Not Taibo's best work but an insightful view into differences between anarchists and communists of the 1920's and 30's. Overall a fun, short read.

I've long admired Paco Ignacio Taibo II's detective fiction, particularly his series featuring Hector Balascoran Shayne (and even more particularly the book Some Clouds, with its existentialist overtones). When a new Taibo comes into translation, I feel a palpable excitement and anticipation; his hard-boiled characters are strikingly human and his Mexican settings are rich with atmosphere and dense with detail. But I'll admit that I've grown to experience some trepidation about Taibo's non-detective fiction. While his experiments with style and structure are often playfully challenging (take Leonardo's Bicycle, for example), they are just as often difficult to navigate. And while his knowledge of Mexican culture and history (specifically political history) is admirably broad, I've sometimes felt at a loss to understand his allusions to historic figures and, because of this, at a loss as well to fully understand the context of these tales. Such has been the case with Just Passing Through, which mixes fact and fiction, reportage and postmodern play, in exploring the story of revolutionary Sebastian San Vicente. While I've enjoyed the book on one level (it's been advertised as an adventure tale, which is not entirely the case), I had a lurking suspicion that I was missing another level of the story -- even with the annotations provided by translator Martin Michael Roberts to help readers like myself less familiar with Mexican history. While Just Passing Through is a good read, it's not Taibo's most accessible work. And with this in mind, I'd have to say that I'd recommend this one to more serious readers, to those a little more up to a modest challenge, than to fans of Taibo's brilliantly engaging mystery fiction.

Murasaki star system contains a duo of inhabitable planets that orbit each other: Genji - a high-gravity world with a dense, soupy atmosphere; and Chujo - an arid, wintry world of canyons and wind-swept plains. Neither is perfect for humans - on Genji they must wear pressure suits in addition to getting used to gravity levels half-again as high as on Earth; Chujo is more forgiving, though it can be intensely cold. Both planets serve home to sapient races: the Ihrdizu of Genji - low-tech amphibians that congregate in small villages; and the humanoids of Chujo - aloof, mysterious beings that ignore the humans entirely. It is here that the first manned interstellar expeditions will arrive, bearing humans of all frames of mind - Earthlings and off-worlders, atheists and philosophers, mystics and iconoclasts...

Instead of being a collaborative novel, "Murasaki" is a mixed bag of science fiction stories that share a setting, each written by a different award-winning author. Mind the fact that the only interesting part is the fairly in-depth world-creation notes (included as appendices), and that the stories are pathetically shallow and lead virtually nowhere...

...That is precisely what I though about this "science fiction novel in six parts" prior to reading the last two parts, which are so refreshingly, profoundly excellent that I almost wept with awe. A mystery of interplanetary proportions is suddenly built up and then revealed in flying colors.

It's really a pity that the rest of Murasaki doesn't follow suit.

I became interested in this book after reading Otherness by David Brin. One of the short stories in Otherness is actually a chapter in Murasaki. The book itself is has a very intruiging storyline and I enjoyed reading much of it. The only problam I had was the mental transition I had to make with each chapter of the book, as they are all written by different authors.

All in all, I would definitely recommend this book for anyone who likes the work of Brin, Bear, Anderson, Pohl, Kress etc etc etc.. They all wrote parts of it.

A good read.

i guess brevity isn't always a good thing. many of these stories are silly or cute -- in the oh, he was a serial killer/vampire/crazy guy vein. though there are some that manage to create a chill in a very short space (a hard thing to do), most of them left me frustrated and/or bored.
maybe it's that i sat down and read half the book in one sitting - not advised. your best bet is to skim, there are a few treasures in here. when it's good, it's very, very good. when it's bad, it's just awful.

If you're into horror, get it. If you're not into horror, take a look at it and read few right there in the store (which is easier than it sounds since most of the stories are only about 3 pages in length, max). It's a cool collection of tales that you can kind of treat like a literary snack, a horror-d'vour, so to speak. Plus, it really helps to get you interested in the genre and reading in general; you feel as though you're accomplishing some serious reading, even if some of the stories aren't that great.

There's so many stories, you really can't go wrong; there's going to be something in there for you, and if you run across a couple of stinkers, so what? They were only 3 pages long anyway!
A must for writers looking to hone their voice down to a sharp point.

The stories in this book are short but they have the same impact as any story three times their length. The endings were unexpected and that is what i look for in a good book. Each story is unique and has you checking under your bed twice before cutting the lights out.

Everyone should try to learn Join Up. It works, no matter what these people say.

I read the book The Man Who Listens To Horses and say the PBS special on Shy Boy. Then I attended two seminars a year apart. I got to talk to Monty and "read" his face and body language. People give themselves away by their actions. After meeting Monty, studying him and learning his methods, I have a very strong tendency to believe him. I was an abused child and most of the beatings by my parents were never known about by the neighbors. The other forms of abuse were also hidden until the cops finally caught my dad and sent him to prison where he belonged. I've never really recovered but I vowed my children would not be raised like me. Nor would my animals be treated to breaking with spurs and whips. Monty's methods worked on every horse I have. The horses are so much more trustworthy when they believe they can trust humans. Over the last four years the Monty Roberts method is the prime method we use on our ranch.

Thank God the cloak of kindness has been removed from this self styled equine messiah,and the real person hiding underneath has been exposed for what he was and is. The suspicions I had while reading The man Who Listens to Horses are at last confirmed, lie by lie. Nothing added up. The time line, events, box car adventures, James Dean, Nevada, Salinas Rodeo dates all were out of sync. I was there then, and my foggy memory of the events just didn't compute in my mind. A visit to the micro film archives at the Stienbeck Library backed up my suspicions. Can't beleive that anyone could annihilate their own family with so many blatant lies just to feed their ego and strengthen their bank account. Well now, thanks to the perseverence of Joyce Renebome and her daughter, Debbie Ristau the truth emerges. They have compiled an accurate documented chronology of the life and times of four generations of the Roberts family, piece by painstaking piece. An easy read, the story is truthfully told. The memory of Marguerite and Marvin Roberts is vindicated. Shame on you Monty Roberts, your time will come.

I've read 100 pages into the book so far, and I would have to say it is not that amazing. The book basically runs through a project that they did using XP and they share their stories and experiences. The project they talk about is very typical to most websites (a way to register, login, get a forgotten password, etc.)

I was very surprised to see that the project was estimated at 25 days. Even some functions like creating one table was estimated to take 4 hours. It seemed that the developers were not very capable individuals, or perhaps they simply expected an incompetent crowd to be reading the book. There is actual proof of my claim too since even taking their 4 hours to make the table, they had still forgetton to create the 'password' attribute within the table. They realized this when they tested their code. Leaving out those architectural details are we?

I also did not agree with the book's statements in not considering architectural details - in fact none were considered at all, even when it came down to iteration planning. I know this is an element of the XP methodology, but some of their reasons for not doing a model indicated that they didn't understand the problem enough. The only valid reason I found for not planning for future change was that the customer may not request the features required by the more robust architecture. That is valid, but let's think about repeat business. Let's assume they come back in a year's time to make those changes and you'll probably be thanking yourself you did make it scalable. It's less time for you and your staff and less you have to charge your client. Everyone is much happier.

Another instance of terrible design is on page 103. They used an Adapter pattern (found in the GoF book) to adapt a method from their database class to another class with the identical name for the method. Well, as far as I know, that is NOT why you use the Adapter pattern. Adapter is used when you have an API that doesn't follow an interface used throughout the application. Programmer's use the Adapter to make an interface conform to a new one. Well, in using the Adapter in the book's example, they are merely delegating a task, not adapting an unfamiliar interface. Even worse - What was the method called? - findUserByEmail() found inside the Database connection object (connecting and closing the DBMS). Why is it there? No architecture thinking done at all! It should have been placed in a UserFactory or User Data Access Object class in the first place (the book refers to it as its User class). They would have avoided this problem (and misuse of a pattern) altogether.

One more thing about architecture. There was a case where they had made 2 servlets, both containing almost identical code. With XP's refactoring, they had created a base class and inherited appropriately. After restructuring their test cases and refactoring several times, they finally got it right. Wouldn't a solid design have been better? The book states that up-front design is bad. Well, I know the point of XP is to not follow a hardcore design document for the entire project because you realize that customer requirements are voltatile. But, shouldn't we at least come up with a smaller design document for each iteration? I mean, it's not practical for a customer to interrupt an interation - in fact it's a rule the customer cannot do according to this book. I still say, if you are not going to plan your system, at least plan the architecture for a 'subset' of the system - i.e. in each iteration plan.

Even after reviewing the code, I thought some elementary coders were at work. There was a part in the book where they either had to convert some pages from ASP to JSP if they wanted the banner to be the same, but they could have simply encapsulated the banner into a file and included it in both the ASP and JSP versions, saving their estimated implementation time of 5 days.

The book has it's morals, but the project is by far too small to be a true testiment to the success of XP. This kind of project could have easily been done by one competent person sitting at their machine for 2 days, and I do believe it would have been done much better architecturally as well. There is no design pattern work, no architecture and clearly reading their programming flaws and decision making failures, no wonder they estimated a completion date of 25 days.

I gather that XP is still good for projects with much greater complexity than this registration system, but the book does a bad job explaining that. It seems XP is good for programmers that need other support to compensate for their lack of ability to be a good programmer - I know that is not true when it comes to pair programming, but this book isn't doing a good job of convincing me otherwise.

I haven't read any of the other XP books - but stay away from this one unless you want to read bad software designs and coding examples, non-realistic programming errors, and poorly made decisions. It's not XP that would have helped this team, a new set of programmers and architects would have done better.

If you simply want to learn about XP, stay away from this book.

If you want to learn about failures on projects and actually learn something, read the Mythical Man Month.

If you want to spend [price], throw it into lottery tickets, you'll learn about 'wasting money' and how to better spend it.

If you need to learn XP.... try another XP book in the series.

This is good book if you've already learned the basic theory of eXtreme Programming, and want to see XP in practice from a developer's point of view. You won't learn the theory from this book, but you will watch as pairs of programmers works with their customer to prioritize and estimate stories, and as the pairs proceed through the work, making mistakes as they go, and recovering from them. The focus is on planning, unit testing, and refactoring.

The application they've taken on is simple, but non-trivial. It helps to know Java and be familiar with the JUnit testing framework, and have familiarity with servlets. I picked up a couple of useful testing techniques from their examples.

As a developer who has used XP in a somewhat patchwork fashion, I've been looking forward to this book for some time. My interest was mostly driven by an article "Uncle Bob" Martin co-wrote a few months back about a pair-programming development episode in which the pair wrote a small program to score bowling games. The article was written as a dialogue between the two programmers and was very well done.

Once again, they have used a real project (actually in production on the Object Mentor website) to illustrate what development under XP is really like.

This book has been written in the style of the other books in the XP series: it is brief, conversational in tone, and to the point. It departs from the other books in the series by including quite a few pages of code. It's also reasonable to say that the authors are assuming the reader is somewhat familiar with XP, and I'd say it is a companion piece to the XP explained book by Kent Beck (or perhaps the extremeprogramming.org website).

I imagine the authors agonized over how much detail to go into with this book. The purpose of the book is to illustrate XP in practice (not to teach servlet programming), and I'd say the level of detail they went into is just about right -- they describe their experience over the course of a one-week iteration, down to the level of their daily tasks and the interactions (even one verbatim dialogue) with their client. The authors do an exceptional job of describing the *is* of XP without being pedantic or cute, which has been a significant flaw in a lot of the XP advocacy I've seen on the web.

The book is well written, and the code is good...I only saw one technical error. Overall, an excellent book. More than ever, it makes me want to try a "pure" XP approach on one small project to see if I can really make a go of it.

A good book of letters should bring its subject to life for the reader. This book is dry to the point of being brittle. At no time time during the reading of this book did I get any sense of what Oppenheimer was feeling or experiencing. Oppenheimer was involved with one of the pivotal events of this century and the whole experience comes off like a trip to a neighborhood store. The recollections mentioned in the title are not those of Oppenheimer but of friends and family. Like the rest of the book their thoughts and memories add little to the understanding of Oppenheimer's life and work.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was better at keeping himself hidden than most people, and you won't learn a lot about him from these letters, but it does a give a rare, patial glimpse of a very mysterious person.

This book is not meant as general reading. For more colorful writing, see Smith's _A Peril and a Hope_. Letters and Recollections is, however, an incredibly valuable resource for those of us researching the time period and Oppenheimer. There were letters, interviews, and insights that I simply could not have obtained anywhere else. Smith has a personal connection with Los Alamos, and that shows in her writing and sources. She gives an side to Oppenheimer like no other book I've read (and trust me, I've read a lot of them). Thank you, A.K.S.!

If you're looking for an exposé against Dave Hunt or Constance Cumby, which I wasn't, then you've come to the right place. Most of the book contains problematic attacks by these two, and is dated to the late 80s. And even then there's way too much. The point could have been made with half the pages. I struggled to get through the whole thing, but finished because usually the Passantinos write quality stuff. The best thing I learned was just to avoid Hunt and Cumby altogether. There are many good counter-cult authors out there, including the Passantinos, such as Walter Martin, Elliot Miller, and Douglas Groothuis.

If you're looking for good discernment techniques or the ability to recognize poor analysis, just read the first and last chapters.

Far better than Spencer's Heresy Hunters: Character Assassination in the Church, this provides a useful check for those involved in the biblically crucial, but potentially perilous, task of discerning true doctrine. See Robert Bowman's critique however for balance...

I am a student of health sciences in USA, and I picked this book for a comparison on US and Japan and germany health care system and policy. I was interested in the book, it was well written, but it provided me with no detail insight into the real mechanismas of health care policy abroad. I would only recommend this to people who do not have to analyse the topic for course work.

This was a great book. It is a wonderful opportunity to read for research on this particular area. I thoroughly enjoyed this as many others I interviewed did also. Buy this book...it's a good read!

I bought this book mainly for it's 3D section, but also to learn about DirectX in general. I had hopes of writing a simple 3D game (maybe even a 2D one), however it quickly became apparent that the Author has probably never used DirectX for that purpose!! I honestly found myself wondering, "Why else would you use DirectX if not for programming games?"

I worked through a few of the lessons (attempting the 24 hour goal), however after the first few lessons, I just couldn't continue. The lessons were so damm boring. I mean - the whole point of DirectX is to bring games to life, if not games, then at least bring the screen to life! This Author killed any spirit I had to create a "laser gun battle while driving to a fight scene in my Hover-Ferrari dodging laser fire from monsters with laser-cannons grafted to their chests!"

Instead we get a [bad] picture of a two dimensional, badly drawn taxi, moving to the left of the screen slowly (but smoothly), while the background moved a little bit and a sound moved from one speaker to the other. I mean really!!!! I have not seen a game like that EVER in my life - except for something designed for toddlers whilst learning to tell the difference between a horsy and a cow! Granted, this particular topic was only a demonstration of some DirectX techniques, but I had to wonder in what kind of game I would use these techniques? It just wasn't interesting at all - completely boring beyond belief!

The most complex example in the book involved several textured buildings, with a single stationary car and a moving helicopter that you got to fly, except fly is the wrong word! It quickly became apparent that the Author doesn't know how to program the DirectX 3D stuff. When the helicopter rotated, the buildings changed shape! I was absolutely dumbfounded!

SAMS put their name to this book, but instead of that being a good thing, it's now a warning label when I go shopping. Obviously SAMS do not require a high standard for their books, or their Authors.

In 24 hours? Ha! Here's the sequel... "Teach Yourself to Write Diablo 3 in 21 Days"!

You will not "Teach Yourself DirectX7" in 24 hours. You will, however, learn that this code dosn't compile without your having PREVIOUS KNOWLEDGE of DirectX.

The absolute beginner might like this book. However, since the stuff really doesn't work anyway, I can't recommend the book even for them.

Stay away from this book. Instead, read the .HLP files and example code in the SDK, which to this date are still the best source of info. Heck, they all but write your first app for you if you bother to look hard enough.

i borrowed this book from a friend, and must note that there are SEVERAL SEVERE errors in Hour 5 (i havent got past it now)

for instance, they modify the bitmap_surface function, yet do not disclose the new one, or how to modify the existing one to handle the RECT they've added... im not a new programmer, and i STILL cant get this working via the book...