Simmons Books

First, let me say thank you to John for his efforts. The read was definitely worth it. The book was not as academically systematic as say, Pearson's "Hero and the Outlaw." But, if you're an analytical sort of writer, I believe that you will enjoy "Grail."

True be told, I think "Grail" is two books in one, with the second book overshadowing the first.

In the first part of the book, John talks about "verbal identity" as a compliment to visual ID. I shared the book with my fellow advertising imagineers, and we had a spirited debate on the practicality of establishing an objective set of tonal guidelines for brand managers. My only complaint was that John left his readers hanging a bit by omitting real-world suggestions for helping a client adopt such principles. (Maybe Interbrand didn't want any trade secrets getting out.)

John's second big idea was the notion of storytelling and its importance in creating a deeper understanding of a brand's essence. John used some excellent examples, and delivered his points well.

Truth be told, the dust cover and title nod more to the first focus area than the second. But, that's a bit misleading in my humble opinion. John's passions seem to be more focused on preaching the virtues of story telling to add value to brands - and his sermon was well received.

King Arthur and his knights sought the Holy Grail. Brand managers seek another shining goal: public adoration and identification. Author John Simmons shares that quest, but his knights in shining armor are writers. If the real legacy of King Arthur isn't the still-missing Grail, but the magic of enduring storytelling, Simmons is a sword-carrier in that crusade. He somewhat self-indulgently advocates a creative experiment in brand management based on examples from his firm. In his experience, the most effective approach to brand building is to have "creative" writers - not corporate managers and certainly not non-creative writers - devise stories that are "true to the brand." Such stories, he believes, are the most powerful medium for conveying brand strengths. As with most myths, readers may wish for more empirical evidence, even while enjoying his observations about the English language and its limitations. We recommend this book to brand managers and corporate communicators who want to use language more creatively in hopes of creating that "Holy Grail" of a story.

As much of a misnomer as "Creative" is in ad agencies, this book is just a sad example of the exact opposite.

Main premise: like knights looking for the Holy Grail, you need the magic of enduring storytelling to seep into your branding efforts. A magic that comes from writers and "creative people" instead of "corporate managers" and "surely not non-creative people".

Shallow. Self-indulgent. Hackneyed. Sorry for not even attempting to be creative in lamenting about this tragic excuse of a book, but that's only because it is not worth it.

This book is a very basic, readable overview of small business valuation, which primarily offers the underlying theories and reasons behind different business valuation methods. It also includes a discussion of why one should be considering purchasing a small business in the first place. It does not include actual formulas or calculations that one would need for creating a specific value for a business, but rather gives you a working understanding of how small businesses are valued.

If you would like a fairly enjoyable read on the basics of small business valuation theory then this book makes a good choice. If you are trying to come up with an actual value for a specific business, look elsewhere.

Out of 244 pages, only about 20 of them deal with valuation calculation. Most of the book is basic accounting vocabulary. The sections dealing with valuation don't leave you thinking that you could actually put together a reasonable estimate of business value, and most of the valuation models require the use of a very subjectively computed Risk Price Multiple (RPM). Some good information, but overall I would recommend seeking an another resource.

Found lots of great tips and suggestions in this book. Very easy to read and follow the step-by-step advice. Covers all aspects of OS X, from file system to printing.

The author wrote a fundamental "How-to" book for OSX, only introducing each item as a "problem", e.g." I don't know how to..." or "I want this or that to happen"...
If you are looking for solutions to real headaches, such as the Trash refusing to empty, or error messages infoming you that you lack the privileges to perform an operation, do not look for them in this collection of trivia!
I am sorry to have wasted my money on this book. I am sure even a book entitled "xxxxx for Dummies" would be on a higher level.

I read Curt Simmons'Creating Active Directory Infrastructures book and bought this one as well. This book is very easy to read and covers AD in a visual way. The book crawls all over the AD tools and shows you how to and why to configure this or that. It also has info about design and planning as well as DNS, DHCP, and other networking services. It's kind of a different way to learn a high level topic, but I liked it, and it will be a great reference book.

This book has been very poorly edited with numerous typos in the text and the illustrations which make it confusing and frustrating to read - I would hesitate to buy another book from this publisher again. Buy something else instead - this isn't worth the price.

I bought the boxed set, but i have 2 Active Directory book in the box set. The outside cover said network infrastructure, but the everything inside is Active directory.

Many of the preparatory textbooks available for the 70-29x Windows Server 2003 exams are simply not thorough enough to completely prepare you for these exams. Notably, Microsoft's own series is quite terse when verbosity would have been in order.

McGraw-Hill's 70-29x series continue their tradition of thorough treatments of topics. I especially like their system of describing and explaining a technology or a subsystem first, and then describing its practical implementation. Although some background with Windows is necessary, and even a bit of background info on the material covered in the exam is quite useful, this book can be used to put together most of the picture of Server 2003.

If you're looking for just one box set, pick this one over Sybex's or Microsoft's. You'll be glad you did.

In 254 pages prolific Microsoft technologies author (more than fifteen titles) Curt Simmons and newcomer Ash Rofail do a quick 254-page survey of .NET.

Part I, 1/3 of the book, gives a quick overview of the development environment including the common language runtime, framework classes, web services, ASP.net, ADO and XML. Part II has one brief chapter on the seven key MS server products that provide the horsepower behind the applications developed for .NET. An appendix covers the basic of Windows 2000 Server and Active Directory.

The book is meant as an overview for IS managers and software architects. Developers may want to read another book for their first look; C# is not even mentioned. The book is a bit uneven with unexpected bursts of detail on, for example, XML code and later on SQL Server.

I found the book useful, after several months working on a .NET project, as a quick check on whether our contemplated architecture was taking advantage of all of the Microsoft technologies. I am not sure that I would have enjoyed the book if I had not been already fairly well read on .NET; but none of the other overviews that I have read covered all of the MS technology bases. Architecture mistakes are costly, so the $... is well spent.

Curt Simmons writes nicely so the book is a quick read.

This book would be helpful if you need a big picture of Microsoft's product line under the .NET banner. It's brief and readable, not going into much detail under any section. In the first part, the authors cover the .NET framework but give rather skimpy coverage to ADO.NET. The second section describes the .NET Enterprise servers. Much of the material can be gathered from other sources, although the authors tie it together with some basic descriptions of e-commerce strategies, web services, and how the servers are employed. However I think the retail price is a bit high for the value added.

If you want to get a broad overview of .NET and don't need descriptions of the .NET Enterprise servers, I would suggest "Introducing .NET" instead of this book, since it provides more detail. If you don't care about the $$ but want an easy read pulling together Microsoft's strategy and product line, this book might suffice.

Interesting book that gave you other looking

Interesting book that gave you other locking

Richards Simmons diet is far to hard to do. He claims it is easy but I have not been able to do it because I feel hungry all the time. I think it is sad that he believes people have to eat this way in order to lose weight. No one can live hungry all their life and when I saw he has a book called "Still hungry after all these years" I knew it would never work for me.
Still Hungry After All These Years: My Story

So I became a little depressed by this and have gone in search of help else where . Good luck to you if you bought this book, hope it works for you.

Great buy for some lucky person. Richard goes into great detail and is very personal about health concerns, and exercise, and is very chatty and friendly in this great book.

I received this book as a gift for my birthday. If I had paid for it I would have felt I got my monies worth. I liked it. I read fiction every day. I usually read a book every week or so. I found this book to be entertaining and think it was a pretty good first effort for Steve Simmons. I actually laughed out loud several times which is rare for me unless I'm reading Joeseph Wambaugh. I would recommend this book. The only critiscism I have are quite a few typos and missused words. I hope he writes another book because I think he will just get better. This has a whirlwind pace to it and is set over a very short time span. Buy it.

I got this book hoping to find others like garret oliver's "the brewmaster's table," which i highly recommend. this is a cook book, with relatively few thoughts about pairing beer and food. the book's divided by meal categories (i.e. soups, appetizers, deserts, poultry, etc.), and within these categories there's several recipes that entail using beer in the cooking process. to start off, "beer cheese puffs". YUCK. this book is filled with "american" cuisine, but is also influenced by british cuisine (hence the welsh rabbit/rarebit recipe).
my complaint is thus that the author tried to hard to find recipes that include beer as an ingredient, when there's nothing new about that at all.
If you ARE looking for a good cookbook that deals with beer as an ingredient AND pairing, I'd recommend Harlow's "Microbrew Lover's Cookbook"--it is wonderful. this book might satisfy someone who doesn't really concern themselves with fat/calorie/cholesterol levels in their diet, but most of the recipes here just seem unhealthy--plus it's really heavy on the stews and soups.
I'd say that the best thing in this book is the recommendations on what each beer style is best paired with at the beginning. it's short and without any creative insight, but good knowledge to have for someone who wouldn't normally think about these things and is curious.
Overall, I doubt I will use this book that often. It just has too many unappetizing-sounding recipes, too many obvious recipes that I could figure out on my own, and not enough about pairing. On the positive side it is well written, the directions are very clear, it has a good index, and most of the bread and meat recipes look pretty good. Plus the book is generally low in cost ;)