CAD and CAM Books

This book simply repeats and re-blends old ideas from various novels by Ludlum, Robin Cook and others. Yes, there is considerable action in this book, but again, it seems a little overdone. How come many of the foes that the protagonist faces tend to be as competent as the protagonist and yet keep making obvious mistakes? Also, this theory that some one organization is pulling strings to change the world is simply too long running, right from James Bond times. I also find the "Castor and Pollux" thing very very mushy, especially between the super-agents that these folks are cut out to be. Can't these ghost-writers find other themes to write about? Definitely not in league with the typical Ludlum genre.

The book had a most vivid narration and it was exciting in many ways up and until the end. The ending for me was a bit predictable as to the identity of Genesis and I had that figured out about halfway through the book. I was disappointed in the ending somewhat as it left some holes or rather some unexplained non-closure items with the legendary field agent, Todd Belknap that conveyed his character to be weak in the end showing a dramatic inconsistency as Belknap was so strong throughout the plot line of this novel. It was as if someone else stepped in and wrote the ending and ran out of runway with "I am woman hear me roar". If I knew how it would of ended, I may not have even started reading it. Attention! Tom Cain, Author of "The Accident Man", we need your new book, Part II: "The Survivor", and in a hurry!

As you (try to)read this book, you see an actual well told story...BUT with at least one Twenty-Five cent word on every page. I don't know the genius who could read this book, and not stop on one of these words and go "Huh????" If you haven't read this book, go to the book store first, thumb to ANY page and start reading. I swear 98% of the time you'll find a word you've never heard of before! Writers, this doesn't make you a better writer as your reader has to keep a dictionary next to them. Thumbs down, sorry.

I really enjoyed this book and will recommend it to my friends. I didn't see the ending coming. The minute I thought I had the plot down they twisted it. If you like this genre of 'spy action' books then I you will get your money's worth.

i enjoyed reading the BS,
as i do most ludlum books,
enjoyable, not great, but a good read, nonetheless.

While the book is well organised and number of topics covered is substantial, this was the worst intro-to-anything book I had to suffer through. If calculus is something you are very comfortable with, then go ahead, read it. :-)

In general avoid this book.
I purchased this book for a course, and unfortunately this is my first book. Its 95% maths, of course AI is a lot of math, but the book is so abstract and nothing related to practical stuff. Take convolution filters, it gives integrals and all that stuff, but what exactly does it do, how does it perform it on images, and where the heck are sample images, and sample matricies.
I bet this author must have sent this book out to teachers so that 50 students would have to buy this over priced book with no practicle use and so hard to read/understand and extremely dense.

A nice book. Especially the order in which the topics are covered is a good idea. However, you will not find the following errors reported in the book's webpage:

Page 52: The "high-degree function" is not a function!

Page 92: In Figure 6.6, the topmost pixels that get deleted as a result of the averaging operation should actually remain there, since both their sums are 4, which is greater than the threshold, which is 3.

Page 100: In Fig. 6.13, the last row of the last image contains a spurious image boundary.

Page 151: In Fig. 9.8, there are two nodes with name n; the one which is higher in the figure should have the subscript 1.

Page 152, item 3 in the list: There is an implicit assumption that h-hat always returns 0 for goal states. I don't think that this assumption is stated earlier in the text.

Page 165: In Figure 10.1, all arrows are supposed to be pointing away from the current state.

Page 246: The last paragraph mentions ".. the two interpretations for Clear and On suggested by Fig. 15.2", but aren't actually THREE interpretations suggested for On?

And in the current errata list in the book's website, something is clearly wrong with item 6, since it says n_i should be replaced by n_i.

All in all, a good book.

After having borrowed and read part of Nilsson's previous book "Principles of Artificial Intelligence" at the library some years back I was quite positive about the prospect of reading this one. However, it falls short on many of my expectations and can therefore not be recommended for neither the beginner nor the expert.

The book covers all the major areas of artificial intelligence but does so in a very superficial manner. There isn't actually enough information in the book at allow to to implement some of the techniques available - it is mostly teasers. Also many of the subjects are - and even some of the subjects that I already knew about beforehand - incomprehendable and I often got more confused about a subject than before I began reading it.

I very rarely give a book one star, but this one deserves it in the light of the many better books on AI. I recommend that you read "Russell and Norvig: Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach" instead.

Jacob Marner, M.Sc.

The field of artificial intelligence has an interesting history, both in terms of its content and the philosophical debate it has provoked. The field could also be loosely described as divided into two camps, those who view it as a collection of highly sophisticated algorithms, and those who view it as an attempt to create machines that exhibit human-level intelligence. Ironically, in the latter camp, it is difficult to assess the progress that has been made, since criteria for measuring machine intelligence are never explicitly given. Instead, dependence has been made on the "Turing test" for intelligence, a test that is difficult to apply, and in fact can be said to be too vague for a practical, objective assessment of machine intelligence.

This book is written more in the context of the latter camp, than in the former. However, in-depth discussion of the Turing test is not given, and this actually is one of the main virtues of the book, although the author clearly believes that the purpose of doing research in artificial intelligence is to achieve human-level intelligence. As he remarks in the last paragraph in the book, it was written to overview the techniques that he believes are required to achieve human-level intelligence. Although he does not explicitly give the reader tests for machine intelligence that will allow progress to be measured, he devotes a small portion of the book to various ideas on just what constitutes intelligence.

The book also gives a general (and sometimes very brief) overview of the algorithms used in artificial intelligence. Search heuristics, neural networks, and genetic programming are some of the topics that are covered. The influence of the "intelligent agent" paradigm, that is now taking the AI community by storm, is very apparent throughout the book. The author though does not neglect some of the topics in "good-ole-fashioned" artificial intelligence that arose decades ago and is still applicable today, especially in the field of logic programming. These topics include resolution in both the propositional and predicate calculus, and in expert systems. By far the best discussion in the book is on knowledge-based systems and evolving knowledge bases. This topic has taken on considerable importance in recent years due to the importance of data mining and business intelligence.

Readers who are considering artificial intelligence as a career choice will find good motivation by reading this book. The field also is quite different than most others in that it respects a high degree of individual creativity and ingenuity, and has a high bandwidth for new ideas. Beginning with its origins in the 1950s, the field has grown by leaps and bounds, but its applications have exploded in the last five years, fueled mainly by business and financial applications. Concerned not only with achieving human-level capabilities, but also with other forms of intelligence and how they can be useful, artificial intelligence has become one of the predominant forces in the twenty-first century. One can only be excited and optimistic about its further advances.

This is a book my mother-in-law left for me to read when she was here at the end of October. I had never read anything by this author before. The book was much better than I had expected! There are lots of characters to keep track of so you do have to concentrate when you read it. I enjoyed the twists and turns. It's also not the typical medical mystery book I am so fond of so that was a nice change too. I will seek out other books by this author in the future.

I was pretty disappointed with this effort by Stephen Frey. After awhile mentioning billions as if it has any meaning to the average reader, makes my eyes glaze over. The supposed good guy, Christian, is set up and fooled on a regular basis. If he is this gullible how did he become such a financial wizard? Too many unexplained happenings. He swims in icy Maine waters and his shoes don't squish? Is he wearing shoes? Don't his clothes drip all over the place. No, no and no. The author fills up a lot of pages and has a secret club a power club that has been written about many times before. It is an old plot idea and one can only hope this type of organization does not actually exist. If it does, expect your brain to be pulled out through your nose; the fate of one hapless character. Don't waste your time. I suffered so that you would not!

Somehow between "The Chairman" and this book, Christian Gillette morphed from a cutthroat chairman looking to protect himself from other nefarious characters and cutthroats, a truly fascinating enigma - into a hero-for-everyman type of character. The book still kept me interested, but the series' high note was the 1st book, and the overall quality of the story has descended steadily since. Hopefully, "The Successor" will reverse that trend.

Deceit, trust and honesty are themes that are repeatedly surfacing in Frey's novel "The Power Broker." All relationships are questioned and tested in this action and crime packed story.

The novel encompasses several original story lines that did not seem to mesh together until the second half of the book. The two powerful, secret orders one of white and the other of black men entailed a large amount of detail on both sides that left the reader confused as to which characters belonged to which orders. Each of the orders had separate goals for a presidential hopeful.

I had great difficulty keeping track of the dozen or more characters in this novel, even though many were killed off during the course of the novel.

I did quickly become attached to the true main characters of the book Christian, Quentin, Nigel and Allison. I found that my favorite part of the novel was the dialogue between these individuals. The story that was told with these characters through their business practices was easy to follow and believable.

In all honesty, I had to force myself to read past the first few complicated and intricate chapters. There were too many characters and settings introduced in the first few chapters. I especially found myself very perplexed as to how the prologue fit in with the beginning of the novel. As the story progressed, the amount of story lines seemed to increase and did not converge until the final few chapters.

This novel could have used a character chart or map to prevent the reader being lost with too many characters and settings.

For some reason I keep picking up Frey books with the expectation that they will be knock down thrillers filled with intrigue. You will find a little of that here, but the Power Broker is so filled with compositional flaws that anything approaching readability is quickly overwhelmed by Frey's need to jump around from one character to the next. I lost count of how many first person chapters Frey pushes in here that orient themselves around someone new. Also, for the first half of the book Frey is constantly adding new major... very major plot threads that are as cumbersome as car wrecks.

This could have been a pretty good book I think if Frey had approached it through the eyes of a single character such as the predominant protagonist, Christian Gillette. I am always game for a political thriller and it seems that Frey has managed to pit several sides against each other in a unique bid for power. Sadly, Frey is a pretty good writer of prose, has interesting ideas, basically, he has everything you need for a darn good genre writer... everything that is except a will to force his thoughts into a tract that would allow for another to follow along.

When I started to read the book, at first I was overwhelmed by all the information. I found that it was hard getting through some explanations especially when finding that there are many typos in this book. The books that I read before on advanced usage of ConceptDraw were clearer but much easier concerning the programming part. This book is 100% for advanced Visio users.

I have read both of the books (and others) and I find that Graham Wideman's book Visio 2003 Developer's Survival Pack is far better than Edson's. Wideman also has the same book for Visio 2000 and 2002. Wideman's book has far fewer errors (and his corrections are online), and far more useful samples/examples. Just a lot more meat, frankly. Amazon may not have Wideman's latest book - google it or go to diagramantics.com. It's worth the cost for real visio developers.

This book is a very good book for advanced VBA development with Visio. This book is not for the faint at heart. If you are looking to do serious development using Visio then this is one of the books that you need.

I admit that there are some typos in this book, but this doesn't detract from the value and advanced concepts that this book teaches. You are not going to be able to find very many books that have this depth. You need to be a senior level developer to appreciate the content of this book.

I recommend this book for serious VBA Visio Automation.

Having now read most of this book, I can say that I learned far more than I got from the Microsoft PDF files that shipped with Visio Pro--but I can't say I enjoyed it. If a writer with an ego bothers you, find a different author. If errors bother you, find a different publisher. As if to make a page quota, whole paragraphs are repeated, changing only a letter: "PosX is the X coordinate...{6-line paragraph)" followed by "PosY is the Y coordinate...(SAME 6-line paragraph)". This cut and paste goes on for pages in places. Examples and exercises almost never yield a useful product, though they are carefully explained. David knows a lot of history of the tool, which would have been pretty interesting except for the thread of vanity that sewed the stories together.

David Edson expects the user to be fluent with the elementary Visio features and VBA. The book builds upon this premise and imparts a comprehensive and incremental teaching of Visio. While the examples and illustrations are chosen well, the accompanying CD was missing a few examples, and came up blank. Overall, I strongly recommend this book to help for automation using Visio.

As an ASIC designer I found this to be useful when doing synthesis work. If you are experienced in synthesis, synopsys online documentation and personal notes may prove as useful. I simply liked this text. The price is really not that far out of norm for technical books such as this one.

This book is extremely general. Even for readers who do not want to practice synthesis or timing analysis. It gives very few minor examples. It is not worth the money. I finished reading the book in 1 day. The information in this book is so shallow. I wasted my money. If you have access to the synopsys tools, it is much better to read the tools user guide.

I got turned off from this book the moment I opened it, and before I even read a single line. It has huge font size (even larger, instead of smaller, for example scripts) and one-inch margins on top and bottom. (An O'Reilly book has 40% more information on same-sized page, and it's far easier to read.) Every other sentence contains a punctuation error. All this makes it hard to concentrate on the content.

The content itself is good for the absolute beginner, but not much else. The example scripts have no useful comments. Several important concepts (wire-load models among them) are mentioned without explanation. Other concepts (such as false paths) are explained in a misleading way.

The author may be a superb designer, but that does not automatically make him a decent writer.

Also, shouldn't editors have caught the English language errors?

This book is very general even to readers who are unfamiliar with the topic. It is a waste of money. It is extremely short, I read the whole book in one day. It has bits and pieces here and there, but no fundamentals. This book is not useful, even to starters.

This book offers nothing extra from Synopsys On-Line Documentation. It is simply over overpriced.

Yes, I got an impression that from the middle of the book the story was finished by someone else and this was not VH book... The beginning was very promising and very pleasantly told but then the book changed its stile. The book is ok to read but it is definitely not the best and not as gripping as others. I would not consider this a typical VH book.

My husband ordered this book for me for Christmas- I didn't get to begin the story until two months later. When I started to read it, I noticed that the book had the correct cover, but the inside contained a completely different story, "Berlin Game." However, it is too late to return the book! Please make sure the story you choose to purchase matches the cover of the book you order.

You won't take anything of this book but you will have a good time reading it and that is the greatest part of reading a book, the story of Carmel is nice and will keep you reading while she is in England and Australia, when she return to England and discover the assassination the story gets a little boring but still is a good reading, you won't know the time of the book until the last page, I think that that was a good idea.
By the way, which girl wouldn't want to have three options of marriage in less than two weeks?

As a child, I grew up reading Victoria Holt's books and when my future father-in-law gave me this book to read, I couldn't wait to finish reading my other books so I could read this one. And I have to confess, I was not disappointed by this book at all. It has enough mystery in it to keep me guessing and just a little romance to make me wish I was like the heroine and no gory details about any murder or anything. It is just a fascinating book to read especially while soaking in a hot bath.

Carmel March was found in the Marlines' garden at Commonwood House. And when tragedy struck the Commonwood House, Carmel was whisked away to Australia. It wasn't till when she came home to visit England again that she realized that the wrong man was hanged for the murder of the mistress of the Commonwood House. And she embarks on an eventful journey to discover the truth.

This is such an easy read and so delightful too. I snuck in my reading time in between unpacking boxes of books and I couldn't wait to read the next page ~~ so I would sneak off to read it! Holt does it again. I remember again why I was such a big fan of hers while growing up. And I would recommend her books to any mystery lover. She's one of the leading classic writers for the mystery world and you won't regret reading her books.

I had read "The Captive" some years ago and stumbled across this one again. This is a pretty good read. Its a slight mystery...who are the parents of Carmel, who was found under the azalea bush? Is she related to the gypsys camped in the woods?
And who really killed that mean invalid? You won't find out 'til the very end. Ms. Holt keeps you entertained along the way---Carmel has many an adventure and misfortune in her short life. She travels with her "Uncle" to Australia and lives there a while. Then shes back in England and involved in suitors, weddings and tragedy.
I noticed in the publication that Ms. Holt was born in 1906. That would mean this woman wrote this in her 80s. I am very impressed! The quality of the story and the reflection of life in it is well thought out and gives insight into whats important to be happy.

This was a secondary text for a solid modelling class that I recently took. I believe that I personally drew 90% of the excercises with little difficulty. I found it to be a straight forward guide to mastering the basic SolidWorks commands. Unlike some texts, the author doesn't always give you every single mouse-click necessary to draw every part. In fact, I found a step or two missing here and there. Personally, I believe that this just makes you think a little bit more.

The only real shortcoming of this text is that it doesn't really cover assemblies, mating up parts, and determining interferences.

The book does have a good index in the back, so it can serve as a decent reference to the various commands and features. It also has a trouble-shooting appendix that could prove useful.

If you combine this with Planchard's _SolidWorks 2001 Tutorial_ (which does a much better job on assemblies) then you've got everything you really need to develop a working proficiency with the program.

This is a wonderful book for beginners who haven't taken SolidWorks dealer training or can't afford same. It has lots of practical design examples from real life.

This book is worthless. First, they don't tell you that what release of Solidworks this book covers until you find out for yoruself when you crack open the cover. Guess what? It's for a version of Solidworks that's three years old and there isn't an update version of the book available! Secondly, the step by step lessons totally [are bad]. Very poorly written and illustrated.

Un-detailed, very overpriced. crude tutorials with insufficient explanations.

This book is a great introduction to feature-based modeling. It doesn't teach everything one needs to know about SolidWorks, but what it does teach, it does very well. I wish there were more books like this one that covered the advanced features of SolidWorks.

This is a difficult tutorial book to read and to follow. The coordination between the text, graphics, images, and cd-rom files are sketchy at best. It is just difficult to learn Revit because I often find myself troubleshooting the errors in this book. The people who read this book are in the building industries and picking up redlines and xrefs are very important. How can a book that suppose to teach Revit, a program that promotes drawing coordination, lacks these vital attributes? This is just absurd.

This book is purely introduction. Don't expect to become a professional drafter with just this book.

I feel that this book will really help the department I am in. We are trying to implament REVIT, this book is a real good tool to help with the training that is needed to get this done.

After working with this book for four hours I'm already fed up with it. This book has poor presentation by doing things such as referring to highlighted section on all black and white drawings, and providing tutorial steps for functions that do not work in Revit. Also, vague wording makes it hard to find tools and tool bars being referred too. This book is not a good learning tool. Think twice about buying this book, and read any glorifying reviews carefully and with reservations.

I read this book A-Z and it helped a lot. Although i already have made one little revit project before reading this book, there were a lot of useful tips. I liked the way book tells about revit - everything's written from architects sight not techno-geek's.
Only four stars because there were too less information about revit families - thats very important even for beginers.

This book has very poor organization. I would not recommend this book to a beginner.

This book provides a perfect introduction to the field of vhdl for synthesis. Very simple and it almost cover the main topics of the language in an efficient way. The book does not provide a detailed description of the language but the level of introduction is sufficient for anyone with little or no background in VHDL.

This book is a fine introduction to VHDL, well written in the early chapters. Unlike most VHDL books it covers the language from a higher level, including fundamental concepts like test benches that seem to be buried or lost in other books on the subject. It could use a lot more detail, though, and the later chapters seem rushed, and also dated in some areas (VHDL 87 vs. 93 in particular). And as others have mentioned the examples seem inadequate. If you buy this book, you might also want to get something with more detailed examples to go with it.

This book provides a perfect introduction to the field of vhdl for synthesis. Very simple and it almost cover the main topics of the language in an efficient way. The book does not provide a detailed description of the language but the level of introduction is sufficient for anyone with little or no background in VHDL. Tip: follow this sequence when reading 1, 3-6, 2, 7-9

I tend to agree with one of the reviewers that the some of the constructs are not explained at all. As a hobbyist my hope was to use this book as a guide reference and use VHDL using Altera's software but I wasn't able to do so. The examples are unfinished without much explanation.

Good thing is that if you are a beginner you will learn something if not everything from this book. I gained a lot from chapter 2, first look at vhdl.

The first Harold Coyle book I've read and I must say I enjoyed it a lot. Although the book suffers from technical and factual errors/flaws, it succeeds in making me care or hate the characters. This being Coyle's fourth book, he is even more comfortable developing his characters and effectively introduce new ones. The romance between officer Scott Dixon and reporter Jan Fields feels more comfortable, and not as forced although they all seem to get conveniently involved in every major conflict throughout the series.

Part of the story is told from the point of view of a woman who's about to become a commander of her own platon unit. Her experiences and adventures in the book alone make for a very interesting story in itself. Some scenes I enjoyed: one officer can't help but stare at her breast, another one where she needs napkins, and what a well-rested soldier looks like. Kozak's story into the military is a somewhat ideal presentation of the author, and so don't expect a highly realistic exploration of integration of women into the American military. But if the author were more serious, we should see other infantrywomen besides Kozak.

The battle scenes are not as descriptive this time. The first day of war but when you start reading that part, you're already in the middle where US troops suffer huge casualties. The Mexicans are shown as highly motivated and seemingly well-trained for this war. And there's something corny when the troops talk to the main Mexican character, Col. Guajardo. And Mexico seems to be described as a utterly poor country than it actually is. Hey, my Diamond Supra modems are made in Mexico.

It's not directly mentioned, but the story does take place in 1995. The president's name was never mentioned in the book but if it was Bill Clinton, he would have to have done something right if he's re-elected 1996 because the president here handles the crisis poorly. :)

I have the book with a cover w/ a painting of a Bradley IFV with the US and Mexican flag in the background. This is a better looking cover than the bland red cover you see in this webpage.

I'd call it un-readable, but, unfortunately for me I read it. The plot never `clicks' and the action is about as suspenseful as a falling leaf.

In Trial by Fire, Harold Coyle's fourth novel (and third in the Scott Dixon series), the United States Army shifts its focus from the recently ended Gulf War and the demise of the Warsaw Pact and onto battlefields and opponents -- this time much closer to home, across the Rio Grande in Mexico.

Set in the early 1990s (most works of fiction often reflect the times in which they are created) a short time after the abortive Moscow putsch, Trial by Fire begins with a deadly and successful coup d'etat in Mexico as the military, fed up with the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) party's corrupt and inept ways, does away with the President and most of the PRI leadership. Motivated -- mostly -- by patriotism, genuine concern for Mexico's countless millions of poor inhabitants, and a desire to kick the country into the approaching 21st Century, the new Council of 13 moves quickly to sweep aside political opposition and the powerful criminal organizations that practically run some of the country's states.

But when Col. Alfredo Guajardo, one of the members of the new military junta, sets his sights on Hector Alaman, aka "El Dueno" (The Manager), a notorious drug baron whose empire has spread across the entire Caribbean, the New Revolution that he has helped to successfully bring about will be jeopardized by the aftershocks of a daring military raid on Alaman's fortified villa/compound at Chinampas. While the Mexican army's heliborne assault is a nominal success and the huge estate is captured, Alaman himself escapes along with a handful of experienced, ruthless and highly paid mercenaries.

Alaman's escape from the raid at Chinampas will soon prove to be more than an embarrasing incident that can be dismissed by the new rulers of Mexico. Alaman's thirst for revenge has no limits, and together with his little but efficient army of foreign mercenaries, including an American named Childress and Lefleur, a particularly creative Frenchman who will carry out any act of violence as long as his pockets are lined with dollars, the drug lord strikes back. Knowing full well that they alone can't topple the Army and the Council of 13, Alaman and his goons create a series of border incidents to create a Second Mexican-American War.

Coyle, who is one of the best writers of the military fiction genre, once again places Lt. Col. Scott Dixon, veteran of two previous conflicts (chronicled in Sword Point and Bright Star) and Medal of Honor recipient, at the tip of the spear of America's response to the apparent new enemy south of the border. Serving with Dixon once again is Capt. Harold (Hal) Cerro, former airborne officer and veteran of the Iran and Libyan campaigns, and now assigned to the 16th Armored Division, where he will be serving for the first time as a staff officer rather than commanding a company in the field.

Coyle also brings back such memorable characters as Jan Fields, the brash, beautiful, intelligent and dogged reporter who is Col. Dixon's current lover, and whose reporter's instincts and desire to get the story land her in jeopardy and Congressman Ed Lewis, a forner National Guard officer who wants to know the truth about why American troops are being sent into combat in Mexico.

Trial by Fire also introduces a vibrant new character in 2nd Lt. Nancy Kozak, one of the first female officers to be assigned to the Infantry branch as a platoon commander. Coyle does a terrific job in describing Kozak's determination to be "all that she can be" in a profession that was once considered a males-only "brotherhood of war." His portrait of her drive to be a good infantry officer while still being female is a fine example of storytelling at its best, and his knowledge of the military, its equipment, and more importantly, its people and culture, allows Coyle to show the men and women in uniform as believable human beings with real emotions. His novels are somehow smaller in scope than his mentor Tom Clancy's huge technothrillers, but Coyle's depictions of his cast of characters are more appealing.

A good effort from Coyle......

All things considered, Trial by Fire was an enjoyable book. I have read a number of Coyle's novels, some of which featured Lt. Nancy Kozak. In Trial by Fire, I had the opportunity to go back to the introduction of Lt. Kozak. The story was not as tight or compelling as some of Coyle's other works, but it was a solid work nonetheless. The plot started quickly with the overthrow of the Mexican government and increased tension between Mexico and the US. The rising anxieties, escalating conflict and troubled negotiations were certainly plausible. For Coyle fans, this novel is worth the time. I am glad that I went back to pick this up.

Never mind the fact that, based upon my experience as a Bradley platoon leader from 1993-4, I find it impossible to imagine a woman becoming an infantry officer with as few problems and confrontations as Lt. Kozak seems to encounter in this book. Never mind the fact that a platoon leader has 30 or so soldiers, yet there were maybe 4 or 5 at all mentioned, let alone developed, as characters in this novel. And never mind the fact that a reader gets zero sense of what it is actually like to be inside a Bradley in training or in combat (I have not experienced the latter, and can't picture it after this novel). The real problem is, Coyle can't write. This example sentence will make my point better than any conclusion I could pen myself: 'With the grace and determination of a wire-guided antitank guided missile, Dixon moved towards the refrigerator.' I don't know about you, but I could probably figure out that a wire-guided missile was, indeed, guided. 'Nuff said.