This is very handy for the newer antiquer and even for those that have been around for a bit since one person can't know everything about all things. It fits nicely in one's pocket or purse and with the cover taken off is a nice subtle black so you won't look to obvious as you check;-) The only thing I would like to see more of is pricing but it's not a bad little book for the price and it may save you some money along the way too.

This book is mainly just worksheets/stationery for writing assignments, alphabetized, like "H is for Hero". Some were useful, yes, but nothing original or innovative, also they weren't as attractive as in similar books. Thumb through it first and see if it suits your needs, but there is better stuff out there.

This book is for grades 1-3. Being a first grade teacher, I have found a lot of the reproducibles are too hard for my students. This would be a good resource for a second or third grade teacher, but I would not recommend it for first grade.

The book is set up with an activity for each letter of the alphabet. The activities can be used in any order, which works for teachers who want to integrate this into their existing curriculum. The reproducibles are quality learning material, yet still entertaining for primary students.

There are hardly any toasts in the book. How many times have you been involved in a roast compared to a toast or impromptu compliment. The title of the book is totally misleading. It should be "One Liners in Search of Their Once in a Lifetime Moment." The only persons that should buy this book is that rare individual that is involved in roasts or that even rarer person that has far too many friends. Use the one liners in this book and your friends are sure to disappear. Or you run with a really strange crowd. I know a couple of strange people that I could give the book to, but should I encourage them.

As a trainer and coach, I feel this book is a good guide for any occasion - however, it is to be used in a light-hearted vein. It actually brightened my day.

It can prepare you when someone is about to pass a witty remark - and you can give an equally witty rejoinder!

However, I feel that its greatest strength is to give speakers a good starting point to develop their own brand of witty humour.

Go on - buy the book.

At least the jokes are clean. If you desire stronger stuff go to the best seller list of the new york times. Some of the jokes might be described as sexy clean. How do you write (or compile) a joke that is sexy clean? Ask Gene Perret.

While the ideas and concepts presented are solid, they definitely fall short in the entertaining department. As the title sys, the focus is on facts, not fun. Homeschoolers will not appreciate the hodge-podge of traditional classsroom-oriented activities that involve more than one or two students, while classroom teachers may find some of the "same old stuff" presented in a new way. However, there are some clever ideas and interesting games for presenting multiplication tables; they just borderline on the mundane, in my opinion.

The bottom line is this: If you buy this book, your kids will learn multiplication without a doubt. They will glean some very helpful hints and they will be able to tackle even the most difficult problems...they just won't have alot of fun doing it, and you may have to spend more prep time that you want. I don't know about you, but I already work with a math curriculum, so I don't want to use a supplement that calls for the same amount of prep time as my curriculum calls for. I also want something my kids can grab onto in a fun, meaningful way. If you are just looking for something to reinforce multiplication at home (whether or not you are not a homeschooler) I would definitely look elsewhere. The activities presented here are for classrooms, not home learning environments.

A better choice is Meish Goldish's Making Multiplication Easy - absolutely one of the best supplements around on this topic.

3 Stars. Could have been better for both teacher and student.

I had high hopes for this book when I ordered it. I was looking for fresh ideas to teach my second and third grade students multiplication. The book is cute and has many ideas for memorizing multiplication facts (flash cards, poems, games). However, it is light on ideas to teach students concepts of multiplication. The book is good, but didn't have enough substance for me.

Jim Elliot is an ok book about a missionary. He goes to Peru to visit a group of Native Americans to teach them about God, and also to translate the bible.

I was a little disappointed by this one. The photos are often not sharp enough to really bring out details. Also, most of the Americal colonial and early 19th c. details pictured are in New York so you get a good look at styles from the region, but not a broad overview. My biggest complaint though is that so much space is devoted to reproduction or historic-inspired details rather than the real thing.

If you're looking for an idea book for adding historic-inspired touches to a home, this is a good choice. As a source for restoration, I think it falls short

Having just moved to San Francisco, and being a fan of mysteries and crime novels, I figured this collection of thirteen short stories and excerpts would be a nice way to get to know my new surroundings. Unfortunately, only a few of the stories really attempt to evoke their setting, and on the whole, the book is a bit flat.

Bill Pronzini's contribution is a tragic (and rather predictable) little story set in Glen Park and the Mission. Dashiell Hammet's 1928 Continental Op story, "Fly Paper" is the longest, and perhaps best fiction in the book. Hildegarde Teilhet's "Demon in the Belfry," which recounts a savage double murder that occurred in 1895 is interesting reportage, but pales next to Oscar Lewis' 1924 true crime article, "The Phosphorescent Bride." His retelling of a famous murder and legal battle is the most engrossing bit of writing in the collection. Joe Gores contributes an early story from 1966, in which two hipsters decide to go witness an execution at San Quentin for kicks. It's an effectively creepy story, but not as evocative of the city as one of his DKA stories (which are collected in the volume Stakeout on Page Street) would have been.

The editors note that Jim Thompson's story "Ironside", is one of his few that has fallen out of print. However, after reading it here, one can understand why as it exhibits a few of the harsh sentences he excelled at, but none of the coherence. Scenes from the 1958 film Vertigo are included, and although one may concede that Alfred Hitchcock "made" the movie, it's nonetheless irritating that the actual authors of the screenplay which is being excerpted, Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor, are buried. Ambrose Bierce's Poe-inspired ghost story is a decent inclusion, but Mark Twain's brief ghost piece is not. Marcia Muller's "Deceptions" is a so-so story set amidst the city's elite and the Golden Gate Bridge. The excerpt from Mabel Maney's "The Case of the Not-So-Nice Nurse" is atrocious, while those from Gloria White's "Murder on the Run" and John Lantigua's "Heat Lightning" are more interesting, especially the latter, whose action is set in the Mission.

On the whole, the collection is a very mixed bag, one I found rather disappointing. There's no real sense of the city to be gained from it, nor was I introduced to any outstanding talent I wasn't familiar with. Oh well, I guess I'll stick it in the guest bedroom.

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.