this is a complete mess, so much time is spent trying to manipulate your feelings that evrything else falls by the wayside, i was so borde by the end, i couldnt care less what was in the sepcial features.
the first part of the film contains about 4 praying scenes alone, ok, mel is supposed to be mr nice guy, we really dont need all the emotional guff with his wife and kids, hopefully once the action starts itll improve we think, unfortunately not.
the battle which is the grist of the film is confused and very badly done, the music, which sounds like something which should have been in braveheart, is so out of place, weve seen platoon, and they got it right.
are there any characters here other than mel, there dont seem to be, what a confused mess, it looks more like the battles are taking place in canada than south east asia.
cutting from the middle of the battle scene for another manipulative wifes delivering death notices was so badly done, and pointless.
yet another ego vehicle for mel gibson, or should that be john wayne.

an amazing book, Keith Jessops passion of diving and particuliarly wreck salvage, leave indelible memories.
the books balance is great, enough early details to establish his character, the book really picks up pace with the various wreck salvages leading up to the edinburgh, the background and research is well documented, as are the details of setting up expeditions for locating and then salvaging the wrecks.

this is definately one of the best non fiction books i have ever come across, the authors approach keeps the material leaping of the page at you, and he really gets into the spirit of the times, thankfully, and doesnt take on this PC, holier than then attitude.
there are so many great stories here, and a lot of amazing facts, the dangers and casual diregard for life of the period are all too vividly illustrated, its hard not to be impressed with the achievements of the various merchants and explorers on their rotting timber boats, and this book really brings the period to life.

The high quality footage of the blue planet is a joy to behold, theres some jaw dropping sequences, and the hard work and dedication which has gone into making this feature drips through from every frame.
there are faults, the sound effects are sometimes too obvious, and the fact that they stand out, obviously means they got them wrong, and the sound is nice, but is too overawing on occasion, the footage should have been allowed to take priority throughout, to cheapen it with silly sound effects is a real shame.
also there is way too much repitition of sequences, which again is a shame, with the vast ammount of footage they must have captured why do we hark back to the feeding frenzy baitball in almost every episode.
luckily the quality of the filming is such that all can be forgiven.
the extra features are a bit patchy, a couple of the interviews are mildly watchable and the making off feature is excellent, but would have liked to have seen much more of this and possibly some extra footage, the making off was excellent though, and definately one of the highlights of the whole series. the other extra features are pure filler though.
amazing and informative, the BBC has carried off a massively ambitious project very successfully.

An interesting approach, but to be honest somewhat more effective for the beginner than those with some level of existing Spanish.
The suprise is that the biggest inhabition to starting any langauge is actually building up the confidence to speak it, the trick here is that the listener feels more confident in speaking spanish immediately, this is a big achievement, it took me years to be comfortable with my level of knowledge to start experimenting.
As an intermediate level spanish speaker, i found this a useful practice exercise, useful for dipping into now and again, and i did find that he imparts the same lessons which i would pass on to make learning spanish easier, so you cant say better than that.
I agree with the comments about the comedy accents and overacting studnts, but if viewed as amusing it actually makes the course more enjoyable.

The picture quality seemed to be a little substandard on my DVD of Thesis, or possibly this is a faithful translation of the original material.
The movie itself is nowhere near as good as abre los ojos, and treads on mostly familiar ground, although it is possible to see the way the craft has progressed from here.
There are some pretty big holes in the story which are best just left alone, the twists and second guessing are without doubt the highlight, and there is doubt in your mind right until the end.

I find these shop manual books amongst the most useful in my bookshelf. For an experinced user most often all that you need is to quickly look up the features and settings of a particuliar tool or dialog box.
This is a complete reference manual to the whole package, forgotten how to do something it will be in here somewhere. There is also a useful how-to section at the back covering common techniques.
These books make a designers life soo much easier.

In terms of pure dreamweaver functionality, this version doesnt have any ground breaking advances, but by the inclusion of ultra-devs data driven dynamic site development tools, dreamweaver and ultra-dev have finally merged into one product dreamweaver mx.

Having been a user of both Dreamweaver and Ultra-dev since their arrival on the pro web design scene, this represents a big change in one respect in that data driven web sites are now being delivered into the hands of every web site producer with the same product they use to design simple pages.

The most exiting thing for me is the new PHP feature, and in this i find Macromedia continuing in their trend of offering what their users are most hungry for, now i have no excuse for not learning PHP.

In terms of changes to the actual core design product, i have been happily switching between dreamweaver 4 and mx, and theres nothing in mx that i cant live without, obviously im not here refering to the dynamic data side of things here.

thankfully you can work with mx and make it look like the old dreamweaver interface, im currently working with the new integrated interface, and it all looks a bit frontpage to me, ill give it a chance though, admittedly it is slighly more efficient, but its just starting to look a lot less like a design tool, and a lot more like a developers tool.

Of the new features the ability to creare code snippets is pretty handy, but nothing too revolutionary, and the tag-inspector does speed up speed of changes to the code minded, but again nothing very new.

if your using dreamweaver for mainly design orientated web production, its possible the new features may not be enough to sway the upgrade, one big plus is the support for all the new and emergent technologies and standards, xml, xhtml, and as i mentioned earlier PHP on the dynamic side.

Dreamweaver is still the leading professional web design tool, it will reward all the learning by giving an easy to use cutting edge web development tool. The huge community of developers and users who provide countless extensions to dreamweaver allow easy adaption to whatever tasks it may be put.

In terms of pure dreamweaver functionality, this version doesnt have any ground breaking advances, but by the inclusion of ultra-devs data driven dynamic site development tools, dreamweaver and ultra-dev have finally merged into one product dreamweaver mx.

Having been a user of both Dreamweaver and Ultra-dev since their arrival on the pro web design scene, this represents a big change in one respect in that data driven web sites are now being delivered into the hands of every web site producer with the same product they use to design simple pages.

The most exiting thing for me is the new PHP feature, and in this i find Macromedia continuing in their trend of offering what their users are most hungry for, now i have no excuse for not learning PHP.

In terms of changes to the actual core design product, i have been happily switching between dreamweaver 4 and mx, and theres nothing in mx that i cant live without, obviously im not here refering to the dynamic data side of things here.

thankfully you can work with mx and make it look like the old dreamweaver interface, im currently working with the new integrated interface, and it all looks a bit frontpage to me, ill give it a chance though, admittedly it is slighly more efficient, but its just starting to look a lot less like a design tool, and a lot more like a developers tool.

Of the new features the ability to creare code snippets is pretty handy, but nothing too revolutionary, and the tag-inspector does speed up speed of changes to the code minded, but again nothing very new.

if your using dreamweaver for mainly design orientated web production, its possible the new features may not be enough to sway the upgrade, one big plus is the support for all the new and emergent technologies and standards, xml, xhtml, and as i mentioned earlier PHP on the dynamic side.

Dreamweaver is still the leading professional web design tool, it will reward all the learning by giving an easy to use cutting edge web development tool. The huge community of developers and users who provide countless extensions to dreamweaver allow easy adaption to whatever tasks it may be put.

This is one seriously thick book, and takes ome time to work your way through, so offers pretty good value for money.

The problems with trying to write an extensive overview book along the lines of this or dreamweaver bible, is that as each version expands the capabilities of the product, the book becomes thicker while at the same time having less space available to deal with each area, i can see that this seems to have created a problem with this release as there are huge ammounts of functionality that have been added, especially in the area of dynamic data driven web-site design.

This book works well as an overview of the product, and for a beginner to dreamweaver would prove a very good overview and reference. The material to be gleaned would be similiar to that gained from a two or three day introductory training course.

The introductory material is well dealt with and clearly explained, the authors are definately at their most comfortable with this traditional style web design using dreamweaver, and this is the books strongest area.

Personally i wouldnt see too much material here which would be of interest to an intermediate or advanced dreamweaver user, the new features are dealt with fairly quickly at the front of the book, and beyond that there is a quick overview of the new data driven dreamweaver using the various technoligies, but useful only as an introduction to these technologies.

For the designer the book much like all big overview books of this type offers nothing new, the design examples are very basic, and there is nothing new or challenging, the book is more software centric than design centric, most useful as a reference for the various dialogue boxes and settings, but certainly not inspirational in design terms.

The book design itself is somewhat flawed, nice cover, but the interior layout is poorly designed, in a book of this size somewhat understandable as there is such a high volume of content.

The various interviews with designers, are superflous, and run in with the body copy to the degree of annoyance, again more a layout flaw, but these interviews are of limited use.

I would also question the long delay before introducing the site management tools, in fact first introduced in depth at page 700, these in my opinion should have been integrated earlier.

The newest and most exciting side of dreamweaver the data driven side associated with ultradev previously is seriously under represented here, and a very basic overview of the various technologies and a very simple example site is all we get. This section also lacks the flow and confidence of earlier sections.

in summary, the book offeres a good tour through the software, and it is a very good learning guide for the beginner to dreamweaver, for the advanced user there is some useful reference material but lacks serious depth in the new areas.