Active Books

Great illustrations, instructions, etc... A must have for anyone learning survivalism, a great gift for boys and men, and of course Mom's who love to camp.

Like hellcatty from Hong Kong, my version is also called a survival manual. While there is some information of use in the book, in most areas it is sadly lacking (although it has pretty pictures). For example, on page 63, it shows Mr. McManners doing a bow drill fire. I'd sure like to see him do it in person if this photo accurately portrays his technique. Unless he has arms like Lou Ferrigno, that top hand of his is going to be all over the place. Similarly, on the same page, his portrayal of hand drill fire making leaves a lot to be desired. He states that the hand drill fire technique 'only works effectively in hot climates, where the wood is really dry.'
It also works very effectively, at least in my area, in the winter, when it also can be quite dry. His drill also looks somewhat top heavy and unbalanced. Overall, as stated in my title, save your money for a much better book.

The version I bought has a different book title, which is name 'Hugh McManners Outdoor Survival Guide'. I found the book title is misleading, since the content of the book is not much about 'survival'. The recent book title is much better. This is not a manual,I recommend it to all wilderness training beginner.

Gives the reader a good place to start. This book is loaded with illustrations and pictures giving a broad range of topics to the reader. I would suggest reading in more detail and study of Wilderness Survival/Training with other books before venturing out into the vast remote wilderness areas. I still find myself reviewing the book periodically. It is a keeper.

You'll notice that other reviewers have described this book as a "good introduction" and I think that's probably an apt description. Yes, there are nice color photgraphs and drawings. The author's described background would indicate that he's qualified to comment at length on the subject. The editorial review states that the book is more international in scope, describing wilderness techniques in foreign lands. It's true that the book talks about survival on other continents, but I have to say that its treatment of those hostile (and likely even more unfamiliar to most of the book's readers)environments is more superficial than its treatment of general survival techniques. What this book does is give a very broad overview of the serious subject of survival. To be well learned and therefore genuinely useful, such techniques require in-depth, detailed study. This book, however, is sort of a coffee table book of survival. I am tempted to say that it is a survival book for people who might rather fantasize about wilderness ventures than actually go on them. I won't go so far as to say that it is a useless book; there is a fair bit of good information in it. But if I were to compile a list of survival books that I've read..which would number closer to 100 than 50...I would put this one near the bottom. It is most useful as a supplement to an established survival library. If you're looking for a good first book on survival I would recommend Wiseman's SAS Survival. I would also advise any novice contemplating a trip into remote areas to find a text dealing specifically with that environment, and to first get REAL experience with a seasoned group of outdoorsmen.

Having visited the frozen north of Alaska in 2007, i wished to revisited some of those lands through the stories of people who lived in extreme conditions both weather and wildlife. This book transported me back for yet another glimpse of life, harsh and unforgiving. Great read

I purchased this book as I like to read about TRUE life adventures. This book will not disappoint. I cringed with a couple of the stories as they are true and one wonders how human beings can survive sometimes. Definitely worth purchasing. I am going to see about other books by this author. Buy it, you won't be disappointed.

Great for the short of time or attention span as it's a bunch of 1-5 page stories. I call it, "Bad *&@#$% that can happen to you if you visit Alaska". It's one of my favorite books for entertainment & I bought this one as a birthday present for my brother. Great gift item. The stories are riveting.

MORE BEARS AND SURVIVAL STORIES..READING THESE GIVES YOU AN EDGE...I NEVER GO OUT IN THE BUSH WITHOUT A WEAPON AND A FIRE STARTER...

I think reading any work should teach you something, and tales of wilderness incidents should not simply be armchair rubbernecking. This book is a collection of true incidents involving sportsman, backcountry travelers, and bush pilots. Their misfortunes could have been models for preventing readers from finding themselves in similar situations. Kaniut misses this opportunity. Instead of an analysis of the actions that saved the subjects (or cost them their lives), most stories are just circular and pointless recollections of how scary it was having a bear drag you around/being submerged in freezing water/crashing a plane in the backcountry, etc. According to this book, surviving these incidents simply requires some really hard praying, but reaffirms one's love of life and/or faith in god. It's akin to seeing dozens of people pulled from a wrecked plane and saying "WOW, what a miracle!!" while ignoring what the pilot did in the last seconds, recognizing the crew for an efficient evacuation, and acknowledging the skill and training of the ground emergency response crews. Kaniut would relate being mauled by a bear, the conclusion being that this was a terrible attack by a viscous animal, but god smiled and saved the day. In contrast, an NGS story I read after Danger Stalks about several bear attacks on hunters taught me (if I was inclined) how not to handle kills and seasonal factors that could emerge in the future that would make bears more aggressive, all the while infusing the human emotional element of these attacks. A serious missed opportunity is analyzing bush pilots' incidents. This book could have served as an excellent resource for this otherwise dry and difficult to find info (you can read FAA/NASA reports, but they often lack analysis, can be hard to sort through, and often simply blame "pilot error leading to..."); but the reader will have to find their own lessons in the aircraft incidents, if Kaniut provided enough detail between the sermons and anecdotes. Thus distilled, Danger Stalks is either just reflective of the human fascination with other's bad luck or a fluffy triumph of the human spirit book.

Very good and exremley useful for Database apps and all of the above for the COM Developer. The compnents are striaght forward.

This book is good for those who just start developing COM objects for ASP. I think the way the writer starts from a simple example and escalates to a more complex issue is commendable. The scripts detailed in this book are functional and ready-to-use in nature. Kudos to Buczek for that. It sure did save me a lot of time.

I don't use the CD at all. But looking at the the scripts gave me an idea where to start. Though I won't recommend this book for advanced COM developers, this book sure is worth the money for beginners.

As a corporate trainer I'm often confronted with more training issues than I have time for as far as traditional presentations etc. This being the case, using the online approach is an awesome option to have at one's disposal and Mr Buczek's book is an wonderful resource to have.

Not only are the ready made scripts a huge time saver, they're also very educational. In other words, rather than being limited to standing on the shoulders of others, you're being given the tools to develop your own applications.

I want to mention too that My Buczek is very approachable. On more than one occasion he's emailed with responses to questions that I had and that's enough to justify the cost of the book in and of itself.

Great book...!

This is extremely useful and practical book. It does'n waste your time on empty wordiness, but gives you just what you need to get it done. For me, a programmer with long experience needing to pick up just another technology, this was just what I needed. Got me going in no time. Thanks, Greg! Hope for more books like that from you.

The author has done a poor job of considering the importance of the reader's time.

Hundreds of pages are redundant wasted repetition of the same information -- horrendous waste of reading time.

Samples are set up in the most complicated organization possible. Plan on spending dozens of hours moving files from the CD creating data connections, editing and compiling to get to a working set of examples to follow along in the book.

Never does he explain steps to create a working example. That is left to tthe reader to dig out, if they can.

As a teaching manual this book gets a zero!

A very comprehensive book for the advanced trap shooter. I could find a lot of useful tips and techniques even if my skil is below proffesional trap shooting. I could not rate it with 5 stars because of the two main tesis, the mental and visualisation issues. I simply do not believe that visualisation is an universal thruth which can be applied by everyone and this should also be valid for the mental part. By definition, since we all are individuals there are no standard solutions but the book is however worth buying!

Good reading and the information was just as good. When your shooting Trap and Skeet you need all the help you can get.
Thanks James,
Bubba

This is a very practical book, which helps you master the mental game of Trapshooting. As the saying goes, "You have yet to hit your lowest score!" The trigger words are very helpful and keep you on task as you develop your own reperetoire of words; with his tips you enjoy the game in spite of the learning curve. I am seeking my final punch to the back fence; his suggestions have gained me four yards! One final note;the secret to hitting higher scores is to properly adjust the nut behind the recoil pad!

Excellent... Gives you all of the elements to build on for breaking 100. Very detailed, explains how things work and why. I have improved my score at least 25% by following his suggestions. You must practice - he tells you what to do and how. Keep it with you at the range so you can use it as a reference when misses occur...
You should read his other book first.

Anyone wishing to alleviate years of mistakes and truly understand the fundamentals to become a better shooter must buy both of James Russell's books.

It is with great pride to tell you that I finally ran my first 25 straight at the 27 yard line today because of the books. This was a big goal for me. Thank you, thank you James.

A must have for all trap shooters.

... both good and bad. In this particular case, they all give a fair view of the content of the book.

I bought the book because I wanted to read something about MACD, from the guy who came up with the idea. There are so many ideas out there and I have found it useful to let the inventor himself speak for his idea - rather than getting somebody else's rehash of the idea.

If you want to get a feel for MACD book is okay. There are some other ideas in book as well, but how many ideas do you need? I would not recommend the book for those ideas. Another reviewer pointed out that his newsletter is quite poorly ranked. That is also something to take into account when reading random ideas.

If you consider yourself as a serious global macro type of stock market trader, this book is an absolute must along with Stock Traders Almanac by Yale Hirsch. This book is complete compilation of 30+ year market veteran
who has many tips and tricks to help your trading.

Gerald uses an easy to read and casual writing style with meaningful insight into technical analysis.
He builds your confidence as you work through the book and eventually you become empowered enough to work effectively within the USA equity markets.
This book has helped me create my trading system that is producing a successful trading account currently and will allow me to make necessary trading system changes into the future.
The years of work outlined in this book along with substantial backtesting create real power tools for investors now and into the future.

To quote Dr. Alexander Elder from the foreward:

"The only thing you need to bring to reading this book is a commitement to market work. What you need to succeed is right here, on the table in front of you. It will be curious to see how many people actually take this knowledge and work with it to become successful traders and investors."

My experience with the techniques decribed in this book confirm this assertion. From the VIX, to the Moving average trading channel, and the MACD signalling the market bottom. All of the techniques described worked flawlessly in the recent market correction in January of 2008. I guess I have to say thank you Gerald Appel for sharing the insights you have gained over 30+ years of trading. I'm not sure I would have been generous enough to do that. Why would he give away his secrets that he worked so hard to develop? To quote Dr. Elder from the Foreward again:

"I recently visited Jerry and asked why he wrote this book. He laughed, "I enjoy seeing my picture on book jackets....It feels good to get your ideas out into the world, leave a little of your imprint around. I have never lost anything by giving ideas away. If people find it useful, it makes me feel good."

Trading is hard work. This book is a very good investment but only if your willing to invest the time and effort necessary to learn it and apply it.

bought this book beacause of macd - ok but nothing more. the rest of the book is more or less useless. For me it sees that he wrote this book because of what he had to say about macd. absoluttly wate of money and time. do you want the best go to a. elder. he si the best.

Since the wizard is pretty straight forward the book wasn't much use. I would have liked more discussion of when to use the default and when to customize.

The book advises a minimum 8 gb system drive. Even with Exchange et al on another partition the updates eat up most of the 8 gb quickly causing performance problems. I suggest 14-16 gb wth hard drives so cheap and the time wasted if you have to repartition.

Another place the book recommends the hard drive be at least 2 gb. That may be the minimum per MS but the author should provide realistic minimums.

With few exceptions, this book simply instructs the reader to accept default prompts and reiterates the choices offered by dialog boxes. I suspect the book has two target audiences: 1) small business owners who don't want to know much about SBS and just get it running, and 2) those who need to get it running but also want to learn about the program. For the first group, I suggest you save the time you would spend reading the book and do whatever it is you do to make money and use it to pay an IT professional to install and configure SBS. For the second group, I suggest you buy another book that explains SBS in greater detail.

This book is fine for an overview of the features included in SBS but, if you need to set it up, this would not be a book that I would recommend. In fact, I wish I could get my money back.

The author approaches the set-up as if it were almost an out-of-the-box program and does not address any of the potentially major problems that can crop up. - And a lot do - just check out the TechNet newsgroup for SBS on Microsoft's website - http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsServer2003/sbs/community/newsgroups/dgbrowser/en-us/default.mspx?dg=microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs

The main problem with this book is that so many things can go wrong with SBS and she has only 6 pages on troubleshooting, and it is totally basic - which she admits by naming the chapter 'Troubleshooting Basics' - but what about troubleshooting is ever basic and where is the 'Advanced Troubleshooting' chapter???

Plus, there is no section in this book on troubleshooting the set-up process.

She writes for troubleshooting: "'Repeatedly ask why?'; 'Ask, 'what just changed?'; 'Cut the problem in half'; 'look for a simple solution'; 'gather evidence', 'write things down' etc. -

What? Have none of us gone through a basic science class! What would have been helpful would have been if she went over what CAN go wrong - you know, typical scenarios.

For example, critical elements like the fact that you need to register with a third-party provider a second domain name for your local network, etc. are not covered in the book.

Under 'Domain Name Naming Conventions' the author writes:

"Typically, companies separate their Internet presence from their internal network by using a different extension. If your company already has an internet presence (website), you can use the domain name with the .local or .office extension. If you don't already have an Internet presence, you should consider a domain name that is somewhat descriptive of your business..."

What the author forgets to mentions is that, whatever you choose, you have to register it - EVEN IF you already have an internet presence and EVEN IF it is only for the internal network.

She gives this super-basic overview of domain names when the entire functionality of SBS is dependent on the DNS. I would say that most people picking up this book know already that a internet domain name needs to be registered but what some people wouldn't know is that an internal domain name also needs to be registered. More information on setting up an internal network is not there.

She took the easy way out and she does this through most of the book.

This book is great for those that only work on small business server on occasion. I refer to it every few weeks. a great reference.

This is a great resource for anyone who is installing or maintaining Windows SBS. There are a lot of screen shots so you know where you're headed and the information is clear and concise. I didn't want a lot of technical jargon, just a book that could help step me through the setup and installation and help me avoid common mistakes. This job filled the bill and I'd recommend it to anyone who's working with SBS.

Good book, good samples and good programming techniques, The author is very clear and the concept is explained very nicely, he just fails short in the implementation of the component in the ASP pages, he explained very good but the componet was already prepare for that tutorial, I would like the author develop the component throught the tutorial and then implemented, at last that is the way it is!!! , as a web developer I am interested to in the creation of the COM, but I gues that is a diferent subject from the point of view of the author. A very understandable book.

The book had numerous code examples, as implied by the title. Specifically, I understood and was able to easily implement the Server.Execute method in my own application thanks to Listing 10.7 on Page 250. Thanks, Mr. Reselman!

Regardless of how good the text in any programming book is, the book is pretty much useless if there is not adequate support for the code - particularly in a "By Example" book - which this book purports to be. The book contains no CD to test your code against the authors. Well, that would be OK if there were the support files online - like Wrox has; but NO. No supporting code anywhere. And don't be fooled by the "Where to find the Code" heading in the Introduction - it just points you to sample code for a single chapter. I encountered "internal server error HTTP: 500" in one of the exercises, and wanted to test my code to what the author had written. No such luck. Was it me? Maybe. Was it the code in the book? I'll never know... Buy "Beginning Active Server Pages 3.0" published by Wrox. They know how to support their products. As for this publisher, they don't have a QUE.

In terms of adding to the reviews so far, I would say that Reselman does a good job of introducing real-life programming issues in context. He walks you through those 'gotchas' that you will encounter.

No surprise that the book has no javascript examples to speak of, focusing on vbscript. That's good at the intro level -- you've got enough to learn about without having javascript syntax problems all the time. I agree that it's a good reference, but because the examples are concrete (one is called 'using ASP to add a record to an ODBC datasource'). If you use this stuff much, you'll want to use functions a lot -- hopefully you might be able to reuse some code -- so I wouldn't put too much credence in the low review).

In terms of prerequisites, I would think it useful to have some general SQL knowledge ("sql for dummies" is a great add-on -- you'll be using SQL for all data access, so getting it down is key), and some basic HTML as well. Other than that, I found it very straight-forward.

Cheers!

Being a beginner with ASP I bought this book as a tutorial to learn ASP. I have access to ASP professional Developers so I was able to ask a lot of questions in learning ASP. The code and explainations that are in the book are not clear and are hard to understand. I had to ask many questions. The code seemed to be hard to follow. The Developers that I have access to felt that the Author used too many 'functions' when they were not needed (this made the code hard to follow.) I am going to have to buy another book to learn from. This book may be good for refrence, but not learning from.

I never write reviews, but this is an ex.Message :-)
The most helpful part of this book is author's business and architectural approaches.
There are some bugs in the code-examples, but!
Even if you're not experienced developer you can find and fix them.
More you can take it as sudoku puzzles.

Only one thing I would consider as a pros - is an examples based on the OLEDB non-SQL provider, which is little bit outdated, for small and medium-size companies.

Book is especially helpful for developers who specialized on the in-house extranet applications.

With the Best Regards to Author!

~Part I - The ASP.NET Programming Environment
Chapter 1 - Introducing ASP.NET
Chapter 2 - Introducing ASP.NET Web Forms and Controls
Chapter 3 - Using ADO.NET in the .NET Framework
Chapter 4 - Data Binding
Chapter 5 - Input Validation
Chapter 6 - User Controls
Chapter 7 - Custom Controls
Chapter 8 - Business Objectives
Chapter 9 - Working with ASP.NET Web Services
Chapter 10 - ASP.NET Applications
Chapter 11 - Caching
Chapter 12 - Tracing
Chapter 13 - Security

Part II - Projects
~Project 1 - A Personal Finance Manager

Chapter 14 - The Design of the Personal Finance Manager
Chapter 15 - Chart of Accounts
Chapter 16 - Transactions
Chapter 17 - The Trial Balance Report

Project 2 - Web Services
Chapter 18 - Creating a Generic Database Web Service
Chapter 19 - Designing a Navigation System
Chapter 20 - Incorporating Web Services in the Chart
Chapter 21 - Incorporating Web Services in the Chart of Accounts Form
Chapter 22 - Incorporating Web Services in the~~~ Trial Balance

Project 3 - Inventory Management System
Chapter 23 - The Design of the Inventory Management System
Chapter 24 - Inventory Masters
Chapter 25 - Inventory Movements
Chapter 26 - The Inventory Balances Report

Project 4 - The GenEditAdd Control
Chapter 27 - Using the GenAdd Control
Chapter 28 - Extending the GenEditAdd Control

Project 5 - Visual Studio.NET
Chapter 29 - Displaying Database Data Using a Strongly-Typed DataSet
Chapter 30 - Writing CRUD Applications with~~ Visual Studio.NET
Chapter 31 - Creating a Web Service Using Visual Studio.NET

Part III - Appendixes
Appendix A: Installing the Sample Database
Appendix B: HailStormIndex~

The author's ADO chapter was excellent. I found the entire book to be a great source with well thought out examples. I have 6 other ASP.net books, and I highly reccomend this one.

I got this book mainly to reuse the GenEditAdd component described in it. However, it seems that the book is totally unsupported now.

The author's web site has not been updated recently. The versions of the source code available from the author and the publisher are different, and at least one of those versions appears to be based on a .NET beta.

The author's contact email address does not seem to be working. Neither does the contact form on his website.

The writing style is great and his projects are pretty well thought out. However, I have to downgrade my rating of this book because:
1) Appears to be based on an early beta.
2) Most of his coding examples produce poorly structure html. To borrow a phrase from the xhtml/xml world, it is not "well formed." In other words, it doesn't follow accepted w3 standards.
3) His use of CSS is just flat out not right.

My fiance and I have started hiking to get in shape for our wedding, and we found this great book as the best-reviewed NJ hiking book out there. Even though we don't have kids, we're really enjoying the details about the hikes, the new routes we never knew existed, and we're taking great nature photographs -- we've seen some really gorgeous scenery out there! Highly recommend this book!

This product was sent in a timely manner and in described condition- would do service with again!

As an experienced hiker, I've scratched my head over the value of this guide book; I have a good collection of New Jersey guide books, and generally would pass this one by and recommend a guide with a greater range of trails from easy to moderate to difficult. Parents would then have a resource to meet a varieties of needs, depending on the age of their kids.

But, last summer I found a neat way to use this book. I took one of my rent-a-kids on a hike in the Ramapo Reserve in Oakland. He had a great time, and I gave him the guide for his very own.

His mother wrote a very nice thank you note, and I've found that kids have invariably enjoyed their own copies after finishing a hike. Eventually, I'm sure, they'll graduate to guides with a range of more challenging hikes, and maybe even become a member of a hiking organization.

Robert C. Ross 2008

Who knew that New Jersey could have so many places to enjoy the great outdoors? Growing up in Montana, I hiked in my backyard. Now with my own children I drive for thirty minutes and can find an age-appropriate hike and enjoy New Jersey nature.

Zatz also includes things to watch for on the hikes (animals, flowers, etc.)

I love this book. I just got it a few weeks ago and we have hiked each week since I got it. I find it easy to use. I love that it ranks the difficulty of the hike. I have a 5 yr old and a 7 year old. This book makes it easy for planning an afternoon trip vs an all day adventure. It also tells you things like if the trail is "bugy" in the summer or if you need to wear long pants because it is a "thorny" hike. Lots of great & useful tools.

The author had a good idea in Chapter 1 for developing the rationale for COM. It was an interesting read, and educational, without hardly even mentioning the term, COM. From there the writing went downhill. I'm an experienced programmer with a fair amount of prior exposure to COM, but the author lost me before the end of his 90-page chapter 2 on designing interfaces. He failed to introduce new terms before using them. He strung dozens of topics together with no apparent connection or organizing framework. Rationale was missing. I labored over this chapter but gained very little understanding. The text was well edited for the most part, but three stars overall is generous.

I found this book to be an excellent reference from the minute I opened it. I began by paging through the chapters but almost immediately found areas that helped with the project I was currently working on.
Unlike most books that spend the first several chapters covering basic topics that are covered by every other book, this one actually presented a more concise and in depth look at those topics. The chapter on IDL was well worth the reading.
This is difinately not a book for the beginner or for those looking to use languages other than C++. I did find some pieces questionable. The authors implementation of a resource sharing mechanism seems unnecessary. Why is it that authors know how to write better code than anyone else?

The book is incredibly difficult to read from cover to cover. Instead of just getting to the point, there is so much verbiage as to make the whole thing unintelligible. The examples, with the VCR/TV analogy in the first chapter, were simply confusing and could have been made more clear IMHO.

Better to try another COM/ATL book

I found this book to be an excellent reference from the minute I opened it. I began by paging through the chapters but almost immediately found areas that helped with the project I was currently working on.
Unlike most books that spend the first several chapters covering basic topics that are covered by every other book, this one actually presented a more concise and in depth look at those topics. The chapter on IDL was well worth the reading.
This is difinately not a book for the beginner or for those looking to use languages other than C++. I did find some pieces questionable. The authors implementation of a resource sharing mechanism seems unnecessary. Why is it that authors know how to write better code than anyone else?

This book is ideal for beginning to develop applications and for the need for a better understanding of the different COM aspects. The variety of examples is however limited and builds upon previous shown examples. However the author limits the need of useless repeating. Read this book if you want to understand the different tools but for real development the book is not practical enough.