The Complete Dictionary of Symbols is an engaging and accessible guide to more than 2,000 major themes, figures, and symbols that are commonly found in myth, art, and literature. Drawing on classical mythologies, Biblical themes, and traditional symbols from cultures worldwide, this user-friendly, attractively priced reference has comprehensive entries on everything from individual animals, plants, and objects to gods, goddesses, supernatural creatures, heroes, heroines, mythical episodes, prophets, saints, miracles, and myriad other subjects. Whether the topic at hand is Mercury or Merlin, the Egyptian ankh or the humble ant, engaging text reveals the origins and meaning of each symbol. Interspersed with the main entries are short articles on themes of special interest, such as the Sun, Moon, and stars, or common vices. Three hundred illustrations, an intuitive system of cross-referencing, and authoritative research make The Complete Dictionary of Symbols a reliable resource for school, home, or library.

10 very portable, pocket-sized hiking and running maps come in this modern corrugated carboard envelope-style box. An index map of the whole park is included, along with the following 9 maps: - Stone House - City View - Wild-Leif - Heart of the Park - Old Growth - Avenue of Trees - Maple - Big Stump - Hole in the Park The maps are printed on waterproof plastic that can stand the rigors of running and hiking in wet weather or sweat.

Esselte kartor (Firm)

Not Applicable (Na )

Not Applicable (Na )

Ernest C. Ackermann

Douglas Adams

DOUGLAS ADAMS

Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams

Scott Adams

Scott Adams

Alan Ahlstrand

Lynelle Scott Aitken

Sinan Si Alhir

David Allen With first-chapter allusions to martial arts, "flow,""mind like water," and other concepts borrowed from the East (and usually mangled), you'd almost think this self-helper from David Allen should have been called Zen and the Art of Schedule Maintenance.

Not quite. Yes, Getting Things Doneoffers a complete system for downloading all those free-floating gotta-do's clogging your brain into a sophisticated framework of files and action lists—all purportedly to free your mind to focus on whatever you're working on. However, it still operates from the decidedly Western notion that if we could just get really, really organized, we could turn ourselves into 24/7 productivity machines. (To wit, Allen, whom the New Economy bible Fast Companyhas dubbed "the personal productivity guru," suggests that instead of meditating on crouching tigers and hidden dragons while you wait for a plane, you should unsheathe that high-tech saber known as the cell phone and attack that list of calls you need to return.)

As whole-life-organizing systems go, Allen's is pretty good, even fun and therapeutic. It starts with the exhortation to take every unaccounted-for scrap of paper in your workstation that you can't junk, The next step is to write down every unaccounted-for gotta-do cramming your head onto its own scrap of paper. Finally, throw the whole stew into a giant "in-basket"

That's where the processing and prioritizing begin; in Allen's system, it get a little convoluted at times, rife as it is with fancy terms, subterms, and sub-subterms for even the simplest concepts. Thank goodness the spine of his system is captured on a straightforward, one-page flowchart that you can pin over your desk and repeatedly consult without having to refer back to the book. That alone is worth the purchase price. Also of value is Allen's ingenious Two-Minute Rule: if there's anything you absolutely must do that you can do right now in two minutes or less, then do it now, thus freeing up your time and mind tenfold over the long term. It's commonsense advice so obvious that most of us completely overlook it, much to our detriment; Allen excels at dispensing such wisdom in this useful, if somewhat belabored, self-improver aimed at everyone from CEOs to soccer moms (who we all know are more organized than most CEOs to start with). —Timothy Murphy

Bryan Costales Eric Allman

Harold Johnson Aaron Allston

Isaac Asimov 14 new short stories, previously uncollected essays on science fiction and the craft of writing, and the Hugo Award-winning title novella about a writer who gambles everything on a chance at immortality.

Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov and science fiction are one and the same to millions of readers.He was the field's transcendent genius, its reigning prophet, its genial patriarch, and its most prolific author. But Asimov also wrote fantasy, and invariably of an enduring quality. Magicis his final original collection, containing all of his uncollected fantasy stories that have never before appeared in book form.

In addition, this farewell collection of Asimov's writings also includes his thoughts on the genre of fantasy itself. Here are the fascinating musings of a wide ranging intelligence, discussing everything from Tolkien to Spielberg, from Unicorns to King Arthur, from the difference between maidens and damsels to the speed of Seven League Boots - scientifically calculated at last!

Staff of Research & Education Assn

Leon Atkinson Core PHP Programming: Using PHP to Build Dynamic Web Sitesbegins with an introduction to PHP that rapidly moves through the language's constructs. In his introduction, author Leon Atkinson provides a taste of PHP's variable usage, user input, conditional branching, and looping functions in a very concise chapter. A series of topical chapters follow, which explore the language in depth, presenting operators, statements, and concepts. User-defined functions, arrays, and classes are all covered, as is the often tricky topic of disk access.

Part II of the book comprises a topical summary of PHP's built-in functions. This section begins with I/O functions of all types, followed by an analysis of data manipulation and mathematical functions. The chapter on database functions provides a good feel for PHP's extensible nature by discussing programming issues involved with using databases such as dBase, IMAP, LDAP, MySQL, ODBC, Oracle, and Sybase. Throughout all of these chapters, the author is careful to provide digestible, real-world examples for every function.

The final two parts of the book present programming algorithms and basic concepts in application design. Atkinson provides reusable algorithms for sorting and searching, string manipulation, database access, and graphic generation. He discusses how to use PHP with HTML and create applications that are intelligently modular. The accompanying CD-ROM provides the source code for book examples, PHP, Apache, and other programs to get you rolling quickly with this intriguing language. —Stephen W. Plain

Rise B Axelrod

Sara Baase

Paul G. Bahn John Flenley Paul Bahn

Mark Bailey In this entertaining homage to the golden age of the cocktail, illustrator Edward Hemingway and writer Mark Bailey present the best (and thirstiest) American writers, their favorite cocktails, true stories of their saucy escapades, and intoxicating excerpts from their literary works. It’s the perfect blend of classic cocktail recipes, literary history, and tales of the good old days of extravagant Martini lunches and delicious excess.

When Algonquin Round Table legend Robert Benchley was asked if he knew that drinking was a slow death, Benchley took a sip of his cocktail and replied, “So who’s in a hurry?” Hunter S. Thompson took Muhammad Ali’s health tip to eat grapefruit every day; he just added liquor to the mix. Invited to a “come as you are” party, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, arrived in their pajamas ready for their cocktail of choice: a Gin Rickey.

Forty-three classic American writers, forty-three authentic cocktail recipes, forty-three telling anecdotes about the high life, and forty-three samples of the best writing in literature –Hemingway & Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Great American Writersdelivers straight-up fun.

Robin W. Bailey

NICHOLSON BAKER

Shivakumar Chonnad Needamangalam Balachander This book addresses "front end" questions and issues encountered in using the Verilog HDL, during all the stages of Hardware Design, Synthesis and Verification. The issues discussed in the book are typically encountered in both ASIC design projects as well as in Soft IP designs. These issues are addressed in a simple Q&A format. Since each issue is independently dealt with and explained in detail, this book acts as an important source of reference for the Verilog users. Each of the FAQs will be illustrated with figures and tables as required. The latest Verilog-2001 and SystemVerilog have also been referred to in this book.

With the increasing complexity of ASICs being designed these days, the decisions that one makes in any of the stages of Design, Synthesis or Verification has profound effects on these three stages. This book presents the intricacies of these inter-dependent issues in the context of the Verilog HDL.

Michael Balfour

Nick Bantock Few books are more romantic than this trilogy, nor more surreal. Griffin Moss is a rather doleful, lonesome, gaunt, and haunted postcard designer in London. Sabine Strohem is an illustrator of stamps living on an island in the South Pacific. One day Griffin gets an extraordinary letter from Sabine revealing that she knows all kinds of things about his life and work—somehow, she can share his soul from afar. They start exchanging love letters, yet it remains an open question whether Griffin and Sabine are two hearts that mystically beat as one, or simply illusory. "You're a figment of my imagination," Griffin accuses Sabine. "You cannot turn me into a phantom because you are frightened," Sabine replies. Phantom or soul mate, Sabine is pursued across the globe by Griffin in an increasingly impassioned fashion, and the mysteries deepen.

The legendarily popular trilogy of books containing the Griffin-Sabine correspondence literally contains the correspondence: postcards, front and back, and letters in envelopes pasted into the book, which the reader must open and read—a temptation few can resist. Nick Bantock's story was way ahead of the computer game Myst, with which it shares a moody allure. Bantock designed hundreds of book covers (for Philip Roth, John Updike, and others) before he fled London for a lovely island off the west coast of Canada with his rather Sabine-like artist wife and became improbably famous by dreaming up this trilogy. His artwork is gorgeous, and countless romances have been intensified by exposure to that of Griffin and Sabine. —Tim Appelo

Susan Barclay

Bill Barker

Clive Barker

J.G.P. Barnes

Michael Barr

John Bartlett

L. Frank Baum

Kent Beck Kent Beck's eXtreme Programming eXplainedprovides an intriguing high-level overview of the author's Extreme Programming (XP) software development methodology. Written for IS managers, project leaders, or programmers, this guide provides a glimpse at the principles behind XP and its potential advantages for small- to mid-size software development teams.

The book intends to describe what XP is, its guiding principles, and how it works. Simply written, the book avoids case studies and concrete details in demonstrating the efficacy of XP. Instead, it demonstrates how XP relies on simplicity, unit testing, programming in pairs, communal ownership of code, and customer input on software to motivate code improvement during the development process. As the author notes, these principles are not new, but when they're combined their synergy fosters a new and arguably better way to build and maintain software. Throughout the book, the author presents and explains these principles, such as "rapid feedback" and "play to win," which form the basis of XP.

Generally speaking, XP changes the way programmers work. The book is good at delineating new roles for programmers and managers who Beck calls "coaches." The most striking characteristic of XP is that programmers work in pairs, and that testing is an intrinsic part of the coding process. In a later section, the author even shows where XP works and where it doesn't and offers suggestions for migrating teams and organizations over to the XP process.

In the afterword, the author recounts the experiences that led him to develop and refine XP, an insightful section that should inspire any organization to adopt XP. This book serves as a useful introduction to the philosophy and practice of XP for the manager or programmer who wants a potentially better way to build software. —Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Extreme Programming (XP) software methodology, principles, XP team roles, facilities design, testing, refactoring, the XP software lifecycle, and adopting XP.

Messaoud Benantar

GREGORY BENFORD

Herbert Benson

Hans Bergsten

Jean F. Blashfield

Mike Blaszczak

H.P. Lovecraft Robert Bloch Lovecraft is "the American writer of the twentieth century most frequently compared with Poe, in the quality of his art ... [and] its thematic preoccupations (the obsessive depiction of psychic disintegration in the face of cosmic horror)," writes Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Review of Books. Del Rey has reprinted Lovecraft's stories in three handsome paperbacks. This first volume collects 16 classic tales, including "The Rats in the Walls,""The Call of Cthulhu,""The Dunwich Horror," and "The Colour Out of Space." Introduction by Robert Bloch. Wraparound cover art by Michael Whelan.

SIMON BOND

Sunset Books

Joshua Piven David Borgenicht Be very, very afraid. When you step through your door for an innocent excursion, grave danger awaits. You might be mugged; tied up; attacked by scorpions, piranhas, or tarantulas; trapped in a falling plane or elevator, a runaway train, a car on a cliff, a sandstorm, a riptide, or a riot. But now it's safe to take that vacation anyway. Just pack The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Travel, and you'll know what to do when you find yourself, say, leaping between rooftops: "Because you will not be moving fast, it is safe to roll head over heels, unlike jumping from a moving vehicle." Now you'll also know what notto do: never pick up a tarantula, as the spines on their abdomens are like little harpoons, and don't yank the reins of a runaway camel ("Pulling on the nose reins can tear the camel's nose—or break the reins"). You may have the sense, if a leech invades your air passage, to gargle with a 50 percent solution of 80-proof alcohol—but without this book, would you remember not to inhale?

In short, this is the most delightfully terrifying, all-true, laugh-out-loud hilarious book since the original Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, which covers such horrors as alligators and quicksand. Don't leave home without it! —Tim Appelo

Joshua Piven David Borgenicht How to Wrestle Free from an Alligator: 4. If its jaws are closed on something you want to remove (for example, a limb), tap or punch it on the snout.

Though it's being marketed as a humorous title—after all, it's unlikely you'll be called upon to land a plane, jump from a motorcycle to a moving car, or win a swordfight—the information contained in The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbookis all quite sound. Authors Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht consulted numerous experts in their fields (they're cited at the end of the book) to discover how to survive various and sundry awful events. Parachute doesn't open? Your best bet for survival is to hook your arms through the straps of a fellow jumper's chute—and even then you're likely to dislocate both shoulders and break both legs. Car sinking in water? Open the window immediately to equalize pressure, then open the car door and swim to the surface. Buried in an avalanche? Spit on the snow—it will tell you which direction is really up. Then dig as fast as you can.

Each survival skill is explained in simple steps with helpful illustrations. Most stress the need to be prepared—both mentally and physically. For example, to escape from quicksand, you will need to lay a pole on the surface of the quicksand, flop on your back atop the pole, and pull your legs out one by one. No pole? No luck. "When walking in quicksand country, carry a stout pole—it will help you get out should you need to."

Hopefully you'll never need to know how to build a fire without matches, perform a tracheotomy, or treat a bullet wound. But in the words of survival evasion resistance escape instructor "Mountain" Mel Deweese, "You never know."—Sunny Delaney

Jorge Luis Borges If Jorge Luis Borges had been a computer scientist, he probably would have invented hypertext and the World Wide Web.

Instead, being a librarian and one of the world's most widely read people, he became the leading practitioner of a densely layered imaginistic writing style that has been imitated throughout this century, but has no peer (although Umberto Eco sometimes comes close, especially in Name of the Rose).

Borges's stories are redolent with an intelligence, wealth of invention, and a tight, almost mathematically formal style that challenge with mysteries and paradoxes revealed only slowly after several readings. Highly recommended to anyone who wants their imagination and intellect to be aswarm with philosophical plots, compelling conundrums, and a wealth of real and imagined literary references derived from an infinitely imaginary library.

PETER BOWLER

RAY BRADBURY From "Rocket Summer" to "The Million-Year Picnic," Ray Bradbury's stories of the colonization of Mars form an eerie mesh of past and future. Written in the 1940s, the chronicles drip with nostalgic atmosphere—shady porches with tinkling pitchers of lemonade, grandfather clocks, chintz-covered sofas. But longing for this comfortable past proves dangerous in every way to Bradbury's characters—the golden-eyed Martians as well as the humans.Starting in the far-flung future of 1999, expedition after expedition leaves Earth to investigate Mars. The Martians guard their mysteries well, but they are decimated by the diseases that arrive with the rockets. Colonists appear, most with ideas no more lofty than starting a hot-dog stand, and with no respect for the culture they've displaced.

Bradbury's quiet exploration of a future that looks so much like the past is sprinkled with lighter material. In "The Silent Towns," the last man on Mars hears the phone ring and ends up on a comical blind date. But in most of these stories, Bradbury holds up a mirror to humanity that reflects a shameful treatment of "the other," yielding, time after time, a harvest of loneliness and isolation. Yet the collection ends with hope for renewal, as a colonist family turns away from the demise of the Earth towards a new future on Mars. Bradbury is a master fantasist and The Martian Chroniclesare an unforgettable work of art. —Blaise Selby

Lisa Stevens Stewart Wieck Tim Bradstreet

Louis Brickman

Frederick P. Brooks Theclassic book on the human elements of software engineering. Software tools and development environments may have changed in the 21 years since the first edition of this book, but the peculiarly nonlinear economies of scale in collaborative work and the nature of individuals and groups has not changed an epsilon. If you write code or depend upon those who do, get this book as soon as possible — from Amazon.com Books, your library, or anyone else. You (and/or your colleagues) will be forever grateful. Very Highest Recommendation.

Subrahmanyam Allamaraju Andrew Longshaw Daniel O'Connor Gordon Van Huizen Jason Diamond John Griffin Mac Holden Marcus Daley Mark Wilcox Richard Browett Sun's Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), provides all of the APIs that are needed to build world-class enterprise applications. Written by over a dozen experts, this new edition of Professional Java Server Programmingprovides a truly massive and authoritative guide to the latest standards and APIs that are available in J2EE. This title is a must-have for anyone who's serious about enterprise development in Java.

Weighing in at over 1,400 pages, Professional Java Server Programmingprovides a wide-reaching resource of all of the APIs that are required for J2EE development that centers on servlets and JSPs for creating UIs and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), XML, and JDBC for getting to data on the server. Besides being a practical guide to how to combine these standards (with plenty of useful examples of these APIs in action), it also delivers a healthy dose of the design philosophy that's recommended by Sun for building scalable and robust enterprise Web applications.

Throughout, this text does a good job of merging theory with practice. Almost every chapter has a useful working example that shows how APIs work, with sample code for such Web applications as an e-commerce shopping cart, tech support pages, and a front end for a manufacturing database. The core of this volume is its treatment of servlets and JSPs for building Web-based front ends in Java. This new edition also highlights EJBs in excellent detail, with a thorough tour of designing, programming, and deploying EJBs effectively. (There's also notable coverage of the emerging EJB 2.0 standard, which adds several important features, like a query language for more powerful database access.)

The practical focus here is reflected also in chapters that are devoted to debugging, testing, and deploying J2EE applications—critical issues for any aspiring enterprise developer. While no single book can make you an expert, this one can get you started with a superb tour of the APIs and technologies that you'll need to tackle large-scale development in Java. —Richard Dragan

Topics covered:

• Introduction to enterprise computing with the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform (technologies, APIs, architectures; development roles)

• Introduction to RMI (including security, parameter passing, and distributed garbage collection)

• JDBC tutorial (including prepared statements, updateable result sets, batch updates, connection pooling, and distributed transactions)

• JNDI and LDAP

• XML basics (including XML parsers, XSLT, and CSS)

• Servlet tutorial (servlet APIs, the servlet life cycle, requests and responses, and maintaining session information)

• Shopping cart servlet example

• JavaServer Pages (JSPs) tutorial (directives, scripting elements, custom tags, and tag libraries)

• JSP coding standards

• Using JSP and XML together

• JavaMail

• Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) tutorial

• EJB containers

• Design guidelines for EJBs

• Session and entity beans

• Container vs. bean-managed persistence

• New EJB 2.0 features (including the EJB 2 0 Query Language)

• Sun's Model-View-Controller architecture for designing enterprise-level applications

• Performance and scalability hints

• Debugging and testing techniques

• The Java Message Service (JMS) and message queuing

• Integrating J2EE with CORBA

• Deploying J2EE applications

John Levine Tony Mason Doug Brown

E. A. Wallis Budge

Carey Bunks The excitement described by Carey Bunks when he first beheld the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) in 1996 is palpable when you hold Bunks's new book in your hands. The phantasmagoric image on the cover of Grokking the GIMP: Advanced Techniques for Working with Digital Imagesmelds a photograph of the moon's surface from a high orbit with an apparent solar eclipse by the earth. A penguin floats discretely in a hot air balloon between sun-earth and moon. Is the sun-moon-earth image a bit of the penguin's imagination? Is it a piece of GIMP artist/developer Tuomas Kuosmanen's imagination? Maybe it is really a credit to the visionaries at New Riders who have produced an art book to suit the computer how-to market.

"Grokking" is a Robert Heinlein-ism for "appreciating," and docent Bunks takes us through the museum of computer art and method as he demonstrates the features of the freely redistributable package. The contents follow that path set down by many other how-to tech book authors: tutorial, a taste of image theory, working with the independent features of GIMP (layers, selections, masks, and colorspaces) before advancing to compositing and rendering, and ending with a short review of Web-based applications of image manipulation.

The book's strengths are Bunks's obvious passion for his subject, his mature didactic style, and the wonderfully spacious design and breathtaking color-on-every-page strategy that allows him to beautifully frame GIMP features at their best. The most notable of his many case studies is the "Panorama" project that glues a series of laterally overlapping narrow-view photographs of an architecturally interesting room into a single, stunning, wide-angle panorama of the whole. Bunks documents each step in the transformation and describes the required geometrical, hue, and brightness adjustments needed to warp and blend them together.

Look again at the cover, but not literally. Ignore the unphysical details. Rather, imagine the mind's capacity for juxtaposition and GIMP's power for actualizing this visual synthesis. In form and content, Bunks and New Riders have shown that the possibilities for the tech book are far broader than previously imagined. This is an eye-opening contribution, indeed. —Peter Leopold

EUGENE BURDICK

Sean M. Burke

William S. Burroughs "He was," as Salon's Gary Kamyia notes, "20th-century drug culture's Poe, its Artaud, its Baudelaire. He was the prophet of the literature of pure experience, a phenomenologist of dread.... Burroughs had the scary genius to turn the junk wasteland into a parallel universe, one as thoroughly and obsessively rendered as Blake's."

Why has this homosexual ex-junkie, whose claim to fame rests entirely on one book—the hallucinogenic ravings of a heroin addict—so seized the collective imagination? Burroughs wrote Naked Lunchin a Tangier, Morocco, hotel room between 1954 and 1957. Allen Ginsberg and his beatnik cronies burst onto the scene, rescued the manuscript from the food-encrusted floor, and introduced some order to the pages. It was published in Paris in 1959 by the notorious Olympia Press and in the U.S. in 1962; the landmark obscenity trial that ensued served to end literary censorship in America.

Burroughs's literary experiment—the much-touted "cut-up" technique—mirrored the workings of a junkie's brain. But it was junk coupled with vision: Burroughs makes teeming amalgam of allegory, sci-fi, and non-linear narration, all wrapped in a blend of humor—slapstick, Swiftian, slang-infested humor. What is Naked Lunchabout? People turn into blobs amidst the sort of evil that R. Crumb, in the decades to come, would inimitably flesh out with his dark and creepy cartoon images. Perhaps the most easily grasped part of Naked Lunchis its America-bashing, replete with slang and vitriol. Read it and see for yourself.

William S. Burroughs

Terry Burrows Remember passing notes in school? Now you can type just about any secret message you can think of into your cell phone and beam it silently and electronically across the room, or around the world. TXT TLK: Hw2 Tlk W/o Bng Hrdis your secret decoder ring, a passbook full of cute, romantic, and strange sentiments translated from an increasingly common text-messaging shorthand. You may think you're hip for knowing what "LYLAS" means ("love you like a sister"), but what would you do if someone sent you a message saying "GAL?" Or how about the cryptic symbol that looks like this:

@->->->-

Well, in response to "GAL," which means "get a life," you might respond with a snappy "ThtsSoLm" ("that's so lame"). But if someone sends you the symbol, count yourself lucky, because it represents a flower. Then again, if it's someone you don't know, you could answer "WGYMN?" ("Who gave you my number?")

All this sounds a bit like an elaborate way to avoid making a phone call, or even (gasp!) meeting someone face-to-face. And you've got to have a state-of-the-art cell phone to be able to send text messages at all. But TXT TLK, in an obvious appeal to wired youth, says these shorthand messages are most useful when you want to talk but don't want anyone to hear you—in a classroom, maybe? —Therese Littleton

Tim Burton This unassuming hardcover in black buckram with a dark lavender title plate is the door into a world of twisted pleasures. Filmmaker Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, The Nightmare Before Christmas) tells 23 winsomely macabre stories about boys and girls who don't fit in. Their bodies are misshapen, their habits are odd, and their parents are appalled by them. But they do try hard to be human, like poor unwanted Mummy Boy, who's "a bundle of gauze": he goes for a walk in the park with his mummy dog. Some kids are having "a birthday party for a Mexican girl." They think Mummy Boy is a piñata: "They took a baseball bat and whacked open his head. Mummy Boy fell to the ground; he finally was dead. Inside of his head were no candy or prizes, just a few stray beetles of various sizes." For all its simple humor, The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Storiesis a peculiarly disturbing book about the violence that children suffer. It is illustrated in pen and ink, watercolor, and crayon. The themes and imagery are at a young-adult to adult level.

H. Rider Haggard Dennis Butts

THOMAS BYROM

Kevin Hemenway Tara Calishain

Bill Rosenblatt Debra Cameron

FRITJOF CAPRA

Kay Reynolds Ardith Carlton

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson John Tenniel Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll

LEWIS CARROLL

Lewis Carroll Yes, this is the Lewis Carroll who wrote Alice in Wonderland, and these two works show the same quirky humor. Here you see Carroll the mathematician at his playful best. Don't let the title of the first work mislead you—this isn't about modern symbolic logic but about ways of expressing classical logic with symbols. It's loaded with amusing problems to delight any mathematical puzzler. In the second work he turns logic into a game played with diagrams and colored counters, giving you hundreds of challenging and witty syllogisms to solve. Great mind-stretching fun.

Carter

Kenneth A. Russell Philip Carter

Chuck Cavaness If you've adopted Java as your organizational language, you're probably using, or planning to use, some sort of multitier design to maximize maintainability while making your data store accessible to as many applications as possible. The Jakarta engine ranks as the interface server of choice in that environment, and the Jakarta Struts Framework 1.1 makes it far easier to implement multitier information systems. Programming Jakarta Strutsis the best how-to documentation around—in print or on the Internet—on the subject of using Struts to their greatest potential. Chuck Cavaness's book is comprehensive, detailed, critical of its subject where appropriate, and generally invaluable to anyone implementing the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern in Java with the assistance of Struts.

Thankfully, Cavaness opens with an overview of the MVC pattern with a focus on how you're meant to implement it under Struts. For anyone thinking that implementing MVC sounds like more trouble than it's worth, this clarifies why such design usually pays off in the long run. After that, it's into the particulars, which include code listings (lots of them, delightfully commented) and crystal-clear block diagrams that show the flow of messages among objects. There are also many database schema charts that show how the authors structure data in the storefront and shopping cart application that spans the whole of this volume. —David Wall

Topics covered:The Jakarta Struts Framework 1.1 and how to use it to implement the Model-View-Controller (MVC) software design pattern. All the important features of Struts 1.1 get attention, including exception handling, the validation framework, internationalization, logging, and templating with the Tiles framework.

Daniel P. Bovet Marco Cesati

John Viega Matt Messier Pravir Chandra

Jagadish Chandra Chatterji

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Steve Ciarcia

Michael D. Ciletti

Jerry Cinnamon

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

Collings

D. Appleton and Company

James Duncan Davidson Inc. Apple Computer

Barnaby, III Conrad One hundred forty-four proof, notoriously addictive, and the drug of choice for nineteenth-century poets, absinthe is gaining bootleg popularity after almost ?a century of being banned. Due to popular demand, Absinthe: History in a Bottle is back in paperback with a handsome new cover. Like the author's bestselling The Martini and The Cigar,it is a potent brew of wild nights and social history, fact and trivia, gorgeous art and beautiful artifacts. As intoxicating as its subject, Absinthemakes a memorable gift for anyone who knows how to celebrate vice.

David "Zeb" Cook

TSR Staff David Cook

James William Cooper James Cooper James W. Cooper

Alessandro Rubini Jonathan Corbet Updated to cover version 2.4.x of the Linux kernel, the second edition of Linux Device Driversremains the best general-purpose, paper-bound guide for programmers wishing to make hardware devices work under the world's most popular open-source operating system. The authors take care to show how to write drivers that are portable—that is, that compile and run under all popular Linux platforms. That, along with the fact that they're careful to explain and illustrate concepts, makes this book very well suited to any programmer familiar with C but not with the hardware-software interface. It's worth noting that the emphasis in the title is on "device drivers" as much as "Linux." This book will make sense to you if you've never written a driver for any platform before. It helps if you have some Linux or Unix background, but even that is secondary as a prerequisite to C skill.

For a programming text—and one concerned with low-level instructions and data structures, at that—this book is remarkably rich in prose. You'll typically want to read this book straight through, more or less skipping the code samples, before sketching out your plan for the driver you need to write. Then, go back and pay closer attention to the sections on specific details you need to implement, like custom task queues. For coding-time details about specific system calls and programming techniques, count on the index to point you to the right passages. —David Wall

Topics covered:Techniques for writing hardware device drivers that run under Linux kernels 2.0.x through 2.2.x. Sections show how to manage memory, time, interrupts, ports, and other details of the hardware-software interface.

Intel Corporation Intel Corp

FASA Corporation

Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft Press Microsoft Corporation This package is remarkable, not just for being a huge resource kit, but because it includes a full working copy of the Windows 98 Beta 3 operating system (OS). This marks the first time that Microsoft has ever bundled a beta OS with a book. If you're not already part of the Windows 98 beta test, it's probably your only shot at testing Windows 98 and its supporting applications and tools before it is released. The bundle includes a free technical support program that covers the important areas of boot failure, data loss, and critical application failure (this program is available to U.S. and Canadian customers only).

Microsoft is primarily targeting the Microsoft Windows 98 Resource Kit, Beta Release at administrators who want to evaluate Windows 98 in a corporate environment. But the beta has remarkably few rough edges and anyone interested in Windows 98 should be able to install it successfully.

The CD-ROM contains the full beta version of Windows 98 Beta 3, including Internet Explorer 4.0, the Outlook Express mail client, FrontPage Express, the Microsoft Personal Web Server, and a clutch of administration tools. The installation features are complete and all major features of the operating system (including network protocols and device drivers) appear to be in place. More importantly, bugs seem to be at a minimum and the code is clearly in good shape for testing by real end users. The beta can be installed on a newly formatted drive or as an upgrade over an existing Windows 95 installation.

The administration tools include the Windows 98 System Policy Editor, Registry tools, installation scripting, and the Power Toys. For end users, the disk also contains an online User's Guide and three Discover Windows 98 automated tours. The beta will not operate beyond December 31, 1998, at which point Windows 98 will presumably have shipped.

The printed volume is primarily intended to help system administrators support Windows. Almost 1,800 pages in bulk, it covers deployment and installation, system configuration, networking, Internet communications, and the Windows 98 architecture in even more detail than past resource kits.

The Schwa Corporation

Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland In this latest novel from the poet laureate of Gen X—who is himself now a dangerously mature 36—boy does indeed meet girl. The year is 1979, and the lovers get right down to business in a very Couplandian bit of plein airintercourse: "Karen and I deflowered each other atop Grouse Mountain, among the cedars beside a ski slope, atop crystal snow shards beneath penlight stars. It was a December night so cold and clear that the air felt like the air of the Moon—lung-burning; mentholated and pure; hint of ozone, zinc, ski wax, and Karen's strawberry shampoo." Are we in for an archetypal '80s romance, played out against a pop-cultural backdrop? Nope. Only hours after losing her virginity, Karen loses consciousness as well—for almost two decades. The narrator and his circle soldier on, making the slow progression from debauched Vancouver youths to semiresponsible adults. Several end up working on a television series that bears a suspicious resemblance to The X-Files(surely a self-referential wink on the author's part). And then ... Karen wakes up. Her astonishment—which suggests a 20th-century, substance-abusing Rip Van Winkle—dominates the second half of the novel, and gives Coupland free reign to muse about time, identity, and the meaning (if any) of the impending millennium. Alas, he also slaps a concluding apocalypse onto the novel. As sleeping sickness overwhelms the populace, the world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper, but a universal yawn—which doesn't, fortunately, outweigh the sweetness, oddity, and ironic smarts of everything that has preceded it.

Douglas Coupland The first and only story of love and looming apocalypse set in the aisles of an office supply superstore. 

In Douglas Coupland’s ingenious new novel—sort of a Clerksmeets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf—we meet Roger, a divorced, middle-aged “aisles associate” at Staples, condemned to restocking reams of 20-lb. bond paper for the rest of his life. And Roger’s co-worker Bethany, in her early twenties and at the end of her Goth phase, who is looking at fifty more years of sorting the red pens from the blue in aisle 6.

One day, Bethany discovers Roger’s notebook in the staff room. When she opens it up, she discovers that this old guy she’s never considered as quite human is writing mock diary entries pretending to be her: and, spookily, he is getting her right.

These two retail workers then strike up an extraordinary epistolary relationship. Watch as their lives unfold alongside Roger’s work-in-progress, the oddly titled Glove Pond, a Cheever-era novella gone horribly, horribly wrong. Through a complex layering of narratives, The Gum Thiefreveals the comedy, loneliness, and strange comforts of contemporary life.

Coupland electrifies us on every page of this witty, wise, and unforgettable novel. Love, death and eternal friendship can all transpire where we least expect them …and even after tragedy seems to have wiped your human slate clean, stories can slowly rebu