This book found its way to my hands in 1992. It is astounding...and simply magic! Countless times I would read the message for the day and it provided the perfect guidance for things that were happening in my life. It's a great book and a great gift. Plus if you travel a lot it does not take up much space at all and can be a constant companion. Thank you, dear Eileen Caddy, for such a jewel!

This is a book that every one should have and use on a regular basis. I think that if this were the case there would be more happines and tolerance in the world. I have recomended this book to a number of people and each of them has sent me a message saying thank you and that the book was helping them in many ways.

This book has been by my side for over 5 years, traveled half way around the world, and never ceases to amaze me with how timely it is. I've made tiny notes in the margins and can track my progress in life. It is a very life-affirming and self-validating book.

If you need to QUICKLY find just the basic info to get you up and running, this is it. Every lesson offers a short demo program.

This book provides a very good foundation on Win32 Programming, focusing only on the essentials need-to-know APIs within a relatively short period of time. This is a good starter book, as well as a good revision book.

This amazing book folds and opens out as a HUGE pop-up history book...from the Big Bang to the 20th century. Each 'slice'of pop-up history shows they way people were in ancient times. Illustrated in a lively and humourous way by Stephen Biesty, this book is sure to keep anyone bored, busy. This amazing book can even be hung up on the wall; great as a unique decoration, toy or classroom tool.

Even though they were one of the greatest songwriting teams of the 1960's, there's never been a book written about Bacharach and David. "Burt Bacharach & Hal David: What the World Needs Now" is the first. It is full of strong archival material and includes Platts' interviews with Burt and Hal, plus many artists, including Dionne Warwick, Gene Pitney, and B.J. Thomas. The book is a detailed wealth of information of this songwriting team's body of work. A must read for Bacharach/David fans, musicians and music historians. The book tells the complete story of Bacharach and David's songwriting partnership, from the 1950s to their reunion in the 90s. The book includes color photos of record sleeves, a detailed discography, chart information and a comprehensive list of every song Bacharach and David wrote together. Robin Platts' style of writing is comfortable and concise. As a songwriter myself, I was inspired by this book.

Our society is made up of groups, at work, in sport, school, church and family. Dr. Platts tells us how we may add to our group's cohesiveness while having fun. He describes sixty-seven games and exercises which have been developed over the past twenty-five years at the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland, where evolution of group consciousness is an ongoing process. The aim is to achieve what Dr. Platts says are the three essentials of successful groups: cohesiveness, trust and fun. He warns that these games will not work however for groups already in difficulties. Basic goodwill must first be established and the games integrated into the process of building group trust. Then as part of the process, dynamic results can be achieved within a short time-frame.

The book discusses group preparation and session planning, as well as sequencing and formatting. Each game is described in detail with suggestions for its presentation and sequencing. To help beginners with game selection, a chart lists the primary uses of each, but this is no standardized blueprint, 'play this to get that.' The games and exercises operate at both individual and group level, opening up new and sometimes challenging dimensions of identity. Game facilitators must stay alert to the shifting consciousness of the group and set aside their own agendas, selecting games to meet the group's changing needs. This reviewer has found selected games effective with adults, teens and children, provided the age groups are kept separate.

The author, Dr. David Earl Platts, has a doctorate in Educational Administration and Supervision. He served for several years both on faculty and administration at the Florida State University. Later, he was in charge of the Group Discovery Program at the Findhorn Foundation. He has graduated in Psychosynthesis Counseling and Therapy, and now directs his own management consultancy. His book is clear and well laid out, and touches the reader at levels both of mind and heart. Any one engaged in group processes will find it a very useful tool.

When I started reading this book, I thought it looked pretty good. Then I started to see goofy assertions about how the author thought C++ should be coded (which were downright wrong). It makes me mad when people assume that the way to program in C++ is the way MFC is programmed. This book perpertuates this idea. Telling people that multiple inheritance in bad has no place in this book. If the author does not understand the proper use of this C++ feature, then they should not discuss it. It is hardly pertinent to the subject in the first place.

I also noticed that the book was originally OLE stuff that has been re-purposed for ActiveX.

There are nuggets of information if you want to wade through this book though.

David has done us all a great service in writing this book. His clear explanations and relevant code samples speak volumes. If you've never read anything about OLE, this is the place to start. I especially liked how he shows the pure OLE way to do things and then compares that with using MFC to do the same thing. He also points out many of the gotcha's when using MFC. His writing style is clear and his sense of humour is entertaining. All I can say is get it. It's definitely worth it!

This book raise an interest. Tired man who have read Inside OLE or other boring book may be say that wow~~. Simple but powerful book. This book is really essencial book who want to dig depth OLE/ActiveX

Lynes' photography is truly amazing! I will never tire of their nuanced beauty, and really love this collection of his best work.

Over the years I have collected everything I can about George Platt Lynes career as a photographer. As a true admirer of his wonderful black & white photography I feel this is a wonderful new addition published by Taschen. It's a beautiful over-sized book with over 240 pages of beautifully reproduced photos of his many different images. The book is broken down into five sections; Portraits, Ballet, Nudes, Fashion and Mythology. I especially enjoyed his ballet photos, fashion and nude images. Each section has a detailed history of each photography subject.

It's a great history of his career. There is a detailed biography by David Leddick that is excellent. It's very informative and helpful if you are not familiar with Lynes work, or if you are just refreshing your knowledge of this man's great photography from the 30's & 40's. There was a certain innocent and raw beauty in photography back then that makes these images of his very classic. Lynes use of shadows and light make his models come right at you, in such stark realistic fashion.

This book would make a great gift, or a great addition to your collection, or coffee-table. A real visual experience from one of the best!

"As a photographer George Platt Lynes was a brilliant craftsman and master of composition, whether it be in one of his many portraits of the famous and the legendary, or in his stunningly vivid documentations of the New York City Ballet. But Platt Lynes was also a myth-maker with a photographic obsession that remained mostly unpublished until after his death. In collaboration with his male nude models he was able to transcend time and place - these images simultaniously glance back as a "homage" to Greek mythology and athleticism, and look forward to the modern, urban eroticism of Robert Mapplethorpe and Bruce Weber. This book breaks down his body of work into distinct sections. The portraits include such luminaries of twentieth century art and society as Thomas Mann, Igor Stravinsky and Gertrude Stein, as well as fellow lens-men Cecil Beaton and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and it is clear from the lighting and the often surreal framing that he was a master of the form. It is in his extensive nude images that his admiration for the male body and his expert technique are truly brought together." - text from Intermale

The author touts the book's simplicity and ease of use in learning COM. And the book does have a few nice block diagrams that show some client-server sequences in error handling, automation, etc.

But actually the book does not flow particularly well. Some of the examples aren't well drawn. Subjects such as enumerators, collections, callbacks, and connection points are either not covered at all or mentioned in passing within another subject. Other topics are covered in a bits-and-pieces style that doesn't quite explain.

I don't believe that a COM novice would get too much out of this book. Only a COM knowledgeable person could fill in the gaps that this book leaves. But that's not who the book is for.

I'll recomment "Developer's Workshop to COM & ATL" by Troelsen for anyone wanting to learn COM/ATL. That book ranges from basics to full-blown coverage. It is the best out there.

I've graduated about 9 years ago. While in college I was programming on PC using assembly language, C, Pascal on DOS. When I worked I move on to Unix , programming and doing computer animation. After years on Unix, I feel that programming on PC is somewhat alien. So many has changed and a lot has to be re-learned and unlearned. "The Essence of COM" has filled in the gap, good book for anyone who needs to catch-up with the technology quickly. The reason it does not get a 5 star is that at times the sentences need to be edited by an english teacher (of course he/she must understand COM first).

Aren't you fed up with 800-1000 pages books? This book explains more in less words and this is what personally I'm looking for; I have too many huge, thick books on my "to be read" list and I'm scared and stressed when I see them; I use this book as a COM refresher when I feel I loose the contact with the basics; I tried, for instance, to read an excellent book about COM+ (Transactional COM+, Tim Ewald), but I needed a COM threading refresher before tackling COM+ concepts. And I didn't need more than 2 hours to put order in things...

This book is very helpful to anyone who understands COM but are confused by the vast array of new services offered by COM+. This is the first book they should read. However, this book is (intentionally) very incomplete, lacking any actual programming how-to.

I think 2 more books are needed for a healthy understanding of COM+. The next book should be an easy Visual Basic how-to guide, and the book after that should be a more hard core VC++ guide/reference book.

Very similiar in scope and tone to David Chappell's classic "Understanding ActiveX and Ole"

Explains the evolution of COM+ from COM/DCOM plus MTS and MSMQ, finally integrated into the operating system (Windows 2000).

It is an entertaining, easy to read book, that even your manager should be able to understand. Its almost as good as listening to a Don Box lecture! Highly recommended!

This book presents the new features of COM+ in an extremely intelligent and sometimes very humorous way. Its focus is definitely not on the mechanics of the new components, but rather on their high-level purpose along with design and architectural issues. This allows the reader to gain perspective rapidly as the messy details are left to the Windows 2000 documentation.

Bits of brillient philosophical insight are included. Read the epilogue and you can justify your comfy six-figure salary.

Technical people reviewd this book as not useful to them but good to get an introduction into .NET. But who wants to see a code example for an ASP.NET page, when he is about to understand what .NET is all about? For a technical person the book is too superficial and for a manager it's too code based. Therfore the book could only help people who might have to develop for/in .NET in the future. But then, those people might rather go for a book, which does both: introduce them to .NET AND provide the technical details to perform the developement.

Still, the book is pleasant to read and by it's ironic style of humor it successfully hides it's strong ties with Microsoft. (And, .NET seems to be an intersting technology).

For those of you who are still afraid to admit that .NET is here to stay - fear no more - David Platt's "Introducing Microsoft .NET" can help you pick up with Microsoft's latest invention.

The four core chapters of the book - ".NET Object", "ASP.NET", ".NET Web Services" and "Windows Forms" give an overview of what each technology is and how you can put it to work right away. Each chapter talks about the "Problem Background", technology's "Solution Architecture" and always gives a "Simplest Example" - an ideal construct. The author then elaborates on the major particularities of each technology and explains how they all tie together. Written with no bias towards any part of .NET, after finishing this book you'll have a fair idea on which topic you want to read more. The generous 2" wide margins are full with conclusions and bookmarks (of the kind "The sample starts here", etc) to ease your search through the book. Frequent diagrams, screenshots as well as notes and warnings (on a gray background) add to the readability of this book.

The majority of the samples are in Visual Basic .NET and however much this may displease the C++/C# fans, let's admit it - this makes the samples just a few lines long, they fit nicely on one page and they reduce the size and weight of the book by a whole lot. The author has only included the relevant pieces of code in the book, leaving the rest for you to download from his website. If you ever read a book on Win32 with declaration of the same "WinMain" and "WinProc" on every fifth page then you'll find this simplification very useful.

You can familiarize yourself with the style of the book by downloading the source code and a chapter on ADO.NET from http://www.introducingmicrosoft.net/. Reading this chapter will give you an idea of where the book is headed.

You'll need the .NET Framework to run the samples, available on Microsoft's MSDN website. Visual Studio.NET is also available thereat if you have the MSDN Universal Subscription or (as of this writing) have it shipped to you for $12.95 (4 CDs).

An adaptation of the topic from this book on ".NET Objects - Interoperability with COM" was also published in the August 2001 issue of the MSDN Magazine, also available online on the MSDN website.

Firstly, I have been working with .NET since early Betas so have seen through a number of .NET stages of life. And the author David Platt teaches Harvard graduate courses. Recently I went through a week long training with the author and that is how I was introduced to this book and to him.
So, what I would like to say is that in this book, even though the author calls it an introduction, that is so very humble.

Any developer working on Micro$oft's toolset will realize that a book, which in its first chapter, goes through COM Interop and gives working samples of using COM components in .NET and vice verca cannot be called a manager's introduction.

Now, for those guys who still think that is a "manager's introduction", may I ask how many "typical development" managers can just go in and understand the ins and outs of a COM interop sample?

COM by default, has been hard, and from what I have seen, typically managers avoid understanding the "real" details of the same. (e.g. how IDispatch really works with or without type libraries or what are the 18 or so OLE interfaces used in an Activex control or how DCOM talks over internet and what is the difference between a COM+ component and an MTS component etc.)

Then the author gives very interesting and practical examples of using ASP.NET authentication/authorization and *encryption*. Again I guess most books on just this one topic ASP.NET may spend several times the volume of this complete book and still not cover this level of details effectively in such a small set of pages.

Then let me give another example. David in chapter 4 gives some excellent inside information about web services and gives a very interesting sample of using chunkiness in web services. Again, this is not for the light-hearted as most books on .NET with a lot more pages in them don't cover details any more than basic how to write a web service (Which is trivial as it can be made via a wizard or else one can write one in 5 minutes or lesser by hand!)

And btw, I love its samples because they are all very interesting considering that the author has worked closely with Microsoft on technical documentations.