Tag along with a little boy and his steam engine as they "chugga-chugga choo-choo" to the city on a very busy day. This engaging little book, (also available in board size), begs to be read repeatedly due to its wonderfully rhythmic prose and vibrantly animated illustrations. "Sun's up! Morning's here. Up and at 'em, engineer. Chugga-chugga choo-choo, whistle blowing, Whoooooooo! Whoooooooo!" This book is actually a nighttime story, but my 11th month old is so enthralled by the vivid colors and musical beat that I read it to him after his naps. Oh, and not just for little boys, my four-year old niece adores this book. She asks for Chugga-chugga choo-choo and walks around afterwards saying Whoooooooo! Whoooooooo! A real winner! Birth and up.

This is a great rhyming story about a boy's imaginative train play. A young boy has set up a creative train layout in his room: going over the fish tank (bridge), to the freight yard, up mountains, down valleys, etc. His entire room is laid out with track and many of his toys are involved in the layout such as blocks to prop up the track and dolls to lift boxes. As we read the book we see the toys "moving" and doing jobs and the illustrations are such that we are as small as the train and looking out and around as if we were riding the train ourselves. At the end the train is said to go into the roundhouse and the boy is seen sleeping in bed with his locomotive and the track laid out on the floor all around his room! Great imagination!

The text itself is well written and rhyming and just has a great flow to it.

I bought our first hardcover edition right after it was published which was over 3 years ago. My older son has loved this since he was 2 years old and I have read it over and over and over. He is a real train lover and even now at age 5 he loves this book (over many of the other train-themed children's fiction books we own).

The text is not annoying in any way and I truly don't groan when I have to reread it to him several times. My second son has loved this book since infancy. Sadly, after 3 years of handling it finally fell apart and now I am buying a second hardcover edition. I browsed the board book version in a store but was disappointed. The hardcover is a larger size than usual and the illustrations are bold and large. In the board book version some of the illustrations are greatly pared down in size and much is lost. If you own the board version I highly recommend also buying the hardcover edition if your child likes the book. This would make a great gift!

Chugga Chugga Choo Choo captures and holds the attention of my 10-month-old baby boy every time we read it to him. Not many books (other than Eric Carle's) can do that. He loves the fun rhymes and the bright & colorful pictures as well as the "choo choo!" and the "whoo whooo!" sounds that we make for him.

Our copy of The Big Orange Splot is dog-eared from reading. Mr. Plumbean, whose house is splotted upon by a paint-wielding seagull, expands himself by creating the home of his imagination. He causes a revolution on his neat street, not combatively, but persuasively, by living his dreams and inspiring his neighbors to do the same. This book takes the band from around the conformist's heart and allows it to expand to fill one's personal space. Please read this to your children often.

The Big Orange Splot is, according to me, the best children's book I have ever read. It shows children (as well as adults) that being yourself is the right thing to be. Creativity is sometimes stifled in this world, and this book shows that it is a wonderful thing to be creative. This book helps the reader to grow as an individual, and to heighten their level of self-esteem.

This was the first Pinkwater book I encountered. In fact, it was the only Pinkwater book I had as a child. I loved it then, I love it now. I've read and enjoyed many other Pinkwater books as an adult, but this one is still my favorite because of its sheer nonsense in the pursuit of happiness. I am overcome with giddy joy every time I read The Big Orange Splot.

I am a actor and performer in high school and I often compete in the literary circuit. This piece alone has won me several awards. I recommend it to any aspiring actors who need a piece to start on or any established actors who need something new. It is also great for an entertaning read or for high school Shakespeare students who need a new twist on the Bard (especially the view of Hamlet as a meat allegory!)

I have seen the Reduced Shakespeare Company perform this play and these guys are absolutely hysterical! This book provides a side splitting look at Shakespeare in all his glory and wretched excess.

Despise reading Shakespeare? Not to worry, as the RSC introduce you to Shakespeare in a variety of hilarious ways - via a cooking show, a football game, even a rap song! Indifferent to Shakespeare? Well, don't you worry either. The RSC cover the Bard's plays and sonnets in ways you'd never imagine, prior knowledge of the plot becomes unnecessary. Love reading Shakespeare? Then you'll still enjoy this book!

Plus, there are brilliantly clever footnotes (I've always hated them before, but I loved these!), funny forewords and humorous pictures. This book is brilliant and funny and worth every penny!! Buy it!

I am an actor and performer in high school and I often compete in the literary circuit. This piece alone has won me several awards. I recommend it to any aspiring actors who need a piece to start on or any established actors who need something new. It is also great for an entertaning read or for high school Shakespeare students who need a new twist on the Bard (especially the view of Hamlet as a meat allegory!)

Information Technology Control and Audit is an excellent reference to IT auditing for beginners. The text book covers a wide range of topics such as the audit process, the legal environment of IT auditing, security and privacy and much more. For those considering a career in the IT auditing field, there is a chapter devoted to IS Audit Career Planning, with insightful tips on how to get ahead.
Overall, the textbook offers a colorful look into IT audit and control from experienced co-authors in the industry. Defintely recommended for those who would like an complete overview of IT auditing.

I personally love this book because of the following reasons: 1. This book is very easy to read- compared to the other books I have read, this book presents the contents in a very clear and concise way. 2. A very through book- the book provides people with detailed information about IS auditing. It covers most areas in which an IS auditor will utilize in his/her practice. 3. An informative book- the book provides people with different valuable tools, techniques as well as guidelines in addressing the audit, control and security problems. In addition, the book provides numerous research resources and case studies.

However, the format of the book may be improved by the following suggestion: the book should use different font size to distinguish different level headings.

I found this book extremely helpful for beginners to build understandings of what IT control is and how IT auditing is performed. This book tries to present a general but complete picture of IT control and auditing, and guides readers step by step to understand IT auditing processes and methodologies from both a theoretical and a practical perspective. The major contents covered in this book include IT auditability and controls, system development controls and auditing processes, CIS application controls and audits, IT operational controls and audits, and legal issues involving IT auditing. The concepts and practices introduced under these topics are of particular value for IT auditing beginners. This is also a well-structured book. Followed the major texts are appendixes of practical audit cases, bibliography of publications, professional standards, glossary, and sample audit programs, all of which provide both IT auditing beginners and professionals with valuable references for further research and study of IT auditing.

I did find some spelling errors and structure confusion in a few chapters that affect readability and understanding of the texts. But they don't affect the overall content quality of the book. This is still a good book to have for learning and referencing.

I was going to write that Pinkwater is not your normal young adult author and then I got to thinking--what is your normal young adult author? Lewis Carroll had his thing for photographing young girls, C.S. Lewis was a bit of a hermit, Roald Dahl played with perversity (if you think his children fiction are dark, try some of his adult stuff, which I couldn't finish). The women might be sane, for I've never heard a nasty story about Madeline L'Engle, Diana Wynne Jones, or E. Nesbit (well, she was a bit of a socialist radical). It does not matter. Pinkwater is akin to all of these in that no one else could quite copy the things that he writes.

This is a collection of Pinkwater novels that have been out of print for years (the original copyrights on these range from 1978 to 1982), but not out of mind. Alan Mendelsohn, in particular, seems to be well-loved and is often mentioned as a favorite of the younger set. I'm glad to finally have this opportunity to read it, for it is indeed a fun book, full of exceedingly strange twists and turns. You aren't sure if Alan is from Mars, or if he's just playing, and then you are sure, and then you aren't. It's Philip K. Dick lite, but it's fun.

Slaves of Spiegel and The Last Guru are much more simple (I would even think that they are meant for less mature readers than for the other three in this book), but like the best children's literature, they have something for everyone. I chuckled through Slaves of Spiegel, finding the contest quite amusing, especially the description of some of the delicacies concocted in the name of food, and I thought the satire, while obvious, in The Last Guru quite effective.

The Snarkout Boys resembles Alan Mendelsohn in its convoluted plot, but it seems much more grounded in reality, if a particularly eccentric reality, at least until the last quarter of the book. Its depiction of high school is stiletto sharp, but nothing as cutting as in Young Adult Novel. All the books have a jaundiced view of school, noting the common problems of cliques, moribund teachers, and the energy of youth (yes, that last is a problem--hey, you didn't think, as a teacher, that I would side totally for the kids, did you?). All of these novels were fun, and I would recommend them to your local dissident youth.

I loved Pinkwater when I was eleven and I love him at least as much now. He treats his readers with respect, rather than talking down to them, and he is one of the funniest writers I've ever read, for any audience. His characters are some of the best in fiction, and his ideas are far-fetched enough to make anyone wonder a little about the fine line between brilliance and insanity. Having five novels in one volume was almost more excitement than I could handle. A warning to kids: you may want to keep two copies of this one around, because you'll never pry this book out of the hands of the adults around you. A warning to adults: once children are introduced to Pinkwater, there are reading flashlights to be confiscated in the middle of the night. One last note: Pinkwater has written for all ages, from some wonderful picture books to at least one book of essays for us grown-up folk who have loved him on NPR. Try them all.

The price would be a bargain just for one of the books it contains. Some of these books (and a lot of Pinkwater's others) start out with ordinary kids or teenagers who have adventures and slowly find things getting weirder and weirder. Others just start out weird and never let up. _Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars_ is probably the best of these five. It makes surviving high school sound almost fun; Alan Mendelsohn brightens up a dull day by tripping people, telling his history class about Ben Franklin's sex life, and telling the whole school he's a Martian. He's my new role model. _The Snarkout Boys and the Avacado of Death_ is similar in that it's about high school boys who make their lives more interesting -- by sneaking out at night to the Snark Theater and making friends with avacado-obsessed movie-lovers. _Young Adult Novel_ is delightfully clever, absurd, and ironic, and _The Last Guru_ is pretty good as well. (I haven't finished _Slaves of Spiegel_ yet.) If you like Pinkwater at all, it's hard to go wrong with the funny, fascinating books in this collection.

I started reading Daniel Pinkwater books when I was 7. The first book I read was Lizard Music. I like it the best. I think it's cool because it's a magical book and I like magic.

I remember the day that I found this book vividly. The cover was more aesthetic than all the other books in the library, and, peering at the title, I figured I like lizards and I like music. I fell in love with this book shortly thereafter. It's been almost a decade later and I have since read books that have surpassed this in intellectual levels, but its oddness still appeals to me.

This is an obscure classic that belongs on the shelves next to Dr. Doolittle and Alice in Wonderland, other favorites from my past. It is difficult to describe this book beyond touting its greatness in vague terms, it is something to be experienced on ones own. To summarize shortly, it is the story of a boy left home alone and his adventure in the big city as he meets the Chicken Man, and sates his curiosity concerning the wacky lizard musicians he comes across. Whether you are young or old, this book will appeal to your creativity and your sense of absurdity.

Looking back at all the books I read as a kid, I fondly recall several books which did more than tell a wonderful story...they truly made me think differently about the world around me. The L'Engle books, the Dahl books, and the Pinkwater books fall into this category. But most of all, Lizard Music. It's the book that made my kid-self reorganize his brain to accomodate a world with talking lizards and lesser kudus. It's still one of my favorite books of all time.

I am Jewish, and when I read this book, I found out the realistic happening of what could have been me in the Holocaust if my ancestors had not moved to America before this all started. Books like "The Devils Arithmatic" are very well written books but do not give the 411 on what really happned. For example, "The Devil's Arithmatic" skiped parts about Jews ging into a ghetto and they made the Jews not know who the Nazis were in 1942. By that date, everyone that was Jewish knew what was going on and would have probably been sent to a ghetto long before. This book, however, gives the true happening of the Holocaust, and shows what people lost that were so dear to them. I was almost in tears when I finished this book. My teacher at my middle school had a historical book report project she assigned. She reccomended "Daniel's Story" as her favorite book. My friend who sits next to me, is Hindu and read the book when she knew nothing about the Holocaust. She loved it and couldn't put it down. In conclusion, this book is one of my favorites and it was a great learning experience- even though I knew much about the Holocaust already. Please read it!

WOW! This story is surely one of my favourites! Before reading Daniel's Story, I had no background information at all about what the Holocaust and World War II was like. It was a shocking and very compelling novel, to say the least. I first read this story about 2 years ago, and I've read it 5 times since. It keeps drawing me back, with its strong plot and setting development. The characters really got through to me as well! GREAT JOB, Carol Matas! I would HIGHLY recommend this book to ANYONE who wants to learn about the Holocaust and what the Jews had to go through back then.

Daniel's Story, a book about a young boy going through the holocaust is one of the best books I have read in my life. I picked up this book because of my love for historical fiction. Daniel's story brought me smiles, tears, and sympathy.
Carol Matas is a great author and great descriptiveness towards her writing. She writes as the character. As if Daniel were my age, talking like my age. This creates more of a connection with the main character for the reader.
This book describes the average life as a jewish child during the holocaust. What they had to go through, and the triumphs they had to overcome. I would highly suggest this book to anyone and everyone. Even if you are not interested in historical fiction.
Great for school teachers as well for their students to read because of its historical information. Basically Daniel is taken from his home to live in a ghetto. Here, his family either dies or gets trasnsported somewhere else. Him and his father manage to stay together, and stay alive. Their is also a little love route in this book for all of you girls. haha
Again, great book, good to read. Highly suggest if you want to learn about the Holocaust and the way it really was. Daniel is a great, strong character. And the way the author portrays him through out the book relates to many of the young readers out their.
Here is my personal rating:
Description: 4/5
Want a book that can give you vivid pictures in your mind? You will find it here. Great descriptions of not only settings, but character detail. Although the author can be abrupt at some times.
Plot: 5/5
Great plot, although it is very similar to Elie Weisel's "Night". But great story of a young boy and father trying to survive during the lead of the Third Reich.
Characters: 4/5
You will find many character through out this book. Many though are young boys, just about Daniel's age. They all though have very unique characterisitcs. Although sometimes the author could use more description in them to make them "Round Characters".

So, my raiting would be a 13/15. Again, great book!

O'Reilly & Associates, well-known for quality computer references, have once again done a superb job with this manual for vi. This Unix text editor can often be intimidating for those who haven't been exposed to it, but once a bit of time is spent with vi, it becomes second-nature. This book greatly helps in that endeavor.

Using this book, in conjunction with making vi my default PINE editor (thereby forcing me to become fluent with it, lest my email use become rather slow and awkward,) provided a huge speed boost in learning the vi editor. Vi is very powerful, and is almost always included on every unmodified Unix install. These items, coupled with the fact that vi doesn't automatically insert line breaks (like pico does) make it one of the most-preferred text editors amongst Unix sys-admins.

Not only does _Learning the vi Editor_ cover the essentials, but moves beyond basic editing functions into more powerful features, such as global searches & replacements, customizing the editor, "moving around in a hurry," command combinations, and other advanced vi features. For even better results in using vi, pick up a copy of O'Reilly's _sed & awk_, though it's not necessary for effective vi use.

_Learning the vi Editor_ is written in a friendly, casual voice, and Linda Lamb provides what your input and output will look like for most commands, interspersed with comments that put the reader at ease, such as "Qute forboding, isn't it?" followed by reasons not to be intimidated.

This book will help just about anyone conquer the mighty vi tool, and will help prove vi's superiority over any other Unix text editor. (Ahem - no offense to the emacs gurus out there.)

Vi is a powerful yet difficult editor to learn in the beginning. Although there is an abundance of references on the web, it is very difficult to learn the editor effectively without a book. Even more difficult to learn is the advanced features of the editor. The book has definitely made the learning process as painless as possible. The chapters are arranged in such a way that the reader can learn the editor incrementally without being fed too much information at once. At the end of each chapter there is a reference so the reader can refresh what he/she has learned in the chapter. (This also makes the book a very good reference.) What I like most about the book is in Part II of the book: "Extensions and Clones." The book first gives a summary of all the common USEFUL features of the clonse. Then, in subsequent chapters, the author shows how to use the features in each of the clones. This has made my life much easier because I can look up what I need and then go to the particular chapter (in my case, vim) for the information in the sub-chapter.

vi has a well-deserved reputation as being one of the least friendly editors in the UNIX world. This book, however, makes vi relatively painless to use, even for those accustomed to GUIs. Nowadays vi tends to be used mostly for quick editing of configuration scripts and the expansive amount of detail here is not likely to be that useful to people except those who plan to use vi almost exclusively. If you follow the examples, and practive using vi while reading this book, however, you will find that it does cover all the basics well and that you will feel quite at home with this much-maligned text editor. Most of this information is available freely on the net, but it not collected in one place in such an orderly fashion as this. Much of the advanced features will probably be rarely used, but if you spend a fortnight with this book in front of a UNIX or Linux box, you will find that you will be a vi pro in no time!

Giovanni Boccaccio THE DECAMERON. Second Edition. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by G. H. McWilliam. cli + 909 pages. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin Books, 1995. ISBN 0-14-044629-X (Pbk).

Second-hand opinions can do a lot of harm. Most of us have been given the impression that The Decameron is a lightweight collection of bawdy tales which, though it may appeal to the salacious, sober readers would do well to avoid. The more literate will probably be aware that the book is made up of one hundred stories told on ten consecutive days in 1348 by ten charming young Florentines who have fled to an amply stocked country villa to take refuge from the plague which is ravaging Florence.

Idle tales of love and adventure, then, told merely to pass the time by a group of pampered aristocrats, and written by an author who was quite without the technical equipment of a modern story-teller such as Flannery O'Connor. But how, one wonders, could it have survived for over six hundred years if that's all there were to it? And why has it so often been censored? Why have there always been those who don't want us to read it?

A puritan has been described as someone who has an awful feeling that somebody somewhere may be enjoying themselves, and since The Decameron offers the reader many pleasures it becomes automatically suspect to such minds. In the first place it is a comic masterpiece, a collection of entertaining tales many of which are as genuinely funny as Chaucer's, and it offers us the pleasure of savoring the witty, ironic, and highly refined sensibility of a writer who was also a bit of a rogue. It also provides us with an engaging portrait of the Middle Ages, and one in which we are pleasantly surprised to find that the people of those days were every bit as human as we are, and in some ways considerably more delicate.

We are also given an ongoing hilarious and devastating portrayal of the corruption and hypocrisy of the medieval Church. Another target of Boccaccio's satire is human gullibility in matters religious, since, then as now, most folks could be trusted to believe whatever they were told by authority figures. And for those who have always found Dante to be a crushing bore, the sheer good fun of The Decameron, as Human Comedy, becomes, by implication (since Boccaccio was a personal friend of Dante), a powerful and compassionate counterblast to the solemn and cruel anti-life nonsense of The Divine Comedy.

There is a pagan exuberance to Boccaccio, a frank and wholesome celebration of the flesh; in contrast to medieval Christianity's loathing of woman we find in him what David Denby beautifully describes as "a tribute to the deep-down lovableness of women" (Denby, p.249). And today, when so many women are being taught by anti-sex radical feminists to deny their own bodies and feelings, Boccaccio's celebration of the sexual avidity of the natural woman should come as a very welcome antidote. For Denby, who has written a superb essay on The Decameron that can be strongly recommended, Boccaccio's is a scandalous book, a book that liberates, a book that returns us to "the paradise from which, long ago, we had been expelled" (Denby, p.248).

The present Penguin Classics edition, besides containing Boccaccio's complete text, also includes a 122-page Introduction, a Select Bibliography, 67 pages of Notes, four excellent Maps and two Indexes. McWilliam, who is a Boccaccio scholar, writes in a supple, refined, elegant and truly impressive English which successfully captures the highly sophisticated sensibility of Boccaccio himself. His translation reads not so much as a translation as an original work, though his Introduction (which seems to cover everything except what is most important) should definitely be supplemented by Denby's wonderfully insightful and stimulating essay, details of which follow:

Chapter 17 - 'Boccaccio,' in 'GREAT BOOKS - My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World'
by David Denby. pp.241-249. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. ISBN 0-684-83533-9 (Pbk).

Ten young Florentine noblemen and women escaping the Black Death in Florence in 1348 entertain themselves by each relating a story per day for ten days - 100 entertaining stories in all, mostly set in and around medieval Florence. Although famously naughty, none of these stories strikes a modern reader as more than mildly erotic. Rather, they consistently astonish by their thoroughly modern message that women are as good as men, nobility doesn't come from birth, sanctity doesn't come from the church, and - above all - true love must never be denied. Amazingly, Boccaccio often delivers this message while pretending to say the exact opposite; sometimes he presents very sympathetic characters who get away with things thought scandalous in his time, offering a mere token condemnation at the end, while other times he depicts someone actually following the accepted code and committing some horrible act of cruelty in the process. Either way - and despite his claims to be upholding convention - we always know what he really means, and apparently he didn't fool too many people in his own day either.

But one doesn't need to focus on the revolutionary aspects of the Decameron to enjoy the book; each of the stories delights the reader with a different tasty morsel, and, you can read as much or as little at a time as you please. Once you get past the introduction, (and that's probably the most serious part of the book, so be sure not to give up before you get to the first story) the stories will make you laugh, make you cringe, and make you sit on the edge of your seat. Inspiring authors from Chaucer to Shakespeare and entertaining audiences for over 700 years, the Decameron continues to delight.

For a book to be even considered to a classic; then it, i.e., the book has to stand the test of time (and by so been read, pondered on and enjoy by several generations). The Decameron (Oxford World's Classics) by Giovanni Boccaccio, et al is one of these few books, e.g., The Odyssey, Thus Spoke Zarathustra et al. The story follows a plethora of storytellers whom all have gone to the countryside to escape the plague. The stories are filled with bravura, vigor, fortitude, a bit of sex and many other subjects (that are all written with an uncanny ability). If one considered oneself to be a scholar or a learned man then this book, i.e., The Decameron (Oxford World's Classics) by Giovanni Boccaccio, et al, is a must have; since not owning or having read it, then one as a person/scholar/learnedman must be considered less then civilized.

This is actually a presentation on de Tocqueville's life and times, centered on a general analysis of Democracy in America, but including much background on his family's history, his political career and accomplishments and a look at the historical context of France, Europe and the US in the mid 19th Century. The themes of DiA are reviewed with many quotes from the book and from commentaries by de Tocqueville's contemporaries. He is presented in all his glory: his hits (the brilliant insights into social character, the nature of democracy and his devastatingly astute, timeless analysis of our American identity) and his misses (his advocacy of war and his surprisingly traditionalist views of society's class structure). An occasional cheesy French accent in some of the characterizations is the only flaw. This is a _great_ commute tape, I look forward to "reading" more in this series on other great writers!

There is no doubt that Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America is perhaps the greatest book ever written on the US government and the principles of democracy. Tocqueville clearly shows both the promise and the problems of democracy. In many ways he is not at all flattering of the Americans, and in fact shows us how really terrible we can be. Nevertheless, he still shows hope in the ideas of democracy, and points that it is possible to overcome these problems.

The Mansfield edition of this book is a wonderful translation with great annotation and references, that make it good for a studnet or a casual, non-social theory, interested person to read. The introduction is also beautifully written and lays out the ideas de Tocqueville had marvelously. I think that this will be the edition to use in the future.

After hte events of last year, it is important for us to keep in mind what this country is about, what are its true problems, and how we can improve it. The problems that de Tocqueville points out are not something that panders to either left or right in our current sense, but points to problems fundamental in all democracies and particularlly in the American way of democracy. Yet, his hope should be uplifting.

Toquevilles' Democracy in America, written over a century and a half ago, is almost as relevant today as when it first appeared in print. Outside of the Federalist Papers, no book is as essential to a American student of political philosophy as this. This book is neither a manifesto of the right or left - both sides can draw powerful arguments (and lessons) from this work. Paramount to the book are the conflicts between equality and liberty, which today remains the core difference between the major political parties. Toqueville also predicted the rise of America and Russia, as well as the growth of the central government - a hundred years before it became reality. His praise of the American system of decentralized, voluntary associations is also dead on. A wonderful book.