Subjects:  1. Campaigns   2. Europe   3. Europe - Germany   4. Germany   5. History   6. History - Military / War   7. Military   8. Military - Weapons   9. Military - World War II   10. Panzer-Division 'Das Reich', 2   11. Regimental histories   12. Waffen-SS   13. World War, 1939-1945   

Customer Reviews (2)

The Naked City
Chicago as it is. The history of Capitalism and the history of American power have never been disected like this before. This is a good intro to those who are interested in cultural studies and their relevance to our every day lives. This is a superb work in the line of Braudel, Jared Diamond and Mike Davis.

Especially recommended reading for students of Urban Studies
Ably translated into English by Graeme Thomson, The Pig And The Skyscraper, Chicago: A History Of Our Future by Marco d'Eramo is a serious-minded and acutely insightful social analysis of Chicago as the penultimate example of the modern metropolis. From Chicago's humble origins to its towering rise in world prestige to the churning capitalism that keeps it running, The Pig and the Skyscraper looks closely at America's famous windy city and pulls no punches regarding the dark side of urban sprawl. A fascinating, in-depth account, The Pig And The Skyscraper is especially recommended reading for students of Urban Studies and the historical, contemporary, and future development of metropolitan Chicago. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. General   2. Social Science   3. Sociology   4. Sociology - Urban   5. United States - State & Local - General   6. Urban Sociology   7. Illinois   8. Urban communities   

Customer Reviews (2)

A great source of resource file formats
Something not highlighted in any of the comments I've seen on this book is that it contains a .res to .rc conversion utility which I think alone is worth the price of the book.

Good
This book is good ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Computer Bks - Operating Systems   2. Computer Books And Software   3. Computers   4. Microcomputer Operating Environments   5. Operating Systems - Windows   6. Operating Systems - Windows 95   

Customer Reviews (4)

UNICODE is a work in progress
Consider it an overview of the developing UNICODE standard. As such, it will serve the engineer working on software in English and many other European countries rather well. It will be a good _starting_ _point_ for engineers developing software for other languages.

This book is essential for software engineers, at least for the next ten years or so. All programmers should understand characters, and UNICODE is the best we have for now. Even if you don't need it in your personal library, you need it in your company or school library.

The standard is flawed, as all real standards are, but it is a functioning standard, and it should be sufficient for many purposes for the near future.

The book itself is fairly well laid out, contains an introduction to character handling problems and methods for most of the major languages in use in our present world as well as tables of basic images for all code points. Be aware that these are _only_ basic images. For most internationalization purposes, be prepared for more research. (And please share your results.)

**** Finally, UNICODE is _not_ a 16 bit code. ****

(This is well explained in the book.) It just turned out that there really are over 50,000 Han characters. (Mojikyo records more than 90,000.) UNICODE can be encoded in an eight-bit or 16-bit expanding method or a 32-bit non-expanding method. The expanding methods can be _cleanly_ parsed, frontwards, backwards, and from the middle, which is a significant improvement over previous methods.

Some of the material in the book is available at the UNICODE consortium's site, but the book is easier to read anyway. One complaint I have about the included CD is that the music track gets in the way of reading the transform files on my iBook.

The Ultimate ABC Book
This is not just a reference for computer people, but for anyone interested in alphabets, symbols and character sets.

Central to the book, taking up the larger part of it, are the tables of the characters themselves, printed large with annotations and cross-references. If you enjoy the lure of strange symbols and curious writing systems then browsing these will occupy delightful hours.

For the Latin alphabet alone there are pages of accented letters and extended Latin alphabet characters used in particular languages or places or traditions: Pan-Turkic "oi", African clicks and other African sounds, obsolete letters from Old English and Old Norse, an "ou" digraph used only in Huron/Algonquin languages in Quebec, and many others, particularly those used for phonetic/phonemic transcriptions.

The Greek character set includes archaic letters and additional letters used in Coptic.

Character sets carried over from previous editions with additions and corrections are Cyrillic (with many national characters), Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Arabic (again many national and dialect characters), the most common Hindu scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam), Tibetan, Thai, Lao, Hangul, Bopomofo, Japanese Katakana and Hiragana, capped by the enormous Han character set containing over 27,000 of the most commonly used ideographs in Chinese/Japanese/Korean writing. Then there are the symbols: mathematical/logical (including lots of arrows), technical, geometrical, and pictographic. You'll find astrological/zodiacal signs, chess pieces, I-Ching trigrams, Roman numerals not commonly known, and much more.

Scripts appearing for the first time this release are Syriac, Ethiopic, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Cherookee, Runes, Ogham, Yi, Mongolian, Sinhala, Thaana, Khmer, Myanmar, complete Braille patterns, and keyboard character sets. And yes, there are public domain/shareware fonts available on the web that support these with their new Unicode values.

There are very good (and not always brief) descriptions of the various scripts and of the special symbol sets. Rounding out the book are some involved, turgid (necessarily so) technical articles on composition, character properties, implementation guidelines, and combining characters, providing rules to use the character properties tables on the CD that accompanies the book. After all, this is the complete official, definitive Unicode standard.

Of course this version, 3.0, is already out-of-date. But updates and corrections are easily available from the official Unicode website where data for 3.1 Beta appears as I write this. My book bulges with interleaved additions and changes. And that's very good. Many standards have died or been superceded because the organizations behind them did not keep up with users' needs or the information was not easily accessible.

Caveats?

The notes on actual uses of the characters could be more extensive, particularly on Latin extended characters. More variants of some glyphs should be shown, as in previous editions, if only in the notations.

Some character names are clumsy or inaccurate (occasionly noted in the book), because of necessity to be compatible with ISO/IEC 10646 and with earlier versions of the Unicode standard. For example, many character names begin with "LEFT" rather than "OPENING" or "RIGHT" rather than "CLOSING" though the same character code is to be used for a mirrored version of the character in right-to-left scripts where "LEFT" and "RIGHT" then become incorrect. And sample this humorous quotation from page 298: "Despite its name, U+0043 SCRIPT CAPITAL LETTER P is neither script nor capital--it is uniquely the Weierstrass elliptic function derived from a calligraphic lowercase p."

Everything you ever wanted to know about Unicode
This book is basically a manual for Unicode 3.0. It is not a light read but well worth the price and then some just for the glyphs from all of the various scripts that Unicode supports.

At 1040 large (8.5 x 11) pages it is the ultimate guide to unicode. With information on scripts and glyphs I had no idea even existed.

However if you are just getting started with Unicode I would recomend you get Unicode a Primer written by Tony Graham from M&T books. If you understand or feel you are starting to understand Unicode then The Unicode Standard Version 3.0 is the best comprehensive reference on the subject out today. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Unicode (Computer character se)   2. Computer Books: General   3. Computers   4. Programming - General   5. Programming - Software Development   6. Programming Languages - General   7. Unicode (Computer character se   8. Unicode (Computer character set)   9. Computers / Programming Languages / General   

Subjects:  1. Cats   2. Children: Grades 1-2   3. Fiction   4. Juvenile Mysteries   5. Mystery and detective stories   

Customer Reviews (2)

Totally for kids only.
Don't expect any of Garfield's typical humor here. It's all very kiddy and the story of Garfield running away from home to an abandoned Elementry School only to learn that home is best is sooooo childish. Buy one of the comic strips books instead.

A great series for young Garfield fans
These are great chapter books for your early reader Garfield fan. My son loves them, I just wish there were more in the series. Unfortunately there are only four books in the series, so once they have read these four that's all there is. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Children's 9-12 - Fiction - General   2. Children's 9-12   3. Comics & Graphic Novels - General   4. Horror & Ghost Stories   5. Humorous Stories   6. Juvenile Fiction   

Customer Reviews (2)

THIS IS THE GREATEST THAT IT CAN GET
Jim Davis has been a great writer i have all of his books but this is the limit of fun this is the funnest book that u can buy its at a great price i would like to tell all of u two buy this. This is the greatest book that u can buy i respect Jim Davis. Hes the greatest.

Great!
This was a great book! Good for the little ones - as long as they know who REALLY "discovered" America. Garfield tells Odie it was really Christopher Columbuses' CAT that found America. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Cats   2. Children's 4-8   3. Children: Kindergarten   4. Fiction   5. General   6. Humor - General   

Customer Reviews (1)

Garfield goes lit...
5 good, sightly funny stories make this book one of his lit... best. Beside, a fat cat can do so much. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Cats   2. Children's 4-8   3. Children's stories, American   4. Children: Kindergarten   5. Fiction   6. General   7. Ghost stories, American   8. Ghosts   9. Preschool Picture Story Books   

Subjects:  1. Cats   2. Children's 4-8   3. Children: Kindergarten   4. Fiction   5. General   6. Short stories   

Subjects:  1. Careers - Job Hunting   2. Caricatures and cartoons   3. Employment   4. Ex-convicts   5. General   6. Job hunting   7. Reference   8. Self-Help   9. Unemployment   10. United States   

Subjects:  1. Fiction   2. General   3. Mass Media - Magazines   4. Pop Arts / Pop Culture   5. Popular Culture - General   

Subjects:  1. Politics/International Relations   

Subjects:  1. General   2. Nonfiction - True Crime / Espionage   3. Sociology   

Subjects:  1. Case studies   2. Municipal government   3. Politics/International Relations   4. Radicalism   5. United States   

Subjects:  1. 20th century   2. Canada   3. History   4. Politics/International Relations   5. Radicalism   6. United States   7. Working class   

Subjects:  1. Activity Books - Coloring Books   2. Children's 4-8 - Coloring & Design Books   3. Juvenile Fiction   4. Movie Tie - In   

Customer Reviews (1)

IRON CAT IS EXTREME
Garfield is ready to run in this 110% extreme book! Garfield has entered an Iron man race. In the First session the fat cat has to swim to an island to start the second session, which is biking! Can Garfield make it this far? If he does it's not over with yet! The third and final session is to run several miles to the finish line! If Garfield wins he gets the key to the city which lets him get all the food he wants for free! How will Garfield manage to complete this amazing task? Find out in "Garfield's Ironcat" This is a great book! A+! ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Action & Adventure   2. Animals - Cats   3. Cats   4. Children's 4-8 - Picturebooks   5. Children: Grades 2-3   6. Fiction   7. Juvenile Fiction   8. Triathlon   

Customer Reviews (1)

Nice Cover Girl
Hey that's my sister on the cover, so I have to give it five stars. (I would have anyway.) pj ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Art   2. General   3. Pop Arts / Pop Culture   4. Popular Culture - General   

Customer Reviews (6)

Mike Barr tells the story of why Batman does not use a gun
"Batman: Year Two; Fear the Reaper" consists of issues #575-578 of "Detective Comics," which originally appear in 1987. The story follows "Batman: Year One" by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli, but is not really a sequel although it is consistent with the spirit of revisionist continuity inspired by Miller's "The Dark Night Returns." The four issues are written by Mike W. Barr with different combinations of pencillers and inkers (Alan Davis and Paul Neary on the first issue, Todd McFarlane and Alfredo Alcala on the middle pair, with McFarlane inking his own pencils on the last one), which makes for quite a change from star to finish on the artwork.

Barr's goal in this story line is try and make sense of the early years of Batman, guided by the modern version of the character. Specifically Barr was interested in exploring Batman's relationship with the new Gotham City police commissioner James Gordon and answer the big question as to why Batman does not carry a gun. Barr also revisits the fate of Joe Chill, the murderer of Thomas and Martha Wayne, who was originally killed by other criminals when he admits he is the one who inspired the Batman (they also shoot him before he can tell them Batman's secret identity). Clearly that is too impersonal a finale for Chill and Barr takes care of that in these stories. Barr also goes back to the beginning and works in Leslie Thompkins into the Batman mythos.

The other significant development is that Barr takes the DC Golden Age villain the Grim Reaper and makes him not only Batman's predecessor as Gotham City's resident vigilante, but also the representation of the road not taken with regards to how Batman fights criminals. The Reaper's genesis parallels that of Batman, with the key difference that it might have been what Thomas Wayne would have done under slightly different circumstances (which, of course, creates a whole father-son paradigm for the Reaper and Batman, which is totally reinforced by who the Reaper turns out to be).

"Batman: Year Two" does indeed revisit the death of Joe Chill and provide a different context for essentially the same fate, but I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed because with our modern perspectives on the Batman as a comic book superhero I was convinced Barr was going to have Batman step over the line. However, that was not the payoff for this story. Still, the revisionist continuity offered serves its purpose and makes this worth reading for fans of the Dark Knight.

New Reasons to Fear the Reaper
I won't spend too much time discussing the quality of Batman: Year Two, save to say that while it doesn't have the charm or quality of Year One(a tough act to follow), it is well-written and has fantastic art. It also provides the Batman mythology with an intriguing villain culled from the Golden Age of DC Comics: The Reaper.

While The Batman has always had one of the best rogues galleries in comics, there's always room for one more, and I'm disappointed that The Reaper hasn't been revived somehow since this tale. FYI, The Reaper inspired the Phantasm character from the excellent "Batman: Mask of the Phantasm" animated film, as did the overall Year Two storyline.

There are also rumors now that the new Batman film may also be inspired by Year Two, with a young Batman going up against The Reaper. If this is the case, "Batman Year Two: Fear the Reaper" may become a hot item. Whether this proves true or not, I highly recommend this story.

Weak storyline fails to capture the essence of Batman
The book begins simply enough. Batman goes up against a gun toting maniac. However this isn't just any gun toting maniac its his predecessor vigilante the Reaper. The Reaper has no mercy for anyone and is more of a menace than a vigilante. My big problem with this book is that Batman is supposed to have trained for twelve years and be a human paragon. He is also supposed to have the resources and skills to stop a maniac with a gun, no matter how insane. The fact that he decides to work with the man who drove him to become the man he is and use a gun is ludacris. Batman is a Dark Knight. He is called a knight because he posesses chivalry. He's known from the moment he was conceived in crime alley that he can never become what he fights. That is what makes Batman a true hero. However just to see the idiocracy of this horrid book pick it off of the rack. The real Batman Year two is Long Halloween I highly recommend that book instead of this one. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. General   2. Humor   

Subjects:  1. 20th century   2. American - General   3. Art   4. Art & Art Instruction   5. Art Museums And Galleries   6. Art, American   7. Art, Modern   8. California   9. Criticism   10. Denmark   11. Exhibitions   12. History - General   13. Los Angeles   14. Modern Art