Dr. Pueschel is well known as an advocate for people with Down syndrome, a leading expert in the field, and a father of a child with Down syndrome. A noted speaker at Down syndrome conferences across the country, Dr. Pueschel has revised his popular book with the latest information. The book covers a range of topics from prenatal diagnosis to stimulating your child's gross motor, fine motor and speech skills to pre-school to adolesence and on to adulthood. It also covers vital information about the most current legislation including IDEA 1997. This is one of the books that should be on every new parent's bookshelf.

This book takes an interesting approach to using J2EE technology. Rather than concentrating on a single aspect (servlets, JSPs, etc) or spending hundreds of pages to explain all technologies in detail, the author has chosen to lightly cover all the important aspects. In a sense, this book is an "executive summary" of J2EE. The readers who would probably get the most from this book are architects who need to understand J2EE but don't need to write much code and developers who are unfamiliar with J2EE and need an introduction to the technologies. This is especially helpful to developers who have completed the Java Programmer Certification but are unfamiliar with server-side development. There are two things that make this book unique and especially valuable to those new to server side development. First, the book covers the complete end-to-end solution. The author spends several chapters explaining the architecture of web applications. All the basics of server side development are discussed (JSP, servlets, EJBs, JMS, JDBC) but the author also covers other important issues such as the http protocol, web services, database design, and SQL. Second, the author explains which issues are likely to have an impact on the scalability and performance of your web applications. The entire book is under 400 pages and is very readable. Code samples are interspersed throughout the book to help explain the topics. If you are new to J2EE and are looking for a well written introduction then this book is very good choice.

Children with Down Syndrome are at increased risk for many medical problems. As a parent, it is important to understand these risks, be able to recognize potential problems, and also become familiar with many of the medical specialists you will encounter even if your child is healthy. This book discusses all of the common medical problems you may be faced with in a way that can be understood by a parent. Armed with the information in this book, a parent will be able to make vital decisions regarding their child's health and cope more comfortably if medical care is required. Topics discussed include: heart disease, endocrine problems, skin conditions, gastrointestinal problems, and many others.

Children with Down Syndrome are often delayed in developing speech but can compensate for this delay by using sign language and other skills in a technique called Total Communication. This guide provides a wealth of information about speech and language development in children with Down syndrome. Parents learn what to expect as communication skills progress from infancy through early adolescence, how Down syndrome can affect those skills, and what they can do to maximize their child's potential in this crucial area of development. This book was recommended by our son's speech therapist.

Children with Down syndrome often have low muscle tone (hypotonia) and increased flexibility which can affect overall gross motor development. There are many issues that parents need to be aware of if their child has hypotonia. Even the way you hold your baby can affect his gross motor development. This book shows how to encourage and maximize a child's gross motor development - head control, rolling, sitting, cruising, walking, kicking, jumping - from infancy to age six. Pat Winders has written the "bible" of physical therapy for children with Down syndrome. It contains useful information for parents, therapists, and teachers.

"J2EE FrontEnd Technologies" refers to itself as a "programmer's guide" and that is probably the best description of it. While it also claims to be "chock full of code examples" and contains "what you need to know," it falls short in both these areas. What you will find is a fairly detailed and yet limited explanation of the three major J2EE technologies, servlets, JSPs, and EJBs. Although you will find extensive information for these three areas, there are many details left out and there is little attempt made to tie the three pieces together. For example, you will not find any examples of linking servlets and JSPs other than by using the Struts framework. You will also find no more than a brief mention of message driven EJBs. There are numerous UML diagrams throughout the book but in many cases they add little beyond what you can get from looking at the APIs. The examples in the book tend to be overly simplistic, in some cases wasting many pages to show an example that could have been summarized in a few lines of code. The best section of the book is the section on EJBs. The author's detailed description of EJB deployment descriptors is better than what you will find in most EJB books. This section also features the most complete examples found in the book. Overall this book does contain value, although it fails as an introduction or tutorial on the technologies that it covers.

To produce this book, Wrox took twenty expert Oracle developers and had each of them write about their area of expertise. The result is that whether you are a manager, a developer, or a DBA, if you are working with Oracle 8i this book should be on your desk. This book covers virtually every topic that you need to understand about the Oracle 8i development platform. It does not cover each topic completely but it provides a thorough and in most cases sufficient introduction on each topic. For a particular topic of interest you may need an additional book but to get all the information found in this book you would need ten volumes at least. The book opens with an introduction to Oracle 8i and some of its components including Net8 (Oracle's network solution) and Designer 6i (Oracle's development environment). The next section covers PL/SQL and PSP (this is similar to JSP). This is followed by an extensive section covering Java. This section covers JDBC, SQLJ, EJB, and interMedia (Oracle's powerful search tool). The last section covers XML and includes information on DOM and SAX parsers, SOAP, XSL, XSQL, and more. Extensive case studies are scattered throughout the book. Examples show how to use Oracle tools such as BC4J to develop enterprise applications. The book even includes primers on Java and XML. As a tour of all the features of Oracle 8i, this book is without competition.

This book, as part of the Wrox "Early Adopter" series, explains some of the new features of J2SE 1.4. This new version of Java has many improvements over prior versions and also contains quite a bit of added functionality.

The book is very well done and gives excellent examples of some of this new functionality. However some new features have been left out including print service and some AWT and Swing enhancements. The information included, however, covers some of the more complex features of this release.

The book starts with excellent coverage of the new I/O features and the Java Network Launch Protocol (JNLP). The chapter on XML, however, seems unnecessary. Although this version of Java is the first to include XML support, the JAXP, SAX, and DOM information is not new and is readily available from many published sources. The author's coverage of enhancements to the java.util package (especially regular expressions) is very good. The chapter on language enhancements is a bit confusing because the author starts the chapter with items that are not included in this release. This information would have been better placed in a separate appendix. The book ends with a section on possible enhancements for the next release of Java. The section on JAXB will be good news for many developers since it is available as an early access release. The book does not contain an index.

Anyone interested in the new features of Java will find this book very useful.

Trying to develop a Java application without first developing a model can lead to a poorly designed application that fails to fulfill the needs of users, lacks reusability, and is difficult to maintain. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) was developed as an open standard notation to assist developers in modeling OO applications. As enterprise developers we are finding that we are expected to be able to design applications using UML, explain UML diagrams to our users, or be able to develop applications from UML diagrams. UML can be difficult and confusing to use and many of the books available fail to clearly explain the proper use of this development tool. "Enterprise Java with UML", by CT Arrington is an excellent introduction into the complexities of UML. Arrington takes us through the entire lifecycle of a sample EJB application (a timecard system) from requirements gathering to implementation. In alternating chapters he explains the use of UML (use cases, sequence diagrams, class diagrams, etc.) for that step in the development cycle and then uses what he just explained to develop the timecard system. Along the way we make technology decisions, develop our design, and ultimately convert our design into actual code. By the time we are done UML has become a new tool in our toolbox. Arrington has done a very good job explaining UML although some familiarity with UML notation (or at least a handy manual) would be helpful. This is a must have book for any Java developer wishing to learn UML.

For visual programming, Swing is a vast improvement over the AWT. Using Swing you can create virtually any user interface. At the same time, Swing is much more complex and contains far more components than the AWT. This book provides an in-depth introduction into the complexities of Swing. The authors start with a discussion of some of the features of Swing and the Model-View-Controller architecture which helps to make Swing so much more powerful than the AWT. The authors then discuss some of the simpler Swing objects (JLabel, JButton) leading us into a deeper understanding of the Swing architecture and preparing us for the more complex objects that follow. Each Swing class (JLabel, JInternalFrame, JDialog, JTree, and more) is explained in detail with numerous examples for each class. As the topics become more complex, the authors spend more time on the topic and provide more examples. The authors spend 6 chapters explaining the Swing text framework and make this complex topic almost simple to understand. The authors are not content to merely explain how to use the Swing classes but they spend time showing us how to create our own objects derived from the Swing classes. Java Swing is a huge book (more than 1,200 pages), especially by O'Reilly standards, but there are no pages wasted on a "quick reference". The authors have provided us with a well written, complete, easy to understand, and ultimately indispensable guide to Java Swing.