The substance of this book is very good, if too wordy. There is no doubt that the authors have a firm grasp of their subject; now they just need to be concise in discussing it. As stated in the book, the book is designed for readers who have a basic familiarity with BizTalk -- however note that readers are expected to be familiar with MS operating systems and some scripting and programming languages. Not having this knowledge will make this book difficult to follow, especially in the examples.

Since the advent of the spell checker, no one proofreads any more. The book is rampant with errors. For example, the text will state that five parameters are required, then list six. In one case the publishing tool boldly inserts "ERROR! Reference source not found" when the text references a figure... Still, I'll give it high recommendations for content.

As a developer, I bought BizTalk Unleashed to evaluate the capabilities of BizTalk Server 2002. Specifically, I looked at how it can be used in EDI transaction processing and how to use .NET (VB.NET/C#) and I was impressed because the book has excellent examples, from general overview to step-by-step guide, on how to use every tools and technologies that BizTalk has to offer. Most importantly, the examples on how to use .NET (VB.Net/C#/) in developing COM+/COM/Web Sevices is very valuable. Not only they are valuable, all the examples I tried just worked which in itself saved me from frustrations!

I must say that with this book, I clearly discovered many great capabilities of BizTalk and I am confident that I can accomplish anything that involves BizTalk using BizTalk Unleashed!

By the way, the review just reflects my satisfaction of the book.

Given their popularity and relative longevity in the market place, it is remarkable that this recent issue is not of just a small handful of books devoted exclusively to the productions of the Wileman & Co. Pottery - the Staffordshire factory which brought us two household names of the 20th century ceramics. Wileman & Co. had two successful periods of production: first as the Foley China Works (the period from 1896 when one Percy Shelly took control of the factory and employed a number of talented Art potters, painters and modellers) and then as the Shelly Factory (the inter-War years marked by the birth of a new backstamp which saw the factory embrace a number of new styles and media). The history of the Shelly factory lines are as much a history of fashion and taste prevalent in the first half of the 20th century. This book charts in detail Wileman & Co., as it rode the tides of economic fortune and misfortune with a series of varied factory lines. Lavishly illustrated are Intarsio, Urbato and Pastello designs produced under the aegis of a talented new Art Director Frederick Rhead at the turn of the century; the diversification into the lucrative business of crested china. - a market made popular by W.H. Goss - the introduction of wares by the well-known children's book illustrator Mabel Lucie-Atwell and the production of a series of wares which (as much as any factory in the UK) embraced the new design known as the At Deco. The format of the book is very much what one has come to expect from these publishers: various sections of the book deal with backstamps, restoration and fakes and - seemingly a must for all collectable ceramics publications - each of the many colour plates a price guide to the object illustrated.

This book is a rare find! It is hard to find books on porcelain collectibles and this is an excellent one. It has beautiful color pictures, an excellent history and a value guide that is right on! I collect cups and saucers and the Shelley's are amoung my favorites. This book shows the various styles and patterns that Shelley made and is a very informative reference book.

This series of guides is a valuable tool when identifying most of the stone projectile points made by Native Americans all over the United States. I first accquired the 3rd. edition and have since worn it out. Not only does the book identify the points, the color pictures are fantastic, and the many types of flint, chert and other lithic materials are covered. This book contains a wealth of information.

Purchased to study projectile points. I was not disapointed with the packed information and photos on this subject. Used as well, as a price guide for collectors, I none the less use it as a reference manual. It lists point artifacts from each part of the country broken down in groups of states. It then shows most of what is common for that area as far as shapes, sizes, etc. It is a good guide for the beginner to learn both projectile shapes and nomenclature. I carry it as a supplement to other books on archaeology and prehistoric American Native studies.............

I'm in the Royal malaysian police. I'm looking for history about an old sidearms in our force by name Revolver.38 Mark IV Webley. I just be informed that this pistol from Great Britain. I really need more info regarding this side arms. Can you send me this history of Webley thru email as soon as possible. I appreciate you can help and solve my big trouble. Thank you.

I rate this book a solid five stars. This book is a very comprehensive price guide. It covers literally hundreds of manufacturers American and European. The Price Guide lists the grades and options and also classifies the gun (ie.curio, relic, modern, and antique).I do not however,recommend this book to the novice collector. The book is mainly text with few pictures depicting the individual grades or models.Personally I like it for the fact it is "unclutterd" by photo's which can be very misleading. I would say this book is a must have for the experienced collector or auction and gunshow attendants. The guide is compact for easy carrying around the shows and is formatted by maker for quick reference. The guide also has a very comprehensive glossary of gun terminology and even has a cartridge price and ATF classification guide.

The rather long title says it all. It's a nice collection of transistor radios, their descriptions, price estimates, and hundreds of (mostly black and white) photos. Lots of good history here, along with tips for collectors. Not as fancy as some of the others, but a classic, and another must-have.

Excellent book with good coverage of every set I could find. Easy to follow and I particularly enjoyed the history section about the beginning of the transistor age. Very nice book!!

A timeless classic, written by Robert Louis Stevenson was a great book for those of us who like adventure. The book begins at the Admiral Benbow Inn, which Jim Hawkins, the main character works. Suddenly, from out of the blue a rough sea faring man appears named Billy. That is when the real adventure begins!! Jim and his mother find a treasure map in a dead customers sea trunk. Jim got a couple of respectable people together and they bought a ship named the Hispaniola and set of sail for Treasure Island, not knowing the problems that lay before them. I think the author wanted the them to be, be careful whom you trust. I fully enjoyed this book and I think you will too. To find out the rest read, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.

"Treasure Island," written by the 19th century novelist, Robert Louis Stevenson, is the timeless story about life on the high seas with pirates, treasure, murder, and treachery.

When young and naive Jim Hawkins is given a treasure map from the mysterious old pirate, Billy Bones, adventure and trouble are not far behind. Soon Jim finds himself aboard a ship with a villainous crew led by the cunning and mendacious pirate, Long John Silver. Greed and the lust for gold driving the pirates, they have murder in mind when they reach the dubious Treasure Island.

Skillfully yet simply written, Robert Louis Stevenson gives us an alluring tale that sparks the imagination. With its dastardly plot and mothly crew of rogues and villains, it entrances the reader, and keeps them wanting more. "Treausure Island" is the perfect read for anyone just wanting a good, exciting story.

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson is by far one of the best adventure stories I have ever read. This book deserves all five stars, it has everything you could ask for such as, suspense, comedy, action, drama and a great plot line. R.L. Stevenson puts a lot of detail into his main characters such as Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins just to name a few. He describes the scenes with such great detail that at times I had to remind myself that it is only a book. I spent more than 2 months reading this book and I enjoyed every part of it. I could RARELY find a paragraph that was dull, the book was very exciting overall. This book is fairly easy to read and I would recommend it to adults and children of all ages. The book moves at a very good pace, not too fast, not too slow. This book is anything but boring, something new happens in every chapter for instance, when Jim witnesses a murder and when he gets into bar fights, those are just some of the many things that happened. I was very surprised myself when I read this book because it seems a little childish but in fact it's quite the contrary. I highly recommend that you go out and read this book!

Excellent Book, will take it faithfully to antique shows and malls. Lots of great information and the photos are outstanding. I'm glad to finally have a guide book that's helpful, informative and expertly written.

This is just the best book ever on the subject,great photos, unbelieveable color. Very thorough history chapter, obviously written by someone who truly knows his subject and loves it. I am of the understanding that 100% of proceeds from the sale of the book provided the funds necessary for the Runges to establish the Stangl Pottery museum in Flemington. Fantastic book, fantastic people!!! When's book 2?

Absolutely the finest example to date of thorough and organized research! The history of Stangl dinnerware is presented in chronological order of the development of patterns; the history of the pottery and its people is both factual and entertaining. Mr. Runge's knowledge of the pottery and the people who made it great is vast and he shares it with the reader. This is more than a picture-price book - it's informative and interesting reading as well.

Suggested prices are presented with the pattern they represent and are reflective of a nation-wide market, not just the New Jersey "going prices" we have seen before. I would recommend TWO books - one to keep "for nice" and one to use while shopping. You will find the photography to be excellent and detailed - you can actually identify patterns with confidence.

Previous books seem to have been thrown together to get a book in print and are sadly out of date and incomplete. This one reflects years of research and thoughtful presentation. Absolutely a must for Stangl collectors and dealers!

This collection offers the reader a very mixed bag. Pulling off an anthology like this is extremely difficult because the stories threaten to be repetitious, tedious, or both. Robert Price has only moderate success here.

The stories are remarkably varied; Price has taken a good cross-section of stories about the Necronomicon and has avoided the repetition problem for the most part. Despite this, some of the stories are quite predictable.

The strength of this collection indeed lies in its variety. When was the last time you read a Mythos story by John Brunner? His story is one of the best of the book. For that matter, Silverberg and Pohl are not well known for Mythos contributions, but they make contributions to this volume.

The real tedium in the collection comes in the versions of the Necronomicon. There's only so much archaically-written gobbledygook a reader can stand. After a page of it, the rest looks like more of the same. Thus, "The Sussex Manuscript" and Lin Carter's contribution are of little interest to the reader. Carter's repeats the same themes again and again, showing some creativity but soon losing the reader's interest.

The value of this collection, then, is limited. Some of Price's other collections present a much more interesting read. This book is one for the dedicated Cthulhu Mythos fan.

For those of us who came early into our addiction to H. P. Lovecraft, the Necronomicon assumes a singular place as the most famous book never written. Lovecraft's non-existent volume, a treatise on magic that unlocks the dimensional barriers that seperate us from Earth's powerful and horrific former rulers, has assumed a life all its own.
The Necronomicon: Selected Stories and Essays Concerning the Blasphemous Tome of the Mad Arab is a wonderful compendium of lore and imagination compiled by editor Robert M. Price. The various stories, prefaced by an informative and insightful introduction by Price,
are all excellent in their own way, but rather uneven in tone. From genuinely creepy tales like "Settler's Wall" and "The Howler In the Dark" to more tongue-in-cheek offerings like Robert Silverberg's " Demons of Cthulhu," The Necronomicon offers a little bit of everything for the hardcore Lovecraft junkie.
For me, the book's real spine lies in the pseudo-scholarly articles that deal with the Necronomicon and its author, the "Mad" arab Abdul Alhazrad, as if they genuinely existed. Included here are such choice items as a biography of Alhazred, a history of the Necronomicon as written by Lovecraft himself, the John Dee Translation of the Necronomicon (an over-the-top parody so hilarious it reads like Shakespeare on acid), and a refreshingly serious , A Critical Commentary on the Necronomicon written by Robert M. Price.
If the idea of ancient tomes of forbidden magic, exotic lands, distant times and unutterably terrifying monsters appeals to you, then this book is a welcome addition to the growing body of Lovecraft studies.

If you're a die-hard fan of H.P. Lovecraft's work, and the Cthulhu Mythos that grew from it , then you MUST add this book to your collection!

The book is composed of essentially two sections. The first is a collection of stories, by various authors, concerning the Necronomicon, that blasphemous occult tome invented by HPL. The second part of the book has several versions of sections of the Necronomicon, and commentaries about the tome. Even if you do not find the stories of interest, this book is well worth having for the latter material alone! Most notably included are Fred L. Pelton's "The Sussex Manuscript," Lin Carter's "The Necronomicon: The Dee Translation," Robert M. Price's "A Critical Commentary Upon The Necronomicon," and H.P. Lovecraft's "History of The Necronomicon."

Fear not the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods! Get this book!

THE HOLCROFT COVENANT - 4 STARS

I never liked much espionage, spy books at all. I used to think that all of them were boring and too complicated. This changed when I read that book. THE HOLCROFT COVENANT has a very interesting plot that the reader is able to understand without much problems. I'm not saying here that the plot is not intricated. It really is! But Robert Ludlum does it so wonderfully that the reader goes on reading without notice if it's morning or night. He's the best spy book I've ever read, I say this without hesitation. Frederick Forsyth is another good author, but Robert Ludlum is much, so much better. I became addicted to Robert's books when I read that one. Now I love this kind of book to death and would really love to have more and more books by Mr. Ludlum on the following years, God willing. If you don't like much this genre, try this book and start to enjoy it. If you're already a fan of spy books, THE HOLCROFT COVENANT is a must-read, I assure you. Long writing life to Mr. Robert Ludlum! He's just the best on his craft! Try him and you won't be dissapointed.

I've recently found that in all the Robert Ludlum books I've been reading, and in some cases re-reading after several years, that his early work is by far his best. If you're new to this author, this is a good starting point - and this plot was re-used in part for his later effort THE APOCALYPSE WATCH, also worth checking out. This riveting story which has almost come true concerns a vast fortune left in a Swiss bank account by Hitler's aides for the SONNENKINDER project, a plan to start a Fourth Reich and take over the world. Sounds familiar? One of the earlier inspirations for many more novels of this nature, including Clive Cussler's ATLANTIS FOUND in part! Noel Holcroft, one of the Sonnenkinder, must use every trick and desperate measure in the book(no pun intended) to get his hands on the fortune to prevent the Fourth Reich getting their way. Along the way, he finds that he cannot trust anybody he comes into contact with as his trail leads him to Brazil, Switzerland and England. As usual, Ludlum never fails to surprise the reader - who is really the professional assassin TINAMOU? The answer does not come until near the end, which is a surprise in itself! Overall, a very fine read!

You read stories every day in the business section about Nazi millions being discovered in a secret Swiss bank account. This takes place all over the world. This outstanding book tells about 700 million dollars being stored away in a Swiss bank account to start the Fourth Reich. This money is released by the signature of the children of Nazis who were taken out of the Nazi area aboard submarines. This is a truly spellbinding book that is hard to put down. Read this book and then watch the business section of your newspaper or the Wall Street Journal. You will know what I mean by realistic. It shows great writing by Robert Ludlum. Buy this book.

Schiller's case rests on a rich mix of quantitative and qualitative research and analysis. (By qualitative, I include his surveys of fund managers with small sample sizes). He challenges a great many points of conventional wisdom, showing them to be neither conventional nor wise.

One thing he fails to do, however, is systematically refute the hypothesis that high valuations (especially for tech stocks) are justified. Real option pricing, for instance, does demand an approach completely different to that of traditional discounted cash flows: if an investor wishes to take on the risk of an unproven business model, with its attendant uncertainty but large potential upside, that is not necessarily irrational.

Schiller's answer is that the P/E ratios are so far off the historical norms that it's not worth discussing further. And the option pricing view can't hold for the whole market.

The challenges to efficient market theory, and to Jeremy Siegel's (of the Wharton School at U Penn) views in "Stocks for the long run" are similarly one step short of complete.

That said, this book serves the invaluable function of challenging the complacency that pervades popular opinion and the media. My own favourite manifestation of this is the Economist's observation that when stocks rise, newspapers describe them as "strong"; when they fall, they are "volatile". What's in a name? Market sentiment, which drives prices to unsustainable levels.

This book was written because the author cares. Both as an academic and as an observer of public policy, he rightly fears the effects of a collapse in the markets. He deserves to be read.

Robert J. Shiller's "Irrational Exuberance" is about the most bearish book you could ever read about the stock market. Filled with charts and graphs and footnotes of every description, the book--whose title comes from a quote by Alan Greenspan--attacks Wall Street ideas that have become so accepted that they are household sayings. The principal such idea is that securities have always been the best investments over the long run--beating out bonds, foreign currencies, rare stamps, gold and the like. Shiller points out quite a few examples of how market prices, principally the Dow, have remained pretty flat over some periods of 10, 20, 30 years when corrected for inflation. In some circumstances, you might have done better if you put your spare cash in the bank.

Of course the market has been a great place to stash your cash if you got in at the right time--in 1982, for example, at the very start of the longest-running bull market in history. But put your money there now at your own risk. Seventy-two percent of mutual fund managers believe that we're in a speculative bubble now, with the Dow, at 11,000, reaching for figures that far exceed the historic level which would put the rational figure at 6,000. Shiller would not be surprised if the Dow settled in at, say, 10,000--in the year 2020! And what's more, he'd not be astonished if the Dow sank to 6,000 in the near future.

I was convinced after reading Shiller. He has marshalled his facts in a carefully researched screed against following the sheep-like crowds and I have replaced the tens of millions I had invested in common stocks with far more secure, if less exciting, instruments.

Harvey S. Karten film_critic@compuserve.com

This is a treaty on Behavioral Finance. Shiller makes a strong case that markets are not efficient, but respond to crowd psychology.

Shiller rebuts the Efficient Market Hypothesis. He has analyzed many U.S. stock market crashes. In each case, he did not find information absorbed by institutional and individual investors that justified the market downturns. In all cases, it appears the investors were "aware" of the reasons for the market downturn as explained by the financial press after the downturn occurred. For Shiller, this means that the reasons were false, and that investors do not digest information in such an efficient and immediate way as stated in the Efficient Market Hypothesis.

Shiller believes investors are irrational, and trade based on certain premises such as herd instinct, momentum, belief that stocks always go up. These beliefs are reinforced by the media. The resulting market valuation at the time the book was published (first quarter 2000, the market's peak) was far above its intrinsic value. As they say, the rest is history. Shiller's timing was perfect. We have been in a Bear market ever since.