For the price, this little book really is incredible. It's straight to the point and pithy. And the info culled for it isn't theory based--its the stuff the best salesmen like former Lehman Bros. salesmonster Marty Shafiroff are deploying everyday out there in the battlefield we call sales. There are dozens and dozens of useless and dull sales advice books out there--pick this one if you're looking for a sound investment. I hope RJ Shook updates this fine book one day (it is was published in 1990). The info in this book is gold. Having a hard time opening your accounts? Of course you are, skippy, you're still wasting your time reading this instead of ordering this book.

I read this book when I was 20 as a cold-caller with Lehman Brothers. Marty was one of their most successful stockbrokers ever. The idea and techniques disclosed in this book are invaluable to anyone interested in effective telephone technique. It deals largely with the much needed professionalism within sales. I highly recommend it.

These collected essays, first published in such periodicals as The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, or Atlantic Monthly, trace the origins of modern drama in Greek tragedy and comedy. At least four of them should be required reading in any introductory course in British and American literature: The Salesman Has A Birthday; Tragedy And The Common Man; The Nature Of Tragedy; and The Family In Modern Drama. The last of these contains a memorable phrase that furnished the title of the selection of the late U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl's essays, At Home In The World. One brief quotation from Tragedy And The Common Man that seems especially relevant to the present era will suffice: "The Greeks could probe the very heavenly origin of their ways and return to confirm the rightness of laws."

This book is an incredible trip through out Miller's ideas. The essays on the book are very well selected and disposed in a good way for the readers to understand what Arthur Miller is all about. There's no better way to know somebody other than this persons' own words. And this is what's so special about this book. We get to know Arthur Miller through his own special words. The first essay, "Tragedy and the Common Man" is already classical for its contents. Most of the books about Arthur Miller talk about it, but this very book happens to be the only way for us to actually read the whole text. Summing up: if you're willing to go to the bootom of this very important writer, this is the book you must choose.

this book is brilliant. it captures perfectly the obsession of the french decadent movement with the female and what the male will do to control "woman." I will not give away any details of the story, but i must say the female as vampiric, hysterical, and simply put, sick, is what the character of thomas edison in this novel tries to put an end to by making his own version of "the female" that will be better suited to the world and society, but actually selfishly, to the needs of the male, and in particular mr. edison in the novel. it is a brilliant novel and i recommend THE DECADENT READER, from which i read this novel, it contains more unknown and unfortunately unread literature from this extremely fascinating movement at the end of the nineteenth century.

This little known novel is a masterpiece of Decadent literature (a brief movement localized in France around the turn of the last century that was influenced mainly by the poetry of Baudelaire and the theories of evolution put forth by Darwin). It tells the story of a fictionalized Edison who builds a female cyborg to exist in place of the unattainable love object of a tortured young man. She is animated by the spirit of a ghost and has the appearance of a Venus statue. Villiers, in the decadent tradition, lauds artifice above "nature," writing characters who traverse the world of illusion as that which is more real than real, a world in which appearance and the material are everything. This book might be of particular interest to feminists: Villiers only writes women as artifical beings, hysterics, ghosts, objects of fetishism. This book is a must read for any one interested in metaphysics and the rhetoric of "image" versus "being."

A highly entertaining series of short stories. The stories in this book are very original and are not reprinted in many other collections of Alternate History, with the exception of two. If you love alternate history, I encourage you to read, if not buy this book.

Everyone has wondered "What if..." at some point, whether the question involved his or her own life or some pivotal event in history. History as we know it is jolted and questioned at every turn in this emotional collection of engaging and imaginative fiction. Many "what if..." questions are addressed in this volume that allow authors and readers alike to rewrite history, correcting perceived wrongs or tragedies ("Suppose They Gave a Peace..."), creating heroes where none existed before ("The Lucky Strike"), and exploring horrors best left to imaginations and late night readings ("We Could Do Worse"). Any fan of science fiction will enjoy these well-selected, well-ordered stories.

I was diagnosed with cancer less than a year ago and have read several books that describe cancer etiology, symptoms, and treatment. This is *by far* the most useful. Various chapters describe how cancer spreads, what the emotional and physical consequences will be, and what kinds of therapies are available. The heart of the book is a series of chapters numbering about 200 pages (!) explaining the symptoms and treatment of every major type of cancer, and probably most minor types.

What makes this book especially valuable is its clear, direct writing style which uses layman's terms but is still informative, without being condescending or too general. The author obviously has had a great deal of experience conveying medical information to laypeople. His compassion also comes through clearly and shows his sensitivity to the feelings of the cancer patient and those around him or her.

This is one of the few books about cancer that I will probably use as a reference and return to again and again.

Of all the books I checked out from the library, or borrowed from friends this was the best. Covers types of cancers and the symptoms and treatments of each. Chapters on causes of cancer and the latest research. Details for patients and their families on emotional reactions, alternative treatments, and living with being a cancer survior/patient. I originally borrowed this and 6 others from the library, and decided I could not live without a copy of my own (the only book on Cancer I have purchased). If you or someone you care about has recently been diagnosed get this book.

This is a wonderful book that chronicles the Arts and Crafts movement in California. Telling of The Mission Inn, Roycroft, Batchelder and many more. This book is wonderfully illustrated with plenty of color photographs. The book is from a exposition at a Museum. An overall great book.

This book should have been called simply "The Beethoven Companion." While it focues on the string quartets, it deals with many facets of the composer's life, and life in Vienna in general at the time. Detailed but never dull, thorough but never too technical, the book describes performance practice, takes you into the minds of interpretors, and deals with such fascinating philosophical considerations as Romanticism vs. Classicism, the meaning of the "last period," and audiences in Beethoven's time. I have many books on the Quartets, but I've never read another that is this valuable.

A number of books out there look at Visual Basic for Applications, but this is the only one so far that focuses on the newest version of Access. I found this book to be invaluable in cutting through the clutter and getting me straight to the practical applications of VBA. The authors take you through basic programming tenants but don't dwell on them. Rather they jump into examples that are very interactive and instructive. Their examples are clear and are good starting points to expand from on your own. It is not an exhaustive reference, but you benefit from it more if you have some decent Access experience. If you don't know a database, you are not going to learn here. But in just a few weeks after reading this book, I find myself going again and again into the examples as starting points for my own projects. And it is amazing how a little bit of programming will impress the users.

There are a couple of mistakes in the book that can inhibit your code from running. In addition, the database supplied has dates of 1998 and 99, but the book uses dates in 2001, so you have to adjust your code in order to get results. And unfortunately WROX has shut down its errata area so you can't really get help with these problems. So don't assume if your code doesn't work, it is your fault. This is where the code on the CD can be helpful - if it doesn't run right it's the program, not the programmer.

Overall with a little patience and work, you can get a huge amount of help from this book.

A very concise and practical source of information about medicines and their use.

This book could have easily been titled, "Bob Martin hates UML". Actually, that it isn't quite fair. Only the first part should have that title. The second section should be named, "UML is boring so let's design an object oriented coffee pot". The last section could be titled, "I don't have anything else to say so let me pad the book with 50 pages of Java code".

As far as UML goes, the book covers five diagrams. The author's advice can be summed up as "don't use UML except on the back of a napkin that you immediately throw away". Use cases are reduced to four pages and he advises against getting any real details. He likes sequence diagrams as long as they are so trivial that they impart no real information. He gives an example of a "too complex" diagram that in half of a page clearly and simply shows the inter-relationship between six classes. Trying to understand this same relationship with code could take hours.

The big problem for this book is that the author is in love with his process. He is an XP proponent and uses this book to push the XP paradigm. The problem is that a lot of programmers that are not using XP will not realize how XP-centric this book is from looking at the title. XP is not the only process and many programmers work in environments where designers design and developers write code. This book will not help them and could actually hinder them by giving them the wrong idea about the usefulness of UML. If you are looking for a book to help you understand how to use UML to design and develop complex J2EE applications then I strongly recommend "Enterprise Java and UML" (ISBN: 0471267783). I would avoid this book.

This is a great book for learning or improving with UML. Topics are introduced at a level appropriate for beginners but each topic progresses at a nice pace into intermediate territory. There's even advice in here suitable for the best programmers I know.

I love the liberal use of source code throughout this book. We model in order to write code and Bob Martin clearly presents that perspective in this book. If code is the goal then it is worthwhile understanding the relationship between our models and our code. While all of the example code is in Java I'd still recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about modeling and who has even a passing familiarity with Java. C++ or other programmers should have no problem reading it, for example.

I like that the author goes beyond just describing each of the UML diagrams and takes the opportunity to teach good design while he's at it. As just one example, the "Single Responsibility Principle (SRP)" is discussed. This principle tells us that "a class should have only one reason to change." In other words, don't put everything into one class. That's pretty obvious but it's still a common mistake. The book shows a brief snippet of Java code that violates this principle and then shows the UML for how to design it better. More importantly, we're told how to recognize this problem in UML diagrams we create or inherit.

This book addresses one of the big problems I've had with many other UML books--it tells the reader right upfront that not all diagrams are equally important. I love that the author tells us things like that "in the last decade I think I have drawn less than a dozen object diagrams of this kind." That's great to know! Because many other books try to cover every diagram and modeling technique they all end up appearing equally important. In this book Bob Martin tells us that he's only going to cover what we really need to know to be better Java programmers. He achieves that goal with flying colors.

This book is a gold mine of insights into what is essential about OO design, UML notation, and their relationship to writing sound code. The book's focus is on how to create and understand essential UML design artifacts and fundamental OO design concepts to help you write better code. As the book proceeds, excellent examples are provided to ensure that the reader understands the crucial aspects of transforming code to UML and vice versa. UML's role in the development process is put in proper perspective as a tool rather than an end in itself. All the standard UML artifacts are covered: Class Collaboration, Sequence, and Object Diagrams, as well as Finite State Machines (the author isn't a big fan of Use Cases but they're briefly covered too). Moreover, the book includes excellent chapters on sound OO design principles for not only class hierarchies but also package and component building as well. A terrific synopsis of the author's take on an agile development methodology is presented and there are some meaty case studies against which one can try out his/her newly gained knowledge of the topics covered. If you want to learn solid OO design concepts and how to reliably and accurately represent them in UML then this book is for you. I'd also recommend the author's other recent book, Agile Software Development Principles, Patterns, and Practices which won a Software Development Magazine Jolt award.