No words to describe this genius!.How as a landscape gardener,could I have taken ten years to discover his works!!.He is obviously and sadly unknown for his contribution to timeless gardening.This is the "Bible" of landscape gardening,and he is the Van Gogh of gardeners.How can such a valuble and essential book be unavailable!?

I hadn't even heard of Russell page until I perchanced upon this book in my local bookstore some 5 years ago. I was moved to tears by some of the photographs, and that doesn't happen easily to me. The man was a genius, clear and simple, and his designs reached out and spoke to me in a way very few designers ever have. In my own landscapes, I have been immensely influenced by Russell Page, both through this wonderful book, and his own 'Education of a gardener'. This book is superbly illustrated with colour photographs throughout. The photography is excellent, and the written descriptions are well penned, informative, decriptive but not too long-winded. My copy of this book would be on my list of my top ten material possessions.

this book was confusing and very not meaningfull i thought that page lambert did a bad job.

Very good reading, with excellent comments on the Grand Canyon, the experiences of rafting the river and essays on how the canyon touches people in different ways. I have just completed an 8 day trip of over 280 miles in the canyon and experienced every emotion and awe-inspiring moment described in the book. The photographs are worth the purchase price alone. A must read before and after taking a trip down the wonderous Colorado in the Grand Canyon

Writing Down the River grabs your heart and broadens your understanding of the power of the western landscape. The photographs are amazing in themselves; the essays stunning.

Sybil Downing, award winning author of Ladies of the Goldfield Stock Exchange

I've been trying to use this book as my primary reference for ASP.NET for a couple of months now, and I'm to the point where I'm going to go out and buy another book.

This book could be dramatically improved if it had been under the kind eye of rigorous editor, one that would have pulled all the spurious soapboxing and helped refocus the book on addressing topics the author is not favorable towards.

A couple of examples:

1) Paragraphs of prose dedicated to a lengthy explanation as to why usernames and passwords are obsolete, bordering on arrogance. Finally, begrudgingly, getting to the meat of what I need to know: how to do authenticated login. I wouldn't mind so much if the author was providing relevant insight into the directions that the industry is taking, but his proposition that smart cards and biometrics will overtake passwords is the same old rhetoric expounded over the last decade... which has not come to pass.

2) An attitude of MS Access = Bad. Yes, SQL is one of the stonger solutions for the back end, and sure, you should use MSDE if you can't do SQL, but I have a client that needs it to be MS Access. To completely short-change Access is to write yourself out of a very real segement of the market.

In essence, I think this book suffers by actively distancing itself from real-world issues. A more pragmatic, non-preaching approach would have been better, one that focussed on what *I* need, not what the author feels compelled to tell me about.

Ignoring the soapboxes, the rest of the book is pretty good. The author obviously knows his ASP.NET. I'll keep this book around as a secondary reference, but I'm out hunting for a new primary reference.

I generally dislike writing reviews like this, but I dropped ... this book (a local Borders) and I would really have liked to have seen a review like this before I made that decision.

I have 3 other Mastering books and they are all great. This one is not in that category. Mastering C#, Mastering VB.NET and Mastering Cool Fusion 5.0 are all very good books. This author seems like a real C#/ASP.NET Guru but has no ability to convey that knowledge in a clear concise way. It seems to me like everything is just dumped on the pages instead of being built up step by step. This book might be good if you are already very good at ASP.NET and want to gleam some more insight into some of the deeper workings of ASP.NET, but definitely NOT as a beginner/intermediate book. I consider ASP.NET Unleashed a masterpiece compared to this book. After chapter 6, I just gave up and am going to purchase another ASP.NET C# book to meet my needs.

This is the best asp.net with c# book for beginner and experienced web developer among the 4 similar books I bought 4 momths ago, this is the only one I read trough and do it from first to last chapter. Thanks, Russell.

I have been an adult computer trainer for six years and was sadly disappointed in this book. I found it to cover too much information incompletely. I found no concrete application or practice exercises. Usually, a book like this would start by presenting the concept, move to simple and conceptual examples to demonstrate the how, and then advance to more complex and practical examples. Some areas of the book never move past the conceptual to the practical so I can't imagine a reader would know how to apply the knowledge. Some areas covered basic examples but didn't go deep enough. The authors need to take a few education classes before writing anything else that is so out there.

This is a great book for both beginners and experienced VB programmers.

This is not a bad book, however, there are better ones out there. The author assumes absolutely no previous programing experience and therefore even includes a HTML tutorial, which is unnecessary in my opinion. Why would you get into ASP if you don't even know basic HTML? Moreover, the examples provided are too far removed from reality. The author just piles on the different objects, requests etc. without giving evidence of them being actually useful in real life. This book is more of a reference than anything else. For actually starting ASP, I'd rather recommend "Sams teach yourself ASP in 21 days", supplemented by Wrox's "Beginning ASP databases" if you're into more serious development.

I was a raw beginner to ASP when I bought this book, I couldn't even read and write to a text file. This book covers starts at the very beginning with HTML and develops into scripting and then into ASP itself.

It is an excellent reference tool. It covers the ASP Objects (Request, Response, Sessions, etc.) and succinctly covers the methods and properties by listing them in charts and exampling the fundamental use of the Objects using code samples.

This book also covers CDONTS, which is an Object that can be used to send email via ASP code. CDONTS comes with IIS 4.0 or better. As well as several other optional Objects that ship with IIS.

Want to connect to an Access Database? No problem, this book covers the ADODB Object and also covers rudimentary SQL to construct queries. There is also an Instant Reference available from the same author that is handy, when you don't want to lug around a big book!

Thirty chapters of very well taught material. The first half of the book is a very clear introduction to the ASP environment and how to use the intrinsic objects. The second covers other scripting objects, ADO, MTS, XML and how to plan your web site for scalability. The many code examples on the CD are concise, efficient, and scalable. I refer to them frequently. Although the book contains many examples of accessing databases through ADO in VBScript, he points out that this kind of thing is done much more efficiently in a COM component. He shows how to build VB COM components and how to use them in MTS through ASP. Most of the code is in VBScript; however, the surprising inclusion of JScript client side scripting and XML client and server side programming make for a very pleasant and well rounded learning experience. After bringing it to work, two coworkers also ordered it. I cannot think of a better recommendation than that.