Jeff Bridges Books

The hands were not killers, just typical hands that any abover average player can handle. The pros can handle the pressure, and make fewer mistakes. But many of the hands they encounter are not the killers found in some of the hard Test Your declarer Play type books.

Good hands, and fun to read. Good job, 2 thumbs up.

Jeff Meckstroth and Eric Rodwell are considered by many to be the best bridge partnership in the world. They use a highly specialized version of Precision for their bidding. So, one might expect a book by one of them to be high level and complex. On the contrary, Meckstroth has produced a book that contains example after example of common decisions that club and tournament players face all the time. He continually points out why he makes the decisions he does, as well as showing how he finds those extra chances that help make him one of the best dummy players in the world. The 4S hand from match 7 was a revelation to me in how simple the correct line is, but was something I would never have come up with.

This is essencially a warning to anyone who is a fan of Dragonlance and of the Solamnic Knighthood- If you got emotional when Sturm Brightblade fell at the High Clerist Tower, do not read this book.

While, as I stated, it is well written by a talented author and is fairly engaging and a good read overall, there are plot points and events in this book that are downright absurd when in the context of the Solamnic Knighthood.

I don't want to give anything away with spoilers, so I'll simply say that events nearly lead the Knighthood to doing two things that is simply implausible and downright blasphemus.

While I didn't think this was quite a four star book, I felt it was closer to four than three stars. Crook gives us a very interesting look at the Solamnic Knights and the poor condition they find themselves in after the departure of the gods and the subsequent arrival of the great dragons. It seems both the Solamnic Knighthood, as well as the Knights of Takhisis, have fallen on hard times with the arrivial of these dragon overlords. They are grasping at straws and, in desperation, decide to do something that would otherwise be unthinkable for both sides (don't want to spoil it). The story is told from the point of view of the Solamnics and we get to see their struggle between doing what they commander feels is the right thing and what they feel in their hearts they should be doing. Mixed in among this is the courageous adventure of an unusual gully dwarf and his companions.

The characters populating this story were fairly well developed, including a dark elf that fascinated me. I was disappointed to find that he plays no role in Weis & Hickman's subsequent WAR OF SOULS trilogy. The two or three Solamnics that we get to meet are all different and are loyal to the Knighthood and their commander in their own way. The gully dwarf character has traits that make him more than just a regular gully dwarf: honor and loyalty drive him to attempt a task that no other gully dwarf would ever undertake.

The plot is interesting and action packed, with the aforementioned plan between the Solamnics and the Knights of Takhisis being the main plot device to propel the story. I would be very happy if Crook at some point wrote a sequel series to this book using the same characters so that we can see how they have progressed. Not a great book, mind you, but definitely worth a read if your a Dragonlance fan.

I love to read Dragonlance Books, and I either buy everyone that comes out or borrow them from friends. This one was a borrow. The writing wasn't too bad--especially since I believe this was the author's first book. That means his next ones should be better. The plot started slow, but it picked up by the end of the first quarter of the book. I would have liked to see a little more development with some of the secondary characters. Anyway, it's worth a look!

Don't get me wrong, this book was worth reading but there were a few things that bugged me in it. First of all the Gully Dwarves were in a full half of this book and after awhile the jokes about the number two got old and annoying. And then there were the fight scenes; they really weren't there. When I picked up this book I expected to have some really big battles play out in front of me, but that's not how it worked out. Crook used past tense on the battles so you really didn't get to read about any huge action scenes, just a small fight here or there.

There are pluses to this book however. The Dark Elf Knight of Takhisis Valian Escu was an interesting character and I personally would like to see a Dragonlance book that focuses only on him and his life after the Rose and the Skull. And also it was nice to see some of Pyrothraxus the Great Red Dragon of Mt. Nevermind.

I'm new to the entire fantasy Dragonlance series but after accidentally stumbling across Jeff Crook's, The Rose and the Skull, it appears I have some reading to do. Of course, I didn't get all the past references and probably missed half of the inside jokes but hey, you gotta start somewhere.

Crook captured me with his sly humor and tongue-in-cheek descriptions but then was quite the craftsman with the plot and character developments. Lady Jessica was a worthy heroine and I would like to see a book with her and Liam. Not much romance but still, a brooding tension that bordered on romance. Sometimes, less is better anyway. I loved the Gully Dwarves, especially Uhoh, but, what do I know? It seems other reviewers hated that plot line but it appeals to the underdog in me, always a chance.

At any rate, I'm looking forward to reading more in the Dragonlance series, both past and future. Especially ones by Mr.Crook.

As a non-programmer, I found this book to be clear, precise and easy to read. I highly recommend it to people interested in the subject matter, but lacking a technical background.

I had a chance to attend one of John Carnell's sessions here in Chicago. I was very impressed with his presentation and the content. After that I bought the book and I am very impressed with the simplicity with which the content is presented.

This book summarizes Struts and some other technologies related. It can bring you to lot of save times in your beginnigs because It exposes a professional point of view front the use of these technologies and patterns. Not Struts beginners don't purcharse it.

This book is a reprint of a Wrox book that APress bought when Wrox went out of business. Although the book has a publication date of September 2003, it was actually published by Wrox earlier in the year. Also, APress intends on releasing a second edition of this book (ISBN:159059228X) in December 2003. With that in mind, let's discuss the contents of this book.

The book is broken up into five sections. The first and longest section discusses Struts. This section is very good as it concentrates on developing a Struts application and demonstrates good design while discussing the issues that make bad designs bad. This section ends with a look at using ObjectRelationalBridge (OJB) as a data access tier. Unfortunately the book uses an beta version of OJB (it is still not in release) that makes this section obsolete. The remaining chapters cover other open source tools available to developers including Velocity (template engine), Lucene (search engine), and Ant (build tool). Although it is interesting to see how each tool integrates into the Struts application developed earlier, the chapters are not long enough to give detailed information on any of these tools.

The conclusion is that if you are looking for a book on properly building a Struts application, you probably want to wait for the second edition. Since the OJB chapter is obsolete and the chapters on the other tools are fairly brief, this book doesn't provide anything that shouts, "Buy Me" from the shelves.

Since software moves quickly, some aspects of the book are already out of date even though it's only a matter of months old. The template tags are already deprecated in favor of the new tile tags and the Object Relational Bridge stuff has changed quite a bit (which is to be expected if you consider it wasn't even version 1 for OJB). I'm glad there's books on these topics in any case.

The first chapter is a nice read and while it's covered everywhere else, they cover MVC well and how it relates to the struts framework.

My biggest pet peeve is with one of what is otherwise their most useful chapter on prepopulating forms and setting forms up. In chapter 2 they talk about the concepts of pre and post setup actions (post as in after). Then in chapter 3 they use a PostStory example (post as in posting an ad, but then again it could be like the post form submit method). They have a PostStorySetupAction and with all the meanings of posts I had trouble not seeing it as an after[post]-before[setup] action. My brain core dumped and in the end I went back with a pen and marked out "post" everywhere in the chapter. If only they could have used AddStory or CreateStory, or I could forget the other overloaded meanings of post I wouldn't have had to reread that chapter.

The one time the book came to the rescue was when trying to mix the validator framework validation with custom validation. extending the ValidatorForm instead of ActionForm was exactly what we needed.

Not an exciting writing style, but the book gives valuable recommendations for both opening leads and for agreements later in the defense. Recommendations are well thought out and justified. An important principle is that no method will solve all defensive problems.