For anyone who loves the West -- Old or New -- this innovative atlas must find a place on your bookshelf. Created at the University of Colorado's Center of the American West, it charts beautifully and eloquently how the American West has evolved. This volume will help you understand how some myths of the West grew out of proportion to the facts, and how some are not myths at all, but semi-fantastic truths.

To understand the contemporary West, this book would be a good starting place.

One of the best introductions to social, economic and environmental trends taking place in the Western United States. The graphs and photos highlight the new trends from water usage to ethic population patterns. The 7 chapters and two essays provide telling examples of how communtities are adapting to the changes (or not adapting in some cases). The work is footnoted to provide jumping off points for more research. Also, I found the quotes that are placed throughout the margins of the text to be extremely insightful.

The book shines at showing how the West is moving away from a culture of exploiting natural resources for basic industry and instead exploiting the natural beauty to draw ever increasing numbers of residents and visitors.

The University of Colorado's School of Geography uses basic demographic and economic data to profile in understandable maps and graphs the population explosion occurring in the Western United States. The Atlas gives a dramatic presentation of the net in migration into an area with little water and vast amounts of open space. It chronicles the shift in economic activity from traditional industries such as mining and logging, to new industries such as information technologies and service activities. The latter having a special, and economically, rewarding basis in tourism. The Atlas portrays, in graphic form the perdictions made in Cadillac Deseret. It is a must read for anyone concerned about perserving western heritage for future generations.

This paperback literature unit is a wonderful tool for use in the classroom. The price is right! Get this book today if you plan to read James and the Giant Peach to your students. It if full of good ideas for implementation.

I thought it was a well-written, descriptive book, which related the author's love of flying as well as a real sense of adventure. But what I enjoyed most was the intimate glimpse of the remaining small rural airports of America, and the interesting personalities they attract.

Unfortunately, I was unable to finish my journey with Mariana (we were flying over the Badlands), when I left my copy of Zero Three Bravo on the plane during a brief stopover in Chicago. W hen I returned it was gone. As the book is now out of print, I am looking for a copy and would be willing to pay for the book as well as shipping.

Ms. Gosnell offers us a wonderful extended visit with the great variety and unique personalities that populate the small general aviation airports of America. As a pilot who usually flies at bigger, less personal airports; I'm reminded of my experiences at the smaller fields I've visited where love of flying is more important than profit and people are truly unique. While the flying descriptions are well done and accurate, this book is really about the journey and the people and events encountered along the way. The book is for everyone, not just pilots. I'm going to pull out my charts and re-visit some of those small fields I usually just fly over!

From her preflight musings in the office to her final landing at Spring Valley, her story is never old or cliche. The highs and lows of cross country flying are told in beautiful detail. Each page tells a tale, and paints a vivid and colorful portrait of an America that few of us get to see or experience. If you love flying, or are just curious about what it feels like to fly, this book is as close as you can get outside of the cockpit.

I found this book to be very unique among the many books about naval aspects of the Civil War. Gosnell openly focuses on the personal accounts of officers and sailors in the Union and Confederate river forces as well as several newspaper columnists that witnessed incidents. After giving the reader a sound overview of the weapons and ships used in the western rivers, Gosnell allows the personal accounts of those that were there to walk the reader through the river war. Gosnell's comments contexualize the personal accounts but do not overshadow them. It's a very effective way of engaging the reader. The negative aspect of the book is that Gosnell overlooks some events, although he openly acknowledges it when he does so. This book would serve as a fine companion for a more chronologically thorough, less-personal CW naval book.

This book had a lack of examples.
Poor presentation.
The little snippets of code it used to navigate through
the book were very dificult to grasp since there are no
example to demonstrate that they work.
I have been thru just under a dozen .net books. This is
one of the worst alongside ithe vb.net unleashed book.
It was very easy to give up reading this book since you always
wonder if the code you type is ever going to work or
is that the reason why some of the the code was not downloadable

Since this book has 3 authors, it would be interesting to know who wrote what parts. Some parts are very good, with understandable examples and clear explanations. Other parts I just scratched my head and wondered.

It's not that I didn't understand what they were doing, it's that I wondered why they were doing it. It seems they went out of their way to make parts of the code complex and confusing.

The main program developed in the book, the Product Management System, took 4 chapters. It could have been a great example of a simple program that taught the main points of database programming.

However, parts of the code was poorly designed and written, resulting in the program being overly complex and not functioning like a professional program should.

I feel that if you are teaching someone, you should show them the right way to do it. As a beginner in VB I am looking at the whole picture. Just because this book is about database programming, the authors should not ignore the quality of the rest of the language in their example code. Is it too much to ask the professional programmers who write books to write professional quality programs?

I currently don't have a better book to recommend. I've started reading another book I got from the library, but I don't have an opinion yet. To bad the library doesn't have more books on VB so I could try before I buy.

For people with some experienced on VB .Net, this book will serve as a very good introduction on the basic skills on database programming. Not only have the authors done a good job on showing how to use ADO .Net, but they have also done a very nice job of showing how to apply the skills of objected-oriented programming techinques. Base forms are developed and then inherited to develop more sophisticated windows forms.I strongly think that this book is worth reading.

I had mistakenly thought that Wrox books were held to a higher standard. First getting a taste for them going through both of Rob Vieira's two SQL Server Programming books and regarding them as the finest technical books I've ever seen. However this Professional SQL Server 2000 XML is a disappointment. Part of the problem lies with having 12 different authors because it seems a bit jumpy. I think I'll really try to limit my future purchases to single source efforts. Also, no care was taken with the code examples that you can download from the Wrox website. The book shows the source but there is really no way of really matching the example to the source other than guessing the name. Often I've needed to open up all 15 or so files in the directory to realize that the particular example is not included. I'm picking my way through but it is not pleasant.

It is a good book as far as explaning what SQL Server has to offer regarding XML capabilities but it should have covered the case studies fully with the .Net Framework. Also, it covers very good the IIS configuration, and how to manage XML Templates, XPath and Schemas. The book has a migration example from ASP to ASP.Net which does not cover ADO.Net. If you want a rich source on how to integrate SQLXML and the .Net Framework THIS IS NOT THE BOOK.

I looked at two other SQL Server 2000 XML books, but found this one to be the best - covering almost everything on SQL Server 2000 XML. Very well written, nice examples help understand the technology better. The chapter on Updategrams is very useful. I wanted to learn updategrams and this chapter covers it nicely to get started using them in production.

I own about 20 Wrox programming books. This is one of the more disappointing ones in my collection.

I bought the book because I was specifically interested in "Building an Effective Data Layer" with VB.Net, i.e. implementing n-tier applications and specifically the Data Access tier. Unfortunately this important topic rarely came up in the book and when it did it was lost in the details. It does cover the SQLClient, and DataReader, ADO.Net, Data Binding and Stored Procedures. However, other books already do that.

It never specifically covers the "Concept" of tiers, nor the strategy for implementing them (e.g. strategies for passing information between tiers, or using VB.Net's more object oriented features to implement the layers).

The organization and emphasis was weak. The Second Chapter "The SQLClient Namespace" should have been an appendix. The very last chapter is a Case Study which involves a data layer, but the authors fail to explain the strategy and implementation of data tiers using VB .Net.

All-in-all it was very, very disappointing.

Initially the book was a little overwhelming, but as our development team's competence and familiarity with .NET increased, so the later chapters became more valuable. This is especially true of the iBank Case Study, which provides a great "How To..." reference in building a complete enterprise
application using all the elements of .NET based on multiple tiers (Presentation, Business, and Data Layers).

The book's highly professional structure and coding techniques demonstrates the authors' deep knowledge and experience in the SQL/VB.NET domain.

While Teacher Created Materials usually gets it right, something was off with this one. It just seems to be lacking in content. They've combined ith with Journey to make it seem thicker, but if you are teaching either book you will want to suppliment this book if you do purchase it. Just some thoughts from a 4th grade teacher in Idaho.

Dan

This book doesn't have information for expert level. Some of the information are repeated within few chapters. I guess Wrox should reduce the number of authers for a book or atleast the authers should review others chapters before publish.

They repeat the same information over and over and over again. How many times can they tell us the Common language runtime can seamlessly integrate with other languages. I feel like they repeat the same information every chapter. Its sort of nice b/c its in my head now, everything the CLR does, but I could have written cue-cards.

Wrox has a long standing policy of dividing their books into Professional, Beginner, etc. categories. The Professional books are generally a series of books that deal with topics on a level that requires an experienced developer to traverse. While this book might require experience, it does not fit the mold of the normal Professional book.

One of my biggest beef with this book is the same beef I had with Microsoft's MSDN series of .NET books. It feels more like a mismash of articles that have been published before (in Microsoft's case, they had been). There is no real cohesion in the book, and, while the content is not bad, the lack of cohesion makes you feel more like you are sitting through a conference than reading a book on the .NET Framework. One last downside: The appendices in this book are largely useless.

Having knocked the book, there is good material here. While this book is not the best to learn to code .NET, there is ample information on how the Framework works. If C# is your language of choice, and you are an Internet developer, the chapter on Engineering web services may well become the most useful in the book.

I will this book as an addition to your library, although I but not as your first purchase. If you want a book to understand the .NET Framework, I believe .NET Framework Essentials is a much better tome (at a much better price).

Sadly, this is one of the very few books with information on this part of the world - and it gets many facts wrong. This book is obvoiusly aimed at the K-12 market, and aims to function as a primer on this region. Unfortunately, it fails.

* Ukrainian place names are invariably given in Russian instead of Ukrainian (for example, Kyiv is spelled Kiev in this book).

* Moldovan place names are either not spelled correctly - e.g. "Belsiy" for Balti, or given in Russian - e.g. "Kishinev" for Chisinau.

* Country names are not accurate - for example, the German Democratic Republic is labeled as "East Germany".

* Information on these countries' ethnic minorities is shallow. The Gagauz and Bulgarian minorities in Moldova are simply labeled as "other", and the percentage of the pie chart given to these "others" is wrong (13 per cent instead of approximately 4 per cent).

* Finally, many other details are wrong. For example, Moldova is described as having "abundant natural resources and well-developed industries", when in fact Moldova imports nearly all of its power and natural resources, and has virtually no developed industry save for some decaying factories in the Trans-Dniestr Republic.

In short, save your money. If you're looking for information on these countries, look elsewhere.