Open

I really thought that the story about cheating, "The Test", was a valuable lesson for all students, regardless of faith. The structure and craftsmanship was equisite. Over all, I am tiring of this series but have alot of hope for it now. Well done, Ms. Ayers and Canfield/Hansen of course.
Once again, this series has made an outstanding contribution to the lives of people everywhere. In these troubled times, it is truly a blessing that this thoughtful volume has been provided for Christian teens everywhere.
The reason why this series has struck such a chord with readers across generations is the feeling of authenticity it generates within readers. My only criticism is that some of the stories sometimes seem a bit formulaic. A striking exception is found in the story "The Test", which involves the dilemma of a student who cheats on a school exam. The narrative pulls off the rare combination of being impecably written while still ringing true with its audience. As someone who works with young people on a regular basis, I know it will inspire my students for years to come. Thank you.

I never write reviews, but everyone needs to know how wonderful and what an impact this book can have on a person. I am not a very religious person, but I picked up this book and found, that being religious or not had nothing to do with enjoying and appreciating this book. I LOVED IT and could relate so much thank you KIMBERLY KIRBERGER, once again.

The minute I started reading this book I couldn't put it down. As an reader of the Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul series I was blown away by this particular book. I found it inspiring and moving, making me laugh and even cry. I recommend it to any teenager who wants to feel more connected to Christianity and regain their sense of faith.

Lopez is concerned with our collective understanding of nature. From studying a 3000-year-old horse intaglio to looking for Anasazi granaries he seeks our ancestral relationships. The essays work best when he mixes his reflection with keen observations. Where the essays have a heavier philosophical hand they aren't as effective. As he says "The door that leads to the cathedral is marked by a hesitancy to speak at all, rather to encourage by example, a sharpness of the senses". Lopez 's narratives sharpen many senses from the sudden assault of the sound of snow geese to "two snails small as pinheads chewing a leaf".

There are reflections on the role of biologists, from communicating between scientists and shipmates in the arctic to their role in a whale stranding. Perhaps he thinks biologists have greater insight, but he also understands the need for mystery and direct experience.

For Paul Winter fans there is a description of the raft down the Grand Canyon that produced the album "Canyon". As a current update, the snow geese written about in one essay are continuing to boom and damage their arctic breeding grounds.

"I live in a rain forest in western Oregon, on the banks of a mountain river in relatively undisturbed country, surrounded by 150-foot-tall Douglas firs, delicate deer-head orchids, and clearings where wild berries grow" (p. 148), Barry Lopez writes in this collection of his 1978 to 1986 essays. Lopez allows each essay to tell a story leaving its reader with "an inexplicable renewal of enthusiasm." "It does not matter greatly what the subject is," he writes about storytelling, "as long as the context is intimate and the story is told for its own sake" (p. 63). Subjects of these essays include a stone horse intaglio, white geese at Tule Lake, boating the Colorado River with jazz musician, Paul Winter, bull riders, beached whales, searching for Anasazi remains, and "the passing wisdom of birds."

Readers will cross open ground in these essays and enter the natural world, becoming immersed in its much larger meanings. "Wildlands preserve complex biological relationships that we are only dimly, or sometimes not at all, aware of" (p. 80). These essays are rich in wilderness wisdom, enough wisdom to please any fan of Ed Abbey or Wendell Berry. "We grasp what is beautiful in a flight of snow geese rising against an overcast sky as easily as we grasp the beauty of a cello suite," Lopez writes; "and intuit, I believe, that if we allow these things to be destroyed or degraded for economic reasons we will become deeply and strangely impoverished" (p. 38). He quietly observes, "wilderness can revitalize someone who has spent too long in the highly manipulative, perversely efficient atmosphere of modern life" (p. 82).

Whether I'm reading his stories or essays, Barry Lopez is among my favorite writers. He will bring you to the edge of your senses: "Everything found at the edge of one's senses--the high note of the winter wren, the thick perfume of propolis that drifts downwind from spring willows, the brightness of woodchips scattered by beaver . . .all this fits together" (pp. 149-50).

G. Merritt

Excellent reading for those connected with the Earth. Food for the soul. One of the best gifts I have ever recieved.

My husband and I adopted through the agency Jim Gritter works with. The material in this book is a very real look at stories of open adoption! Each story shares a common thread, but is unique. I reread this book several times as we waited to be chosen by a birthmom...wondering what our experience would be like! I learned that each story was different because of the PEOPLE involved...that's what it's really all about!

This is a very informative, easy-to-read, and interesting book. The collection of short stories share real experiences from down-to-earth people. BUY IT and READ IT to learn about open adoption success stories . . .!!

Adoption Without Fear is now 10 years old and still a very correct and accurate reflection of the best adoption practice possible. It is a painful book as it does not allow the shortcuts that many adoption agencies would like to bring adoptive families to believe in. It is honest and accurate. It cannot be ignored by any family wanting to provide the best adoption experience for their child. They themselves may hurt in the process but that is the normal history of truly loving parenting in our human culture. This book talks of the fully open adoption process which is the only safe adoption process in the US. By "safe" I mean that 35 years after the adoption the adoptive parent will have the greatest probability possible of a continuing strong and positive relationship with the child they had adopted 35 years earlier. An adopting family will never regret reading this book, especially as their child becomes an adult and moves out in the world. They will be forever thankful. Bill Betzen

What a concept! Rather than trying to get the most acreage per lot, make smaller lots with more shared open space. A must read for every developer, planning board, and zoning commition. Easy to follow examples show how to preserve historic and environmental features while adding to the value of the land that is developed.

If we developed land in the manner the author teaches, America would look so much nicer! A very common sense approach to maintain rural character in an area and stop sprawl from destroying your area. Every developer, planner, new home buyer, builder, conservationist and private citizen should read this and also buy the author's book, "Rural By Design".

Cheers for Randall G. Arendt, et al. For years my government agency has been fighting a loosing battle in Florida with unmanaged and unfettered urban growth. It seemed as though nothing could stem the tide of urban sprawl until two things happened. One was an election of a more centralist government and the other was the introduction of "designing for conservation" into our policy making levels. This concept was brought into clear focus by Arendt's book. The authors not only presented a practical and economically sound guide for growth that can benefit developers, but the reference can act as a mechanism to help preserve the environmental cohesiveness of any community. The policy makers in our community were so impressed with this book that fifteen (15) copies were purchased to be placed into the hands of influential politicians, developers and regulatory agencies.

This is a really good book for middle school - high school age kids. I recieved this book as a gift from a friend because everyday i had the worse time at opening up my locker. I read it off and on...now a couple years later I have revisited it and found it very enlightning. May fave idea from the book is...give it to God cause there is nothing you can do about it with out him.

years ago i picked this book up from my church's library and took it to work with me. it turns out that this book changed my life. reading it opened my eyes to accept Christ. i've been looking for it ever since. it cuts straight to the chase and gives clear reasons for following God.

After searching a long time to find a devotional just right for me I picked this one up a my local library. Unlike many of the devotional guides I've encountered this one is very direct and doesn't waste a lot of space trying to keep you entertained. It speaks right to the point, without being too blunt or preachy. Althought it's not especially funny it WILL draw you closer to God. If your looking for a real condensed devotional, then this is the book for you; if you want something more lighthearted, try one of Martha Bolton's books. I'm so glad God gave me this book!!!!

The Henderson's book is a superb pedagogic text. The chapters 1 to 5 are superbly written. They are easily understandable by any student and engineer.These five chapters are outstanding. Unfortunately the following chapters are in need of some updates. For example, the sections on spillway design (pp. 180-191), energy dissipators (pp. 214-227), culverts (pp. 258-264), roll waves (pp. 342-344). More importanly the chapters on sediment transport (Chap. 10) and part of the physical modelling (Chap. 11) are really outdated. The interested readers should be advised to consider seriously some modern books : "The hydraulics of open channel flow: an introduction" (Edward Arnold 1999, UK & John Wiley, 1999 in North America) and "The hydraulics of open channel flow" (ASCE, 1998). The former is a solid textbook for undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as professional engineers. The second title is more a reference handbok. The main drawback of Henderson's book is the lack of revision and its unavailability in many parts of the world because it is out-of-print since two decades.

I consider this book as a classical handbook of open channel flow. This book gives an in-depth theoretical background of all the concepts required to tackle the real life engineering problems associated with the open channel hydraulics in a very simple language. The only drawback is that this book, in its original hardcovered form, is out of print for so long time. If you find a copy, do not miss.

I was fortunate enough to find a hardcover copy of this book just a few years ago. I used it as text book in a graduate open-channel flow course and would not be without it as a practicing engineer. That fact that there is still a demand for a $100 ring bound fascimile is testament to it's continued applicability in the field of hydraulics. It covers all of the basics and I have yet to find a better treatment on the fundamentals of the method of characteristics. The illustrations are quite good and the text is clear and very well written. I actually came to Amazon in hopes of a more current edition for my library and ended up submitting this review. If you ever see one - buy it.

The text was ok except for the fact that the chapter problems did not include any illustrations. A lot of time the students had to guess at exactly what Sturm meant. Towards the end of the course it became routine for us to work the problem first and then check in the teacher's key to make sure that we set it up the way Sturm meant for us to. The class was made of seniors and graduate students.

Another problem is that often the student had to infer how Sturm wanted the reader to use the numerous charts based on empirical data. Sturm wasn't always explicit and that caused problems in getting correct values off them.

To be fair, this is a first edition and there are bound to be errors. Hopefully, the next edition is better. My professor loved this book stating that "Sturm gets to the point." He used Chow and Henderson's texts to supplement this book which helped a lot. There were computer programs and examples of their use in the book which I enjoyed and will prove useful to me in the future.

In a world where engineering texts burn one's eyes like a Saharan sandstorm, Sturm's Open Channel Hydraulics provides rivers of soothing relief. Concise, to the point, and utterly compelling, it stands as a towering example of an engineer in full command of his prodigous talent. Read it and be powerfully enlightened.

This is a dam good book. For those aficionados of hydraulics (such as myself), this book is liberating. Masterful work!

Overall, an excellent book if you are really into learning about the history of the African American struggle in the US for equality. I must admit, I got bogged down in some of the information. And one thing that kept me wondering -- why did Miss Height never get married? I don't mean to be inquisitive, but it is a question I kept wondering about.
Overall -- excellently written, and very detailed. Miss Height obviously has an outstanding memory and eye for detail.

If you'd like to gain an appreciation for a female perspective of the civil rights movement, this is a book for you. I was born in 1957 and came of age during a time when the equal rights struggle for all Americans came to the fore---people of color, gays & lesbians, female--were trying to gain a voice in society. Ms. Height speaks plainly of her involvement in projects that brought about fundamental changes in society. She relates her stories about change as it really happens: one person at a time, one family at a time, one small community at a time. Read and learn !

A leader of profound courage & excellence is explained by her own words and features her lifelong attention to human dignity. You can't miss this window into the Civil Rights struggle of the century.

i haven't finished all of the book(mainly part2 & part4), but base on my experience so far, it's a well-written book.
this book gives you wonderful idea about how to write perl web applications with apache. for someone like me, whom have been using perl for 2 years (mostly are on system side), it's good to get throughout idea for doing User Authentication with session,cookie etc. btw, the code examples are easy to grasp too.

i particularly like Part 4 site managerment. it describes how to run mod_perl + apache server. with fine tunneing, server side config, load banlancing.

don't forget, mod_perl website has a lot config/coding detail too. and also if you are especially interested in writing mod_perl application, i would recommend "mod_perl Developer's Cookbook".

In a classic example of perfect timing, this book came to me at a time when I've been approached to implement a Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl solution to replace a broken, proprietary based application at a local Ivy League University. So the obvious question on my mind was, would this book be helpful or just a waste of my valuable time?

As it turns out Web Development with Apache and Perl is a sort of "glue" book that is designed to help meld what the reader already knows using things that they might not have. For some more advanced readers, much of the information in the book is mostly review, but this volume still serves as an excellent reference to the plethora of choices available to us.

Thankfully, the book doesn't even feign to be introductory, which is a very good thing. Most Perl programmers already have a sizable enough library and the last thing we need is yet another book that is half filled with the basics of the language.

That's not to say that if you are a beginner you won't be able to garner a wealth of information because the first part of the book will ease you into web site basics by presenting you with some very useful information on configuring the Apache server and giving a walk through in CGI scripting.

Be forewarned though, Theo's obvious bias towards Open Source clouds many of the pages in the first section. To his credit, he does leave the door open to the possibility that the reader might choose (or be stuck with) a commercial OS, but unfortunately he goes on to insist that the user re-evaluate their choice, and if they went with a commercial OS in their first round of evaluations that they should consider Linux or one of the BSDs.

Don't' get me wrong, Linux or one of the BSDs is the obvious best choice for a web server, but I think that prodding the reader like this is a bit insulting. And with a title like Web Development with Apache and Perl and the sub-title "How to build powerful web sites with Open Source tools", there's a 99.99% probability that he's preaching to the converted.

In the second part of the book, popular tools used for web applications are discussed including MySQL basics, DBI, SSI and HTML::Mason. It's also where you can find an excellent chapter on better ways to script using FastCGI or mod_perl. Not to mention the all-important chapter on security that covers SSL and HTTP authentication.

For the third part of the book, Theo discusses some example sites for virtual communities, intranet applications and a web storefront. Of course, he doesn't forget to mention Slash since one of the best and easiest ways to start a virtual community is to use the code that drives the ever-popular Slashdot community website.

Oh, and speaking of Slashdot, if your site happens to become anywhere near as popular, the fourth and final part of the book will help you with content and performance management.

So, if you can forgive a little soapbox preaching, you'll find Web Development with Apache and Perl is a very useful book for your web development needs. If you're fairly new to using Apache and Perl this is a must have addition to your growing library.

Excellent book; few typos.

Let me explain who I am so you know where I am coming from. I am a UNIX systems administrator/Perl programmer/web developer for an insurance company. I've had more than my fair share of shizophrenic managers and project managers that would qualify as ignoramuses only on their best days. I do not suffer fools gladly, as I just don't have time to hold their hands and tell them how wonderful they are.

For Managers and Project Managers:
If you are a manager or a project manager looking at web development, and you have a decent technological base, this is an excellent book. Not sure when you started feeling like you'd lost control of the technical people under you, or even if you were aware that you had. As far as I have seen, there are two shops -- technically savvy shops with no direction, and the Microsoft-loving shops with no clue and no direction. (IMO, MS products' sole benefit is to allow managers to delude themselves that that kid they hired out of a tech school for $10 an hour actually knows his --- from a hole in the ground. There are no substitutes for experience, no matter what Redmond says.)

Petersen has a very readable style -- pleasant and professional, without sounding preachy. This is important -- while I appreciate a good flame war as well as the next geek, sometimes software has to be evaluated in terms of its economic value. He also did not put me to sleep -- a rare quality in technical books.

Theo does a great job here. There are many books that will give you extremely detailed information on a single aspect of web programming. This book is more of an overview of how it should be done to get a great site that makes money and can be developed and supported on-time and on-budget.

Petersen's book covers useful technologies, gives you an idea how they are used, gives you examples of them in action, and then talks about tuning for performance. The security explanations are built in from the start, so you don't have worry about having to secure non-securable systems.

The technologies are explained well -- trust me on this. Don't feel ashamed if you skip the coding part and just read the bits around it. That's why you have technical people working for you. You just need to know what they are doing, and be able to give them direction that does not leave them wondering if you've truly lost it this time. Part of the great thing about this book is that it makes sense even if you do not understand perl.

This book will give you the ability to think about your web projects like an architect, not a bystander.

For the poor geeks who have to deal with Managers and Project Managers:
Great book. It belongs on your bookshelf; not just so you know what's in it, but also so you can pass it on when you need to get someone educated FAST.

I liked it because it gave me an idea of other ways of doing things -- why should I reinvent the wheel, when someone else has already came up with a solution?

Get it. Read it. Get a copy to your boss. It gives a good idea of what web technologies can do, and gives some solid examples. It explains these technologies in terms that any person in a technical field ought to be able to understand. This book will save you endless hours of discussing *how* things work, and may get you out of a number of pointless meetings where you wind up spending valuable time explaining basic concepts to people
and trying to stop them from picking impossible projects out of thin air.

With a copy of this on their desk, they will know what's possible, and have a better idea of the web development process. If you're lucky, they will read it, be able to ask intelligent questions and actually understand what you are doing and asking for. If they do not read it, you can still refer them to the appropriate sections of this book and escape out of the meeting.
(it's even of a decent enough size that you can still roll it up and smack them upside of the head if they are not reading it.)

I'd like to teach a web programming course someday, and if I do, I will base it mainly on this book. With it, you will be sure to have a class of developers who actually both have a clue as to what's going on, and can actually do what is needed. After the students have read this book, they can branch out to whatever specialty they need.

It's a disappointing book, and I'm a fan of Joyce Wycoff. It's superficially written unlike her othe r book on mind mapping. My hope is that this book will inspire others to learn more about people think by reading additional books. It's main value may an inspirational one.

Only four stars because the second half of the book is a collection of some pretty old and well known thinking tools: mind mapping, fishbone diagrams, etc. a check on the 3m website will tell you almost as much. The first half concentrates on the problems in business and how the thinking tools can assist. well worth the read if you're not familiar with the above mentioned approaches.

This is an exellent book that is even better than Joyce's mindmapping (which is actually also GOOOD!).... it induce creativities, add a way of tranforming your organization/personal life/business to a new height.... this is a good book to guide us and led us at this time of change.

this book is a definite 5 stars!

tanadi santoso.