As other reviewers have stated, this book is not really an overview of contemporary Japanese animation. Rather, it is a work of film criticism. Unfortunately, two problems mar what would otherwise be a halfway decent book. First, the author writes in dense, verbose academic style that often uses pages of text to say basically nothing (the entire first chapter is especially bad with respect to this information/verbiage ratio). The second problem is even more annoying, in that Napier seems to see all sociocultural issues through the extremely tinted lenses of "political correctness" melded with a simplistic and shallow form of feminism.

If you're looking for a work on anime that will really give you an appreciation of the form along with a more in depth (and unslanted) look at the Japanese culture which created it, then I'd much sooner suggest Samurai from Outer Space : Understanding Japanese Animation by Antonia Levi.

This, to my knowledge, is the only *complete* guide to FreeBSD currently available (no pun intended ;) and does a good job at it. The book is written at a fairly technical level and isn't a "FreeBSD for Dummies," so complete newbies would be well advised to obtain an additional "Unix for beginners" type book as well.

The thorough, techincal style of writing works both for and against you in various sections of the text. The chapters on installation and configuring XFree86 are especially well done, while I found a few sections, most notably on setting up PPP dial-in & updating FreeBSD from source, to be a bit cryptic. Luckily, the FreeBSD project has an abundance of on-line documentation that may explain a topic in a different way that's helpful to you.

Other books that may be helpful to FreeBSD users are _The FreeBSD Handbook_ (ISBN: 1571762418), a hard-copy of the Handbook from FreeBSD's website, and Kirk McKusick's _The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System_ (ISBN: 0201549794). I also understand that McKusick is updating the second book to be _The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System_, but am unsure when this will be published...

There may not be any other books (yet) on BeOS for users, but once you buy this you really won't care. This book is truly superb! Approachable for the novice, yet full of useful info and features for the more technically inclined - much like BeOS itself. Hacker's writing is clear, witty and never bores the reader. If you have *any* interest in BeOS you'll want this book!