Budget Books

I saw the Thomson logo at the top left on the front cover and thought it was textbook quality. I was dead wrong!! As the engineer said, the directions are incoherent and you don't even know when he has given instructions or just an example. I had to search the web for help answers just to do the "Hello World" application. There is no troubleshooting guide in case you get stuck. If you get stuck you better clear up your schedule cause you will be searching for answers for a while. Why not spend that time and buy a good book on programming. I would expect more from a programmer than this garbled mess of words.

This programming book was just what my son was wanting. He thinks it will really help refine his gaming progams.

I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone who is trying to start out in game programming. I am a grad student engineer and have been programming for over 5 years. I just recently got into game and graphics programming and this book is really terrible compared to some others I've seen. The only reason I gave it two stars is because the chapter on graphics mathematics is fairly complete, and the book provides a good high level picture of how a game is structured. However, the code specifics are downright horrible, the listings seem to be randomly thrown in without any clue as to where they should go in an actual program, the writing is boring, the directions are sparse and inchoerent, and much of the source code provided on the CD is incredibly difficult to get running (if it runs at all). Also, there is a discussion board on wazoo, but don't excpect much help. Many of the forums end with unanswered questions including many that I had. For an intro book to programming games, save your money for another book, because this book just isn't worth the cost in wasted time and money.

It's ironic that a programmer would be so terrible at giving directions. To start out with, the directions for setting up SDL (a necessary programming toolkit) were almost non-existant. Just this small task took me 8+ hours, and I had to resort to browsing web-forums!

Often the directions were so terrible that it wasn't even clear whether or not he'd just given directions for a procedure or was just providing an example. As a programmer, the author should be able to give sequential, succinct, and easily-followable directions. At this,the author, unfortunately, fails miserably.

Erik Yuzwa's GAME PROGRAMMING IN C++: START TO FINISH will lend particularly well to prior C++ programmers and users who want to learn game programming. Chapters use current game programming information and take a lesson plan graded learning approach to building an entire course in C++ game programming, from the basics to creating a complete game.

On my trip to Italy I found this book VERY unhelpful. The maps were not detailed enough and while in Florence I noticed at least 3 other groups of American tourists all of us looking for the same Let's Go restaurant that did not seem to exist, this was after looking for another recommended restaurant whose street did not seem to exist. I would not recommend this book.

I got this book based on its excellent reviews in preparation for a semester in Italy. Usually I choose Lonely Planet or the Rough Guides for travelling, and now I wish I had stuck to those. The book is difficult to read and its attitude makes me angry every time I open it. I feel like it doesn't have very much history or background, and putting prices for every attraction in parenthesis in the text is distracting. Not only that, it doesn't really say anything new -- you are left with information about the boring central tourist attractions, and no way to escape the herds.

Travelers heed this advice that this book by far provides a superb collection of eateries, lodging, roadmaps, and sights, ideal for the budget traveler. It allowed me to thoroughly taste Italy's flavor literally and figuratively in a short period of time. Most importantly, its information puts you in control and feeling like a native, not a confused tourist. "Let's Go's" yearly updates enables travelers to confidently scour every crevice of the Italian landscape with utmost zeal. It's witty clips should also be commended in providing travelers entertaining literature during claustrophobic Italian train rides. "Let's Go" wets your appetite for the catacombs of Palermo or Michelangelo's David in Florence's Academia before your even get there. "Let's Go Italy" goes beyond just maps and door to door directions, its content also steers you into or away from local trouble depending on your inkling for adventure, and keeps you one step ahead as you prepare for and are on your journey. If authentic Italian pasta is in your future, don't forget your passport, and make room in your pack for "Let's Go Italy."

I hate to disagree with the other reviews you'll read here, but I honestly think this book is terrible. I've traveled quite a bit, in lots of different places, and I've really enjoyed books from the "Let's Go" series. This one, though, was so badly done that I found myself getting frustrated and angry each time I tried to use it.

The authors try (too hard) to be cool and hip, and I'm afraid that they've let that get in the way of presenting their information in a way that makes any sense at all. And, I'm not just talking about the poor job they did describing the things I'd gone to Italy to see, either. Their maps were lousy, and this book lacks even such things as clear advice on such mundane things as getting your laundry done and how to use a payphone to call home.

Do yourself a HUGE favor and steer clear of this pitiful attempt at a travelm guide.

I am biased to 'Let's Go.' I used their books in '99 for Ireland, England, and France. They are perfect for the student or budget traveller, especially those looking for hostels. I would recommend this series to almost everyone I know.

I just got Italy 2001 for Christmas, and I love it already! I have been waiting since September for this book to come out! It seems to be more organized and informative than the others.

The only downside of 'Let's Go' I've heard is that the places they recommend are loaded with American students, and fill up quicker because they all have the same book. I didn't have this problem, but if you use their most popular recommendations, make reservations!

Having lived in Costa Rica several times, I found this book to be very accurate and credible. I was a little bummed that there was little mentioned about Monte Verde, or the countless world class Surfing areas. I would have liked to have seen a section strictly dedicated to some of the incredible Costa Rican sights,and something about the awesome Canopy Tours and recreation opportunities available. No worries. I highly recommend this book. The info is accurate, detailed, and covers all bases. Absolutly Primo!

I actually wanted to give the book less than two stars but it sparked an idea. If people will by this then I might try my hand a retirement book and actually put valuable information in it. Actually the book starts out promising enough in trying to get you interested in the country. However, its weaknesses become evident very quickly. The first weakness is a lack of objectivity. A good book will give you the good and the bad. The author here seems like a salesperson for Costa Rica.

Second weakness: the author gives far too little analysis on the issue of taxes. This subject should have a dedicated chapter. Suppose your retirement income is from mostly untaxed foreign sources and comes to $70K a year. Now if additional taxes in the country come to 30% you will pay $21,000 before you buy one single thing. If a comparable country had a 10% tax rate you could still pay $14,000 more for rent, travel, transport etc. before breaking even.

Third weakness: lack of honesty. Crime has increased in Costa Rica. The author's attempt to gloss over this was so transparent he would have been more credible if he had purposely omitted the topic. The dead give away is the authors comment "like many other countries Costa Rica has crime." He then works to minimize the issue. No statistics are given - and particularly year to year so you can see trends.

You are much better off looking up articles on the country. Just a preview: a lot of things rot or have mechanical difficulties in the humidity. Some people's idea of paradise (particularly the Germans') is spending 365 days a year smoking and drinking, and waking up with a hangover half naked on the beach in the morning.

My wife and I find the new edition of this guidebook not as complete as the previous editions. We like the old cover and color pictures which were in previous editions.

In general the book is very well written organized but lacks a lot of details about living in the country i.e. insider information.

Mr. Howell's book is very well written like his book about living in Mexico. However we find Christopher Howard's "New Golden Door to Retirement and Living in Costa Rica" to be much better and paint a more relaistic picture of the country. Howard lives ther full time.

After having read this book, the other guides about the subject of living in Costa Rica and having resided in the country, I can categorically state this book doesn't really talk about the down side of living there. Granted the country is very nice but more info. is needed. It just doesn't cover the negatives in detail.

I bought this book for a trip I'm planning to Budapest, and unfortunately, while advertised as being a part of the book, my copy does not have the information on Budapest. I'll add it to my library of travel guides, as I will probably visit Austria and/or Switzerland at some point and the information will be useful. Also, I am a big fan of Let's Go guidebooks anyway, as the writing style and wealth of contact information make travel planning easy. I just wish the Budapest, Prague and Munich info had been included.

"You can't judge a book by its cover." Truer words have not been written when it comes to "Let's Go Austria & Switzerland - including Prague, Budapest, Munich 2000".

A lot of info on Austria and Switzerland but Prague, Budapest and Munich aren't to be found in this guide!

Yes, the editors made a serious mistake when they forgot to include Prague, Budapest, and Munich and yet advertised it on the cover. Those were only bonuses, not the focus of the book. I bought the book for my year abroad in Austria and found it extremely helpful. For the time I had it I did not get lost following the maps and the information was accurate. Unfortunately the book is now in a river in Luzern. Ran after it for a long time with no luck. I replaced it with the 2001 edition and was disappointed to find that they cut out a city that I was planning to go to (Cesky Krumlov). I thought the 2000 version was good. If you want the three cities they missed, copy the pages from a book in the library.

I've spent months in Austria and Switzerland, using a variety of travel books, and Let's Go is the best, bar none. They have excellent coverage of the outdoors, witty writing, and they find cheap, cheap, cheap places that nevertheless manage to be great finds. The maps have improved over previous years, but they could stand an extra one or two. Fortunately, the rest of the information is up to date, as it is the most-recently updated book (so far as I've seen).

The other books, I'm sorry, .... Lonely Planet books are updated every eon, and they've got the prose style of a VCR instruction manual. Rough Guides, while quite literate, lack the phone numbers, dates, and times that are the bread and butter of budget travel guides. The Frommer's and Fodor's guides to Austria are a joke: they have few listings outside of 4 star hotels, and could have been written by the tourist offices! The point of Aus/Switz is its natural beauty, and appreciating that is facilitated by good info, not by spending cash.

One note: the focus here is for the budget traveler. Those with money will benefit from this, as many of the most friendly places in Austria are cheap (like Privatzimmer and family-run Pensionen). However, the other, mostly older travelers who want to stay in posh hotels and would rather take a cable car than go hiking might want to get a book like Frommer's, or just do whatever the local tourist office tells you to do.

I browsed through this book looking for the Prague section mentioned on the cover. I looked through another copy to make sure I wasn't wrong. I read the contents, read the index. Prague, Munich, & Budapest are NOT discussed in this book. Spend your money elsewhere if you want to see the area.

Mr Tone's book is informative, but not anything that cannot be found for nothing on the net for nothing. He is evidently well informed, possibly this is a prelude to something more substantial.

I found this book to be very helpful. It has a lot of information in one place that IÕve had only previously seen spread over three or four different books. It gets right to the point without any fluff. The tables that explain the different types of time code, how pull-downs work and the different types of digital audio alone make this worthwhile.

This is an excellent reference. It quickly and easily covers the main steps to getting through a project. It's short and to the point, which I liked. It doesn't go into great detail but it does give you a good overview of all the hows and whys for dealing with digital audio. Despite a few typos and its homegrown feel, it is well worth the money.

This book really only covers pull-down/pull-up in any depth, and that information is incorrect. It repeatedly refers to pulldown/pullup from film to video as being 1%, when it is actually .1%, a mistake by a factor of 10! That would make it hard to stay in sync! If you already know anything at all about film audio post, this book is too basic. If you don't, there are better sources, such as the Protools reference manual.

I used this book as my main "get-around" guide during my vacations in Argentina. The book has an excellent section on travel tips which I found very useful, specially the "Smart Travel Tips" section.

But some of the maps of Buenos Aires in the book have the locations wrong. I would say most of the maps need revision; I always found a mistake. My advice is to have a back up, maybe a good tourist map which you can find almost anywhere for free on hotels or tourist centers.

Also, the phone listed in some of the attractions are wrong. For example, I wanted to arrange a reservation for one of the tango shows listed on the book (by the way, do not miss them for anything in the world!!!), but the phone numbers were wrong also.

The book overall is good, plus they have sections on other parts of Argentina, which makes the book very practical if you plan to travel the country, but again the best advise is to have a backup guide (and map), specially for Buenos Aires.

I read every guidebook I could find before visiting Argentina with my family two years ago and then moving here for a year last July.

This is by far the most complete guide I've seen, with lots of helpful, realistic information about where to go, what to do (and what not to do) and where to stay all over this country -- not just in Buenos Aires. Even after living here for months we still pull it out from time to time.

Don't leave home without it.

I am an avid reader of travel books and travel quite a lot. This book was not helpful to me at all for my up-coming trip to Argentina. It was difficult to follow or locate places to visit. Also, the websites listed frequently did not "work". I wish I had my money back!

Coming to Argentina for a month, I bought this guide book and a few others (Lonely Planet was the best) in advance to try to get a general idea of what to do. Simply put, this book sucks. It has a tiny list of places to eat and see for how huge Buenos Aires is, seems to not have the most useful travel information and tips, and is out of date on a few of its recommended destinations. More than that, its poorly organized, not really offering itineraries or good suggestions, but rather just displaying a few possible destinations in no real order and with no particular travel audience in mind, except maybe business travelers or people with loads of money to spend who dont mind spending their time figuring it out on their own because the guide is worthless.

Lonely planet was way better, it had more suggestions and a more coherent feel. It was also bigger, it just has more. It also had better maps and even some photos, so you could get a glimpse of an area you might want to check out.
I'm done with fodors, I doubt I'll buy their books ever again.

leave this badly written guide on the bookshelf and buy the lonely planet guide to brazil instead.

THIS IS A REVIEW FOR THE 2004 EDITION. THE OTHER REVIEWS HERE ARE FOR AN OLDER EDITION. I used this book for a trip in November 2004. The Fodor's guide was good for the major places I traveled to (Salvador, Belo Horizonte, Rio), but didn't cover the more obscure places in the south of Bahia or even some places close to Salvador. However, it was really nice to have this book to compliment (save me from using) the crappy Lonely Planet book all the time. At least I got a second opinion! The Rio coverage is pretty good and this was the most up-to-date book I used. Apart from the LP city guide to Rio. The Fodor's menu guide in the back of the book really came in handy. Ultimately, none of the guides to Brazil seem superb, so I recommend taking at least two and plenty of grains of salt.

What a great guide to this wonderful country - not just a listing of tourist trappings, rather a substantial guide to the real Brazil. If you're interested in going beyond the tours and hotels, you should use this guide.

The book, frankly speaking, stinks. All it does is it creates dead weight for you to be carrying. You'll definitely be better off using other travel guides (e.g., Lonely Planet) or even inquiring at your hotel desk. Only about 10% of the information in the book is actually somewhat useful. It is otherwise rather USELESS!

This guide is very poorly thought out, with near-hopeless maps and a rather irritating tone (gee just gotta out of high school...). The recommendations were generally reasonably sound, though I found the transport details to be out of date (I used 2001 edition). There are better guides on the market (hello Rough Guides and Footprint)...

I travelled Belize and Guatemala for 3 weeks using this book as the only source of guide. This book does not contain any pictures (unlike in Lonely Planet) of attractions so you have no idea what kind of place you are visiting until you actually go there. Unlike visiting Europe where many people have some idea of what they want to see in a country they plan to visit (e.g., Effle Tower in Paris) I believe most people visiting Guatemala have no idea where they want to visit and so having some pictures of major attractions would be very helpful in determining whether to make a trip to certain attraction or not. Everything is black and white in this book and the only color pages are ads!!!
Also, the format of the book has not been changed at all at least since 1994 (if not longer). One might argue that why mess with a successful product but I think the publisher could use a design update and still improve the layout of the book. The book uses soy ink and recycled paper. While that may be environmentally prudent thing to do, I sure didn't like ink left on my fingers and low quality of the book due to employment of such ink and paper.
One strong point of the book I found was its accuracy of listed various costs (hotels, fees and etc.)

Overall, this book was satisfactory and provided the information I needed. If you are only interested in contents of the book, this will do fine but if you think how material is presented is also important then look at other books.

From Planeta Journal - A smart, region-wide guide to the best values in Central America. This book chooses Quetzaltenango as the best city "where you can learn a little Spanish in peace." It's a handy guide that introduces Maya culture, outdoor opportunities and alternatives to traditional tourism.

This guide is very poorly thought out, with near-hopeless maps and a rather irritating tone (gee just gotta out of high school...). The recommendations were generally reasonably sound, though I found the transport details to be out of date (I used 2001 edition). There are better guides on the market (hello Rough Guides and Footprint)...

This book is fine if your idea of travel is a beaten up VW camper, and you don't mind sleeping in areas that make you wonder about you and your cars safety... A triple A membership is a better deal and gives you a better idea of what's available and the expected comfort level. If you want a true taste of america get "Eat Your Way Across the Usa"

I recently spent two months on the great American highways with a copy of Let's Go in the passanger seat, a trunk full of dirty clothes, and a warm soda in the cup holder. It was the experience of a lifetime, and I owe much of it to Let's Go: USA. If you are looking for _the_ American travel guide -- a guide without pretense, cut corners, or boring prose -- use this book. This guide really captures the quirky flavor of travel, without sacrificing accuracy.

I'm Planning a cross country trip that will cover many states! I have 2 months to do it all. I was having such a hard time figuring out what exactly I'm going to be doing on my trip. It seems like there are sooo many places to go. This book Takes you there! It has so much information compiled between the covers. One has to think how much time and effort was put into the production of it. It goes as far as to give prices and times that certain attractions are open. There are also maps of the places you want to go. The purpose of this book as a whole I think would be to let you know of the big places to visit, but also the places that everyone else misses out on. I enjoyed this book and continue to process the unbelievablt amount of information that it provides. Thanks Let's Go

I was reluctant about buying a Lets Go title as I had seen bad reviews of them before, but when I only saw good reviews of this one I went ahead and bought the book. To put it bluntly, it wasn't worth the weight in my pack. Addresses were wrong, vital information was missing, prices were vastly underquoted... even the Essential Information in the beginning was unhelpful. And given the strength of the US dollar, what is "budget" to the American Lets Go team is very seldom "budget" to those of us whose currencies are weak against the US one. I'll be sticking to Lonely Planet.

The author tries to cover too many areas. He should have focused on COST MANAGEMENT and BUDGETS and taken one or two examples and defined all variances analysis from beginning to end, Then he would have HAD a fine book. Examples skip from one to another with no correlation to accentuating COST ANALYSIS-BUDGET development and management.

This little book is a wonderful review of all the things you need to consider if you are doing accounting in a manufacturing concern. The ideas are applicable as well for service organizations but the examples are geared toward accounting for manufactured products. The authors talk about when or why you would use a certain type of costing method rather than just explain how it's done. For example, they explain the reason for using Just In Time costing and the benefits over traditional cost accounting and describe what performance measures you would use with each system. I'm only halfway through my libray copy but have decided to buy my own to keep for reference.

This is a very well - organized introduction to cost accounting. There are some very useful chapters on cost behavior and cost estimation, as well as cost-volume-profit and break even analysis. The theory is very clear, however, the quantitative examples are basic. Not a complete study guide for the MBA student, but a great compendium to supplement theory and basic understanding. Plus, if you own several volumes from the Barron's Business Library you get the bonus of having them look cool on the bookshelf!