Active Books

Don't waste your money or time. I read everything in print, OCD that way. This belongs in the trash. As a disaster survivor, it would be about as helpful as using chopsticks to repair a car engine. It contains so many incorrect information that it's dangerous. Oh well...anyone can write a book. Helpful suggestions would have been nice: buy in bulk, get a vacuum sealer, stock up on water, purification tablets or a filter, multi-vitamins and antibiotics, have a first aid kit, batteries, a solar/crank radio w/shortwave, etc.

This is a very well written book. I got it from the library and I had to buy it for my own personal library. By no means does it have all the information, but it has a great list of about 30+ books to also buy. None of which are written by this author. This is the first survival book I have ever read. It was so good that I started buying all the books it recommends, which are also full of great information. A lot of other reviewers poke fun at some of the information in this book but a lot of it is taken out of context. A must for any survivalist library and a great start off point for anybody interested in starting one.

You have to love this book.

I know I do.

My favorite parts are the fore-mentioned alien-attacks and the gang-wars that take over your city. The author suggests that the gangs will completely outnumber your police/army/navy/special-ops/national-guard completely and that you should find a safe place to hide while they over-run your city.

I'm sure.

He later suggests that you attempt to create an uprising by gathering munitions and what-not to do so, but BEFORE all that, try to gain money by selling food to the gangs that have infected the inside of your city limits...HUH?!?!

And just so you know...there is NO way to survive completely after a nuclear-strike! Not unless you have building beneath the Earth, perfecting a culture that can survive without the sun or fresh water and been building it all underground for years just in case something like this happens!

If any of THAT sounds insane, then you're game for this joke of a "survival-guide".

--Matt

It took this nut only until the 5th paragraph to get down to SERIOUS factual errors, as in "56% of the American public voted against Bill Clinton".

His advice is incredibly unworthy of our times: "Make sure you have extra amunition, as a good firefight uses it up fast", and "If you have snitches in your neighborhood, have a midnight discussion with him, and if that doesn't work, take care of him and remember not to leave any brass laying around that will allow the government to trace it back to you"

I breezed through the entire book and then discarded it. I wouldn't even want anyone to know it was in my posession.

You have to love this book.

I know I do.

My favorite parts are the fore-mentioned alien-attacks and the gang-wars that take over your city. The author suggests that the gangs will completely outnumber your police/army/navy/special-ops/national-guard completely and that you should find a safe place to hide while they over-run your city.

I'm sure.

He later suggests that you attempt to create an uprising by gathering munitions and what-not to do so, but BEFORE all that, try to gain money by selling food to the gangs that have infected the inside of your city limits...HUH?!?!

And just so you know...there is NO way to survive completely after a nuclear-strike! Not unless you have building beneath the Earth, perfecting a culture that can survive without the sun or fresh water and been building it all underground for years just in case something like this happens!

If any of THAT sounds insane, then you're game for this joke of a "survival-guide".

--Matt

10% good explanation in a clear style.
90% fluff.

Will any book be more frustrating when the codes can't compile, or compiles but won't run?

This is a great book but it is a very painful read. I cannot explain why it is but I certainly learned a lot from it but it took a very long time to read it. Examples are fantastic. Other than the fact that it is hard to read, it certainly is another quality product from Wrox. If you are a little confused with this review, you will be even more confused after read this book. Not bed time reading.

I highly recommand this book to those who want to really learn ATL. It delves into implementation detail of ATL abit too much though. It is abit less practical than ATL Internals, but is packed with lots of examples to help beginners grasp the atl/com concept.

All in all, this book is definitely worth the money & time to read, but one heck of a boring book to read.

It is a very useful book if you already have some experience with ATL and COM but have some questions about those technologies unanswered. The author gives an excellent explanation of almost any aspect of ATL yet assumes the reader is not a complete newbie. The chapters on Object Wizard and on Threading and Marshalling are particularly useful. In combination with PROFESSIONAL COM APPLICATIONS WITH ATL, this book provides a powerful resource for an ATL COM developer!

Very interesting book with lots of information. I had a very frustrating time with the examples that did not work. I ended up not really using the CD at all and just stuck to reading through the examples in the book.

This is a grate book, except for the fact that most of the examples do not work (even from the provided cd), and some of the controls referred to are out of date and some, no longer supported. The first half of the book is ok to get you familiarized with ASP and web based data access.

Just as the teach yourself 21 days series, this book is also full of syntax errors. I wish I could get a refund. Surprise, most of the examples in this book simply doesn't work.

I won't buy any teach yourself series again. It just waste my money

The book is probably terrific for managers who simply want to 'read' about the technology. Don't try to put the examples to use though; you'll be quite frustrated.

I found that this book did NOT NEARLY meet the qualities that I have found in other Teach Yourself series books. Teach Yourself Visual Basic 5 in 21 days and Teach Yourself Visual Basic for Applications in 21 days were 100% better than this book.

Poorly written, not tested, not worth the money.

This book covers awesome web technologies; however, non-working created a lot of frustrations on my part and makes me wonder about the validity of the entire book altogether.

To the authors, try to test run your examples before releasing the book and its cd.

In short, the material covered in this book could have been thoroughly explained in 8 hours or less -- not 24. The author continuously repeats himself (e.g. tells you how to create a new file repeatedly). So, the real message becomes hidden within the repetitious rambling. Entire chapters are spent on covering just one or two insignificant topics. As other reviewers posted, the author states "that is out of scope for this book" way too often. The writing style is a bit monotonous -- needs a bit more enthusiasm. Examples are VERY poor in the few times they are provided. The author makes it seem as if Web Matrix is the industry-standard tool to use when coding ASP.NET, when in reality, it isn't. As another reviewer stated it, you will definitely know how to click and drag objects onto the page -- but not really code. Overall, I think this book could have been much, much slimmer and be labeled "Teach Yourself ASP.NET with Web Matrix in 10 Minutes". It has the content of the "10 minute" series. I give it 2 stars because although it doesn't teach much, it does teach some. I will buy other SAMS "Teach Yourself" books because I think they are good in general, but I won't buy anything else from this author.

As you can see from my rating, I'm not offset by this book. I would recommend it, but only to circumstantial needs. This book is written with great style, and an interesting mannerism. I guess that's what you get with an author that happens to be younger than the majority of the projected audience. The information contained is helpful, but seems like the author directs you more towards his free website, rather than show you an example in the book you've just purchased. It's almost a slap in the face if you think about it. I felt like I've paid for something he's giving away to everyone else.

Personally, I've been a web, and application programmer for about ten years. I have learned many languages, but felt a little uneasy about learning ASP.NET. Not only did I not want to have to run an SQL server, I didn't want to deal with the aspects of online checkout. I recently accepted a job where it was a prerequisite to have ASP.NET background, so I bought this 24-Hour guide to jumpstart myself into the world of Active Server Pages.

This book really did show me that there was nothing to worry about. Although reading this book is almost like a rollercoaster ride. He jumps around so much, you don't know wether you're going up or down. One second he's talking about VBscript, then about aesthetic properties, then he's talking about how everything you need to know is beyond the scope of this book, and you should really buy his other ones. Then goes on to explain how to install the SQL server (In Hour 13. More than halfway through the book, and you can now run the software needed to make your pages work). After I setup my SQL server and started making sucessful, and almost-useful database retreival pages, I realized that the book ended there. It started harping on un-needed aesthetic properties of dropdown menus, and listboxes (I guess that's what you get with such a young author). The DataGrid properties were very helpful, and useful to use when "dolling up" your website, but if you've got an IQ of over 40, you could probably figure out that the same properties apply in the same way to all of the web controls, and the readers might know how to use a Repeater control.

The most important web control in the arsenal of an ASP.NET programmer is the Repeater control. This book has one statement regarding the Repeater control, claiming it to be (and I quote), "Beyond the scope of this book." I think there are more mentions to the phrase, "Beyond the scope of this book," than explanations of imperative web controls.

I would recommend that you check out the free website located at http://4guysfromrolla.com before buying the book. There are more examples at the site than in the book, as well as full programming example codes (which by the way are not explained in the book).

The programmer that plans on using a text-based editor to create ASP.NET pages should not buy this book. Anyone with very little programming comprehension, or any beginner that knows nothing about pre-existing web languages may enjoy this book. For a 14 year-old beginner of HTML, this would be a very fun book, I'm sure.

The book is great and very simple even simpler than the Dummies book, It helps in building a solid knowledge in the .Net framework. Their use of WebMatrix was a good idea because it's very easy to be used and it's FREE. Really the book was great I liked it and I encourage you to buy it today. I have some comments on the book but it's nothing really.

I got this book becuase I just want to know how to simply connect to a database in ASP.NET. This book failed for that purpose. Rather than explaining things step by step, this book does a "quickie" job trying to explain complicated procedures in a few short paragraphs. The topics are so condensed, it is almost like reading a college student's notes for class. It does not give enough detail or examples to get you started writing high powered applications in ASP.NET.

I would not recommend this book to anyone, as it ignores the fact that there are other tools on the market, and keep telling people that you have to input HTML codes manually. There are also so many mistakes in the book that make the reading difficult. Even if I have been following his instructions on the exercices closely, some times the resulting web pages won't run at all.

The author's writing style is not only extremely poor, but confusing as he uses terminologies that a LOT of beginners may not be familiar with. You'll find yourself going over to webopedia.com for explanations for a lot of his terms which he simply mentions or just glosses over.

I was forced to by this text for a college course and have found much better beginning asp.net and vb.net texts since buying it.

Disorganized....ADO.NET example in chapter 7 doesn't even make any sense if you follow it....Errors throughout...download of examples doesn't even have the examples from the book....

Over all this book is covering a lot of topics and should be good for beginner. Too much explanation of the code and stuff that's obvious for intermediate / senior levels. I did encounter couple problems. COM+ part does not go into details. The sample that I made (downloaded) for this chapter did not work. It might be the operation system problem, but I did not find any references in the book that you can't do this if you are running on WIN2000. Also, web services did not work with my components, again, no references in the book what do you do if web service looks inaccessible.

I am an experienced HTML, PHP and Javascript developper.

I recenctly decided I would like to pick up VB.net for web development and maybe pass 70-305. I just finished VB.net Step-by-Step and was pretty happy.

I bought this book based on the reviews and I have to say I am frustrated and disappointed.

First off, most of the book is spent making console applications, not web applications.

Second, there are no clear tutorials or labs that allow you to practice or apply what you have learned. Lots of code snippets and incomplete programs that aren't terribly clear. Lots of theory, not much application

Finally, the author assumes knowledge that hasn't been demonstrated in the book to date when giving examples or using terminology. For someone who is unfamiliar with the MS programming world, it can very confusing.

All in all I'm not impressed.

.NET technology is specifically tailored for internet applications and the title of this book includes Web Programming. In fact there is very little coverage of web programming. The entire section on VB.NET covers only console applications. We are almost half-way through the book (if you ignore the 140 plus pages of appendices and index at the end) before a step-by-step guide to creating a (very simple) web application is given.
Most of the book consists of tedious listings of available controls and their properties/methods - is not that what the user manual is for? Code samples are almost childish, like displaying a message stating which check boxes have been selected. In the intro Crouch states the book is aimed at software developers. If so, why spend so much of the book explaining the simple in detail and skipping over the difficult concepts that are new to VB.NET. OOP is not new or exclusive ot VB.NET so why should it be covered here? And why having covered OOP, does Crouch then proceed to totally ignore the concept in his samples? Nowhere does Mr Crouch explain how to use his code samples, which are usually separate HTML and VB code, in the .NET framework. Loads of topics covered come without any code samples at all (yes, you've guessed it, the complicated or difficult parts).
The book also covers ADO.NET. Why? If I wanted a book on ADO.NET, then that is what I would buy. Ironically, the code included with the section on ADO.NET is much more practical than in the rest of the book. Pity the same standard could not have been applied throughout. I strongly recommend you buy something else.

Steven A. Smith, ASP.NET by Example (Que, 2002)

It's been five years since the release of ASP.NET by Example, so if you're already well-versed in ASP.NET, this probably isn't the book for you. I, on the other hand, know nothing about ASP.NET, and picked it up as an introductory tome. (If you do so, you should have at least a decent background in either VB.NET or C#, the two languages Smith alternates between for his code-behind pages.) As someone coming into ASP.NET brand-new, I found it well worth reading, informative, and easy to understand. Of course, some stuff has changed in the intervening years, but enough has stayed the same so most of the book will still be useful to the ASP.NET noob. A good place for beginners to start. ****

I bought this book recently to learn ASP.NET and feel I have mainly wasted my money. In the main the author simply has not put himself into the place of the newbie he aims the book at.

Rather than give opinions, let me quote specific examples from an early chapter. Listing 4.1 gives code to be added to the page_load method. When you try to run it it doesn't work. You find out 3 pages later that you should have added a group of "using" statements. It would have been easy to add these lines to the snippet, or at least give a forward reference to them.

In the same snippet you're invited to open a database named "pubs" (Publications) The following snippets perform various functions on this database. But this is not a standard database, and you're given no details of how it's put together so you can mock up your own in Access or whatever.

I advise against this book.

After reading some of the other "by Example" books, this one was a disappointment. XML by example was excellent.
This book was too full of errors, and would do more harm than good for someone's first book.
There are better books out there to learn ASP.NET.

Perhaps a second edition, with closer editing, would be better

I too purchased ASP.NET by example and I feel strongly about how terrible I think it is. The positive reviews may have been written by the Authors or their friends. I feel that this book has been slapped together quickly in order to sell books rather than to impart knowledge. Never before have I seen a book with so many glaring errors. The website of examples was not even responding when I tried to access it. Then when it was back online, the same errors were in the example code as the book.

For example Chapter 9 (Using ASP.NET User Controls) is missing the fundamental InitializeComponent() and all of the related constructor methods that are required for the software to compile and run.
This book is full of information that looks good at first but when you start to really try and use it there is a lot of information missing.
DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK. I am sick of handing over good money for poorly written reference books.

I agree with the reviewer who mentioned that this book would do more harm than good.

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 too found it difficult to find an XML book dealing with Specifically .NET. This book does a good job in alot of respects, but falls short and wanders off the subject a bit in some chapters (this of course can be skipped over.) The author does give alot of real world examples through out the book, which is always a plus. Overall highlights in what I learned:
Serializing / Deserializing XML in .NET
.NET XML Base classes and their Implementations
SQL Server 2000 interaction with .NET & XML
ASP.NET Web Services (you create a public Address book Web Service)

It even has a decent reference section at the end dealing with XSLT that I find I use frequently.
This book represents (at this time) a great bargain!

More about XML than "XML and ASP.NET." I have already read a lot on XML and this book just confused me about what I already knew. It is full of definitions that don't really define anything and is lacking in good examples. I have read many, many books on programming and on the .Net framework specifically and this is by far one of the worst. After I know XML well I am sure that I will come back to this book and understand it completely. I am very sorry that I wasted my money on this book.

This book reads like a medical journal, point-by-point layout out the facts and presenting very narrow-minded interpretations of what ASP.NET and XML are designed to do. For one thing, the authors exude an opinion in their writing that ASP.NET is useless without XML, and that XML is the greatest thing to come along since the transistor. I disagree with the sentiments, but that's beside the point. This book doesn't accomplish anything in the end but to confuse the reader. It's as if the authors are trying to impress you with how many acronyms they can spit out in a single page (I counted over 30 on one particular page). This is not writing, this is not teaching, it is shooting facts at the reader with a shotgun.

In retrospect, I read this book a year ago when I was new to ASP.NET (but not to XML). I find it useful for storing read-only data in XML to be used in ASP.NET web sites. However, it's still one of the dryest books you will ever find.

This book (in my opinion) is for those more interested in XML alone than its use with ASP.NET. I was looking for a book that combined the two effectively, but found this one to be very difficult to read, with topics discussed without definitions (only references to chapters ahead of the current one), and little introduction to .NET or ASP.NET. There are very few examples, and even fewer pictures to display the effectiveness of the examples. Maybe I need to spend more time digesting the material, but there is little use of ASP.NET in this book... and even less integration of the two technologies. This is not for anyone interested in eCommerce or strictly internet programming.

This book is by far the best information out there on xml in the .net framework that I have seen yet. (And trust me, I've looked.)

This book is well-organized and jam-packed full of useful information on a very wide variety of subjects. More than just your run-of-the mill red covered book that regurgitates the documentation.

As for other reviews, I suspect it's like many newbies in programming. Laziness is clouding their judgements.

The book was an excellent book for beginners. I found that it walks through each section step by step with excellent examples. You start out with the basics and proceed into more complicated designs such as using xml and databases. I would definitely recommend this book for someone who is starting out with asp.net as it gives you a good footing into the language.

I have read almost all the chapters of this book. I have been programming with intermediate ASP for past 5 years. The reason I picked up the book was for the easy transition from ASP to ASP.Net and this book help me do that. The book explains ASP.Net 1.0 at the novice level. For serious developers this book can serve as an introductory book for ASP.Net. I have now moved on to Professional ASP.Net book by wrox and many times I have to go back to this book to look into introductory details of the new features of ASP.Net.

The book is well outdated (as of mid-2004).

I'm just finishing the Begining ASP.NET with VB.NET 2003. This was Wrox's suggestion as the follow-on book to really understand website database development. A real waste. The Begining ASP.NET provided the same level of detail.

The book did use SQL Server -- a plus -- which the Begining ASP.NET book lightly covered. But, not enough to justify the expense of buying the book and even more importantly the time to wade through it.

I have been a fan of wrox books in the past, but this is not one if their better ones. The writing was poor overall, and there were times where I read the infomration three times before I eventually started to search the internet for a better explaination. The chapters on xml were useful, but could have gone into a little more detail with simple ways to data bind instead of focusing on datagrids as a single solution. As a resource, the index is useless and no glossary to organize key concepts to reference was a disapointment.

This book does not look like from Wrox, it got only the bad side of Wrox books - put code on dark background to damage readers' vision.

The usefulness of this book are the examples, while the explanations are not all good. There are 13 authors for this book, the quality of each part of this book differ a lot. Unfortunately, the most importance parts for me: the OOP part and Control part, got the lowest quality. The technology used in these two parts is: put some words there but no real explanation on many important points; simply repeat the sample code to fill out the pages. This is more damaging because of readers' trust on Wrox books, I invested lots of time on this book without questioning, then I found I wasn't going anywhere.

John explained the trading systems that would probably work. Some history of performance is shown in the book. Anyway, the system should be tested in the choppy market condition first before it applied in your live account. I'm afraid that it's only working well in a trending condition.

I have bought this book as I had heard a lot about this author from trading symposiums. He may be a great trader and also may be a great presenter in symposiums but when it comes to writing a book, I would not say he was successful.

1. Good amount of content in this book is a repeat from his other two books. So if you happen to have one of his other two books you may want to ask yourself why do you want to buy this book.

2. Good amount of content in this book is freely available in the internet. Not only its covered for free in the internet, its actually more detailed and better articulated with good examples. Take the challenge and just do a google search for simple terms like candle stick, pivot points, stochastics, MACD, chart patterns etc and you will be amazed how much great content is there for free.

3. The three trading system methods being discussed is nothing new. Even if its not new, I would have atleast expected that these systems be covered in more detail with proper definition of the rules. Unfortunately, only overview of the system is provided and its up to the reader to figure out the missing pieces are. Book touches upon filters, entries etc but nothing detailed enough to be useful. I don't really know why the author calls the systems high probability. The first 2 of them are based on stochastics & MACD respectively. The last one is based on pivots & MA though not new, detailed information on tis system is not provided.

4. The tradestation back testing strategy code and the results looks like are cheri picked. You try to run that strategy with different instruments you will see the real truth. There is nothing great about this strategy. He talks about scaling when entering the trades but he does not incorporate that in the strategy and leaves it to the readers to figure that out. What is given in the strategy is the most basic version which you can find by posting in tradestation forum for free.

5. The pivot point moving average system strategy code is not presented. I was looking for clear rules on how this strategy can be implemented. If you talk about a strategy, you got to be specific about the rules so that anyone who want to backtest can do so. Unfortunately the rules are not specific. I had written to the author to get more information about this and found out that he would be selling this as an indicator in 2008. So looks like (my personal opinion) the Pivot point Avg system being mentioned in the book is a marketing instrument for his indicator being sold. I have read other books where the author refers to paid indicators he has written but does provide detailed information on how those indicators work and the details/calculation behind that in the book. If someone likes it and do not want to develop it themselves, they can always buy it if they like.

6. CD...... I am amazed that the author is marketing about calculators. All the calculators he talks about are available free in the internet. In addition, anyone who has excel can create these indicators in less than 5 mins. Most trading software automatically calculates these numbers. So I am not really sure what is the value of the indicator other than for marketing purposes. The CD does have a training video which is good. Other than that, I feel this CD is a way to make sure that you don't return this book as once you open the CD you cannot return it.

7. Looking at the chapters, you will notice...
Introduction to Forex... nothing new here... You can read about this in million sites for free.
Candlestick.... All this content is free in the internet. If you already own his previous book, you are wasting your money to read the same content thats available elsewhere.
Patterns..... Same as candlestick. Its filler information. No new insight. No actionable information. Unfortunately nothing of value here.
Fibonacci chapter was so theoritical even if you read it 10 times you will know what it is but will not help you in any shape or form. Its like learning about the internals of the car's engine which has no relationship to how to drive the car.
Trading system chapter was not detailed enough and lacked depth.
Psychology chapter was brief..

In essence, the book is like going to a mediocre Sunday buffet. It has references to different concepts but none of the concepts are covered in depth nor any new insight provided.

8. Since you paid good amount of money for this book, you atleast expect the book to be printed in good paper. You will surprised that the quality of the paper printed is also not good.

9. On the good side
Book discusses about Multiple Timeframe analysis which is good though Elder does a better job in his book.
Discussion on scaling out is interesting.
Quick Training video in the CD is good.

In summary, this book is not worth the money. No new information. Even the information covered is not covered in detail. Not much actionable information. So if you don't have access to the internet and cannot read content online, you can pay for this book to get all the basic information (in a printed form) though you can get such (better) information for free in the net. If you are looking for specific information on the 3 systems John is talking about, be prepared to get disappointed.

Hope this helps.
Ram

Person certainly opened my eyes to pivot point trading in this book. Combining sound strategies and trading psychology is a great combination as both are monumentally important. Thanks directly to this book, I am able to consistently make money from trading forex, which I have been trading for about 2 years now. Cant recommend it enough!

This is definitely not a beginner's book and I suspect that some of the reviews found here giving this less than 4 stars are beginner or very ignorant traders that expect to be spoon fed.

Is this book perfect? No, that is why I did not give it 5 stars. But it does come close. The only perfection I have seen is Steve Nison.

This book is basically about candlesticks, pivot points and some basic indicators like MACD, Stochastics, Fibbonacci. He also discusses risk management and psychology.

If you are looking for a 'system'...you will and you won't find it here. He gives you some basic systems to start with. Really...you have to learn, understand and create your own system and style of trading Forex and build on the knowledge given in this book. No book can give it to you. It comes from knowledge of yourself and experience with Forex.

I found his information on Pivot Points to be excellent and it definitely expanded upon my already strong understanding. I trade pivots, candle signals and at times use things like Bollinger Bands for confirmation. That is it. I stopped complicating Forex, made it simple and the money rolls in. Trending pairs, consolidated pairs, ranging pairs...doesn't matter. Once you understand price action...the world of Forex is yours.

One of the reviewers beneath me claims the techniques Person teaches do not work unless there is a trend. HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA WRONG!!!!!

I use these techniques in trends, ranges, for momentum and breakouts. It applies if you know how to trade those conditions. If you know what is and is not possible in those conditions!

If a market is only moving in a 20 pip range....DON'T TRADE IT. DUH! Nothing but scalping will work there. If the market is in a 30 to 40 pip range...I am making the money! Also, (common sense alert) what is possible depends on your broker, the spread, etc. My broker is an ECN so I have no slippage or spreads to deal with. I pay a $10 commission on each standard lot I trade. So, if I grab 20 pips ($200) and I pay a $10 comm. I made $190. With an ECN, I can trade anything.


Do not expect this book to be more than it offers. Any idiot can read the table of contents and clearly see what this book will cover and will not cover.

If you are new to Forex...get a strong foundation down first before you try this book. If you are already successfully trading and want to learn more...this book is for you. If you know pivots inside and out...you probably will not learn anything.

If you are not successfully trading Forex, have an intermediate to strong understanding of trading but do not use or know anything about Pivot Points....this is the book for you!

Before buying any book, before you even try trading...you had better have a strong understanding of Japanese Candles. They work in every market and on all time frames. I would not trust any material unless it is Steve Nison's. So start with his books and build from there.

Steve Nison's 'Profiting in Forex' DVD set (about $600) is THE gold standard when it comes to learning how to use candles with Forex in my opinion. That DVD course BLEW ME AWAY! And I knew my stuff too but I still learned new things! If you want to get good at Forex...combine that course with this book. If you are new...start with the basics first.


This book definitely provides a lot more than most may notice. The question is...are you capable of seeing what the other complainers missed?

I wish other 1-star guys had posted their messages earlier. I could have saved the useless time and money I spent for this book.
The content is very limited. It has a few things on forex introduction, general trading tips (the usual things), Fibonacci and pivot points, but it remains very basic and there is nothing that is not available for free.
The style is not good and clear. The book is much too thick for its actual content (lots of fillers).
The so-called systems are too basic to be good over the long run. And there are about 3 of them, quite similar to each other. It does not match the message of the book: "High probability systems and strategies for active traders"...
The CD? Like others said. A joke. The so-called calculator is a link to a web page where the real calculator is. Therefore you need internet, and in fact you don't need the CD! The link could have been just given in the text. Besides, this type of calculator is available on the internet for free and its realization is such a poor challenge that any beginner in programming could do it.

[...]

I picked this book up about three years to late, as it is entirely written about the original IBuySpy Portal framework, and I am an avid DotNetNuke module developer. The author presents numerous great examples of custom module development for IBuySpy, including a simple library application, extended discussions module, a complex Human Resources module, and a great Document Management System. Keep in mind IBuySpy is the forerunner to DotNetNuke, and all of the modules outlined in the book port nicely to the newer architecture, as they leverage many of the features moved forward into DotNetNuke, like user account integration, portal security, and more.

As I worked through configuring the various samples provided with the book, I got to set up & play with the original IBuySpy Portal framework after nearly three years of playing with it for the for the first time. When it was first released, it very intimidating in some of it's implementation details, although it didn't appear as sophisticated in it's business architecture, unlike the original Reports, Time Tracking, & Issue Tracking kits.

The book provides one of the best guides I have read to everything IBuySpy. The second time looking at IBuySpy portal, I was more able to appreciate the great concepts introduced in it, and I was at times amazed at how simple the IBuySpy Portal is when compared to the latest version of DotNetNuke. With the Introduction of the DotNetNuke Data Access Layer (DAL) in version 2.x, DotNetNuke was able to encapsulate all of the sophistication, and more, of the business layer found in the Time Tracking/Reports starter kits, at which point I was hooked.

I found the Document Management System described in Chapter 9 sophisticated enough that I believed it was worth the effort to convert it to a modern DotNetNuke module. The module is very well designed and documented in the book, so I decided on an uneventful Sunday afternoon to start converting it. Approximately 40 hours of development later, I have completed converting the module to DotNetNuke 2.1.2 (DotNetNuke 3.0.9 was released two days before the writing of this review).

I bought this book for 62 Euros (75 USD) in Lisbon that is too much for 450 pages (with promos, content, indexes, images from internet) book without any CD and with broken promise of the downloadable code!

IMHO, there was no need to bloat the volume of a book and reader's tiredness reprinting from internet the lengthy code examples just for the sake of a few modifications and after that again printing, again, the resulting snippets (it is proper only for e-books)

Since the book is oriented for working with codes, the absence of electronic version is also the great drawback.

The book seems to be the monopolist on IBuySpy Portal (the only one available) , but I wouldn't have bought it, had I known about mentioned above.

While the book is useful (in abscence of any other choice, esp. in electronic version), I estimate the ratio "price/worthyness" as extremely high

PS
I was also more interested in C# and/or Visual Studio .NET versions of IBuySpy Portal, and I think VB.NET is just inappropriate language for the middle-, like IBuySpy Portal,
and large-size projects)

In order to use this book effectively, you really need a good understanding of SQL and SQL stored procedures. The book isn't for SQL Beginners. The tables come from WROX without the identities being set, so you will need to know how to do that. The book also requires a good understanding of stored procedures, you will need to know how to fix the stored procedure if it isn't working correctly. The easy way to work with the stored procedures and all of the changes the WROX programmers made to IBUYSPY is to load their backup database onto your server using a different database name, then import the tables and stored procedures you need into your Portal database. There are some problems with the code that requires revising the name spaces and assembly references to get them to work with the ASPNET Portal, but once modified the code does work well for the most part. I really wish the WROX programmers had spent more time on the RTF piece. I eventually replaced the RTF functionality with someone else's software, but I have to admit that I learned alot about ASP.NET controls by examining the WROX RTF code. The document management piece is worth the price of the book. The documentation really is not very good but if you study the code, you'll learn alot. I disagree strongly with the reviewer who stated this is for people who want code but don't want to learn what it does. If you can make the WROX code work, you're doing pretty well.

I bought this book because I have been thrust into the Intranet development world, and I really don't have a lot of experience building multi-functional web pages. I bought this book to really help me understand the IBuySpy portal, and I have used it to customize that package for a couple of different web sites now.

The Good:
The book is very good at explaining the various components of the IBuySpy Portal. It's a lot like a tourist map; highlighting certain pieces (while complete overlooking other aspects).

The Bad:
As others have noted, this book doesn't go deep into explaining ASP.NET, or how to use classes in the .NET architecture. It merely allows you to copy a lot of code, cross your fingers, and see something work.

The Ugly:
As with most "best-of-breed" solutions from Microsoft, stuff breaks. While this particular manual does point out why some stuff doesn't work as well as intended, it doesn't go into a lot of detail (and don't expect it to catch everything).

In Sum: Buy this book if you have a need to get an intranet up and running quickly, and want to impress your non-developer friends. Don't buy it if you're expecting to use it to learn ASP.NET.

If you wish to understand the IBUY Portal, don't count on this book to help you. I didn't like the style and structure of this book. I got the sense that this book was just another rush publication with a group of programmers getting together, assigning chapters with desired content and then got down to pulling and writing code.

WROX needs to do a better job of controlling quality and up front planning for their books. Sorry, but this book shows none of that. The design of the existing site was mostly crammed into a single chapter. A decent database diagram was not included and no UML or other diagrams were presented so we could easily understand the Object architecture. Instead, the documentation was simply a straight lift from sql server table descriptions. I found myself drawing my own diagrams as I went through the book. An architect's perspective was desparately needed in this first chapter.

I won't be buying any more WROX books if things don't improve by enforcing good technical writing standards for their publications.