transport the reader on a journey of where the shroud has been as well as keeping the reader in suspense over the situations the main characters are put through. For example, although it was easy to follow the various plots, The scientist who did the cloning of the DNA is threatened by various groups and loses his fund money after apparently breaking some of the rules. The ending is rushed leaving the reader wondering why the novel was written in the first place. I know I did.

Hewlett's book begins with the discovery of a burial shroud, which is transported to the University of Arizona for analysis. When the shroud is carbon dated to the time of Jesus Christ, all hell breaks loose leading to a worldwide political and religious power struggle. Stir in some religious fanatics and a secret society who want to reclaim the holy relic, a researcher who clones the DNA which could possibly be Jesus, and then you have Hewlett's book, Divine Blood.

This could have been a great book, but turned out to be a quick, predictable read.

As Discover Magazine correctly pointed out (June 2001)"when James Martin makes a forecast, people listen". Unfortunately what they did not say is that Mr Martin cannot write, and if he intends to make money from writing, he should keep his day job. The book is filled with complete pages and paragraphs that are duplicated many times in many chapters. Mr Martin has a strong liking for the word "ubiquitous", which he uses at every opportunity (appropriately or not), and the phrase "winner take most", which he must want credit for coining. Mr Martin needs to hire 1.) an Editor, and 2.) a "ghost writer", or pledge not to write again.

Summary of the early parts: computers are going to be intelligent, but they will be intelligent in their own way, not like us. Now you can skip to chapter three.

That's kind of what this whole book is like: fascinating comments and revelations not necessarily addressed in an organized or clear way, as if the author wrote the book in a great hurry.

The gist is fascinating: computers are changing our world in extraordinary ways, and what they can do and how they do it will shape our future. The middle part of the book discusses the potential impacts, though as a computer geek I found the final part the most interesting, in which he discusses the nature of computer intelligence. This includes techniques such as genetic algorithms, neural networks (which work even though the programmer can't tell you how), complex adaptive systems, etc.

On the other hand, there are some appallingly sloppy moments that damaged my confidence in the book: cybernetics genius Norbert Wiener's name is consistently misspelled (remember, "i before e except after c"), there are several references to a mythical "penal" gland (I think he means pineal), and Martin relates the notion that draining water spirals in opposite directions in the northern and southern hemispheres as if it were authoritative truth rather than an urban legend. But it's worth a quick read, and it is a quick read.

I have to disagree with the previous poster's comments. Clearly he has no idea who Dr. James Martin is...so let me tell you.

Dr. James Martin, chairman emeritus and founder of Headstrong, has been called "the Guru of the Information Age," "The Father of CASE," and the brains behind Rapid Application Development (RAD). He received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his book entitled The Wired Society: A Challenge for Tomorrow, based on his predictions and progressive views about technology, published twenty years ago. Computerworld has ranked Dr. Martin the fourth most influential person in the computer industry.

Dr. Martin is widely acknowledged as a renowned authority on the social and commercial ramifications of computers and technology. He is well known on an international scale as a premier strategist on management and information technology, and has a remarkable track record of accurate predictions about future technology. He served as a member of the Software Scientific Advisory Board to the U.S. Department of Defense, and also holds a chair at Oxford: the James Martin Chair of Computing at Oxford University is concerned with advancing the frontiers of system development. Dr. Martin earned an M.A. and D.Litt. from Oxford, a D.Sc. from Salford in England, and honorary degrees from a number of institutions, including a D.Eng. from Hokkaido Technical University in Japan for his work on Information Engineering.

Dr. Martin's educational background, complemented by his solid business and technological experience, has led to a long-standing track record as one of the world's best-attended lecturers. He spends considerable time giving seminars and lectures to high-level executives looking to hear about the future of technology and its effects on their businesses and lives.

Finally, Dr. Martin is a prolific author, with over 100 textbooks in his name-more than any other living person. Many of his books, including Cybercorp, The Great Transition and The Wired Society have been best-selling IT and business publications.

This most recent book, "After the Internet: Alien Intelligence," discusses how in the future, the primary value of computers may well be to 'think' in ways that humans cannot. Martin asserts that software is coming into use that can automatically evolve, 'breed' solutions, or 'learn' valuable behavior of its own--at electronic speed. This self-perpetuating computer process is so complex that a human can neither follow the logic step-by-step nor come to the same results by other means. It is alien intelligence. The book is grounded in hard science and real-world examples, and provides a fascinating look at machine capabilities beyond our wildest imagination. Martin futher explains how it will change human thinking about computers, as well as about business as usual in everything from manufacturing to consumer marketing to medical research. He also shows how the rise of this new computer intelligence will strengthen the Internet, culminating in a global chain reaction with a powerful impact on business, economics, politics, and social connectivity.

In short, I'd have to say that he does know a little about technology and is an expert in alien intelligence!

Martin does another disservice to his readers with this book. It is a compliation of anecdotes, stories and hype. It also contains repetitive material from his other books.

Sadly, it is not recomnmended.

There is one quote in this book which alone makes it worth the price of purchase: "Most systems being developed today are the wrong systems." The book essentially explains why this is true and what to do about it. Anyone building enterprise systems needs to understand this concept and reckon with it. Ignore it at your own risk. While the book is not fun to read because it does not take this ball and run with it clearly and forcefully starting at the beginning and proceeding to the end, it illuminates the subject in important ways -- vital ways. Martin's mind operates at a higher speed and in different ways from the minds of most people ... and he is usually right. I'd be suspect of anyone claiming the capability to build systems today who does not understand the issues and concepts in this book. Buy it and read it, then read it again.

Just Amazing, every busines student should read it

If you're looking for a useful guide to Turkey, don't waste your money on this book. Its authors obviously had no real feel for the country or understanding of its history and their suggestions are not of much help. The Lonely Planet guide is far and away the best available.

Just got back from a six week trek and island hop round Greece! I had a wonderful time and couldn't have met my budget and rigorous itinerary without Let's Go's extensive budget hotel and restaurant options. I though the writing style was witty and I knew I could trust the hip nightlife picks for my more debauched nights on the islands!

Let's Go excels in its detailed, sensitive coverage of the Greek isles. I couldn't have made it through without Let's Go's help finding the out-of-the way bargain hotels, connecting from island to island, and figuring out which ancient sites and Byzantine monasteries were worth seeing. Admittedly the Turkey section was a little bit weak, although I loved the Black Sea Coast coverage; the Sinop listings included a few cool bars where I met Turkish college kids, Austrian ski bumbs and American archaeologists. The book could stand to improve its coverage of the neighborhoods of Athens and of Eastern Anatolia, but in terms of budget options and nightlife coverage the other guides don't even compare.