Proxies Books

All the characters in the book are so real, they remind me of a lot of people that I know. From the first sentence to the last, the book keeps you guessing. Will there be a sequel I wonder. I hope so. Lets encourage the author by supporting him. Buy this exciting and humorous book. You'll be glad you did.

It is too bad that a big name critic has not reviewed this book. So many more people would have the opportunity to read this exciting, fun story. Get a copy while it is still available.

Chapter 13, titled MANSFIELD, is only two pages long, but it is packed with dynamite dialogue and descriptions of the room called THE CLOSET. Do yourself a favor. Read it !

The high-profile Law Firm of Daniels & Rumm, with its wonderful characters like Jacq Daniels, Jarvis Rumm, Marcus Lambrusco, Sherry Weinstein, Gina Collins and Brandy Jones (just to name a few), weaves a wonderful story of suspense and excitement. I enjoyed the names of all the great actors in the book. Get a copy. It's one of a kind!

'The curved blade of the knife flashed forward and deep.'
That's the first line in the book...enough to carry you to the second line, and so on. Couldn't put the story down. Scary, but lots of humor, too. Loved it!

A few years back I read and taught The Language of Good-bye, Fischer's first novel, in the MFA in Writing Program where I teach. The students (and I) were impressed with Fischer's beautiful style and ability to juggle plots lines and viewpoints, particularly because her two main characters came from such different cultures. TLOGB is a book I've read more than once and truly enjoyed, so naturally I looked forward to her next book, which was a while in coming. But SO worth the wait. There is nothing uneven about this book, so pay no attention to the Kirkus review. Having finished The Life You Longed For just moments ago, I felt compelled to write this review. It is an astonishing book. This is the best kind of story there is--involving, complex, raw in places, a peek into a world that could slip right by. The characters are imperfect and human and so real it gives you the shivers. The amount of scientific information, the weaving of 9/11, the denoument, wow. Another reviewer said it would make a great movie, and while that's true, I am satisfied that it is a book because I know I will read it again and again. TLYLF belongs on the New York Times bestseller's list. I plan to buy copies for my reader/writer friends and spread the word. Just a tremendous read. I hope Fischer has another book in the hopper so I can read more of her stories soon. Loved it.

This is one of the best books that I have ever read. Maribeth Fischer is now one of my favorite authors. You must read this story!

I was disappointed with this book. The protagonist was unlikeable (surprisingly, since she was the mother of a terminally ill child). The author equates Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy cases with the Salem witch trials, and apparently doesn't believe that there are any "real" cases. This is provocative, but disingenuous when there are actually cases where mothers have been secretly taped in hospital rooms doing things to make their children sick. Each section starts with a pretentious introduction written in italics which is apparently placed there to show how thoughtful and philosophical the author is, but comes off as pretentious and does little to move the story along.

I literally could not put this novel down. It grabs you on page one and never lets you go, never lets you relax. It procedes with high emotional intensity to the end.

This is a novel that teaches -- about mitochondrial disease, about Munchausenn's, about the failings of the child protective system in this country, and about our own human failings. It does so in an extremely well-crafted story. I read it wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

This would make an amazing movie.

I look forward to this writer's next novel.

Maribeth Fischer manages to accurately capture the conflicting and confusing emotions surrounding the terminal illness and death of a child. She portrays the impact of a mother's seemingly obsessive devotion to her ill child on her marriage and surviving children. She also reveals the very human nature of grief-the need to retreat to a haven unrelated to death, a place where for a few hours Grace, the mother, can be an ordinary woman. Fischer maintains the integrity of real life by realistically portraying the consequences of Grace's actions. She introduces dramatic tension by carefully exploring how a loving mother's determination to do everything possible for her dying child can be misconstrued, leading to a tragedy of nearly equal proportions to the child's death. Her rich use of metaphor makes the dark subject a joy to read.

Even though this book is a novel, its descriptions of heartbreak and grief are spot on. Healthcare providers, especially social service professionals, could gain valuable insight by reading Fischer's book.

I sent in a review and it has not yet appeared. Did you receive it?

Louisa J. Lasher Thanks much

This book is very insightful into the world of facticious disorders. It helped me cope with my mother who has Munchausen's syndrome. It may not completely solve the why, but it gives the possibilities. I enjoyed the different stories about other people and family members who have fallen victim to these types of people. I highly recommend this book to anyone.

This is a very well-written book and an incredible read. I found it really hard to put down. Dr. Feldman writes about these patients with great compassion and sincerity, but is at least as sympathetic to those who come into contact with them, including their poor families. (What they must go through!) Although I am not a psychiatrist, I do think this book should be compulsory reading for everyone who works in this field.

I'm interested in this topic because of my experience in dealing with a family member who has used tales of illness and hardship for years to get support and money and get out of trouble that he brought on himself. Reading this book helped me to comprehend that his schemes and scams are not all that far-fetched or uncommon among practitioners of fraud. I would have liked to have had more case histories and info specifically on malingering.

In "Playsing Sick?" Dr. Marc Feldman opens a window onto the minds of those whose need for love and nurturance drives them to the extremes of fraud, emotional abuse and even self mutilation. Malingering, factitious disorder and Munchausen Syndrome are often misunderstood by the general public, but Dr. Feldman offers clear explanations of these behaviors and illustrates them with real cases. His examination of Munchausen by Proxy is particularly compelling and includes the all important distinction between Munchausen by Proxy and factitious disorder. MBP is not a disorder, Dr. Feldman argues, but abuse. In my opinion, the two should never be confused. "Playing Sick?" is a must read for anyone who works in psychology and related fields, such as social work. But it is also a fascinating read for the nonpsychologist.

With the Terri Schiavo case still fresh in our minds, the need for a living will and/or health care proxy is vitally important.
This book offers timely advice about living wills and the need to find a professional advocate, like Mr. Shenkman, to guide you through the process. It is important for you, and your family, to be prepared when the time comes. This is an important book that should be read by all.

Mr.Shenkman's book is excellent and an easy read. He presents such an important and difficult topic in a very concise format, addressing issues that many would not think of in drafting a living will. A MUST READ, especially in light of the tragedy the family of Terri Schiavo has just endured.

I highly recommend this book because it addresses religious issues which no other books cover, provides cutting edge legal tips (in plain English) to avoid the tragedy that Terri Shiavo's family endured and presents a far more comprehensive approach than the generic internet forms most people use. If you care about what happens to you when/if you are unable to make medical decisions for yourself, then read this book.

I am a legal aid hotline attorney and own an online medical supply and equipment business. This book is informative but probably provides more infomation than you need if you just want to draft a wiling will. There is a wealth of information and sample forms on the internet. In Illinois, where I practice, you can find forms for living wills, power of attorney for health care, declaration for mental health treatment and more on the Illinois Department of Public Health website. Many other government sites have similar resources. The problem with using forms from a book is that they can become outdated and ineffective. The real key to a living will is to make sure your family and medical providers know you have one. Otherwise, your wishes will not be known. Read this book for an indepth treatment of this subject, but to just draft a living will you can find what you need online for free.

As an estate planning attorney, I am very impressed with the sample forms and analysis contained in this book. While I believe and recommend that such forms be prepared or at least reviewed by an attorney, these are the best forms I have seen available to the public. If you review or think through these forms, you well prepared to meet with an estate planning attorney.

then get this one. I learned enough about the reasons for using it and also how to configure it to authenticate against an LDAP server.

Well worth getting and keeping on your shelf.

Squid: The Definitive Guide by Duane Wessels is a great book for someone with aspirations of setting up and getting the most out of Squid. It is lengthy at just over 400 pages, but that is to be expected and desired in O'Reilly's "The Definitive Guide" series. One point worth mentioning is that Duane Wessels (the author, for those with short synaptic cycles) is the one who started Squid and still works on it today. Each chapter builds nicely on subsequent chapters, so there isn't any skipping around. If you're just looking to set it and forget it, this book is probably not for you. Otherwise, read on.

The first three chapters are pretty basic: history of Squid, downloading then installing. For those with no concern of going through downloading and installing, there is a nice section describing each configure switch and, while weighing in at a healthy 48 options, it may be helpful to have this as a reference.

Chapter Four, Configuration Guide For the Eager, is an often desired, but often left out chapter in technical books. By just reading chapters one through four, it is possible to have a fully functional setup of Squid, albeit not very secure or ready for the pounding of the masses. You will, however, begin to understand how Squid operates. This chapter discusses the most often used settings, such as: minimum/maximum size of cached objects, log files and ACLs to restrict addresses, etc.

Chapter Five, Running Squid, covers what you expect. It includes such topics as, boot scripts, chrooting and rotating log files. Again, basic stuff, but necessary for the sake of completeness.

Chapter Six, All About Access Controls, covers one of Squid's major powers and attractions, access controls. ACLs give the administrator extremely fine-grained tuning. Some of the choice highlights for limiting access to addresses/domains include, but not limited to: filter by subnet, MAC, IP address or administrator assigned group. Furthermore, regular expressions can be used to filter URLs or URIs. A most likely seldom used, but very cool, feature is the ability to filter by BGP AS (Border Gateway Protocol Autonomous System) numbers. HTTP request methods such as POST, PUT, DELETE, etc. can also be filtered. Filtering by time or restricting access by user name is also supported. Each topic is assiduously explained and leaves little to be desired.

Chapters Seven and Eight cover disk caching with chapter Seven being basic material and then Eight covering more advanced topics. Discussions on object pruning, size limits, cache replacement policies and many other cache optimizations are covered in these chapters and are necessary to thoroughly understand if you are situated in a relatively large environment or just want to squeeze every bit of performance from your Squid.

Chapter Nine, Interception Caching, covers transparent proxying. This chapter discusses the benefits (no need to configure clients) and drawbacks (cannot do user authentication) of implementing such a system. It then goes on to discuss how to configure Alteon/Nortel, Foundry, Extreme Networks, Arrowpoint, iptables, pf and ipfw to perform the routing to the Squid box.

Chapter ten, Talking to other Squids

Scalability is another favorable attribute of Squid. Running in parallel with previous chapters, this chapter details the advantages (load balancing and increasing your cache hits) and the disadvantages (security problems with having to trust neighboring Squids) of a caching hierarchy. In addition, it explains how to configure connect timeouts and other tweaks to keep Squids aware of when their siblings are down.

Chapter eleven, Redirectors, covers another great attribute of Squid. Redirectors can be used, among other possibilities, to remove advertisements in web pages or rewrite client requests based on their given URL or URI. This chapter details how they work, from a protocol level, and provides example configuration settings such as sending only specific users through the redirector or conversely, letting specific users bypass the redirector altogether.

Squid can be configured to use various user authentication methods to allow or deny access. Chapter Twelve, Authentication Helpers, covers these options. Squid can talk HTTP Basic, HTTP Digest and NTLM. Each type is well explained in how it works and detailed in how to setup.

Chapter Thirteen and Fourteen fully explain logging and monitoring. The logging chapter explains the type of information each log file catches, a full description of each error or information type (which is a great reference that I made full use of) and configuration directives that change what is logged or how it is logged. Monitoring Squid covers the Squid Cache Manger (A web front-end to many great statistics), a brief mention of using Squid-RRD and using SNMP. Such monitoring statistics include, file descriptor allocation, byte hit ratios, cache hits and cache misses and a wealth of other useful information.

Chapter Fifteen, Server Accelerator Mode, explains Server Accelerator Mode, which is also known as Surrogate Mode. It is a neat trick where Squid stills runs as a proxy, however, the Squid server is proxying the world (or a select few) to your server. One obvious advantage includes performance (or Slashdot hardening if you will). There are several config directives explained here as well as some gotchas.

Chapter Sixteen, Debugging, is the is one of the few chapters that I did not need to reference. Although, if you need to, there is some good information provided.

Appendix A comes with a config file reference that actually provides more information then the comments in the configuration file (Holy moley!...they better trademark that idea before other authors catch on!).

Appendix B briefly covers memory caching and optimization.

Appendix C shows how to use delay pools to limit user bandwidth.

Appendix D details file system performance benchmarks to show you filesystem and operating system differences.

Appendix E discusses running Squid on Windows using Cygwin.

Appendix F covers auto configuration of Squid clients to avoid needing to physically visit the many machines you administer.

In conclusion:

Pros: This is "The Book" for Squid. No skipping from chapter to chapter, the author was also the designer and still one of the maintainers, fuller descriptions of the configuration file directives that the configuration file comments. It is a great reference.

Cons: Really the only thing that I didn't like was that he only discussed HTTP proxying. There is a brief mention of FTP and SMTP, but only a couple of sentences. To be fair, in the preface he did mention that he would would of liked to written on these topics but didn't have time.

For the new comer I recommend to buy this book if your finding an alternative for Microsoft box like ISA or MSProxy 2.0.

Squid is robost and a very stable Proxy Server, you can use it even in Entreprise consumption..trust me I use it since 2001.

If your looking for technical books or documents about Squid, this is the one your looking for...

Back in 1998 when I was running my own ISP, Squid was a lifesaver because it allowed me to provide excellent web response to customers over a very modest upstream connection.

When I moved on to consulting Squid was the answer to a wide variety of client problems from employee Internet access control (Redirectors) to company website performance (Server Accelerator Mode) to plain old web page load times (Proxy Cache).

Now that I've moved in-house in a large corporation (30,000+ employees) and I've found out what commercial vendors are charging for their solutions to each of these problems, I have gladly used my knowledge of Squid to save us money.

Of course, that knowledge was not easily won, at least not for me. Because Squid was an open source project there was a lot of information available on the Web, but, of course, because Squid was an open source project, it was hard to find a definitive answer to my particular problem without asking a lot of dumb questions on newsgroups or making a lot of trial and error attempts tweaking compile time options, system changes and configuration file settings.

I have waited for this book for a long time.

I was concerned that it might be too detailed to be readable. Thankfully, Duane Wessels, the primary architect of Squid , has laid out this book to provide simple access at the Macro level. The chapter arrangement and organization are very intuitive. And yet the book still contains enough information to satisfy almost every question.

The one caveat I would make to a reader is to maintain situational awareness while delving into a chapter because, without noticing it, you can suddenly be confronted with pages and pages of configuration file details. There's no avoiding it, when a book says `Definitive Guide' on the cover you expect to have full coverage. It's just that the book is so lucidly written that the transition from high-level discussions to detailed facts might catch you un-aware.

And, really, it's that kind of feeling that lets you know that you're reading a very valuable text. I spent the first hour after I got this book skimming each chapter, happy at each additional topic I discovered. Then I went back and asked it the two hardest questions I have faced using Squid over the past year, in each case the answer was easily found and fully explained (Mr. Wessels deserves an award for making transparent proxying understandable).

The wait for this book was well worth it. I highly recommend it to any person working with, or thinking about working with, Squid.

This guide will pay for itself many times over. If you are considering a caching server for home, office or business you need this book.

My previous experience with proxies was MS proxy server 2.0 and I was a little apprehensive of this project; not to worry. Forty six pages into the book, squid was running; total time invested including installation of the program was about 2 hrs.

Another two hours of reading and precious few changes to config files and my log files are rotating, all ports I need exposed are open and the rest are hidden. I have already been able to tune squid to accelerate delivery of content using *only* this book as a guide. I haven't even had to look at the online documentation for squid (the first time I ever recall that happening).

Not only is my internet connection now available to all users, but also every one is browsing faster than they were before on single dedicated dial ups.

I can't say enough good things about the book or the program. In 14 years of networking I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly. This is one of those rare guides whose author is extremely knowlegable and the material presentation is flawless. I have a large computer science library and in my experience, it doesn't get any better than this.

Bravo Mr. Wessels!

Playing Sick?: Untangling the Web of Munchausen Syndrome, Munchausen by Proxy, Malingering, and Factitious DisorderPatient or Pretender: Inside the Strange World of Factitious Disorders

This is the only book written with a "gameplan" for discovery of Munchuasen by Proxy. Lasher and Sheridan have given tremendous thought and definition to the Munchuasen diagnosis. They provide a detailed plan to determine whether or not Munchausen by Proxy has taken place. It is such a difficult disorder to prove, and this outline gives medical personnel, child protective services, and the law enforcement agencies a step-by-step guide in proving/disproving MBP. I think it should be required reading for anyone in the medical field. It's amazing that approximately 45% of medical personnel have never heard of MBP. If healthcare workers are not even aware such a disorder exists, there is minimal chance a perpetrator will ever be caught. We deal with this disorder in our family, and this book has helped us know what to look for and where to begin in our quest to "save" our grandson. I highly recommend this book to all professionals who care about children.

Great book, really delves deep into the psyche of people with this disorder and how it is interlinked with borderline personality disorders and depression. This book also has a excellent diasgnostic survey for clients suspected of this disorder. Certain criteria have to be met and law enforcement notified before a diagnosis can be made, it is a very difficult disorder to diagnosis, but this book sheds some new light.

I was knowledgeable about Munchausen by proxy before I read this book, but it shed a whole new light on the subject for me. It is clearly the definitive reference in the field. It is readable and filled with summaries and charts that facilitate understanding and practical application. It is not to be missed for any professionals involved in the protection of children.

A distressing look into how far will some people go to get attention. Through detailed case studies and analysis, the authors take readers into the lives and minds of people whose obsessive craving for attention compels them to fake illness, sometimes to the point of death.

This book is an excellent first step! With this book, not only will you be able to get Proxy Server up and running, but you will also understand what you did and why. I hope to see more "ON SITE" books in the future!

The material progressed in a logical order, and was very understandable. I have experience with Microsoft BackOffice products, but I learned Proxy Server via Kevin's ONSITE book, and was able to configure Web access through a cable modem for 125 client seats. I recommend this for anyone wanting to understand Proxy Server 2.0, and be able to apply the knowledge practically.

Well, all I can really say at this point is "WHOOSH!!!" I feel like I've just ridden the Viper at Great America for 6 straight hours! So many many twists and turns and switchbacks. AND I honestly thought that one main character was going to turn out to be a real baddie, too (glad the character wasn't though, I liked them).

The characters are very nicely rounded out, the story is very compelling, and the addition of a brilliant love story in the midst of the chaos was so well done. I did get lost a couple of times and had to double back, but once I either caught up or decided I would "get it" later on, all was well.

The story was so well written and so engaging I finished in less than a week. The characters show real feeling and personality. You really get a feeling for either liking the person, being very unsure about trusting them, or really wanting something bad to happen to them. I think the author has captured a whole new genre of stories here, they're very hard to explain in a short conversation. They ideas are very fresh and very ancient at the same time.

Do yourself a favor, read part I "The Turel Effect" first.

I'm really looking forward to the third installment!!!

From boardroom to bedroom?
Chairman of the board Worth Carson had been none too pleased when beautiful Amelia Glenn walked into his office wearing only a trench coat and a belly dancers costume. While revenge had been the primary goal on his mind, all thoughts of getting even soon vanished.
This is one of Ms Palmers better efforts.

This handbook is quite comprehensive - deals with its topic from perspective of both management and shareholders and addresses the wide range of issues that can possibly arise in handling shareholder proposals under the SEC's Rule 14a-8. Bill Morley has been the "dean" of the proposal process for well over two decades and the two authors cover a lot of ground from their own strong backgrounds. Considering there is no other book on this topic - and that the topic is becoming a focal point in corporate governance, it's a book many of us have been waiting for!