Ferguson Books

Ferguson is a superb storyteller, and a magician with words. A coming of age story, which is uniquely idiosyncratic, replete with one of a kind fictional characters. A tale of a child and his schizophrenic mother, that reveals truths we all need to come to terms with.

I picked this book up from a bargain bin somewhere, and tried several times, unsuccesfully to actually read the entire thing. I felt that the descriptions by the author were interesting and provided some good visualization, but had a very hard time discerning dream sequences, flashbacks, memories, current time, etc. The net effect is that I often found myself reading, not knowing what I was being told. Don't get me wrong, I love a book with lots of turns and perhaps convoluted plot lines, but this one went too far for me.

I have had this book for many years. I own many books on the subject but find this one is the best. Simple to follow, it is full of great advice on many kinds of mystical subjects. WOW! Helps on prosperity, health, rituals, protection, and many other matters of interest to all.

Universal Mind is a simple book that goes over simple occult principles and explains topics like reading your future from dominos, playing cards, talking to people in their dreams, color healing, healthy eating, and a few other topics. Nothing ground breaking, but still a nice little book for people interested in occult aspects.

this book seemed like it would at least have train schedules that would be useful in planning your trip, but while it has a few they are useless. use the swiss or german rail website and rick steves and the lonley planet book to plan your trip, skip this one!

As of yet, I have not journeyed through Europe. My desire when I get there is to go via rail. This is an excellent guide to help you plan you travels through the country. Where to go, where to stay and what to see and do. Since I have yet to go to Europe, I can not attest to this books reliablity. Though from what I have read, seems to be quite insightful and full of help for a visit.

you probably just bought a Eurail pass and are looking for more info how to coordinate your european vacation as far as rail traveling goes. stick to your pass and a basic guide. you do not need this. the timetables are completely off. not one even matched. european train stations are so organized and easy to follow that you don't need a guide to tell you where to find an atm machine, an exchange office or a travel agency. as soon as you step out of the trains you'll clearly see signs directing you to the right places. i never thought it would be so useless, esp. if you are doing a backpacking trip. those day excursions that are sudgested from the "base" cities only direct you to tourist traps. i would avoid buying this book if i had the choice again. stick with a Lonely Planet guide. in my opinion the only publisher that tells like it is. Lonely Planet's Europe on a Shoestring or Let's Go Europe give you most of the info that is provided in this book and way more on top of it. stick to your pass and the timetable that they give you with it. you don't need this book.

I recommend you not buy it unless your interested on only the major cities and express travel (and you're too busy to get the same information from [a website]).
A disappointment in that it has no local train schedules. Earlier Eurail books (1980' and 90's) had much more data on train stations along the way. The fun for me is in staying in a smaller village and catching a 15 -20 minute train to city center to see its churches, museums and architecture. Other than the travel times, this book tells us nothing we don't already know; i.e., for sight seers there are frequent trains(usually every hour-sometimes two)to all major citys....

I bought this book because I had the 1990-91 Edition and wanted updated information. I found the 2001 material to be so similar it was laughable. The base cities are the same, the excursions were the same, the 'how to' information was identical to the edition ten years earlier. I found little if anything to be new, fresh, or informative. The book was a huge disappointment.

Ferguson insults the purchaser of the Penguin Paperback by omitting the bibliography and only providing sketchy footnotes. "Serious scholars" who desire these items are advised to buy the Harcover edition. Other than that, it is a good read

This book was just way too detailed for me. It contains lots of facts and figures about biz transactions but it is just too much. It was to the point of who cares? Niall Ferguson really did his home work as far as that is concerned but it made the book boring. To me it felt like it was written by an accountant. It is the story behind the facts and figures and how they came about which make for interesting reading. But I have to give him credit for the time he spent putting this book together is unimaginable.

Having said that I would have enjoyed it more if it had some stories where they made 1.2 million on this deal or lost 500,000 on that deal but it wasn't there. Just an accounting at the end of the year saying this was what they had at the end. No exciting stories like the robber barons trying to take over a railroad or JP Morgan putting together large trust deals in the US. Although chapter 11, which tells of the Rothschild involvement with mining and Cecil Rohdes and De Beers was very interesting and by far the the best chapter in the book, although it was not enough for me to give it a better rating. But that chapter for me made the book.

I skimmed more of this book then I did the first one. There are a few more interesting stories in here but not enough to really keep you interested. If you like well written interesting biographies this is probably not for you.

A very complete book, a mine of facts but the author was unable to sort what is important from miscellaneous. The mix of general european history, business history and family events is by moments as indigestible as porridge por a non-scot.

What has Ferguson not told about the Rothschilds in this second volume of his seemingly exhaustive two volume set?

He all too facilely dismisses Victor Rothschild's being the fifth man in the World War II Soviet spy ring of Blunt, Burgess, et. al. He dosen't discuss the Rothschilds' connection with Freemasonry at the highest level, and their gift to Israel of the Supreme Court building, a New World Order artifact, heavily laden architecturally with Freemasonry symbolism. Likewise, glaringly absent from note are Illuminati activities, which the family has been widely thought to be involved with. History Professor Ferguson could fill in his blanks on some vital but shady Rothschild history from Henry Makow, a researcher and writer--and a Jew.

According to an article on Ferguson in Harvard Magazine (May/June '07), he is about to take on biographical writing of Henry Kissinger, at Kissinger's request. This should generate caution. Could Kissinger's "papers" be entirely relied on? Kissinger probably saw what sheen Ferguson could put on the Rothschild's archives as raw material, ignoring or minimising important but dark concerns.

Same question on the Warburg's family papers that he is availing himself of. What will Ferguson tell us about Paul Warburg's role in establishing the egregious Federal Reserve, and Max Warburg financing the Bolshevik revolution?

Let's hope that Ferguson can either put this and other allegations to rest once and for all or illuminate them if true--but now that he's shown his colors with the Rothschilds, I doubt that he will, either way.

It seems that sympathetic academic interest in these elitist families and individuals is inevitable in part because that is where the big bucks for research and publishing would be, especially for a scholar who professes to have, as he says in the Harvard Magazine article, "become a thorough philo-Semite".

Is there a whiff of opportunism here at the expense of objectivity?

I agree with one of the critics that the book had many facts and details that broke up the pace of the book for me. Ferguson presumes that the reader knows a fair amount about bonds, consuls and other financial mechanisms. He would have done well to slow down a bit and explain a few of the terms and concepts. And I think that Ferguson tells an utterly superficial and innocuous history of the Family. Long awkward sentences make for labored reading. That having been said, this was no doubt a delicate and ambitious undertaking.

It was frustrating from the first set of codes i tried to follow.
The beginning of the book indicated that it was also written for begining programmers but totally lacked basic instructions and explanations.

I'm new to C# and this is my first book on it, I've had some experience over the past several years in C/C++ but am new to C# and .net in general. This book is a good read, and the first several chapters give you a clear understanding of how to do tasks in C#. It doesn't spend a lot of time going over the basics that you should probably already have learned from other languages (controls, variables, etc.) but has gotten me up and running with C# in no time flat. I wouldn't say it's 100% comprehensive and I have purchased other book to accompany this one as I finish reading it, but it is definitely a good read for someone who has some knowledge of other C languages (some background in C++ OOP is definitely helpful, the author starts in talking about object oriented structures from the beginning and assumes that you know what he is talking about) will do fine with this book.

The Bible series is one of my favorite series of technical books due to it's usual great presentation of the data and the sheer volume of information presented. I'm a very careful shopper and usually research the books I'm going to buy. However, due to the high quality of many of the other books in this series I purchased this one on faith. This turned out to be a big mistake as this book is poorly laid out, covers some topics to a depth that seems ridiculous and other topics are just barely touched. There are not nearly enough examples and the chapter on ADO.Net is woefully inadequate. The book works as a high level overview, but there are much better books out there that work even better as a high level overview. If you want a better book then look at Wrox's "Beginning Visual C#" ISBN: 0764543822 or Wrox's "Professional C#, Second Edition" ISBN: 0764543989.

This books is poorly written. It tries to be a book for beginners, which is fine with me, but it then mentions complex topics in passing without elaboration. For instance, it talks briefly about structures. It assumes I know what/how/when to use structures vs. classes (until much, much later in the book). What's the difference between a structure and a class? It just assumes that I know. That may not be the best example, but it's one of MANY examples.

Another qualm I have with this book is it is too much "what" with very little "why". It pays very little attention to best practices. For example, it will tell you how to implement an interface, but what are the best ways to implement an interface. Granted this gets into more esoteric OO design concepts, but still, give me some ideas on HOW to do stuff, not just WHAT I can do. Most other programming books have more of this HOW kind of discussion.

Finally, there are the annoying typos. It clearly shows that this book was just thrown together. The quality just isn't there.

I can't recommend a specific alternative, but go with something that has better reviews.

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OK - I'm revising my review as of 5/21/03. The above review still holds, BUT I have now read 2 other C# books, and to my utter astonishment, they are worse. So - this is the best book I have found yet, though it has some serious issues, as I mention above.

I praised this book on a Mircosoft newsgroup... But the more I read this the less I like it. I wanted to share some thoughts here. After comparing this book to a few others on C#, I feel this has one a more comprehensive table of contents. You get a full 9 pages on XML commenting while others give a paragraph or two. There are some cool chapters such as "Building Mobile Applications", "Working with COM", "Working with COM+ Services" and ".NET Remoting". These are topics that my 1600 page VB.NET book (Francesco Balena, Microsoft Press) didn't cover.

However, there are a lot of typos, a lot of fluff, explanations are sometimes very poor, and organization is pretty bad.

It hasn't been very thoroughly proofread. Take this for example: "Abstract classes are also, by definition, virtual methods..." Still not sure how a class can be a method. There are a lot more like this, but re-reading the paragraph you can generally figure out what they're talking about.

By fluff, I mean that they do things like give an example of operator overloading for each and every unary operators (come on, do I need an example for unary plus AND unary minus?) Or how to cause about 6 different exceptions (OutOfMemory, StackOverflow, NullReference, etc) and how to catch each one. It's a good way to pad the page count, that's about all.

The overall organization of the book doesn't make it a very good read, either. It really skips around a lot. For example, talking about overloading members and virtual members BEFORE talking about classes seems like a poor choice to me if you're really aiming to help novice programmer.

It claims to be written for novice and experienced developer alike, but I'm not sure it makes a great first book on .NET. Although, if you are a veteran programmer, you'll fly through the first 11 chapters since they are written more so for the novice.

If you already know VB.NET and want to transition to C# (like I'm doing) then this book will get you up and running with all of the important things. However, the WROX books have gotten some good reviews on newsgroups, so I might give those a try instead.

Hello, My name is Johnathan Mark Smith from the Staten Island Java Group This book is hot !!! If you are a real java programmer this book has to be on your desk. It is pack with anything you would went to know about the JDK 1.1

This book does not worth your money. This is very much like the API doc on the web, there is NO example. Better save your money to find a better ref book such as the Chan & Lee...

This book documents version 1.0.2 of JDK. Sun is up to version 1.3 and has made dramatic additions since 1.0.2. Don't buy something so out of date.

As others have pointed out, there isn't much here that isn't in the freely available JDK documentation. Also, most computer books lag behind the actual software they cover. There are a few indispensable "classic" computer books out there, but they're all about stuff like UNIX, TCP/IP, and C, targets that don't move as quickly as Java does.

But I don't think I'm the only professional programmer in the world who appreciates having printed documentation. It's handy to be able to take a book on the road, or to the nearest couch, and flip through the pages at my leisure. I like putting a finger in one page and a pencil in another while I flip to a few cross-references. I doubt that online docs will ever really replace the Real Thing for me.

O'Reilly is one of the two or three best computer book publishers out there (Addison-Wesley and Prentice-Hall are also excellent, but pricey). This book is typical of O'Reilly's stuff: practical, dependable and inexpensive. I do Java GUI programming full-time, and I've used this book a lot. So far as I can tell, every method for every class is covered at just the right level of detail. If you want an authoritative, exhaustive reference that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, look no further.

If you do not have the javadoc API reference, this book will be very helpful. But this is not the case for most Java programmers. The book does offer things more than what you have in the html javadoc, however, they are VERY limited. As the dynamic html reference gets richer in each 1.1.x release, the benefit of buying this hardcopy deminishes. The samples in this book are largely overstated. They are more of decorations rather than real things.

In short, be cautious. If the book description makes you consider buying this book, you'd better find it in a nearby bookstore and read several pages first - to make sure this is what you want.

This book is worthless. As a .NET developer, I was expecting it to be a book on the .NET Mobile API, and catered to those developing .NET for the mobile community. NOTHING in this book that you cannot pick up in the QuickStarts. Nothing. It contains so little information that like one of the other reviewer, I'm ashamed I bought it too. Don't waste your time or money on this book unless you only want to have a high level intro on mobile devices and little sample code on how to do them in VB.NET - YUCK!

I recommend this book highly. It has a proper introduction for .NET devices and application development. This is the exact book that I was looking for.

What a great book! I'd been hearing so much about wireless development and .NET that I really wanted to start learning about both of them. I've been programming in Visual Basic for a few years now, so I was pleased to find that this book seemed to assume a level of experience fairly close to my own.

The first half of the book tells you all about different kinds of wireless devices -- which was great, since I was only familiar with my own Nokia cell phone. The second half of the book tells you all about the different .NET technologies that you can use with these devices.

After reading this book, I was able to create a full WAP-based hour-tracking application for my personal use in just one evening. That alone paid for the book!

This book is simple garbage. Ferguson is ignorant of very basics of technology he laborously attempts to write about. This book contains severe factual errors. for example in Ferguson view main difference between Java and .NET is: "Java is Sun technology for 'write once, run anywhere'. With .NET however...The CLR runs on a Windows server - not on the client devices! ... .NET means 'write once, adopt on the server, receive anywhere'." This got to be a joke...Rest of the book is no structure, no real contect - just chaotic collection of topics (mostly in pictures) somehow realted to mobile space. I'm surprised APress agreed to print this drivel - it woudn't pass juniour .NET engineer technical review.

I bought this book at the PDC in LA just a few weeks ago. At the PDC, the .NETcf (compact framework) was released, and this book covered the process of building .NET apps that run on various PDAs. Within miniutes, I was able to build a C# app for my HP handheld. The book talks about lots of other cool topics. For example, there is coverage on how to get .NET apps to run on Palms, cell phones and even interact with J2ME clients (using web services / XML).

All in all this is a very solid book on building mobile apps using .NET. (...) ...I for one found a ton of information that was no where in the supplied docs.

I entered the ISBN for the third edition and ended up with this book. While I do recommend this book for those interested in the sociology of families and kinship, make sure if it is assigned for a class that you have the correct edition.

I bought this book for my sociology in family studies class and it is perhaps the most useless textbook I have ever read. The contents are jumbled together and resemble different clippings from different articles (I realize this is an anthology, but I would atleast like it to be well structured and meaningful). I didn't learn anything significant from this book and I dread opening it. Save your money and don't buy the book. And if you are a professor, please don't choose this book for your students. I'm an undergrad student at a top 30 University, and lot of my peers agree that this book is confusing and not helpful to learning.

This isn't a bad book. It's a compilation of readings regarding contemporary families. A lot of focus is on feminism and gay and lesbian families. If you can read it with an open mind (not necessarily have to change your mind) then it can be interesting and educational. Some readings are better than others and I think this depends on you interest. I personally liked the readings on working families and grandparents.

I chose this book for my 200-level family sociology class instead of a text book. Most of my students were not sociology majors, but most enjoyed the readings from this book. It is not a textbook! I suggest either covering more introductory and general material in lectures or pairing with a textbook and using the readings in this anthology to flesh out specific issues and topics in the study of family sociology. I found that it included topics, such as gay and lesbian parenting or absentee parenting, that were difficult to find in other readers. As another reviewer already touched on, I also appreciated the integration of race, gender, class and sexuality throughout the book, rather than a special chapter at the end of a general section on each topic. A few drawbacks: (1) I found that I had to supplement with outside readings for my section on abuse - the readings included were too specialized/not what I was looking for in this topic; (2) there were no readings with a more international or transnational focus; and (3) unlike, for example, Andrew Cherlin's reader, this one did not include samples of what conservative perspectives on family diversity and trends look like. Otherwise, I found this to be an excellent reader.

I have used this book in my 200 level Sociology of Families courses. The students enjoy most of the readings but there are a few that are overly technical and/or assume the student has a background in the topic. Despite these issues, overall I feel it is one of the better families readers on the market now. Chapters are diverse and do not "tokenized" issues like race, class, sexuality, and gender in "special" sections. My students really enjoyed the different perspectives and qualitative studies she chose to include.

Kitty Ferguson gives a lot of info on Stephen Hawking's life and works, being a small book in size it is full of interesting theories on Universe and Black Holes. It is purely scientific book thus it tries to explain everything scientifically, eventhough Stephen Hawking sometimes accepts that science cannot prove some things that are beyond our reach, nevertheless he does not accept that the whole universe is a God's creation.

"The Creation of the Universe" by Hârun Yahya is an excellent book which explains scientifically how God has created the Universe.

After reading A Brief History of Time I decided that I wanted to learn more about Stephen Hawkings himself and how he became who he is today. I picked up this book written by Kitty Ferguson, which is claimed to be a biography and started reading it. After about twenty pages she was done talking about his life and started talking about his theories. This was disappointing to me because I thought the book was a biography.

As I continued reading I became somewhat confused while she told about Hawkings discoveries. The explanations were little or none in trying to get the reader to understand the ideas. It did not help that there were very few small illustrations that were in the book to go along with her explanations. If there were highly detailed color illustrations such as those in A Brief History In Time, it might have been much easier to understand.

I did enjoy the beginning of the book where Kitty goes into detail about the beginning of Hawkings life but I feel like it was just an overview of how he became who he is today. I would not recommend this book, instead I would recommend A Brief History In Time because it is much easier to understand because it has great illustrations and is not so mathematical.

I really liked this book at times, but found Kitty tries to hard to explain Hawking's theories. If you are not one of the Mensa crowd then it gets a little meaningless like similar to reading Greek, can you speak or read Greek? not me! Some of Hawking's theories are explained well and are pretty straight forward, such as the singularity theory and how many believe the universe has expanded and then retracted back to a singularity and then expanded and retracted over and over. Also it goes into detail about his belief that particles can escape black holes, once it reaches the event horizon it splits the negative may fall directly into the black hole past the even horizon and the positive falls away from the event horizon freeing it.This aside what I really wanted to read more about was the man Hawking himself. I mean come on, I've already read "A brief history of time". In short this book is short on explaining much about Stephen and tries to hard to explain some of his many theories.

I felt that Ferguson achieved a nice balance by intermingling Hawking's biography with introduction to his theories. It allows your brain to alternate between working on science and returning "back to earth" to meet an interesting human being with all his problems and victories. The science part is very layman-friendly, and at the same time is not too slow for the scientifically-minded (just a bit too politically correct, but it's understandable). The biography part is tactful, and with just the right amount of detail. The book is clear and inspiring, and she convinced me to read Hawking's "A brief history of time".

Strangely enough, Hawking's book turned out to be not as clear and inspiring as Ferguson's book. She painted him as the king of clarity, conciseness, and humor, but I don't get such an impression at all from reading his book. So now I have mixed feelings: I respect Ferguson for being good at writing and teaching (better than Hawking at both), but I'm annoyed with her for the false advertisement.

After reading "A Brief History Of Time" by Stephen Hawking, I was absolutely taken with astrophysics. Now, I'm no professional, but I could understand Hawking's book even if I had to learn to concentrate on what I was reading completely and reread some places. Hawking attempted to explain even the most complicated things - and succeeded. I thought I could pick up Kitty Ferguson's book for some easy reading on Hawking's discoveries - boy, was I wrong!

Kitty Ferguson makes absolutely no attempt to explain the things she's talking about. None! She simply gives you facts that are impossible to accept without explanations. For the most part, I did know what she was talking about - and even then I was astounded by how confusing she had managed to make it all seem, and how imprecise a few of her facts and analogies were.

If you understand the things she's talking about (and you probably do understand most of the things if you know at least something about Hawking's discoveries), you have no need to read this book. It's not even that good of a biography. If you don't know a thing about astrophysics, but would like to learn and, what's much more important, understand these things, pick up another book - and I myself would suggest the aforementioned "A Brief History Of Time" by Stephen Hawking.

This book is not a how-to-do thing. You will learn why this cypher was created, how it was created it all the details. Not an introductory book. But very worth to who ever want to enter modern applied cryptographic field.

This is the official discription of the Twofish encryption algorithm by the people that developed it. The book gives the direct discription of what they have done, *PLUS* the reasons behind the choices that they made, and the considerations that were involved. The book has a readable style, and covers this algorithm in greater detail than I've ever seen one covered before. This book is a must for anyone planning to implement the algorithm.

This book assumes that you know something of Cryptography, it would not be a good introduction to that topic. (However the main author's book "Applied Cryptography" serves that function well)

Bruce Schneier is the Yoda of crpytography and information security, if you've heard him there's no need to ask anyone else. This book would probably only appeal to the genuinely avid crypto fan, its Greek to anyone else. It is a thorough exposition of the making of the Twofish cypher, the latest attempt to secure information as absolutely as possible. You must be well versed in cryptography to get anything out of the work.

The back cover promises "Step-by-step instructions on how to use it in your systems." This is why I bought the book. However, there are only a handful of pages on "Using Twofish", and none of them have anything like a step-by-step howto.

In case you've been asleep for the past few years, the AES competition is over. Rijndael won, two-fish lost. End of story. This book serves only as a historical artifact depicting Schneier's failed attempt at lasting fame and glory.

Listen to the *real* crypto experts (i.e. the AES judges) and stick with the solution that they've chosen.

The source code in this book is an ungodly mess that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. It is a mish-mash of poorly explained macros and pre-processor directives. It would take a divine miracle to get the source to compile (Scheier neglects to go into the details of how to do a build, he just throws the source code at you and expects you to figure it out). Perhaps, then, it's no surprise why team-Schneier lost AES.

This book was just PR for the AES competition. Now that it's over, the only thing this book is good for is to prop a door open.