This book is a pilgrimage. Not a linear pilgrimage that sets off from a given point and progresses towards a distant goal, but a pilgrimage through a labyrinth or maze - a circular pilgrimage, if you will.

The writer, a naturalist with a home and garden in eastern Massachusetts, is at home also in the wilderness of the western United States as well as in thr historic gardens of Italy. He traces for the reader the influence that the great gardens of Italy, part cultivated, part bosky wilderness, have had on the development of both the gardens and the wilderness of the U.S. But the book is not so simple and direct. Through it runs the theme of the labyrinth, its symbolism of the complexities of nature, its paradoxes, twists and turns.

The true spirit of wildness is seldom to be found, the writer says, in our large "wilderness" parks polluted by ATV's, rangers and over-run camp sites. Human connection with the land is most strongly felt in our gardens - not the front yard with its neatly mowed lawn and well-pruned foundation planting but a truly creative garden with wild spaces and vistas that welcome wild creatures. We can save some land from developers, build small parks, add in gardens with their boskyness (lovely word, that) and create our own web of wilderness even in our most built up areas,

Did the nature god Pan die with the birth of Christianity and the idea of dominion over all the creatures of the earth? The writer is optimistic that he did not and that the true spirit of nature can be revived, one natural garden space at a time.

This is the work of a respected nature writer who is stringing together ideas about wilderness and gardens loosely and creatively. It is both evocative and provocative, a mental ramble for an open and enquiring mind.

Like a ramble through a garden, or through the twists and turns of a maze, Mitchell takes the reader on a casually structured walk through memory, opinion, and speculation. He jumps from topic to topic in an engaging manner without exploring in any great depth his subjects -- the history of gardening in Italy and America, a few favorite writers (Thoreau, Wharton), his own large garden, his personal history, encounters with interesting people, the American conception and use of wilderness, urban encroachment, mazes and monsters, some colorful myths and stories. Nor does he need to go deep. His attempt in these related essays seems to be to introduce the reader to a great variety of ways of thinking about gardens, to provide different pathways through the subject, different perspectives. And he succeeds. Despite his overly ambitious subtitle ("Italian Gardens and the Invention of the Wilderness"), which suggests a strong unifying theme that the book is not disciplined enough to provide, he continually evokes the beauty and mystery of gardens as places of internal as well as external discovery. Constantly on the lookout for an iconic, sexless Pan, Mitchell finds the demigod in humans, goats, decorative statues, the center of a maze, and, ultimately, in the enduring metaphor that survived the arrival of Christianity not just to exist on its own, but also to inform the imagery of Satan. There are several startling moments as he gently guides us on his personal journey, such as the fact that in the 1960s scientists discovered lead from auto exhaust embedded in Arctic ice, or his encounters with an unnerving hiker in one of our national parks. Throughout, Mitchell's abiding faith in the garden, in the importance of human contact with the earth, sustains the book's meditative and thoughtful tone.

John Hanson Mitchell has spent the past two decades prowling a square mile or so of suburban woods and fields in Eastern Massachusetts, searching for its past and speculating on its future, and in the process producing 4 books (Ceremonial Time, Living At the End of Time, Walking Toward Walden, and Trespassing) dealing with the nature of place and its affect on the people who live there. His latest book, The Wildest Place on Earth, may at first glance seem, if not exactly a detour, at least a stroll down a side street, away from his favorite square mile of land known as Scratch Flat, but read on and you will find that Mitchell is once again exploring in small spaces.

In The Wildest Place on Earth, Mitchell sets out to discover the nature of the American wilderness and the influence of Italy's tamed landscapes on the American experience. In a series of rambles that span decades and move effortlessly from the history of Renaissance gardens to American conservationists, and the Hudson River school of landscape painters to encounters in America's overcrowded and over-loved wilderness parks, Mitchell pokes and prods and writes of the past. This book is part travelogue, and part informed speculation as Mitchell comes to realize that wilderness is perhaps more a concept than a true reality for most of us, and that the wildest place on earth may be his own somewhat haphazardly planned backyard garden that has grown over the past decade into a lush and relaxing presence.

Mitchell writes much in this book about the Greek and Roman myths and how they influence, even to this day, what we see and feel as wilderness. The god Pan is always present, and the history of mazes and labyrinths makes for some fascinating side trips through Italy. If you are looking for a few good modern-day gardening stories, he supplies those as well.

The editor of the Massachusetts Audubon magazine Sanctuary and the winner of the 1994 John Burroughs essay award and the 2000 New England Bookseller's Award, Mitchell is a graceful stylist who will win you over as he rambles an speculates'much like a close friend who you may not always agree with, but you can't stop listening to those provocative opinions.

Like any other recent Wrox titles, this one contains jewels and pretenders. On the bright side, quite a few of the Java and XML chapters are strong, and I particularly liked the ones on EJB, PL/SQL-Java inter-operation, and SOAP. There is also a chapter at the end on setting up the environment to run the book samples. On the not so bright side, the PL/SQL chapters are disappointing, because they cover either fundamental stuff that anyone who calls themselves an Oracle developer should know, or irrelevant technologies like OAS PL/SQL cartridge and PSP (huh?). The chapters on JDBC and connection pooling wasted 60% of the pages by talking about the basic JDBC API and showing the details of a connection pool manager class, rather than talking more about Oracle's extensions to the JDBC 2.0 standard and optional packages API. Finally, there is one glaring omission - MTS (I am talking about the Microsoft stuff here), although it does contain an informative chapter on ASP/Oracle. One more thing: this book covers Oracle8i Release 2, not the latest 3.

With everything considered, you may still want to own this title, as it is the only book under the sun that covers all (well, almost) current distributed programming technologies that interface with Oracle (both J2EE and Windows DNA). It also covers promising Oracle proprietary technologies such as interMedia, BC4J, and Portal (aka WebDB).

One of the best books around for database application developers working with Java/XML on the Oracle platform and who don't nowadays! The book is up-to-date with Oracle 8.1.7 and covers new aspect such as JDBC2.0 and the Java to native compiler (NCOMP). I give it five stars because it covers all important Java/XML aspects in great detail and because it already proved its worth by providing me with solutions for really tricky problems. The only neagtive thing I can think of is its size. But I guess the American authors probably got paid per line.

This book is one of the more comprehensive I have read about Oracle programming. It has very good examples and you will find tips and information you won't find in any other books/web sites/forums etc. This book has been written by genuine Oracle developers and you will get a depth of real-world knowledge and application. I recommend highly it for the serious Oracle, Java and XML developer.

Oh, western man! When will you learn your lesson? People vehemntly guard their private property. One would think that after looking at my continent, and looking and the failed socialist experiments of the twentieth century, Americans would learn the lesson of the importance of private ownership. If elimination of private property is what you Americans want, then you too will be condemned to poverty and death.

This book passed a basic test of polemical writing: it inspired me to go out and do what the author strongly suggested the reader do. It was the middle of the night, but I put the book down and went out for a walk in the woods on someone else's property (don't worry they have plenty) so that I could look at the moon and stars and sparkling landscape from a high place.

I learned an awful lot about the history of private property from this book. Because the concept of private property is so central to American identity I was left wondering why someone had not presented an environmental history from this perspective before. It is has given me a lens through which to read other books of environmental history.

Mitchell is honest about where he stands in the debate about who should be in charge about what should be done with private land. He is an ecocentrist, pure and simple, and doesn't trust individual landowners to "do the right thing" by their land. He allows that one of the chief antagonists in this book, a man named Morrison, actually does take good care of his land, but he makes it clear that he does not want to leave such a precious thing as the land to the chance that the owner may or may not take care of it. In fact, much of the book is an attempt to show us how absurd and artificial the idea of "land ownership" really is.

One of the threads in the story is Mitchell's recounting of an attempt at group ownership ("co-ownership") of land. The community that is finally realized falls short of its ideal, but he insists that it is far better than the default condition in modern America. Decide for yourself whether it is a pyrrhic victory.

The main thread of the book is the tribal history of his favorite plot of land in Littleton, Mass. As usual, it is a pretty sad story.

John Hanson Mitchell is a graceful stylist who has been hammering away at a host of environmental subjects from the perspective of a single square mile. Trespassing may be his best book yet, and only slightly less ambitious than his monumental tour de force, Ceremonial Time. He takes the theme of ownership of land, one of the most potentially boring subjects around, and turns it into a great nonstop read by focussing on a single five hundred acre tract of land through some three hundred years of history. Some of the characters in this book are right out of Dickens, some of the descriptions of the landscape are out of Conrad, and, as far as I can tell, he's got a great understanding of the whole process of the creation of the American laws that govern the use of land. But you don't have to be interested in environment or legal history to enjoy this. Just read it for the characters. I wept for Sarah Dublet at the end of this book.

John Mitchell can't quite decide if 4 Go Mad in Massachusetts is a travelogue or a travel book, but therein lies its perfection.

A series of short stories about his family's travels all over the state make more fun reading than a bland travel book, while imparting the kind of hidden information about attractions both offbeat and obvious that often goes unsaid (like that when visiting 'The Butterfly Place' his twin boys get more excited about an infestation of mealy bugs they find, or how the boys' 'Uncle Biz' accompanies them to a historic site and meets a man in period costume portraying his Mayflower riding ancestor but all he can think to ask him is "Where is the bathroom?"). From the Thermometer Museum to an Anatomical Museum, to the Freedom Trail and Edaville Railroad, Mitchell paints a portrait of the state with equal parts sarcasm, wit, and wonderment that goes far outside the lines yet entices the reader to delve deeper into finding the Massachusetts that lies just outside the box.

Throughout the nearly 200 pages of this book, John Mitchell finds himself facing an age-old dilemma: can a family find places to visit that won't leave at least one side of the parent-child team screaming for mercy? How do two young hipsters entertain their kids without hooking them up to the corporate theme park teat?

It's a tribute to the Mitchells' parenting skills that they and their children derive as much fascination and enjoyment from talking to hens at the zoo as they do from wandering through a World War II-era submarine (although the boys get as much pleasure from crawling across the lined-up bunks and pretending to be moles). Between John's smart, clever prose and Jana's gorgeous, fluid illustrations, 4 Go Mad will make you want to visit more places and spend time examining their beauty, their pathos, and how different age groups derive different meanings from them. A smart, fun read.

From the moment I picked up this book, I was hooked - and I don't even live in Massachusetts! The adventures of the Mitchell family not only entertained me - they opened my eyes to a small part of the vast array of hidden oddities out there in the world just waiting to be discovered and explored!

And what explorations they have! Every chapter uncovers yet another amazing locale - each more fascinating then the last.

Harry and Hugo sound like wonderful children with vast creativity and an immense amount to offer - who wouldn't be with parents like these?

Love it! Love it! LOVE IT - keep up the good work!

I mostly agreed with Eric Ma. There are some areas that Wrox needs to review the whole process of publishing Java-related books. Here are some drawbacks that I can draw from reading recent Java-related books:

(1) Repeated Contents: Materials about Servlet, JSP, EJB, JNDI, JDBC, XML, etc are repeated over and over many books. This could waste time, money, and papers for both Wrox and readers.

(2)Books or Articles?: I asked myself: is Wrox publishing books or articles? Each book is written by many authors and the book's flow is inconsistent. The assessment that it is not a book but a collection of articles may partially true. It is true that a book if written by a team of authors could speed up the process of releasing it, but if Wrox editors and coordinators have to do their better jobs.

I suggest that Wrox should review its strategy of publishing books to avoid the repeating of materials over and over and thus bring down the cost associated with publishing the books. The final result is: readers and publisher will both save time and money. Otherwise, readers will loose their belief with Wrox.

For the past 2 years Wrox has been publishing books dedicated to Windows-based data access (ADO etc.), but the same cannot be said about their Java/database collection. Although you find chapters on JDBC scattered all-over almost all server-side Java related books by Wrox, there was no single volume from them that teaches JDBC first, and then show how it is used by the newer dependent technologies, until this book arrived. After looking through this book, I must say the authors and editors have done a rather commendable job.

Why do I make the above conclusion? Let me give you my general impression of the book first. A theme repeated in several of my recent reviews on books from Wrox is about the problem in coherence associated with multi-author books. Well, having more than a dozen of authors for a single book seems to be a fact of life (for books from Wrox at least) now, as the publication cycle gets shorter. I was rather surprised to find out that the organization and coherence is very good in this book, i.e., there is very little overlap among chapters. Also, this books uses JDBC cleverly to tie other pieces of J2EE together, making smooth transitions from one chapter to another. If you want to know, this factor alone prompted me to add an extra star to the overall rating of the book.

Let's now run down the chapters of this book quickly. The first 115 pages deals object-oriented and database modeling, and can be skipped by any "Professional" developer. Then after your obligatory intro to JDBC API, the next chapter covers the JDBC 2.0 optional package. This is the best treatment of this topic I have seen. Then another chapter is all about SQLJ, another first. The effort of having a chapter on database performance should be lauded, where connection pooling, prepared statements and stored procedures usage are demoed. The reminder of the book is about applying JDBC in various J2EE components, such as JSP, servlets, EJB, JMS, and XML. For this part of the book, even though I accept the fact the proper stage has to be set for each one of them, I still don't believe the book found the right balance between focusing on JDBC and showing what these other technologies are about. A large number of pages are used to teach basic JNDI, servlets, JSP's, and EJB's stuff (remember there is already a book on J2EE from Wrox!). Therefore, it is up to the reader to discover the real nuggets of gold hidden in this pile, which are far and in between in places. I found that some critical issues are not highlighted or details are lacking, such as how to use connection pooling/data sources in servlets, JSP's, and EJB's, the threading issues related to sharing database connections, and good database practices in BMP EJB's. However, the one thing I cannot complain about is that the book did not forget to teach the transaction aspect of EJB with a good depth (there is a short ans sweet chapter on using JTA/JTS inside EJB). There is also a chapter on the brand-new JDO framework, even though the spec is still in a state of flux. Finally, there are 4 case study chapters in the book - although the design and implementation are limited in scope and as a whole those samples do not teach all you need to do know about enterprise scale J2EE system development, they do provide a flavor of how JDBC is used in real world, together with setting up Tomcat, JRun, Orion, and WebLogic to access MS SQL Server and Oracle databases.

Now my overall take of this book. For VB/SQL and pure back-end PL/SQL developers who are eager to jump on the Java express train and need a suitable platform (especially for the ones who learn best from playing with actual code), I recommend this book as one of several you should own. Compared to other JDBC books from say O'Reilly and Sun's JDBC Tutorial, this book is the most up-to-date, contains the most source code, and has the broadest coverage of related topics. But keep in mind some of the advanced topics such as EJB and JMS can be intimidating for new-comers. On the other side of the coin, people who are advanced in various server-side Java technologies are unlikely to benefit a great deal from this book and should look elsewhere for info (for example Wrox's J2EE and upcoming EJB titles).

This book is an excellent read for people who want to feel the timelessness of the Catskills. It gives the reader a sense of stepping back in time. The pictures show an example of New York that no "foreigner" could imagine. Every time I show this book, the overwhelming response is one of surprise. One only mentions New York and immediately the hearer conjures up images of its famed city. But where does the great metropolis of New York get its life? It flows from the mountains. This book does an excellent job of portraying the peace and serenity that a visitor, or native, would receive from observing the splendor and beauty that only an incredible God could instill within these lost hills.

easily read in layman's terms to understand the basic principles of chaos mathematics.

I read this book after reading another by the author as I liked him so much and I was not dissapointed! The book provides detailed, fasinating accounts of people with eccentric hobbies that they have devoted their lives to. For example, Mrs Elizabeth Wells Gallup, the baconian cipherer. A great read. enjoy.

I work in several Microsoft languages and have needed to explore VB.NET just like all the others. Ever since PDC I have been programming in C# as much as I can and have explored VB.NET so make sure that anything non-specific to C# can be accomplished in VB.NET. I also read books for recomendation to others. This book is not one that I will recommend. Not because VB.NET is less of a programming language, but because this book does not cover the amount or topics needed, IMO. A super sound knowledge of OOP is needed because it's maditory in VB.NET. You can not get away from this and you need to understand this first. This book covers these topics so minimally that you don't really have any real-world application and looks sort of like someone explaining the Impliments keyword in VB6. My recommendation is to NOT get this book. And if you are determined to go to VB.NET then please get a book dedicated to OOD (Object Orientated Design) and/or OOP (Object Orientated Programming). The last few chapters are interesting but so high level that it's difficult to get full understanding of how to really use the material. I rated this book a 2 instead of a 3 because of the lack of meat on OOD and OOP. The syntax is there, but the knowledge is just not expressed to where you know why or when.

I am about to wear this book out because I use it so much. We are currently developing a new product based entirely on Microsoft's .NET platform, and I use this book constantly as a reference whenever I do any VB.NET development. So far, it has answered every question we ahve had.

To appreciate this book, you must have done some pretty serious development in Visual Basic 6.0 or another high-level language. It is not an introduction level book, but does a great job of introducing experienced Windows and web developers to the new VB.NET environment. If you fall into this category of developers and are considering a move to the .NET platform, then you definitely want this book!

The only other .NET book I've read is the Wrox "Preview of ASP+" which I thought lived up to it's title. For me, this book goes well beyond a preview.

I read the whole 433 pages over a span of seven days and with the knowledge I've gained I'm preparing to recommend using the .NET beta technology to begin development on an Enterprise system that (in our architecture) would otherwise require use of Visual C++ and the ATL. Now I know that with VB.NET you can easily create free threaded applications and objects and you can just as easily create Win32 services.

Everything you need to know about the changes (and there are many of them) is explained in detail. Chapter 5, covers object-oriented programming for those who are new to the concept and explains how VB.NET handles: inheritance, and function overloading.

Even if you can't find it in your local bookstore, buy this book (if you have the public beta of course), after you read this one you'll likely be ready to go in to your manager and build and a case for reasons to mirgate to .NET

Novelist Greg Rucka came aboard the Batman books during the groundbreaking "No Man's Land" epic. I loved that story arc, but since then, I've found Rucka's work, both on Batman and other comics (Whiteout, Batman/Huntress, etc.) to be either hit or miss. He is capable of great work, as the Two-Face story in this book shows, but when he's off his game.....oh boy.

The biggest problem here is Editorial; When DC rebooted Detective Comics, post NML, they made a few awful decisions- Artist Shawn Martinbrough's work is boring and nondescript, and it's made even worse by the "Limited" Colors used. The book looks like someone spilled a mug of Hot Chocolate on it. Just awful. Why bother to color it at all? It would be much more palatable in black and white.

An Editor should also have stepped in to stop Rucka from using a ridiculous designer drug as his plot device; The drug doesn't just addict, it turns it's users into animals. Literally. Snakes, Wolves, etc. After years spent trying to keep The Batman books (Semi)believable, the sight of addicts turning into snakes had me howling with laughter. Is this the best the great Ra's Al Ghul could do? Pathetic! Ra's Al Ghul is not my favorite Batman villain, but I think that's why he never used to turn up much: It took a really talented writer to do something with him. Rucka was not that writer. After all of that buildup, the story doesn't end, so much as stop. It's almost like Rucka ran out of writing paper....

With the great array of Batman books out there, you can't really be in bad enough shape that you'll want to waste your cash on this....

Great read. Not so great art work but you can't blame that on rucka can you. Rucka did a great job with the villans i think. i purchased this along with batman broken bat. Broken Bat was a little better cause of the art work. BUY THIS BOOK!

Frank Miller, Jeph Loeb, Ed Brubaker & Greg Rucka. What do all of these guys have in common? Apart from being absolute masters of the comic book medium, and also being able to tell cracking good mystery tales, they have the distinction of being able to give us the BEST Batman tales. Greg Rucka's take on Batman/Bruce Wayne is at once both believable and fantastic! Do yourself a favour and check this book out. The story flows along at a brisk pace and the art is done in a psuedo film nior style. Very groovy.