The Lonely Planet guides are excellent for any locale..but this edition (covering Italy, Spain, Greece, France, Portugal and even Morocco) is a must-read for the quintessential backpacker jumping on a plane for Europa. These guides excel at recommending lodging of many price ranges (from youth hostels to 5-star hotels) and meal choices of the same range (excellent recommendation for outdoor markets.."buy a loaf of bread, a block of cheese and a bottle of wine here"..which is a plus as many guides catering to this area focus on only older travels with large budgets..or persons seeking to spend only a dollar a day or some insanity..it's always good to have the most information possible..and it's included here. Entertainments ideas from free plaza and park visiting to museums, discotechqes, architecture, boat rides etc. etc. are included..good for young and old. It even lists culture-sensitve information such as appropriate dress for visiting churches and monasteries as well as travel-safe tips for women. Book your Eurorail pass and get going.

Lonely Planet has great books and this one certainly was. It's very thorough and tells alot about things that interest travellers. They are up to date and tell you the pros and cons of the different countries. I liked it alot and I know that other people will too.

Explorers by Philip Wilkinson is the beautifully illustrated story of the men who explored the wide and unknown world. From the Vikings who traveled the seas, to Marco Polo and his forays along the great Silk Road into China, to David Livingstone trekking along the African Nile, to Francis Drake who circled the globe in a wooden ship, to the Lewis and Clark expedition to the American West, to the mountain climbing expeditions of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, to the deep sea excursions of Jacque Costeau, Explorers chronicles some of the most important explorations of history. Highly recommended for both school and community library collections, Explorers is enhanced with sections explaining how explorers planned and prepared for their trips, the tools and equipment they used, and the mapping techniques they employed and which were used by the others who came after them.

Presents a good overview on most of the elements. The basic edition is realy the same as the Advanced edition but with some of the Transition Metal stuff tossed out... I wouldn't buy the Adv. Edition, unless the school was shoving it down my throat... Not that this is bad, but I think that there are WAY WAY WAY better books on the subject of Trz. Complexes and Mechanisms (Spessard comes to mind in the fantastic "Organometallic Chemistry"). It is undeniable that FA Cotton can really write well and that the man is a genius on the subject, hell the guy lived through the glory years of Inorganic, but the book never really shows people what really happens mechanistically in the book... Everything is presented in an encyclopedic fashion, which sometimes makes things ambiguous... I think that this is a landmark of a book, but one that is really a first reference on a particular subject...

I had the first edition of this book as a student and used it my first years teaching inorganic chemistry before I tried other books. The reason I left this text to try others is that there is just so much information here and not the best organization for the order in which I teach inorganic. However, that being said, I am now returning to this classic from Cotton, Wilkinson & Gaus. The main reason being I had fewer student complaints about the text when I used this book vs. the others. As other reviewers mentioned, the text is encyclopedic! And you end up jumping around to find what you want; however, Cotton et al. has the most complete volume for the undergraduate & beginning graduate course, so that you can pick & choose what you want to cover without much problem. For those with a descriptive bent, there are many descriptive chemistry chapters. For others who have a bit more physical inorganic bent, there is good coverage of those topics. I've used texts on both ends of the spectrum, and I found they only pleased a small portion of the students, while others struggled. This book has everything you want in a beginning course, and more (!) while being flexible enough that you can design your own course by picking chapters to cover. Finally, for the student, it is an excellent reference to keep for the future.

This textbook is written in an easy to follow matter unlike other inorganic textbooks in the market that is harder to understand.It gives good examples for an introductory course especially for first year University students.The only downside is that, advanced concepts are not or insufficiently discussed.But in the Advanced Inorganic Chemistry textbook by the same author,these concepts are discussed in more depth. I would recommend that any student who is interesed in inorganic chemistry should get both the basic inorganic and advanced inorganic textbooks .With these two books you should have no problem understanding the wide topic of inorganic chemistry.By using an introductory and an advanced text, the student is slowly introduced to the topic.Instead of being thrown headon into reading and understanding a single inorganic chemistry book

This is a book for programmers who have a solid background in servlets programming and some experience in JSP. For beginners and for people who wish to learn those techniques on a standalone machine, they will be better off with Hall's "core servlets & JSP" or Fields&Kolb's "web development & JSP".

The book consists of 20 chapters. The first 12 chapters discuss the various salient aspects of JSP and the rest ( about two third of the whole book) is devoted to case studies.

A. THE BOOK'S STRENGTH:

By adopting Tomcat as its main testing software, the editors of "Professional JSP" have assured that most of the code examples will work. This is a big improvement over the past wrox books.

There are some excellent chapters in the first part. The discussion on session tracking is a real gem although the author failed to make a showcase of the code examples. The chapter on JSP Architecture contains some of the clearest explaination on the techniques of redirecting, forwarding and requestdispatcher. The chapter on customtags is equally very well done. But my favorite is the chapter on Global Settings, the idea is so practical. I also like the idea of emphasizing the importance of authentication which showed in many chapters of the book.

The case studies will serve as an excellent reference. Its coverage ranges from (1) the front end of an insurance company (2) a good pictures website which use JSP to publish its data (3) Security with JNDI (4) a online store using LDAP and JSP (5) J@EE, EIBs and Customtags (6) Multimedia and JSP (7) Weather website with JSP, XSLT and WAP (8) Porting ASP to JSP.

2. BOOK'S WEAKNESS:

The book is a combined effort of many authours and its unevenness showed. The first three chapters to introduce to JSP are out of place and a real waste. The chapter on Dynamic GUIs is a great idea which turned into a joke: after showing the general diea how to do it, the author sent readers to his website to learn the rest(?). And the chapter on JDBC connectivity and Pooling is a big disappointment: most of the chapter devoted to get connection, create databse,editing it and make query; and the rest the author explained how to use his own pool manager package, PoolMan. This wouldn't be too bad if PoolMan worked, with Tomcat.

The richness of the case studies is also its weakness. Unless you are experienced and have the facilities, you can't test them all. These techniques become obsolete pretty quick.

Probably the strongest objection to the book is its price. Buy it for your company and share with your colleague.

This books lives up to its title in that it provides both real-world JSP techniques (through 7 very informative case studies chapters), as well as JSP background information that serves as a quick start guide. I rank it as one of the top 2 JSP books currently available (the other one is Web Development With JavaServer Pages by Messrs. Fields and Kolb).

After the JSP fundamentals are out of the way (which I am sure any JSP newcomer will appreciate and can benefit from), the book picks up pace with discussion on JDBC connection pooling, and the best practice for data access from JSP. Then comes the chapter on custom tags. My favorite chapters are the ones on debugging JSP's and implementing the MVC design pattern in JSP/servlets.

The case studies are very comprehensive and closely correlated to the earlier chapters. In one case study the design methodology is clearly explained with UML diagrams, which are very helpful to someone who is currently architecting an enterprise Java Web application. Other case studies cover such a wide area of topics such as JSP in combination with LDAP, EJB, XSL, and WAP.

For ASP developers, this books has two enormously useful chapters to get them started on JSP right away. One is a case study showing how to port an ASP app to JSP, and the other compares and contrasts the object model and syntax between ASP and JSP.

Having said all the above, this book does suffer from certain weaknesses. One is typical of any multi-author book, i.e., repeat of the same topic in different chapters. This is the case with JDBC, which shows up in both chapters 4 and 7. Another problem is the lack of the use of a standard servlet/JSP container, which will help new users to run all samples under the same software setting (although there is an appendix on setting up Tomcat server). Finally, a few chapters seem to be out of place in term of the logic flow of concept, such as the ones on dynamic GUI's and JNDI.

Finally, this book is still thin on heavy-duty J2EE topics, such as EJB, distributed transactions, message service, and interoperability with CORBA. This is why I consider it as an intermediate level book, not an advanced one. Hopefully we will see another Wrox book in the near future that addresses some of these issues.

This book covers the chapters in a very structured way. It starts with a concise description of the JSP Basics with a detailed explanation of the concepts. It explains all the concepts in a very clear and simple words supported by an equally clear Comments and examples. Any body with a little of Java experience can become very familiar with the JSP syntax and concepts by reading first few chapters. It covers all the necessary JSP syntax for building a small web application to a very large distributed Application. It also explains about the way the JSP pages are processed by different web servers. For example it explains about the various methods available to maintain a persistence session and their merits and demerits. This is the first book in JSP series that explains not only the concepts of JSP and how effectively one can use them with the help of this book. It also covers various other topics like EJB, JNDI, JDBC, XML, XSLT and WML in very detailed way. Overall I feel this is the greatest JSP book ever published so far. I could build a simple and robust JSP Web application by reading the first few chapters in a short period of time.