I pity anyone who buys this book. I can't believe that this book made it past the publisher's desk. I am in awe of the scatter-brained nature of its composure. I could only imagine an acceptable excuse would be if the writers were schizophrenic and lost their medication.
For instance, within the section dealing with Arrays, they jumped into accessing member functions via pointers, which makes no sense considering they hadn't even covered pointers or even classes for that matter. I started to wonder if they intended people to read the book from the back to the front.
I'm a fairly experienced programmer, and I'm blown away at the hackneyed approach they take toward the subject. The convention of sprinkling the text with words in bold face type was extremely distracting to the flow of reading. It would have been nice if they paid attention to quality instead of rushing this book on the shelves to beat competition.

The search continues for a Visual C++ .NET book that won't be a waste of my time and money.

this is a great book with huge materials and code examples about Ms Visual c++ .Net, especially in introducing Managed C++ codes. This book is a must for who wants directly using Ms Visual C++ .Net.

St. Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, St. Bride, Fleet Street and St. Stephen Walbrook (the 'dress rehersal for St. Paul's Cathedral') are familiar to most Londoners; their elaborate spires, now hemmed in by ugly office-blocks, spatter the horizons of tidy panoramas of 18th century London by Canaletto and Samuel Scott. Every one of these - with maybe the exception of St. Martin Ludgate - was gutted during the Second World War, by which time many of their pews, reredos and glass had been ousted in favour of convenient but sytlistically incongruent fittings. St. Dunstan-in-the-East, not exclusive in Wren's oeuvre as an exercise in 'Gothick' architecture (in spirit rather than in form), is now a pretty free-standing tower looming over a formal garden. St. Mary Aldermanbury was rebuilt in Wisconsin, whilst St. Michael Bassishaw, and St. Christopher-le-Stocks (to name but two) survive only as drawings and descriptions. Jeffery's 'City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren' is an affordable, nicely produced survey of the 52 London churches built from 1670 to replace those gutted during the Great Fire in 1666. After several discursive essays on design, attribution, fittings and other aspects of their conception, Jeffrey provides an expansive gazetter of each church.

His objective is - as he states in his introduction - to present a case for the conservation of the 20-odd churches that remain, whilst addressing aspects of authorship and parochial history relevant to the particular buildings. For those who find the twenty volumes of the exhaustive (and undigested) Wren Society journals daunting and (in the case of most copies accessable) rather fragile, Jeffery's parochial histories and surveys of expenses, craftsmen and subsequent renovations to the churches are brief, concise, and specific. The photographs and engravings included (as appropriate) are eloquent and printed to a high standard. Furthermore, plans (some in Jerrery's own hand) of churches of which little information can be milked (St. Olave Jewry, St. Matthew Friday Street and St. Mary Woolnoth before Hawksmoor replaced it, etc.) are included with each entry in the gazetter, and this section is the author's finest; but his excursions in problems of authorship give frequent pause for thought.

The attribution of St. Paul, Benet's Wharf, and St. Edmund the King to Robert Hooke is reasonably well established: the elevation of the recessed ranges of Bethlehem Hospital and the east and west elevations of Ramsbury Manor are sufficiently close in detail to identify Hooke as the probable author. Furthermore, the similarity of St. Martin Ludgate to St. Edmund means that Hooke's oeuvre is more elastic than one might have anticipated. However, the oblique and hazy attribution of the steeple of St. Mary-le-Bow to Hawksmoor is, quite simply, unhistorical: a drawing by Hawksmoor for the church (complete with an unbuilt three-bay brick loggia with stone coigns and pilasters) is not sufficient ground for the attribution that Jeffery implies. Furthermore, the delegation of 'thirds' of the city to respective surveyors (which has some documentary support) contradicts Jeffery's own conclusion that autograph works by Wren are largely concentrated in the north and west of the city. This would account for St. Clement Danes and St. James Picadilly (whose authorship has never been doubted), but the churches grouped far further east (around St. Vedast, Foster Lane, and St. Lawrence Jewry) are similarly attributed to Wren in other studies on what seem sound traditions. Jeffery does not delve into stylistic analysis to a sufficient degree to play with questions of this sort, and the results he presents should be treated with caution.

As a book that pleads for the conservation of these sometimes crude, ugly or obscure but consistently fascinating and diverse churches, The 'City Churches' succeeds. Thomas Archer's vast Westminster church, St. John, Smith Square, is at present a concert hall; similarly, Wren's St. Magnus the Martyr, whose rusting iron cramps are staining the coursed rubble masonry at the east-end, has been relegated the status of an uninteresting, decaying hybrid wedged onto a narrow site. Jefferys study underlines - in its imperfect but worthwhile scholarship - that the City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren, despite mutilation and neglect (All Hallows, Lombard Street, was pulled down, in the face of fairly serious disgust, as recently as 1938), continue to warrant study and are of considerable architectural interest.

I don't understand why my instructor chooses this book for 3 quarters continously. This book gives you nothing. I have a feeling like the author doesn't know anything, so he uses lots of words to describe some thing that are soo obvious. With other difficult concepts, he doesn't say anything, or just a few words. Some one compared this book with Lev Landau's one. Please give me a break. Lev Landau is a great physicist, while this guy is nothing at all. I still wonder why this kind of textbook is still around. I feel frustrated with this book. My conclusion is: if you really understand physics, this book is not for you. This book is only for kids. I hope that some one could pass my message to the authors, and hope that they could write better books in the future.

This book is very bad. It includes lots of false physics theories which are just copied from other textbooks. It looks as though the authors do not have a good understanding of this subject. It hardly includes any proofs for most of their assertions. This was the first physics textbook I ever bought and I have worked hard to prove many of their theories wrong, to later find out that they are not the correct theories that more advanced textbooks teach in the first place. I seriously do not recommend this book for anybody who has a love for physics and truth. But of course, most other college level textbooks such as this one are pretty much the same. But this sort of introduction to physics is definitely not necessary for a clear understanding. I suggest you skip straight to the next level. By getting books by Griffiths or Kleppner. But if you insist on getting an introduction of this sort to physics, then it is still a good tool for the general topics discussed at college level physics.

In all fairness to the book, it's not as bad as I made it out to be below. It is a little upsetting to be given tons of equations without any proofs. But the proofs really are beyond the scope of the book. I've looked at other books of the same level since I wrote the original review, and this one has turned out to be better than all the others. The book would've been better if they mentioned a few extra things like how its treatment of electricity and magnetism should be taken as only working in an absolute frame, and is only an approximation to the full treatment.

All in all, this book covers so many topics, that no matter what physics you are doing in the future, you'll always be able to find some information in here that won't be mentioned in your other book.

It covers everything you need to know for a first mechanics course, a course in waves and modern physics, a first course in electricity and magnetism, plus a lot more that is never touched in class. Calculus is not needed for the mechanics course, but it is used in the book. If you know calculus, then you'll benefit. If you don't, you can skip the "calculus equations", and the rest of the mechanics part of the book will still all be comprehensible.

(This is based on the British edition of this book, which I expect is almost identical to the American edition.)

I think Jeffrey Archer's best book was his first (Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less) but his other books have been entertaining. Sons of Fortune is much like Kane & Abel, but the two men whose fates are entwined are actually twins, unknown to each other because they were separated at birth without knowledge of the parents. Not plausible, but suspend disbelief for the sake of the story.

The two men's lives are followed from birth, and they run in parallel without ever quite meeting through most of the book. Both go into politics, and eventually compete directly against each other.

The problem that I couldn't get past is the book's completely wrong description of how American elections work (especially the Connecticut gubernatorial primary and general elections). I suppose that Parliamentary elections may work as shown here, but ours don't (and Archer should certainly know it). Most major plot elements in the last third of the book rely on impossible electoral events. The errors aren't small, and can't be overlooked by anyone who's ever seen election results.

Even without the errors, this would be Archer's weakest novel. With the errors, it's almost impossible to finish.

Jeffrey Archer's recent legal troubles are well known. Perhaps he needed a quick bestseller to finance his ongoing appeals. That can be the only excuse for such a contrived, almost amateurish effort as "Sons of Fortune". Despite his background in politics Archer makes some careless mistakes of history (Henry Kissinger serving as LBJ's National Security Advisor for one). The timeline of the book is clearly unrealistic, as are many of the twists and turns in the plot. Archer should concentrate on writing short stories where such devices are the norm.

Ace voice performer Paul Michael gives a compelling reading to British author/politician Jeffrey Archer's latest foray into the lives of men and a nation.

Action begins in Hartford, Connecticut, when twin brothers are born and then abruptly separated. It is the 1950s, and one boy, Nat Cartwright, is sent home with his mother, a school teacher, and his insurance salesman father. Apparently beginning life on an entirely different path, his brother, Fletcher Davenport, becomes the son of a wealthy man and his society wife.

As the years pass, Nat attends a state university which he leaves to serve in Vietnam. Upon the end of the war he returns to college to earn an MBA. Fletcher, on the other hand, has gone to Yale where he earned a law degree. Success as a criminal lawyer comes easy for him, as does a later Senate race.

Each survives the ups and downs that life has to offer before they both contemplate running for governor, still totally unaware that they are brothers.

Will they discover the truth and, if so, how will they be affected?

- Gail Cooke