This book collects some of the stranger Spider-Man adventures and features some good stories by famous creators. While not all the stories are great they are mostly solid works.
The first storyline has Spider-Man heading to the Savage Land in order to find the man known as Karl Lykos (formerly Sauron) who is no longer controlled by his pterodactyl-counterpart and wants to lead a lonely life in the Savage Land. But with Spider-Man and Angel mutated into monsters can Ka-Zar save the day? Perhaps, if Lykos is willing to do something no one hope he would do. This story is forgettable but fun. Nothing worth noting really, except it marked the return of Sauron.
The second story has Spider-Man trying to remove his powers but instead gaining four more arms. Taking refuge in Curt Conners lab Spidey runs afoul a new foe: Morbius the Living Vampire! Who is he and what happened to him to make him a vampire. And will Spidey survive when the Lizard shows up? A cool Stan Lee and Roy Thomas written-tale that features a great first act, as well as a great moment in which Spider-Man tries to picture his new life with six-arms. The story slips a bit with the introduction to Morbius but overall is a great Spider-Man tale.
Next is a Howard the Duck tale by Steve Gerber himself, one that will hopefully make you forget about the Howard the Duck movie. This romp features Howard one of the series main characters as he has to acts as a warrior to assist an evil wizard to save his new friends neck. While not the best Howard tale, it does have it's moments as well as some great art in certain points. The introduction of Spider-Man to the story, however, feels really forced.
The last tale has Frank Miller art but is probably the least of the bunch. Still good though. Spider-Man is called upon to save Dr. Strange from a villain who emerges from the team-up of Dr. Doom and Dormammu. But how can Spider-Man succeed where the sorceror supreme has failed?
Overall a good set of obscure Spider-Man stories that's good for trade paperback fans who don't by back issues with good stories.

This is the Elektra saga excerpted from the Daredevil comics. They took bits and pieces of the original stories and tried to put it together in a book that emphasized Elektra. Not a good idea as a lot of the origianl storytelling elements were lost in the transition. Hopefully Marvel will rerelease the original Frank Miller Daredevil series in their complete form.

I love Frank Miller's Sin City series. Even though I lost interest in comics as a teenager, my interest in the Sin City stories has stayed strong. But "Family Values" is a real disappointment. It starts off promising, brutal killings, great dialogue, a mafia theme, but it gets pretty far-fetched before long. I found myself cringing at the action sequences. Spectacular deaths, yeah, but freakin' CHEESY! The art work looks rushed.. sure, it's looked rushed before in other Sin City volumes, but the stories always made up for it. This story wasn't very impressive. The ending just fizzles. I would recommend this for hardcore fans and Sin City completists, but for anyone else, you'd be better off whipping out your old Sin City issues and reading 'em again.

Let me start by saying I'm a big Frank Miller fan, and I absolutely love "Sin City."

If you have heard about how great "Sin City" is, and want to check it out, I'd recommend you read this one last. If you're going to skip one, this is the one.

Basically, there's nothing to it. It had my interest early on, but then it just turns into one absurd action scene after the next. While that may sound cool, it gets old real fast.

If you're a diehard "Sin City" fan, nothing I say will stop you from buying this. I don't think you'll hate it. I didn't. It's just mediocre when compared to the other "Sin City" stories.

Miller once again has another masterpiece on his hands with Family Values.It's Sin City at it's best. The Art is a little rough, sort of like the stuff in Sex and Violence.Lynn Varley's cover colors are a work in itself. The Story was superb, with all the family tones. Miho on Rollerblades is one of the books most memorable scenes in there. It really doesn't tie in with the rest of the series but look for two verbally expressed individuals making a little scene.Great art Great Story, keep it comin Frank !!!!!

I cant speak to this book in its entirety, as I dont usually buy tech books to read them; rather when I encounter an obstacle I thrash thru books until I find something that addresses that obstacle, putting them back on the shelf once the problem is resolved. Thus, to me, the quality of a programming book is how helpful they are in solving obscure problems that usually are hard-to-impossible to find documentation for.

Background: I primarily use VB and T-SQL to convert/transform environmental data from over 500 independent sources on a regular or sporadic release cycle into a site-organized perspective which I then convert into attribute-centric XML (each string the totality of a single site and all of its related children) to be stored in a single text field with its site info also stored in other fields as a header, id'd by GUIDs. We collect massive amounts of data in a wide variety of formats which we transform using 3rd party apps, custom apps, and when necessary via a Hand Keying agency for paper datasets. Our data process is many-stepped and complex and involves moving data between different formats and many different SQL Servers at various stages. To expedite this, a co-worker and I have written a collection of automation apps and utilities. However, at 2 different points in the process sombody has to manually DTS data either into SQL (typically from MSAccess which we use a convenient intermediary for analysis and conversion) or from SQL Server to SQL Server. The DTS Wizard makes this easy, but nevertheless manual, and therefore inefficient (and repititious/annoying). Previously we had played around with various methods of using packages, building packages on the fly, and more esoteric methods but due to the sheer diversity of incoming data and inconcistencies in format from data providers, nothing worked better or more easily than just biting the bullet and manually using the DTS Wizard.

Recently, my coworker came across this book and noticed that, while most of it seems pretty uninteresting, Chapter 10 had very simplified code for creating simple DTS packages on the fly. The code & documentation we had found previously seemed to occlude/complicate the matter significantly, to the point that implementation would be too time consuming. However, the code in this book was easily adaptable to our purposes and in conjunction with some of our existing tools could become the basis of an in-line solution, removing the irritating manual DTS Wizard portion of our process.

So, this book gets 3 stars on the basis of solving a single irritating issue thats been a thorn in our side for some time now.

Be warned however, that we had to tape a yellow sticky over one of the writer's portraits; we kept having an unpleasant reaction everytime we looked at the book's cover. When you see it up close yourself, you'll understand what I mean...... ;)

I was discouraged from getting this book for a while because of the other reviews on this page, but when I really needed an additional reference for SQL-DMO, I went ahead for whatever I could get from the book. I have read through the portion of the book (The chapters, not the appendices - they are more for reference).
First, the book is not just a rehash of the SQL SBO, nor of the reference on MSDN. It was my frustration with searching through them, getting explanations that did not always offer enough of an example to really clear up the concept in my mind that led me to seek another book. The chapters in this book do lead the reader through examples, and do solidify the concepts I was looking to have solidified such as the practicalities of the object Heirarchy. Once you have this part firmly in mind, then MSDN, and SQL SBO's endless diagrams and cryptic descriptions begin to make more sense.

As for the examples being in VB, I program in C++ and Perl. I very, very seldom use VB or any of its variants, but it is so simple that there is no problem whatsoever in translating the examples from the VB in the book to the languages I use. The object model is the same regardless of the language, the languages just have a little different notation in accessing the properties and methods. For example:

VBS:

Private dSrv
Private dDb
Set dSrv = CreateObject("SQLDMO.SQLServer")
call AddSurvey("MyCompany", "MySurvey", "MyDbName")
Call dSrv.Connect("(local)", "sa", "changed")
Set dDb = CreateObject("SQLDMO.Database")
dDb.Name = "myDb"
dSrv.Databases.Add(dDb)

'set some db options:
private dbOption
set dbOption = dDb.DBOption
dbOption.SelectIntoBulkCopy = 0
dbOption.TruncateLogOnCheckpoint = 0
dbOption.AutoCreateStat = 0
dbOption.AutoShrink = 1
dbOption.AutoUpdateStat = 0

MsgBox dDb.Script

Is this in Perl:

use Win32;
use Win32::OLE;

my $srv = Win32::OLE->new('SQLDMO.SQLServer');

$srv->Connect('(local)', 'sa', 'changed');
my $db = Win32::OLE->new('SQLDMO.Database');
$db->{Name} = 'MyDb';
$srv->Databases->Add($db);
my $option = $db->DBOption();
$option->{SelectIntoBulkCopy} = 0;
$option->{TruncateLogOnCheckpoint} = 0;
$option->{AutoCreateStat} = 0;
$option->{AutoShrink} = 1;
$option->{AutoUpdateStat} = 0;

Win32::MsgBox($db->Script());

As anyone can see that takes even a few seconds to look at those two scripts for creating a database, the object model is exactly the same. The scripts are doing exactly the same thing. The only difference is in the language syntax, and there is such a direct correlation even there that it is very easy to translate from the examples in the book into the languages I prefer to use. For C++, chapter 12 is dedicated to setting up and creating projects in C++. From there, it is just using the C++ syntax to access the same object heirarchy.

In my opinion, the book does what it says it does, and was helpful, and clear in developing a better understanding within me of using SQL-DMO, SQL-NS, and DTS in my development.

Steve Howard

I had to write some programs for work that involved getting into the DMO objects of SQL Server, and this book was simply invaluable to me in understanding the objects better and helping me to produce a program that I am really proud of.

I have not checked out the other sections of this book, however the books from this lot (wrox) tend to be very good, with useful, real-life examples and detailed explanations. I also used a similar book from them to learn ASP.

I highly recommend this book.

I saw this in a comic book store and boy, was this a disappointment. Most of the material has appeared in the pages of the Sin City comic books. Here, they're reproduced at a larger size but big deal. Compare this to the recent Art of Hellboy and you'll see a huge difference in terms of value. Do not buy this book if you already own the Sin City comics or graphic novels because you're going to be getting something you've already seen.

I have been a huge fan of Frank Miller since his Wolverine mini-series done in the late 80s. I'm a huge Sin City fan, and I own all of the graphic novels, even though I also own most of the individual issues, so you can imagine my joy when I heard this project was first announced. It arrived today from Amazon, and I'm returning it tomorrow morning. This book is about 90 percent reprints of pages from the various Sin City mini series, and some promotional items, with perhaps a dozen or so rough layouts and sketches. There were exactly 4 images in this book that I hadn't already seen!!! I can't believe he would try to milk [$$]from his fans like this!!! If you own the majority of the graphic novels in this series, don't waste your money on this. There is very little about his thought or design processes. If you haven't read any of the books in this series, this is a good teaser for the full graphic novels.

I bought this hoping that it would wash the bad taste of DK2 away, but now I feel doubly cheated.

Sin City has always been one of my favirote books out there. I have always wondered how Frank Miller managed to get the book to look so good. So when I heard about this art book, I jumped on it. It completely blew me away! It has several scenes that they break down for you. It also has the different drafts that Frank went through to get single pages done.

Im sure that you think, "well, art books cost a ton!" But, this one only costs around [fairly decent priced]! Plus its worth every penny! Young Artists, Sin City fans,and anyone who likes good art should pick this up!

It wont disapoint you!

This review is pertaining to the 7th edition, hardcover book. This book is printed in very small print, all in one color (blue), on very thin (cheap) paper. How the publisher justifies the ridiculous price is beyond me!

If you need to buy this book for academic purposes, then at least try to find a cheaper used copy--It's not worth the money!

Good Intersting and useful.