Bruno Books

Some of the solutions could include more steps and the book does not include solutions for every problem, but averall it is a good addition to the main text.

This is a good book that is extremely fair and unprejudiced in presenting the views of people who aren't fair or unprejudiced. Actually, I read this book because I thought it was about Third World poverty (and there is one, called simply "Third World", that is), but nevertheless this book highlights the fact that there is some poverty even in America, a fact most of the essayists acknowledge, and propose various solutions to remedy the problem. Every major opinion is represented, and each is given equal time. The only problem I see here is that many of the essays are a bit outdated (many written during the Depression Era, when domestic poverty was a much worse problem).

What attracts me to this book is that it has "A Tools Approach" in the title. It does have a pretty comprehensive coverage on tools currently available for model based testing. There are a dozen examples and case studies in the book to illustrate different approaches/tools for building good models specific to the SUT.

Another thing I like about the book is the literature listed at the end of each chapter for further reading.

One thing on my wish list for the book is a guide to building model based test frameworks (for housing the models) due to the fact that lots of times testers need to build such a customized framework before building models (again, due to lack of mature commercialized model based testing frameworks).

This was a book full of a wide variety of ideas on the subject of racism. I gave the reader a chance to read opposing viewpoints on racism by simply turning the page. I would encourage everyone to read this book. It opens a readers' eyes to different opinions on the issue on racism.

I was a little disappointed by "Secret Gardens of Paris". I found the gardens featured in this book to be similar to each other. I was looking for more variations in color and texture. Most of the gardens have very little color. It seems that green and white are the dominant colors. Also, I was hoping to see more architecture than what is shown of the Parisian buildings featured in this book.

This book covers many cities not in the Spartacus International Gay Guide. However, I feel that the Gay Guide would hove given a person sufficient information for their needs. The Sauna Guide should give more of a descriptive message for each sauna to make it more valuable.

This collaborative effects breaks the back on often overlooked issues of globalization. Tzonis brings the books into focus, creating layers of comparisons between conditions and countries otherwise unrelated. As well the book becomes the highlight on some unknown but rather talented architects working within a space cultured by globalization.

This was a good book with interesting stories of vegans around the world. (I gave it 3 stars because I thought the writing was a little boring at times)

I bought this book in hopes of having an all in one resource for the CCIE written exam. This book barely touches the surface of some very important concepts for the CCIE written exam and is not enough for any real world task.

Another issue I have, is the author uses all the acronyms, but doesn't write them out. I have a great deal of experience in working with many of these technologies, so it's not such a big deal for me, but others may find this frustrating.

The CCNP level books (Routing, Switching) cover the technologies in much greater detail. The exam certification guide is extremely weak, and maybe good for a quick refresher prior to takeing the exam, or perhaps recertifying. Otherwise, I'd look for better material.

I am reviewing the CCIE Routing and Switching Exam Certification Guide (ISBN 1587200538), which is the official preparation guide for the CCIE R&S exam from Cisco Press. The book weighs in at 688 pages, which is about right for a book of its type. The problem is that the type of book that it is doesn't really work for an exam like the CCIE. If we were talking about the CCNA or one of the single CCNP exams, I'd say "sure, you can get it all in one book", but not the CCIE. This book is a lot like reading a menu in that you get enough information to get you interested in a topic and decide if you need to learn more. The problem, however, is that in the case of the CCIE exam, you don't need a menu, you need a cookbook! The actual purpose of this book, as stated in the Foreword, is that it should act as a late-stage exam preparation tool to help you assess our strengths and weaknesses and focus your study. Basically, once you've gotten to that late stage, you've been reading for about six months and all this book does is breezes over all of the stuff that you've already learned. Occasionally, you might hit something you haven't read before and might take a moment to fill in that particular gap, but largely you feel like you're wasting your time. A book covering this wide a range of topics is easy to stall out on. If you feel like you're not getting anything out of your valuable reading time, you really have no motivation to keep going. I personally stopped this thing halfway through, read a book on poker and then came back to it.

I think a better approach to future editions of this book might be to rewrite it as a preliminary study tool for the CCIE. They could take each of the blueprint objectives and write a chapter which explains in detail what knowledge and experience you need to have in order to pass that objective. Readers could use the end-of-the-chapter assessments to make a judgment call on how much studying they need to do on that objective. Each chapter should also make suggestion of where the reader could go to get additional knowledge on the topics covered in that chapter. See, what I was missing early on in my CCIE studies was a "test prep quarterback" to point me in the right direction. I think this book would keep the reader's attention better if it was recommended as the first thing to do in the test prep process, not the last.

Okay, okay... I think I've dwelled on the negatives quite long enough. There are some things I really liked about this book. First off, since it's widely known that CCIE candidates can never get enough practice questions, it'll be no surprise that I liked having the practice exam on the CD. I also liked the Scenarios at the end of each chapter. They really made you think and try to apply what you've read. I'd like to see an entire book of them. I also found the authors style to be very readable. Anthony Bruno took the challenge of writing a book that covers the entire CCIE blueprint and got it all into 688 pages. That takes a very concise writing style, and he pulls it off.

In conclusion, I'd have to say that I'd recommend this book to others, but as a preliminary guide and not as a final exam prep tool. Someone coming in cold, or even coming off of the CCNP exams, would really benefit from this book as indoctrination into the level of study necessary to prepare for the CCIE. I'd warn them, however, that this book isn't meant to be used as a one-stop shop. You really must read other books and get a lot more information off of CCO in order to prepare properly for the CCIE.

I give this book a 3 on my 5 ping rating scale.
!!..!

Hi,
I'm a CCNP and CCDA and I've always used CiscoPress Certifications books to prepare my exams.
I bought this book hoping that, as the others, it would give me all the elements to pass the test. Oh...if I was wrong.
Soon after starting reading it I realized that this book wasn't teaching anything. Each topic was just mentioned and not really unfold as the exam requires.
I wasted a week reading it and...you know what? At the end I studied on my CCNP books, integrating what was missing with documents on Cisco CCO. I passed the written test this morning at the first try.
Don't waste you money on this. Please

I am really surprised that this book is even passed off as a resouce to use by Cisco to pass the test. It touches on alot of things but only at a surface level. If you do pass the written it will not be because you read this book. Take my advice and the advice of others: save your money and spend it on the book by Rob Payne et al.

This is somewhat of a shock and disappointment because I used Bruno's CCDA book to prepare for that test and it was an excellent resource.

Sorry Cisco I love your stuff but this book falls well below the standard I would expect from one of your publications. I'm a CCIE I passed my lab Jan 2001 and took my recertification 2 years ago in IP routing. My job has changed a little since then and I no longer have as much routing exposure as I used too I'm now all LAN at a large datacenter and some OSPF. Anyway I got this book to help me with my second recert, I wanted a quick read it once and pass it guide. Well with the CCIE its just not possible, sorry but its simply not that type of certification not even the written you need to know this stuff DEEP, no shortcuts IMHO.

This book promises a lot but simply does not live up to it, as a CCIE I used this book to take my recert and failed. So I hit the real books, the one's that got me through the exam and lab 6 years ago, TCP/IP Volume 1 and now Volume 2 by Jeff Doyle, Lan switching for CCIE's, and Internet routing architectures from Halibi (BGP is also covered in the Doyle V2 book now), and passed the written exam with a 93%. I would also add a Cisco specific QoS book to the reading list as well for the 350-001 exam as there was a lot of QoS in the exam and Doyle does not cover it.

The titles above brought a lot stuff flooding back to me, stuff I forgot and stuff that the certification guides like this one were not able to restore from my memory.

Believe me there are no shortcuts to getting this I should know it cost me over $300 for the exam and 160 bucks on 2 certification books to find that out, oh yeah this also applies to the flash card book for the CCIE written also available from Cisco.

Positives are that the book does have a good general coverage of the subjects for day to day referance but no where near deep enougth and links to websites with the rest of the info you need but with this book and the flashcard book alone your not going to pass this the written exam. Its way to deep an exam for that save your money and get the Doyle books.

I have a bad record of choosing books from the Airport Bookstores. I have made some really attrocious choices. This one is not that bad, but I could not recommend it to anyone. If I would have read the inside flap I would have realised that Michael White was the "Science Editor of British GQ Magazine" --- I did not know that anyone who read GQ would be even interested in Science, but if they are, there taste would be light to the point of idiocy, like this book.

The title is inane enough. It lured me in like a sucker... I was interested in reading the counterpoint of what would be two personalities --- the Pope and Bruno. But the Pope does not even really appear in the book.

The main problem is twofold:

1) Lack of any discernable organisation. The book is a mess. It is hard to put together any discernable record of the like of Bruno after I read this --- was he in Frankfurt first and then Paris? Maybe it was the other way around?

This means that White mixes everything up, chronology, main themes and the roles of people in the book. Ideas are not at all well developed. There is a sometimes peurile feeling about his writing style: when an idea is developed a little he switches to other things --- one feels that he is writing at times for the attention span of a 12- yr-old reader.

2) Weak development of themes inside the book. Scholastic ossification of the ideas of the Catholic Church is a great topic, but White's starts with a description of how Aristotle was always wrong on everything... and vaguely brushes him off as an almost personal hindrance to development of ideas. Such comic-book interpretations really show a lack of mastery of his subject.

White intimates a tremendous importance for the hermetic tradition, although he keeps this significantly nebulous (something that a reader of GQ or Omni might be interested in). As usual his work verges towards veneration for mysticism.

At the end of the day he should have marshalled his forces with more discipline and spent the time on making this into a serious work that it should be, and as Bruno deserves. It appears that he merely cranked this one out. He will pay for this as readers such as I will never buy another of his books.

Back to the Thompson Twins Mr. White!

This is a horrible book. I checked it out from my local library because I didn't have much faith in it, and I was sorry I even wasted my time reading it.

Who does this book serve? For those who know anything about Giordano Bruno, it is a waste of time. And those who don't know anything about him might be discouraged by how poorly-written this book is, and thus decide not to look further into Giordano Bruno or his philosophy.

Only the most titilating aspects of Bruno's execution at the stake are really described with any detail in this book. Michael White doesn't really explain anything about Bruno's complex philosophical system, based upon the Art of Memory and founded through the Renaissance perspective that ancient wisdom had more to offer than the modern knowledge of the time. Bruno intuited that the sun was the center of our solar system and that the earth was only one of an infinite number of planets, not through data compiled by looking through a telescope, but by reading ancient texts -- from Plotinus to Nicholas of Cusa and others -- and picked out the parts that made sense to him. He then syntesized these ideas into a coherent worldview that reflected his perception of the world around him. In the work On the Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas, Bruno's discussion about images and ideas the humans construct in their minds and how they relate to the actual objects themselves can be seen as a precursor to semiotics.

If you are looking for a biography of Bruno in English, then read Giordano Bruno: His Life And Thought by Dorothea Waley Singer. It is out of print, but might be out there still on the internet. The writing is clear, it avoids sensationalistic descriptions of bloodshed (unlike Michael White), and has a more firm understanding of Bruno's philosophy.

If you are looking for inspired attempts to place Bruno's philosophical system within the context of other streams of thought in Renaissance Europe, then look into Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition and/or The Art of Memory, both of which are by Frances Yates.

The main drawback with these books by Yates is that she thinks of everything as "Hermetic." Their are Cabalistic influences in Bruno's thought, and Yates doesn't always bring that out in her analyses. But there are other books available that follow up on the good scholarship in Yates, and question her bold enthusiasms when they overstep the evidence. Such works are Eros and Magic in the Renaissance by Ioan Couliano, the book by Hilary Gatti -- which analyzes how he operated as a scientist and not just a philosopher, and Giordano Bruno and the Philosophy of the Ass by Nuccio Ordine -- which tries to place his theory of the path to wisdom through ignorance in a well-established tradition.

If you want to read Bruno's work itself, there are many of his works available in English, including the Rabelaisian and bawdy play, The Candlebearer, published by Dovehouse Editions in Canada, as well as his more philosophically mature dialogues, The Ash Wednesday Supper, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, and The Cabala of Pegasus.

In short, anyone expressing even the slightest interest in any aspect of Giordano Bruno should look elsewhere, and avoid this book by Michael White.

Michael White succeeds in personalizing the heretic monk Giordano Bruno, giving us a more complete picture of the man than we find in other sources. His book educates us about the social, political, and religious environment in which Bruno lectured and wrote. We also feel his suffering at the hands of the Inquisition. Unfortunately, we learn less about Bruno's ideas, which covered a remarkably wide range of speculations. We are given only shorthand versions.

White's writing is very readable, but one sometimes wonders if all of it is based on documented fact. For example, he writes that "A sudden hush fell over the room; the judges sat motionless. Bruno, his confidence clearly ebbing away, his energy almost drained, looked around the room once more, seeing the still faces, the eyes of witnesses quickly averted." How does White know all these details? Passages like this read as if the author were using literary invention to make the dry records of the Inquisition more interesting.

It is strange, that religion and burning in the history of mankind frequently lie together so near: momentarily the assassination attempts of Islamic fundamentalists in New York, London, Madrid and elsewhere, or (on the other hand) the million humans, who became victims of the Inquisition of the catholic church in the Middle Ages. Giordano Bruno has been one of the most famous mourners. Because he questioned the Ptolomaei conception of the world of an earth, around which everything circles, and because he tried to replace the earth-centric-theory by an analysis, which postulated a lot of moving solar systems (plausibly spoken from today's view), in which there is no hierarchical order, - therefore he had to accept more and more furious attempts against his person, which wanted to force his obedience. Apparently unteachable he classified the subject not as passive nullity directed of God, but as active, self-constructing substance. The theories of the Vatican of the case of sin and of the predetermination of the fate Giordano Bruno rejected as life-strange. "The general opinion is not always the perfect truth..." Giordano Bruno today is still quoted. Such remarks produced expensive, bitter consequences: On 17 February 1600 he publicly was burned on the Campo di Fiori in Rome after eight years torture and dungeon detention. Hundreds of years the burning of disbelieving people seemed to be the major task of the Christian denomination. However today the Pope-administration gradually makes some steps backwards, remorseful: On February 18, in the year 2000, cardinal Angelo Sodano, the undersecretary of state of the Vatican, expressed the "deep regret" of the catholic church (according to ZENITH NEWS AGENCY with regard to the death sentence against Giordano Bruno) in a letter to the participants of a congress in Napoli, which took place for the memory of this Italian philosopher in the local theological faculty 2000. It was a "terrible death", "a sad episode in newer Christian history". Respect considering the dignity and the conscience of humans, who look persistently for the truth: this is a level, in the present not yet all countries, confessions or population circles succeed to manage. The book of the British science journalist Michael White ("Science editor of British GQ Magazine") was criticized by some reviewers, because it has been written in a teenager-language, less scientific, more thrilling like an adventure-story. But on the other hand it is an easily reading, you can practice before you will fall asleep. Short before snoring you can brood about the fact, that religion (connected with the aim to burn people of "wrong" confession) did not yet disappear as a pattern of acting among the earth inhabitants 400 years later...

This book is far from being either a thorough or balanced biography of Bruno. When its not digressing into the author's sweeping and judgmental generalizations about history - "For such people, everyday life was an agony and the society in which they lived was almost stagnant...all but a few... spent most of their time inebriated" - and his demonization of Christianity, it focuses only on Bruno's arrest and trial and covers only in bad summary or not at all the rest of his life. White rips on Catholicism and Protestantism beyond the facts, yet depicts Renaissance intellectuals anticipating a supposedly true faith of modern scientific theories and method as humanity's salvation. What few and poor citations and footnotes are provided - "Christian doctrine does not evolve; it is based upon cast-in-stone tenets and therefore cannot develop or offer anything radical or original." - are too little to justify the sweeping judgments, and leave one confused as to whether the Hollywood style dialogues between Bruno and his confessor are actual quotes or White's embelishments.

Its no secret that the churches and governments of Europe abused their power severely during the last 1900 years. A lot of the bleakness of situation that White describes is true. But he goes beyond history to paint a black and white picture of a purely evil church and intellectuals martyred for their belief in scientific methods and theories that DIDN'T YET EXIST. The complexity of the historical situation and the intelectual relationships between the Christian clergy and scholars is glazed over; the motives and reasons for the atmosphere of suppresion are chalked off solely to the evil ignorance and greed of every single person of power in the church. The complexity of the crossover identities of European Christian scholars and their struggle to reconcile their faith and observations goes out the window - White has Bruno convenienently seeing the good in everything mainstream science currently cheers, and totally condemning everything it currently despises. His treatment of Bruno's interests is completely anachronistic and belays all the tenets he held to that scientists would balk at, and vice versa.

This book isn't about Bruno's views - its about White's. Like a bad Hollywood movie set against a historical backdrop, this is more about what's going on now then what happened back then.