Languages Books

Enthralling, entertaining, educational, and thought-provoking, "The Symposium" is one of Plato's classics. A group of men gathered at a dinner party in ancient Greece discuss the topic of love. Each man offers his view or definition of love, and the results are all different, engaging, and full of symbolism. Although it is a short book, one must not read it once and put it away; it ought to be be read again and again just to compare to what is "picked up on" each time. One thing always puzzles me: I will never know why Plato included the doctor (his name escapes me at the moment) have a bout of hiccups during someone's speech. I have never come up with a satisfactory answer - nor has any one I know, either. Nevertheless, this is an excellent read that I highly recommend for anyone - student and nonstudent. Enjoy!

The Symposium of Plato is a profoundly thought-provoking, entertaining and inspiring piece of philosophical writing. It is very short, yet infinitely more substantial than many longer works.

We are in Athens, 416 B.C.E. The scene is a banquet at the house of Agathon, who had the day before celebrated the victory of his tragedy. By the end of the party, seven men - and one absent but central woman - will have presented their views on the nature and meaning of Eros, or love.

There is no difficulty in keeping the characters distinct in our minds. Plato has great fun contrasting the opinions - and verbal styles - of tragic poet, comic poet, politician, physician and the rest, allowing absurdities and profundities to mingle freely. Socrates is very appealing, saint-like, yet utterly down-to-earth, playing his usual role of a 'philosopher' - one who 'knows only that he does not know' - always in passionate search of the truth, but catching only revelatory glimpses of its perfection.

Phaedrus gives the first speech, praising lovers' (especially homosexual) passion and loyalty, which makes them perform mighty and heroic deeds. Pausanias differentiates between virtuous, or spiritual love, and common, or bodily love. Virtuous love between men should not be primarily about sex, but about improvement and education of the soul. Eryximachus, the doctor, makes a mostly irrelevant (and boring) speech, claiming nature's contrasting elements illustrate the need to balance the healthy and unhealthy aspects of love. Aristophanes then delivers a brilliantly memorable speech, hilarious and poignant by turns, telling of how humans were once two-in-one, back to back, with two heads, four arms and four legs, with three combinations of sexes, male/male, male/female, and female/female. Their strength and speed made them threaten the gods, so Zeus cut them in half, leaving them to search forever for their other halves, and through love attempt to regain their original oneness. Agathon then gives an over-the-top, ecstatic speech, praising love as the youngest, most graceful of the gods, saying he brought order to heaven itself, 'empties men of disaffection and fills them with affection', etc, climaxing with the suggestion we all follow in love's footsteps, 'sweetly singing in his honour'.

It is then Socrates' turn. He performs for all conversations that took place between himself when much younger and Diotima, a 'wise' woman from Mantineia, to whom he had gone for instruction in the highest truths of love. In sum, the lesson is that love is the desire for the everlasting possession of the good and beautiful, which brings happiness. We crave immortality, in order to be happy eternally. We love our offspring, artistic works, laws and institutions, because they are all attempts to achieve an immortal name. These, Diotima claims, are the 'lesser' mysteries of love.

The 'greater' proceed from the 'lesser' in ascending steps. From one beautiful body the lover creates 'fair notions', then he sees all bodies are similar and equally worthy of love. From bodies he proceeds to the beauty of the virtuous mind, then the beauties of institutions and laws, climbing from there to the beauty of the sciences, until, after much growth in wisdom, he reaches the vision of all creation as beautiful. The final step is to rise to the contemplation of unchanging, eternal, absolute beauty itself. To spend your life in union with perfect beauty allows you to bring forth 'real' things, not 'images' and 'be immortal, if mortal man may'.

A drunken Alcibiades bursts in at this point, and gives a rambling, often funny, speech about his love for Socrates and how he - a very beautiful man - was spurned sexually by him. He describes Socrates' near-supernatural control of himself, totally above the effects of pain and pleasure. The book ends with a description of Socrates' companions all falling asleep as dawn breaks (after all-night drinking) and his going about his usual day.

Throughout the Symposium, Plato makes it clear that sexual relations are not the best thing at all for 'lovers'; they who wish for the highest happiness must seek to grow in virtue and wisdom and become increasingly detached from earthly pleasures. This is the origin of the phrase 'Platonic love'. Women were not considered their intellectual and spiritual equals in Athens at the time, so men of sophistication had to look to each other for emotional sustenance.

What then, we may ask, can the Symposium offer human beings today who are not interested in purely mystical/intellectual living and prefer the sexual and emotional satisfactions found in personal relationships?

A great deal, I believe. In his introduction Benjamin Jowett states that Plato 'is conscious that the highest and noblest things in the world are not easily severed from the sensual desires, or may even be regarded as a spiritual form of them'. In other words, earthly pleasures and transcendent ones are inextricable. Plato used words such as 'good' and 'virtue' to describe freeing oneself from the world of the senses, by using our reason to choose correctly who - or what - to attach to as we move through life. If we choose correctly, be it friends, sexual or lifetime partners, we strengthen our sense of inner freedom, until finally we experience it at the deepest, mystical level - the profound shift in consciousness that Plato was pointing to as the highest good - which in and of itself is morally and values-neutral.

The genius of Plato is that he communicates the total commitment required to attain perfect freedom, and the moral obligation of all human beings to strive for the happiness it alone can deliver.

Plato's "Symposium" will always be read because there will always be people who question the nature of Love. Agathon's dinner party is the scene of a conversation between a small group of men, who go around the table offering their views on Love. What does Love mean to us to-day? Reading over the responses of the dinner-guests and their host, we find the same range of answers in Ancient Greece that we are likely to find now.

Phaedrus and Pausanias are utilitarians and materialists. Phaedrus looks at love between people and a proto-Burkean love for government and state. Pausanias complicates the argument, saying that there are two different kinds of love, one which is common and one which is heavenly - yet still oriented towards the real and the tangible. Eryximachus is a proto-Swedenborg, trying to reconcile or harmonize the two kinds of love.

The jewels of Plato's "Symposium" are Aristophanes and Socrates. Aristophanes gives us the profoundly moving depiction of Love as a fundamental human need, a desire for completion. For a writer of comedy, whose aim as an art form is forgiveness and acceptance, Aristophanes's explanation is no surprise, though its depth is amazing. While women are generally discounted throughout the "Symposium," not only does Socrates, as we might expect, completely astound his audience (both inside the book and out) with his progressively logical and ascendant view of Love, but he also does it through the voice of a woman, Diotima. When we realize that Socrates is a character in this fiction, and that his words originate in a woman, the egalitarianism and wisdom of Plato the author truly shines forth, like the absolute beauty he claims as the ultimate goal of Love.

Was Plato a feminist? I don't know. I do know that the "Symposium" is a tremendous book. I picked it up and did not stop reading it until I was finished. The style of the Penguin translation is smooth, with a lighthearted tone that can make you forget that you are reading philosophy. Plato's comedic masterpiece in the "Symposium" is the character of Alcibiades, who provides the work a fitting end. Get the "Symposium" and read it now. You cannot help but Love it...in a Platonic sort of way.

Perhaps the most "literary" of all Plato's works, "Symposium" is the story of a dinner party gathering of great (and a few not so great) minds, whom engage in a discussion in praise of eros, or passionate love. It is considered literary because it is highly metaphorical, it's characters are drawn well and in some cases unforgettably, and it succeeds on many levels. It is not uncommon for Socrates to elevate the subject of discussion in any given dialogue to that of our earthly existence, and how we should go about it. Perhaps shocking to readers unfamiliar with the Greeks is the prevalence of homosexual love, particularly with young boys. But, if nothing else, this is an insight into ancient culture. And the absolutely magnificent speeches given by Aristophanes and Socrates remain profound and beautiful to modern readers, regardless of whether or not the other speeches are unpalatable to some. Also, Alcibiades, drunken, hilarious rant is not to be missed. Read in a single sitting, this work is almost sublime.

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Plato's "Symposium" is the story of Agathon's dinner party where conversation takes place with a small group of men, who recline, eat and drink around a table offering their views on Love. This story is an amazing account of how intelligent and yet so different a culture the men from ancient Greece were compared to our society today. Each speaker has this most amazing ability to tell two stories at the very same time, an creative artistic movement of what love 'is' in each and every story. applying and , metaphorically. intertwining a cultural, mythological story of the gods, giving far deeper meaning. In addition to this, the love relationships and sexual nature of these men also permeate an entire cultural feel to the story, enveloping a radical differentiation from our de-mystified and de-enchanted world back into a once existing world of substantial meaning and profundity.

Phaedrus, speaks first and relates how love is the greatest good, the beautiful, is shameful of ugly things and how only lovers are willing to die for one another.

The second speaker, Pausanias, applies two types of love, one Aphrodite, a common base love working at random with men's feelings, for money, for loving physical bodies, boys, men and women. The other type of love, from a much younger goddess, being a higher type, the heavenly, who only loves other men and boy love, but this is not physical body love but from affection of the mind of virtue and wisdom..

Aristophanes has the hiccups, so it is Eryximachus, a doctor, who speaks third, applying the idea of love as a double love; "for bodily health and disease are by common consent different things and unlike, and what is unlike desires and loves things unlike." p.82 The god of art was said to implant love as a healing art, all such love guided by this god. "It is quite illogical to say that a harmony is at variance with itself or is made up of notes still at variance." "So love as a whole has great and mighty power, or in a word, omnipotence ."

Aristophanes, the comic writer, gives a moving account of Love as a absolute human need, a desire for completion to the point of each person once shaped differently being cut in half, taking our current shape, in need of the other to complete the whole of what we once were. "For first there were three sexes, not two as at present, male and female, but also a third having both together," and they were violent, strong and forceful and would even attack the gods. So Zeus and the other gods held a meeting and decided to cut them in halves and make them weaker. From then on, they were sexually drawn to one another, both heterosexual and homosexual, reasons all due to the way of the cutting of the halves.Lesbianism and boy to man love is freely spoken of and justified according to this story of the gods. His moving speech on the beauty and virtue of love however, is according to Socrates, true only in the sense of romanticism and fictional idolatrous admiration of what love should be. For Socrates found such a romantic explanation of love as untrue to what love really is and what love contains, as it does not contain all the beauty and good.

The fourth speaker, Agathon gives a moving speech on the beauty and virtue of love however, it is according to Socrates, true only in the sense of romanticism and fictional idolatrous admiration of what love should be. "For all the gods are happy . . and love is the happiest of them all being the most beautiful and best . . the youngest of gods." In his speech, love is every good, virtuosos and beautiful thing.

The last speaker, Socrates, found such a romantic explanation of love to be untrue, for what desires good, virtue and wisdom is only something that does not contain such, something lacking, and therefore lacking it desires such things. Love only desires what it lacks. Love is neither beautiful nor ugly. "To have right opinion without being able to give reason is neither to understand nor is it ignorance. Right opinion is no doubt something between knowledge and ignorance."

It is so interesting how common and free sexuality and homosexuality were, how each man present commented on the beauty of the young men in their glory of youth. Alcibiades, jealous of Agathon, also a young beautiful male, makes a moving speech how Socrates refused his love and how other like young men, also were moved with his amazing wisdom and prose.

While women are generally discounted, and the bonding of affection in male love was considered a higher love by Pausanias, Socrates explanation of love, by far the most profound, was one he received from a woman named Diotima. Here, as another reviewer has stated, shows Plato's the egalitarianism and wisdom, like that of the beauty and ultimate goal of Love.

Later a group of men crash the party and the drinking really gets started. Some leave, while Socrates stays all night, never loosing integrity from his drinking and leaves with all his integrity.

Shirley Halperin and Steve Bloom have authored the definitively written and graphically-presented book in honor of pot culture. While most citizens, whether they relate personally to cannabis or not, can recognize North America's ironic cultural embrace for a substance banned by American and Canadian governments for 70 years, authors Halperin and Bloom's expertise and rich knowledge of cannabis' intersection with music, movies and television help readily guide even novice devotees of cannabis down a path of cultural and historical enlightenment.

The book is beautifully published and provides for a comprehensive tour of cannabis, entertainment, culture and the abject failure of cannabis prohibition in modern North America.

Enjoy!

Allen St. Pierre
Executive Director
NORML
[...]

This book is great as a read on it's own or a conversation starter with friends. Want to know how to make a carrot pipe? What about making cannabutter? Not sure what kush is? This book will get you started on the never ending cannabis culture.

The one downside to a book like this is it's lifespan. While i'm sure a lot of the information will be relevant for a long time to come some of it wont. With the development of new strains, smoking techniques, and slang the only way to be up on the jargon is to be a stoner yourself.

Honestly $14 for this book is a steal. So if you want to be educated on the stoner species or you just want something to stare at while your high this book should be in your collection.

I bought this book once I heard it being advertised on 107.7 The End as one of the best marijuana books around. Each page has new, interesting information and a lot of it is related to celebrity stoners. Each day you can find something new in the book, and all my friends are in awe of the book and love to sit and read it. GREAT BOOK

light read thats totally funny and brings you back to college days. and believe it or not you learn quite a bit! sooo many songs and bands were referenced in this book....i totally heard their music in a different way. 311 fans a must read

This is the definitive guide to what Pot brought to Pop Culture and it is really amazing how ingrained it is in our society. We all know Pot won't kill you, but leave it to Halperin and Bloom to show us how pot has enhanced our lives. Like it or not, we would be lost without weed and this entertaining, enlightening and thorough look at how Pot has ingrained our society is a great read. I wish I had this when I was 15, but I had to learn all the tricks on my own. Now I just have to hide my copy from my kids....I want them to figure it out the hard way.

Not having every used WF, I have to say that Bukovics makes reading this book a breeze. He covers the aspects of the subject very well. I'm only about 1/4 into the book and I can't find any errata on Apress' website. There are a few examples I need to go through again because I am getting compile errors. However, since I'm actually typing the code straight into the IDE, I may have made some mistakes. I love the fact that all the code is presented in the book and every part of it is explained. I'm confident that thanks to Bukovics, I should have a solid grasp of WF when I'm finished with this book.

After spending more than one year on writing workflows in SharePoint 2007 environment, I am currently working on a project using Workflow in .Net 3.5 and a Window Forms environment. In this project, I have to write my own tracking and persistence services, etc. As you might know, SharePoint takes care of those services for you.

I pick up this book trying to leverage the latest technology development in .Net 3.5. After I read the first 10 chapters, I believe I did the right thing. I am really impressed by Mr. Bukovics's knowledge and insight in workflow. I also believe he is an excellent trainer.

He explains concepts clearly. The examples are simple enough so the readers do not get lost in the details. Also, he solves problems using different approaches, and then evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of those approaches. I really like this kind of methodology. I also like the style of source code printout.

I really enjoy reading the chapters about ReplicatorActivity, Local Services, Event-driven Activities, and Correlation.

In Chapter 3 Activities, the author introduces how to use NUnit to test the Custom Activities, which is very interesting. There are also quite a lot of tips like this in other chapters.

As I said before, his examples are simple enough so the reader can understand the technical feature easily. From another angle, that also means the examples are not fancy enough. To make up for this, you can also buy Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation Step by Step by Kenn Scribner, which has some interesting examples such as ATM, GPS Truck tracking, Leakage Control System. I believe that these two books complement each other.

I rate this book five stars without hesitation!

This book was absolutely fantastic! It was incredibly well written and ALL of the examples worked, without a hitch. As difficult as it is to keep current these days, Bruce has a writing style that is extremely forgiving to the reader who is constantly juggling a few different tech books at once; he is constantly reminding you about things that you have read in chapters that you may have not touched in weeks or even months. I personally like this approach, as it allows me to pick up the book and get back into it as if I'd never put it down.

In addition to his writing style, I'm very thankful of the WorkflowInstanceManager that he created and referenced throughout the book. Even though I feel that it needs more threading support, I have found the manager to be easy to use and easily extendable.

Perhaps the most valuable portion of the book was the workflow designer host that Bruce created in the final chapter. On initial skim, I never really understood how serialized workflows and a workflow designer host could benefit me. But after getting his long (but worth it) code sample up and running, it opened my eyes to many application design possibilities within my organization. The customizable designer is an invaluable tool and has saved me countless hours of R & D time.

Thanks Bruce!

I make my living as a consultant software architect/programmer and usually self-educate on newer technologies through books like this one. I've often found Apress titles to be of great value and this one does not disappoint. In Pro WF, the author takes a logical textbook approach (introducing what you should expect to learn, teaching the material, reviewing what you should have learned) as he guides you from a broad foundational understanding of the workflow framework and components through advanced topics such as persistence, serialization, web services and wcf integration. What makes this book stand out is that the author does a great job of inserting practical tips that highlight nuances of the framework that someone without prior experience would not intrinsically know.
I'm very pleased with this reference. I think you would be too.

I'm somewhat bewildered as to why such an important technology (WF) has produced an astounding dearth of good books on the subject. Thankfully, we have Mr. Bukovics' offering which would be a stand-out even if the book marketplace was full of options.

With this newer version of his book (yes, I did purchase the 3.0 version), we get very important information on (1) the two new additions to WF offered in 3.5 (2) WCF-WF integration and (3) advanced topics on Services. These topics smooth out the rough edges of WF 3.0. Comprehensive discussions of these topics, and others, are not readily available from any other source.

Therefore, this newer version of the book is a must-have; even for those, like myself, who purchased his first version.

great book on xml, specially on different kind of parsers, their purpose, advantages and weakness.

I really like reading this book. It is easy to read and understand. The author does a good job of describing the XML technologies related to JAVA. This book has a lot of code to analyze. This book is a must have for the experienced developer who wants to do JAVA with XML. I have a message for the experienced developer: THE CODE WILL CHALLENGE YOU; IT CHALLENGED ME!!!

Michael

This is definitely a valuable resource for anybody dealing with XML and Java, written by one of the best tech writers in town. The author covers in details a huge amount of topics and API, so many that you couldn't ask for more.
Be advised that some basic understanding of XML and intermediate Java skills are required to get the best out of this book

I bought this book when it first came out. I really enjoyed reading it. The book is well written. It has a lot useful code.
The author code that can be used in the real world of JAVA and XML. I liked the books section on JDOM. This book shows the differences between DOM and JDOM. Also, this book has a lot of information on SAX, DOM, JDOM, and it shows the differences when using each. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn JAVA and XML. Make sure you are an experienced developer before purchasing this book.

Michael

If only every technical book was written this well! Anyone who is working with Java and XML should have a copy of this book. Highly example driven with clear explanations, the author makes using XML in your Java programs a breeze. Even better, the author has a style that makes the book fun to read as you feel like you are learning all sorts of secrets from an XML insider.

The book starts with a quick introduction to XML and then gets into how to create XML documents in your programs. The first four chapters cover everything you need to know about creating XML whether it is for XML-RPC, SOAP, or simply to store in a file. The next section covers parsing XML documents. SAX and DOM are compared and then the next eight chapters discuss these two methods of parsing documents, explaining how to use them, comparing them, and helping you determine how to decide which technique to use for which situation. The section on DOM explains not just how to parse documents using DOM but also how to create new documents. The final chapters of the book cover JDOM, XPATH, and XSLT.

Did I mention that this book is full of examples? The author doesn't rely on simply explaining how something works or how to use a technology (even though his explanations are excellent), he has examples to demonstrate everything he discusses. Each example builds upon the previous example and makes learning the techniques easy and enjoyable.

Love him or hate him, Noam Chomsky serves a vital role to any thoughtful and/or politically minded individual in the United States today. By focusing on what you're NOT hearing from the major media sources and political powers, Chomsky engages his audiences by exhaustively cataloging his sources and letting them make their own decisions on what they need to do with the information.

This book represents some of the most accessible Chomsky that you can buy. Comprised of a series of interviews with Alternative Radio founder, David Barsamian, "Propaganda and the Public Mind" does exactly what you would expect it to do; exposing propaganda as a weapon used by the powerful, how it can be recognized, and showing the extraordinary impact normal people can have when they work towards the right sort of changes. Even while discussing grave issues, Noam manages to convey his faith that positive action is alive and well. As a lovely bonus to the interviews themselves, the resources section of the book will help you get as deeply into any of the subject matter as you dare.

I was thrilled by this book. If I were a doctor, I would prescribe an essay a day (which, unfortunately would only last a week for this book) as an antidote for the daily news.

This book in an important insight into how public figures make hay of the psyche of the populace. The less prepared we are to see and understand what's going on, the more they get away with and the more we and our children eventually pay for down the road. This book should be mandatory material at the highschool level.

Walter Jacques, Oklahoma City

This is an excellent book filled with great information about the world we live in. Chomsky is easy to understand in interview format and still gives loads of facts with logical conclusions.

For the price, this is a worthwhile book that presents a different perspective on politics and current events. Just be warned this is not an objective treatment on the science or implementation of propaganda. I was looking for a book that explored how propaganda works and is managed. Instead, the author spends a lot of time criticizing policy and those he considers the power elite. I appreciate the author's point of view but tend to discount criticism that doesn't come with proposed solutions, examples, supporting data and facts.

What differentiates this books from other's in Chomsky's canon is that it is a series of interviews, obviously, but in other ways it's an simplified guide to Chomsky's beliefs and journalistic pursuit of modern life. Chomsky is an amazing person and an excellent humanists and his insights will be sure to help you try to understand modern life better.

My first edition copy of this book is dog-eared and full of bookmarks. This is an excellent tutorial on installing and using qmail. It includes step-by-step instructions for each task involved in setting up and administering (as well as customizing) qmail. Great text. Highly recommended. You don't need to be a Linux expert to install qmail if you follow this guidebook.

Dave Sill did an excellent job of showing how to setup email server. If you know some Linux commands, you'll have no problem setup your first Linux email server. I personally prefer Dave's Qmail handbook to John Levine's Qmail (I got as well). Levine's Qmail is an great second book.

Best Linux book I ever bought!

Everything you need to know about Qmail from installation and complete configuration. There is no other book.

After a month, and hours of installing and reinstalling FreeBSD and Qmail, I finally got the mail server working right! This was my first attempt at a mail server which I use for my family members and a few friends. There are a few errors in the book in some of the scripts which did cause me many problems. That was a pain. But, even at that, I don't think I would have been able to get Qmail running without this book. It is a great book for a person like me who is always doing something a bit over my head.

I just finished setting up a mail server at home and this book really made it simple. I'm not a novice, so I can't speak to it's ease of use, but the steps were simple, and a bit verbose and repetitive, but overall the book was invaluable.

I also needed DNS and BIND to get everything working just the way I wanted, so I'd buy them both.

Tim

After reading this book over the holiday, I decided to give it a try on my new project. I applied the authors categories to business plans I needed to prepare. I have to admit that her approach made an improvement that even impressed my managers. Her questions in the appendix were also extremely useful in helping me think of more needs than I had originally thought were important. Her chapter on the parts of a requirement helped me supply the details that I would have omitted previously. Bottom line, the author makes you think allowing for better definition of product needs.

When trying to understand what information architectures are all about, this is the only book I have come across that answered all of my questions and placed the field in context with modern technologies. Unfortunately, most books on information architectures fall into two categories that miss the mark:

1. There are books written by IA experts before the internet, and the terms and viewpoint used require considerable on-the-fly translations to modern technologies.

2. There are books written by IT experts who couldn't spot an IA if it bit them on the leg. These books are fat with useless lists of IT technologies and acronyms.

Fredinandi's book is worth reading cover-to-cover, and more than once.

This is the first book about Requirements Pattern. You can easily understanding your problems after define all project's requirements. This book also provides a completes framework to categorizes and organizes the different types of requirements, forming a requirements set. It makes our project done on time and within budget. Thanks to Pat for this excellent book.

This book servers as an excellent source for gaining insight into the field of requirements engineering. Developers, Managers, Requirements Engineers and Testers could all benefit from reading this book. In addition to providing important information about requirements engineering in general, the book presents a requirement pattern framework targeted for e-business and web based applications.

This book servers as an excellent source for gaining insight into the field of requirements engineering. Developers, Managers, Requirements Engineers and Testers could all benefit from reading this book. In addition to providing important information about requirements engineering in general, the book presents a requirement pattern framework targeted for e-business and web based applications.

The book explains a simple method to analyze and rewrite a sentence. The first fifty pages felt redundant, but slowly changed my view of writing. I now don't look at copy the way I used to. I'm using the method to write this review. The typical author can cut down copy by more than 50% to clearly convey a point, while respecting the reader's attention. I found the book in the bibliography of the Nuts and Bolts of College Writing, another outstanding book.

I teach college rhetoric and composition, and I ultimately decided not to order this book for my classes. The information and explanations are as good as any I've seen in a writing handbook, but I cannot justify asking students to pay this much for a book that is essentially a supplement to another textbook. The book is short and small, and I can only imagine the students' reactions when picking up the slim little volume in the student stores and seeing the price tag. They'd be too mad to read the darn thing. I give it five stars for content, but 1 star for price. Where is the price coming from? There are few copyrighted items reprinted and no color illustrations. It's just original prose in black and white in a tiny paperback. It's absurd to charge that much! I'll be placing it on reserve.

I have the 2nd Edition with the $8.00 price tag still stuck on it. 20 years ago, this was a required text for Technical Writing. Now I'm writing my first technical book, and picked it up the other day. What a shock! It's still relevant, quick, funny, and very inspiring. How many college texts hold up that well?

Here's the thing. Revising Prose practices what it preaches. It shows how to mercilessly cut filler, sharpen your opinion, and ultimately to say what you really want to say. That it does this in much, much less than the usual 300 pages shows that it works pretty darn well.

Let's face it. You pay much more for a small diamond than a big piece of cubic zirconium. This is a true diamond of a book.

I'm working toward my MFA in creative writing, and ran across this book during editing classes for my BA years ago. It was a required text, and I wish I'd had it much earlier.

While ostensibly for business, academic or technical writing, I've found it very useful for fiction and creative non-fiction. If nothing else, it illustrates clearly how combinations of particular words create certain effects for the reader (examples of how to best confuse, bore, or torment a reader are always useful!) I've bought it as a gift for other writers, recommended it to collegues at work, and use the ideas in the Paramedic Method to "get the lard out" of all my writing. This book is useful to anyone who wants to write clearly. Like most of the better books on writing, it's also short, precise, and occasionally funny.

I have the 4th edition of this book, which is about 50 pages less than the 5th edition. The first two chapters and the appendix are excellent. The rest of the book is very repetitive, although periodically interesting. The author offers unique advice. I now wish I had ordered the 5th edition to see if the other 50 pages contains new information.

I have received but not started his "Analyzing Prose" book, which is very substantial and appears to contain similar material.

John Dunbar
Sugar Land, TX

I enjoyed every topic covered. It opened my eyes a little more on QB. It truly is the next level up from your ordinary QB programming.

The Revolutionary Guide to Qbasic is by far the best book out there for programming games in basic. It is filled with chapters on sound and graphics that nearly every other book on the market neglects to include. I make games in my spare time and until now have been picking apart other games and asking more experienced programmers how to write complex sections of code. Well, no more! This book has it all: 3-D scrolling, tile based gaming, creating music, and more. Why buy another book about how to make a loop or print data to the screen? This book it truly the best way to advance your hobby in Basic programming.

Very, very nice. Forget the petty nitpicking, this is a GREAT book for people serious about using QBasic as a programming language. If it had a true introduction to QBasic for beginners it would be the one-stop-shop for the language. As it is, though, you need to be somewhat familiar in order to appreciate just how good this book is!

This book is great. Despite one person's comment on the authors' English it is not bad. I understood it perfectly. No book will make sense if you carefully select a part that needs another paragraph to make sense. The book has a great disk of code along with info on advanced QB topics. Great book! Buy it!

This book, I feel, is the greatest QBASIC tutorial/reference ever written. It is definitely considered to me a sequel to all the other QBASIC books on the market, in that it seems to take you not only one, but many more steps ahead. I have been looking for a book with even just a little bit of advanced graphics and sound programming. Buying this book got all that and tons more. I pity all those who don't own this title!

I just finished the Poldark Saga (all 12 books) and can't recommend them enough!! I was able to secure 10 of the 12 from our local library system but had to buy the other two due to unavailability, and they are well worth their purchase price. I'm a lover of Brit lit and this series takes you to the Cornish coast and proceeds to envelop you into the lives of an engaging family and their friends and foes. Great descriptions of the coast and the weather, both of which figure greatly into the story lines, and the characters are indeed people you would enjoy knowing.

The quest for the 12 books was well worth the effort. Go forth and enjoy!!

These books have no equal in historical fiction. I have read them several times and am starting over again. The writing and character development are the best I've ever read. Start at the beginning and end with #12 - Bella Poldark - which was written a year or two before the author passed away. This series could provide a book group with material for an entire year!

I have recently been introduced to this series and started reading books which were originals from the 40's. It is a wonderful series and I have now read 10 of the novels and wish it would never end. Great piece of history and family. It is so nice to be able to read "new" books, even though I enjoyed the yellowed pages of the old ones I have. Don't miss it! Also have the BBC Video set which is in black in white, but interesting, none-the-less.

In 1783, Ross Poldark, the title character to the opening volume (published in 1945) of the magnificent Poldark series, the great undertaking of Cornish writer Winston Graham's ninety-three-year life, is first introduced to us as a young man in his early twenties, a de-commissioned infantry officer, recently returned from the brutality of the War of Rebellion in Colonial America. Given up for dead and in fact wounded almost to the point of death, Poldark returns to his native Cornwall, a scarred, limping figure, still spirited but aged and hardened by the horrors of war. Grimly, the adventurous risk-taker Poldark discovers his father, the local squire and something of a lothario, is dead, his fiancée, Elizabeth, believing Ross killed in combat, is now engaged to wed Ross' cousin, Francis, and that an ambitious family of rising commercial entrepreneurs, the Warleggans, are in the process of trying to persuade Ross's uncle to sell them the mines that would have been Ross's has his father's will been penned without the apparent tragedy of his son's death foremost in his mind. The story spreads like the branches of a massive tree and before the conclusion of this, volume one, we come to meet the sort of characters that will never be forgotten, and find ourselves witness to scenes and situations that stir the imagination.

What separates the dozen Poldark novels from so many other historical works is firstly the intricate, good-natured, involving plotline Graham sustained throughout the sixty years he was writing about these characters, but above that, there is within each Poldark work a sense that one is entering a past time, not merely reading of it. Life as Graham writes in any of these books is a near three-dimensional voyage two hundred years backward, and he leaves few stones unturned. When one reads these novels one learns about the mining industry of the era, the banking industry, social customs, warfare, and contemporary attitudes on an encyclopedic range of subjects. One witnesses the rise of Methodism, and grasps its role as an outlet to quell ill-will among the English lower classes, as nothing did among the violent-minded masses of 1780's France. Graham tells us what people in those times wore, ate, drank, what they would have felt, witnessed, heard, smelled, thought, and feared. He takes a modern person into what might very well be described as a psychological/sociological time machine. These books boil with the gamut of human emotion and passion, from hate to lust, to love, to desire for all manner of possessions.

Ross Poldark and the eleven other novels that follow it are storytelling at its old-fashioned greatest, and this book launches what I truly feel is the greatest historical saga in the English language.

This is the first Poldark novel introducing Ross Poldark, Cornwall mining owner/farmer/squire and his extended family.

I especially enjoyed listening to the audiotapes narrated by
Tony Britton; his chararcters' accents are humorous and entertaining. I love the Poldark series and after I read or
listen to all the novels I'd like to see the videos.

Wonderful stories and characters, highly enjoyable. Hard to
put down.