...this is NOT Pocket-sized. The book is about 9in. x 6in., and would only fit in the pockets of a giant. I wanted something 1. portable and 2. a good desk reference for TCP/IP sockets. This book fits nicely into the second category if not the former. It has a reasonable index, and is organized nicely to quickly find information. Why on earth it's called the "Pocket Guide" is beyond me.

I picked up this book on the advice of a friend, and have been rewarded for reading it, though it has not been a painless task. It is a pretty challenging read. However, MacKay weaves many interesting historical yarns about various popular investment schemes and how they drove people into delusionary behavior. Some of the stories are amazing, and certainly humorous (for example "patents" being granted for a perpetual motion machine). This book is worth your money, but you're probably not going to read it straight through. It's probably a better "bathroom read"; a few pages at a time over many months.

I have yet to find any of the O'Reily reference books to be useful. They are poorly organized, and it's REALLY hard to find answers to quick questions. I LOVE almost all of the reference companion books. I'd say that you should save the dough on this reference and just buy another copy of the "Perl 5" camel book unless you're desperate for a more portable size.

I've worked with Oracle for quite a while, and I've tinkered with PL/SQL, triggers, etc. on and off during the time that I used Oracle. Recently, I needed to write a really simple PL/SQL program to assist in doing a backfill. I bought this book expecting to pluck out details quickly for writing this program. Unfortunately, there was no index, and the table of contents was a little too high-level to help you find specific information. Finally, once you locate an appropriate section, the text is terse and the examples are quite basic.

I concede that I probably should've bought "Oracle PL/SQL Language" the book for which this is a reference for my particular need. Just beware, however, that this book is solely a reference, and is hard to use unless you already know PL/SQL.

I've tried, and struggled (I'm not a finance whiz... I write software) to create a strategy for using my stock options without the counsel of professional help. Learn from my experience. Reading this book, or any other book such as Robert Pastore's "Stock Options" will not equip you to make strategy decisions for exercising your options (unless you're gifted in finance). You will need a CPA and or financial planner.

Until I was granted options, I had no clue what stock options were or the issues that I would face. Having read this and other books, I'm now better educated about the issues but I was only given a vague idea of what to do practically/strategically.

Don't expect Ms. Thomas' book to provide "strategy advice" expect it to provide facts; and lots of them. Read her book and other's with the intention of going to someone whose full-time job it is to help you with issues in exercising your options. You will be well equiped to test what you're being told and you'll be ready to receive and act upon (or reject as I've also learned) real "strategic advice"

Don't buy this book if you want to learn to care for your clownfish, or sea anemones. It is only marginally good at identification, and is sparse on content about selection, care, feeding, etc. The pictures/illustrations are pathetic, and it also has a bunch of "unnecessary" information about how to care for a marine aquarium. I didn't buy the book to learn how to take care of an aquarium. I bought the book to learn how to take care of clownfish and anemones. This book looks like a book that was published in 1973 and has been sitting on the shelf of your public library since then.

I'm a software developer, and have more than an avocational interest in probability. I wanted to get into the discipline proper and try to learn about probability as if I were a student in college again. This book reads like wading through waist deep bubble gum. I had to read the first couple pages about 10 times before I really understood what was going on. This book may be a good "Introduction" if you've already got a degree in math or statistics, but if you want to learn about probability from the ground up, start somewhere else.

I bought this for my son, but it turns out I enjoy it far more than him ;) The back of the book says something like "any child that doesn't soon own this should rightfully feel that their education has been shamefully neglected." An apt description! Every page is PACKED with detail. Each page represents a letter of the alphabet, and everything on that page starts with the letter. There are things hidden in shadows, and things that are in plain view. You'll get stuck if you open this book. So plan some time to use it, bring your observation hat and thesaurus, and have a blast.

I bought this on a whim, but it's been rewarding. The only reading/learning I've done on XML has been through software APIs to parse it. Needless to say, I only understood the language from a syntactic point of view. This slim guide does a fine job as a reference, but it also useful for a breif tutorial/lesson/motivational example. Worth the dough.

From beginning to end this book is packed with information that is IMMEDIATELY applicable. For example "Always declare destructors to be virtual" otherwise you may end leaking memory when subclasses are deleted. Or hiding the implementation of a class in an "Impl" that your class just passes through to. That way, if the implementation changes, the clients of the class are protected from recompilation.

Beyond the wealth of just downright practical information the oragization is fabulous. The only other technical book that has organization as good as this one is "Design Patterns" There are several chapters such as "Memory Management" that have "Items" and each item has a few paragraphs describing the motivation for why you should believe Meyers with examples to prove it. Then there are solid examples that show the implemantation of an example usage.

My company gave this book out with "Design Patterns" to EVERY developer in the company, and it was probably the smartest thing I've ever seen a company do.

Read it and learn a TON.