More like Strange and Amazing FALSEHOODS About Star Trek! This author appears to have done little research to compile this book, and any true Star Trek fan can easily dismiss it as ludicrous fiction!

After all, we die-hard fans all know that the Enterprise is a CONSTITUTION class vessel. So why does Mr. Cohen state that it is a CONSTELLATION class ship? This is only one example of several errors, so if you are looking to expand your knowledge of the Star Trek universe, BEWARE of this book!

I read this, as the author was an instructor of a friend of mine in San Francisco a few years ago. He told me horror stories about this man's class and the self-important style of this book. My friend was right. The book is badly-written, VERY unfunny and simply BORING. The author has a mediocre ability to shape words and has NO ability to make the reader feel anything. You could use this book as a coaster, but not as something to read. Avoid like the plague.

Let me open with this handbook's positives. It has reasonably useful BNF-like syntaxes for SQL and statements useful to the administration and tuning of SYBASE installations. The author also does a good job detailing the history of SYBASE's growth and development, and the differences between products on the market. Several chapters offer fair introductions to a variety of topics. For a DBA's handbook, I might give this a mediocre two stars.

Stop here if you're a Developer, though, and look for a Developer's Handbook elsewhere, because this book falls short of what it actually claims to be. There's nothing on Transact-SQL, all the add-on statements that SYBASE supports like dateadd(), etc. The programming APIs most developers are likely to use such as OpenClient, is given a cursory example chapter which does little to explain OpenClient's intricacies. Instead, the example (whose C code is in double-spaced Courier type which fills space by having approximately fifteen lines of code per page of code listings) is heavily lifted from SYBASE's own OpenClient example program (only the SQL statement being performed programmatically appears to differ).

Lastly, there's absolutely nothing about Python integration in this book, if that matters to you. But even if it doesn't, the poor typography, numerous typos and grammatical errors, and general lack of new or useful information to anyone already acquainted with SYBASE should be taken as strong signs to spend your documentation dollars elsewhere for a developer's handbook for this RDBMS.

In Graham Greene's excellent book "The Quiet American" he writes about a charecter type that is all too common in American politics. They are well-intended, but dangerously naive and simplistic in their willingness to trash everything that democracy stands for in order to protect the very same. In Greene's book, he cogently demonstrates that this very charecteristic would lead the United States into a protracted war in Vietnam (the novel was written in 1955). This isn't a type that's unique to either end of the political spectrum either, John F. Kennedy was a "quiet American" on the left (most people conviniently forget that his gung-ho green beretism got us into Vietnam to start with) and Oliver North is the pefect example on the right. North's testimony made me almost physically ill. To listen to a man justify his total disregard for the principles of democracy in a naive attempt to FURTHER democracy was disgusting. The only thing worse was to have people shower him with praise and call him a hero. But it's all here, for those with eyes to see: Oliver North, the quiet American.

This book was hideous. The only book that I have reviewed on Amazon that I hold in as great disdain is the "Ayes of Texas" also by Daniel da Cruz. As is true with the other novel this book is so full of clichés, stereotypes and impossible science to make even a callous reader become nauseas.

Basically Texas is an independent country and must fight those evil Russians who control the rest of the world for all practical purposes. Come stage center Ripley Forte, billionaire, playboy extraordinaire. What a cad. This book is terrible. Please, Please save your money.

I thought that this book would cover newer token-ring products since it was published in 1998. However, while the architecture of token-ring is nicely covered, most of the products listed as references have not been marketed for many years. If you are new to token-ring, this will give you some idea of how it works and how to fix. However, if you have switches and other new technology like category 5 cabling, this book will not even mention them.

One of those collections that cuts up larger works.

I loved this book

Why did I buy this book? Because the title was similar to the book Emotional Vampires but the information in this book is deranged!
Waste of money and time.
TTFN

This book isn't really about native literacy, it's a postmodern ethnography (ugh) which is about what it's like being an anthropologist wandering around Navajoland looking for the occasional scrap of paper with written Navajo on it. It's like Derrida doing a travel magazine article, except with more jargon.

Since this is an ethnography, you occasionally learn a fact or two, like the fact that there's more things written in English than in Navajo -- which the reader could possibly have predicted from the facts that Navajoland is surrounded by the US, and that most Navajos were not taught to read and write Navajo in school. But because this book is from the bad old days of 1980s postmodern anthro, the facts are few and far between, and the book's 200-odd pages are filled with navel-gazing about how challenging it is to write about this subject which the author would be writing about (i.e., Navajos and literacy) if he weren't instead writing ABOUT writing about it.

If this were exactly the only book ever written about Native Americans and/or literacy, it might be worth reading. Lucking, there are other books, which makes it hard for me to imagine there ever being a reason to spend time reading this empty and uninformative book. Instead, consider these, just to name a few:
Margaret Bender's /Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah's Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life/
Deborah House's /Language shift among the Navajos: Identity Politics and Cultural Continuity/
Ross Woodruff's /The Development of the Navajo Orthography and the Translation of the Navajo New Testament/
Bernard Spolsky's /Linguistics in Practice: the Navajo Reading Study/