A REALLY good book; I recommend it highly. Well-written, terse, and a page-turner.

Having read Paul Reilly's Dragon Fire, I was anxious to read The Espionage Game. Wow! Where has Reilly been hiding? I need MORE! When's the movie???

This is the book that the Access programming community has needed for years! It uses a Problem - Solution - Discussion format instead of the usual academic "let's disect Access's capabilities, throw them at you in little bits, and let you figure out the WHY later" format. Even the table of contents is much more readable and understandable. You know the reason for reading the chapter right from the start, not at the end.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not bashing the multitudes of other Access reference type books, it's just that we finally have a book that fills a BIG gap. Once you read this book, you'll have more use for the others. This book and the others complement each other nicely.

The format of this book is not exactly new, however. Rob Krumm's programming for dummies books have used this format for years (albeit not as explicitly), which is why I enjoyed them so much and always hoped he would go beyond the beginner level Access programming books. Access Cookbook does exactly that, and in a very refreshing way.

Two things about this book were a big surprise to me. 1. Ken Getz wrote it and 2. O'Reilly published it. I couldn't think of 2 better choices! Ken Getz takes his high level expertise and writing style and transforms it into a new book that opens up his experience to a much wider audience. THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! And then there's good ole O'Reilly publishing who have always had a talent for presenting a very academic subject to a less academic audience without loss of rigor.

"Cookbook" is an ok word for the title I guess, but I think "Storybook" may be more fitting, because I find that when I start a section of a chapter, I just can't put down the book until I see how the section ends. Likewise, when I start reading a Discussion section, I have to read it all before I put the book down and hit the keyboard. I even use this book for bedtime reading!

Enjoy!

O'Reilly has a series entitled "The Missing Manual" of books. This could rightfully be the "Missing Supplemental Guide" for Access, for this book opens up a lot of the lesser known tricks that are not covered in the standard text but are part of the problems database managers face all the time. Getz, et al take us beyond instruction into actual working code, and explains the idea behind it. The examples are practical - I've put a number of them to work in daily business already. And with the accompanying CD, you can see these functions in action through live database examples. The help in the book is not overly technical so only an Access Guru can follow and replicate it. It's written for people who work with Access and are comfortable with it but want to take things to the next level. The book is organized into thematic chapters so you can delve into what you want or need to know and get the full range. My copy is covered with post-it flags for different examples I want to refer to again and again. It is not often that a book can fill the void in instruction, but Getz and the Access Cookbook had done just that. User friendly, practical, and understandable make this book a permanent resident on the shelf only an arms length away.

Another reviewer complained that this book includes material originally written for a book on Access 95. That's true, but the examples were updated to run on newer versions, and there's also a lot of great new material.
Chapter 5, "Taming Your Printer," was completely rewritten to take advantage of the new Access Printer object. Many of the topics in Chapter 11, "The Windows API," were changed to account for changes in recent versions of Windows. Chapter 12, "Automation," has new topics that show how to automate the newer versions of Office products. Plus, there are two completely new chapters--"Using Data Access Pages" and "Working with SQL Server Data."
So, even if you have a well-worn copy of the classic Access 95 How-To book on your shelf, as I do, you'll find lots of useful new material in this new Access Cookbook.

We are more than our symptoms. It is a natural progression, demand and supply, that one in three people in this country have experience with some form of alternative medicine. Currently there are four medical schools that off courses on Integrative medicine, and over twenty schools teach spirituality, healing and medicine. We are seeing a new generation of doctors of modern medicine trained and enlightened on holistic healing. Dr. Ian Smith, medical correspond for ABC, is one of the young doctors of this generation. Dr. Smith talks about natural healing, Chi and herbs whenever he is on the Today show. Having come from three generations of TCM - traditional Chinese medicine, and work with Chi energy healing, I see this book provides a timely overview of the available alliterative methods as well as some of the basics on prevention by living a healthy and balanced life. Cancer isn't necessarily an automatic death sentence anymore. Often times it is a manageable disease like arthritis. One can live with cancer and still achieve a good quality of life.

As a physician striving to keep pace with the rapidly growing science behind natural medicine, I have always found Dr. Murray's writing to be highly trustworthy, practical and just really great reading. This book is an excellent resource for anyone struggling with cancer. I am recommending it to all of my cancer patients and I have begun to incorporate many of the books recommendations into my practice. Thanks Dr. Murray for a fantastic book!

I already own the whole set of (excellent) books, nevertheless I bought the CD basically to get the added benefit of direct access searching. Alas, I lost the money. I use an iMAC to do my research works. Well it turned out that the search engine included in the CD doesn't work directly, but uses a tricky TCP/IP connection against a 'search server' written in Java. In my iMAC (that I keep completely updated) it just doesn't work. First, you need a connection of some sort (even simulated) to resolve the localhost/127.0.0.1 pair (as MAC TCP doesn't use a Host table). If (and when) the server starts, it sends erroneous results to the browser (spaces are interpreted as delimiters so that 'System Folder is passed as 'System' thus causing the browser to be unable of find the right location). The server fails under MRJ 2.1 and MRJ 2.1.1 (it even fails to correctly install the preferences). A short letter to ORA just obtained the well known 'not our fault but of the server (external) implementors'...and 'very hard efforts to implement it on Macintosh'!?. Otherwise the port to HTML is excellent.

I had always been an O'reily fan and this network CD set, not only is great but a lot more convenient. I can have a terminal window and a browser open at the same time. Very convenient and it is all you need to start networking.

Creo que es un excelente recurso para quien tiene que administrar redes. El hecho de tener en un solo CD Sendmail, DNS,TCP/IP, Firewall y Security es invaluable a la hora de consultar y solucionar problemas. Si bien prefiero a la hora de leer con tranquilidad el libro en papel, en el momento de buscar soluciones en el trabajo, el CD ha probado ser una gran ayuda.

I agree with many of the reviewers below that this book was helpful and often interesting. It gives a readable orientation to one of the most important movements in the software industry today, and the editors have been fortunate to gather together so many contributors who obviously know whereof they speak. In particular, the editors' Introduction, Eric Raymond's "Brief History of Hackerdom," Richard Stallman's account of GNU and FSF, Bruce Perens's discussion of Open Source, and Tim O'Reilly's essay on "Infoware" were informative and thought-provoking.

That said, it should be noted that the Amazon reviewer above gets it wrong when she writes that the book gives a "fascinating look at the raging debate." In fact, *nothing* about Open Source is debated in this book, which is a major disappointment. As the reviewer from Princeton below notes, the goodness of everything Open Source and the badness of everything Microsoft seems to be a given for many of the writers. At the risk of criticizing the book for not being something its creators didn't intend, I think it would be greatly improved with the addition of a wider range of viewpoints and even a dissenting voice or two. (There are a number of essays that could give place to some alternate content: Eric Raymond's second essay, "The Revenge of the Hackers," leans heavily toward the self-congratulatory, as does the Netscape cheerleaders' "Story of Mozilla." And Larry Wall's "Diligence, Patience, and Humility" seems to have been included not on its own merits but on the author's reputation as the Perl Deity.)

A final wish is for the book to address a broader range of readers. As a longtime computer user but a relatively new programmer, with no formal business training, I found many of the essays to rely heavily on the jargon of hackers and MBAs. More editorial control here, in addition to a broader range of content, would make this book seem less like preaching to the choir and more effective at spreading the Open Source gospel.

This is a good idea on O'Reilly's part to try to document the history and goals of the Open Source movement, which had roots in several college campuses and research labs in the '70s and '80s, and became news in the late '90s with the popularity of Linux, Apache, and the decision of Netscape to open its browser source. The best introductory piece, however, is probably Eric Raymond's "Cathedral and the Bazaar" which is not in this book(O'Reilly publishes it separately, but it's available free on the Web and short enough to be read in one sitting). As for this collection, I liked Robert Young's business case for distributing open source - his story of how Red Hat was launched reminds me of the Compaq tale of "three guys in a restaurant". The Apache article is also quite good, and Linus Torvalds offers a brief but interesting (and characteristically opinionated) article about how Linux evolved technically. There's also a good article discussing the various open source licenses (BSD, GPL, Netscape, etc) and what they do and don't restrict.

Others I was less impressed with. Stallman's article is predictable and self-serving. He explains how he evolved his software-as-gift philosophy but doesn't come close to terms with how the software industry can support substantial employment if all source is given away. There's yet another history of the different branches of BSD Unix. There's a breathtaking inside account of the launch of Mozilla which ends with the fancy Silicon Valley party when development has finally gotten underway. The low point is Larry Wall's "essay", which is a frankly ridiculous waste of time and print.

Although this is a mixed bag, there's enough reference material and interesting points of view to keep the book around.

Open Sources is a collection of essays by people who have been involved in a prominent way in what is being called "the open source revolution." The authors are all very bright people with good intentions and diverse viewpoints; this makes for interesting reading. However, I had a problem with the introduction. In fact, I hated it. It attempts to couch the issue of free vs. non-free software in religious terms: in the bad old days, free software only came from universities or other government-funded research. Then, a few companies saw the light and began to open-source their software; currently the industry is divided between these companies (the saved) and the rest of the companies (the damned) who will spiral into oblivion due to their proprietary selfishness. I thought the presence of this sort of rhetoric in the introduction, which sets the tone for the rest of the book, was particularly unfortunate.

The essays in Open Sources are a mixed bag. Kirk McKusick's history of Berkeley UNIX is great, as is Michael Tiemann's history of Cygnus Solutions, RMS's article about the GNU project, and Bruce Perens' article about licensing issues. Also, I really enjoyed the transcript of the infamous 1992 flame war between Linus and Andy Tanenbaum about the merits of Linux vs. Minix. On the other hand, Paul Vixie's article about software engineering is pretty random, Larry Wall's article does not seem to have a point at all, and Eric Raymond's

second article and Tom Paquin's account of the open-sourcing of Netscape are too self-serving to be useful.

Overall, I enjoyed this book quite a bit. However, the year that has passed since its publication has exposed some of the more outlandish predictions made by its contributors (Eric Raymond said that Windows 2000 would either be canceled or be a complete disaster). My guess is that Open Sources is not destined to become a classic. Rather, in a few years it will be viewed as an interesting but somewhat naive period piece.

This book covers a lot of topics - but lacks in-depth explanation on many important stuffs. I tried to reference the book to help me with some Excel automation. However, the 40 Excel pages in the book helps only a little. Not a single word on 'charts', poor presentation on 'Range', no mention of Excel built-in functions... MS user's guide or online help is much better. The coverage on other parts look just like the Excel.

This book shows at a very high-level, what you can do with VBA in all of those MS Office applications.

The only problem with this book is that every piece of information can be gathered from MSDN.

If you are not sure what VBA is, or how you can use other Microsoft Products in you Visual Basic projects, then get this book. It will be a real eye-opener.

This book is a good starting point before you go out and buy that 2 inch thick book on your individual office component. This book does not go into advanced concepts, it is moreover a guide to Office's object model. I felt that it left many important concepts out. The selection of what was important in Excel was sporadically helpful. I started out with this book, but needed additional references to drill into the specifics. I've *never* accessed data the way they say to in Access, nor would I. There is a discussion section in the back with suggestions on how to use the Office suite to solve problems, but no specifics.

This book was a big disappointment. It does gloss over alot of the key VPN ideas, but there is not much substance. I've learned more from reading various tidbits off the internet.

Also, before you even consider using PPTP you should read the CounterPane cryptanalysis paper on PPTP.

http://www.counterpane.com/pptpv2-paper.html PPTP on windows NT is just not secure!

For a total newbie, this book might give them an idea of what to look for on the internet, but besides that I don't see too much value in this book.

I wouldn't buy it again, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone that I liked.

What was O'Reilly thinking!! This is the first time I wasted money on an O'Reilly book (and I have plenty). This book was a rush job. There are many inaccuracies, a lot seem to be the editors mistakes. The authors seem to have the practical experience, but it is not communicated in a clear manner. The chapters on PPTP, AltaVista and Cisco PIX were organized in a good way and were helpful. Overall, the diagrams are poor. Better graphics could have salvaged this book. I give it two stars because there are not that many books on the market.

This book solved a lot of problems for me. While much of the product coverage no longer applies, the theory and practice of the VPN, as well as the basic need for such a technology gave me the information I needed to convince my upper management to use VPN's better.