This book is merely a collection of antecdotes throughout his recruiting career. In true Bill Radin style it's like a stream of consciousness about recruiting, with no central theme or direction to the writing. ...

i can save you the time and effort of reading this book. the main theme is to never discount your fees. that's about it. quick to read and kind of helpful but not the best book out there on recruiting.

On the positive side, the book is well written and easy to follow. Most readers will pick up at least some good ideas from this book. I will certainly use things like the Test of Commitment, designed to see how willing a candidate really is to make a change. However, this book was not quite what I expected. It was only when the book arrived that I realized that the content is predominantly written for contingent recruiters working mid level roles where ringing clients to market a candidate is totally acceptable. I found the book through the Amazon search engine under the heading Executive Search, but what Bill Radin calls executive search is very different to how we use the term in the southern hemisphere. Here, search is almost never contingent (it is a retained industry sector), it is used for very senior roles, and business ethics prevent candidates at that level being marketed. I'm not sorry I bought the book, but it did not help me as much as I had hoped.

I am always surprized at the lack of information about the metal heat treating field. This book is definitely included in this. Although many of the processing techniques are good, some make me cringe and want to run for cover. The metallurgical information is remaniscent of Biringuccio or Agricola, both written in the 1500's. If you have enough metallurgical knowledge to know what is correct and what processing techniques are good, then you don't need this book. If you don't have enough knowledge to decipher this, then it is unreliable. On a lighter note, the other sections, not dealing with heat treating, seem good.

If you are looking for all the books Bryson has written, look up his official web site or at random house publication's web site.

I agree with Julian, while this particular book may be a bit more technical than his others, it is certainly worth the money and belongs on every Bryson fan's shelf. The insights into metal are as plentiful as the humor - especially when the author dives into the always hilarious topics of carburization and TTT diagrams. Side splitting! I never knew that working with metals could be so entertaining but I guess I should expect that from Bryson. He can make any topic a joy.

While the book provides a wide range of knowledge - I'm sure this will become the standard for manuals on grinding which I think is the books strongest section. It is also the section the allows Bryson to really exercise his comedic genuis even if some of the humor may be lost on the casual fan.

My only complaint is that this gem isn't available on audio-cassette but I'm sure that Random House will fix that soon. I would love to hear these words from Bill's own mouth especially when he talks about getting the most out of a furnace!

Also make sure to look for Bill's book "Cryogenics" which I think he was working on while still living in England - it, too, is a joy to read - especially the highly entertaining section on liquid nitrogen! The section on Stress in Materials was also top notch - almost as humorous as his observations about the women of Iowa in earlier books. Keep up the good work Bill!

This is perhaps the worst book on programming I have ever read. I am an advanced autolisp programmer hoping to learn Visual Basic for Autocad and this book claimed to be for me. Unfortunately it wastes its ink on theory and large print than just giving a lot of useful programming examples - which is the best way to learn programming in my opinion.

We can't find no much help on this book. The Cd rom that came with the book was blank and I had to download the examples files on the internet.

AutoCAD VBA Programming Tools and Techniques

I detest the conduct of Bill Clinton. I disliked some things about this book. Primarily, that the author threw a ton of stuff against the wall, to see how much of it would stick. In doing so, some does, and a lot doesn't. Therein lies the problem: making accusations which lack substantiation or a volume of compelling circumstantial evidence, helps rather than hinders the Clintons. The book relies too much on rumor and innuendo to truly succeed. I have gained much better information and enjoyment from the Slick Willie books, the Year of the Rat book, Dave Marrannis First In His Class, No Surprises, and even The Clinton Chronicles book. The book's redeeming value is that you will read some things you probably haven't before, and a few of them have credible facts and evidence. These are in the minority, however.