Concise and Complete Coverage
351656
I spent almost all of my professional career concerned with the mapping of Africa. And in the course of mapping one scans and extracts a lot of information from various open sources. In the course of this study I became familiar with the social, economic, and military happenings in Southern Africa.
I can say that except for the works of Al J. Venter, a reporter from South Africa, there are very few books with detail on the bush wars conducted by black nationalists in opposition to the minority white rule resulting from colonialism. And often the insurgents had clashed among themselves for ethnic reasons and some blacks remained loyal to the minority governments.
In other cases, when the white rulers gave up and went home as did the Portuguese in Angola and Moambique the remaining contenders began civil wars backed by the west and by the Communists respectively. In 1976, the Portuguese Army had revolted in protest to the endless bush wars in Africa and overthrew the government. The army had been especially disgusted with the conflict in defense of Portuguese Guinea-(now Guinea-Bissau) located on the shoulder of West Africa, a hot and worthless swamp land which had no economic value and a land where there were few white settlers.
In contrast, the Portuguese ruled lands in Southern Africa had a large settler class, intermarriage was common,for there was no color line there, as there was in English speaking colonies. But still the post independence unrest was such that most of the settlers migrated back to Portugal and some to Brazil. A civil war ensued which is still going on.
On the other hand, the struggle in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, was long and the white regime became an international pariah. The social structure was so unequal that half the land was owned by the whites who composed less than ten percent of the population. But the initial years of the peace settlement were so calm and benign that I feel that it was a positive influence on the South African settlement. Many whites who had fled to SA went back to Zimbabwe but in recent times unrest has broken out again. The socio-economic pie has yet to be fairly divvied up in Zimbabwe.
1922432
It covers way more than I had expected.  The basics on any topic is key and this really helps cover that.
4162733
Excellent coverage of all I wanted to learn - from basics to advanced. Engaging writing style too, for otherwise dry topics.
405769
Added as part of reference library.  Excellent coverage.
3678992
easy to follow - use
Answered all my Questions
3377524
I really enjoy this book because of the many, many aspects of using InDesign that are covered in this book. It quickly addresses nearly every desired thing to do in InDesign with enough info to give you a much more polished document with very little work.  It covers the basic - like drawing basic shapes and text frames - to the fairly complex, such as modifying your plug-in preferences and InBooklet imposition.  Each topic is summed up in about 2 pages, so you don't have to work your way through a dreary chapter or more to just get the basic How-to for what you want to do.  I'll keep this one around for quick reference on things I don't do very often.
3182211
In his forward to Piziali's book, Harry Foster, of Jasper Design Automation, says that this is "the first book to introduce a useful taxonomy for coverage metric classification." I agree that "useful taxonomy" describes this book well. I think it would be hard to find a more clear and complete introduction to functional verification coverage concepts and methods.

As an added bonus, this book is a good read. Piziali has a passion for verification coverage and a passion for language. The result is prose that not only is clean and easy to follow, but that also infects you with the excitement Piziali feels for his subject.
4917055
I have found the topics covered in this book very useful. Most of the common applications are covered: Apache, Bind, DHCP, FTP,  MySQL/Postgre, VPN, etc. While not an advanced book, the coverage is thorough. I run each of the apps listed above except for VPN and I used this book to install/config each app.

This book has taught me not only about FreeBSD, but also the FreeBSD way to doing things like the strict use of the filesystem and installing all apps under /usr/local. I have not mastered any of the topics written about in this book, but after reading this book I understand a great deal more about them. For example, the differences in the startup scripts between Linux and FreeBSD and how applications are installed with ports and packages compared to APT-GET and RPM.

Finally, I enjoyed the fact that the writing style was not cut and dry or overly humorous and drawn out.

Great book that, once read, becomes a great reference.
2155996
Like a lot of folks, I recently took an interest in Go as a result of the Lee Sedol - AlphaGo tournament, and I started combing online and print sources for introductory material.  This book stands out as the best I found.  While relatively short, it covers a lot of ground.  It is well organized, includes thoughtful exercises, and is written clearly and concisely.
3927001
Very concise and down to earth exposition of the situations that can get you to lose your life or suffer serious damage to your body and mind. Comprehensive and easy to read. Being so concise, it has to be seen rather an introduction. The information presented is backed up by the website, that completes the book, including links to order the materials the author considered are best for self defense. I ordered some of the stuff recommended and found it if decent quality and priced right.
1521194
In this wonderfully concise and well written book, Greg Knaddison has managed to cover both the theory and practice of securing your Drupal site as well as your users against the myriad dangers of the internet. As professional Drupal site developers, we pay close attention to security. It is great that we can now have so many userful resources together in one place.
1637771
This is a concise and well organized read that I would certainly recommend to anyone delving into the world of Linux systems administration. Well worth purchasing for your reference collection, it succinctly covers a broad range of Linux server security areas. It serves as an excellent introduction to the massive topic that is system security, with no shortage of technical depth to explore. Even as a seasoned IT pro myself, I find this book a very useful reference point, to have to hand.
842695
I'm really impressed by the diverse coverage in this book, from e-mail protocols, HTTP transactions, server and browser architecture, XML and XSLT, to best practices for web application development. I've seen too many hodgepodge books on web application development that try to cover a broad range of topics that are slapped together haphazardly. This book has a well-defined learning path and a consistent style throughout, doing justice to each topic covered and tying all the information together cohesively. They say it's not supposed to be a tutorial on Struts, but the chapter for the book's sample application is better than many dedicated Struts tutorials. It explains clearly why MVC approaches are better than code-focused platforms like ASP, .NET, PHP, and JSP Model 1 -- because those approaches don't divide component responsibilities appropriately. The chapters on browser and server architecture explain the processing flow of HTTP requests and responses better than any other book I've seen, and the figures are quite helpful.
3451136
I was initially reluctant to buy this book because almost 700 pages seemed like overkill to me, but I'm glad I did. Most publishers provide "Bonus Chapters" about XSLT and XPath, but this book provides the kind of detailed coverage needed to accomplish real world tasks.
4325962
This book is almost overwhelmingly thorough, which made it, in my experience, an extremely useful resource in preparing for the Zend PHP certification exam, as well as for learning and daily use. While it's incomplete where the test is concerned-you won't find a listing for "Reflection" in the index, for example-it's a useful reference for most of the material on the exam.  All of the built-in string and array functions are described clearly and concisely, with examples of use. PHP installation and configuration settings are laid out in the kind of painful detail expected by the exam. There's an introduction to object-oriented programming,  overview of regular expressions and a whole series of chapters detailing some of the most useful features of PHP and reviewing some of the most common problems (web services, user authentication, and secure programming, to name a few). And that's before we reach the second half of the book, providing the same kind of detail for MySQL, including PHPs several interfaces to it.

One limitation, from the perspective of an absolute beginner, is the lack of large-scale examples. Gilmore doesn't walk you through the development of a web application; the book is more of a reference text, using smaller examples to illustrate small, specific topics, with the expectation that the reader can assemble those ideas into usable examples. This was probably necessary to enable the chapters to function as individual units, which is one of the book's major strengths.

Books of this size can be daunting to a reader. Gilmore's friendly, readable prose goes a long way toward making this one approachable, as does the modularity, allowing a reader to digest only the chapters needed at any given moment.
3647708
There's a wide variety of electronics explained within the book that should satisfy the geek inside all of us. If you're looking for a simple explanation of the field of electronics, you're probably one of two people: the type of person looking for coverage on a wide-variety of electronics in use today (and some on their way out) or you assumed (perhaps wrongly, like me) that this only included PC's, SmartPhones, and the like (that's what the "click to Look Inside" link is for).

The book covers many PC peripherals,  but it does not delve into the latest gadgets on the market; nor does it promise to, thankfully. Unlike individual products on the market today (and quickly gone tomorrow), the information contained within the book will contain the backbone of information needed to understand the field of electronics, as a whole.  A nice jumping-off point for further exploration. A quick look through the Contents available through the product page will show you what you're in for.

The first 5 chapters covering electricity, how it behaves, and how we control it for use in our everyday lives was the best explanation I've seen around. Mainly because it's easy and simple to understand. Just the way I like it. The rest of the book is dedicated to the individual product categories that fall under the heading of "electronics", along with summaries on how they work.
Some coverage started off being a huge bore for me, such as the coverage of Radios, CRT televisions,  and tape recording. That is to say, I ASSUMED from the outset I would be bored. A couple pages into each and I found myself being thankful I didn't skip it as it covered individual bits of knowledge I had always been curious about (sound theory, analog vs. digital television, radio frequencies, etc.) So, I ended up reading practically the whole book, skipping only the sections that deal directly with the hardware of the devices I listed above.  Of course, you may love these things and think I'm a complete wack-job for skipping them. God bless America.

In the end, I really enjoyed the coverage this book provided and feel it will serve well as a starting point for anyone wanting to delve into any individual subject covered within the book.  I found it highly enjoyable. Good luck and Merry Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/etc./etc.!
50542
well done and useful with just the right amount of background