Of the three books on reggae I have recently read this is the second best. It gives a fairly good overview of the music, recommends albums from various periods and interviews a lot of former and current stars. It's not really a book for continuous reading but rather a reference work to be consulted occasionally. Overall a worthwhile addition to the growing literature on reggae - better than Reggae, Rasta, Revolution but not as good as Reggae Routes : The Story of Jamaican Music which is definitely the best book ever written on the subject.

Jamaica's incredibly prolific musical output (more than one hundred thousand different records over the last fifty years) is a phenomenon totally out of proportion to the island's small size, its 2 million strong population and modest wealth. Equally significant is the huge influence of reggae music on everything from punk to hip hop to today's rave and dj culture. So if you're looking for a reggae primer that really explains what it's all about, this is the book you need. Authors Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton possess an unrivalled knowledge of Jamaica's rich musical heritage and if you've ever bought any of the superbly remastered and repackaged reissue cds from Barrow's Blood & Fire label, you'll find the same care, attention to detail and love of the music in the pages of the Rough Guide.

The book chronicles the entire history of Jamaican music chapter by chapter, from the earliest beginnings to the sounds being made today; explaining when, how and why each new style developed, who made it happen and the background of continuing social change in Jamaica itself, which has always played a part in shaping the music. There are also excellent accounts of the evolution of reggae in the UK, the USA and Africa.

In each chapter the main text is supplemented by profiles of the major singers, groups, dj's, musicians, producers, engineers, studios and promoters who came to the fore in that particular era, which often include interviews with the artists themselves. The accompanying discographies are well researched and can reliably be used to add to your record collection. There are over a thousand featured albums in the book, each of which is concisely reviewed, and although there's no rating system as such, the most important releases are highlighted as being essential for a particular artist or style. Such ratings are inevitably subjective, but if you follow these recommendations you won't go far wrong.

The Rough Guide is also well illustrated throughout with photographs and album artwork, and overall the book is as comprehensive and accurate as it can be while remaining reasonably concise. I don't generally spend much time wading through books about music because theory (ie reading about it) is invariably much less enjoyable and informative than practice (ie listening to it), but I've found this one to be consistently useful.

If you have a few dollars more to spare I'd recommend that also you buy the wonderful 4 CD set "Tougher than tough: the story of Jamaican music", so you can read and listen in parallel; and if you'd like to dig deeper into the subject try the excellent "Bass culture: when reggae was king" by Lloyd Bradley. But the Rough Guide should definitely be your first book about reggae music and will probably be the only one you'll ever need.

Most people that have criticized this book already know a great deal about reggae (or at least think they do) and don't need a primer such as this. Sure, it can't include everything. It is the "Rough" Guide afterall. In my opinion, one could do considerably worse than this book written by one of the foremost reggae historians working today. It has been accused of being relatively stale and slow but if you're interested in the subject matter that shouldn't matter, right. This is history not entertainmant. If you want to be swept away by the prose get Borges. If you want to learn about reggae from a knowledgebale source then read this book. It's that simple.

I am only 14, but as I read this story of danger and heroism I am touched. This detailed book of the Canadian Forces and one mans life as a sergeant is amazing. It has inspired me to join the Forces when I'm older. It is a book that every student should be required to read. It is a vivid story full of adventures. I read and found it great. I was looking for a book on the Canandian Army in the local library and found this book it looked very interesting so I checked it out. It's the best book I've read in my life!

I read this book and I could not put it down! As an ex- canadian forces member everything he said is true and factual. I only hope there are more books like this cause if there are I'm sold! Bravo Zulu Davis!!!!

I myself also being a member of the Canadian Armed Forces found that this book really hit home. It really shows the amount of personal drive the Canadian Infantry soldier has despite the pervasive political control and outdated equipment. It was also a chance to reflect on my own and ongoing experiences as an Infantier and gave me a true idea about Yugo and Rawanda that I had only heard about, but never truely understood. If you have any affiliation with the Canadian Army, buy this book.

White Swan, Black Swan was a very up and down book for me. I don't usually read short stories, so I was pleasantly surprised to find this book not as frustrating as most short fiction is for me. The entre given by these stories to the world of ballet and dancers is fascinating. The stories with fictional characters were good to great. Sharp's dancers and their mates are sharply etched, pained, joyous, dwellers in a world that combines tulle and pointe shoes, gossamer and aching joints.

However, I was puzzled by Sharp's stories featuring well-known dancers. These were scarcely fictionalized accounts similar to those I've read in biographies or magazine articles. They provided me no additional insight into the inner lives of these famous folks and I wondered why Sharp had bothered, when her fictional characters were so good.

These days,I usually avoid fiction that claims ballet as a subject matter. I was a professional ballet dancer myself, and most books on the subject that I read in the past (again, I am emphasizing FICTIONAL here)were as cliched as those posters of dancers with the quote "If you can dream it, you can become it..." This book, however, was great. I was impressed with the boldness of Sharp's voice and her handling of the subject matter. The truth is that the ballet world is magical and beautiful, yet also painful, unforgiving, and not without betrayal. White Swan, Black Swan tells the stories with grace and intelligence.

I love this book! I've taken only four months of ballet in my life --because I was a laughable clutz at it -- yet I was quickly drawn into these stories and the world of ballet the author creates. And I stayed in that world, turning the pages, because the characters gripped me. And though these are stories, they read like a novel: the same characters appear in various stories so that we can follow their lives to resolution, even though some of the resolutions are sad.

I liked Sharp's use of famous people in some of the stories, because I had known little about them beyond their names; now they are real people to me with their own private stories and heartaches. I also love watching the characters, both famous and those created by the author, as they live their private lives off-stage.

This book has everything I look for in fiction: heartrending characters who are also lovable, unusual settings and predicaments that keep me reading, beautiful words and images. The author has created a "world," and I loved being in it.

While most books on this subject tend to jump around and offer a lot of code snippets that may or may not apply to your application this book uses a sample application "Hotel Reservations" throughout that illustrates nearly all of the language fundementals while emphasizing the .NET framework. The application is developed in a way that does not necessarily tie you to the Visual Studio.NET development environment but still illustrates many of its features. It provides a very good overview of the .NET framework and covers all aspects of the development interfaces from User Controls to Web Forms Page Life Cycle.

This book was used as a text in a class of 9 and all reported that they found that it would help them do their job better. I use this book frequently when looking for examples of how to employ a particular C# feature such as Asynchronous Callback or Disconnected DataSets.

Thanks to the Authors for a job well done!

This book gives experienced developers all the practical insight they need to build enterprise applications for Microsoft's .NET platform using C#. This book covers important topics in the .NET Framework for experienced programmers. This book is perfect for programmers who have basic knowledge in object-oriented languages such as C++ or Java but no need of prior experience in C#. The self-reliant treatment provides an easy and concrete insight to application development in C#.

This book gives experienced developers all the practical insight they need to build enterprise applications for Microsoft's .NET Platform using C#. A seasoned Visual Basic programmer who has experience in working with objects and components in VB could also read the book.Using extensive code examples and a running case study, the authors cover the complete process of constructing a .NET application: creating a monolithic C# console application; enhancing it with a Windows Forms interface; isolating functionality inside components; adding database access and security; and finally delivering functionality through ASP.NET and Web Services.this book is intended for experienced developers and provide all the practical insight they need to build enterprise applications for Microsoft's .NET Platform using C#.

This book is clearly defined, in-depth and example-rich. The major case study, the Acme Travel Agency, is progressively developed in Chapters 4 through 12. It illustrates many features of C# and .NET working in combination, as they would in a practical applications. The experienced C++, Java and VB programmers become efficient with .NET with the help of this book. 

Unlike some technical texts, this C# book by Robert Oberg is actually pleasant and straightforward to read. There is a good balance of narrative and examples, new features being introduced, explained and demonstrated. There are helpful hints along the way for experienced Java and C++ programmers.

The book focuses on the C# language but the coverage of ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Visual Studio.NET, web forms and web services is all there. OO is covered nicely but this is by no means a book on OO programming. I'm sure that there is a need for a .NET book on OO given that many adopters will have no background in this -- something similar to the Java Objects wrox book perhaps.

If you are interested in programming in C#, just curious or want a reference text then this is a very good book. Being at around 185 pages this book gets right to the point, so it is for programmers familiar with languages like Java, C/C++ or those that are experienced. It contains a language reference and introduction into the .NET framework and class library. It does not cover using Visual Studio .NET and RAD application development. Topics pertaining to the .NET framework are restricted to a few areas, with a few small examples, with pointers given to where to look in the framework SDK online help. If you want to pursue your interest in C# then you can get a more thorough book to follow C# Essentials, but this is still useful as a small quick reference to the language.

The joy of O'Reilly books is that are concise. You can pick up this book and read it in two days and start writing C# code immediately. This book covers all of the major elements of C#, but without lots of handholding.

If you're a beginning developer, this will be a poor choice. However, if you you're a fairly experienced C++ developer, I would strongly recommend this book.

I've printed out the C# Language Reference. I know all the answers are in it somewhere, but it's nearly 300 pages of dense writing. Rather than wading through it, I paid $15 for this book and I'm now writing C# code steadily and easily. I refer back to this book for quick reference questions (what's the format for setting a property, what does a COM interop call look like etc.) and then go online or to the language spec for deeper questions.

If you want to get up to speed on C# quickly, this book should meet your needs well.

C# Essentials by O'Reilly is a small, yet complete reference of the C# language. In less than 200 pages it contains a complete specification of the language. Having worked with C# since before it was public beta, and the only documentation that existed was a specification within Microsoft, I was surprised to open the book and learn new things about the language that I was not aware of.
Chapter 1 - Introduction
The first chapter gives a brief introduction to the language and it's relation to the .NET programming paradigm. The one issue I had was the use of the term "Component orientation." The use of the overloaded term "Component" to describe a single class has confused many people and its use in here was no different.
Chapter 2 - C# Language Reference
Chapter 2 is a complete reference of the syntax and features of the language. This chapter really shines. It provides complete explanations of the language features without being too wordy. Additionally, it provides real world contexts for using the features that keeps the usefulness out of academia.
One piece that's incongruent with the recommended coding standards published by Microsoft is that the author places curly brackets on the same line as the construct, rather than moving them to the next line.
Chapter 3 - Programming the .NET Framework
Chapter 3 gives a great introduction to the .NET framework as it relates to C# and covers things such as string use, collections, regular expressions, attributes, threading, COM interop, and others.
Chapter 4 - Framework Class Library Overview
Chapter 4 gives a brief overview of where to find major functionality within the .NET framework. It doesn't go into detail of how to use the class library, but does give an overview of where things are. This chapter probably could have been left out, since the framework is well organized into pretty descriptive namespaces, and the book didn't elaborate enough to be useful.
Chapter 5 - Essential .NET Tools

Being only 4 pages, this chapter could have probably been called an index. It lists out the utilities distributed with the .NET framework and provides an abstract of their function.
Conclusion
Chapter 2 and 3 alone are worth buying this book. If you're looking for a concise C# reference, or are looking to migrate from C# from another language, this is the book for you.

A long-term corporate client recently requested a class in C#, as they have an interest in learning about the language but are not yet ready to adopt it for development. To prepare for the class, my first action was to read this book. As I worked through some of the more interesting exercises, I was struck with how easy they were. Very few are more than two pages and all were easy to understand. As I closed the book, I was pleased with my knowledge of the language.
As I went on to write the material for the class and began creating the exercises that I would use in the training, there was no difficulty as I was well-versed in most of the syntactic differences that C# has with C++ and Java. Since I have a set of standard exercises that I use in my other programming courses, this made it very easy for me to build the lessons.
The exercises are also well-suited for anyone with a minimal programming background. Even someone with little experience can work through them if they possess the determination to do so. I recommended it to my students as a book that they could use to fill in the details that it was necessary for me to leave out.

Focus of this book is on the language itself - It doesn't get side-tracked talking about Visual Studio and .NET in general, like many C# books. It is written in a clear, friendly tone and the concepts and definitions are easy to understand. The organization is also well thought-out. Like all 21 Days books, it is divided into 3 weeks of 7 days (chapters) each. In this book, Week 1 covers language basics, like using the compiler, variables, operators, control statements and an introduction to classes and methods. Week 2 goes into more intermediate language topics like enumerators, arrays, exception handling, inheritance, interfaces and delegates. Finally, Week 3 introduces a some advanced C# topics like operator overloading and reflection as well as demonstrating how C# fits with the rest of the .NET world, specifically, the .NET Framework, Windows Forms, Web Services and Web Forms.

One caveat: If you don't have a lot of programming experience, the first couple of days cover conceptual topics that may be a little confusing. Don't let that trip you up. Just skim over them ignoring anything you don't understand and head to Day 3. That where the real meat of the programming topics begin and from there it starts at the beginning and builds on itself, as you'd expect.

I particularly liked the Week In Review sections that provided extended examples (often several hundred lines of code) that demonstrate the concepts covered in the previous week. Cross-references make it easy to look up anything that is unfamiliar. This really helps pull together the concepts and helps you understand how to apply them to real-world code.

Overall a great tutorial that doesn't skip around or backtrack like so many computer books do. The organization also makes it a good reference for looking things up after you learn C#.

Like most of the 21 Day books, this one does a good job taking the reader through the basic aspects of its subject matter. The book says it's written for novice programmers-- I'd take that with a grain of salt. If you haven't programmed before, C# can be a difficult place to start, and this book won't really make it much easier. But if you have had experience with VBA in Excel or other programs, or if you are in an experienced VB programmer, this book will ease you into C# without undue difficulty. Lots of quizzes and exercises, so you can check your progress as you go along and apply what you are learning. Only one chapter on the .Net Framework, and only one on Web programming, but these topics are dense enough that you would probably want a separate book on each topic. So, one can't really fault Jones for only touvhing lightly here. Two chapters on WinForms and Windows applications, with the rest of the text focused mainly on console apps to demonstrate the language.

Yep after months and months of ranting and criticizing that the red book publishers (Wrox) have lost their magic touch, just when we were about to give up on them, they return with an outstanding book, probably one of the best in their Beginning series ever, and coming back in form in such style, this is simply unbelievable - Beginning C# is all I needed.
Working as a developer in ASP for over 3 years now, but never actually having tried my hands in a real hardcore programming language, I bought EACH AND EVERY book on C# being published since the past one year, but couldn't get past the 40th page of any of the books, they were designed for hardcore programmers and for a moment I wondered if Microsoft and other authors were leaving pure ASP programmers down the drain.
Beginning C# is the answer to all the prayers if you've faced the same delima as I have.
First the drawbacks.
Someone at wrox has decided that publishing a book less than 1000pages is a crime.so I guess I can let go of that. This book has 1031 pages.
Having multiple authors at times irritatingly breaks the smooth flow of explanations from chapter to chapter. GDI+ may be understanding enough as a chapter but the manner of explanations and approach to "try it out" examples is suffocating, irritating and makes you want to tear the entire chapter out of the book.
Also some examples are NOT WORKING and THIS CAN GET YOU FRUSTRATED, so be WARNED.
The plus points.
25 chapters, precise to the point, length of each chapter kept under 25 to 30 pages. Basic aim of each chapter is to explain the topic and right away get your hands dirty with examples.Each example explained step by step.
OOP being an integral part of C# comes only on Ch#8 after you have grown sufficiently confident enough to open Visual Studio and write basic programs for Windows/Web.
This according to me is a very intelligent planning of chapters and hence non of the chapters come across as speaking to you in a foriegn language or in a manner of saying that "sorry if you don't understand us , you are an idiot"....
This book can be held at the same high teaching standards set by Beginning ASPDatabases/Beginning ASP/Beginning JavaScript.

The only other book which even comes close to this is C# By Herb Schildt. Which is another exceptionally good book for beginners, though it does not touch the wide range of topics as Beg.C#
With this book Wrox is back in form.
Simply put... An Amazing Achievement....

Wanting to move up to a more sophisticated WEB language (from ASP,VB) I've bought quite a few books on .Net and C#. However, all of them left me with a lot of questions on how to just get started with the language.

This book solves all those problems. Anyone new to C# or just object oriented programming, can learn from this book.

The way that Karli eases you into the concepts and describes what each line of code does is extremely helpful.

This book is probably NOT for the Intermediate to Advanced programmer as Karli covers a lot of basic programming concepts. However, It also is a great primer for anyone wanting exposure to the language.

I wanted to learn C# (and learn more about .Net), and I'm coming from a mostly VB and ASP background. I was happy with Wrox's "C# Programming with the Public Beta" book (co-written by Watson), but wanted something that was more complete. At close to 1000 pages, this book certainly FEELS complete. It is also smartly outlined with excellent examples and exercises at the end of each chapter (but where are the answers??). Best of all once you step through the chapters on Windows and the web, there are TWO complete Case Studies (something I love about the Wrox books), and an article about building an Online Shopping Cart Using C#.
This book is similar in quality to Ivor Horton's "Beginning Java 2" books. (Only with better examples, in my opinion).

"A Short Sharp Shock" is a complex book, but it isn't as difficult to understand as some reviewers have made out. This novel is a story about a man and his journey to rediscover his past and the identity of a girl; a common enough theme. This strange world and the characters inhabiting it are painstakingly constructed by Kim Stanley Robinson to explore thoughts on chaos, dreams, memory, history, and love. Basically, what is it that makes us human? Pay special attention to the different creation myths told over various campfires throughout the book; since the author "created" the world, these myths explain what he was trying to accomplish with this novel.

Throughout the novel the reader is asked what makes us human and what makes us unique individuals? Is it our genetic make up? Our dreams? Our memories? Our biochemical construction? Our capacity to love? And, interestingly, is it our connection to the past, to our ancestors?

I finished this book in a day but I thought the novel was just long enough for Kim Stanley Robinson to cover all the points he wanted to, especially when you consider how intricately detailed each scene is described. If it were longer one could get bored, and his intent wasn't to create a rich fantasy world to escape to and to explore, but to create a world in which to explore questions of existentialism. There are, however, a number of inconsistencies in the narrative, I would be interested in finding out if they are deliberate literary devices or oversights stemming from impatience in going to press.

This is Robinson like you've never seen him. I guess I COULD compare it to his Mars trilogy, Ice Henge, or Antarctica, but it's really unlike them. However, it ranks up there with his very best works.

As usual, his character development is incredible. The description of the Fantasy world he creates is amazing. I finished it in one sitting, though I thought about it for the next week.

The novel's strength lies in its inner meaning. Read for face value, it's a decent novel though extremely confusing. Read with some thought and reflection, it can be seen in many different lights, such as the circle of a human life, relationships, histories...the list goes on.

Truly a remarkable novel, but don't read it if you just want a light, fun read (like Dune or Grisham novels).

"A Short, Sharp Shock" is quite different from any of Robinson's novels, or for that matter from any of his short stories that I remember. It's as good as anything else he's written, but in a totally different direction.

Robinson creates a world of mythology, of peculiar yet compelling visions. The story can only be said to be elliptical, orbiting far out into mysterious lands and lives, before hurtling back to its starting point in a particularly thought-provoking way. If all this sounds vague and atmospheric, I'm sorry, but this is not the kind of book that can be described by simply condensing its plot.

That plot focuses on an amnesiac character who finds himself abruptly thrust into a peculiar world, a thin strip of land surrounded by an untravelled ocean. As he travels along through this evocative landscape, he interacts with a cast of memorable persons most of whom are not clearly friends nor enemies, but all of whom provoke some kind of response in the protagonist (and in the reader). The meaning of this journey starts out simple -- a search for someone who might be his partner, and who was kidnapped by a band of local thugs -- and with every page, it becomes more complex. By the end, the journey has become a metaphorical strand tying together cosmology, love and hate, cultural diversity, parallel universes, the unrecoverable loss of memories, and I don't know what all else.

No review can adequately describe this story; it's too complicated and yet too simple. I *wholeheartedly* recommend it.

The Nutshell series published by the O'Reilly group has become so ubiquitous in the IT world that it needs very little introduction. As the preface of C# in a Nutshell states, the aim of the series is to become the desktop reference for whatever technology is covered by each book. In this case, O'Reilly aims to make this book the must-have reference for all C# programmers. This review will focus on the points that any good reference book should address, namely: brevity, completeness, correctness, and usefulness. Unfortunately, my own personal knowledge of C# is restricted to what was discussed in .NET Essentials (another O'Reilly publication), so I won't be able to be as critical of the correctness as I would like. My conclusions are thus based on short tests that I ran to check the validity of the claims made in the book.

C# in a Nutshell scores high marks in both the brevity and correctness categories. Humorous as it might be to label an 830-page book as brief, it actually qualifies as such. The main discussion of the language is kept to the first 270 pages, with an average of about 20 pages devoted to each subject. Only the essentials are discussed, and that will usually be enough when you need to quickly look up how to do something. The remaining 560 pages are devoted to a Quick Reference of the .NET framework classes. While reading the text, I never came across any glaring inconsistencies, such as conflicting descriptions of how to accomplish a task, which leads me to suspect that the text is mostly correct. The few actual tests I ran worked as expected. On a superficial level, I found the content credible.

When it came to completeness, I wasn't as impressed. As a reader, I have somewhat of a personal bias: I'm pretty familiar with both C++ and Java. I also suspect that this knowledge is shared by a large percentage of this book's audience. As a consequence, I found myself wishing that the advanced features particular to this language had been covered more thoroughly, and that the description of features shared by C++, Java, or both, had been trimmed down a bit. I found the sections on Custom Attributes, Serialization and Threading to be especially light, given that they are all core features of the C# language. I also found the two sections dealing with integration of legacy components (DLLs and COM) to be somewhat inadequate for professionals who actually need to deal with these issues. However, I do understand the balancing act that has to be done to keep this book brief. I would have wanted more emphasis on the unique features and considerations associated with this new language, and less on the basics. On the other hand, the authors should be commended for the range of topics they manage to touch on in such a small number of pages. Certain topics, such as Diagnostics and Command-line tools, are fully described and could easily have been forgotten.

My real beef with the completeness of this book is related to the 500+ page SDK Quick Reference. Let's start with the good: The descriptions of the classes and their uses are verbose, and useful. The Quick Reference is logically divided up according to the .NET package divisions, and each description includes a very good UML diagram showing you where each class fits into the grand scheme of things. Now the bad: Though the class interfaces are fully detailed, there is no description whatsoever of the actual method parameters, and how they will be used internally. From a programmer's perspective, this is extremely annoying. Here's an example of what I mean: The class System.Timers.Timer has a property called interval that can be set through the constructor, or through property accessors. Without a proper description, one might imagine that this property relates to the interval at which the Timer does what it does (in this case, throws an Event.) However, we have no idea what units the interval property is using. Do we specify the units in seconds? In milliseconds? In nanoseconds, even? We have no idea, and we can only figure it out by trying it ourselves. You can imagine how frustrating this would be for properties where the answer is not so easily discovered.

The second major issue I have with this book is the unadvertised omission of the System.Windows.Forms and System.Web namespaces in the Quick Reference. It seems as if these GUI-related namespaces have been saved for Programming C#, but I found their omission in this book to be questionable, at the very least. I wouldn't complain if the namespaces were at least described briefly in the Quick Reference, but they aren't even mentioned once. This choice renders the book practically useless on its own for anyone who wishes to add a visual interface to his or her program, which, unless you're writing server code, is nearly everyone. I think that if the goal of this book is for it to be the only desktop reference you'll need, then in this respect it has failed. Similar to the Java in a Nutshell / JFC in a Nutshell combo, you'll probably need both this book and Programming C# for a complete reference from O'Reilly.

All in all, it is hard not to recommend this book for anyone who plans to work with C#. Its description of the language basics is thorough, the advanced features are at least brought up and discussed, and the reference, for all its flaws, will be considered useful by most. In particular, I appreciated the UML diagrams included in the book, placing it one step ahead of the Microsoft documentation. However, the book is somewhat incomplete, and you will most likely want to get Programming C# (convenient, isn't it?) and keep that bookmark to Microsoft's online documentation, at least to look up what the function parameters actually do.

This newly introduced "C# in a Nutshell" provides all the basic information most programmers would need on both C# and general .NET programming. It is a textbook that will appeal to both intermediate and advanced users. All parameters which constitute the basics of C# language, Visual Studio .NET, and object-oriented principles were expertly exposed. I was really impressed by its method of handling the Systems.NET, Systems.XML, and Interopservices.
This is one C# book that I would recommend for most intermediate users, (as well as advanced users who need a handy companion). It bared all the C# parameters, although some sections were overtly summarized.

If you have picked this book to learn C# because you don't have much time, most likely you will find that it's a hard nut to crack. In my view, it's a handy reference book for intermediate C# progrmmers who want to review key features of the C# language, essential programming concepts using the NET framework classes and the details of any of the 700 .NET Framework Classes in 21 important namespaces without using MSDN online libaray. If you often find yourself printing topics from Visual Studio NET Online Help and read them on weekends, then this book is for you.

Section I (chapter 1- 4) summarizes key concepts of the C# language, illustrated with succinct code.

Section II (Chapter 5 to 19) covers programming using the Framework Class Library, such as String, Collections, Streams and I/O, Serialization, Assemblies, Reflection, Custom Attributes, Garbage Collection, Threading and Interop.

I felt that each topic discussion is a little too brief and many important topics mentioned in the overview section of the book are not discussed at all, such as graphics, data access with ADO.NET, Remoting, Window Forms, Web Application, globalization, Configuration.

In section III, some useful .NET Framework SDK tools are covered, which is very helpful.

The last section is detailed listing of the most important core types/classes of the .NET framework. I like the UML diagrams illustrating class hierarchy and relationships.

Personally I would like to see some code samples under important types.

The book is 832 pages thick, I hope the future edition will add the missing topics mentioned above and more code, making it a 1,000 page reference book. -- Reviewed by Timothy D.

As another reviewer said, the structure is not logical, e.g., capturing video is at the end of the book, when it needs to be at the beginning. The author steadfastly recommends using the single-track, rather than the far more intuitive and simple-to-use A/B roll method of editing, forgetting that anyone buying a beginner's book on Premiere is just that...a beginner! Why not make it as easy as possible? His approach offers no real advantage. Further, the "visual" aspect is not sufficiently helpful, and the short descriptions create 2 new questions in the reader's head for every 1 new concept covered. Do not buy this book.

A comprehensive and well organized manual for Adobe Premiere 6. Includes a great Index and detailed Table of Contents, making it easy to find answers to almost any questions very quickly. Text is generally to the point and clear, with many illustrations. In addition to thoroughly covering Premiere, there are general sections related to video, such as Frame Rate, Time Code, Interlacing, Aspect Ratios, etc..

It should be noted that this book is NOT a step-by-step tutorial to teach you Premiere. It works as a reference manual, and does that job admirably. Although one could probably learn Premiere with this book, for beginners I would recommend Adobe's Classroom in a Book series and/or the tutorials that ship with Premiere.

Overall, an outstanding book and an excellent value. ...END

Premiere 6 for Macintosh and Windows Visual Quickstart Guide by Antony Bolante, et al can help readers at any level learn this very capable but sometimes complicated software. Chapters and examples are organized in the same order that most users will access various Premier 6 features, Macintosh and Windows version differences are painlessly explained, and step by step task instruction is provided in each chapter. This logical "here's how you do it" approach, plus the wealth of illustrations and non-technical explanations should be especially welcome to readers without experience. It is refreshing to read a computer book that visually educates and contains plain language instead of chapter after chapter of technical jargon. But, this is far more than just a book for beginners, as the experienced user will also find many tips and strategies for effectively using Premiere 6, too. Explanations of the many audio and video import and export settings, information missing in most Premiere documentation, were invaluable in helping me produce an acceptable end result. The comparisons between Premiere 6 and traditional film editing were also very interesting, and although this information isn't necessary to use Premiere 6, it helped me understand how motion picture editing is done. And the price is right too, especially for a 400+ page book loaded with examples. This book helped me make the fast progress that I needed to make, and did it with style. Bravo!