Ralph Williams, an SEI Authorized CMMI Lead Appraiser and Transition Partner, has produced an easy to use guide to assist the process improvement professional! It's well-organized and structured in parallel with the CMMI Staged Representation.

Thanks Ralph for helping to make the incomprehensible available to the rest of us. This thirty something page guide is a summary of almost 750 pages.
It clearly shows the process areas relevant to each maturity level and discipline (or bodies of knowledge), and the generic goals, which are the significant factors that were not explicit in the old CMM's.
These are the rocks that provide the stepping-stones to increasing maturity levels applied to all process areas.
As a practicing process engineer this book is in daily use with me. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Price of a Horse, the third in the series, is a fine read. The story never flags, the inclusion of historical characters (Billy the Kid and Doc Holliday to metntion two) doesn't seem forced, and there are moments of sly and side-splitting humor (the scenes with Nash and Gustav the cook had me laughing out loud).

Cotton writes with the authority of a scholar and the easy style of a true storyteller. In his Jeston Nash novels he has managed to tell fast-paced, entertaining stories filled with action and humor and to slip in a few weightier issues (women's emancipation in this novel). He takes a genre form, elevates it to serious literature, and doesn't become boring.

If you are a a fan of novels of the old west, buy this book (as well as the others in the series). You won't be disappointed.

The day I found out Ralph Cotton and I shared
the same grandfather, the main character of this
book, I went out and found Price of a Horse and
dove in. I didn't know what to expect, since I'd
never heard of Ralph's work and had grown up
reading the wonderful novels of Louis L'Amour.
No way could this new guy, let alone a long lost
relative, prove to be a writer of merit.

Boy was I wrong! Price of a Horse is one of the
finest Westerns I have ever read, and the other two
Cotton novels I have read are at least as good or
better. He uses beautiful turns of phrase, slam-
bang action, nice period detail and well-drawn
characters. You don't find all this usually in one
Western novel. Usually you have to pick and choose
the merits of regular Western fare.

Not with Ralph, though. He has many more stories
to tell, hopefully all about our rapscallion grand-
father, James H. Beatty. Read on--you are sure to
enjoy.

But reading Emerson directly is at once an enlightening and maddening experience: "enlightening" because Emerson was a philosopher in the best sense of the word -- a lover of wisdom -- and "maddening" because he was _not_ a philosopher in any _other_ sense of the word. He was stubbornly disinclined to argumentation or even systematic exposition; his essays read more like sermons than like philosophical arguments; he preferred to deliver himself of his oracular insights without, it seems, subjecting them either to the criticism of other minds or even to the rigors of critical self-reflection, on the view that Reason was an all but infallible source of insight into truth and its objects are known with the same immediacy with which we know that we are awake. (It is a curious view of reason which makes no allowances for improvement of one's understanding.)

As a result of this take-it-or-leave it approach, his writings are all too easy to misunderstand, and for this he must bear much of the blame. For example, his remarks on charity in "Self-reliance" have led some readers to suppose that he was opposed to charity altogether, whereas in truth he believed that we are each of us suited by talent and temperament to be "charitable" to a special class of persons for whom we are therefore _truly_ responsible. Then, too, his remark in the same essay on "a foolish consistency" has been infamously and endlessly misquoted -- but even in its proper context it invites misunderstanding by failing to pay sufficient attention to the non-foolish variety of consistency (which Emerson supposed would take care of itself more or less automatically). Here again, Emerson's account of Reason, in giving so much weight to intuition, leaves strangely little room for reflection.

But in my own opinion, at least, Emerson's insights are genuine, sometimes brilliant, and essentially right, and it would be a shame if the readers who needed him most were unable to profit from his writings merely because he had been needlessly obscure. It would be nice, then, to have from another writer the guidance that Emerson himself was unwilling or unable to provide.

As you've probably guessed by now, that's where Richard Geldard comes in.

In this volume (which is a revised edition of _The Esoteric Emerson_, so don't buy them both!) Geldard does a marvelous job of exposition. He knows his Emerson backwards and forwards, and he sets out the essential features of Emerson's thought in clear and orderly fashion, chapter by chapter.

His essential "take" on Emerson, as you can tell from his title, is that Emerson is best approached as a spiritual teacher. I think this is not only correct but even obviously so; yet it is surprising how few available critical studies of Emerson are actually written from this point of view. At any rate, Geldard's exposition will provide the reader of Emerson with a much-needed "map" of the territory traversed in his writings.

I suspect that Geldard's "map" will make Emerson available to many readers who might otherwise have found him unpalatable. Some readers may, for example, be put off by what seems to be Emerson's extraordinarily cavalier attitude toward tradition in favor of present experience.

But according to Geldard, Emerson's actual meaning was as follows: "We have to break, lovingly, the vessels of our tradition in order to become one with the source of that tradition" [p. 176]. Now, certainly there is a difference in emphasis here with the religious tradition in which Emerson was brought up. But surely this is not far from, say, the Christian doctrine that the scriptures are a closed book unless read "in the Spirit." (Granted, Emerson had much more in common with the Quakers than with the Calvinists in what he made of this point. Nevertheless it is not alien to even the most theologically conservative Christianity.)

Not being a Christian myself, though, I am interested not primarily in reconciling Emerson with Christian theology but in simple exposition of his teaching. And Geldard excels in this regard: in ten straightforward chapters he sets out the essentials of Emerson's teaching and places it into the context of his life. Not bad for 177 pages of text.

There are one or two points on which I wish Geldard had done a _little_ bit more explaining (for example, on the difference between the meanings of "idealism" in its philosophical and its popular senses), since he does not seem to be presuming any prior acquaintance with philosophy on the part of his readers. But this is just nitpicking on my part. (Hey, I have my own favorite hobby horses too.) This is a fine book and it will be of immense value to anyone who wants to understand what in the world Emerson was on about.

This book is 650 pages of pertinent and valuable examples and I have used it many times to help me solve many real world problems. I specifically liked that fact that it is the first book I have ever read that described the WM_GETMINMAXINFO message as a method of making CFormView based applications look the way they should. For the record, every other programming book I have that relates to MFC in any way gives naive CFormView examples that look stupid when running and behave stupidly when used.

The authors include a lot of science in this volume, including background information concerning moons and planets across the solar system. Most of this book covers Titan of course, what we know about it and how we came about that knowledge, from early times to the present. Titan's atmosphere and surface and sub-surface conditions recieve the most attention, with the chemistry of the atmosphere discussed at length. Also, the authors debate the possibility of an ethane/methane ocean existing on Titan as the surface temperature, according to available evidence, is close to the triple point of methane. All of this science can of course, as the authors point out, shed light on the formation and evolution of the solar system and in turn give us clues to our own origins in the misty past. As a chemist I especially enjoyed the information on the chemistry of Titan, and the space-buff in me enjoyed all of it. In addition, the Cassini spacecraft is detailed, and there are lots of illustrations, many in color.

On a personal note, I remember being at the space center as a visitor just a few days before the launch of Cassini, in October, 1997, and thinking that here is this spacecraft sitting out there on the pad just a few hundred yards from the Atlantic beach, I wondered then, will Huygens, at the end of it's journey, find another beach? Space travel is cool!