This is a good fundamental text on basic military strategy and higher tactics. Some of the concepts might be a bit confusing for those who know nothing on the subject, but for those who know a little, this title provides an excellent overview of basic concepts such as troop concentration, front lines, surprise and leadership. The text is Napoleonic/Clausewitzian in scope, with the classic military historian's method of studying leadership by studying proven leaders, in this case great military commanders and titans of industry. A lot of good inside information on business decisions that were made particularly in the area of marketing. And there in lies the major weakeness of this book - you can only take it seriously to a point - likening selling of rubber bands and automobiles to leading a cavalry charge acroos the battlefield or being a guerilla leader.

This was the best of the crisis of empire series, a standalone novel set in the same universe as the rest of the series. Although there are some tieins to the rest of the series this can be enjoyed on its own and conclusion does not affect the rest of the series. The main character, Al Spencer is a navel intellignce officer who has just had his life ruined by the whims of the empire. He is picked up out of the gutter by the Kona Tatsu (secret police), cleaned up, given a small task force and sent to a world where KT agents keep disappearing. The novel deals with the problems of understanding and dealing with an Artificial Life form (AI) while at the same time trying to deal with his own problems. One of the books stregenths is the personality built into the AI. Although enormously powerful it has its own weakness and gaps in understanding. The book takes a little while to develop its characters and situation but by a third of the way through it is hard to put down. Highly reccomended

This books is satisfactory..The first 10 chapters are good, the Schema Chapter 11 forgot how to tell the XML document which Schema do you want to use (This is a confusing figure it out chapter). The XML Databases chapter is poor, only showing examples with SQL Server (What about standard SQL databases, not the MS one).

The book is almost 900 pages but only 500 are material, the final 400 are case studies and appendixes.

However this is not a bad book, but is not the best way to start learning XML.

XML is not the replacement of HTML. If you want to write XML to convert it to HTML with XSL then you will take twice the time to create them, not an intelligent move. The true power comes when you want to interchage data between applications, not only web (you can use it with desktop applications with C++, Delphi, Java, VB, ASP or any other programming way) or to talk with a web server sending an XML request and receiving an XML response that you can parse with DOM or SAX.

Recommended but you will need other books to go on.

(This is a review of the 1st edition of this book.) My title to this review may be contradictory, but what I mean is, this is a good book for someone with absolutely no background in XML, as long as that person has some technical background in a related field, like HTML, Javascript, Java, etc. If this is the first book or experience you've had with any web-related technology, then you'll be hard-pressed to keep up.

Hunter does a good job explaining each item and I really like the way he branches into many related technologies, instead of just plain XML. Those related technologies include XSLT and XPath, DOM, SAX, DTDs and schemas. Some of these things, such as schemas and DTDs are essential for learning XML, so I'm glad they are covered.

At the beginning of the book, I thought that Hunter was another Microsoft lemming, just following the Microsoft trends and technologies. But it soon became apparent that he uses MS products where they make sense, but is quick to point out their drawbacks. It irks me to no end how the entire world chooses an internationally-accepted standard, then MS decides to come up with their own. Hunter does a good job of pointing that out.

One complaint is that this book doesn't do much in helping the Macintosh user that's starting into the XML field. That may have been remedied in the 2nd edition, and to be fair, there weren't a lot of tools available for the Mac user when this was written. I did find some Mac tools and found it humorous how the Windows, Java and Unix tools require extensive use of the command line, altering class paths, etc, while the Mac version was "drag the file onto the icon" to accomplish the exact same thing. But that's how the Mac world works.

I've seen 4 or 5 XML books and own two including this one. The other one I have is XML: A Primer 2nd Ed by Simon St. Laurent...I've seen other books as thick as or thicker than 'Beginning XML' and from a quick glance, I've found to contain little more than fluff.

'Beginning XML' does a good job of covering all the important topics related to XML like Namespaces, DTDs, Schemas, XPath, DOM, SAX, XSLT, CSS etc... much so that the title is not really accurate in this sense. The other introductory XML books out there do not even touch on these topics to any practical degree.

I would also not recommend a Microsoft Press XML book as, typical with anything from Microsoft, I suspect it will teach you XML in a style that forces you to be dependent on Microsoft tools. However, as MS is one of the most important purveyors of quality XML tools it would also be a mistake to ignore their offerings. 'Beginning XML' does a very good job of acquainting you with both the MS tools as well as some of the more important third party ones.

The author's style is very friendly and easy to read and succeeds in making very complex and often boring topics like XSLT almost tolerable and sometimes even entertaining. Even more importantly, he touches on all the important issues in depth so that after finishing this book you can consider yourself at least an intermediate level expert in the myriad XML-related technologies out there.

The only reason I'm not giving five stars is because there just might be something better out there. But then, I wouldn't hang around waiting for one, 'coz Beginning XML, unlike the other books out there, is going to educate you on the topic in a sufficiently comprehensive and useful way. XML and its related technologies is a huge and difficult field, and any book that looks like it makes for light reading will, in my opinion, fail to teach the subject properly.

When I first saw this book in hardcover, I jumped on it. After seeing the hardcover price, however, and what was "inside" I found I could leave it on the shelf.

This book is basically the aircraft history of every single B-17 ever built. Now, if that's what you're looking for - then this book is for you. If, however, you're looking for the comprehensive narrative history of the B-17 Flying Fortress that you "thought" this book was going to give you -- keep looking. That's not what this is.

Now that it's in paperback, I MIGHT consider purchasing it. As someone has said, this is like the "B-17 telephone book". It's an awesome reference work on each individual aircraft just like they maintain at the USAF Historical Research Agency in Montgomery, Alabama. For many, this book is ideal. For most of us, that's probably way too much detailed airframe information than we care for.

I was rather disappointed with the content of the book. Over 70% of it has little to do with "story" as the title promises. The majority of the book is more like a telephone book, with a 250-page (out of the total 319 pages) listing of 12,731 B-17s. Each of the entries starts with a US Army serial number assinged to the aircraft, followed by a series of dates and proper names (i.e., the aircraft's base assignments while in the U.S.). The length of the entries can be anywhere between 2 to 10 lines. The book is a valuable companion for B-17 experts or for people who has a passion for certain recorded facts about those 12,731 B-17s listed. And the 250-page listing is obviously an admirable outcome of strenuous work. But I would not recommend this book to people who want to read touching and exciting stories of or about the Flying Fortress. I have a feeling that I was misled by the book's title.

This books announces itself on its back cover as the "ultimate illustrated history of the B-17." But it certainly doesn't qualify as that, and even the title is rather deceptive. The book really is devoted to giving a very short, condensed history (about four lines, in three columns) of every single B-17 ever built. It is a work of reference, and an impressive one, rather than a story. This compilation fills 249 of the 319 pages of the book, leaving just 60 pages devoted to telling the story of the B-17. And that is too short, of course, to contain a complete, thorough treatment of the B-17's service life: Better accounts of that have been published elsewhere. This part still contains contain some quite interesting information, nevertheless. To conclude, this is a very valuable book to have if you are deeply interested in the story of the B-17, but it isn't what it pretends to be. Therefore, it rather disappointed me; but for some readers this will be exactly what they want.

Not so long ago, the thought of running a corporate PBX on a client/server network was unthinkable, almost ludicrous. Now many companies have a VoIP (Voice Over IP) PBX via their Cisco routers. Some organizations have separate VON (Voice Over Network) systems. While the benefits of convergence are many, their security implications are often ignored or, when they are considered, are addressed too far along into the development process.

That convergence is the focus of Voice and Data Security. About a third of the book addresses the fundamentals of voice and data security, covering topics such as cryptography, sniffing, and spoofing. The rest of the book deals with securing digital and voice assets.

As an example, PBX and mail fraud are huge problems facing corporate America. Yet while most companies are aware of the situation, many organizations don't do all they can to secure their voice systems. This book contains an excellent policy and audit checklist on how to set up a corporate PBX policy. Items such as protection management, standards and procedures, technical safeguards, and incident response are discussed in the checklist, which alone is worth the cost of the book.

A single unauthorized modem in a corporate network will undermine firewalls, cryptography, and all other protection mechanisms. Thus, the authors cover how war dialers and telephone line scanners can be used to ensure that the back doors that unauthorized corporate modems create are closed.

Voice and Data Security is valuable to those needing a good introduction to the core ideas and security repercussions involved with the convergence of voice and data systems. It speaks volumes.

I am a senior engineer for network security operations. I read "Voice and Data Security" (VaDS) to learn more about vulnerabilities in the voice world. A search for "voice security" here yields four results, of which VaDS is the only in-print title. Although I would have preferred VaDS to focus solely on voice security issues, I still recommend it as the only modern published reference for this critical topic.

When reading VaDS, it's important to remember that all of the authors have some sort of relationship with San Antonio-based voice security company SecureLogix. That's ok, as Foundstone is the powerhouse behind the successful "Hacking Exposed" book series. Some parts of the book read like commercials for SecureLogix products like TeleSweep and TeleWall, but the authors largely focus on non-proprietary solutions to voice security.

VaDS is strongest when it speaks solely to voice security issues, and, to a lesser degree, network infrastructure. I learned quite a bit about tapping phones (ch. 11), voice mail abuse (ch. 14), and voice-data convergence (ch. 5). Chapters on broadband infrastructure and exploitation were helpful. Even though the final chapter seemed out of place, its intriguing coverage of cyber law kept my attention.

Less helpful were the chapters covering general security issues, such as cryptography (ch. 18), malware (ch. 19), sniffing (ch. 20), scanning (ch. 21), passwords (ch. 22), firewalls (ch. 23), IDS (ch. 24), and denial of service (ch. 26). This material is so well-covered elsewhere that its appearance did little to help VaDS distinguish itself. Chapter 27 was an exception, with its succinct discussions of popular Microsoft IIS web server vulnerabilities.

Aside from including well-worn material, VaDS suffered slightly from a few technical mistakes. Explanations of buffer overflows in chapter 4 needlessly associated them with TCP-based sessions. UDP-based buffer overflows are exploited regularly. The author of this chapter also seems to believe that buffer overflows are a problem because they overwrite "user ID and privilege information" on the stack. That's rarely the case; subverting return pointers is the problem. Chapters 8 and 15, describing voice protocols like H.323, were difficult to understand, and ch. 18 (p. 283) makes an unsubstantiated claim that "a well-known Mid-East terrorist was discovered to be using steganography." Typos on pp. 155-156 appeared, and port 443 was replaced by 444 on p. 69.

Overall, VaDS marks a welcome contribution to the information security community. I plan to include it in my tier two security analyst reading list, with recommendations to concentrate on its voice-related content. Hopefully the second edition will strip out the unnecessary network security coverage found elsewhere, and include more excellent explanations of voice security issues.

(Disclaimer: I received a free review copy from the publisher.)

Roger Angell takes you through the troublesome and nail-biting career to the ordinary every day life of the renowned pitcher, David Cone. From his first participation in a major league uniform with the New York Mets, to many thriving seasons with the Yankees and Red Sox, and from the time that David's arm felt like a stable rocket launcher, to the end of his career when he prospered by throwing mostly split-fingers and curveballs instead of a blazing fastball. A Pitchers Story not only makes the reader envision a life as an imfamous pro-baseball player, but also learns from the way to handle themselves under extraordinary pressure. This book is also similar to a pitching lesson in itself, as grips of seams and the twists of wrists are manifested by the masterful Cone. I am sure that this story has made hundreds of people realize how hard-working and dedicated a person must be in order to maintain a respectable and successful career in the big-leagues, as Cone consistently did throughout his almost two-decade career. This book is certainly better than the average biography, and I would recommend it to any lovers of "America's Past Time."

This is a very good book but it ends up just a notch below Angell's other baseball books. I think the reason is that this book is essentially a biography and, thus, it gives the author a more limited scope. If your wish is to read a biography of David Cone, you could not pick a better author to do the job. If you want to enjoy the writing of Roger Angell, you may, at times, feel like David Cone gets in the way.

What an interesting turn of events; a world class baseball essayist picks an all-star caliber NY Yankee pitcher to follow through a season. They both agreed that this would turn into a book after the season. The problem is that this turns out to be the worst season of Cone's career. Lesser participants would have probably dropped the idea in mid-season. However, this book turns out to be more than the recap of a swan song. Angell gives us the beginning and the middle of Cone's career to go along with the end. We see the highlights and not just the low lights. David Cone makes for an interesting subject but the reader often enjoys the sidebar stories more than the Cone stories. The beauty of Angell's writing is how he takes us on journeys through Baseball and the reader is able to see through the author's panoramic view. We may start with the Red Sox and end up with the Padres. In this book we keep coming back to the ups and downs of David Cone. There are times we would have preferred to linger at other places and with other personalities that Angell introduced us to. Still there is plenty here to keep the reader's interest.

One last comment is on the publisher which is Warner Books. I am confused how it came to be that a lesser publisher would handle this project. The book may be well-written but it is of poor quality. My hardbound copy may not withstand another reading as it is already showing signs of coming apart. I recommend getting the paperback version (assuming there is one). I suspect the paperback will last longer than the cloth-bound edition.

I loved this book. If you are familiar with Roger Angell's baseball essays that appear regularly in the New Yorker, you know his love of the game and the people who play it. This book traces the year of David Cone, a very good pitcher, who just happens to have probably the worst year of his career. To the author and subjects credit, they go on with the project anyway, and it makes for a much different book than the author was planning on. You must pay attention while reading, because the author is often going back to the past of David Cone, shedding light on how he became a successful pitcher, and the ups and downs of his career, and in his life. It is a must read for anyone who enjoys great writing, and loves baseball. I personally would love to see an update on what happened to David after he joined the Red Sox, and what he's doing now that he's no longer in baseball. Thanks, Roger!

This book is great for practice strips! The only way to learn rhythm interpretation is to practice, practice, practice. This book is loaded with strips (and their answers). The content is OK. I didn't like how the author grouped junctional rhythms and heart blocks in the same section, too confusing for the new practitioner.

This is a good book for those that already have some knowledge about ECGs...if you are new to them, I would suggest finding another book to help.

Quite extensive workbook about hearth arrhythmias. In each case chapter starts with short theory and than examples of charts for the particular arrhythmias and than you get a chance to practice yourself with number of charts, answers in the back with explanations. It is a good practice book.

This is the pooest book I have ever read. You don't know what the author is triing to clarify. All the equatios seem to have jumped out without any derivation. The author lacks stern mathematic fundamentals.

I'm not complete reading this book yet - but from what I read so far - I found this to be a very informative book. It has a nice thorough introduction to most of the basic concepts dealing with curves and curved surfaces. The mathematical examples are easy to understand - it's a very good book for anyone who is starting to work with curved surfaces or needs a quick refresher. Oh yeah - is it me or does the author look kind of like Sean Connery?

You don't have to be a graphics guru to appreciate this book. A good high school math student could grasp the exposition in this book. I highly recommend this to teenage prodigies, not only for the exposition, but to read about the accomplishments of the prodigies who made this science. This book really emphasizes understanding and generalization - it will serve you well when you head out on your own. It is not language or platform specific and will remain relevant to the future for this reason. This book will serve as the foundations of a CAD, animation, or gaming background. It won't make you an expert in any of the fields, but your feet will be well grounded. The book progresses from Bernstein Polynomials, parametric Curves through Bezier Curves and on into the more recent developments in Knots and NonUniform Rational B-Splines.

The author is more than qualified to write an historical perspective: He's been a leading authority on the subject of computer graphics and CAD programming for more than a quarter of a century. He's been a personal acquaintance of many of the principal characters in the unfolding of this exciting and still young branch of mathematics. Characters such as Pierre Bezier, Steven Coons, and Carl de Boor. I should emphasize that the historic perspective doesn't interfere with the flow and development of the text from a purely mathematical point of view. You could read the text and skip the history, but that'd be a shame because the historical accounts and biographies are what set this text apart. In some sense you feel like you're experiencing the thrill of discovery in the same way that the theory developed - only in fast forward.

For these reasons, this book will also be of interest to anyone who enjoyed James Gleick's Chaos. But unlike Gleick's Chaos, you'll really get to understand the mathematics behind the story - the story of the development of NURBS. It reads like a novel with twists, coincidences and subplots. The men behind NURBS have had a profound influence on the last part of the 20th century and their methods will literally shape the future as the graphic tools of tomorrow's designers. I wish all textbooks could be written in this style. That would also mean all textbooks would have to be written by the founders of their respective fields and that wouldn't be a bad thing.

If you're a blue-collar Microsoft junkie looking for some sort of certification to let you pretend to be a programmer, perhaps your appetite will be better served by more specific texts. But for anyone who appreciates the art of programming, this book is for you - even if you don't ever touch graphics, it's just a fun book.

After Patterson's last disaster, When The Wind Blows,he has redeemed himself with his newest book, Pop Goes The Weasel. This story is very exciting but light in terms of character develoment, narrative style and basically most other literary elements which make for a well-written novel. However, these are not elements I, and I think many other readers', seek in a James Patterson book.With this said, I think you will enjoy Pop Goes The Weasel very much and find it a very, very fast read. The one minor flaw that I've found in this and other Alex Cross books is the totally unrealistic maturity level and dialogue voiced by Cross's seven year old daughter, Jannie. I'd suggest that in doing research for future books, Patterson should spend a little time finding out what real seven year olds are like.

Another Alex Cross adventure comes with another super villain and non stop thrills. This time Cross is investigating a series of "Jane Doe" murders in the impoverished sections of Washington D.C. The problem is that he is doing so unofficially and he is one of the few that sees the crimes as being related.

The killer is a well respected foreign dignitary who also has a passion for role playing games. He, along with three others throughout the world are members of an exclusive game called the four horsemen. How Cross comes to his identity and possible capture is a series of non stop chills. The ending may not be as topsy turvy and dramatic as other Patterson books, but some surprises do change the complexion of future Cross novels.

Patterson sticks to his format here. The positive aspect is that his fans know the characters and enjoy their continuing saga. Sampson has developed into the type of figure that would be extraordinary in his own book. The negative aspect is that some of Cross's statements and the details of his family life are a bit worn on the faithful Patterson fan. As a result, the Alex Cross novels could use an injection of freshness. Therefore the novel was a bit shy of the better Cross chapters.

Overall the book has a quick flow and only sputters in some of the chapters that surround Alex's relationship with Christine. The villain is devious but also falls short of a Gary Soneji or Jack and Jill. The plot is better than average and I am still left wanting more Alex Cross. A no brainer four star piece of fiction.

James Patterson has created Alex Cross so well, that he can be hard to distinguish from reality. He is a wonderful father, an upstanding citizen, an excelent cop, and a brilliant psychologist.

Pop Goes The Weasle, the latest installment of Alex Cross, gives his fans almost everything they could ask for and some they don't want!.

Just when Alex is the happiest he has ever been, the events surrounding the latest psychokiller threaten to make this the worst time of his life (even worse than when his wife was killed).

Will Alex pop the question to Christine? Will Alex prove to be a "bad cop", or worse yet a murderer? Will Alex lose what he holds dearest to his heart?

Read this book, and these questions and more will reel you in and keep you hooked until the very last page.

One caution! Don't read this book if you want a long read. I read this book in about 12 hours with no trouble!

The book is not bad and somewhat practical. If it was sold for half of its present retail price, I'd give it 4 stars.

I am the senior web developer at a small company looking for a good book to bring my less-experienced people up to speed on JSP. I bought this book because the introduction says, "This book is designed to teach you JSP, even if you have no Java experience whatsoever." Sadly that is not true.
Just three pages into Chapter 2, 'Creating a JSP Page', the author hits you with several pages of Java source code as he compares and contrasts the java source produced by JRun, Tomcat, etc as a result of processing a simple JSP page.
The first piece of JSP you see is the page directive, and this topic begins with references to java packages. First, I would think that there are kindler, gentler ways to dip ones toe into the JSP waters. Surely some simple JSPs could be written that do not require the <%@page import...> directive, saving this subject for later. And even so, the explanation of packages would make no sense to someone who did not already understand java.
And so it goes throughout this book.

I have some programming experience but am new to Java/JSP. I choose this book to start out with and am about half way through working all the examples by hand using Forte for Java CE and then "deploying" them to a seperate test server running Tomcat 4.0. Basically, there are several errors in the example code in the book. Some of these are fixed on the versions on the cd - some not. I've wasted many hours scouring the net and pulling my hair out to get the examples to compile and work in both Forte for Java CE and Tomcat 4.0 - EXTREMELY frustrating for newbies like me. Too bad, since otherwise the book is pretty well written. Don't assume the example code is correct and you'll be okay.