I saw it in my teachers shelf. I looked at the cover and it looked interesting to me. I read it in the beginning of the year 2003.

Robinson Crusoe was sailing in a violent storm and it destroyed the ship. Next day he built a fort to protect himself from wild animals. In the beginning of the story he is on a island alone. But at the end he meets some indians.
People who like adventure would like this book.

I like this book because Daniel Defoe can grasp your attention within the first two chapters. He had caught mine with Robinson Cruesoe's ways.
Defoe makes his character stand out, and lets you see the relationships in which Cruesoe makes. You feel like you know what Cruesoe is like, after only a few chapters.
The development of this book, and its characters is extraordinary. With Cruesoe, throughout the book, you see his tenacity, and how he just won't quit, he won't let go of survival. You also see how Cruesoe's friend can learn English, and understands so he can communicate.
The action in which Robinson goes through is incredible. He battles storms, and gets in fights with cannibal hunters, and fights with survival. With Cruesoe, you wonder how one man does it.
The plot, having action packed pages, out standing vocabulary, excellent development, and interesting twists, makes you sit at the edge of your seat, and want to read faster.
Though the book is fiction, it still has a moral. The moral that I think is having a lot to do with colonial times. Having no refrigerators, no computers, no television, and no microwave dinners. This book shows that man can live without modern conveniences. He doesn't need any of the fancy electronics we have made to be content.

The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
This book was outstanding!!!. Daniel Defoe writes another amazing adventure of Robinson Crusoe. This book is about an adventurer who get's stranded on an island. His name is Robinson Crusoe, and he was born in England. One day when Robinson and his crew were on a boat there was a bad storm and they had to jump off the boat. They swim for shore and make camp.This story takes place on an island. The main characters are Robinson the adventurer,Friday - the slave, and Friday's father. These characters learn how to be friends and fight and work to get off this island. I recommend this book for anyone who likes action and adventure.

This book made me feel like I back in school (in a good way)! It was very informative and covered all the bases. I am about to begin a career in campaign management, and I think this book is one of my best resources. I got the most out of the section on fundraising.

This book is one of the first books I reccomend whenever anyone asks me for a primer on political campaign strategy. This book is not for true beginners - if you don't know how to run a get out the vote operation or organize your grassroots organization, buy this book AFTER you've read a book geared towards beginners.

If you know the basics though, this book will guide you through Political Campaign Strategy 201 - it is a great, intermediate level work.

I wrote "25 Fundraising Secrets - Raise More Money, Guaranteed" to give political candidates some great advice on fundraising for thier campaigns. I often tell readers of my book to check out Shea's book as well, which has an good fundraising strategy section that gives the basics, and compliments my "secrets" book well.

As a previously elected official (Mayor of Ashland, OR), author of The Campaign Manager, Running and Winning Local Elections, and a local campaigner for the last 15 years, I try to read every book there is on running campaigns.

The process of running an election is always evolving and so I look for new material to expand my understanding of this bizarre field. Daniel Shea's book is excellent. It is well written, comprehensive, and has a depth of field I've found in no other book. While it may not give you the step-by-step approach to campaigning, it does provide the necessary foundation for understanding the process and getting to a win. What a resource.

Shea's accounts of statewide campaigns are extraordinarily helpful in illustrating specific aspects of a campaign and his understanding and explanation of electoral targeting is excellent. Electoral targeting and precinct analysis may be one of the most important things a candidate can do to win an election and yet is the most difficult for some to understand. However, Daniel Shea is able to explain it in simple, understandable ways so the reader can apply it.

Whether you're interested in running for office or simply want a better understanding of how the process works, I would recommend this book. Easily five stars. I only wish I'd written it.

I found the book very useful. It acted as both a refresher on the queuing theory and as a reference book.

The only thing I have agnist the book is that I wish it had some more advanced examples. I found the examples a bit simple and theoritical. Such examples are needed to understand the theory.But more real life examples would have shown how to structure the problems in the first place.

The modeling of the Internet has become extremely important in recent years as it continues to grow in leaps and bounds. Network architects have to become very aware of the performance issues when they design networks that will be integrated into this elaborate spider of clients, servers, routers, and switches. The issues in the modeling of global networks are extremely complex and involve very advanced mathematical techniques in order to do the job effectively. The authors of this book however have written an introduction to Web modeling that is written at a level appropriate for network designers and the beginning modeling engineer. They employ Excel spreadsheets and C code to assist in the modeling efforts, and these packages are available on an accompanying CD.

After a brief discussion of the issues concerning capacity planning, Web server, Intranet, and ISP performance in Chapter 1, the authors move on to defining and characterizing client/server systems in the next chapter. After a brief overview of the history of the Internet, they discuss LANs and WANs, and a quick treatment of protocols. The TCP protocol is considered in somewhat more detail because of its importance in network performance.

The quantitative analysis of performance in client/server environments is begun in chapter 3, wherein the authors begin with communication-processing delay diagrams to illustrate how requests spend time at each resource. This is done for both a 2-tier and a 3-tier C/S architecture, and the authors detail how disk subsystems contribute to the service time at a disk. An elementary iteration technique is used to compute the disk utilization. A very interesting and detailed discussion of the RAID-5 disk array is given. Some elementary queuing theory is discussed, using the assumption of flow equilibrium. A simplified summary of the utilization, forced flow, service demand, and Little's laws is also given without resorting to complicated mathematics.

Performance issues in Intranets and Web servers are the topic of the next chapter, and most importantly, the authors outline the differences between HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1. The role of the proxy server and its contribution to performance is also discussed, along with Web cluster architectures. The authors first mention the role of burstiness in this chapter, but do not give an in-depth mathematical discussion.

In chapter 5, the authors give a step-by-step methodology for capacity planning for C/S systems. Workload characterization, data collection issues, model validation, and forecasting are all discussed quantitatively with more details in later chapters.

How to characterize the workload quantitatively is the subject of the next chapter, in terms of a business, functional, and resource-oriented methodology. The authors discuss briefly workload models from a non-mathematical point of view, with parametrized models given the emphasis. The calculation of the parameters is given a more detailed and mathematical treatment, with distance measures and clustering algorithms outlined. Self-similarity in network traffic is first mentioned here, but not discussed from a rigorous mathematical perspective. The authors do however give a rudimentary method for calculating the burstiness.

Benchmarking is discussed in Chapter 7, with the authors detailing the most common approaches to this activity, and mention the most cited benchmark sources, including SPEC, TPC, AIM, and NNBB. The authors divide benchmarks into two categories, component-level and system-level, and discuss CPU performance benchmarking, file server performance, and transaction processing systems as examples of these two categories. Web server benchmarking is also discussed in the context of the two most popular benchmarks: Webstone and SPECweb. Webstone uses Little’s Law to derive a metric called Little’s Load Factor, which gives the average number of connections open at the Web server at a particular time during a network test. Their discussion is very helpful for network modelers who need an introduction to the current benchmarks used in network testing and planning.

The authors fortunately get even more mathematical in the next two chapters on system-level and component-level performance models. Various queuing models are analyzed assuming operational equilibrium, which the authors assume for all models in the book, and which means that the number of requests initially is equal to the number at the end of the observation interval. State transition diagrams are introduced, but the mathematical formalism used is not based on one from stochastic processes, but instead is more phenomenological. The authors employ mean value analysis to solve closed queuing networks with the EXCEL spreadsheets nicely illustrating the results.....

The last chapter of the book discusses how to obtain network performance data experimentally. This can be a difficult task, but the authors do a good job of discussing the possible strategies one can use to collect this data, and give a brief overview of the commercially available network monitors available for this purpose. The difficult job of parameter estimation using measurement data is also discussed in some detail. The authors refer to their other book however for a more thorough treatment of validation and calibration techniques.

The authors have written a fine book here, and will serve well the person first beginning in network modeling and the network designer who needs to understand performance issues. After reading this book, and with some more mathematical preparation, readers can then move on to more sophisticated treatments of the mathematical and simulation modeling of networks.

Easy enough for any IT person to understand yet detailed enough for real world capacity planning. It doesn't favor any hardware or software but drills in on ways to measure any of them.

The papers provide very clear explanations of a number of software fundamentals. The key ideas (information hiding, documentation methods, software structures) are covered from numerous different angles which ensures that they are well understood. Some of the commentaries are more useful than others, the ones that I liked the best were those that highlight the present day relevance of the ideas and details. On the downside, its certainly not bedside reading material, but at the same time its difficult to use as a reference because it does not try to pull the papers together. There are only a small number of core concepts - an incredible achievement for any one person, but limiting its usefulness for a reader. And despite the assurances of some of the commentators I think that some of the papers have dated.

The ideas presented in this collection of papers changed forever the way I think about developing sofware. These papers separate the men from the boys. If you understand the concepts layed out by Parnas in these papers you are well along your way to understanding the fundamentals necessary for developing quality software. The papers are clearly research oriented and don't have modern real world applications presented in the text, however, the ideas are timeless. The reader will need to make some connections with the modern world on their own. It is well worth the time and effort to read and digest what Parnas has to say.

The software world is full of "revolutionary" ideas that seem to be periodically rediscovered. Topics such as refactoring, data hiding, and "design for change" have all made recent rounds in the development world. However, most of these concepts have been part of the research literature for decades.

Much of the software development work done today is done by people lacking the requisite fundaments for the job. Very few are capable of assessing the true technical strengths of software products. Most are content to read the glossy sales brochures or shallow write-ups in trade magazines to maintain their knowledge of the state of the art. A careful reading of the collected papers in this volume go a long way towards protecting the reader from the modern snake oil salesmen of the software industry.

This book should be required reading for all software developers who strive to deserve the title "Engineer."

Tenebrea's Hope is a reward for readers who made it through Entering Tenebrea without giving up on the series. Book Two of the Tenebrea Trilogy is definitely better than its predecessor, despite an ending that's a wee bit trite and anticlimactic, and fails to deliver any major plot payoff.

The story picks up with Andrea Flores and renegade clone Tara in mid-flight away from the wreckage they generated on Cor. Blowing up the clone institute seemed the only way to buy time for mounting a full offensive against the Ordinate's NewGen clones, but it also blew Andrea's cover and K'Rin's plans for mobilizing the Jod Council in secrecy. Under ambitious Admiral Brulk, the Ordinate traces the saboteurs back to Jod and seizes the initiative. Accusing Jod of incitement to war, Cor gains a political weapon in lieu of the NewGen forces it lost.

Still too closed-minded to understand the real threat, Jod Council leader Pl'Don sees the Ordinate mess as an excellent opportunity to destroy his long-standing opponent K'Rin, along with the Tenebrea and the entire Rin clan. Expecting to take a Council seat as leader of any potential fight against Cor, K'Rin instead finds himself and most of his men taken by surprise and packed off to a prison planet. Worse, a traitor in K'Rin's ranks has told Pl'Don about the Tenebrea's use of the illegal Quazel protein; with no access to the necessary counteracting enzyme, the prisoners are doomed to a gruesome and lingering death.

Cooling her heels in a hidden outpost with fellow Tenebrea H'Roo and escaped clones Tara and Eric, Andrea is spared from Pl'Don's trap. She and her companions are now the Tenebrea's best hope. There's hope for her, too, as-almost against her will-she finds herself beginning to care again about the fates of those around her. Suddenly her life's mission of killing as many Ordinate as she can is sidelined by her need to spring K'Rin and the Tenebrea. She does return to Cor as she promised outlaw clone Brigon in Entering Tenebrea, but it's to recruit his assistance in the great escape rather than to fight the Ordinate. Meanwhile, Cor is preparing to sandbag Jod in pretty much the same way that Pl'Don took out K'Rin and most of his men-a nicely ironic touch.

The story lines in Tenebrea's Hope are much more scattered than in Entering Tenebrea. Where most of the action in the previous book was focused on either Andrea or K'Rin, those perspectives are joined here by alternating sections centering on Pl'Don, Brigon, Brulk, and a number of other minor characters as well. The increased plot complexity helps to conceal the believability issues that still crop up from time to time, but the transitions are choppy and continuity sometimes suffers. As in the first book, the characters and situations are absorbing enough to ensure that most readers will be back to see how all those cliffhangers are resolved in the final installment of the trilogy.

This second book of the Tenebrea trilogy was even more engaging than the first. I was drawn in from the very first paragraph, and the story held my interest all the way to the last line. And, as only a good book can, it left me wanting more. I cannot wait to get my hands on the third book, Tenebrea Rising.

This story is so incredible that I was so caught up in it, I actually forgot where I was a couple of times. I was sad I reached the end of the book, and desperately wanted to climb back into Andrea Flores' world.

It's beautifully written. The characters are multi-dimensional and endearing, the imagery evokes pictures in the mind that are fascinating, and the story has so many twists and turns it keeps the reader on his/her toes. Roxann Dawson and Daniel Graham make a superb team. I thought Ms. Dawson was one of the most gifted Star Trek actors ever, and her talents continue to deliver.

Roxann Dawson and Daniel Graham make a powerful and exciting writing team. They each bring to this trilogy their own unique blend of talent and creativity.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading both "Entering Tenebrea" and "Tenebrea's Hope".
Captivating, edge of your seat suspense and a spectrum of emotions was felt, as I became a sideline character cheering on Andrea Flores in her quest.

I wait with bated breath to read the third book in this tantalizing trilogy, "Tenebrea Rising". I look forward to seeing Roxann Dawson and Daniel Graham at the NYC Convention where I will wait in line yet again to be the first to obtain a signed copy of the final book in this intoxicating trilogy.

KUDOS TO THE AUTHORS..............

Bonnie K. FitzPatrick

Constructing the appropriate team and environment for the creation of a software project is difficult because writing code is difficult. Many still object to the term "software engineering" because they feel, with a great deal of justification, that it is not yet stable enough to be a field of engineering. To them, a field of engineering has a set of formulas that define the rules for the use of raw materials. Engineers then construct their edifices by placing the proper numbers in the formulas and then building the structure using the results. Despite decades of effort to make it otherwise, software creation is still more art than engineering.
Paulish understands this and uses rules of thumb rather than formulas to describe the software construction process. It all starts with the software development plan (SDP), a description of the organizational structure of the process and the roles and responsibilities of all the members of the team. Short and primarily in outline form, it sets out the general format of how the goals are to be achieved. Experienced managers understand that this starts as a straw man, to be slowly solidified as all inputs are accepted and incorporated.
The hardest part of all software projects is the management of expectations, and it is the place where a manager can make the most difference. One of the quickest ways to poison a well functioning team is to allow unreasonable or inaccurate expectations to be inserted into the plan, either explicitly or by rumor. Paulish devotes chapter four to this, although it is too short. There is much more to this area than he lists in chapter four. Fortunately, this idea recurs in many other sections, so it does receive adequate coverage.
In the modern world, the management of a distributed workforce is fairly typical, and as anyone who has done it will tell you, in many cases the time differential is one of the smaller problems. Language difficulties also occur, but the real difficulties are the social and cultural differences. When you consider how difficult it is to communicate when you share the same cultural background, language, office space and are in proximity for eight hours a day, you realize how difficult it is to make yourself understood when you are separated by half a planet. Chapter 6 is devoted to this issue, but once again, not enough ink and paper are used to cover this critical area. The best piece of advice in the entire book is to undergo some form of focused multicultural training before embarking on an outsourcing project.
While there is a chapter devoted to metrics used to chart progress, it is largely devoid of formulas and expressions. Many of the metrics used are politely referred to as "controversial", which is often a euphemism for "widely disbelieved." Paulish firmly believes in leaving aside the firm tracking mechanisms and relying on hands-on efforts such as following the daily bug tracks and even working as an informal tester. This will give a manager a feel for the software that no other technique ever could.
One of the last chapters is also one of the best, where the simple question "What is a good job?" is asked and answered. This is critical, for software is one area where you can win the battle but lose the war. Many software projects deliver a functioning product and a team of dysfunctional members. The best managers reach the release date with a team that is tired and proud rather than just tired. Paulish rightly considers the staff turnover metric to be one of the key indicators of whether the project can be deemed a success.
Paulish describes a quality, maybe even an ideal manager, which is someone who absorbs a lot of the normal shocks of software development rather than amplifying them before passing them on. His ideas will work to make software development projects work over the long term and if you are in that group, then some of your attention should be focused on what he is saying.

Certainly the importance of mastering project management, in particular for products that contain signficant amounts of software, is crucial for business success, both at Siemens and elsewhere. This book is based on extensive practical experience and is a broad and well-written book on this topic. The special focus on software architecture as a major success factor for projects provides a useful perspective -- not only for project managers but also software architects as well as others in the software development team. This book also provides a unique "global development" perspective on the topic of project management.

The ideal audience of this book includes anyone who works within, or who follows, SEI's (Software Engineering Institute's) extensive body of work on architecture and/or product line engineering, or who needs to develop a project management framework for software development. While the approach in this book is more suited for product-oriented development, it can also be used for major internal projects.

As the title implies, the focus on the project management framework is the architecture, and the key elements of the approach are planning, organizing, implementing and measuring. The latter element lends itself to continuous refinement and fits nicely into CMM level 4 and 5 organization, which is not surprising since the CMM is embedded in practically every guide produced by SEI.

What makes this book special, though, is the clearly defined approach that is systematically presented using case studies and frequent diagrams to orient you as you go through the book. More importantly, the author communicates a vision and shows how to put it into practice.

I like the approach because it lends itself to realistic project planning and estimation. By taking an architecture-centric approach it's easy to develop a complete work breakdown structure early in the planning phase, which provides a foundation for detailed estimating. I also like the way the approach separates, then integrates, team organization, requirements and strategy, risk management and release planning.

This is not another project management methodology, but instead, shows how to use architecture as the focal point of the project and use whatever specific PM methodology suits your organization to effectively define project deliverables and the final product. It's complete, realistic and will work in practice.

After waiting patiently for a seller who was going to sell this book for a reasonable price, I got one for about twenty dollars. While this book has a lot of good information, a lot of it is obsolete and you'll really have a hard time justifying spending the kind of money people are asking for it.

I have a lot of assemly books and I will rate this one as an advanced book but you can still get a good education from it if you know the basics of assembly language. In my opinion, the difficulty of the language is over rated. A great book to learn the language is : "Assembly Language for Intel Based Processors (4th Edition)" by Irvine. (emphasis on 4th edition cos it covers 32 bit coding)

This book presents a wide variety of topics, but doesn't go into a great deal of detail about any of them. I still recommend the book as an overview to the subject area.

Don't get me wrong this book is awesome. Just know a fair amount of assembler before coming to this book. Goes into great detail on difficult subjects or subjects rarely covered in other books. Proteteced mode, advanced video, data compression, pentium, advanced sound, viruses, advanced low-level disk access and DMA are all covered. My only beef is no PCI coverage, it only seems natural that an advanced book cover this along with the advanced ISA. Oh well 5 stars anyway for all the excellent coverage elsewhere. Although approaching the *outdated material* realm it does go to profound lengths to enable you to write real world assembler for todays still active processors.

This book seems tailored to the Web novice. And it's not very insightful about unions either, relying mostly on old platitudes and even a 1947 book by C. Wright Mills to discuss the bureaucratic obstacles to computer-driven change.

I have designed a few simple Web pages and been involved in Web planning at my union. To me, this book offers little in the way of new insights.

This book has effectively established the "bar" for cyber-unionism. Some might complain that the book is not detailed enough or technical; however, Mr. Shostak is the first author to formally challenge existing paradigms and move unions to action.

As a student at the National Labor College, Vice President and CIO of my union, and webmaster for our site, I recommend this book as a must read for any unionist who is attempting to implement technology in their union. Actual implementation methodologies and philosophies should be forthcoming in his next book which I am eagerly anticipating.

This book gives you the particulars as well as the rationale for trade union activists to be active in the use of computers. It is fair to say that already the book is having an inflence on how union organizers function in this technolical age. Boeing employees almost all of whom are highly computer literate are doing card checks, arranging for workers to respond on line to fill out cards and to then keep them informed about the campaign. the Union at Boeing in Wichita already has organized 1,300 workers in this fashion. This book has the potential to profoundly change the way in which unions reach out to potential members.

When I read the synopsis of this book, it seemed like an intriguing odyssey through the bewildering and often grotesque landscape of modern America. It may be the greatest disappointment I can remember reading in the past decade. Askt's pedestrian prose style and wearily-paced plotting managed to make even as sure-fire a sequence as a gangland slaying seem tiresome, while the lovingly-detailed descriptions of every meal the obese protagonist eats become numbingly repetitious and dull. Burl himself is so wretchedly unappealing a character that it seems a penance to have to spend so much time with him (and he appears on virtually every page except for the rare merciful interludes devoted to his detective friend, who appears inexplicably interested in finding the missing Burl after he goes off on his secret cross-country journey. Most people, finding that someone as needy and self-indulgent as Burl had dropped out of their lives, would heave a sigh of relief and just hope that he never reappeared). Gluttony is, of course, one of the seven deadly sins, and Askt has performed the rare feat of making sin seem neither wicked nor intriguing -- simply boring.

I've read this book several times and with each rereading find more to admire. It's rare to find a work that is at once original, erudite and unceasingly entertaining. It succeeds on several levels -- as a contemporary allegory, as a character study of the intelligent, funny and tormented-by-his-bulk Burl, and as a rollicking great yarn. Burl's enormous appetite is a terrific metaphor of our consumer society; his journeys through a hilariously gothic America and his virtual death and resurrection are the stuff of great literature.

I selected this book from the library shelf based on its intriguing cover. I read the first couple of pages right there, and was hooked. This is one of those rare books I shall remember all my life, as Burl was so real, quirly and loveable, and his life and views so fascinating, that I was sorry to finish and say goodbye to a new-found friend. Daniel Akst's language is a joy to read, his erudition impressive, and his wit absolutely beguiling.

I bought three of his books including this one. He promises a FREE review of your sales copy with his suggestions. I mailed it in and he never responded. Avoid. The book is decent but nothing great.

Dan Kennedy did a great job of making a business sound simple. His writing was extremely easy to follow and motivating at the same time. Kennedy got to the point instead of dragging out the idea until it was lost. It is extremely helpful and interesting to anyone who is interested in starting a business. This book was easy to read. Kennedy not only gave facts but supported them as well. In many ways that was his faulty point, his facts where merely his real life experiences, but they still supported his statements. Kennedy made the buisness world sound so simple.

I had to get this for class. What can I say? My professor's this guy in his late 90s, wears a bowtie, and talks about how America was saved by Eisenhower.

But, I had to get it to pass my final! It wasn't bad, really, just kind of had a simple take on business. I know 'cause I asked my Dad and he works for Microsoft.

My girlfriend, Cleo, said I'd be better off with this Guerilla pR: Wired by Michael Levne. Tons of stuff about promoting yourself over the Internet.

But, hey, I passed my final!