This second edition has all the qualities the first edition had 10 years ago: Their writing is clear, they provide a sober assessment of the costs & benefits of various services (as opposed to other reviewers, I don't think the authors had much of an anti-Microsoft bias, just a realistic perspective on where Windows products are regarding security). The book is still fairly compact and it comes with an excellent biography and pointers to security software.

This looks like the definitive book on designing virtual worlds, and is likely to stay so for many years. It clearly shows that the author had 25 years of experience--not just as a designer of such worlds, but also as a user--to draw on, while at the same time being sufficiently detached from the industry to be able to offer candid opinions on any subject.

It's hard to think of anything on the subject that Bartle does not at least touch on (providing extensive, scholarly quality references to a wealth of further on- and offline materials), from the deepest metaphysical philosophy to the daily squabbles between users and administrators on virtual worlds large and small. Bartle does not in general provide cut-and-dried solutions to the world design issues, but he gives an extensive discussion of approaches attempted and how they succeeded and failed.

My only reservation with this otherwise excellent book was that I found some of the discussion a bit overly extensive. I would have preferred a book maybe 200 pages shorter, especially towards the final chapters of the book.

If you're planning on designing a virtual world, buying this book is more than just a good idea: Failing to do so would border on criminal negligence.

As opposed to a number of other introductory books for Java, this one doesn't cater to "Dummies", but to competent programmers who want to pick up another programming language. It gives a solid introduction to the language and manages to introduce the necessary object oriented concepts along the way without boring readers who have prior OOP experience. It is also entertaining without being overly cute. I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone with prior programming experience.

There's little in the problems identified by this book or in the solutions suggested that I would disagree with. However, I didn't really learn anything new and surprising from it either.

This book may have its place as a beginner's supplement to Meyer's _Effective C++_ books and Sutter's _Exceptional C++_ books. I wouldn't recommend it for advanced C++ programmers, though.

This book is an outstanding companion volume to the Unicode standard. In fact, if you had to pick one, you'd quite possibly be better off owning this book INSTEAD of the standard. The author display an impressive knowledge of the world's writing systems and of the inner workings of the Unicode standardization process.

Part I of this book starts with the history of character encoding standards, from Morse code to today. It then presents a thorough review of the Unicode architecture and associated standards. The information presented was mostly excellent, although I found the section describing SCSU a little bit too sketchy (and the actual code in part III not entirely satisfactory to fill in the gaps).

Part II gives an overview of the various writing systems and character ranges represented in Unicode. Even for a nontechnical audience, this part would be fascinating with all the typographical and historical trivia it presents.

Part III discusses various algorithms applicable to text processing in a Unicode context. I must admit that I found this part a bit of a letdown. Many of the algoritms are only sketched out because discussing them in detail would be beyond the scope of the book. Quite possibly, the pages dedicated to these algorithms would have been better spent presenting examples of code using the various existing APIs for handling Unicode (Java, ICU, Perl, Windows, MacOS X).

This does not take away from the fact that this is a great book that any programmer interested in Unicode should own.

Gravy Train is living proof that even indie labels sometimes sign completely untalented novelty acts. Their music somewhat resembles the songs that Cartman & Co. sing on "South Park", except that Gravy Train's music is more amateurish and their lyrics are not funny.

If you like Lolita Storm, Gravy Train should be to your tastes. Otherwise, you'll most likely find this CD a complete waste of money. Personally, I wouldn't pick it up if I found a copy on the sidewalk.

As several other reviewers here have noted, the plot of this novel is based on numerous implausibilities. The biggest, to me, were

- that somebody could predict years in advance that a court case would reach the Supreme Court.

- that the bad guys would try to kill people connected to the brief when precisely that would only reinforce the credibility of an otherwise rather far-fetched theory.

- that the protagonist is so reluctant about sharing her brief with the world, when disseminating it would be the easiest way of ensuring that killing her had no further value for the bad guys (and indeed, they run as soon as the story is finally published).

To compound these issues, the novel ends with essentially the same escapist ending as _The Firm_, the Grisham novel I'd read prior to this one.

However, despite all these weaknesses, this was an entertaining book that made for a fun 2 days of reading. As a further redeeming merit, Grisham had a surprising flash of brilliance when he equipped this novel (written in the early 1990s) with a dimwitted, hands-off, U.S. president, run by his handlers, whose interests were mainly playing golf, packing the Supreme Court with rabid right wingers, and doing favors to his cronies.

A book with a fascinating premise, even though it is only partially explored (the ecologic impact of manufacturing and disposal of hundreds of millions of bodies each day is only mentioned in a passing sentence) and fun action.

The main problem in my opinion is that the resolution of the central riddles in the book does not live up to the quality of the rest of the book. It reminds me a bit of how early novels by Neal Stephenson used to end, or, as another reviewer here mentions, of the ending of Joe Haldeman's _Forever Free_.

Despite this weakness, this is a very entertaining book that I would recommend to any Science Fiction enthusiast.

This book covers a broad range of game programming areas, with specific sample code provided both in print and on a CD.

What the book cover and abstracts fail to emphasize is that despite the "OpenGL" in the title, this is a rather Microsoft Windows specific book in many aspects. A considerable portion of it is spent talking about Windows specific APIs like DirectSound, and most of the examples use Windows event handling. It's probably hard to avoid the former issue, as there are no platform independent APIs for high quality sound, but many of the examples would not have suffered from being written using GLUT event handling.

Overall, the book is written in a sensible style that may be more accessible to some readers than the "official" OpenGL manuals. However, the areas that I had independent knowledge on (Math and Physics), I noticed numerous mistakes and sloppy reasoning, which may or may not extend to the areas that I can't verify independently.

Not overly valuable to me as a non-Windows programmer who has read the "official" tutorial volume, probably quite a bit more valuable to a Windows based programmer with little prior OpenGL experience.

This is a book that the C++ community has been in need of for several years, and it seems that an ideal team of authors has come together for this: Nicolai Josuttis again contributes the thoroughness and lucid writing that has made his earlier book _The C++ Standard Library_ such a pleasure to read, and David Vandevoorde contributes historical background about the evolution of C++ standard and its implementations that help to understand some of the peculiarities of how C++ works today and some of the directions it's likely to evolve in.

The book is divided into 4 parts. Part I gives a basic overview of the template mechanisms in C++ and part II goes into more detail on this. Part III applies templates to standard problems, while part IV covers more exotic uses of templates similar to what is discussed in Alexandrescu's _Modern C++ Design_. Even for a reasonably experienced template user like me, there were many details I learned even from the most fundamental part I.

This is a near perfect book (apart from a few apparent bugs in the code examples that hopefully will get corrected) that will greatly benefit any programmer who works with template based code.