This is the sort of guide for people who need a guide to walk out the front door of their house. The advice about money exchange is completely outdated now that ATM's are found nearly everywhere in the world. The guide misses several interesting areas of France, most notably the Ardeche region. It completely misses the mark on Vieux Nice by characterizing it as unsafe when in fact it is probably the most interesting part of the town. And if you follow the bar advice, you will normally end up in an Anglophile ersatz pub and miss the French cafe experience. If you are a traveller who likes to remain insulated from the French, buy this book.

I used this guide while traveling in Paris and plan to use it in an upcoming trip through the Riviera. Their tips were insightful yet witty. With this book I found a really nice hotel which was quite cheap - 130 francs ($22) a day for a single room. Follow their advice and splurge on food, the French take their food very seriously. However, don't follow the advice on exchanging money at the American Express office. Their rate is horrible. A better suggestion would be to exchange US cash at one of the exchange bureaus on the street and compare rates. Their 'security suggestions' regarding places to use caution at night were a bit excessive according to my French friends from Paris. Their maps of Paris could have been more substantial as they only covered a few of the arrondissements in great detail. Otherwise a great guide to France.

The important thing that I notice is that the book is too heavily based on the Open Card framework. I needed instead a book on java card first. Only found some tutorials on the net until now.

As a person who is concerning in developing javacards via OCF, found this one very useful due to contents that it has on framework. You could get and develop off-card apps, if it does make sense to you..

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.

I agree with all of the points made in Christina Dunigan's review above and would only like to add the following:
1. In addition to the other ethical violations articulated, the protagonist of the book casually mentions that he met his present girlfriend when she and her then fiancee came to him for treatment in connection with a sexual problem. Somehow, she ends up dumping the fiancee and dating the therapist. If this is really "non-fiction," the New York Medical Ethics Board should look into the facts of that matter as well.
2. The protagonist's belief that the therapist/patient privilege would be sufficient to quash a subpoena for his records is not credible. After the therapist discloses to the police that he knew that the slasher's female victims had their vaginas sewed with surgical thread, any judge who wanted to stay on the bench would have compelled the therapist to disclose the name of the patient who disclosed that information to him.
3. How is it exactly that the therapist reasons that it would be an ethical violation to disclose the identity of a serial murderer/rapist/kidnapper to the authorities, but it there is no dilemma involved in writing a book about the entire matter for his own financial gain? Perhaps this is addressed in the later chapters of the book -- I had to stop reading when the protagonist failed to report his girlfriend's kidnapping to the police.
... The ONLY reason I bought it is that it purported to be a non-ficition or true story. It's too implausible even for fiction.

The closest this comes to being a non-fiction work is if you could pass it off as "docu-drama." And even then, it would be a pathetic excuse for docu-drama.

The supposedly "ethical" headshrinker does things like:

1. Fail to pursue commitment for a patient who is clearly a danger to others. 2. Fail to call the police and report a kidnapping and assault committed on the woman he supposedly loves by a patient who has been stalking her. 3. Brings a dangerous and unpredictable patient into a therapy group and unleashes him on the hapless patients who trusted him to provide them with a safe environment.

He also interferes with a police investigation of brutal serial murders.

All this is supposedly in the name of "professional ethics."

The author also misrepresents the idea of patient confidentiality. Professionals who are working with the same patient get releases all the time to discuss their findings with one another. There's nothing the least bit unusual or ethical about it. In fact, it's standard oprating procedure when taking on a new patient to request releases to get his records from anybody else who has treated or assessed him.

The author is clearly hoping that he can bamboozle the reading public behind a phony wall of professional mystique.

If this story is true, the author belongs in prison as an accessory to murder, and should be drummed out of the profession for inexcusably putting his ego ahead of his responsibilities to the patient and to the public.

This book does seem more like fiction than non, but I loved it either way. It was a good read no matter how you look at it. The book had an interesting story line, and the fact that it was based on a true story made it all the more interesting, even if one doesn't believe it as truth. (...)

Pedantic and self-important prose mask the significance of Thomas A. Edison in this poorly crafted and ponderous work written by some academic. Don't waste your time.

This book is essentially unadulterated Edison. Martin Melosi (author) wrote a very very detailed book about one of the great inventors. The book is a little boring, but if you want to learn A LOT about Edison this book is for you. But don't take my word for it...wait actually you should

The quality of pictures and diagrams were poor. More slide preparations should be displayed

Property is a difficult subject, therefore, any casebook on the matter should be clear. This casebook, on the other hand, did more harm than good. Every case was followed up by questions with a list of cases to "see." Most first year law students have hundreds of pages to read every week and will never refer to these other cases. Thus, these questions (which are worded rather obscurely, I might add. The notes seem to be in another language: Latin) are never answered by the student. With a subject like property, it would be more helpful for the casebook to have more straightforward explanations to accompany the cases, as in Singer's casebook

This 372-page hardback consisting of 10 chapters totalling 286 pages, two appendices of 24 and 46 pages respectively, a lengthy bibliography and a good index, is an attempt at reconstituting the prehistory of Polynesian migration to Easter Island in the light of the evidence from a modern indigenous manuscript ("Manuscript E") of uncertain authorship, reproduced in full in the second appendix, pp. 304-356, the first mention of which dates only from 1954 or 1955. Its translation, alas, instead of being presented with the original text, is scattered, piecemeal, throughout the diverse chapters of the book, so that only the most dedicated reader will likely go through the immensely time-consuming task of verifying it. This is all the more galling that, in many places, Barthel himself marks his own translation as doubtful (?). Evidence is drawn from other sources, sometimes without any translation at all (viz p.150, six verses, pp. 76 to 92: eighty-four verses without a single translation!), or with only partial translations (viz p.146, five verses, only two translated), or some in Spanish, without any English (viz p.196, fourteen verses with only a Spanish translation). Even the opening, p. vi, consisting of 10 verses (evaru kainga / etahi i ravaa...), is only accompanied by a German translation! Barthel's interpretations are thus, for all practical purposes, unverifiable by any but the most dedicated and knowledgeable reader with a great deal of time to spare. Or should I say waste? Indeed, in the last chapter, Barthel derives from Manuscript E the exact dates of Hotu Matua's migration to Easter Island: departure from Hiva on April 25, arrival at Rano Kau on June 10, arrival at Anakena on July 23, etc. Those dates are calculated as if there were a regular correspondence between the ancient Easter Island calendar and ours, valid year in, year out. But there can be no such correspondence, because the ancient Easter Island calendar was lunisolar (like the Jewish and ancient Greek ones), with twelve lunar months of 29 or 30 days, and a thirteenth embolismic month inserted about every third year to keep with the seasons. This book is valuable only insofar as it gives the full text of Manuscript E in transcription (a straight photographic reproduction would have been better). Barthel's one seminal, indispensable work - Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift - remains, alas, untranslated.

Don't even bother reading this book. It's poorly written, boring, and shallow. If you're looking for some down-home, country, good-ole-boy stories and recollections...try somewhere else. I was extremely disappointed with this reading...

Many radiologists do not feel at ease in the head and neck region: the anatomy is complex, pathologic conditions are sometimes difficult to describe and analyze, and subtle radiologic findings may have dramatic consequences for patient management. Therefore, a book offering an 'systematic approach to the radiologic evaluation of the head and neck region' and helping in the interpretation of 'difficult cases' should be more than welcome. Unfortunately, this book does not fulfill the expectations raised by its title.
After a short general part, introducing the concept of the book, and discussing the different diagnostic imaging techniques used in this field of radiology, each anatomic subregion is covered in a separate chapter. Each chapter begins with a (too) brief anatomic introduction, goes on with a short review of the pathology encountered, and the use of the imaging techniques in this specific subregion. The typical imaging findings for the different kinds of pathology are reviewed and a differential diagnostic list is presented in the form of one or more tables.
The images are generally of good quality, but it is striking that the majority are MR images; the few CT-images included are generally of less good quality. The authors have a definitive preference for MRI. Although there are very good indications for MRI in the head and neck, in my experience, CT is the most frequently performed imaging modality. In many indications (e.g. in neck and sinonasal pathology), CT provides sufficient information to take management decisions; often, MR images will not add crucial additional information. If it is the goal of this book to educate the reader, than CT should have been discussed and illustrated more thoroughly. In that light, it is amazing that the authors include examples of conventional radiographs (e.g. of the temporal bone), which are nowadays obsolete. Several 3D-MR reconstructions are shown, with a small window in the patient's surface, allowing to view the deeper lying pathology; such images may look impressive, but usually they do not add complementary information compared to the original images; inclusion of such images in a book advocating cost-effectiveness is not appropriate.
The legends accompanying the figures are not always that accurate. Images and corresponding text are sometimes pages apart.
Many tables containing differential diagnostic lists are presented. Some of them are well constructed, some are incomplete (e.g. the table on unilateral vocal cord paralysis does not mention 'idiopathic' as possibility, actually one of the most frequent conditions), while some others are lacking (e.g. a table or flow chart on tinnitus should have been included). The criteria used to come to a differential diagnosis are sometimes not well specified, so that the book may not be of great help in difficult cases. For example, a case of focal arachnoiditis with cochlear involvement is 'documented', but it is not clear which criteria are used by the authors to differentiate this from a small intracanalicular schwannoma with intracochlear extension.
Descriptions on several items are vague or incomplete; for example on imaging of laryngeal cancer, nothing is included on pathways of tumour extent, and how to recognize radiologically subclinical but relevant tumour extension - giving such information to the clinician is of utmost importance, and often the only reason why imaging is performed anyway. In the chapter on the paranasal sinuses, a description of the important anatomical variants and the ostiomeatal unit is lacking. Some entities are described in another chapter as one would expect (e.g. conductive hearing loss is not in the chapter on the middle ear, but in the chapter on the internal auditory canal, cerebellopontine angle and labyrinth).
Some inappropriate recommendations are made, e.g. on otosclerosis, where the axial CT-images 'should be supplemented with coronal scans or coronal reconstructions' - in my experience, axial CT-images are optimal for the diagnosis of otosclerosis. In the same book, posttraumatic 'prolapse of cerebral structures into the brain and middle ear' (sic) is illustrated on axial CT-images (I can't recognize such a prolapse on these images); this represents an indication where coronal reconstructions certainly may be useful.
The possibilities of MRI are sometimes frankly overestimated: e.g. in the chapter on soft tissues of the neck, the authors claim that a 'careful analysis of signal characteristics...' can 'reliably differentiate recurrent tumor from postoperative changes' and 'MRI is best for differentiating these [postirradition] changes from recurrent tumor'. Imaging plays a growing role in patient surveillance after treatment of a malignant head and neck tumor, but the limitations of CT and MRI have to be acknowledged correctly.
The references are rather limited in number.
Throughout the book, many small inaccuracies are present, both in the text as in the figures. Already on the cover, one of the figures is reproduced upside-down. 'Sarcoiditis', instead of 'sarcoidosis', 'Hoeve syndrome', instead of 'van der Hoeve's syndrome', are some other examples.
Overall, this book did not impress me in the positive sense. It is not detailled enough, and sometimes the vagueness and inaccuracies cause confusion. I can not recommend this book.