As a veteran TDCJ administrator [28-years] I have to say I've never read a more self serving pile of criminal coddling swill in my life. Mr. Martin and his ghost writer need get out of those plush-carpet offices and hang out on a real prison unit for awhile - meet some real live convicts - get a good dose of reality - before they start soliciting for the Judge Justice humanitarian of the decade award.

This is a mini history of the Texas Prison System and the changes and the reason for the changes that I have read to date..by the way I am a retired officer from the Texas Prison System.

A nice coverage of the proud history of a local area. Written in a lively and altruistic prose, Martin carefully regards the many aspects of her hometown. However, she has a peculiar habit of occasionally trailing off in ellipsises. A must read if one is a resident of Dothan, AL.

If you are an absolute beginner to programming games in Linux this book might be useful in that it introduces you to some of the main libraries used in Linux game programming but the book lacks any real information. Even if you read it from cover to cover you still won't know enough to make even the simplest game. The best thing you can say about this book is thay it can give you some hints about where you can really learn to do Linux game programming.

This book is a good overview of what gaming libraries are out there for programming in linux and some fundamentals on getting several of those gaming libraries. But that's it...

I've found the book to be extremely lacking in depth or finished code samples. It gives snippets on how to accomplish something then leaves you hanging. Plus there are quite a bit of syntax errors in the code that can leave a beginner quite frustrated. Nothing is worse than cutting and pasting code from a book word for word and not having it compile because of poor book editing.

The author tries to cover everything from sound, to video, to AI, to networking - with several different libraries - in a 300 page book. And a good fifty of those pages are concerning the gpl and other licenses. Knowing about the GPL and about open source is great, but not when I spent money on game programming (video, sound, ai). What this results in is less than 10 pages on one particular topic.

To sum up: browse this book in the bookstore and then keep moving. Buy yourself a better C++ or OpenGL book instead. Or just go online - better information exists out there.

The author knows what he is talking about and you can tell that he has been there himself. The experiences he shares are invaluable - they save you so much time! This book gets you started by answering the really difficult and important questions: What are the best libraries and tools to use, how do you get the major obstacles out of the way and what are the basic principles in modern game programming. If you have ever strived to write top quality software you will appreciate and undertand the advice in this book.
This won't teach you how to program in C/C++, although there is plenty of good general advice. But it will teach you what you need to know to write games in C/C++.
If you are looking for completed source code that you can tweak a bit to have your "own" game, look elsewhere. If you are a C/C++ programmer, but not very familiar with Linux, graphics, sound, or networking - this is for you!
I loved the authors humour, too, by the way. Excellent reading.

This is the worst book I have read so far. There are so many errors in the book! And all descriptions about J2ME are vague. It's really a pity that I spent my money on this useless book.
Don't buy this book!!!

If you are a developer and eager to find resource on Java Mobile development, this book must disappoint you. This book just give you a general java mobile concept. May be this technology is too green so that all topics are not in depth to discuss with very limited examples.

The worse of this book is some examples just show the source code only with no any demonstration of the program running or even the complied result and that made people hard to understand what the source code mean.

If you see the content that this book cover MIDP for Palm. Don't believe this, this book is only cover the early stage of java KVM in Palm but not included the current Sun MIDP for Palm OS

I found this book very useful for getting to grips with the wide range of technologies available for Java platform on mobile devices. It's strong point is the breadth of subjects covered and not the depth. However, if like me, you prefer to get on to a quick start and the get deeper into the subject on a "as needed" basis this book will provide it. It got me up to date and able to continue on my own from the first three chapters.
If you are already an experienced J2ME developer then the case studies will show how others have tackled some J2ME problems. If you are a beginner then you will get a complete treatment of the range of technologies.

The editor, Andrew Ross, describes this book as "an expanded edition" of a special issue of the journal "Social Text". Potential readers should be warned however that it is also an expurgated edition, from which Alan Sokal's celebrated parody of of recent socio-cultural jargon has been suppressed. One understands Professor Ross's chagrin at the cruel and unusual joke that Professor Sokal practised on him. However, the unadvertised deletion of Sokal's contribution is a hoax on the buyers of "Science Wars" who naturally expect to find in it the one item of the original publication that has received worldwide attention.

The subsequent reviewer found the current tome missing in scholarship, merely by not having reprinted Sokal's piece from the social text issue of the same name (science wars). If one cared to read through the book, however, one would notice a number of quite specific reasons for this: among these that the book is meant as a counter argument to Sokal, Levitt & Gross's readings of their fave foe: pomos and other dangerous 'leftists' (what does this mean?). It is no secret that these authors are fired by a profound hostility and unwillingness to engage with the material with which they are dealing. This has already been shown ad nauseam in the litterature (see for instance Callon's review in social studies of science). Nevertheless this book stands as a nice response to some of the worst nonsense that has come out of the sokal/gross tradition. Specifically one should not miss Hart's devastating analysis of Gross et al's 'scientific neutrality' and their analytical abilities in Higher Superstition. Other pieces such as Mike Lynch's are good too; some however, are merely perpetuating the current stand off in a nasty 'war' (among these both of Ross's pieces). So is this review, I presume. That said, I should stop. Read both sides before you judge, you might get to know a good bit about rhetorical wars from the putatively neutral and objective scientists (sokal, gross, koertge etc).

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 barely provides the entertainment value of what it costs to purchase. The photos themselves are haphazard with little artistic value. There are some interesting graphic design elements to this book but they are few. Overall, a disappointment...

A collection of 50 photographers taking snaps of the theme of 'Tati', a Paris department store which first opened in 1948. Some of the photos are very "store" related, but others you would never guess they went hand in hand with the retail chain Tati. This book was only $...when new, and for it's size and photographs, it's a bargain. I'd say only about half of the 100+ photos are interesting, but well worth the $5-$6 price you can find this book for used nowadays. This book also contains two Martin Parr photographs of mannequins, and a bunch of employee candids taken by Catherine Deneuve.