This is a very good, highly readable history of James J. Hill, his family and his numerous successful business adventures, and the Great Northern Railway in particular.

Of the four major biographies of James J. Hill, this one is the best and most detailed. If it has a fault, it is that it is too detailed for many readers. But for those interested in the financial history of the Great Northern Railway and the personal history of its builder, this is the classic.

Martin had full access to the James J. Hill papers, now open to the public. Pyle's 1917 biography was also based on those papers, but Pyle was an employee of Hill's and tried to whitewash the truth, which actually made Hill look worse than he was. Holbrook's brief bio was based mainly on Pyle and rumor. Malone's 1996 book on Hill is to Martin's what Holbrook's was to Pyle's--a good intro but not as detailed as Martin's.

We have read a lot of biographies, but this one was different. I don't really know why. My son, 6, was captivated by this book. He now devours EVERYTHING he hears about Martin Luther King, Jr. My son learned about a man like himself in many ways who experienced difficulties and fought unfair laws just because of his color. He also learned about a man named Gandhi and the influence he had on Dr. King. I was so impressed by the impression that this book made on my son. And he recognized scenes from the book when we watched the movie "KING." Rarely does any book have this much impact on a young child. It definitely deserves 5 stars.

This is the perfect biography for kids around 8-12 years old to read. It has lots of information and is a little more advanced than a Martin Luther King biography you would find in a first grade classroom would be.This would also be a great book to read if a child has to do a report.

This excellent book illustrates a comprehensive collection of Wells Fargo's history. Wells Fargo was founded in 1852 to meet the need for safe transmittal of gold and mail. The name "Wells Fargo" has stirred the hearts of Westerners for many generations. This collection of memorabilia recreates the challenges and adventures of the early Wild, Wild West. Beginning in the days of the California Gold Rush, founded on July 13, 1852, the company forged new standards of service, honesty, and reliability to become the oldest bank in the West. This book is a must read for people interested in the development of the American West frontier. Today, Wells Fargo & Company now 147-years old is a $202 billion diversified financial services company providing banking, insurance, investments, mortgage, and consumer finance through 5,836 stores in all 50 states, Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America and elsewhere internationally. Enjoy this adventure of history 1852 to 1918 of the Wild,Wild,West.

This book offers exercises, explanation and examples of a transformative approach to radical social change. While I believe it is out of print, I will keep recommending it to anyone who's working on issues of oppression and organizational change within their movement.

This is one of the only elementary texts I've found that explains Latin meter correctly and from first principles. Handbooks of Greek meter often treat Latin in a 2-page appendix, saying little more than "The Romans borrowed all these meters." This book, on the other hand, is half Latin and half Greek, and works equally well for students starting from either language. The Latin aeolic meters are explained in terms of the glyconic, not in terms of "feet" as so many books do; this makes it easier to see how aeolic meters work and facilitates learning the Greek versions later. The meters of Plautus and Terence are explained, but saturnians are only briefly mentioned. The student of Greek is also well served by West's book (though this one is an easier read), but for Latin there is not a whole lot else that is as good.

Having previously read Wrox's Professional ASP Programming, I tried this book, hoping for something of equal merit.

This volume is has some decent material, but is marred by a tendecy to sloppiness.

Firstly, as other reviewers have noted, there are too many authors (count 'em - 16!), which is unnecessary, and leads to inconsistencies in presentation. The book could quite easily have been authored by a single writer. There are only a few chapters that required specialist knowledge.

For example, the early chapters are quite good at advising the reader on PHP settings. Since there's no option explicit in PHP,the author correctly advises the reader to increase their error setting to report unused variables. Later, however, much of the code uses uninitialised variables. This is particularly the case in the chapter on form handling, the approach to which is too crude, and uses form variables directly in code, whereas a better approach would be to capture them and process them using isset(). The isset() function isn't even covered in this chapter,but is used correctly in other chapters.

Secondly, while the converstational tone of Wrox books is often appealing, it can also be a problem at times. The presentation is not always comprehensive enough, and Wrox authors have a tendency to give overly clever examples.

Strangely, there's no reference section. I found some of the explanations sloppy and confusing, especially the section of session variables. (I still can't get the WAP application to work properly.)

Thirdly, the chapter on OO design leaves the reader stranded. After a decent theoretical discussion, the writer informs the reader that there will be no code examples, as the reader now knows enough theory to work an example out for themselves! If I've paid for the book, I don't really want to have it set homework for me.

Fourthly, there are an annoying number of errors in the code. Many of these are corrected in the online errata, but there are quite a few that aren't at present. Furthermore, some of them are not typos, but seem to be the result of misconceptions on the part of the writer. This tends to reinforce the impression that some of the authors are relatively inexperienced.

Lastly, there are a large number of errors in the downloadable code. I suppose supplied code should be seen as a bonus, but it's poor quality control, and greatly adds to the user's annoyance.

I learnt PHP3 from Leon Atkinson's Core PHP programming, but i had to refer to the manual and the list archives for several problems.I came across this book recently from KY's review corner - I have been able to raise my level of PHP knowledge after reading through this book.This book is an asset for Professional PHP developers who can refresh their PHP knowledge with the excellent case studies. For beginners there are several examples throughout the book that will help them understand how to use PHP to create fully featured active sites.This book also has extensive database treatment - using PHP with MySQL,PostgreSQL and ODBC.
It is a must for anyone wanting to use PHP or make the move from PHP3 to PHP4!

Another excellent red book on PHP. I have learned PHP through several books, extensive articles, tutorials, and now Professional PHP4 tops the list of useful PHP literature.
Things that i found really helpful:
•Explanation for all those buggy installation problems
•Handling files on the server's file system, and how to upload files from the web browser
•Sending e-mail and posting new articles with PHP, working with SMTP, POP/IMAP and NNTP
•An exhaustive case study (76 pages!) on building a shopping cart application for mobile phones
•Using PHP as a command line script interpreter
•PHP with XML
This book has a pretty exhaustive view of most topics, and is the ideal book for PHP developers wanting to add professionalism to their web application development. I shall continue using this as a reference for all topics PHP (till I get another red book with photos).