Good points/Bad advice
342731
Siegel brings forth many good points in this book about project management, but I could have done without the first part of the book.  I have my own project experiences to learn from, and I feel that this first section merely promotes Studio Verso and the firms that conform to the "David Siegel" methodology of web site production.
 The second half of the book uncovered some good points, but it seems that Siegel is bent on the idea that a bigger firm is better.  This is not necessarily true.
 Overall, I would rate this book as a good one to read if you are just beginning a web venture, possibly to teach you some business issues involved in web design and some basic development strategy.
756762
The authors seem to be very knowledgable however the book is poorly written and poorly edited. It makes for a tough read... It contains good information and offers advice that you should consider, but it's not "a beginners guide"...

In one place they say they don't want to seem opinionated and then they repeatedly offer opinions without explaining what's behind those opinions.

Sections (they call them chapters) are short where they introduce a subject and then say they'll follow up on it later; but just in case you want to know, they offer their opinion on the best alternative without justifying it. They seem to offer good advice, not inconsistent with other books I have read (recommended below)...The authors do eventually emphasize planning, but they provide little guidance on how to go about planning. 1/2 way through the book, chapter 30 on page 149 of a 308 page book they introduce the topic "fail to plan and you plan to fail"... then list some of the things you should plan for...hopefully you didn't run out and take their early recommendations straight to your local pet store ...

The authors should have planned their book a bit better- and whover edited the book (if there was an editor) should have advised them better...

I am a beginner. I have never implimented a marine aquarium. I found this book to be full of advice, some of it reasonable, but of little help in planning or in organizing my purchases.

The Conscientious Marine Aquarist by Robert M Fenner is more comprehensive, highly organized, and does a much better job presenting alternatives and explaining the attributes behind them. If you only bought one book, that would be the one to get.

I also found The New Marine Aquarium: Step-By-Step Setup & Stocking Guide by Michael S. Paletta well worth the read, and also very organized and well presented. I would recommend both because they educate you how to make decisions for yourself and how to plan your aquarium. They walk you through the decisions step by step. If you read either of those, and do some research online to get different opinions, read through forums, you won't need this book at all ...

On a positive note, the cover if fabulous!!!
2536013
There IS some good advice in here. but it's wrapped up in a soft-focus background story so sickly that I found it difficult to swallow.  I ended up actively disliking Howard, and resenting every long, drawn out anacdote.

He's a nice guy - I get the point. Now please tell me what I need to know.

Top tip - Brevity is the source of wit. Some of the stuff in here about Inflection Points and Legacy Vision is great. I just wish the editor had used a sharper blade. Or maybe a shovel.

I'd recommend "Anything you Want" by Derek Sivers instead of this.  But we're all different. According to Howard.
2787752
Dr Laura gives some good advice but it is mixed with absolutely stupid advice such as when she says that a person should stay in an unhappy marriage because of their commitment.

It is unfortunate that she chose to use this relationship book as her soapbox to promote her own religous beliefs. If you don't believe in God and as Dr Laura, you can never be happy is the moral of her story.

Laura makes a number of irresponsbile and misleading statements such as calling daycare, modern child abandonment.

She talks about chastity until marriage several times and about 'shacking up' to use her term but never once does she explain why monogomy is important in a healthy relationship and she absolutely never mentions that a relationship has a natural progression part of which is physical. She moves the step of marriage up to be much sooner than it should be in a relationship while at the same time saying people should wait 'through the 4 seasons' or a year before being married.

Actually says 'it is dangerous to pursue a physical relationship without the promise of marriage'. Is she saying men should promise marriage before they are ready?

She would have produced a much better book if she had given more examples of callers to her radio show or letters and given less malformed advice. Her rants and raves are actually entertaining, too bad that along with examples were cut short with her religious promotions and poorly thought advice snippets.

I listened to the whole thing(audio book cd) and I couldn't list the 10 stupid things implied in the title. I guess they are there and maybe under chapters 1-10 in the book. I could call out several stupid things but I didn't see 10 that stood out. Lots of it was common sense and phsychologically off callers made it obvious.

It is fun to listen to but make sure it is not the only book you use as a source. There are other better sources for relationship info.
4672296
My main concern is the conflicting advice. This applies to all gout recommendation - even from my doctors - so I can't expect more and that's ok. Consider it three stars for the whole gout care industry. Why, in 2018, can't science provide definitive advice that authors can use to write books like this one. It shakes one's faith in the healthcare industry.

An example is coffee. I've seen it on every list from "Never" to "Often". In this book it falls into the "Lots" list. Also, I thought there was good breads and not-so-good breads and not all need to be avoided. Yet on the avoid list is simply bread. Yesterday, at the doctor, I'm told red meat is not bad but stay way away from pork. Red meat is on the avoid list while I don't see pork anywhere.

I'm just a bit frustrated and maybe taking it out on this book a little but I have yet to find any advice from anyone from doctors to health websites to fellow sufferers as anything better than OK advice. At least none of it seems to be wrong on purpose but all of it seems to be inconsistent.
1547546
This is mostly a "you can do it" book about improving your finances, with a lot of rhetoric and some good but very general ideas about the importance of getting out of debt and living within your means. It's an easy read, but there is some very poor financial advice in this book which should be ignored by anyone who is serious about getting out of debt. Mr. Ramsey suggests paying off your smallest debts first, based on the idea that seeing the progress you are making as you pay them off one by one will give you a psychological boost and help you stay on track. That makes no sense! The fact is that there is rarely a compelling reason not to always pay off debts with the highest interest rate first. The more interest you pay on your debts, the longer it will take you to get out of debt. In my opinion, Mr. Ramsey should have advised his readers to be aware of how much interest they are paying on their debts and to focus on paying off those with the highest interest rates first, rather than focusing on paying off the smallest ones. Reducing what you are paying in interest charges every month by paying down your highest interest rate debt first is not only encouraging, it also makes good sense financially.
720534
The good:  there's some great advice in here, and it's definitely worth reading.

The bad:  It's mixed in with an awful lot of new-age crap, aromatherapy, and some distinctly non-scientific information.

If you're looking for a book that's going to cover what you need to know, and uses the best possible scientific methods to ensure results, then a lot of the advice is brilliant.  However, it does veer *heavily* into the realms of quackery and pseudoscience, and for that I can't recommend it as heartily as I'd like.  Bogus puppy massage therapy to "unlock" inner energies, aromatherapy, and other non-results-oriented stuff could have been left out; people who are prone to believing that stuff were already likely to believe it would help their puppy undo the damage caused in its previous life, or something - it doesn't belong in an honest book on advice for rearing a dog.

There is also the usual heavy-handed product and service placement, targeting new puppy owners with specific advertisements for specific toys, services, and products, including endless repeated references to the DVD.

It's unfortunate that they decorate such a good book with such things.  Fortunately, it's mostly decoration, and other than some of the food advice (where it becomes very hard to tell actual advice from stoner hallucination) it's pretty easy to separate the wheat from the chaff.
2772693
Bad advice. There are much better, more Biblically sound books to help your marriage. Spoiler: Getting angry and staying angry is ridiculous advice. Forgiveness is the answer.
1442597
The bad points, first:

1. For whom was this  book written? There was lots of strange, inaccessible vocabulary throughout the text that made this suspiciously like many other texts that a person might encounter in a Philosophy class in undergraduate. (Think back to all those classes that you sat through where you thought that you might perish of boredom before the 50 minutes was up.) There are other books that have dealt with pseudoscience in a much more engaging manner (notably the Robert Park book, "Voodoo Science"). If the point was the let people know about the fraud that characterizes American academia, why not write the book in a way more accessible to the hoi polloi?

2. The tone of this book was extremely bitter/ acerbic/ angry. I know that it is hard to be patient with people that are uttering nonsense with seeming profundity. But it is hard to separate a point about the seriousness of someone's scholarship from the bitter, ranting tone of this book.

3. I tend to think that this book could have been a lighter read if fewer examples of academic foolishness were chosen and dealt with at slightly greater length. To be sure, there is NO SHORTAGE of topics that could have been chosen, and I'm sure that it was the authors' first instinct to try to include them all. But the book suffered as a result.

Good points:

1. It was so refreshing to hear that, yes, the emperor has no clothes. The same 3 credit hours of tuition will buy a course in engineering as will buy a course in "Marxist Interpretation of Feminist Literature." It is amazing that more people don't know that taxpayer dollars and federal subsidies are funding money that could better be spent on research into preventing rectal cancer.

2. There were some very clever uses of words. One example is the comparison of Marxism to a priesthood (with which I'd agree). Another was the comparison of intellectuals to "philosopher-kings" a la Plato.

3. The authors were very perceptive in recongnizing that most intellectuals seek INFLUENCE more than anything else. Helping the oppressed or having more noble motives is merely a pretext.

All in all, worth purchasing second hand on Amazon.com. A good week of evening readings.
1327516
The author repeatedly mentioned his memoir. I know this book is the highlight of critical points, but the reference of the book is excessive.  He also spent too much of the book advocating therapy. Many of his points are good, but I got from other parenting books already.
3675029
Overall some good points and helpful insights. Various important reminders throughout. Long story short is that the same points could have (and should have) been made in about 30 pages. Talking about something longer doesn't make that thing more compelling. If you can find the cliff-notes somewhere, that will be more worth your time.
618150
I thought there were a few REALLY good points and analogies in the book - but then there were some parts that didn't line up. The author didn't want to attribute greatness to a leader but then a level 5 leader is a very key characteristic of a great company. I am disappointed because the points that are good and valid I can't do anything about. This book is mostly for CEOs or people in power. All I can do is tell my managers about what I learned and hope they apply if
1092522
The author points out problems she sees. Often her cures are as bad or  worse than the disease. She longs for and explictly states she wishes to  cure the situation with excessively strict parenting and sports.
I don't  see how this is to work. Worse yet case studies from a psychologist are  often skewed because they see only the worst cases where parents have  thrown up their hands.
Less than strictcontrol and sports,one (male or  female) needs to see them selves as a valid person. It took me to 26 or so.  There are outlets such as zines (independent self-published fan/magazines)  that I believe give one a better sense of self, where both girls and boys  communicate their ideas and find a sense of self-worth and value. I'd  advise getting a copy of "broken pencil" or doing a search on  zines. When realizes there are others out there like oneslef one can  accumulate a sense of self-worth.
Even more important one can communicate  with the authors and gain support that way. This seems a far superior  method than anything proposed in reviving Ophelia proposes.
Have Fun,  Sends Steve chromexa@ovis.net
506817
I think this is a good book for someone who has a more authoritarian parenting style and is looking for middle ground between that and true gentle discipline. I think there are some excellent tips and I appreciate the A-Z categorization for easy reference. What I found conflicting was the advice given for sleep and a small tidbit regarding breastfeeding. While the authors respect the choice of parents who co-sleep, they take a very firm stance against it and advocate for Ferberizing/CIO. I find this conflicting because the rest of the book encourages parents to support the emotional well-being of their children and yet they should abandon that at the bedroom door? I think the authors would have done a better service to their readers if they actually examined ways to gently encourage better sleep habits (and yes they do exist).

They should also examine current research in regards to "Crying it Out" and the negative effects it has on infant brain development, in addition to attachment theory and the importance of responding to infant cries for communication. The greatest injustice a parent can do to their children and themselves is ignore their intuition when something feels wrong, and I was sad to see the authors encouraging this. In addition, I'm unaware of any lactation training that either author has, but they also encourage night weaning at 3 months of age. Anyone with even a smidgen of lactation training knows what a bad idea this is, and I would encourage readers to go elsewhere for accurate advice, such as La Leche League.

All in all it's a decent book, like many books you take some information and you leave some.
3221061
When my wife and I first started dating, her mom (my now mother-in-law) lend me her copy of this book when she learned that I was in debt because I made the huge mistake of financially helping out one of my best friends who decided to take advantage of me and screw me over.  Anyways, this book does have practical good advice on how to budget your money, but it is generally good practical advice that needs to be approached with caution.  It's good for people who make $60,000 a year and are $80,000 in debt because they lived like they make $90,000 etc.  But if you're a working stiff like me who barely squeaks by in life making less than $40,000 a year and your only debts are a car payment and student loan, I would recommend speaking to a licensed financial advisor before going nuts over anything Dave Ramsey talks about in his book, otherwise some of his advice could hurt you more than help you (like it most likely would've in my unique circumstances).  I have listened to his radio show before many times, and I personally am not fond of him or his show because he seems very arrogant and full of himself.  He's also very opinionated and seems to think his way of budgeting money is THE way and all other ways are of the devil, etc. (Hence the title of my review).  He's also very harsh and insulting towards his callers which I personally don't find that to be Christ-like in any way.  I know he is very strong about his christian faith (as am I), but sadly, his arrogance helps reinforce the negative stereotype that society has against christians as being "holier than thou".  Unless Dave Ramsey changes his self-absorbed attitude, he's gonna have a hard time getting respect from me.
3130290
Ok, I really wanted to like this but it's just bad...

This is NOT a book of secrets, it's a book of uppity advice mixed in with common sense stuff that has already been said, done and written like "Fair is not always equal; equal is not always fair"  or "A good man is hard to find" -- really? That was news to me!

The theme of the book in regard to love is really summed up in a few words --- marry rich. There was no applicable advice here for the everyday woman. While reading those chapters, I kept on thinking -- "Who the hell does this apply to?"

Surprisingly for me, the only redeeming quality was the advice on friendships. (I am not going to judge the section by the public uproar on one of the authors real life hypocrisy on the topic). The advice on "forgiving and lettng go" was good and did make sense--- but it was common sense.

There are better books out there on these topics, don't bother, there's nothing new here.
3596657
Larry Winget makes a lot of good points. However, my only suggestion would be to save yourself money and get this book out of the library. Also, I found Larry to be a bit ironic like one reviewer said. He tells others to disconnect from cable TV. Unfortunately if I disconnect from cable TV I won't be able to watch his show Big Spender. I also found it ironic that he implores others to stop smoking when he says he owns a mobile cigar business??? Last I read cigars are not healthy either and if not more expensive then cigarettes. Oh, almost forgot Larry says he is not one of these new agey type of self help authors, but in his section on recommended reading he recommends two books by the biggest new agey authors around: Deepak Chopra and " Dr." Wayne Dyer.

I commend Mr. Winget for encouraging people to donate money to charity, but I think throwing money at cause one cares about is easier then giving of ones time. How come he does not encourage people to volunteer?