The book does not focus on the "Scientific and technical" side (only 1/3 of the chapters). Maybe that is why the subtitle has disappeared from the cover. Chapters 1-9 and 21-24 are generalities about XML and XML-aware applications. These would have been much clearer if the authors omitted to present all these useless options such as PUBLIC identifiers. Chapters 10, 11 and annex A paraphrase the MathML specifications. The MathML specs, freely downloadable online, are unusually clear themselves so the book does not bring much. I would have liked a word about the XSIL format, an index for the CD, and a correct table of content. I understand that if the authors had taken the time to write a well focused and pedagogical text, it would have been obsolete before publishing. Yet I am still looking for a book on XML for scientists.

Because the topic is changing so quickly, it is difficult to publish a current book on XML. Even with this disadvantage, the book gives the reader the information needed to understand how XML works, what its potential is, and generally how to implement it. I have two negative comments:
1. The book is a too cursory with emerging technologies which will be the mainstay of the technology: DOM, XSL, XSLT, SAX. These parts are critical for implementors and should have been discussed more thoroughly.
2. For a book on markup, they should have gotten the table of contents marked up correctly.

On the whole, an excellent book. Very readable.

Like Psycho, Bloch based this novel (however loosely) on real-life events. American Gothic focuses on the career of H.H. Holmes, a serial killer who lured victims to his "castle." Bloch's version is appropriately chilling, and carries his typical stamp of suspense.

However, Bloch is best known as a short story writer, and for good reason. His stories shine, while his novels tend to drag. This book is no exception. His writing style is much better suited to shorter fiction, and the plot and atmosphere of American Gothic are not well sustained throughout the length of the novel. If you are a Bloch fan, then by all means read it. If, however, you are a horror lover, something faster-paced may be more to your liking.

3-D adventure games and especially role-playing games tend to be the hardest genre to publish a good accurate guide, but using Prima's Bomberman World guide to help with the game is futile. First of all, there are hardly any secrets and the entire thing is 2-D where anybody could understand the simple, yet sometimes bland objectives. This book was really fun to read just for pleasure, and it wasn't bad at all.

I read this book as part of a correspondence course through the University of California, Berkeley in 1997.

The book is 8x11, about 350 pages, color photos and diagrams. The typography and layout are very good. Text is dense. The writing style is clear.

Chapter topics: Intro, Darwin, cell biology, genetics, race, human variation, primate evolution, living primates, primate behavior, hominid origins, interpreting early hominids, homo erectus, homo sapiens, lessons learned.

I rate the book average because topic coverage seemed thin. Later editions of the book contain more material. The book is graphics-rich. Lots of drawings, photos etc. More so than I am used to seeing in textbooks.

One has to celebrate the publication of a book like this, becuse of the scarcity of the information available on this subject. The book is relatively big (709 p.), more expensive than big ($150) and of course has quite an amount of interesting information.

But it is probably as important to highlight its shortcomings, which show how much remains to be done. I do not pretend to do a general review, for which I am not qualified and that is quite impossible in a work of encyclopedic pretense like this one. I will restrain my commentary mainly to the treatment of the field of electricity and magnetism, which I suppose has its importance in scientific instrumentation and does not lack in amount and variety of instruments by itself. Its reflection in this book is very unfair and inadequate, in my opinion. All the entries that begin with "Electricity-Electrostatic" span a mere 20 pages, 7 of which are dedicated to medical applications (electrocardiograph, electroencephalograph, electromyograph and electroretinograph, to be precise). One will search in vain, on the contrary, for any mention to the electron tube, or valve, or thermionic device. The totality of what the editors and the authors have to say about radio waves and related topics is included under the clumsy entry of "Radio Wave Detector". Here the whole history of electromagnetism and of radio is dispatched in little more than one page, including all its apparatuses and "science". In this egregious page one finds the only mention I have been able to locate to the "thermionic diode" and the "triode", but not one reference to galena or silicon or germanium. Coils, resistors, resonance, oscillators or quartz crystals are not even mentioned per se. The arbitrariness of the selection of voices and of the espace allocated to individual items is reflected in the fact that "oscilloscope" , for a contrary instance, has an entry for itself of a full page an a half. Under the entry "Current meter" it is only spoken about devices to measure water flows.

Another example of what I consider a total lack of perspective could be the fact that almost 10 pages are devoted to several types of compass, whereas the whole subject of clocks is dispatched in 5 pages. The editors try to explain in the Introduction how they have managed to handle the question of What is a Scientific Instrument? The explanation is not very clear and the results reflect this. Whereas it is probably fashionable among historians of science and museum curators to consider "Escherichia coli" as a "scientific instrument", this kind of boutades and trade jokes should not justify the lack of rigour in the treatment of what are, and have always been, undeniable instruments of science. The book is a conglomerate of fair individual cards, but nobody seems to have taken care of the equilibrium of the whole file. For having so many illustrious authors, the work is quite poor, superficial and deceiving.

Cross-references are practically nonexistent and the main index is of no much help unfortunately for bridging the lacunae, being for the most part a mere reproduction of the entries of a work that is by itself alphabetically ordered. The typography, printing and other production aspects of the book are of good quality.

in my veiw it is good but not so goo

If your repetitive strain situation has gotten to the point where you need primarily information on coping with the pain and inconvenience, possibly from surgery, this book has the best coverages of that aspect, among the 6 books I've read. The non-MD author appears to have written approximately 1/3 of the book from a non-technical viewpoint, describing the life experiences and ideas on coping, down to the most intimate issues. Easily worth the "price of admission" for any of the ideas you might pick up.

I was reading this book for reference on ChangeListener (page 729). The examples given does not even IMPLEMENT the ChangeListener interface. What a strange way to programing. This is entirely different from LeMay's TY 21 day examples. I am really confused. I am not buying another book by the same authors.

I bought this book when I was a beginner and read it rather quickly. Today I started work on a telnet client and remembered the book describing the use of telnet URLConnection. Cool, so I loaded the CD-ROM and to my disappointment no protocol handlers (the telnet handler or one for the other example) were included at all. I e-mailed their support person but after a few exchanges it became clear he didn't have a clue.

I found this a good reference on networking, I/O, RMI, and some threading.... but then again, I had some previous knowledge on each of those topics. Non-the-less, if you would like more information on those topics, I recommend it. Besides those topics, this book doesn't tell you anything useful. Just scratches a surface on Swing...

Remember that if you're a beginner or an advanced JAVA programmer, then this book will be completely useless. Trust me! For the amount of money, there're lots of better books around. In fact, you'll find the Official JAVA tutorial on java.sun.com much much better.... and it's free.

This book is a workbook without answers to the questions. It also contains errors. After all 't' does not come before 's'.

We were looking for a book to help us set a standard for our office to file invoices and ledger pages. After reveiwing the book at the library, we chose not to purchase the book, as it gave poor examples and did not solve our problems.

With the changes in the way a computers alphabetize the names businesses, there is also a great need for the rules on now businesses containing personal names needs to be reviewed. Computer alphabetize names as John Smith Co. as John Smith Co. and the current rules state the company should be filed as Smith, John Co. Good luck trying to find it under the two different systems.