Languages Books

Nonfiction Matters by Stephanie Harvey is a great resource for any teacher with a low self efficacy about teaching writing. The book is a very easy read and organized so that it can be easily referenced when teaching any part of the writing process. Her enthusiasm for teaching nonfiction writing and her excellent lesson ideas make teaching students how to write good nonfiction seem possible. The lessons and instructional strategies are diverse and can be used to meet the needs of all students. With Stephanie Harvey's help you won't have to read another piece of boring nonfiction produced by your students again. This book helps you learn how to teach your students to explore their passions in creative and authentic ways.

This book transformed the way we teach reasearch at our school. Our students can't wait to dig deeply into subjects and share what they've learned with others. We've truly become a community of learners and the tools and encouragement in this book helped to make that happen. I re-read it every year.

Nonfiction Matters by Stephanie Harvey is a great book that not only gives teachers great ideas on how to teach nonfiction writing, but also on how to learn along with the students by inquiring about real things in life anyone of them might have an interest in.
I recommend this book to any teacher who is willing to take the challenge and transform her / his classroom into what every classroom in the world should be. Teachers will find new incentives to motivate their students along with simple economic ideas that will get their students writing passionate, interesting nonfiction papers everyone will want to read.

Every middle-grade teacher should own this book! It is such a relief to find a book by an author who clearly knows how to engage students in authentic, "real world" material. Not only is this book enjoyable to read, but it actually shows you how to jump in and make nonfiction reading work for your students--or your children--wherever they may be on the ability spectrum.

I think it can be difficult to teach things which we intuitively do well, and many teachers are good readers. This book is marvelous, because it refuses to advocate a painful, repetitive break-down of dull practice skills. Instead, it shows teachers and parents how to explicitly address skills within a meaningful context. That is so critical! For example, the book talks about readers making connections, and recognizing types of connections, including text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world. Making connections is not a new idea for reading teachers, but these categories are great for making non-fiction accessible.

The ideas and strategies in the book are motivating and inspiring, if overwhelming. The author's journey is really that of a continuing learner, and it was so valuable to me to read about her overflowing ideas and philosophies and strategies, as well as the way she handled roadblocks with colleagues and students.

I love that this author has the courage to present teaching as a "messy" art and science. It doesn't pretend there is one right answer or one right method or one right kind of student or teacher. It recognizes the complexity of so many variables coming together--ability, interest, personality--and acknowledges and addresses these variables, instead of pretending they don't exist.

This is a book for thinking, reflective teachers, and it's good.

I just had this book assigned to me for my upcoming course in Materials for Teaching Reading. The semester hasn't even started yet, and I have devoured this book. Stephanie Harvey has done an incredible job of breaking down the process of reading, writing, and researching nonfiction in such a way that I really feel prepared to go out and start teaching it. Not only am I prepared, I am EXCITED! I can't wait to implement what I have learned in my future classes, as well as in my own life journey of continued learning and research. Not only is there great information, the book is written in a very readable, interesting manner, a good example of good nonfiction writing.

The latest research and opinions on nonverbal communication skills are examined in a fine survey for coaches, business leaders and workers alike, with chapters telling how to understand and speak body language to take advantage of workplace atmosphere. Chapters offer analysis of this language, and use black and white photos to analyze and provide examples of common body language.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

I don't usually review books very often but this is undoubtly the best book on body language that I have read. I usually feel that it is a waste of my time to read this type of book. It is one of those nothing new, I have read it all before type feelings. This book was different. It was clear, included more body language and exceptions. Very interesting and entertaining with the photos and cartoons. A guick read and you actually learn things to watch for and try, including your own bad body language.

The Nonverbal Advantage is one of the best books I have read on understanding body language and explaining how to use it in the real world. The book is accurate, concise and provides a guide that will work for the professional and the student.

This book is a great addition to the working library of any Project Manager, Manager and any professional who needs to work with people.

Well worth the time to read. Pictures were helpful, but the most useful were the exercises that were interspersed throughout the book. My guess is that most people are unconsciously competent in the reading of nonverbal expressions. This book helps you get to "back" to a conscious competent and then to use the experience to read others.

Clearly one of the most important works I've read in recent memory. With personal interactions giving way to increasingly high tech "touch points" (email, telephone conferences, IM/text messaging, blogs, wikis, social networks, etc.) I fear we might be losing an innate ability to communicate on a deep, personal level.

"The Nonverbal Advantage" makes up for this shortcoming with powerful, easy to understand techniques anyone can quickly master to enhance their personal and professional communications.

I have been fascinated by the simplicity and usefulness of the
Object-Process Methodology paradigm and approach expressed in the book. As a
researcher in Science Education I have been grappling with how to represent
complex, technology-enhanced educational systems that involve humans,
processes and educational artifacts. OPM and the OPCAT software enclosed
were very instrumental in enabling me to model and represent the "big
picture" of educational systems I developed. With OPM I was then able to
gradually refine portions of the system to any desired level of detail.
The applicability of OPM to IT-intensive educational systems is a testimony
to the generic nature of the methodology and to the fact that it is useful
in so many domains. The combination of a single simple graphical model that
generates natural language on the fly is really unique and valuable. I
wholeheartedly recommend the book to anyone interested in modeling complex
systems, be they of technological, economical, or social nature. The method
is straightforward, easy to learn even for non IT-professionals, and most
rewarding in terms of the quality and clarity of the resulting graphical and
textual model.

This book describes how Object-Process Methodology (OPM) CASE can be used as a tool for generating complete system intent specifications by graphical object diagrams, precise semantic and syntactic language, and intuitive symbols, definitions and structures. As systems have become more complex, a prevalent problem in systems development has been the number of accruing errors. These errors can cause catastrophic failure in the worst-case in addition to intolerable schedule delays and cost overruns. Introducing errors as well as difficulty finding and successfully correcting them occurs because of the lack of proper analysis and design tools for complex system specifications. OPM has the attributes to mitigate against the possibility of system failure, providing comprehensive visibility for better schedule and cost control in product development. It enhances reuse of system modules, processes and software routines in different contexts, while reducing the chance of errors. OPM automatically generates intent specifications that are readily understood by both customers and product team members and are translatable to machine control subsystems. OPM is a holistic systems paradigm that extends the Object-Oriented (OO) paradigm and overcomes its major shortcomings by integrating system structure and behavior in a single integrated graphic and natural language model. OPM successfully tackles the task of development and lifecycle management of systems, products and projects. OPM is a significant extension of and a major departure from the OO approach. It incorporates the system static-structural and dynamic-procedural aspects into a single, unified model. Presented as a concise visual formalism by a set of Object-Process Diagrams (OPD set), it is automatically translated into a set of Object-Process Language (OPL) script, a subset of natural English. At the basis of the OPM philosophy is the observation that to faithfully and naturally analyze and design systems in any domain, processes, like objects, should be considered as stand-alone "things" (entities) that are not necessarily encapsulated within objects. This detachment and de-coupling of processes from objects emphasizes the duality and complementarity of objects and processes, and opens the door for structure-behavior unification. At any point in time, objects exist with some structure and state. This is the static aspect of the system. Processes affect objects by changing their states. This is the dynamic aspect of the system. System complexity is managed through a number of graphical scaling options: zooming into and out of processes, unfolding and folding objects, and expressing or suppressing object states. These mechanisms provide for selectively detailing a subset of things while still maintaining the high-level context of the details.

OPM provides a new framework for specifying design intents and capturing the complexity of hardware and software interaction. Through OPL, it is possible to translate the process into a machine executable code. In addition, OPM can capture the dynamic behavior of the hardware attributes and software states in a single integrated graphical and textual language that is understandable by domain experts who have no programming experience. These traits of OPM ease the development effort for evaluating the system reliability during the design stages. Simulation and testing protocols can be automatically generated though future extensions of OPM to reduce lengthy system verification efforts.
The main benefit of OPM is its ability to identify system objects, processes, and the relationships among them in a structured way. The resulting OPD set becomes an excellent framework for identifying how to implement structural and procedural improvements. The resulting OPL script provides a well-defined set of existing and future specifications for the system. The ability to freely switch from text to graphics and back is of great value to understanding the system as a whole with a single graphic and textual model, without the need to consult various models and carry out mental transformation among these various models.
Based on my personal experience, the following points highlight the benefits OPM can bring to the particular projects described in this paper.
1. OPM is an excellent way to represent daily activities, products, processes and other complex things
2. OPM has allowed representing the complete system with its various aspects in a single model. The model specifies the systems function, structure and behavior aspects without sacrificing clarity.
3. OPM can be used as a common language to exchange design among members of a team.
4. Since OPM design is visual and textual at the same time, it is easy to explain the design.
5. OPL is very easy to generate from OPD
6. OPM will be a good tool for documenting the existing processes and as ISO documentation.

I have used many methodologies over my career. Most of them are based around the object-oriented and structured design paradigms. I found out about OPM quite by accident about a year ago. I've been using it ever since. I have used it to model both hardware and software systems, as well as for business process modeling. It is an excellent methodology and I recommend it for anyone developing any kind of system.

One of the nice things about OPM is that it is easy: I was able to get a team "up-and-running" with the methodology in less than an hour of teaching them some basic concepts (try doing that with UML). Another feature is that you can use this for any type of project; you are not locked into a structured or object-oriented mindset like structured analysis or UML. OPM can handle both types of concepts with ease.

Finally, this methodology is fast. It is just easier and more intuitive to model in an OPM fashion. I've also found that others can comprehend the OPM models better than other methodologies too.

I used to be a UML advocate until I found OPM. I have found concepts that are difficult to model in UML are quite easy to model in OPM. It is just more flexible.

The book is really good by the way. It is very complete and gives plenty of good exammples. I congratulate Dov Dori and his team for providing something that all engineering disciplines can use to design their systems.

OPM is a methodology for modeling systems, technical as well as any other system. In the techical world it compares with UML. OPM is designed with consistant and simple notations, uses simple rules that when combined can be used to model any system (real or informational) to any level of complexity that is desired by the system architect. Also, it integrates object modeling and process modeling in one diagram (although you can still keep them separate if you wanted).

UML uses complex rules to model complex systems, something that is very difficult to make happen, therefore it is very difficult to learn and use. OPM uses simple rules and consistant notations to model complex systems. After simple introductions to the methology, we have been able to start using it in our organization. More powerful and far simpler then UML. The way UML should have been done long time ago.

There is an eternal debate between system designers
and architects of software, products and large systems:
Is it ever possible to show structure (the arrangement
of objects) and system behavior (over time) in the same
representation? Dov Dori's book shows convincingly that it can
be done. Particularly powerful is the duality between
graphical system representation and natural language.
Also, the CD-ROM with OPCAT software allows one to follow
the examples in the book and apply OPM directly to a project.
The book is clearly written and will appeal to engineers,
computer scientists and software developers. A refreshing
contrast to the traditional way of looking a object-centered
systems architecting. This begs for more ... in terms of
connecting OPM to other tools such as Design Structure Matrices,
but also for representing highly complex systems over >2 levels
of decomposition.

This book is intended for graduate students of English who might need to acquire a reading knowledge of Old English for their studies, but who are not necessarily knowledgeable in Indo-European linguistics or familiar with archaic, highly inflected languages.

The author begins with a simplified but fairly comprehensive grammar of Old English which runs about 40 pages, and covers pronunciation; an explanation of gender, number, and case(s); the forms of the definite and relative articles; strong and weak verbs; adjectives; nouns; additional sections dealing with more advanced declensions/conjugations of nouns and verbs; and i-umlaut.

I read the grammar several times initially, and returned to re-read several times as I progressed through the readings, to review some of the concepts. As an earlier reviewer noted, you don't want to rush through the introductory grammar in your haste to get to the Old English texts; only confusion and frustration will ensue.

I should note in respect to pronunciation that Prof. Diamond uses distinctive symbols to denote palatalized C and G, which allows the beginner to avoid having to check the rules constantly to determine if a given C or G needs to be palatized in its environment within a word. This allows the student to pronounce Old English with confidence from the beginning, and I found that I quickly internalized the use of palatalized C and G using this method.

The readings are interesting and challenging. They are printed with Old English on the left- and Modern English on the right-hand page, allowing the student to plunge right into reading Old English without memorizing long vocabulary lists, with minimal flipping back to the glossary. The readings are graded, increasing in complexity of grammar and vocabulary as one progresses, and also incorporate fewer word-for-word translations as the student is guided into Old English poetry; this makes the student work harder on translations as he/she advances through the readings, and prevents excessive reliance on the Modern English.

There is a full glossary in the back, which includes all divergent verb and noun forms for the student's convenience. For example, it lists "seoles", the genitive singular of "seolh"; and "slog", the preterite singular of "slean". For a beginner, these situations might otherwise be nightmarish, trying to feverishly determine the infinitive of the verb or nominative singular of the noun, sufficient to look it up and find its meaning.

This book fulfilled my fondest hopes, allowing me to gain a reading knowledge and proper pronunciation of Old English in a relatively short period of time, and I highly recommend it.

This is the first Old English grammar I studied, nearly 25 years ago, and it remains perhaps the best one-volume introduction to Old English around. Concise, simple, and accessible, this text has both a reader and a grammar in one cover, containing selections from the major Old English poems and prose works.

The prose works include 'The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan', selections from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the preface by Alfred the Great to the medieval work on Pastoral Care by Pope Gregory. There are relatively few Old English prose works that have survived into the present day; there are even fewer authentically Old English pieces, as many Old English prose works are in fact translations of Latin pieces, and for some reason adapted their grammar to the Latin original rather than the Old English natural pattern.

The poetry exhibits the paired-verse pattern (although the translations accompanying them do not strive to keep the metrical pattern). The poetry include majors works such as Caedmon's Hymn, The Battle of Brunanburg, The Battle of Maldon, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, maxims, riddles, and other poems. There is no Beowulf contained here, nor any other heroic poems (such as Deor), as Diamond states that these are the most likely follow-up readings after one gains a grounding in Old English, and the poems contained here are often overlooked by students save for the most dedicated of scholars.

The texts here are normalised to Early West Saxon dialect, with a grammar very simplified; concepts are introduced that are directly useful for the texts contained herein. The glossary is similarly normalised, and cross-referenced for various verb forms and other vocabulary links such as prefixes and alternatives. In a remarkable insight on how students use texts, Diamond states that, for the purposes of this introductory text, notes have been eliminated, as students rarely refer to them anyway. The section on metrics introduces the five principle types of verses, as well as some minor variations.

Diamond includes a brief bibliography with dictionaries, grammars, commentaries and more; this is now somewhat out of date, but also shows the slow pace at which some aspects of Old English scholarship proceed, with references going back to volumes published in the late 1800s.

A very useful and fun text from which to learn!

I bought both Prof. Diamond's Old English Grammar and Prof. Baker's Introduction to Old English after checking them out from my local library. They are both excellent works, but I prefer Prof. Diamond's book for a couple of reasons.

First, although trivial, I have learned other inflected languages such as Greek and Latin and they always present noun declensions for the various cases in the following order: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, etc. Prof. Diamond presents noun declensions in the same way while Prof. Baker's book presents them in the order nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, etc. It throws me off just enough to be irritating when I am trying to memorize the case endings.

Second, as mentioned in other reviews, Prof. Diamond presents translations with each text. This makes it possible to learn a few words and them jump straight into the texts without having to guess whether or not you understood the various pieces.

Prof. Baker's book has its merits such as its companion website and its more detailed discussion of grammar, but I would recommend starting to learn Old English with Prof. Diamond's book.

One more point - if you are considering buying both keep in mind that many of the literary samples in both overlap so if you buy Prof. Baker's book you should buy it because you want a better understanding of grammar not because you want more samples of Old English.

I was lucky enough to take Old English, Old Norse and Beowulf in old English from Dr. Diamond at the University of Nevada, Reno. What a wonderful teacher... His book was a wonderful introduction to Old English.

A must for all Asatru Folk who need to learn Old English. The smart idea the writer has is to skip the Latin transations and to only use poems written in Old English, this way you learn the words as well as the grammer. Wyatt Kaldenberg

If you buy just one Oracle Java book, this is the one to buy!Just the tuning chapter is well worth the price.

Also covers Java stored procedures, EJB programming, servlets and JSP. I liked the conciseness of the book.

Rarely one comes across a book so complete as this one. What I liked the most in the book was COMPLETENESS in its discussion. Must say that the author is very precise and consistent in his approach for all topics throughout the book. Just like Mr. Tom Kyte, (Does he need any introduction?), the author too does not hesitate in sharing his personal preferences on dos and don'ts and also shares his personal preferences on the books for advance readings. Advance Java Programmers might be little disappointed if they evaluate book from Java Programming perspective alone but the book is mainly related to JDBC programming for the Oracle Environment and he has covered much more than that for that matter.I must say that for quite sometime I was looking for a book of exactly this kind, and sure this has found a permanent place in my bookshelf now.A brilliant work by Jason Price, will look for more such books from him in future!

I wish more books were written like this. Price did a nice job of balancing depth with usability as well as explaining JDBC standard features with Oracle JDBC specific extensions (and their performance characteristics). It was a very quick read yet I didn't feel slighted in any way. I can see referencing this text frequently as I occasionally require to tap into more Oracle specific features from within Java (JDBC) applications.

I've been programming with Java and Oracle for about 3 years now, and this book shines the light on things like best practices when using Java and Oracle together. This book is a must have if you are using Java and Oracle: kind of like the Thomas Kyte book "Expert-one-on-one" is now.

This book teaches you not only how to do things, but _why_ you want to do things a certain way. Because of that, this book is streets ahead of anything else available on Java and Oracle - even the other Oracle Press Java books.

This book even teaches you how to use JDeveloper to create Java programs.

If you're a newby or an expert, this book will be useful when using Java and Oracle together.

I spent quite some time reading through the various books on Java programming and Oracle, and this book really stood out as being the best. It covers everything you need: SQL, PL/SQL, Java, JDBC, and J2EE components (EJB, servlets, and JSP). It even covers how to use JDeveloper. I highly recommend this book.

Measure twice, cut once. This proverb is a sample of the master carpenter's wisdom, which I would not disregard. But there is perhaps even a better wisdom for such tasks.

I knew an uneducated man, formal education ended in the sixth grade, a good part of his youth behind a mule, and in his young manhood giving service under General McArthur in Pacific island warfare. I don't think he weighed 130 pounds dry at age 65. But he taught me an immense amount as a master carpenter in his late years, overlooking my efforts while working in his home shop, helping me directly to improve my own home and its furniture.

What Virgil taught me was, cut twice, first on scrap then on final. He kept a bucket of scrap pieces of wood ready to run through the table saw, jointer, or router, before running through the final production piece in the work.

There are delicate refinements which only the observant and humble souls initially acquire. When they share these with us, we are immensely blessed.

The Plain Reader is a collection of articles that once appeared in the magazine "Plain". Its authors are comprised of individuals with varying philosophies on the virtues of a simple life. Some articles are written by Quakers, Amish and Brethren. There are also articles by homesteaders, authors of several books, and others.

Since the authors come from so many different backgrounds, the articles aren't always compatible. For example, several of the articles are extremely anti-technology, anti-electricity, anti-competition, anti-public school education, etc., whereas others espouse the use of some of these things in moderation.

To me, extremism in any direction is the antithesis of simplicity, which, after all, is what this book is supposed to be about. Still, the book is correctly subtitled "Essays on Making a Simple Life" - it is essays by different people, with different backgrounds and different beliefs about what constitutes a simple life. It is an educational read, not only about simplicity, but also about how certain groups view the rest of the world.

This selection of essays should be on the bedside table -- and read -- by everyone who claims to want to simplify their life. The truth is, many of us (Baby Boomers, Yuppies, BoBos et al) would like to live a simple life, provided we could still have all the amenities we've grown accustomed to -- cars (but nothing flashy), television (but not cable, of course), movies (art on film), designer clothes (but simple ones), gourmet food (we'll grow the herbs ourselves), computers/Internet access (well, it's just a modern typewriter/telephone and what a research tool!)

Savage and his friends claim that the techno life most of us lead is actually simpler than the lives they lead. In the techno life, we can do away with too much interaction with others. We separate ourselves with complications. We can live in virtual reality, paring down the complications (human beings) into abstracts. We can have friends around the world, although we might not know our neighbors names. We can amuse ourselves, filling our time with fantastic games, entertaining TV, music from around the world. What's wrong with that? It may be that life is so short, and we are spreading ourselves so thin, with all the possibilities at our finger tips, we may be missing real life completely.

They claim the simple life is actually the more complicated life, with all the mess and difficulties of living in a small community, having to rely on neighbors (who we might not even like) for help, raising our own foods, finding ways to entertain ourselves and our families that might involve planting, sewing, talking, writing, singing, and being in the moment (without the new agey spin to it).

Without lecturing, this collection of articles from The Plain Reader newspaper (subscribers are limited to 5,000 in order to keep it small and hand-made) motivates, illuminates and educates us.

Although the authors are generally Luddites, Quakers, Mennonites and other plain living folks, living sans TV, Nintendo, radio, daily newspapers, ownership of automobiles, etc., the articles are not judgmental of those of us still living in the consumer world. And let's be honest -- as much as we claim we want the simple life, here we are, you and I, writing and reading reviews, and buying books over the Internet! We're mentioned in the book, sympathetically.

In an interview with Jerry Mander, the Plain editor says, "..but I have never had anyone say to me, 'No, no get away from me. These issues aren't important to me. I like being a machine.' On the contrary, in every case where I've spoken heart-to-heart about my concerns, they've turned around and said, 'You know, I, too, have a real sense of unease about what I'm doing. I think I do watch too much television. I do feel controlled by it,' etc.

Now if I were to wag my finger at them, or organize activities to "wake them up," appealing to their minds, they would simply hold more tightly to their stake in the dominant culture. When I tell them my fears and failings, I've not had a single person fail to respond. And so I do believe this is how we're going to reach people. Our magazine reaches people by dissolving their fear, by encouraging others with what we're doing."

And so this book encourages us, with examples of what the plain folk, some once Bobos like thee and me, are doing. It almost pains me to read it, for I fall far short of the pure and simple thoughts in here. And yet there's hope -- I may not give up everything, but I can question, and make changes in how I live my life.

Mary Ann Laiser writes of The Media-Free Family; Bill Duesing has thoughts on "Leaving Money Behind; and Art Gish speaks of 'Food We Can Live With."

Even if you're not ready to leave it all behind, this is a wonderful book to read. So thought provoking, it may inspire you to question some of what you're doing, what you're allowing your children to do (I'm speaking to myself, here!) and how even small changes can be made. We bought one copy, but now we need more to pass along!

Can be read bit by bit, or at one sitting. Use a marker, or bookmarks. The woodcut illustrations by Mary Azarian are simple, but beautiful (better even than the cover.)

A wonderful view of the world without all the gadgets we think are necessary. A great way to live and belong in the world. As a Christian I think we could do without alot of the junk the world thinks we need. Thanks for a great book.

This is one of those days when I am feeling terribly blessed because I was able to buy a copy of The Plain Reader Essays on Making a Simple Life - Edited by Scott Savage. This is one of those books if you can find a copy I recommend you buy it. It is out of print, so I think the only places you can find a copy are via used books or small new booksellers who may have a copy stuck away somewhere.

So what makes this book a gem? Well, for one thing it is a series of articles on a variety of topics, written by a lot of simple living folks on subjects that those seeking or living a simple life will really appreciate. One might even say its a great book to have next to your bedside so you can read something short, and encouraging before going to sleep.

I have purchased several markets development books and this one beats them all. It has a fantastic overview of the markets, the language is awesome & the detailed instructions on how you can build your system ground up is fabulous. I'd recommend it to everyone from Beginner to a Pro - "A must buy !!"

For me, just beginning in this field, this book is a gem.
It has great explanations of the lingo/structure of the financial markets as well as useful code examples.

'Practical .NET for Financial Markets' by Samir Jayaswal is a very specialized book for all financial developers. Laid out over 9 chapters with 500+ pages of detail this is a wonderfully written reference for this niche market.

If you are a .NET developer in the financial industry you owe it to yourself to pick up this great resource!

***** RECOMMENDED

This text is excellent in what it sets out to do and five other reviewers have said so with 5 star ratings. I agree very much with the reviews of Ted Hrudz and Gulli Ellee, in particular - they are well said and spot on. I think I must make a few comments of my own, however. I have managed financial software projects in the last seven years and have experience in developing and implementing capital and money market securities software, and prior experience in implementing equity software, so I have some background and interest in this area.

First the positives: This books succeeds enormously at providing a very good introduction to equity markets and front and back office software development from a .NET development lead, architect or developer perspective. In less than 500 pages the authors manage to provide a very good and reasonably comprehensive/broad tutorial in several aspects of financials as well as .NET and the book makes reasonably easy reading for such technical subjects. Most of the relevant and interesting topics are covered or touched on. The reviewers I mention above itemize most of the .NET and financials topics covered so I will spare you the repetition.

The authors are obviously very knowledgeable in both the securities domain and the .NET architecture and development technologies and issues and convey their knowledge expertly. This book makes an excellent introduction (but ironically advanced/intermediate in several respects) to the domain concepts and requisite architectural/developmental .NET features. Having said that let me add that you will need more than this book if you seriously plan to undertake financial software development with .NET. You may need to supplement your knowledge in both areas with some of these books, depending what you already know or have been involved in:

Securities/Electronic Payments Domain: 1. Securities Operations: A Guide to Trade and Position Management by Michael Simmons; 2. Corporate Actions by Michael Simmons; 3. After the trade is made by David M. Weiss, Revised 2006 Edition; 4. How the US Securities Market Works by Hal McIntyre (2nd Edition); 5. Gobal Securities Operations by Jeremiah O'Connor; 6. Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners by Larry Harris; 7. An Introduction to Financial Technology by Roy S. Freedman. 8. You may also need to understand Secure Electronic Payment Systems (see texts by Weidong Kou, Mostafa Hashem Sherif)

Technology (.NET Framework, Visual Studio & SQL mainly) : Books by some of the best authors such as 1. Juval Lowy and Alex Ferrara (.NET 3.5, SOA/WCF, Web Services, Remoting, Messaging, Application Logging, Threading, Component-based/Distributed Architectures, Application Security Design, etc.); 2. Chris Sells (Windows Forms in VS 2005); 3. David Sceppa, Brian Noyes, Fabrice Marguerie or David Ratz(ADO.NET 2.0/3.5/Data Binding or LINQ); 4. Stephen Walther, Alessandro Gallo, Cristian Darie, Marco Bellinaso (ASP.NET 2.0/3.5 and AJAX); 4. Nick Rozanski (Software Systems Architecture); 6. Itzik Ben Gan (MS SQL 2005-8); 7. Secure Coding against hacker attacks using books by Gary McGraw/Billy Hoffman/Michael Howard such as 'The 19 Deadly Sins Of Software Security'; to explore such topics in greater detail.

I think the author could have added the equivalent VB.NET code for VB developers and architects. That is the main beef I have (and the book is a bit too expensive, buy it online for a rebate. It should have been paper back to reduce the price for readers) but I still thinks it deserves a 5-star ranking . Bravo to Samir Jayaswal and Yogesh Shetty, the authors!

The authors' experience building a .NET application for a trading house shows. As a result I learned a little about the domain & saw several well written "how to" .NET examples based on it.

Two negatives might be worth considering before spending a fair amount of money. First, not much (anything?) about building high performance applications. Lots of talk about needing performance in the securities market, little in the way of delivery. Second, the book is based on .NET 1.X "best practices". The chapter on 2.0 reads like a last minute techno-tour.

I found this book very useful if you want to develop a solid, feature-rich web application. It provides a review of all technologies needed to piece together your own solution, using always components/frameworks that are well entrenched in the development community. Not only you will get an understanding of the back-end architecture(PHP, Zend_Framework, Smarty, MySQL) but you will also get to learn how to tie in your front-end components (Ajax, JavaScript, CSS, JSON) in a seamless application.

I see this book as a very good manual for a CS class in LAMP web development.

Este libro, es excelente para personas las cuales hemos trabajado mucho con aplicaciones para internet, pero que estamos interesado en el web 2.0, ajax y el mundo del MVC.

Hasta el momento no tengo quejas sobre este libro, y creo que no la tendré, aunque tengo que mencionar, que deberian explicar que el libro hace uso de Zend Framework y que sin el seria dificil aplicar Web 2.0 basandonos en el libro.

CodeIgniter es mi framework para desarrollo, pero ahora que el libro me introduce hacia Zend Framework creo que tengo mas posibilidades, si eres alguien que desea aprender Zend Framework, introducirte en el mundo del web 2.0, creo que este es el libro perfecto.

This book is outstanding. Not only does it guide you through on building online applications but it also drags you through the Zend PHP framework. I would recommend this book to anyone is going down the path of becoming a fantastic PHP developer. It is a good resource.

I have been working with PHP for several years now yet the first part of this book had me pulling my hair out (whats left of it). Setting up the environment is tricky and it probably would of helped me if I had a stronger background in OO programming. With that said, this is a good book and I would recommend it to any intermediate level PHP developer.

This is an excellent book and I have enjoyed reading it over the past day. For someone trying to piece together the various technologies like Auth, ACL, Config, Logging and Session it's a great resource for the first several chapters, going into detail about the configuration and setup of this simple environment without any of that padding and guff that a lot of other authors include. The book doesn't treat you like an idiot, which I certainly appreciated.

The only issue I would raise is that the Author has used his own classes for database Table access instead of employing the frameworks standard Zend_Db_Table and Zend_Db_Table_Row bases. This means that anyone wanting to adhere closely to the Zend Framework (for corporate reasons) will have to reverse engineer the approaches used. An odd choice for a book almost entirely based on the Zend Framework.

I couldn't put this book down, it hooked me from the Prologue, and engaged me to the end, luring me with the twists and surprises, and moving me wonderfully with the writing - sometimes causing me to pause and then turn back the pages to see how she had carried me, the reader, from there to here. Breath-taking in parts, like when riding in an airplane and the plane is losing altitude.

The Price of Silence has gotten very good reviews as a page-turning, intriguing, very creative psychological thriller. New reviews emerged with the publishing of the paper back in June 2008. At the same time the Italian translation, Il prezzo del silenzio, was released in Italy, to great acclaim. The author as you might guess from her name, Camilla Trinchieri, is Italian American. Her father was Italian. She spent years working in Italy, and is fluent in Italian. Covered by multiple radio interviews, newspapers and magazines stories, the launch of the Italian book has received a lot of attention. For more information about the author visit www.camillatrinchieri.com, and keep an eye out for her next book!

A mystery set in New York City, the main characters, a family of three, all present their own perception of events as the story unfolds. The novel jumps from the present to the past and from various locales with such fluidity of motion that you hardly notice. The main characters are all focused around the murder of a young Chinese girl, An-ling Huang. Things are not as they seem as the story begins in a New York court room, where the mother and wife of the story, Emma, is one trial for her murder. This is certainly not your traditional "mystery," as the victim is made known immediately at the start of the story. What is gripping about this novel is how the story retraces the actions of the main characters, who all too easily begin to realize the price of each of their silences.

The novel, written first in English (and also translated into Italian), is masterfully written -- the story compelling and identifiable. You will marvel at how adept Trinchieri is at shifting the points of view of the story between the characters (each chapter or even subsections of a chapter are told from the point of view of different characters) as well as the temporal setting and physical locations within the novel. What is unique about this work is how the story bucks the trend of the traditional linear "beginning to end" who-dunnit. Trinchieri is no slave to tradition and manipulates time and place to heighten the drama as events unfold, which, I might add, builds and then finally climaxes as all is revealed.

Another interesting aspect of this work is how the victim is introduced to the reader. She is not simply a corpse, but an active player in the story -- seen different by each of the major and minor characters. Not only does it add depth and intrigue to the work, it also forces the reader to decide for him/herself which persona of the victim is the most accurate. This only leaves the reader wanting more!

I highly recommend this edgy and creative work. You won't be disappointed!

In Manhattan Emma Perotti teaches English as a second language. Five years ago, Chinese immigrant An-ling Huang signed up to attend Emma's ESL class. Emma felt the frightened young girl's loneliness and overall defenselessness. Emma suffers from guilt from an incident involving the death of her other child as an infant. She has hidden her culpability from her husband Tom for years. she brings An-ling into her family.

Whereas An-ling thrives on her teacher's motherly attention; Tom is irate and resents the intruder; An-ling perceives his loathing Emma while Tom's teenage son Josh forges his own special relationship with her. However, when An-Ling is found suffocated to death, Emma is arrested. During her trial secrets the Perotti conceal from one another and that of the deceased Chinese woman surface.

This is an exciting family drama as guilty secrets lead to an implosion. The story line is fast paced from the moment Emma feels that helping the vulnerable An-ling will give her some solace from what she accidentally did years earlier to her little girl. Although the climax feels too easy, readers will appreciate this look at relationships when lies are key elements of the foundation.

Harriet Klausner

I am recommending this book to everyone. It is not only wonderfully conceived and written, it is so different from the ordinary mystery. Combining original characters, psychological insight, and a page-turning plot, it cannot be put down. What's coming up next?

A thoughtful beautifully told taut psychological novel with each of the characters drawing the reader into their innermost thoughts and secrets. All building up to a exciting ending. A must read - you'll definitely enjoy this book. Kathy F. New York City

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