Third Trade Paperback outing for the Powers comic book series, third super homicide case for our heroes, some character development who will enhance the metaplot of the series.
It share the weakness of the previous two: lame detective plot, but that is clearly not the reason for the appeal of the book(s).
Good characters, really good dialogs, a well defined background and captivating art are the selling points.
In a perfect world should have get just three stars, but in comparison to the rest of the market the fourth is well deserved.
And, as a matter of fact, even Watchmen had a lame detective plot.

Although this book is a decent overview of various topics, I don't like the book overall. I would be very frightened to find my pages looking like hers and I would refuse to look at sites like the pages represented here unless they provided life saving information. Her sense of using CSS1 style sheets seems to be to make the pages look much, much worse than those written with tables. Also, she chooses to show what style sheets can add to a page made with tables by trying to make the tables look very simplistic. Had she invested the same amount of coding in the tables examples as she did in the style sheets examples, the results would be far less distinctive and the results would actually work on all browsers instead of sporadically even with newer browsers. For instance including one image in a table example and then having a dozen in the style sheets - which has more potential to look good? This book, I've found, isn't even a particularly good reference. With the simple investment of a few icons she could have made information such as whether a tag is deprecated, or what version of HTML the code was introduced in or what browser versions the tags work with more quickly and easily known. It may be an okay reference, but it is my no means quick or complete. I bought this book for $15 and am barely happy with it at that price.

GOOD book. Loads of information. It assumes prior knowledge of some of the Technologies but a good place to CONTINUE from a beginners book (NOT A STARTER BOOK BY ALL MEANS!) Particularly useful for new technologies eg ActiveX and XML. Good buy second book.

I was looking for a book to help me sort through which web technologies I should use (Active Server Pages, Java servlets, CGI, client vs server-side coding, scripting vs compiled code, etc.) in designing an online resource for my employer's web site. This book assumes some technical background to be easily readable. It is definitely an overview of the available technologies (not an in depth tutorial, although it does give a good sense of what it takes to work with each technology). I found it to be EXTREMELY helpful in explaining how the different web technologies relate and for getting a bird's eye view of how to work with each technology. This book was exactly what I needed to help me make an informed decision of which web technologies were right for the job I was faced with. After skimming the appropriate sections, I was ready to start planning the development work ahead of me. Before this book I was wondering whether there was some technology that I might be missing or whether I was indeed choosing the right method for what I had to do.

The problem with the Power Transition Theory (and many other similar theories) is that it attempts to provide an all-encompassing explanation of wars and conflicts. The theory is very elegant and interesting, but cannot reach beyond general statements that are of very little explanatory value. For example, the claim that a state will challenge the dominant power when it reaches parity or overtakes that power is very trivial. Anyone even remotely familiar with world history would agree that probably that is a necessary condition (though there are certainly many exceptions) for a war between world powers or between any other pair or group of competing states. If that can be supported by additional studies, that's nice, but we still don't go beyond generalities.

And yet, the authors continue forwarding such claims as: "the conflict between Iran and Iraq was the result of Iraq's overtaking of Iran in the wake of the 1980 collapse of the Iranian political regime." They should know better and recognize that even if the so-called 'overtaking' played a role in the Iraq's attack on Iran, this was just a matter of timing in taking advantage of the presumed Iran's weakness, but it was not the real cause of the conflict. Further, concluding from the actual strength of the two states and the poor performance of Iraq in the war one would even question if there was 'overtaking' in the first place. The authors engage here in a circular reasoning: 'Overtaking' occurred because Iraq attacked Iran; Iraq attacked Iran because 'overtaking' occurred. As many theories of this kind, Power Transition theory struggles with a serious dilemma. In its general form it cannot really explain anything, but the soonest it goes beyond the generalities, it encounters a whole gamut of explanations that deem the theory irrelevant. One solution of the authors is to add a variable of "dissatisfaction of states involved in powers' competition." But this is a simple "backdoor" attempt at incorporating other factors playing a role in international relations. To say that a state is satisfied or dissatisfied necessitates asking another question: why are they satisfied (or dissatisfied)? But once we start searching for answers we discover that we don't need the Power Transition theory anymore. There are other more convincing explanations of wars and conflicts.

And if we don't search for the answers, we will fall into the trap of another "circular reasoning' argument. When a war happened, there must have been 'overtaking' and 'dissatisfaction,' but if a war didn't erupt then there was no 'overtaking' or both states were 'satisfied' with the overtaking. That's certainly very convenient way to explain wars, except that it does not explain anything. And since it cannot explain the past, the "predictions" for the future are in the realm of speculations no different from any educated journalist.

In short, the book presents many new and interesting points, but the new are not necessarily that interesting, and the interesting are not new. The authors frequently remind us that "Power Transition theory is a powerful predictor of war," that it is "unrivaled in scope," that it "anticipates the characteristics of conflict," but there is no real evidence that it does or it is any of these.

Mariusz Ozminkowski, Pasadena, California

What is the current threat to world peace? What will the post Cold War-system look like in the 21st century? Who will follow the United States as the next world power? Power Transitions answers these provocative questions revolutionizing academic analysis and merging it with hands on policy. This book is a must-not only for graduate and undergraduate students in political science-it is an academic book that is approachable for everyone (especially international business executives) who wants to understand the current state of the world. Power Transitions intriguingly predicts China's rise to world dominance in carefully documented terms. India is predicted to be the power to dominate China. These statements are not alarmist statements, but scientifically derived predictions of prestigious academics, providing practical political solutions for these potentially dire events. The Department Chair of the National War College, Ronald Tammen, joined forces with Jacek Kugler, a distinguished professor from Claremont Graduate University, Alan Stam from Yale, and a hand-full of brilliant young analysts from various institutions to compile a new theory and a new perspective for a new age.

I was dissapointed at first. I don't think the RETRO GIRL IS DEAD issues seem very good. Besides good dialogue and a cool idea the rest seemed just like a pile of cliches: the coroner who speaks too technically, the unctious cop who gets in the way of their investigation, the overbearing captain, the fallen protaganist with a dark secret... and then to top it off there was no real story besides them walking around and meeting people until finally the guy they were looking for basically turned himself in.

But after those first 6 issues I think it improved dramatically, with unexepected things happening, and the characters starting to take on a little depth. The ROLE PLAY storyline was great.

The "Powers Scriptbook" contains scripts for the first eleven issues of the comic book (which contains the interesting combination of police procedurals in a superhero-filled environment) and several pieces of artwork by the book's artist. Being a fan of the book (and wanna-be screenwriter), it's quite interesting to see a collection like this. A worthwhile read for fans of "Powers".

The McGraw-Hill cover misrepresents this book. It may preach to the choir but makes no converts. Concepts are long, obscure or ignored. The print is tight and some tables are not legible in places. The reader will learn little. Pedagogy is not the authors' strength. Having learned the basics of electricity in school I hoped for some of what the publisher promises, but was very dissappointed and 60 bucks poorer. Avoid my mistake.

I work for a major electrical contractor, and the project I am working on is in the 500 million dollar catagory. This project is re-modeling a major government facility with multi-tennant and varied design projects within the whole project. This project is design build and fast track. This Handbook is extremely valuable especially when used in conjunction with the McGraw hill electrical code handbook. Anyone working on such a project should have this book,believe me it is excelent!

While the author tries to make an interesting case for computerized indexing, offering that it allows the user to become involved in the process by choosing depth of indexing, the book completely misinterprets the results that a good indexer can produce.

The author gave a test article (about 20 pages long) to an indexer, who came up with 7 or 8 search terms describing the index (the indexer did not produce a complete index to the article). The author compares his computer program, which is full of detailed instructions, plus the necessary human tweaking of the computer search results, with an indexer who was given no instructions at all.

It is patently obvious that any indexer told to "index this article as if it were a book chapter" would produce a much deeper, well thought out index than the seven search terms the author received for his "test" indexer.

In addition, because a computer program was used to produce this book's own index, there are a number of occasions where words are listed in the index simply because they show up on a particular page, not because they are an important topic on the page.

While the books presents an intestering description of computer indexing and makes some important points about including users in the process, its analyses of human indexers display a total lack of the value added service and intellectual decisions that good indexers produce on a regular basis. It is also obvious that the author knows little about indexing, as he otherwise would have known that a list of 7 subject descriptors does not an index make.