When this book surfaced about eight years ago, I remember all the critical kudos and recommendations it got. For some reason, even though I had the book shortly thereafter, I never got around to reading it until now.
This book has some exceptionally well written scenes; vignettes that touch the heart and make for some truly memorable moments. For instance, the hero (?), Evan Scott, needs to buy ammunition so he goes to an old childhood friend whom he has neglected since becoming a well established architect. Their scene of what friendship can truly mean is really heartfelt. Later, Evan,along with his unsolicited sidekick, Dass, are walking through Central Park and the elderly man suddenly reaches out and takes Evan's hand to hold and walk. Although initially embarrassed, Evan lets him do that and they walk hand in hand, like a father and son walking along the beach. It's moments like these that elevate this somewhat ineffective thriller to its heights. Unfortunately, a series of touching vignettes and some suspenseful action scenes, do not a great novel make. The plot focuses on Scott's efforts to stop a Hindu (that's right) mob from killing people who know about their secrets at a construction site. A girl falls from the building, Scott catches her eyes on the way down, and from then on, Evan is embroiled in a complex scenario with the usual cops won't believe him, wife doesn't believe him, etc. Add to this that Scott has a mistress who works in his office, and you get the ingredients for the melodrama ensuing.
I wish I could like this book more, but there are too many distractions. Even though Dass is a wonderful character and his relationship to Evan really nice, his constant ramblings about the Hindu culture get repetitious after a while. Likewise, the constant reflections of Evan's Vietnam days, while helping identify Evan's character and justifying his derring do, they too get a little too repetitive.
The book does show Smith's unquestionable talent with words and characterizations; unfortunately, in this case, they're so heavy-handed, we miss the thriller aspect.

I wasn't sure that I could finish this book after I had read the first half. It seemed disjointed, with no real detail but a bunch of actions thrown together. Each action was meant to catch the attention, and did mine. However, the transition from action to action reminded me of the camera work on NYPD Blue. This may work on TV, but in a book it almost makes you wish you could get seasick.

On the other hand, the last half of the book seemed to come together and flow better. In any case, it would make a better movie than a book. Sly Stallone as Evan "Rambo" Scott might actually attract some interest, and it would be much better than "Judge Dread".

I have read all of Mitchell Smith's novels, and this one was a pleasure. I really love his unique writing style. Mitchell is an unusual writer, having written books about widely different subjects: Due North about a woman living in the wilds of Alaska; Stone City about life in a prison; and several thrillers. His characters are interesting, and his descriptions of scenes are excellent. Highly recommended

When you look at the table of contents, you can discover the book is not just about how Java and Corba work together. Or let me put it this way, that's not the only theme you can get from this insightful book. My take-away after reading all the parts where it discusses the history and difference between Corba and other distributed object technology is a satisfatorily complete overview of all these middleware/messaging technology, which are all important contributors to today's red hot J2EE-compliant application server market (BEA WebLogic, IBM Websphere), or what EJB likes to be known as: ORB with TP monitor capability.

Granted, the book is a little outdated (written in early 1998 apparently), and this is about the only drawback of the book. Hope the authors will come up with a new edition with all the latest development in this topic soon. And mind you again, I skipped all the implementation parts of the book (which is the only reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 stars - because I don't wanna be potentially overrating a part that I didn't read). I focussed on the high level discussion on CORBA concepts (which explains it better than other books I've read on this subject), how Sun started to endorse it with Java, as well as comparing technologies (comparable not in the technolgy purist's sense, but in the sense that they are 'enablers' for IT folks who wanna implement remote object invocation over enterprise LAN or over internet) such as traditional sockets, CGI, RMI, Servlet, and the major CORBA rival - DCOM. If you've used these various technologies before separately like I did, and sometimes felt a bit overwhelmed by all the different standard and practices, this book provides an EXCELLENT melting point where suddenly why there're all such various levels of technology, and the relative pros and cons of each of them all makes sense.

While the cartoon martians are a bit over the top, the rest of the book is right on target. I sure wish the authors would have come up with something with a little more meat than the "Count" object they seem so infatuated with, but I give them credit for getting all the mileage anyone could out of it. This is an excellent technical book on the subject of Distributed Object Computing (especially using CORBA) if you already are comfortable with Java. I didn't wait for the second "release" of this book (we had to get started right away) and immediately found that none of the examples work directly with the new downloads of OrbixWeb or Visigenic, although most of the fixes you need are obvious enough to work out. I assume the next "release" of the book will fix that problem. In all, the level of detail on CORBA was excellent and there was even a good section for comparison with other competing technologies (although I felt comparing CORBA with Java sockets was a waste of space).

This is an excellent book for learning and applying CORBA from a Java environment. It is loaded with examples and is pretty well indexed. I have been able to find just about everything I wanted related to CORBA programming. It's focus is programming. In addition, it does an excellent job of comparing and contrasting alternative technologies (e.g., DCOM, HTTP/CGI, RMI, Sockets/RPC) and implementations (e.g., JavaIDL, VisiBroker, some Orbix, Applets). It has nice tables of capabilities and performance metrics to summarize the various comparison sections. It does not cover any details of the underlying protocol, etc. The last half of this 1000-page book is devoted to three-tier implementations, Java Beans, CORBA beans, and Enterprise Java Beans -- excellent coverage of an important topic, but better split into a second book if only to help make the index less cluttered.

I've read a couple of other books by Mitchell Smith. If memory serves correctly, I read Daydreams, Stone City, and Karma. Stone City was excellent (about a small town History Prof in jail for drunk driving, who must discover which of his prisonmates is a serial killer who's offing the prisoners) and the other two were good. Unfortunately, this latest book is something of a departure for him, and mostly a disaster.

For one thing, while it's supposed to be a suspense novel, there was, strangely, no suspense. It wasn't that I guessed the ending so much as I didn't care. The plot involves a main character, Joanna Reed, who writes poetry and teaches at a small liberal arts college in New England. At the beginning of the book her husband is killed. We know he's been murdered because it's narrated for us, and we know how the killer did the deed. The killer is a young woman named Charis, and though we know how she did it, we're not supposed to know why. The problem is that there are only a few possibilites as to motive, and one becomes likely and obvious rather quickly. Charis moves on to kill the remainder of Joanna's family, one by one, and then tries to befriend her. This goes on for the best part of 400 pages.

Unfortunately, there was nothing to make the story worthwhile. The characters are somewhat interesting, but the suspense is robbed from the story. One side plot has Joanna (the widow) becoming convinced that fishermen must have killed her husband because he saw them smuggling marijuana. This is interesting, except there's not much suspense---we know they didn't kill him, and we know they won't kill her (because the book's about halfway over at that point, can't have a book without a main character). As a result, it winds up being a pointless plot device that goes nowhere.

I can't recommend this book, and Smith goes on the list of "maybes" for now.

I think Mitchell Smith is a fabulous writer and I've read every one of his books. This isn't his best work (I strongly recommend his others), but the story is compelling and interesting. And Smith always creates intriguing, multi-dimentional characters. I think Smith is a bit of a rara avis, and his books appeal to people who appreciate a deeper insight, a different point of view and a lot of character analysis. And his writing is rhythmical, but every book makes me gasp at least once with surprise. I think the characters in this book are less sympathetic than some of his other work, and the plot a little more obvious. Nonetheless, it's solid work by a great author - but read his other work for a real treat.

After spending the day reading this novel, as the story progressed, all I could think of was wanting to read more of his novels. We all know that variety is the spice of life, and after reading previous reviews, this is shown to be true with me.

Admittedly, I didn't understand the use of "peeing", like "all women always have to pee before they go anywhere", but I felt the story to be fast-paced, pretty incredible, but very believable when you know the true stories of some of those very mixed up people that walk our streets. I felt that in places he became a bit "wordy", but felt that it might not be for possibly more intellectual people than myself. I am not much of a fan of poetry, especially literary poetry, and could have done without some of those references personally.

I thought it to be a good day of good myteries, and definitely something that I see Hollywood making a movie of. Very enjoyable and I plan to purchase more by this author.

In Mitchell Smith's "Sacrifice," a bank robbery nets the surviving thieves nearly a million dollars each. For one of them (Tyler Pierce), though, the plans he had for the money soon become insignificant. His daughter, with whom he has not had contact in years, becomes the victim of a serial killer in Florida. Pierce then decides to take his funds to use them to hunt down the killer. With the contacts that his criminal background provides, Pierce is able to find help in a few sources, foremost among whom is a prostitute with a valuable knowledge of the area.

The conflict of a hardened criminal against a serial killer has the potential to lapse into a cartoon, but Smith, to his credit, avoids that by a large margin. On the other hand, the portrayal of the killer does seem to lapse into a sort of fantasy of what such a killer's mind might be like. Whether the killer is realistic or not, the killer's inner monologue does not seem real, and that fact detracts from the novel substantially.

"Sacrifice" is not so much a thriller as it is a detective novel involving a most unlikely pair of detectives, and it is good enough to keep the reader's interest. Further, it rises above many, perhaps even most, of the genre entries. But the book is not much more than a ridealong, a chance for the reader to follow a singular investigation. The characters, though they interact, seem not to affect each other to the point that they change substantially. The ending does reveal a significant change in one of the characters, but it is almost without precedent. That is, there is nearly no foreshadowing to suggest the dramatic change.

For people in search of an intelligent thriller, with both the advantages and liabilities of that pair of words, "Sacrifice" is recommended. However, readers in search of a character study should look elsewhere.

Tyler Pierce is an extremely likeable anti-hero with an odd mixture of flaws and strengths. He is a knight errant with no confidence in the law enforcement establishment and a strong preference for doing things his own way. The author is a skilled writer who introduces the reader to the killer early, but still manages to maintain the suspense to the end.

Well, I enjoyed this more than I did Karma or Stone City, both by the same author. I found the setting to be believable and learned quite a bit about illegal banking techniques and roofing. And I would read a book centering on any one of the characters in this one; they're that well-written.

I have been using this book in an attempt to learn to read,
understand and write schemas. The only virtue this book has
is that it is a huge compendium (900+ pages) on the XML Schema.
However, it appears to have been created by taking the public
domain XML Schema documentaton (from W3), editing it a bit
and then sending it off to Addison Wesley.

XML Schema are fantasticly complex. Far more complicated than
grammars for programming languages (e.g., an ANTLR grammar).
Schemas support something akin to subclassing in an object
oriented language. However, in classic Schema fashion, it is
convoluted and difficult to understand. This book provided
no help in understanding "abstract types".

Even for simple elements of the schema this book simply lists
the syntax for the schema. What would have been FAR more useful
would have been to list schema elements, along with the XML that
they describe.

The world would be a far better place if XML Schemas faded
away like the poisonous miasma they are. But since they
seem to be here to stay, having somehow gathered a critical
mass of users, a good reference is needed. I have not
read the O'Reilly book "XML Schemas" but its got to
be better than this. Unless you simply want a bound copy of
the W3 documentation, save your money.

Finally, as if the content were not injury enough, the page
numbers in the index in my book did not correspond to the
page numbers of the topic (they were off by a few pages).
Since in a book like this one frequently references the
index, this is a real problem.

If you are already using XML, it is probably with DTDs, as this was the first implementation of XML. Both came out of SGML, in which the role of DTDs was defined in the early 1990s. Unfortunately, the drawbacks of DTDs were not fully appreciated until they began to be widely used in XML. A DTD cannot easily constrain an integer variable to a range of values from 5 to 10, say. It has no conception of common primitive types like float or double found in many programming languages. Also, the structure of a DTD is quite unlike that of the XML document it supports. From the point of view of writing parsers, you end up effectively needing two parsing algorithms to read a DTD and an XML document. XML Schemas answer all these issues. Plus namespaces are built into them, to handle collisions in tag names when you use multiple Schemas in a document. With DTDs, namespaces came into being after DTDs were first defined, and had to be bolted on in a most awkward fashion. XML Schema notation for namespaces is much more natural.

The problem right now with XML Schema is that it is new. Most XML books use DTDs, in part because when they were written, the Schema specification was not finished by W3C (in May 2001). Some XML books since then do describe Schema. They usually give a good overview and provide examples that work for the XML document examples they describe. So if you have an application that you want to write a Schema for, you can get started. But chances are, you soon run into problems if your application is not a carbon copy of a text's example. You soon need some Schema component or attribute whose usage or even existence was not disclosed in that book.

This book addresses that shortfall. It provides at least one example of how to use every attribute of EVERY Schema element. A formidably comprehensive task. Which accounts for the near thousand page size. But this is far more than just some dictionary-style exposition. They describe important closely related issues, like how to use the DOM and Xerces SAX parsers, and the different outlooks these take. Also, from your viewpoint of how to write a Schema for YOUR application, they offer a top-down approach. Schemas can be result-oriented or data-oriented. You get enough details to help decide which case yours fits. This can greatly aid developing a facile "natural" Schema. One where once you have it and an example XML document that uses it, the layout taxonomy seems axiomatic. Which should be your goal. It is not enough to define a Schema that can hold all the information you have. The skill is in making a Schema that does that and has a clear, obvious logic. Because in many cases others, probably not as technically adept as you, get to fill in documents based on it. So the logic should be clear to them. Even if they do not directly write into an XML document, but build it from a GUI, the clearer the Schema, the easier it is for someone to build a GUI to populate a document based on it.

The authors also provide a website (XMLSchemaReference.com) that has the code described in the book, and many more examples. Worth bookmarking.

So try this book and its website if you need an authoritative guide to writing Schemas.

Frank Smith was truly a man with ideas before his time! He fought and sacrificed to ensure everyone had the same rights that are guaranteed all under our Constitution. This was unheard of in the segregated South in the '50 and '60s. "Mississippi Liberal" is an excellent history of the Mississippi Delta and the environment that shaped the ideas and life of the Congressman from Mississippi--Frank E. Smith. A man who worked hard to make a difference for all races... and he did! A very comprehensive work by Dr. Dennis J. Mitchell--A superb job!