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Is there a more charming picture in children's literature than Scuppers the Sailor Dog standing on the prow of his little boat, dressed in wet weather gear, with a spyglass to his eye?

We are transported to a dog's world. If you love character-filled canine faces, this book will appeal. Scuppers is our little canine hero. His urge to go to sea is irresistible. The little gaff-rigged sailing boat that becomes Scuppers' home hardly looks seaworthy, with colourful patches on its sails.

It's definitely not a luxurious boat, but Scuppers keeps it all very neat and "ship-shape". He has a hook for his hat, a hook for his rope and a hook for his spyglass.

Scuppers gets shipwrecked after a big storm. He is a resourceful dog and soon makes a house out of driftwood. The scene of Scuppers asleep on his deep green bed of pine branches inside his house is bathed in a beautiful, almost magical emerald green light.

He repairs his ship and sails way and soon comes to a seaport in a foreign land. The street scene is straight from a canine Kasbah. There are lady dogs dressed in full-length robes with everything but their eyes, paws and tails covered, balancing jars on their heads. The fact that all the characters in this book are dogs and they all walk on two legs is a minor detail.

Scuppers' needs new clothes after all his travels. It's very comical when he tries on the various hats and shoes of different shapes and colours.

The life at sea soon calls Scuppers back to his boat.

After stowing all his gear in its right place, he is back " where he wants to be - a sailor sailing the deep green sea".

This book is a true children's classic having been first published 48 years ago. The brilliant pictures and the charming story mesh perfectly. Its high sales ranking on the Amazon listings demonstrates it has a timeless and universal appeal.

Excellent illustrations and a wonderful story about this can-do dog named Scuppers. Great cozy scenes, adventure, rocking boats, ship wrecks, house building, everything you ever need. The best book of my childhood.

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Is there a more charming picture in children's literature than Scuppers the Sailor Dog standing on the prow of his little boat, dressed in wet weather gear, with a spyglass to his eye?

We are transported to a dog's world. If you love character-filled canine faces, this book will appeal. Scuppers is our little canine hero. His urge to go to sea is irresistible. The little gaff-rigged sailing boat that becomes Scuppers' home hardly looks seaworthy, with colourful patches on its sails.

It's hardly a luxurious boat, but Scuppers keeps it all very neat and "ship-shape". He has a hook for his hat, a hook for his rope and a hook for his spyglass.

Scuppers gets shipwrecked after a big storm. He is a resourceful dog and soon makes a house out of driftwood. The scene of Scuppers asleep on his deep green bed of pine branches inside his house is bathed in a beautiful, almost magical emerald green light.

He repairs his ship and sails way and soon comes to a seaport in a foreign land. The street scene is straight from a canine Kasbah. There are lady dogs dressed in full-length robes with everything but their eyes, paws and tails covered, balancing jars on their heads. The fact that all the characters in this book are dogs and they all walk on two legs is a minor detail.

Scuppers' needs new clothes after all his travels. It's very comical when he tries on the various hats and shoes of different shapes and colours.

The life at sea soon calls Scuppers back to his boat.

Stowing all his gear in its right place he is back " where he wants to be - a sailor sailing the deep green sea".

This book is a true children's classic having been first published 48 years ago. The brilliant pictures and the charming story mesh perfectly. Its high sales ranking on the Amazon listings demonstrates it has a timeless and universal appeal.

My two-year old daughter--an avid "reader"--cannot get enough of this book. It's the first book that she's ever asked for over and over again on a continuous loop.
In a nutshell, Mister Dog (aka Crispin's Crispian)--who belongs to no one--befriends a little boy who belongs to no one and they decide to live together in the dog's 2-story doghouse. Don't even try to reason the story, but at [$$$] you can't go wrong. And besides, what's not to like about a pipe-smoking, straw hat wearing dog?

This book has been one of my favorites for years, so I was delighted that Golden re-released it this spring. (I've located abridged versions in anthologies, but here the store is intact.) This dog "who belongs to himself" and "dreams his own dreams" won my heart at an early age and stuck with me. Crispin's Crispian is both self-reliant and connected to others -- a terrific combination. Like his work in other books (including "Charlotte's Web," the Little House titles, and "Ride A Purple Pelican"), Garth Williams' illustrations are outstanding.

Penn's wisdom was timeless and practical. The truth that scored three hundred years ago is still hitting the mark today. Mr. Taylors' modern language edition sharpens the point for modern readers and helps the spiritual truths penetrate. Without the barrier of archaic language, Penn shines through all the more.

The historical introduction alone makes this book a good buy. Mr. Taylor has boiled a sea of Biographical information into a salty context that gives the reflections a better flavor.

Get it! Read it! Do it!

The wisdom of William Penn is more accessible with this book which puts Penn's words into modern English. I loved many of Penn's sayings and found them still thought provoking and inspiring today.
A short, but clear historical introduction gives the reader a better sense of Penn's times.
Highly recommend. An easy read but weighty thoughts.

You will want to read this book to your youngster. The rhyme and the rhythm of it will entice you both. Very enjoyable to read aloud. "Frolicsome and frisky and yet greatly to be feared" sounds even more fun in a Scottish accent, perhaps a la John Cleese. The pictures are colorful. This is the kind of thing you want to memorize so that you can entertain a little one someday when you are caught in a big traffic jam on the highway.

A clever little tail in rhyme about a group of devious fish and a surprise that awaits the most clever. I often read this tale to my first born and have returned to read it to my youngest. The first book is now worn and torn.

This book seems to be geared towards classic ASP developer who wants to learn about ASP.NET. There are chapters explaining the difference between ASP.NET and classic ASP and migrating Web applications from classic ASP to ASP.NET. Some code examples use HTML with embedded VB, some use HTML with code-behind files coded in C#, and some use HTML with embedded C# code. The book discusses .NET architecture/framework in some detail and explains complicated topics such as: MSIL, CLR, and JIT quite well. The book covers a lot of territory, including ADO.NET, working with XML data, HTML and Server Controls, Validation Controls, Debugging, User Controls, and Web Services. There are several appendixes which cover ASP.NET syntax, ADO.NET object model, VB.NET language reference, and C# language reference.

This book is a concise and incomplete reference of ASP.NET, but that appears to have been author's intent. It's well written, well organized and easy to understand. I think the intended audience, which is a beginner-to-intermediate Web developer, will find it useful. The author makes an assumption that the reader is familiar with HTML, XML, VB or C#, and knows how to use Visual Studio.NET. DO NOT buy this book if you studying for Microsoft Certification exam/s, it's not intended for that purpose.

I am a Classic ASP developer. The company that I work for has recently decided to pursue .NET for future web development. This was the first book that I read in order to get a grasp of the changes from Classic ASP to ASP.NET. I have to say that this book was a GREAT introduction to a lot of the new features of ASP.NET.

There are a few things I would like to point out when considering buying this book:
1.This is a beginner book. No advanced topics.
2.Good coverage of the different types of controls available in .NET.
3.Quick and easy read.
4.Only basic coverage of ADO.NET.
5.Source code available as a download.
6.Assumes that you have VS.NET although I used ASP.NET Web Matrix.

There were some typos but nothing ridiculous.
Overall I like this book. Good price for a good book.

The title says it all; if you don't have a lot of time to read and just want examples that show you how to get started, this book is for you. The sections on validation controls and ADO.NET were particularly helpful to me: simple code that works, helping me gradually shift my paradigm while still being productive in the transition.

Although the appendices contain some lightweight "refresher" language and class references (which do what they are expected to do), your deeper needs may not be met here. If you need a more complete view of the .NET framework, try Steven Walther's ASP.NET Unleashed; on the other hand, if you want to get your brain around the web controls and data access that form the core of most ASP.NET applications, look no further than ASP.NET By Example. It does what it claims to do, without being everything to everyone... which works very well for its typical reader, the time-starved developer who just came to be shown how to get the job done.

_The Only Wise God_ is a defense of freewill (in the face of divine foreknowledge) and Molinism. Craig turns his attention to the age-old dilemma of human freedom and divine foreknowledge, and attempts a solution. Through a series of discussions on time travel, psychic precognition, and logical fatalism, Craig tries to show that people have freewill even though God knows what they are going to do tomorrow. The strengths of this book include its Biblical defense of divine foreknowledge, and its amazingly clear presentation of the Molinist doctrine of "middle knowledge." However, I do not think that Craig proves his point. His entire case rests upon the reduction of theological fatalism to logical fatalism. That is, Craig thinks that the existence of an omniscient God poses no more of a threat to libertarian freedom than it would if no God existed. But this reductionistic presentation has been sharply critiqued by Nelson Pike and others. I was unconvinced by Craig's book, and I suspect most people will be. The strong intuition that God's past belief about what I will do tomorrow is somehow "fixed" and "unalterable" is hard to deny, and Craig doesn't deal with this issue in any real detail, since he sees it as superfluous.

Furthermore, Craig attempts to refute the major lines of D. A. Carson's argumentation in his book, _Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility_, but in doing so he does not fairly wrestle with the actual Biblical passages. Having read Carson, this severely disappointed me. Craig claims that the Bible says men have freewill, but he produces no clear-cut verses that establish this fact, and he brushes aside the counter-examples given by Carson without any discussion.

I recommend this book for a good defense of Molinism. But for a Biblical critique of Craig's belief in libertarian freewill, I recommend Carson's book mentioned above, and the site,

www.freewill.doesntexist.com

This site offers a storehouse of arguments and Biblical passages used by Calvinists and Arminians alike.

William Lane Craig's book, The Only Wise God, is probably the best introduction to the topic of molinism for beginners of the subject. That is not to say the book is easy reading; it is not. But his clarity and abundance of examples brings out his points nicely such that any casual reader with some intellectual capacity can comprehend his work. There are several positive and negative points of this book. I will highlight each in turn.

Positive Points: (1) The book does a great job explaining God's knowledge of future contingents. He deals with a number of objections, such as those posed by the open theists. (2) He does a nice job explaining Nelson Pike's argument, laying it out formally, and then providing and critiquing three ideas that philosophers have suggested to avoid theological fatalism. (3) In answering the problem with a more reasonable answer, he ties it to questions about precognition, Newcomb's paradox, time travel, etc. He also answers one of the traditional fatalist arguments raised through history about necessity. (4) Lastly, he offers tables to make his points more understandable and he argues his view well.

Negative points: (1) Craig, though I highly respect him, makes some disappointing moves. For instance, he interacts with D.A. Carson, who provides a number of scriptural citations to suggest that libertarian agency is not biblical after all; that is to say that LFW is not what grounds moral responsibility as Craig believes. Here's an excerpt: "Carson counters that there are many cases in the OT where human thoughts and decisions are attributed directly to God's determining (2 Sam. 24:1; Isa. 9:13-14; 37:7; Prov. 21:1; Ezra 1:1; 7:6, 27-28; Neh. 2:11-15). These references, however, are not very convincing and do not even approach a universal determinism.". This is what is called a waving of the hand. I doubt that Carson would find his reply sufficient. (2) There is often this talk about a "genuine freedom." Craig assumes that libertarian agency is genuine when compatibilists will assert that Craig's use of language is an extreme begging of the question. If we in fact do not have the type of control libertarians claim, then it is not genuine at all. (3) I also noticed a loose use of "fatalism." Anyone who apparentely denied the principle of alternative possibilities was rendered a fatalist. Calvinists such as Jonathan Edwards and Paul Helm were noted, along with even Martin Luther. But later, fatalism concerns necessity such that what we will do, we must do. In other words, my writing this review is and has always been necessary. There is no possible world in which I am not writing this review or that this state of affairs could be exemplified. But the "fatalists" mentioned above do not attribute the acts of men as necessary such as the proposition, "God is good," is thought to be necessary. Rather, they denied alternative possibilities and thus libertarian ageny (c.f. "genuine" freedom) because they believed our actions were logically posterior to God's decree and that God's knowledge of our actions were logically grounded in his foreordination. Hence, in the beginning of the book when he does note such people , he is incorrect. When he actually discusses theological fatalism later , I think Craig is on target. (4) The last main problem is that the entire book assumes the existence of libertarian agency. If libertarian agency is incoherent as some philosophers have suggested (i.e. Saul Smilansky), or if determinism (physical or even theological) is true, then the entire book would be completely out of touch with the relationship that actually exists between human beings and God. It would, however, still provide interesting work *if* we were to have libertarian agency. Thus, this book only appeals most strongly to those who already share Craig's assumption.

Though I think Craig is wrong for both philosophical and theological reasons, even if he and Alvin Plantinga state there is no cogent philosophical response (an over-stating of the case in my opinion), I think his work should be read: especially by those who disagree with him. Craig's work has been highly influential, both on the popular and academic level. Despite my vast number of negative comments, as far as I can tell, there is no better place to start than this book for understanding middle-knowledge. I highly recommend it.

If the God of traditional theism is omniscient, then he knows what choices we'll be faced with in the future and how we'll act on them. For instance, if God has always known that I'll write a review of "The Only Wise God" on November 21st, then I cannot do otherwise -- I am "fated" to write this review! For if God has always known that I will write it and I freely choose not to, then God was ignorant of the choice I made. But God cannot be ignorant of my conditional acts, as ignorance is an imperfection. So the question still stands: if God eternally knows our conditional acts, how can true freedom exist? This is the question William Lane Craig attempts to answer.

Craig explains that God's foreknowledge and determination are two different things. For example, I know that spring will occur on March 20th, but I don't "cause" it. My knowing that flowers bloom during this season doesn't "cause" them to do so. Thus God knowing, in His omniscience, how we will respond to His grace does not determine our response. He simply knows the response we will make (being out of time) to that which was necessary for us to act either way (either accepting or rejecting His grace). So although God knew that I was going to write this review before I was born, He did not directly cause my free action. This is a very elementary distinction. If I had chosen to do otherwise, then God would have already known that. This is middle knowledge in a nutshell. Thank you William Lane Craig.

This one is an official history and as such makes for fairly dry reading. It is indispensible for academics but the reader seeking aviation adventure should look elsewhere. It rates a 10 as a reference source (how could it miss?) However on any other level, it rates a 5. So split the difference and give it a 7. See the "WWII Aviation Booklist" for more reviews: http://www.ampsc.com/~prophet/booklist.html

Shakespeare fans are in for a great surprise. I was enthralled at the idea of listing down analogies from Shakespeare's works onto organisational management concepts. And not exactly in a humorous sense. The book was great reading for a one-flight journey. Some analogies like the one about Murphy's Law seemed contrived but you have to give it to Jay for equating Shakespeare with the likes of Scot Adams and other pioneers of economics and management concepts... Also serves as a fairly complete reference guide to own, for those who read parts of Shakespeare and said "Oh even in that era, the business fundamentals were the same, and Shakespeare sure appreciated them"!

"Nell of Branford Hall" was very undeveloped and only gave a brief feeling of what the Plague experience was like. The beginning gave Nell's routine and no hint of the Plague. By the time the Plague occurred, I had lost interest in the book. By the time I became interested in the novel, it was over. The entire book should have given a blow by blow experience of what happened. On the plus side, this book is good for young readers interested in this era. Good for preteens: I recommend; not good for 13+: I do not recommend.

A brief look at the Great Plague of 1665, this story has been written better elsewhere. Though there is nothing really wrong with "Nell"; it reads more like a nonfiction book on 17th century life than a story about a young girl. As a reader who likes to experience the story she is reading, I found myself emotionless throughout the book. You will find a more compelling read in Jill Paton Walsh's "A Parcel of Patterns".

This book was the story of a fictional thirteen-year-old girl and her experiances during the Great London Plague of 1665. Nell Bullen lives with her family in a spacious manor house outside of Branford, a town not far from London. Nell narrates the story of the terrible events that occured when the plague spread to her village. I highly reccomend this excellant book.

k.. If you don't posses the Van Richten's Guide books this is it! , but, if you are one of the freaks who mannage to get their hands on the original books, don't bother!

Essentially this book is a collection of 3 Van Richten's guides, his guide to ghost, ancient dead (mummies) and the Lich. If you already own those books definately skip over this one. But if you don't its definately worth picking up. Included in each section is detailed information about the creature to which the section belongs, everything from game statistics, special abilities (more then what you'll find in the monstrous manual), variations, stories of noteable examples plaguing the Ravenloft world. The thing I liked most about the guides was they can be read by player and DM alike (although certain parts should be reserved for the DM). Personally I photocopied a large section appropriate to the adventure, (taking care not to copy the sections I didnt want my players to see) and in the adventure previous to the one I wanted it used it the players stumbled across a copy of one of Van Richtens many works. It gave the players many ideas on how to combat the undead, short of just running in and batteling away.