Programs Books

This volume has scripts to the first eight episodes of "The Prisoner", together with extras like a script to an unmade episode called "The Outsider". Also contains a number of b/w Prisoner-related photographs.

The book begins with a heartfelt foreward by the late Lewis Griefer (writer of "The General" under the psudonym of Joshua Adam), an introduction by the author, and then a reproduction of the original ITC "Prisoner" writers guide created for the series' writers by Story Editor George Markstein which is a most interesting read! Then follow the original shooting scripts for the first 8 episodes of the series.

Each is reproduced in full, along with cast lists, transmission dates, writers details, original TV Times "trailers", and music cues. The highlight of the reproductions, other than being able to witness the superb scriptwriting, are the endless footnotes supplied by the author. Every single subtle change from the original script to the finished programme are highlighted in these extensive notes, as are interesting snippets of information concerning the filming locations, shooting schedule, performers, crew, and much more. The amount of information Rob has managed to include is not far from astounding, and the mind boggles as to how many times he must have watched the episodes to include every otherwise unnoticeable word change. The above-mentioned footnotes are fascinating, and make this book the ultimate tome of "Prisoner" information.

Also included is "The Outsider", an unused script written by Morris Farhi (rejected by McGoohan), and two storyline ideas submitted by series Music Editor Eric Mival, as well as a biography of George Markstein. It could be argued that the scripts and footnotes would be enough to justify a positive review, but these rare "bonus items" are the icing on the cake and also make for fascinating reading.

Those familiar with the scenes of "The Prisoner" could be forgiven for thinking that reading such a book might be a dull experience, as they already have the episodes on DVD, but they couldn't be more wrong. Whilst much of the scripts remained unaltered for the finished product, there is much that is different. Small/subtle changes in some cases, large changes in others, each and every one is included. Two such interesting things include the inclusion of the "original" Rover device, complete with flashing blue light, and mentions of Number Two's residence as the "Georgian Cottage", rather than the more familiar "Green Dome".

To list all the interesting script changes here would be an impossible task, so I will close by advising that you go out and buy this book and see them all for yourself. At £19.99 (hardback) it is by no means cheap, but is well worth the price for the scripts alone, let alone all the "bonus items" and countless footnotes.

I'm old enough (sad to say) to remember when The Prisoner first aired on American television, as a Saturday night summer replacement for the Jackie Gleason show on CBS. No matter what comes out of all the debates about what the show "really" meant and what McGoohan's "real" intents were, it's definitely stood the test of time. Perhaps because it was as eccentric as it was in its own time. This book is to the series what Martin Gardner's "Annotated Alice" is to "Alice in Wonderland". Needless to say, if you are enough of a fan to want this book, you will also want Volume 2 (thanks, honey... :-), which covers those infamous last episodes (and one unproduced one).

To say that Robert Fairclough's book is a revelation is perhaps an understatement. Sure, its just the scripts. But, the evolution between concept to realization is what this book is really about. Whether or not you agree with McGoohan's decision to take an essentially simple idea (the spy-prison) and turn it into his own subconsious metaphor, if you are a fan of this brilliant show this book is the only one I know that will give you any kind of window into this process.

Can't wait for the second volume.

This really sheds new light onto the series, with deleted lines, scenes, and information not found elsewhere. If you really want insight into things, read the scripts, assuming that you can handle script format...

I have read several books on this topic, but this book was very structured wich made it easy to follow. It gave a very clear explaination on both base- and advanced OOP programming concepts. Many things I'v not read anywhere else and many times I yelled 'AHA!' and 'WOW!'. Yes, it was great fun to work trough all the 'Fun with...' examples.
I really can recommend this book, however NOT if you are a beginner!
I also learned that I'm a Generic Type, because I drink a lot Of T. :)

This book covers what programmers need to know. The pillars of OOP are presented and clear examples are shown.

I refer to this book often because it gets to the "meat" of things rather quickly and is not for beginners.

My only criticism is that this book's examples are 90% console applications. Nobody uses this in the real world. But I understand the focus is on the code, but I still like the Deitel approach better. Use Windows applications NOT console, take the time to get the screen shots. (Just my opinion).

Don't get me wrong, I can easily translate over what he is trying to convey, but still I see great authors such as Francesco Balena showing most examples with the console window. I don't like this trend. But hey that's me.

Very good book though..

This is best VB.NET I ever had. This book explains OO concept very clearly with easy to understand examples. I am still in middle of the book. So eager to finish till end. Waiting to read more books from this writer. Thanks for Excellant Work.

This book covers just about everything: The .NET platform; VB language fundamentals; OOP; Assemblies and classes. In each chapter the author gives a simplified example and then progresses thru to a complete module. He explains each step in detail and give many of the most-likely errors.

This is not novices. The author expects some level of programming experience with VB, C, C++ being the best. It is also best for a Visual Studio 2005 environment, though it is not required. If this is you and you are looking to move to VB.NET, this book is absolutely for you.

If you are looking for a Visual Basic book that covers a lot more than books like Wei-Meng Lee's Visual Basic 2005 Jumpstart than this book should be at the top of your list. As well as the basics this book is very good at explaining advanced concepts like Interfaces, IEnumerable Types, Generics, Asynchronous Delegates, and Multithreaded Applications. The author has an excellent writing style. He stays on track, does an excellent job at expaining complex concepts, and provides a lot of hints about how the topic he is writing about now is related to the big picture. Apress should also be commended for the graphical layout of the book. It is very easy to find information on a particular topic in this book as all of the book is divided into clearly labeled short sections.

Has some great tips and examples for doing some things fast. The code samples are good, concise, and point you in the right direction even if they don't show you a direct solution.

Great book, alot of useful tips/tricks for any level. Also clear and easy to follow.

I have learned lots of little tricks from this book and recommended to other SAS programmers. I have about 3 years of programming experience and this covered some techniques for tasks that we not obvious to me. I enjoyed his other book as well.

An excellent, information-packed and well-organized book that's definitely worth the purchase price and would be a good investment for experienced and novice SAS programmers alike.

I agree with the previous reviewer, especially on the point that the book could benefit SAS beginners, not just the more seasoned programmers: it is clearly organized, and makes it easy to look up the topic of interest.

Love Perl but wish it had the ability to work with the .NET framework? Well, this is the book for you! Let me tell you, if you program with Perl, then this book will earn its purchase price again and again. I've always loved the ease of programming in Perl, especially how well it works with sockets and network programming, but these days, you've got to be able to program Graphical User Interfaces. I've never been able to master programming GUI's using Tcl/Tk, but the C# like format of programming Visual Perl made creating Windows Forms a snap. The book gives so many examples of working with the .NET classes in any practical situation. Its got a great format including a discussion of programming with the .NET framework, a strong overview of programming in Perl, and of course the definitive guidelines to programming in PerlNET. It covers creating your own classes, components, forms, database interaction, and working with ASP.NET. It also gives an overview of working with the CPAN modules which is invaluable. The authors are intelligent, well-spoken, and are clearly experts in this particular area. You have GOT to buy this book!

This book was not only extremely valuable to me in understanding how to use Perl in the .Net Environmental, but also contains the best presentation of how to build pure Perl Modules that I have read to date. These concepts really jelled for me after reading and utilizing the examples presented in the book.

With my limited experience in object oriented programming, this book presented the topics in the right order to overcome my lack of OO experience.

I did have a few instances of failing to find specific terms in the index.

This book will continue to be a valuable resource as I continue to refine my Perl skills in creating perl modules and utilizing Perl in the .Net environment.

Love Perl but wish it had the ability to work with the .NET framework? Well, this is the book for you! Let me tell you, if you program with Perl, then this book will earn its purchase price again and again. I've always loved the ease of programming in Perl, especially how well it works with sockets and network programming, but these days, you've got to be able to program Graphical User Interfaces. I've never been able to master programming GUI's using Tcl/Tk, but the C# like format of programming Visual Perl made creating Windows Forms a snap. The book gives so many examples of working with the .NET classes in any practical situation. Its got a great format including a discussion of programming with the .NET framework, a strong overview of programming in Perl, and of course the definitive guidelines to programming in PerlNET. It covers creating your own classes, components, forms, database interaction, and working with ASP.NET. It also gives an overview of working with the CPAN modules which is invaluable. The authors are intelligent, well-spoken, and are clearly experts in this particular area. You have GOT to buy this book!

Can you mix Perl and Dot.NET ??
I didn't think so till now.

I found the mix of Perl and Dot.NET quite strange - that's why I was surprise to see a book on that matter.

I felt very curious to see how can it work together.

Perl has lots of advantages that make it such an enormous success - very easy to write fast and efficient code.
Ask any unix admin / programmer.

The way Perl works with the rich options of Microsoft's new engine is good. I like the combination. It works well, the examples are quite good.

The first part of the book looks similar to every Dot.NET one can find, but the second part is the value for this book - and that's why I liked it.

Good techinal explainations and examples.
It was a good investment for me.

Hi, All!
I am the lead author of this book. Together with Michael Saltzman and Robert J. Oberg we tried to make this book as good as possible.
The book will be useful for you whether you are an experienced Perl programmer that wants to learn .NET technology or you are new to Perl.
The first part represents a tutorial of Perl itself. In the second part we dive into exciting world of programming Perl inside the .NET Environment.

I hope you will enjoy reading and our code samples will be useful and helpful for you.

Happy reading and programming!

As with all O'Reilly books there's a great intro to the technologies. They take you through how it works, not just how to deploy some code. When you get to the XML-RPC modules, they don't force a solution on you, but give a great tour of what's available and let you pick. For me, the highlight was the intro to Randy J. Ray's RPC::XML modules (he's also one of the authors). I've been fighting with getting the 'system.*' handlers hacked in with other aproaches and it was great to see someone had already figured out such a clean approach. (Which is something since Perl can get reeeaaal ugly!) This book has saved me many days of wasted development.

And yet this book covers every aspect of web service development utilizing perl. As a long time user of the original Frontier::RPC2 module, things have come a long way, and with that greater complexity, the concepts have grown in scope considerably. This IS the book that you want to read if you REALLY want to understand SOAP and XML-RPC. From the XML DTD's to implementation code (either standalone applications or utilizing mod_perl) this book covers everything in between. In all it is a welcome addition to the O'Reilly family of Perl books.

As with all O'Reilly books there's a great intro to the technologies. They take you through how it works, not just how to deploy some code. When you get to the XML-RPC modules, they don't force a solution on you, but give a great tour of what's available and let you pick. For me, the highlight was the intro to Randy J. Ray's RPC::XML modules (he's also one of the authors). I've been fighting with getting the 'system.*' handlers hacked in with other aproaches and it was great to see someone had already figured out such a clean approach. (Which is something since Perl can get reeeaaal ugly!) This book has saved me many days of wasted development.

Some time ago, I purchased a different book: "Programming Web Services With SOAP" (ASIN: 0596000952), and my feeling - and that of many others - is that it was very weak. A decent view from 30,000 feet, but it was not very helpful to a perl developer thrown kicking and screaming into a project requiring XML and the use of SOAP::Lite. "Disappointment" was the best way to describe it.

But *THIS* is the book that the other one should have been - it's fantastic. It is chock-full of real live examples *with code*, the introductory and explanatory material is excellent, and the writing style is simply a joy to read.

In particular, the reference material for SOAP::Lite is very much welcome: it was written by the author of the code.

Five very glowing stars for this book.

Programming Web Services with Perl is principally a book on implementing solutions using XML-RPC and SOAP in Perl. It also covers complementary and alternative standards such as WSDL, UDDI, and REST in some detail. And on the periphery, it finishes with a whirlwind tour of developing message routing, alternative data encoding within XML, security, transactions, workflow, internationalization, service discovery, extension, and management techniques and specifications.

The book assumes the reader will have the knowledge of an intermediate level Perl programmer. I.e., the reader is assumed to have a working knowledge of references, data structures, and object-oriented Perl. On the other hand no previous knowledge of XML, XML-RPC, SOAP or XML related technologies is required.

It should also be mentioned that both of the authors Randy J. Ray and Pavel Kulchenko are also the principle developers of the most popular XML-RPC and SOAP Perl modules: XML::RPC and SOAP::Lite respectively. That said, the book is not a soap box for the authors to tout the merits of their tools.

Rather, it is a practical book which starts with grounding fundamentals. Readers should walk away with a core understanding of XML-RPC and SOAP and not just a particular tool set for working with them. The authors examine the alternative XML-RPC and SOAP tools, illustrate how they are used, and give practical and even handed reasons why their modules should be preferred. Which comes down to issues of features, active development, support, and the amount of work required to code to a particular interface. They then settle down to a comfortable and thorough guide to XML::RPC and SOAP::Lite.

The topics and issues are illustrated throughout using real world web services. For example creating an XML-RPC client for O'Reilly's Meerkat news wire, or a SOAP client to covert use.perl.org's journal stream to RSS. Code is presented to the reader filtered down to highlight each particular issue as it is discussed. This is nice in that it avoids listing slight variations of the same code multiple times, but on the down side it can also leave the reader flipping back and forth to reassemble an example in their head. Full code for each example is provided in the appendices. And all of the example code may be downloaded from O'Reilly at [their web site].

All-in-all, the book is a thorough practical introduction to working with XML-RPC, SOAP and related technologies. When I started reading the book, I was a bit disappointed to see that it only covered XML-RPC and SOAP related services. When I finished, I was impressed with how very much information they'd managed to pack into so few pages.

And yet, I was left wishing there'd been a more through coverage of interoperability issues between other SOAP implementations and things like custom de-serializers. To be honest interoperability and de-serialization are mentioned, and the authors do an excellent job of referring the reader on to sources for continued reading on most other topics.

The book does an admirable job balancing content, length, and information density. Not to mention an excellent job delivering the information that will still be relevant years and not just weeks from the date published. Most of the topics I'd wished to see covered in more depth are those that are still developing and consequently most likely to become quickly dated. In short a well balanced practical guide to applying XML-RPC and SOAP to solve problems.

This book is really easy to understand, and teaches us men what we should really know about taking care of our bodies.
I recommend it highly.

You know you are getting older when your friends greet you by saying "How are you doin?', How's your prostate?" Drs. Nixon and Gomez believe it is time for men to get serious about paying attention to their prostate glands.

In this book you will get the critical information that can help you help guard your health. This is first and foremost the best "preventive" medical book out on this subject.

Diet, that hideous four letter word, is front and center in preventing prostate problems (including cancer). Yes, it is about eating good foods that will protect your health. You will learn how to do a `drive by' fingering (middle index) to the fat-laden, concentrated fast food joints. The doctors first give you reasons why you need to change your eating, (Duh. You're going to die a painful death if you don't) and then they pile on the menus and recipes that you can try.

This book promotes a "take charge" of your life message and then gives you a step by step, systematic guide. To quote the doctors, "The vast majority of cancer doesn't just happen, we do it to ourselves."

This informative guide is extremely well written and easy to understand. The sections on understanding your prostate and the prostate check are worth the price of the book alone. The chapter on prostate cancer and treatments are very good. If you have prostate cancer then this book, along with "Dr. Peter Scardiono's Prostate Book", will help you through this difficult time. Get them both. Highly Recommended,

dudes:
listen up, from one dude to another...this book has chock full of information about what the thing does and also how to protect it from disease. i dont like talking about it anymore than you do but when it doesn't work that's a real problem. so suck it up and read this because everything's really clear cut and easy in here and then you can have some fun without worrying. and we all like fun.

This book has a plethera of information on prostate cancer and treatment, as well as what younger men need to know about their prostate and how prostate cancer can actually be prevented. Written by top leaders in the field, with complicated medical information boiled down to very easy to understand langauge, this book is a must for anyone with a prostate or anyone who's in love with someone who has a prostate.

This book is written by top experts in the field, with the latest information on what men can do to keep their prostate healthy. It also discusses medical procedures and the latest prostate cancer treatments in easy-to-understand language. Another major component of the book -- besides recipes,information on prostatitis and very helpful sidebars on sex and other subjects-- is cancer prevention. This books talks about what men and their spouses can do to actually prevent prostate cancer, which is so important since most people think it's something that "just happens". But 70% of prostate cancer can be prevented, which most people don't know.
It's a must read for anyone with a prostate or who's in love with someone who has one.

Reading it I found that I was doing many things wrong in the Quickbooks and later at the tax time I would have do all the entries again. It certainly saved me a lot of time and money and help me keep my reports accurate.

I just received the book and I'm so happy that I bought it. I had taken a course in college on one of the previous versions and they only did part of what QuickBooks can do and that was a service company. I have a retail business and this book tells me what I need to know about setting up everything for a retail store, inventory, invoice, etc. With this book you don't have to be a CPA to use it but if you have one that's great as CPA's can help you stay out of trouble. Very informative and check with your CPA to see if it's deductible as a business expense and this book will show you how to enter it in as such.

This books is great for users with little accounting background just starting out their own business - A Must Read

This book is a must have resource if you use QuickBooks or have clients using QuickBooks. It is comprehensive and includes setting up the data file and getting started, to entering transactions, and using the reports to help you manage your business. It also includes chapters on managing your QuickBooks files and customizing QuickBooks for your business.

Michelle L. Long, CPA, MBA
Author of: Successful QuickBooks Consulting: The Comprehensive Guide to Starting and Growing a QuickBooks Consulting Business
Advanced Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor
Member of Intuit's Certified Trainer Network

So far Quickbooks pro 2008 has had an option for everything I've needed to do relating to business accounting. It is easy to make minor form changes, invoice customers, create estimates later turning them into invoices, and tracking payments. It is not so great as a time tracking application which I've ended up going back to my old system then at the end of the month enter in my hours from that. In case you are looking for a product to track time I find Timeless Time & Expense very easy to use for tracking project times. For me it isn't overly difficult nor overly easy to track down all the features I use in Quickbooks. However I purchased Quickbooks 2008 the Missing Manual and highly recommend it to any newbies which makes locating those features much easier and aids in my comfort level knowing I'm referring to an experienced users approaches to the software. Even with it's shortcomings I can recommend Quickbooks. It gets a little easier to use as well as powerful each year, which is something I find is usually contradictory. Also for all you get in the package the price (though I hate to spend money on business accounting software) I must admit is much less than I'd expect from such a full featured product.

While at first I thought O'Reilly's new "developer's notebook" series seemed a bit hokey, this book is extremely useful. It's concise and to the point, but full of good examples and information. A plus of the small size is that it's more to-the-point and cheaper than a typical O'Reilly book (which very often seem to ramble on and on about marginally useful information, seemingly in order to justify their $45+ price tags).

This book is the one that should have been written for Java Media Framework, if only that API had ever lived up to its expectations. If you want to add media to your application, and you are using Java, Quicktime is your best bet. However, note that if the Quicktime for Java API doesn't seem very Java-like or object-oriented at first glance, then that's probably because it's not. That is because with Quicktime for Java you are not working with pure Java. Instead, you're invoking a flat C API to create and manipulate C or Pascal data structures using a thin Java wrapper. If you can live with that and you still want to use Quicktime for Java, this book is the essential guide and tutorial you need to get up and running. The book does not waste your time with API printouts or a Java programming language tutorial. Instead, like all books in the Developer's Notebook series, it gets down to business quickly by demonstrating working Java code for a number of useful tasks when working with media.

First, it tutors you on how to set up Quicktime for Java on a Windows machine. This task is more complex than you would think, and this book hits the mark on the subject. Next, it shows you how to play movies and audio files from your Java program. Next, the book tackles the editing of movies from a Java application. This includes topics such as cutting, pasting, going to specific frames of a movie, and "flattening" a movie. In Chapter four, the programmer is introduced to working with Java components and importing and exporting graphics. In chapter five, the user is introduced to working with QuickDraw, the Apple-originated drawing API. This is essential, since QuickDraw is what is used to work with captured images. Thus in this chapter the reader is taught how to transfer data between images and a movie. Next, the art of capturing both video and audio is explored, including capturing audio and video to the same file. The chapter is rounded out with the code for a motion detector. Chapter seven is devoted entirely to audio media. There are particularly timely topics here, such as how to read information from MP3 and from iTunes AAC files, how to provide basic audio controls, and how to build an audio track from raw samples. Similar information is provided in a separate chapter for information specific to video media.The final chapter discusses the effects available in Quicktime for Java, as well as how to add text captions and timecodes to your media.

All in all, I think the Developer Notebook format works well for this subject. At the beginning of each chapter there is an outline of the topics to be covered. For each topic there is a "How Do I Do That?" section that includes a short piece of Java code that performs the specified task. There is also a sample of the output you would expect to see on the screen that should result from executing the code. Next there is a paragraph entitled "What Just Happened?" that explains the code just shown, and finally each topic usually ends with a "What about.." section that answers common questions you may have about extending the code just shown. All code in the book can be downloaded from the book's website at O'Reilly and Associates.

This book is essential reading for anybody who needs to understand how to code with Quicktime for Java, and it is far better than any other publication on the subject that I have encountered. Amazon does not show the table of contents for this book, so I do so for the purpose of completeness:
Chapter 1. GETTING UP AND RUNNING WITH QUICKTIME FOR JAVA
Setting Up QTJ on Windows
Embedding QuickTime in HTML
Preflighting a QTJ Installation
Compiling QTJ Code
Opening and Closing the QuickTime Session
Playing an Audio File from the Command Line
Chapter 2. PLAYING MOVIES
Building a Simple Movie Player
Adding a Controller
Getting a Movie-Playing JComponent
Controlling a Movie Programmatically
Showing a Movie's Current Time
Listening for Movie State-Changes
Moving Frame by Frame
Playing Movies from URLs
Preventing "Tasking" Problems
Chapter 3. EDITING MOVIES
Copying and Pasting
Performing "Low-Level" Edits
Undoing an Edit
Undoing and Redoing Multiple Edits
Saving a Movie to a File
Flattening a Movie
Saving a Movie with Dependencies
Editing Tracks
Chapter 4. WORKING WITH COMPONENTS
Specifying a Component's Type
Exporting Movies
Exporting Movies to Any Installed Format
Importing and Exporting Graphics
Discovering All Installed Components
Chapter 5. WORKING WITH QUICKDRAW
Getting and Saving Picts
Getting a Pict from a Movie
Converting a Movie Image to a Java Image
A Better Movie-to-Java Image Converter
Drawing with Graphics Primitives
Getting a Screen Capture
Matrix-Based Drawing
Compositing Graphics
Chapter 6. CAPTURE
Capturing and Previewing Audio
Selecting Audio Inputs
Capturing Audio to Disk
Capturing Video to Disk
Capturing Audio and Video to the Same File
Making a Motion Detector
Chapter 7. AUDIO MEDIA
Reading Information from MP3 Files
Reading Information from iTunes AAC Files
Providing Basic Audio Controls
Providing a Level Meter
Building an Audio Track from Raw Samples
Chapter 8. VIDEO MEDIA
Combining Video Tracks
Overlaying Video Tracks
Building a Video Track from Raw Samples
Chapter 9. MISCELLANEOUS MEDIA
Creating Captions with Text Media
Creating Links with HREF Tracks
Adding Timecodes
Creating Zero-Source Effects
Creating One-Source Effects (Filters)
Creating Two-Source Effects (Transitions)

This book is great!

This notebook makes all the QuickTime supported formats available to a Java developer. Like all the books in the notebook series, plenty of code, plenty of information to get up and running.

I really liked the information on reading the tag info from MP3s and AAC files, very useful.

Multimedia and Java made simple.

With this type of walkthrough book I usually expect to see just the basic features of the technology explored. This book goes surprisingly in-depth, covering topics like adding effects to playback, transforming movies during playback, overlays, and a wide variety of topics.

All that is crammed into a trim 200 page frame. This is achieved by concentrating mainly on the code, and effectively using a minimum of images. That's a trick given the graphics intensive nature of the topic.

This is not a book for beginners, it's a fast-paced walkthrough for experience developers who want something less referential than the JavaDocs.

With Apple changing QuickTime for Java so anything you made when
use QTJava under MacOSX Java1.3 no longer worked under Java1.4 these required changes to most of your older QTJava code- if you wanted to have your code now run under Java1.4. Apple also moved classes to a new packages so to make the developers nightmare complete. BUT DONT WORRY! This book will show you workarounds for them missing classes (sequence grabbing is back! what a gem). Also covers all your needs as a new developer to the powers of QTJava. Time to make your very own QuickTime player in a few hours! You won't believe the stuff QuickTime can do under the hood. This books covers just more and more stuff as you go though it.

For me this QuickTime for Java book will be sitting next to the older most excellent book from Bill Stewart. I hope all books become as clear and well written as this one from Chris Adamson- top work. Sample code all over the shop; step by step stuff. Cuts to the tasks you will have to tackle without lengthy messing around. Brilliant buy if you want to do cool hardcore design media in java. Or just play a nice sound track in the background of your killer application - maybe u want to make the next video editing studio app, or your own media player, or a streaming server, or a image editor, or or or; you want ta take a ride?

Then again don't buy it! I wont have a job to go to in the morning! :).

I bought this book to help me understand what OA is. Sometimes you go to a meeting, and in the beginning - it feels like you have a million questions that may go unanswered. OA is the best thing that has happened to me in 2007, as I have been on my recovery path for the past 10 months! This book is very thorough, and answered all my questions. In the beginning, I was SO ready to understand, and make the commitment to myself and my recovery. This made it that much easier for me. I continue to use it as a point of reference today with other literature. This isn't an OA book persay, but written by an OAer with a great deal of recovery and helpful insight into my addiction to food. This is a great tool!

ODAT!

Wow-this book really encouraged me in my journey with compulsive overeating. It is a terrific resource for the beginner all the way to the fully recovered! Written from an insider's perspective, this book is sure to comfort, encourage, and strengthen overeaters and/or those who love them.

I started doing online Overeaters Anonymous meetings and joined an OA "mail loop" about a month ago, and needed some basics about the OA program, because although I was getting help from the OA online sources, I had a lot of questions about how OA works.

And other things -- how could I ever deal with holidays and traveling without overeating, how to explain to my doctor, friends and family that I wasn't dieting per se, but rather dealing with my compulsive overeating problem, etc.

I've read this book from cover to cover TWICE now, and each time I find answers to new questions I didn't even know I had.

Jim A. essentially shares his own experience but also talks about OA's history, the steps, what "abstinence" is, and why the program works so well.

A terrific guide -- and one I'm sure I will refer to over and over again!

This book gave me a new understanding of what overeating is. I always thought it was a lack of will power and never had a full understanding of what I was doing to myself. It has shed a new light on things, I have faith that I can recover too.

I don't usually write reviews about books, but I felt obligated to write a review for this one. The book not only gives great advice about eating, but also great general advice for everyday life. The book is well-written and reads like a novel. I highly recommend this book.

I just picked up a copy of this new book. The author did a nice job of pulling together a book useful for experienced programmers and for beginners. This book is very readable and does a great job with bringing you up to speed on the essentials needed for getting a grip on the new language and sets you up nicely for .net. Highly recommended!

I have been programming in C++. This book was a great way to move to C#. The lessons are concise and easy to follow. Each take 10 to 15 minutes. Great investment of time.

I had never used C# or the visual studio before. This book got me up and running with both. I know some C, no C++, so there was a lot to learn. Examples made it easy. Everythign compiled and ran. Took me just over a weekend to get through the book's lessons.

I'm a VB programmer who has not used C or C++. Wright makes it very easy to get up and running with C#. He doesn't assume you understand the ins and outs of C -- which was key for me!

I have been programming in VB and VBA for the last 5 years. Before that, it was C and C++. This book is all about the language of C#. It doesn't cover XML, Web Services, or anything to do with the internet. What it does do, is give you an excellent background on the language and syntax of C#. I now fully understand the differences between C++, C#, and even VB. I highly recomend this book to anyone who has C++ background. If you have a pure VB background it might take a while to get used to the looping and decision making syntax as isn't covered until later in the book, but it is still useable.