Byrne Books

The Columba Press often presents wonderful, short volumes for contemplation, reflection and spiritual growth, and this volume by Matthew Byrne is no exception. This book follows in some ways the same story that the film 'The Passion of the Christ' followed, save that this follows directly from the biblical witness of the Gospel of Luke, from the feast of the Last Supper (Luke 22) to the crucifixion and burial of Jesus (Luke 23).

It is somewhat sobering to realise that this story, all-important to most if not all Christians throughout the world and throughout history, is contained in a mere two chapters of Luke (with parallels, of course, in other gospels; Matthew and Mark also take only two chapters each for the story). Byrne does not try to compare the gospel stories here -- the reader is left to do so (or not) on her or his own. It is not intended, as per the author's own admission, as a critical exegesis or scholarly investigation, but rather a reflection on the feelings and insights that derive from the story, with some attention given to historial, political and cultural issues around the text. These six chapters originated from a series of radio broadcasts, expanded somewhat to take advantage of the greater flexibility of print media.

Byrne has a gift for description. Perhaps the fact that radio broadcasts had to paint visual images in the imaginations of the listeners helped Byrne to craft the text. He goes into good detail about the events and people without overpowering the reader with unnecessary detail. He introduces information to fill in the gaps, and gives possible explanations about what people could be thinking at different times in the narratives, but always stops short of insisting that his interpretation, or any other, must be the one followed.

Byrne's writing is clear and concise, interesting and broadly drawn. While the text lacks a certain depth academically, it is certainly a useful text for devotional and bible-study purposes. One could easily incorporate the six chapters here into a six-week series during Lent, looking toward the event of Good Friday.

While most existing JSF books focus on teaching readers how to use the Faces framework, this book instead looks specifically at Facelets and the component libraries within the Apache MyFaces project, viz. Tomahawk, Trinidad, Orchestra, and Tobago.

After spending a weekend with this book, here are my impressions:

* The book is fairly short, and so seems very diminutive when stacked up against other books on JSF. You can imagine reading this from cover to cover over a long weekend.

* With four main authors, and six contributing authors, this book reads like a series of articles on JSF. Fortunately, the articles are well written for the most part, and you can read the chapters out of order without loss of continuity.


MyFaces Core:
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The chapter on MyFaces Core (the actual JSF implementation) is only about 20 pages long. So while it works as a decent refresher, it is absolutely not a first introduction to JSF. I suspect newcomers to JSF will find this book rather daunting unless they've already read some of the other excellent books on Faces (see my review for Kito Mann's JSF in Action.)

Tomahawk:
=========
This chapter is very well written and focuses on some important components (like tree2, schedule, inputCalendar, etc.) The explanations are clear enough to make you feel you should be able to get these working after a reading. However, I was disappointed to find marginal treatment of the t:saveState component - especially as there are multiple references to it in other chapters (as in the discussion of Orchestra, and in JSF pitfalls).
. . . . . .
As an aside, this book's index is the gold standard for tech books - about 30 pages for a 285 page book. When I went looking for saveState, for example, I was able to quickly zero in on all its references.
. . . . . .

Facelets:
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I got a strange sense of deja vu when I read the chapter on Facelets - turns out it is lifted almost verbatim from APress's Facelets Essentials - along with the surreal Bird Store example. If you have read that book, you won't find many surprises here. This chapter and its Facelets appendix take up 58 pages which turns out to be over two thirds of the content of that other book. Fortunately its the best two thirds - so you really get two books in one here.
. . . . . .
What really bothered me is that most of the examples in this book use JSP as the presentation technology. If Facelets is really worthy of having a mention on the title, I'd have expected to see more real world usage throughout the book.

So why not drink the KoolAid?
. . . . . .
Misc projects:
==============
A common problem I had with the other chapters was that the examples were too short to be of much use.

For instance, the example for pageFlowScope is too trivial to convincingly demonstrate why it is useful. It provides nothing more than a description of the mechanical aspects of using this scope. I'd have loved to see a working example that exemplified how it avoided the weaknesses of the request and session scopes.

[To fully grasp the actual meat of this particular topic, I highly recommend reading about Tomahawk's saveState, Trinidad's pageFlowScope, and Orchestra's conversation scope - all in one sitting. These are all different solutions to the same core issue - so they're best read together. The discussion in Orchestra's chapter is by far the best - esp. see Page 175 - Managing Independent Windows, and page 194 - Orchestra's Architecture.]


Antipatterns:
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The chapter on JSF Antipatterns is a very interesting read. A few of these antipatterns seem like spectacularly bad ideas to begin with and you wonder how they passed design reviews in the first place. However, there are a lot of practical usage tips here (such as thread safety issues with custom validators and converters) that made it worth my time.


Appendices:
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The information on dependency injection with Spring is confined to about a paragraph - so a better choice is Spring Recipes by Gary Mak. The appendix on view state encryption is also a useful addition.

Conclusion:
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This book was long overdue - and is well worth your time if you are into using the MyFaces sub-projects. Throw in Facelets and you have a winning combination.


Damodar Chetty
swengsol.com

The editorial review is not truly descriptive of or fair to this remarkable book.

It is actually a collection of short stories dealing with the various members of the MacFarlane family, told by Kerry MacFarlane, the nephew of Sir Valentine MacFarlane (who does not marry a gypsy - that must be Hollywood influence in the film based on the book.) The family has good relations with the local Romany folk, and many of the stories in the book involve them in one way or another, but that is only one aspect of the adventures of the MacFarlane family.

The stories are firmly rooted in the rural life of Northern Ireland in the late 19th or early 20th century, and Byrne has a good ear for the speech of the time and place. But the stories also involve the wanderings of family members and friends to and from New York, the American South, and Monte Carlo - a Spanish nobleman and his supposed grandson looking for the lost treasure of the Armada - a kidnapped Chinese woman - a horse race - a boxing match - a trial for murder - a duel - and an apparent visitation of the Devil to Destiny Bay. (A possible touch of the supernatural is a regular feature of this book.)

Sir Valentine MacFarlane is an irascible old gentleman and eminently quotable. I would give the book 4 and one half stars because - as one might expect in a collection of short stories -not all are of the same quality. But overall it's worthy of 5 stars and well worth reading.

Indisputably, Derek Bickerton has been the Guru of studies on pidgin, creoles, and language variational studies. Books by Bickerton should be the basic introductory and graduate studies material for scholars, researchers, and interested readers on these subjects. Perhaps the underlying reason in support of Bickerton lies on the fact that he lived in a sort of metaphorical Mecca (Hawaii), surrounded by a multitudinous variety of these linguistic phenomenae. Filipinos,Japanese, Portuguese, Polynesian, and Micronesian Peoples.

great atlas prbably the best of its kind . Two page layout for each disease with nice clinical, MEI and pathology pictures. I highy recommend it for anyone interested in Orbital diseases.

'The book should be read by those who aspire to expertise in the complex but rewarding speciality of ocular microbiology.' Journal of Clinical Pathology, September 1996

"...this concise, generally well written and adequately illustrated text should be welcomed as a useful manual. The use of coloured plates is essential, and the book provides most of what is required. It is not an exhaustive textbook, but provides selective details of a range of key procedures." In Optician

You won't find training info or how to move the pieces, this is what it said it is: a specialized dictionary on Chess.

Absolutely a must have for chess lovers, this book not only embraces classical terminology, but also those term coined and utilized by chess writers and players. The book also incorporates biographical sketches of chess players whose names has become part of our chess heritage. The influences and contributions of these chess notables have been also identified and defined within their biographical sketches.

The definitions presented in this dictionary have several facets: Etymological definitions that are concerned with the origin or derivation of the words or terms which are being defined. Logical definitions to indicate generic terms with their specific differences. Functional definitions to show the purposes, powers, and actions of what is being defined. Historical definitions for those terms that can be better understood by indicating their historical evolution.

In summary an entertaining and informative book.

Good explanation on what magick is and how to use it. Good for the beginner.

This book is really one of the best in this themes,so the writer not only teach the way to find ours goals but how to use this ones and any person has the way to search yours most crazy dreams and it's just star I mean DO IT...and you'll see

When you read this book, all will be revealed to you, it is a powerful, book full of knowledge and wisdom ,written by a man with great insight,that will empower the reader to receive whatever they want from this world