There is a rather peculiar book. Thompson's main goal is to criticize consequentialism but it appears that most consequentialists don't even accept the consequentialism that is her target, namely some kind of view that says we should promote *goodness simpliciter*, NOT goodness for sentient beings, goodness for persons, other states that are intrinsically good or whatever. Thompson has an odd target and even if she refutes it, it's not clear what difference it makes to most other consequentialist theories. (Thompson's view seems like it could be classified as a consequentialism anyway).

Four people give comments on Thompson's main text but two of them are't even philosophers (I think they are from English departments!??). Nussbaum's comments interesting though.

Some of Thompson's articles on these topics are a bit better than this book. I'd recommend checking them out first.

Read the Microsoft documentation instead. This book is a thinly disguised rip-off of the Microsoft documentation padded with examples of dubious value. In 590 pages this book manages to add no value or information beyond the original documentation. That's quite an achievement.

If you want to learn ISAPI...think again. This was "hot" 2 years ago...now it is all but dead.

ISAPI's big promise was better performance and memory usage...ironic that it has now fallen in favor to the biggest performance pig of all web applications...ASP. In an age of fast machines and small web apps, rapid development and ease of use wins out over performance.

ISAPI is hard to learn, harder to get right, unstable, bug ridden (if written in MFC) and surprisingly inflexible.

Look, you're a smart person. You want to do the right thing. You don't need to subject yourself to the torture of learning ISAPI. Only hard-core programmers who are tasked with writing a custom web app that is going to get some VERY heavy traffic should even bother with ISAPI.

So why did I give this book 4 stars? There are no good ISAPI books out there. This one has the most information in it and will allow you the best chance to actually develop something that works. Get this book and hit Genusa's (now dusty) ISAPI site. Also spend a lot of time in the Microsoft knowledge base...there are plenty of workarounds and bugs to learn about too.

Keep in mind that with ISAPI you had better be a damn good programmer. If your DLL ever crashes...bye bye web server. This is harder than you think if you are doing "serious" web programming which includes database access.

Smart managers will not allow mission-critical web apps to be developed in ISAPI by a web punk who has never done this before. Do everyone a favor and get a clue. There is a reason why nobody is doing this stuff anymore!

Game over. Go home and don't look back. Go off and learn ASP and Cold Fusion like a good little web programmer. You will have a marketable skill and will actually get things done.

ISAPI is Microsoft's approach to adding capabilities to web serving. There are only a few books that describe how to use ISAPI. This book is the best of them, because the author: 1) provides examples in both C and C++, and 2) compares ISAPI with CGI solutions. Unfortunately, ISAPI is a complicated subject, so more and shorter examples would help elucidate the reader.

Exhaustive detail fills this Brickhouse & Smith book, neglecting Socrates the person. This is yet another philosophy book that reduces Socrates to a mere series of arguments. Concerned with synthesizing and/or refuting interpretations of other scholars, this book joins the several that fail to present the trial of Socrates in cultural context. The authors also fail to show the dissident character of Socrates, choosing instead to bury him under a mound of philosophical abstractions. Undervalued in this book is Socrates the civil disobedient. The reader is led to think that this great ironic philosopher, as represented in Plato's CRITO, was opposed to civil disobedience. Misreading the CRITO, this book portrays Socrates as a mere apologist for the status quo rather than the political dissident that he actually was. If the Socrates of history depicted in this book is the true one, he probably would not have been tried and executed.

Like many philosophy books, this work is not reader-friendly, making one wade through myriad sections and subsections.

A far better book is the recent one by James Colaiaco, entitled SOCRATES AGAINST ATHENS. Praised for its clarity and elegant prose style, Colaiaco's book captures the drama of Socrates' trial better than any other one, and makes the dissenting philosopher relevant for today. As Colaiaco persuasively argues, Socrates represents a radically new conception of a hero-- the hero as philosopher. Colaiaco's account of the Socrates in Plato's CRITO is illuminating and accurate, with due appreciation for Socrates' brilliant use of irony. Looking for the best book on the trial of Socrates? Read Colaiaco's.

850 pages of rather dull and uninformative prose; does an adequate job of critiquing the novels but give short shrift to the poetry. Unrelenting harangue against the second Mrs. Hardy.