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⸱Adam Croft ⸱ Adele Parks ⸱ Alexander Golfidis ⸱ Amitav Ghosh ⸱ Amy Tan ⸱ Andreas von Hessberg, Waltraud Schulze ⸱ Ann Granger ⸱ Anne Plichota & Cendrine Wolf ⸱ Anthony McCarten ⸱ Antonio Manuel Garrido ⸱ Antony Fedrigotti ⸱ Antony Minessale, Michael S. Collins, Darren Schreiber ⸱ Ari Turunen ⸱ Ariel S. Winter ⸱ Arne Dahl ⸱ Ashish Kumar and Tulsiram Yadav ⸱ Axel Kaiser ⸱ Barbara Delinsky ⸱ Barbara Wood ⸱ Beate Sirota Gordon ⸱ Bill Bryson ⸱ Björn Nehrhoff von Holderberg & Stefan Jahn ⸱ Bobby Duffy ⸱ Bohumil Hrabal ⸱ Brad Meltzer ⸱ Brent Beer ⸱ Brian P. Hogan ⸱ Camron Wright ⸱ Carlo Strenger ⸱ Carol Berg ⸱ Cassandra Clare ⸱ Celeste Ng ⸱ Charles Bell ⸱ Charles Maclean ⸱ Christopher Reich ⸱ Claudia Runk ⸱ Clive Cussler ⸱ Colin Harrison ⸱ Dale Carnegie ⸱ Dale Dougherty & Arnold Robbins ⸱ Dan Ariely ⸱ Dan Brown ⸱ Dan Simmons ⸱ Daniel Kahneman ⸱ Daniel Silva ⸱ Danielle Steel ⸱ Dave Eggers ⸱ David Ambrose ⸱ David Baldacci ⸱ David Carasso ⸱ David Flanagan & Yukihiro Matsumoto ⸱ David Lagercrantz ⸱ David Mertz ⸱ Dionne Lister ⸱ Doris Knop ⸱ Douglas Adams ⸱ Dov Alfon ⸱ Drew Neil ⸱ Eliot Pattison ⸱ Elizabeth George ⸱ Ellen Heidböhmer ⸱ Emily R. King ⸱ Ethan McCallum ⸱ Franz Brandl ⸱ Franz Hohler ⸱ Frederick Forsyth ⸱ Garr Reynolds ⸱ Gary John Bishop ⸱ Gaston C. Hillar ⸱ Gene Kim ⸱ Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Sapfford ⸱ George Mikes ⸱ Gilad Rosner ⸱ Golo Weiss ⸱ Gregory Fell and Mike Barlow ⸱ Hans Bemmann ⸱ Hans Christian Andersen ⸱ Hans Engberding, Bodo Thöns ⸱ Harlan Coben ⸱ Helen Harper ⸱ Hilmar Gernet & Michael Klein ⸱ Ian Rankin ⸱ Ilona Andrews ⸱ Iris Johansen ⸱ Ivan Ristić ⸱ J.D. Robb ⸱ J.K. Rowling ⸱ Jacek Artymiak ⸱ Jack Stack ⸱ Jakub Korab ⸱ James M. Cain ⸱ James Patterson ⸱ James Turnbull ⸱ Jan Janowski ⸱ Janet Evanovich ⸱ Jason Santa Maria ⸱ Jay Kreps ⸱ Jeaniene Frost ⸱ Jeff Patton ⸱ Jeffrey E.F. Friedl ⸱ Jesse Keating ⸱ Jhumpa Lahiri ⸱ Jilliane Hoffman ⸱ Jim Butcher ⸱ Jim Whitehurst ⸱ Joe Abercrombie ⸱ John Grisham ⸱ Jon Loeliger ⸱ Jonas Jonasson ⸱ Julie Kagawa ⸱ Julien Sandrel ⸱ Jürgen Bosbach ⸱ Kate Mosse ⸱ Kate Pepper ⸱ Kazuo Ishiguro ⸱ Keisuke Matsumoto ⸱ Ken Follett ⸱ Kim Harrison ⸱ Klaus Schmeh ⸱ Kristin Cashore ⸱ Kyle Mills ⸱ Lance Henderson ⸱ Laurell K. Hamilton ⸱ Lee Child ⸱ Lev Grossman ⸱ Linwood Barclay ⸱ Lisa Gardner ⸱ Liz & J.K. Brandon ⸱ Lorin Hochstein & René Moser ⸱ Luca Veste ⸱ Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach ⸱ Marion Zimmer Bradley ⸱ Mark Gimenez ⸱ Mark Hayden ⸱ Mark Schwartz ⸱ Marlene Faro ⸱ Martha Stout ⸱ Martin J. Eppler / Sebasitan Kernbach / Roland A. Pfister ⸱ Martin Kleppmann ⸱ Mary Higgins Clark ⸱ Masaji Ishikawa ⸱ Max Barry ⸱ Meg Shaffer ⸱ Michael Conelly ⸱ Michael Crichton ⸱ Michael Palmer ⸱ Michael Prescott ⸱ Michael Reiter ⸱ Michael Schwartzkopff ⸱ Michael Warren Lucas ⸱ Miguel Grinberg ⸱ Mikael Krogerus & Roman Tschäppeler ⸱ Mike Barlow, Gregory Fell ⸱ Mike Wells ⸱ Multatuli ⸱ Neha Narkhede, Gwen Shapira, Todd Palino ⸱ Neil Gaiman ⸱ Nelson DeMille ⸱ Nicci French ⸱ Nick Heinle & Bill Pena ⸱ Nick Stone ⸱ Nora Roberts ⸱ Nossrat & Nawid Peseschikan ⸱ P.D. James ⸱ Pamela Kihm ⸱ Patrick Rothfuss ⸱ Patrick Woodhead ⸱ Paul R. Scheel ⸱ Peter James ⸱ Peter Zadrozny and Raghu Kodali ⸱ Philipp Mattheis ⸱ Piero Martini ⸱ Rainer Maria Rilke ⸱ Ralf Schmidt ⸱ Rhiannon Navin ⸱ Richard Bach ⸱ Richard Doetsch ⸱ Richard Laymon ⸱ Rob Ewaschuk ⸱ Robert A.Heinlein ⸱ Robert Love ⸱ Robert Ludlum ⸱ Robert Mecklenburg ⸱ Roland V. Weber ⸱ Rotraud Saeki ⸱ RR Haywood ⸱ Sabriye Tenberken ⸱ Sadie Jones ⸱ Sandra Brown ⸱ Sarina Bowen ⸱ Scott Chacon ⸱ Sharon Bolton ⸱ Simon Winchester ⸱ Stefan Frädrich ⸱ Stephen Hunter ⸱ Stephen Leather Bowen ⸱ Stieg Larsson ⸱ Stuart Neville ⸱ Sue Grafton ⸱ Sujata Massey ⸱ Sujiata Massey ⸱ Sunil Mann ⸱ Sven Koch ⸱ Sydney Biddle Barrows & Judith Newman ⸱ Sydney Padua ⸱ T. Jefferson Parker ⸱ Tatjana Kühne ⸱ Taylor Aston White ⸱ Ted Chiang ⸱ Tess Gerritsen ⸱ The SWIFT Standards Team ⸱ Thomas Perry ⸱ Thorsten Havener ⸱ Tiziana Bruno und Gregor Adamczyk ⸱ Todd Burpo ⸱ Tom Gabbay ⸱ Tom Hillenbrand ⸱ Tom Rob Smith ⸱ Tommy Jaud ⸱ Trudi Canavan ⸱ Valentin Haenel und Julius Plenz ⸱ various ⸱ Vera Buck ⸱ Veronica Henry ⸱ Victoria Hislop ⸱ Volker Klüpfel / Michael Kobr ⸱ W.Nüßer, M.Stein, A.Hass, T.Kugelberg, F.Kley ⸱ Walter Burk ⸱ Walter Moers ⸱ Wilhelm Busch ⸱ William Andrews ⸱ William Mougayar ⸱ Ye Zhaoyan ⸱ Yuval Noah Harari ⸱

author: Adam Croft    (1 book) go to top

Reading this book is fairly easy. Short sentences. Simple language.

Dan Cooper is away from home, which he often is due to his work. After screwing the hotel's receptionist in the afternoon, he unexpectedly finds his wife Lisa in his room when he returns after supper. Lisa is dead. And on her phone is a message from Dan telling her to come up to his room. But Dan never sent this message. Panicking, Dan goes is running. Away from Britain and through the whole of Europe.

I'm certain this could be made a very interesting story. Could. But not in this book. The protagonist is constantly asking himself why this has happened and who might have done it. Yes, he does get some answers in the end, but without anything that feels like a highlight of the story or a big relevation or the like. All in all: There are lots of better books out there.

author: Adele Parks    (1 book) go to top

Alison is a very dedicated mother. Maybe even a little over-protective. Understandable when you learn to know her past. She has come far. Her world, however, is shaken terribly when a man called Tom knocks on their door. It takes time to come to grips with what he reveals. Their family is almost pulled apart. And exactly when everything seems to become a little better again, everything tumbles completely.

The book is written from a first-person perspective with some flashbacks. Little by little the reader learns how Alison came to be in this position and how hard the way to be here was. However, the writing style is not very catching and somehow it is very apparent the author is a woman, even if you didn't know.

author: Alexander Golfidis    (1 book) go to top

Alex erzählt in der ich-Form wie zahlreiche Jahre seines Lebens abgelaufen sind und wie es dazu kam. Ursache - Wirkung. Es hätte sicher nicht unbedingt so kommen müssen, es hätte auch andere Möglichkeiten gegeben, aber schwierige Umstände (Ursache) gepaart mit eigenen Vorstellungen und Entscheiden (Ursache) haben seinen Weg in die Drogenhölle (Wirkung) gelenkt. Lange Zeit gesteht sich Alex selbst nicht ein, dass er schwerst Dorgenabhängig ist und meint "Wenn es zuviel wird, muss man halt einfach aufhören". Irgendwann kann er sich aber auch selber nicht mehr belügen und muss anerkennen, dass er längst drogenabhängig ist. Und das mit dem "einfach aufhören" ist dann doch nicht so einfach.

"Nur" drei Sterne? Wenn ich danach bewerten würde, wie ehrlich und offen ein Buch geschrieben ist, dann gäbe es sicher mehr Punkte. Meine Bewertungen richten sich jedoch stets danach, wieviel Unterhaltungs- und/oder Informationswert ein Buch mir brachte; fünf für "herausragend", drei für "ok" und eins für "schlecht". Alexanders Lebens(Leidens)geschichte ist offen dargelegt. Sie zeigt auch wie(so) er von einem Problem ins nächstgrössere geraten ist und was ihm jeweils zum entsprechenden Zeitpunkt wichtig war. Sie gibt Einblick in eine Welt und in Gedankengänge, die man als "Aussenstehender" vielleicht nicht so einfach ohne die Hilfe eines solchen Buches nachzuvollziehen vermag.

Unweigerlich taucht bei der Lektüre irgendwo im Hinterkopf die Frage auf, ob das Buch zur Prävention beitragen kann. Ich persönlich glaube nicht, höchstens in Grenzfällen. Ich glaube diejenigen, die auch ohne solche Lektüre Drogen nehmen wollen, werden das trotzdem tun, auch Alex selber hätte so ein Buch vermutlich nicht vom Drogenkonsum abgehalten. Vielleicht hätte er sich selber gegenüber aber schon früher zugegeben, dass er süchtig ist und den Ausstieg früher geschafft. Und da könnte ich mir schon vorstellen, dass diese Lebensgeschichte dem einen oder andern bereits Süchtigen Mut zum Ausstieg gibt.

author: Amitav Ghosh    (1 book) go to top

At the start of the book, Rajkumar Raha is eleven years old. An Indian boy who came to Mandalay by chance, rather than on purpose. From here, the book follows Rajkumar throughout his whole life, and further.

The Glass Palace is part fictious biography, part history book. It lets the characters explain their thoughts, their feelings, their reasoning; it picks up and mixes in historical events (which I did not check and therefor can not confirm) and gives faces to those events. In some parts it is very detailed and in other places it easily skips over many years.

This is an unusual book. Neither is it thrilling and making you want to read "just one more chapter before going to bed", nor is it boaring or uninteresting so you would put it away for good. It is somewhere in between: keeping you coming back to read a bit more, so long, you will have read the whole book in the end.

author: Amy Tan    (2 books) go to top

In this book, Amy Tan tells the story of a young, strong willed, privileged Chinese girl. How the girl loses her (equally strong willed) mother, the way she gets into an awful (but possibly not so uncommon) marriage when she is a very young woman, how she gets to know a much less privileged life when the war breaks out and how she finally stands up against social standards and succeeds to escape her misery.

The story is told in retrospective and at the beginning the reader has no notion of what the book actually is about.

Ruth, her American father dying very early, has been brought up in America by her Chinese mother LuLing. Life with mother has not always been easy. It is only when LuLing is old, that Ruth learns about the past of her mother, just as LuLing herself did not know the truth about her own mother until after it was too late.

A well told dual-cultural story.

author: Andreas von Hessberg, Waltraud Schulze    (1 book) go to top

Dieses Buch stand inmitten von Reiseführern für China und Tibet. Est ist aber weniger ein Reiseführer der während der Reise hilfreiche Informationen bereit hält, als ein Buch zur Vorbereitung im Vorfeld, um etwas über Land und Leute zu erfahren und was einen in Tibet etwa erwarten kann.

Der erste Teil widmet sich der Geographie und Geologie, dem Klima, der Flora und Fauna. Dabei muten die Autoren dem Leser vor allem im Teil über die Pflanzen Tibets sehr viel zu; dort tönt es eher wie in einer wissenschaftlichen Arbeit. Für die Autorin, studierte Biologin, vielleicht sehr einfach verständlich, für den Durchschnittsleser jedoch eher weniger. Auch über die Menschen, Medizin, Küche und die Geschichte Tibets inclusive Religion ist im ersten Teil einiges zu erfahren.

Im Gegensatz zum ersten, rund 130 Seiten umfassenden Teil, fällt der zweite Teil eher mager aus. Es werden hier auf rund 60 Seiten die wichtigsten Reiseziele und Sehenswürdigkeiten beschrieben, bis hin zu einem kleinen Kapitel 'Bergsteigen an Achttausendern'.

Sehr interessant zu lesen ist die lange Reisereportage der zwei Autoren über ihre Fahrradtour quer durch Tibet. Diese Reportage nimmt geanso viel Platz in Anspruch wie der zweite Teil.

Teil vier beinhaltet kurz und bündig die wichtigsten Tipps zur Ausrüstung, zugeschnitten auf Outdoor Reisen, bevor im fünften Teil, mit dem Titel 'Sprachführer', auf sage und schreibe vier Seiten (davon lediglich eineinhalb Seiten Text) das Thema Sprache zumindest erwähnt wird. Dieser fünfte Teil ist absolut unzureichend und wäre besser gleich ganz weggelassen worden.

Die rund 30 Seiten im Teil sechs 'Reisetipps von A bis Z' geben dagegen wieder etwas an Informationen her, incl. Listen für weiterführende Lektüre.

Das ganze wird abgerundet von einem Anhang bestehend aus einem mehrsprachigen Ortsverzeichnis, das als sinnvoll und hilfreich erscheint, sowie einer für die meisten Reisenden kaum sehr hilfreichen, achtseitigen Artenliste mit den verschiedenen in Tibet vorkommenden Tieren.

Wie bereits erwähnt, als Vorbereitung für eine Tibet Reise, um etwas über das Land, seine Leute und Geschichte zu erfahren, ist dieses Buch ganz hilfreich. Als Reisehilfe für unterwegs gibt es jedoch sicher bessere Werke.

author: Ann Granger    (1 book) go to top

Auch wenn dies bereits der neunte band in einer ganzen serie ist, so kann das buch troztdem problemlos genossen werden, ohne die vorherigen geschichten zu kennen. Zwar ist dann nicht klar, was die beziehung zwischen Markby und Mitchell ist, aber das tut der geschichte nichts ab.

Sally Caswell und ihr mann, Liam Caswell, ein forscher, sind von der stadt auf's land gezogen. Sally gefällt es ganz gut, aber Liam kann sich mit der vielen ruhe nicht so recht anfreunden, obwohl genau diese ruhe doch eigentlich gut dafür wäre, dass er mit seinem buch projekt vorwärts kommen sollte.

Drohbriefe von tierschützern und ein päckchen aus London rütteln das ruhige landleben mächtig auf. Es wird gefährlich für die Caswells.

Eine gut geschriebene geschichte, die nicht allzuviel preisgibt und mehrere möglichkeiten offen lässt, so dass bis zum schluss auch für den leser nicht klar ist, wer der übeltäter ist und schon gar nicht, was als nächstes noch schlimmes passieren könnte.

author: Anne Plichota & Cendrine Wolf    (3 books) go to top

This book continues precisely where the second book in the series left off (and did so without a real end). Thus, if you haven't read the first two books in the series, you'll probably be utterly lost.

The Runaways and the Felons, still seething each other, have no other option than to join forces to find the entrance portal to Edefia. Not an easy task and time is critical too.

Despite her unexpectedly gained years, Oksa is still torn between Tugdual and Gus. Which one does she love? Or which one does she love more?

Not wanting to spoil the reading pleasure, I'm not going into more detail about what happens in this book. It is, like the previous ones, fast-paced, interesting to read and lots of things happen. Not many surprises this time, though.

So why only 3 stars out of 5? Because this book, like the previous one, stops right in the middle of the story. It's OK to leave some ends open so the reader wants to buy the next book but, like already with the last book, it suddenly stops. This is like you are on your way to visit your friend's house and when crossing a street on the way, you stop walking right in the middle of the zebra crossing: A no-go! At the very very least make it (more or less) safely to the other side of the street and you can stop there, but not in the middle of the street.
Unfortunately, the English translation of this series seems to have stopped after the 4th volume. It is available in German which would, contrary to the French original) suit me, but these very annoying endings, the switch of language and the increasing predictability of what is going to happen are not enticing me to get even the 4th volume right now.

Without having read the first book in the Oksa Pollock series, many things in this second book of this series would be difficult to understand. So read them in the correct order.

Oksa gains a new friend. Somebody she wouldn't have dreamt would ever become her friend. And her best friend, Gus, mysteriously disappears. Magically disappears. A rescue mission is undertaken, but it costs the Runaways dearly.

The mission to rescue Gus is quite a feat, many challenges to overcome. But the challenges are sometimes a bit overdone. And the end of the book is no end at all. It's more like the end of one chapter, incomplete without the next chapter(s) which follow in volume 3.

Oksa Pollock is a teenage girl who, quite suddenly, had to move with her family from France to England. Luckily her best friend, Gus Bellanger, and his family moved too. Before long, Oksa discovers she is capable of doing some weird things. That's also when things start to get a bit weird...

Oksa is not a normal girl. Neither is her grandma a normal person. Nor some others she knows. They all share a secret. They all have some powers. They all have an agenda. And Oksa finds herself catapulted into the middle of all of this.

The book is interesting and refreshing to read, also for adults. To keep up with all the different creatures and plants, however, is a challenge. The text also uses a large number of less common words which sometimes can be a bit daunting for non-native speakers. Also how some of the creatures express themselves is not always easy to understand. Probably a good book for native and advanced speakers of the language to enhance their vocabulary, but less recommended for non-native speakers who don't have a good grip on the language yet.

author: Anthony McCarten    (1 book) go to top

It is hard to give this book one rating. The story itself and the figures are mediocre. But the message the book contains is right on target and the way it was compiled into an entertaining book is very good.

In the US a beta test is run on some technology which is planned to be used to find anyone, anywhere, anytime. Of course, it will be used for finding villains only. :-P For this beta test 10 people around the United States are selected as testers. When the get the signal to "go zero", they are give 2 hours headway to disappear. Their goal: not to be found for 30 days.

Although not all the technicalities in the book are correct, most of the technology described actually not only does exist today, but also is actively being used in places. So the scenario described in the book is not some far fetched fantasy, but lies within the realm of reality.

The book also highlights situations, when well meant and carefully designed and balanced guidelines may suddenly be disregarded.

Hopefully people will, after reading this book, be a bit more cautious about what data they share with whom. I am professionally involved in collecting technical system data, not personal data. But people interact with systems. It's astonishing what you already can do with only this kind of data.

author: Antonio Manuel Garrido    (1 book) go to top

Das buch handelt von Song Ci, der im zwölften jahrhundert tatsächlich in China lebte und als richter, leichenbeschauer und medizinischer forensiker tätig war. Es ist aufgebaut als erzählung vom leben und werdegang Ci's. Erst gegen ende wird einem bewusst, dass es gleichzeitig eine kriminalgeschichte ist. Der autor lässt den leser die geschehnisse aus der perspektive von Ci erleben, ohne dabei die form der ich-erzählung zu nutzen. Der ehrgeizige Ci geht durch einige höhen und viele tiefen, ist immer wieder der verzweiflung nahe und doch voller hoffnung.

Packend geschrieben, ohne dass die jahrhunderte seit Ci lebte oder die chinesischen gepflogenheiten dabei in die quere kommen. Eine abgerundete geschichte, spannend bis zum schluss.

author: Antony Fedrigotti    (1 book) go to top

Erfolgreich sein kann man nur, wenn man an das glaubt was man macht; wenn man eine positive Haltung hat. Hier stimme ich mit Fedrigotti überein. Wer negativ denkt wird nichts Positives zustande bringen. Und so stimme ich auch dem Inhalt des Buches zu und der Einstellung die es zu vermitteln versucht. Der Autor weist wiederholt darauf hin, dass man eine positive Grundhaltung benötigt und sagt auch, dass wir diese Haltung durch Kontrolle unserer Gedanken entsprechend steuern können, denn wir können schliesslich selber entscheiden was wir denken wollen.

Der Inhalt von "Optimistisch in die Zukunft" ist in Ordnung und weist, meiner Meinung nach, in die richtige Richtung. Trotzdem gibt es etwas, das mich an diesem Buch stört: Werbung und Suggestion. Die ersten zwei Kapitel versuchen vor allem, den Leser davon zu überzeugen, dass es richtig war, dieses Buch zu kaufen und zu lesen. Wenn ich ein Buch bereits gekauft und zu lesen begonnen habe, möchte ich mich eigentlich nicht erst durch 10% des Inhaltes kämpfen müssen, der mir nur sagt "dieser Kauf war richtig; durchhalten und schön bis zu Ende lesen, bitte". Auch im Rest des Buches, der dann endlich etwas besser ist und auch Informationen enthält, finden sich immer wieder unzäghlige Hinweise auf andere Bücher es Autors und auf Seminare, die er anbietet. Das grenzt schon an Suggestion und ich bin mir sicher, dass einige Leute deswegen wirklich weitere Bücher des Autors kaufen oder sich für seine Seminare anmelden werden. Bitte, wenn sie das wollen, ist das in Ordnung, aber mit dieser sich an Manipulation anlehnenden Methode habe ich doch etwas Mühe.

Fazit: Der Inhalt ist in Ordnung, aber and der Form störe ich mich ein wenig.

author: Antony Minessale, Michael S. Collins, Darren Schreiber    (1 book) go to top

While a wiki is a really good means of keeping documentation up to date, especially in a project which is constantly moving forward at a good pace, documentation in a wiki usually is rather troublesome for the newcomer who first has to learn the ropes. For a first overview and as an introduction to a new topic, books are a much better choice and they definitely are much easier to read. So after struggling for some time to get a hold on the topic through what was available on the wiki, I was really looking forward to this first book on FreeSWITCH.

Indeed, the book did fill in some gaps I had, especially it was helpful for understanding the overall structure of FreeSWITCH better. This is what the first chapter is about, the architecture, followed in the next chapter with a walkthrough of how to build and install the software on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. In chapter three the user is guided through a few test calls to get acquainted with making calls and how things work very roughly. The chapter also includes details on how to configure some SIP phones. The remainder of the book goes deeper into configuration, dialplan, the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) engine as well as the event system architecture. The information is presented in mostly logical order and configuration samples are given throughout the book. In this respect, the book is absolutely fine.

However, in areas not directly related to the information it tries to give the reader, there are severe shortcomings. From the beginning to the end I couldn't get rid of the strong impression that this book either was produced without the hand of an editor or that instead of the final an earlier draft made it to the printer by mistake. Many of the samples contain wrong commands or settings, obvious even to a FreeSWITCH-almost-newbie like myself. A few mentioned commands or API calls make you wonder whether they are mentioned just as a reminder to add a more detailed explanation later. Also typographically the book has scope for improvement; the section, subsection and sub-subsection headings all seem to be the same font and size, making it sometimes hard to decide whether the next heading starts a new sub-topic or a new top-topic until you read half through it.

Maybe I'm spoiled from reading too many well produced technical books, but this definitely is not the kind of quality I expect from a publisher of several hundred tech-books.

To learn about the general architecture of FreeSWITCH and what might be possible or if you are new to SIP and VoIP and want to work with FreeSWITCH, then the book is worth an investment, despite its shortcomings. But if you know your way only halfway around SIP, have already been working with another SIP server such as Asterisk or figured out what you absolutely need to know from the wiki, then stick with the wiki.

author: Ari Turunen    (1 book) go to top

Mögen sie arrogante, überhebliche, selbstherrliche, stets nur auf das eigene wohl bedachte menschen? Oder gehen sie diesen eher aus dem weg? Manchmal aber, kann man einem solchen menschen gar nicht aus dem weg gehen. Und in anderen fällen hat man keinen direkten kontakt zu diesen menschen, wird bloss indirekt von ihnen beeinflusst und sieht unter umständen nur einen bruchteil dessen, was diesen menschen ausmacht. Und dieser bruchteil kann ein ganz anderes licht auf die person, deren taten, deren fähigkeiten werfen und uns bewundernd zu ihr aufschauen lassen.

In diesem buch geht es um arroganz. Arroganz und ihre gefolgin, ignoranz, können ganz schön mächtig sein und mächtig machen, aber gepaart mit viel macht, können sie auch ganz mächtig gefährlich sein. Mit vielen beispielen, vor allem aus geschichte, politik, prominenz, wirtschaft, wird aufgezeigt, was arroganz sein kann, wie sie sich auswirken kann und warum wir oft von ihr regelrecht geblendet werden. Vielleicht sind einige der beispiele etwas einseitig, denn jede medallie hat zwei (oder noch mehr) seiten und ich habe keine der beschriebenen fakten überprüft. Doch selbst wenn sie einseitig wären, öffnen sie oft die augen für eine seite, der wir vielleicht bisweilen zu wenig aufmerksamkeit schenken.

author: Ariel S. Winter    (1 book) go to top

Mr. Sapien möchte zeit für sich zum nachdenken und fährt in urlaub. Er hat eine einsame hütte an einem strand gemietet, nicht zu nahe am nächsten ort. Zuvor hat er sich noch einen neuen arm bestellt, weil sein alter defekt ist. Mr. Sapien ist ein roboter, ein älteres modell, einer der wenigen, die noch von menschenhand gebaut wurden.

Die erzählung ist eine durchaus interessante idee. Eine welt, in der fast nur noch roboter leben und kaum noch menschen. Die roboter sterben eben nicht, können repariert werden, wenn ihnen etwas passiert. Bei menschen geht das nicht so einfach. Die roboter wissen auch sehr viel über das 'menschsein', aber sie verstehen es grösstenteils nicht. Wissen und verstehen. Das eine ist nicht unbedingt mit dem anderen gleichzusetzen. Genau davon handelt eigentlich das ganze buch. Was nützt den robotern all das wissen ohne richtiges verständnis? Sie können sich reparieren, sind kaum zerstörbar, wissen sonst fast alles, verstehen aber nicht einmal sich selber. Es gibt ausnahmen. Es gibt roboter, die lernen zu verstehen. Aber diejenigen, welche zu verstehen lernen, gehen an ihrem verständnis zu grunde. Unverständlich für die anderen, welche nicht verstehen.

Komplex? Ja. Und ich behaupte auch nicht, dass diese interpretation richtig ist, aber es ist meine interpretation, mein verständnis vom inhalt des buches. Wer eine geschichte mit anfang und ende sucht, ist bei diesem buch falsch. Es fühlt sich mehr an wie eine erzählung, die irgendwo im zeitstrom einfach ansetzt und irgendwann später wieder absetzt.

author: Arne Dahl    (1 book) go to top

Der letze Fall der Spezialeinheit für "Gewaltverbrechen von internationalem Charakter" beim Reichskriminalamt in Stockholm lag schon eine Zeit zurück. Und seit damals hatte die Gruppe nichts richtiges zu tun gehabt. Das ändert sich aber von einer Minute auf die andere, als ein berühmter schwedischer Literaturkritiker am New Yorker Flughafen kurz vor dem Heimflug von einem Serienmörder hingerichtet, das Ticket storniert und kurz darauf an jemand anders weider verkauft wird. Alles deutet daruf hin, dass einer der berüchtigsten amerikanischen Serienmörder aller Zeiten auf dem Weg nach Schweden ist.

Anfangs muss man sich etwas an den Schreibstil (oder die Uebersetzung?) gewöhnen. In teils langen, verschachtelten Sätzen werden die Personen beschrieben, die Atmosphäre dargestellt, die Umstände dargelegt, kum, "das Spielfeld wird abgesteckt". Zwar geht es stets vorwärts, aber gemächlich. Wer hier durchhaltevermögen beweist wird dann im letzten Drittel schliesslich mit spannender und flüssig lesbarer Lektüre belohnt. Obwohl die Geschichte am Anfang sehr sorgsam aufgegleist wird, erwecken einige Begebenheiten gegen Schluss doch den Eindruck, sie seien weniger von Beginn weg geplant gewesen, als viel mehr eine Notlösung.

Alles in allem, ganz in Ordnung als Unterhaltungslektüre, aber nichts herausragendes.

author: Ashish Kumar and Tulsiram Yadav    (1 book) go to top

As the title already suggests, this is not a book for the splunk> novice. You should already know the basics, such as how to install splunk> and how to make it run, as well as how to basically import data.

The splunk> version used for all samples is 6.3 and the three big topics (but not the only ones covered) are data analytics, visualizations and dashboards. The authors do a fine job explaining. When they write about a feature, they explain what it does, provide a sample implementation, have relevant screenshots so the reader can see what they are talking about and they not only print the code for implementing the feature, but also annotate the code. These annotations are very helpful to understand what is going on, what portion in the code is linked to which other part and where changes must be made. It is these good explanations and well commented code fragments, which I find most useful.

In my opinion this is a good book to have around so you can quickly look up how to implement visualization and dashboard features you don't use every day and have a clear explanation with good samples in no time. Valuable enough to order an extra paper copy for the office.

author: Axel Kaiser    (1 book) go to top

Dieses buch ist kurz, aber äusserst gut. Keine komplizierten worte, keine unverständlichen sätze. Es erklärt in einfachen worten und mit einfachen beispielen wie die wirtschaft funktioniert.

Dass immer alles so schwarz-weiss ist wie dargestellt, wage ich zu bezweifeln, aber dieses buch erklärt hervorragend, auf einfache weise, für jedermann verständlich, die grundprinzipien der wirtschaft.

Sachverhalte einfach zu erklären ist eine wahre kunst. Axel Kaiser beweist mit diesem buch, dass er diese kunst beherrscht.

author: Barbara Delinsky    (1 book) go to top

An average story of the average neighbourhood in an average small village. While Amanda and Graham are struggling to conceive, the reserved widow next door, Gretchen, is pregnant and won't tell who the father is. This again does not quite help the worked up marriage of the other neighbours, Karen and Lee, especially as Lee has a history of cheating on his wife. Also Georgia, the last neighbour on the cul-de-sac is asking herself, whether her husband, Russ, could have fathered Gretchen's child. After all she's out on business for most of the week while Russ is at home...

Barbara Delinsky has a way of working with the feelings of the characters in the book, fear, expectation, doubt, love, trust, that makes a good read out of an average story.

author: Barbara Wood    (2 books) go to top

When the paleographer Ben Messer receives some ancient scrolls from Israel for translation he soon realizes that these scrolls are unlike any others ever found. They might even contain evidence which could prove or change what we think to know of history.

But with each scroll translated, Ben himself seems to change more and more. Is the Curse of Moses upon him? The line between present and history is diminishing with each scroll...

Charlotte, the American-Chinese young woman has inherited Harmony Biotech, the successful company her grandmother has built selling Chinese herbal remedies. Not long after she is in charge of the company, somebody tries to destroy it. Who is it? Why?

An extremely well written thriller, right from the first to the very last page. The way Barbara Wood succeeds to tell both, the story of Charlotte and her struggle, as well as the story of her grandmother in one book, side by side, without the two stories getting into the way of each other, is simply fantastic.

Definitely a book which is hard to put away once you started reading.

author: Beate Sirota Gordon    (1 book) go to top

The autobiography of Beate Sirota Gordon, the daughter of the famous pianist Leo Sirota. Beate has been brought up mainly in Austria and Japan. During war she was studying in America and thanks to her excellent language skills was hired to translate foreign radio broadcasts monitored by the US. At the end of the war she returned to Japan in search for her parents and worked for the US army where she happened to draft part of the Japanese constitution.

While this is not a literary high standing work, it is nice reading and well worthwhile if you are interested in Japan, especially the early 20th century, or in Leo Sirota.

author: Bill Bryson    (1 book) go to top

Bill Bryson describes his attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail, an old and famous trail in the US stretching over more than 2000 miles. Not only is Bryson's writing style entertaining, he also adds quite some facts and figures about the trail itself, how it came to be or various areas through which the trail passes.

This non-fiction book is for entertainment and would not be useful as preparatory lecture for doing the Appalachian Trail.

author: Björn Nehrhoff von Holderberg & Stefan Jahn    (1 book) go to top

Ein kleines büchlein von knapp unter hundert seiten, das rasch gelesen ist. Für den erfahrenen kajakfahrer sicher alles 'alter hut', aber für den neuling eine interessante und lehrreiche einstiegslektüre. Unter anderem findet man informationen über die verschiedenen bootsformen mit ihren vor- und nachteilen sowie die ausrüstung. Auch paddel- und rettungstechniken werden vorgestellt. Die kapitel über navigation und wettereinflüsse sind sicherlich ein wichtiges thema für leute, die sich auf grössere touren machen wollen mit strecken ohne direkten sichtkontakt zum ziel, aber meines erachtens richtet sich das büchlein an absolute anfänger, die sich nicht grad als erstes auf solche touren einlassen sollten.

Klein und handlich, grad richtig um sich erstmals ein bisschen ins thema kajaking einzulesen. Aber auch nicht mehr.

author: Bobby Duffy    (1 book) go to top

Why are we wrong about so many things? (Yes, if you're honest with yourself, you'll have to agree that we actually are.) Bobby Duffy does not pretend to have THE answer to this question, but through his research he does have some hints and ideas and probabilities, which he shares in this book. What I like is, that Duffy is honest and openly says that he, too, does not know the answers for sure, but he does share what he and his team and other scientists found over the years could be probable causes.

Well then, and of what help is this information? When you know where misperceptions are likely to occur and when and why, then you do have a much better chance to stop and think things thorough and avoid at least some of the misperceptions. It's not a definite solution, but it is an improvement in your thought process.

The book is not too difficult to read and it is much shorter than it appears to be; around 40% of the whole page count is taken up by the numerous references.

author: Bohumil Hrabal    (1 book) go to top

The story of Mr. Ditie, a young Czech who starts out as a simple busboy at the Golden Prague Hotel and has a dream of becoming rich and a hotel owner himself one day. Ditie loves his work and has a talent for it and he uses his chances to advance. But World War II has a huge influence on his life. Becoming rich and a hotel owner, is that really what life is all about?

At first the book, which is sprinkled with rather pornographic scenes, which surprised me for a book originally written in the early 19-hundreds, appears to lead to a good story with a climax, but somewhere in the middle this turns around completely. There is no more clear aim, or much aim at all and it becomes more of a reflective text. The expection building up in the reader in the first part is never fulfilled. And people who like thought provoking literature whould probably not guess the second part was to their liking when starting to read the first part.

author: Brad Meltzer    (1 book) go to top

Michael Garrick is a young lawyer at the White House. And he is a very lucky man, because he is asked for a date by the First Daughter, Nora Hartson. Nora is a real daredevil getting rid of the Secret Service tailing them to sneak into a bar incognito and without being watched. There they spot Simon, Michael's boss, who seems to be handing over something. Secret information? Money? Nora convinces Michael to follow Simon and this is where Michael's life starts to go upside down. Within hours he is not only lying to the police, but also investigated by the FBI as a prime suspect in a sudden death case.

This is one of the few books written in present tense, which needed some getting used to on the first few pages. The story is well told with a number of unexpected twists and turns. Good enough, but nothing which kept me up at night reading till dawn.

author: Brent Beer    (1 book) go to top

The book is not too big and it contains lots of screenshots of what is being explained. So it reading does not take too much time. With an approach such heavy on visuals, however, I would have expected the menus etc. discussed to be clearly marked in the screenshots. I am not familiar with how frequently the layout of GitHub's user interface changes, but if readers really do need so many screen shots to follow along, I fear they will be lost pretty quickly once the interface changes.

Not being a technical guide (as is also stated on the cover), there is no information about git or what git does, even though git is the big workhorse under the hood of GitHub. Basically the book tries to go through the motions of viewing a repository, changing a single file, collaboration and configuring a GitHub project. It does this by going through all the menus in the user interface. Yes, it does complete samples of simple tasks.
There is also has a chapter on GitHub Desktop.

If you are looking for a book showing you how to use git, this definitely is the wrong book. If you are a somewhat technical person who knows the basics of git, you probably won't get much out of this book. If you are a non-technical person who needs to work on some projects (possibly administratively) together with others using GitHub, then this book could be of some help to you. And if you are a non-technical person wanting to get a feeling whether GitHub could be a possible solution for organizing collaboration of your company/organization/team software projects, then this book might actually be interesting for you.

author: Brian P. Hogan    (1 book) go to top

tmux is a very powerful terminal multiplexer. Tons of shortcuts, commands, configuration options and a zillion of possibilities. Where to begin and how to get up to a good start if you're new to tmux? In exactly this situation this book comes in very handy. It is short, explains the most important commands and shortcuts you'll need and a bunch of good to know configuration settings. It also gives some brief information on how to share tmux sessions with others.

If you want to get to know all the features and options available, this is not the book to buy, but if you want to get up to speed in no time, this is a good way to start, especially since it not only shows what is available but also the basics of how to configure things and adjust it to the way you want to work.

There is, however, one aspect of the book (at least the PDF version), which could use some major improvement: the font. The book is typeset in a font that is hard to read unless you overly enlarge the pages and even then the displayed keystrokes, in an even much smaller sans-serif font, are difficult to decipher.

author: Camron Wright    (1 book) go to top

Emily is seven years old. Together with her mother she visits her grandpa every Friday. Her grandpa is diagnosed with Alzheimer's and he is not always coherent. Before he dies quite unexpectedly, he composes a number of letters addressed to his granddaughter Emily. Addressed to Emily, but not necessarily only meant for Emily.

This is a very nice and interesting story. Grandpa Harry obviously is no good expressing his true feelings or what is important to him with spoken words. This is also the reason he is somewhat estranged to his own kids. But once he is dead, through his letters for Emily, he finally finds a way to indirectly express his love, to talk about his struggles in life, to finally drop his mask. And it does some good, not only to Emily.

author: Carlo Strenger    (1 book) go to top

"Zivilisierte Verachtung" ist ein essay, der zehn jahre nach seiner erstauflage weiterhin sehr relevant ist, vielleicht mehr noch als zur zeit seiner erstveröffentlichung. Carlo Strenger kritisiert darin die immer höher werdende anforderung, jedem und allem gebenüber uneingeschränkt tolerant zu sein und nichts mehr kritisieren zu dürfen. Nicht, dass er etwas gegen toleranz hat, aber er zeigt wohin uneingeschränkte toleranz und verbotene begründete kritik führt. Und wenn man heute, zehn jahre nach der veröffentlichung, in die welt und in die zeitung schaut, dann weiss man, dass Carlo Strenger den nagel voll auf den kopf getroffen hat.

author: Carol Berg    (1 book) go to top

Seyonne, ein sklave. Sein leben nichts wert. Sein status dem eines tieres gleich. Derweil war er einst höchst angesehen. Der beste "wächter" den die Ezzarier seit vielen jahren hatten.

Aleksander, prinz. Thronfolger der Derzhi. Sein status am obersten ende der skala. Vererbt, von geburt an bis zu seinem tode.

Zwei männer, wie sie unterscheidlicher kaum sein könnten. Und doch so gleich. Zwei männer, die das schicksal auf seine unergründliche weise zusammenbringt und die beide das leben des anderen massiv verändern; in tiefste abgründe stürzen, in gefahr bringen, wieder aufbauen.

Viel kann nicht gesagt werden, über das buch, ohne einen teil des inhaltes zu verraten. Die geschichte spielt in einer welt von verschiedenen völkern, mit kriegen, unterdrückung, intriegen, magischen kräften, gut und böse. Der aufbau ist gut geplant, die erzählung schwebt flüssig dahin, wirkt nirgends langweilig. Die eigentliche geschichte liegt meines erachtens weniger in der handlung als in der sich verändernden beziehung der beiden hauptfiguren; nicht nur dem anderen gegenüber, sondern auch dem leben an und für sich und anderen menschen gegenüber.

Ein gutes buch.

author: Cassandra Clare    (4 books) go to top

Originally, as far as I know, the Mortal Instruments series should have consisted of three books only. This is now the fourth in this very successful series. Often when, due to great success, more books are written than what was planned for, the content of the additional books is not of the same quality any more. How about this one? It definitely is not as packed with superbly plotted action as 'City of Glass', the third book, but that would be almost impossible to beat and very difficult to match. Nevertheless, this is still an excellent book.

The book picks up where the previous one left off. Actually, in the story, it starts just a couple of weeks after the end of 'City of Glass'. And it goes right on. No setting the scene, no long introductions of the characters. But there are plenty of references to what has happened in the other three books, especially the third one. So without having read the other books in this series in the proper order, many things might be hard to grasp and understand. If you haven't done so yet, read 'City of Bones', 'City of Ashes' and 'City of Glass' before this one. They all are very worthwhile too.

Clary is training as a Shadowhunter and much in love with Jace. But Jace is withdrawing himself more and more from Clary. Why? What is wrong? Jace, being Jace and not wanting to bother or hurt Clary, blames himself and tries to hide his problems. Not the best move and rather dangerous. Simon is trying to get used to being turned a vampire while, at the same time, trying to continue with his former normal life. The powers that be don't so easily let him do that, especially not with his unique gifts which are invaluable for some. Not surprisingly, it turns out that Jace's and Simon's problems are related and some evil doers are more alive than everybody thought...

The third book in the Mortal Instruments series is as fascinating as the first two, City of Bones and City of Ashes. In fact, the three books actually are one huge book split into three volumes. Each subsequent one picks up where the previous one left off without either a break nor any explanation what had gone on in the story before. Unlike some other series, where each book can stand by itself, the only way to read the Mortal Instruments series is in the correct order.

Clary finally is going to the City of Glass, to Alicante in Idris. She wants to find Ragnor Fell, who is said to be the only one able to help her mother, who is still lying unconscious in hospital. But Clary does not arrive in Alicante the way she thought she would. As it turns out, the city also faces some never seen mayhem courtesy of Valentine. And both, Clary and Jace learn what shocking thing Valentine has done to his son, what he made him.

It is extremely difficult to tell anything useful about the gist of the story in this series without spoiling it. Just as difficult as it is to put the books away once you opened the first page. As I'm now through the three books in record speed, I finally can catch up on lost sleep...

This book carries on right where the first one in the Mortal Instruments trilogy, City of Bones, left off. And I don't think it would be good to read this again fantastic book without having read the previous one; there is no explanation any more of the main characters or their circumstances, like why Simon gets so sick seeing an episode from a Dracula film on TV or the role of Valentine.

The Mortal Cup is not enough for Valentine. He wants more and he surely does not hesitate to use dark forces to get what he wants. Jace is imprisoned by the Inquisitor of the Clave for his alleged conspiracy with Valentine. But Jace as well as Clary find they have some special powers beyond what they thought possible. The shadowhunters are up against more evil than ever, more vicious daemons than what they usually fight and not everybody survives...

Just like the first book, this is an absolutely absorbing page-turner, even though towards the end I could have done with less fighting and bloodshedding.

Clary Fray is just an ordinary girl, or at least she thinks she is until she learns about daemons, shadowhunters, werewolves, vampires and more such creatures. And shortly after she sees such creatures for the first time, Clary is already deep in trouble. It's not her fault, though, but nevertheless there is no piece of mind and battling some of these creatures is the only way to survive. Piece by piece she learns who she really is, what her mother never told her and why.

This is the first book of the Mortal Instruments trilogy. Right from the beginning the reader dives into an expanded dimension of the world as we know it. There are many groups of species which are not always too friendly with each other. The book is inherently interesting and absorbing. It very much tended to stick to my hands, preventing me from doing much else till I reached the last page. But I can write no more, the second book in the series is right there on my desk and I just can't resist...

author: Celeste Ng    (1 book) go to top

What happens, when a stranger, living by somewhat different believes, comes to a community which strictly functions by adhering to rule-based planning? Especially if the stranger is an avid observer of people and very sensitive to what is going on all around? Mia is an artist and such a person. Mia and her daughter Pearl come to Shaker Heights to stay only for a while. But then they decide do to stay for good and especially Pearl gets more involved with the Richardsons, some 'Shaker Heights natives'. Everything goes well until, one day, some happening brings a lot of commotion into the local community.

The book describes the life of some people and after one third of the book, it finally sprinkles the descriptions and uneventful flow of life with some happenings. But even then, it is much stronger on the descriptive side than on the happening side. There are passages where I felt like a sentence or thought is started and an intermediate block tucked in the middle of it before ending it. Only that the intermediate block was several pages long, telling half a life story. This style does not make the book hard to read, it is still easy to understand and follow. But if you prefer a more straight forward, linear style to these roundabout ways, it can be slightly annoying at times.

author: Charles Bell    (1 book) go to top

One of the best books I have seen for learning a new set of skills.

Creating small microcontroller projects and accessing them in an "Internet of Things style" might look like a daunting task at first. It is not rocket science, but it definitely helps to have somebody showing you the ropes. And that's exactly what Charles Bell does with this book. For his introduction he chooses microcontroller boards running MicroPython. For following along, the Pyboard or a board from pycom (not only the WiPy, the LoPy4 etc. work equally well) are best suited, because all the samples are spelled out in detail for these boards. But Bell also discusses a number of other boards and gives enough details so that I feel I could master the samples with other boards too.

Charles Bell does a tremendously good job explaining all you need to know: the Internet of Things itself, MicroPython (and for that matter Python basics), programming basics, various microcontroller boards supporting MicroPython, hardware sensors, basics in electronics, ... There are always a number of samples, from simple gradually increasing to more involved. Links to hardware and the parts used are given, the hardware and protocols and programming techniques explained and the complexity is always kept in check. Working through the book and following along feels like you are taking a class with a helpful teacher. Things are explained in clear language, complexity is kept in check, the sequence of things in the book in a logical order, ...

I did have some experience in Python and internet protocols, but none at all in electronics or microcontroller board and I felt safe and well taken care of with this book. And I'm certain the same will be true for people knowing about electronics but not programming. And even if all the topics are new to you, you'll find this book extremely valuable.

author: Charles Maclean    (1 book) go to top

Ed und Laura Lister's tochter Sophie wurde ermordet. Die polizei konnte den mörder nicht finden. Ed gibt aber nicht auf, er will den mörder seiner tochter finden und folgt auf eigene faust spuren. Diese spuren sind aber nicht ungefährlich, für andere und auch für ihn selber. Und vor allem ihn verwickeln sie in ungeahnte komplikationen.

Eigentlich ist die idee für das buch gut und es ist auch nicht schlecht geschrieben. Aber irgendwie fehlt mir einfach das gewisse etwas; das etwas, welches mich fesselt und es mir schwer macht, das buch beiseite zu legen. Es ist mir aber nicht möglich dieses etwas zu fassen. Vielleicht werden einfach zu viele verschiedene themen in ein und derselben geschichte miteinander verknüpft.

author: Christopher Reich    (1 book) go to top

Jonathan Ransom is a doctor, working in various parts of the world for Doctors Without Borders. Happily married, he would never have guessed that his beautiful wife Emma in fact is a secret operative for a secret government agency. It is only when Emma blows an operation that Jonathan finds out. Emma has has to run and fakes her own death. But Jonathan now knows and does not want to accept their separation. At a medical congress in London, Emma contacts her husband again so they can have a few hours together. But Emma is up to something and tells him they will never be able to see each other again. Jonathan does not want to accept this, follows Emma and hell breaks out for him, becoming the prime suspect in a car bombing. Jonathan is a simple, but gifted doctor. He turns out to be at least as gifted escaping manhunt, discovering secrets and finding the people responsible.

author: Claudia Runk    (1 book) go to top

Das Thema des Buches ist weit von meinem Fachgebiet entfernt, interessiert mich aber. Die fachliche Richtigkeit des Inhaltes kann ich mit meinen minimen Kenntnissen somit nicht beurteilen.

In den ersten rund 80 Seiten geht Claudia Runk erst mal auf die geschichtliche Entstehung von Schrift und vor allem Typographie seit 3500 v.Chr. bis heute ein. Auch zahlreiche Typographen und Schriftendesigner werden dabei vorgestellt. Danach geht sie, ausgehend vom einzelnen Zeichen über Wörter und Zeilen bis hin zur ganzen Seite, nicht nur auf Formen, Grössen, Hervorhebungen, Abstände ein, sondern auch auf Schreibregeln, Lesegewohnheiten und vieles mehr. Quasi nebenbei wird der Leser mit den entsprechenden Fachausdrücken bekannt gemacht. Die Wirkung der verschiedenen Elemente wird nicht nur erklärt, sondern auflockernd anhand von zahlreichen Beispielen dargestellt. Diese Beispiele dienen gleichzeitig sehr gekonnt als Gestaltungsbausteine auf den einzelnen Seiten.

Immer wieder wird auf Einstellungen in InDesign und QuarkXPress eingegangen, welche aber von Leuten, welche diese Programme nicht einsetzen, ganz einfach übersprungen werden können. Ein Kapitel beschäftigt sich auch mit Typographie im Web und im letzen Kapitel wird auf die Schrifttechnologien PostScript, TrueType und OpenType eingegangen.

Das Buch ist durchaus auch für interessierte Laien lesbar und informativ. Was ich etwas vermisst habe sind härtere Fakten was wann wo in welcher Grösse etc. benutzt werden soll. Zwar werden etliche generelle Daumenregeln genannt aber dann gleich wieder abgeschwächt indem darauf hingewiesen wird, dass man Regeln, die man kennt, bewusst auch umgehen darf, wenn man sie erst mal kennt.

author: Clive Cussler    (1 book) go to top

Terrorists bring down a chartered plane with the UN Secretary-General. When the plane crashes on Greenland, Dirk Pitt is nearby on a NUMA ship and hastens to help. There are survivors indeed. The terrorists, too, learn that not everybody died in the crash and launch a follow-up attempt. Dirk is involved again in trying to rescue the US Secretary-General. But not only her, there are also other important people needing rescue from a superbly planned attempt at their lives. The stakes are high, multinational and the results would be disastrous if the terrorists succeeded. And they are good, those terrorists.

I felt Dirk Pitt is just a bit too much of an over-hero, too good, too flawless. Other than that, the book is well written and the story interesting.

author: Colin Harrison    (1 book) go to top

Bill Wyeth was a very successful attorney until, for his son's birthday, he decided to come back home early from an out-of-town assignment. His life became something completely different after this incident. Mostly by accident, one night he was asked to help out with a legal matter, innocent looking, but this again gave his life a completely new turn.

Colin Harrison has a tendency to write in an extremely descriptive manner. Some parts of the book, especially the beginning, are pages and pages of description, creating an atmosphere. But he also knows when not to do this and keep the story going. If you like a well designed story and can live with long atmospheric descriptions, this is OK. However, if you are a reader which mainly wants to know what is happening as quickly as possible, you'll probably be giving up before you've read the first third of the book.

author: Dale Carnegie    (1 book) go to top

Many of these self improvement books are completely exaggerating and talking about methods which are simply not applicable. This is, I feel, one of the books which actually are on track and give advice which is useful.

There are three parts in this book: how to make people like you, how to win people to your way of thinking and how to change people without arousing resentment. Actually, most of the people will actually know about most of the things the book suggests, but often we "know but do not realize". Ever so often I had to say to myself "Well, that's actually the way to do it and if I think of it, I somehow knew it." But these things have never before been laid out in front of me so openly. Some of the principles described in the book I already used consciously, some of them unconsciously and some where new ideas to me.

The book is not a manual giving concrete steps to take or phrases to use, but rather a guide to show you the direction to follow. The steps used to walk into the given direction must be found and taken by yourself, as they are very much dependent on the situation at hand. But there are numerous examples of how people applied the principles in certain situations. Actually most of the book consists of such examples and what the result was. Sure, Dale Carnegie uses positive examples with incredible results for illustration in his book, basically he shows the tip of the iceberg. The reader must realize that not every time one of these principles is being applied such a huge gain can result. So don't expect immediate radical changes once you start following the advice in the book, but I'm sure the general idea is correct and will yield results finally.

author: Dale Dougherty & Arnold Robbins    (1 book) go to top

All of sed and awk that most unix users know, including many professional administrators, is 's/this/that/' and '{ print $1 }'

But there is so much more these two tools can do. And this book shows you how. In each of the two major parts things are laid out in a logical manner building up knowledge thoroughly from the ground up, all supported by lots of well explained examples.

Both, sed and awk, rely heavily on regular expressions and the authors don't let you down in this area either. Chapter 3 is dedicated to equip you with a well enough working knowledge of regular expressions. It surely is not as thorough as Jeffry Friedl's "Mastering Regular Expressions", but the chapter packs a lot of information into the 29 pages. Especially with awk, there are quite a number of different versions out there and they are not quite identical in feature scope. Differences among some major implementations are discussed as well. Finally, in the appendices, you can find a quick reference for both sed and awk.

As thorough (and even beginner friendly) as the book is, it does have one drawback: it is old. Much of the sample code deals with manipulating troff files or uucp logs. Both things many unix/linux users of today have no idea about. The reliance on such old samples is not a problem per se, they still do the job of demonstrating concepts and usage of sed and awk quite nicely. But these samples are much less applicable to sed/awk users today than they were twenty years ago when the first edition of this book was published. What I also think would be badly needed in an updated third revision is a discussion of how to use these tools with non-English charactersets and Unicode.

While this is an excellent book for learning to use sed and awk much more effectively, let's hope that the authors sometime get around to do an overhaul, provide samples which are more accessible today and also add a chapter or two about using these tools with the much larger and inherently more complex charactersets in common use today.

author: Dan Ariely    (1 book) go to top

Are humans predictable? Mostly. Are humans rational? Not always. But the interesting thing is that even some of our irrationality is predictable, what Ariely nicely shows in his well written book which is not only enlightening but also entertaining.

Have you ever wondered about advertisements which contain one option which no sane person ever would consider? In the first chapter Ariely picks up exactly this situation and explains why this offer is there along the others. It is not an option the company actually wants to sell, but a way to steer us towards the offer it wants us to choose. Why are outrageously expensive things sometimes so much more desirable than comparable, but reasonably priced items? How comes we buy tons of chocolates when they are almost free, but we only take one or two if they are completely free? On the other hand we tend to easily give up a much better deal for one which is free but actually worse. Or why does a certain beer taste better if we're told what it contains only after tasting it, compared to being told before taking a sip?

In many real life situations we're acting irrationally, but do so predictably. Dan Ariely discusses lots of such situations and underlines each of them with multiple experiments. Knowing about this predictability allows us not only to make more conscious decisions, but also to see through some tricks used in advertising or possibly even to better understand how we might need to present something to make it more appealing to others.

While most of the information in this book might not be groundbreaking news to you, it is still worth reading. The statements of each chapter are always backed up by experiments and including their outcome. The whole book is very easy to understand, written in a conversational, easy to follow style, far from the unintelligible scientific hubble-bubble which could be expected for such a topic.

author: Dan Brown    (2 books) go to top

Susan Fletcher, a cryptography specialist with the NSA, had planned a trip for the weekend with David. But it all comes different. First David is sent onto a mysterious mission, and later her boss calls her in for an emergency.

As usual, the whole story plays in a timeframe of only 24 hours, but Dan Brown has enough twists and turns up his sleeve to make it a very eventful 24 hours, right from the first page through to the last one. Even though Digital Fortress is not exactly as highly capturing as some of his other books, it still makes for a fine read. It also makes you wonder how much spying power big organizations and countries really do have.

Some small mistakes in the book, like the mixup of the terms bit and byte, as well as a mistake in some code are tiny glitches. But for somebody who is used to the Japanese language and Japanese names, the Japanese sounding but definitely non-Japanese name Dan Brown chose for one main character becomes a bit annoying while reading. If you don't speak Japanese, you probably won't notice and mind.

Campaigning for office is at its height. Rachel Sexton of the National Reconnaissance Office and daughter of his opponent, is ordered by the current President of the United States to check out and confirm the world changing finding NASA has just made. Only hours later Rachel finds herself on an arctic glacier.

By chance the civilian scientists stumble upon some minor issue which not only puzzles them but also puts a team of highly skilled killers on their heels.

A fast paced, well told political thriller. Dan Brown understands his craft exceptionally well by building up the readers urge to go on reading.

author: Dan Simmons    (1 book) go to top

The story of Jake Perry and his friends, all three of them avid and experienced climbers, how it happens they attempt to summit Mt. Everest in 1925 and what happens on that mountain, this story is not bad. Towards the end it also has some unexpected turn. But the explanations, the details, the descriptions, all that is quite long. I was dragging through the first half of this more than 700 pages long tome considering more than once to just toss it away. Then the second half was more interesting, though still dragging on enough, and I did finish reading it.

If you are a climber yourself, I can imagine you might enjoy the lengthy details, but otherwise there definitely are more interesting books.

author: Daniel Kahneman    (1 book) go to top

There are a lot of books out there which endlessly repeat themselves from beginning to end saying "Do A and you will become rich." "Do B and your memory will improve tenfold." This is not one of those cheap, boaring and terribly overconfident texts!

Daniel Kahneman is not telling the reader what to do, he rather explains what is going on in our mind when we see things, when we hear things, when we are presented with different options, when things are worded one way or another. His insight is based on his own research and that of many other scholars. There are many samples of how such research is conducted, what kind of questions are being asked and how they are worded. This gives the reader the opportunity to formulate his or her own answer before reading on. Kahneman then explains why most people answer in a certain way and where our mind plays tricks on us.

Very interesting and an eye-opener of how we sometimes are being manipulated by the questions themselves.

author: Daniel Silva    (2 books) go to top

Obviously, this is a book in a whole series and it is not the first one of the series. Nevertheless, it was easy enough to follow and absolutely fine to be read "standalone". I like the writing style. There are no characters who hold long monologues, their conversations are brief and to the point. Most of the sentences are kept short, as are the chapters. This fits very well to the action loaded story.

After a certain incident, two master spies, Gabriel Allon and Christopher Keller, are asked to go after one of the best bomb makers in the world, Eamon Quinn, an ex IRA man who is now selling his services to whomever pays well enough. Both, Gabriel and Keller hold personal grudges against Quinn because of some happenings in the past in which Quinn played an important role. So the hunt is more than just a job. Also for Quinn.

The story has twists and turns, which are unexpected. You definitely can't predict the story or outcome after reading a few chapters. Very entertaining.

Gabriel Allon is an art-restorer, officially. Off the record, however, he is one of the best agents Israeli intelligence has. When a scholar doing terrorism analysis is murdered in Amsterdam, Gabriel is sent to his house to make sure nothing linking the dead scholar back to the "Office" in Israel will be found. But Gabriel can not even go out to get some Thai food for dinner without stumbling right into something big. An international chase of very well organized terrorrists starts.

Neither familiar with the history nor the political situation in the middle east, there were many terms and concepts which I did not really understand. Nevertheless, the fast paced story is understandable and interesting to read. But at times it is not quite so clear how Gabriel comes to some conclusions.

author: Danielle Steel    (1 book) go to top

Sarah Watson is Oliver's wife and a mother of three. She did not want to have three kids. But things got much better with every new family member arriving. And Oliver progressed in his job, so they now can afford a house and a full-time helper. But despite having a good life, Sarah is missing something. Something, she wants to have for herself. To get it requires separation from her husband and her kids, temporarily. When Sarah goes for it, this suddenly leaves all the family work to Oliver. Juggling his job, organizing and being there for the kids, coping with Sarah's absence... All that is an ordeal which eats away on him.

This well written story is heart touching in places, but also saddening during the episodes where things don't work out well for the Watson family. The reader accompanies them from a seemingly happy family to the depths of despair and again up the slope of acceptance towards new hope and happiness.

author: Dave Eggers    (1 book) go to top

The Circle is a company in the digital age, not unlike google or facebook today. It is high tech, it is communication based, it is big-data and it is heaven for the employees. Mae Holland was able to get a position at The Circle and her live changes considerably. To the better. Or the worse?

For this book there should be two or three ratings, one for the first third of the book (4 stars), one for the rest of the book (no more than 3 stars) and possibly another one for what the book tries to make transparent (5 stars). The topic is very contemporary. The book shows an extremely realistic trend in our wired civilization. These things shown in the book are really happening, here and now. Many of the ideas and things born at The Circle may seem exaggerated at first sight, but thinking a bit more about it, most of them are actually existing in one or another way. Existing today, not in the future. So the book could be an eye opener, could be something to make us aware of what is going on. Unfortunately it does not succeed in that enough, I feel. There is not enough opposition in the book, not enough protagonists with scepticism (or simply common sense) which do open our eyes. Probably the author intended it that way, thinking that things are overdrawn enough for everyone to realize. But I feel just showing extremes without the opposition does neither make people think, nor does it make a book gripping.

The idea of the book is very good. It is timely. It highlights many things which do exist in our world today but which we often do not recognize as what they are. But the book does not do this as well and interestingly as I think it could have.

author: David Ambrose    (1 book) go to top

Joanna Cross, a journalist, who busted a scam which claimed to make it possible to contact the deceased, agrees to take part in an experiment run by Sam Towne. Sam is a scientist at an university and his area of research paranormal phenomena. The group of people taking part in the experiment, one of them Joanna, try to 'create' a ghost. Once they get first results, progress is very quick and witin a short time they are far beyond their initial expectations. As the created ghost is only a product of their combined imagination, there is no danger in exploring a bit deeper and go a bit further than originally planned. Or ther 'should' be no danger. However, the imagined ghost starts to show unexpected (re)actions. Some of the group get frightened, others want to explore more and things start to get out of hand.

The book is not frightening and interesting to read; it definitely is not part of the horror genre. But the more the experiment in the book gets out of control, the more the story lacks structure. Towards the end it felt to me, as if the author had not thought things through to that stage and was introducing twists and turns to somehow come to an end.

Half of the book is quite interesting, another third is ok and the last bit is, in my opinion, poor.

author: David Baldacci    (20 books) go to top

Amos Decker never forgets a thing he heard, saw, read. Can not forget. This was useful in his second career with the police. He was one of the most successful detectives. But after his wife and daughter were murdered, he also could not forget a single thing, throwing him into a totally different existence. Slowly he is getting a grip on life again when suddenly his ex-partner from his days as a successful detective shows up and some unusual things happen.

The book is interesting to read with some unexpected twists and turns. As the story develops, it also gets more and more complicated. Weill thought out from the beginning, otherwise the bits and pieces would not fall together to form a whole in the end. If you can ignore that the story is just too constructed and the bad guy have planned all the details far too well to be anywhere near believable, then the book is still a good read.

There are some references to the first book in Baldacci's Shaw series (The Whole Truth), but this second book of the series can be read without knowing what happened in the first book; it is a story of its own.

Shaw is good at his job, which is bringing very bad and highly dangerous people to justice. The means to do so are not always strictly legal. This time Shaw has to catch a highly successful Canadian businessman called Waller. Waller is active in human trafficking, but that's not why he should be brought down; it's his new business venture. At the same time another organization is targeting Waller, too, for something yet different. Both, the organization Shaw is with and the other organization, without knowing about each other, plan to get to Waller in the same place at around the same time. Of course, that makes things complicated. However, it is not the only complication.

As usual for Baldacci's books, it is well and clearly written with lots of short chapters. Some cruel passages are spelled out quite descriptively. In general, I like the books by David Baldacci. But all together, I found this book not to be on par with the majority of his books I have read sofar.

Mace Perry, a former cop, gets out of prison, She set up while undercover, sentenced but innocent. And all she wants is to get back into the force. Whatever the cost. The only way she sees to achieve this is to solve a big crime all by herself before the police does. And hardly out from behind bars, she also stumbles upon a mysterious murder case.

Typical Baldacci, the chapters are short, the storyline quite straight, the plot and writing captivating. But Mace is a little bit too much of an overachiever and Roy is way out of his league. Nevertheless, the book is a good read if you're up for some action.

Sean King and Michelle Maxwell stumble upon their next case quite by chance. Their client is a kid who wants them to find out something very important to him. For the sake of the traumatized kid, they agree, even though it does not sound too thrilling...until they have some professional bad guys at their heels while the feds shove their creds in their faces. But blocking Sean and Michelle from all sides does not stop them, it has quite the opposite effect.

Up until now, the reader of this series has learnt a few precious things of Michelle's past, but not much about Sean's. This time it's the other way round. And interestingly, our two private investigators start to heavily rely on another person which we know from one of the previous books.

With book 6 in this series you get what you're used to from the previous books: fast-moving, captivating, unexpected turns (and yes, sometimes a breakthrough which comes out of the blue for no good reason, but never mind).

Ted Bergin, a lawyer and old friend of Sean King, asks for Sean's help in the case of Edgar Roy. Roy has been accused of serial killings, but does that warrant for him to be held in one of the country's most secure prisons? There must be more to it. Sean King and his partner Michelle Maxwell soon have confirmation for their gut feeling. But instead of answers, there are only tons of unanswered questions, blocking walls when asking questions and threats to their lives. Even for Sean and Michelle, this is a very tough and very dangerous case. Multiple parties involved, multiple interests and nobody willing to share any information.

There are some highly unlikely angles to this story. If you can ignore those, then the story is typically Baldacci: fast-moving, fascinating and captivating. For a long time, it is not really so clear, who are the bad guys and who are the good guys. Even when you thought you figured it out, some surprises are waiting.

The fourth book in Baldacci's John Puller series. While not required to enjoy the book, it does help having read the previous books. It helps to understand the condition of Puller's father and the relation between Puller and Knox.

John Puller, a top notch army investigator, again is up against forces much more resourceful than him and he is doing the investigation on his own, without any official backup by the army. After all, it is an investigation he does for himself and he is not supposed to be doing. It's all about the sudden disappearance of his mother. The case was never solved, but with new allegations from a dying woman and some new evidence, Puller is determined to find out what really happened that night, thirty years ago.

The investigation is not only difficult. And somebody seems to become nervous about what could be discovered because pretty soon anyone trying to look into the matter is being stonewalled by some forces that be.

The chapters in this book are short and plenty. It is told from two different perspectives, from John Puller's side and from Paul Rogers side and, as expected from the very beginning, somewhen the two trails of the story mix together and become one. The language is not too difficult and tension is kept high, lots of things happening. However, there are just too many events, coincidences and timings which are rather unlikely, too many characters which come too close to superhero. Baldacci's John Puller series is sometimes compared to Lee Child's Jack Reacher series. Yes, there definitely are similarities. Jack Reacher's adventures are the more credible ones.

The third book in Baldacci's John Puller series. When his brother Robert unexpectedly escapes from the high security military prison where he serves a life sentence, John Puller, a military investigator, is clearly told to step back and not try to do any investigations of his own, a normal procedure in such a case. However, John is not so sure he can just sit still. And when he's contacted directly from the very top of the command chain and offered to actually do an investigation of his own, he is very sceptical but also somewhat relieved, because he does not need to stay under the radar.

Before long, Puller is more or less forced to team up with Veronica Knox, whose agenda and trustworthyness is not quite clear to him.

Even though it all looks like a rather straight forward escape from a place where escapes should not be possible, there is one troubling bit which does not sum up. With a lot of persistence, gradually a different perspective on things becomes plausible, but very difficult to argue, as this alternative perspective would mean that Robert Puller had been sitting in prison innocently for more than two years...

Baldacci's John Puller series is, in my opinion, not as good as his King and Maxwell series, but still offers good entertainment, is easy to read and not so easy to put away once you started reading.

In this 4th adventure of Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, they work for the President again, or more precisely, for the First Lady. Not as Secret Service agents, what they both once used to be, but as private investigators. On a high profile and very sensible abduction case. Both, FBI and Secret Service are working his case, but the First Lady insists that King take a shot at it too.

However, this is not the only case at hand. At the same time some developments ask for Michelle's involvement and the investigation of one more crime.

The book is in typical Baldacci style: fast paced, thrilling and the reader is left wondering till the very end. Sure, some suspicions come up, but at no time are you, as the reader, sure whether your suspicions are correct or not. Also the roles of good and bad are not really so clear. Is the bad guy really so bad? Aren't the good guys possibly even worse?

There is not a real need to read the books in this series in order. Just a very thin sideline development would benefit from it, but that's not really important. Read the King/Maxwell series in any order you happen to come across it.

Luther Whitney is an elderly burglar with high ethics. He only takes from those who have more then plenty and does not hurt anybody. And he prepares well. But on his last heist, somebody comes back home while Luther is emptying their treasures. He finds a place to hide, but what he sees is more than shocking.

Luther could bring down the people he as silently been watching while in hiding. But they are powerful. Very powerful and immensely resourceful. This could cost him his life. And it might also cost the life of everybody else who gets to know about this. Even even law enforcement might be able to do anything, unless this is done very carefully...

In typical Baldacci style, the book is a page turner from start to end, interesting throughout with no boarding chapters. There are other important figures and interwoven stories in the book, but I won't tell you about it, you'll want to read the book for yourself!

This second book in Baldacci's John Puller series is better than the first one. The plot, while still big, is not that unbelievably big and John Puller, the main hero, is not 200% unfailing like in the previous book. In the usual Baldacci way, the individual chapters are short and easy to follow, there is lots of action and the hardest thing about the book is to put it away for the night before you've read it all. Often, however, it is not quite comprehensible how Puller comes to certain conclusions.

While still on recuperation after the last assignment, a mysterious letter from his aunt Betsy reaches John Puller, a top army investigator. Something seems not to be in order, but his aunt does not spell out what. So John, in order to learn about Betsy's concerns, pays her a visit; something he hasn't done for too many years anyways. Only, when John arrives at her house, she's not there. Not only has he a run-in with the local police in no time, but also with the local mob. And yet some other guys are following him.

Baldacci is mostly known for his thrillers. I saw this book and the cover did simply not fit a thriller, thus did not fit the usual Baldacci. It looked much more like something from the fantasy genre. When I picked the book up, indeed, it was a fantasy book. This got me even more interested, wanting to see how good Baldacci stands up to this.

Vega Jane is a Wugmort. Wugmorts live in Wormwood Village and never ever venture beyond their village. Never. Ever. Except maybe that one individual, Vega might have seen. But that would be suicide, wouldn't it? Everything Vega had ever been taught about Wugs, Wormwood Village and the Quag surrounding the village, starts to collapse; definitely not for every Wug, but for Vega, who is ever suspicious, wondering, wanting to know and thinking independently rather than simply accepting everything she's told...

Indeed, Baldacci succeeded in writing a very good fantasy book, which kept me reading and reading. Much recommend. (So why not five stars? For me, four stars means really good and five stars is reserved for extraordinary.)

David Baldacci as the author is almost a guarantee for a good read. True also for this book, which obviously starts a new series with John Puller as the main figure. John is an investigator with the US Army and is sent out to Drake, a remote coal mining town in West Virginia. Puller is suspicious about this assignment, as he is sent there alone, rather than together with a whole team.

The book is easy to read and keeps you wanting to continue. It is possible to guess some things, but that's ok. The story strongly goes in the direction of the "Jack Reacher" books by Lee Child. What I found a bit disturbing at times is, that John Puller is too much of a hero; he's just too good and able to do too many things without help. Also the momentousness of the plot, the bad guys have been planning, is a bit too big for my liking. Nevertheless, Zero Day offers good entertainment for a couple of hours.

Will Robie is a professional assassin for a government agency. But in one job he gets in a rush, he hesitates to pull the trigger. Somebody else kills the victim and Robie is on the run. He is also assigned to be the contact person for the FBI in the case of investigating this murder. A murder, Robie should have performed but has not. Something is not right here and Robie wants to know what it is. After all, his live depends on it.

A few details in the plot are just not realistic. One could definitely not know how exactly multiple people would react in certain situations and design such an extremely detailed and fine grained conspiracy. Nevertheless: typical Baldacci: good plot, well written and engrossing.

Will Robbie is the best hitman the agency has. He does the dirty work, the dangerous stuff. He is the one putting his life on the line in clandestine operations, assassinating "human problems". When an agency handler is killed, Robbie is called in to go after Jessica Reel, who supposedly performed the kill. She's as good as Robbie and an agency killer too. Why she suddenly turned sour and goes after her own people is unknown. Robbie, having worked with Jessica before, can not imagine she's doing something without a good reason.

David Baldacci writes good books, I know that, have read a number of his works. But this one is more than good. Not a single chapter where something becomes slightly long-winded. Quite to the contrary, it was always very hard to put the book down and go to sleep (and more than once I stayed up reading longer than I should have...)

The bullet was destined to silence Faith Lockhart and if the FBI agent with her dies by one and the same bullet too, so be it. Collateral damage. However, it definitely never was planned for Faith to survive and even less so for her to get away.

To lose one of their own men does not go down well with the FBI and of course they put a lot of effort into finding out what this is all about. Not too easy if your unknown enemy is another resourceful government agency working undercover.

The story has and is told from three, or more precisely, even four angles: the view of the FBI, of Robert Thornhill, of Danny Buchanan and of course the view of Faith, who is on the run and wanted by at least two agencies; by one preferably alive, by the other rather dead. What's refreshing compared to some other book in this genre is the fact, that the story does not need too many unexpected happenings or very close shaves and is still very interesting to read. And typical Baldacci: well planned right from the start.

Two seemingly unconnected stories start in this book and it is not before about the middle they finally become somewhat connected.

Annabelle Conroy is planning to relieve someone with a rather heavy bank account of some of his weight. For this she needs some help; a very skilled team and a precisely planned script.

Robert Bradley, a successful and influential politician is shot at a party. Jonathan DeHaven, librarian at the Library of Congress, dies at his workplace. Cause of his death: unclear. Nothing suggests these two deaths, and others to follow, have anything to do with each other. But when the members of the Camel Club have a look into the circumstances of DeHaven's death, they are convinced it was a well orchestrated murder.

As always, David Baldacci captures the reader right from the start and keeps things interesting throughout the whole book, even though the reader knows lots of things already early on and can guess a lot. But the why and how only comes bit by bit. By the way, how are the two stories connected to each other? Well, you'll have to read the book for yourself to find that out, I don't want to spoil it and you won't regret reading the book for yourself.

The private investigator team consisting of Sean King and Michelle Maxwell is at work again. Actually, as Michelle is not really well, Sean takes on the assignment by himself.

Up at Babbage Town, a high level research facility, he is to investigate the death of Monk Turing. Turing was found dead on the more than top secret CIA facility which sits just across the river. Everything points to a suicide. But why go to these forbidden grounds to commit suicide? And why is the FBI interested in the case too. When the top dog of said CIA facility personally summons Sean and the local sheriff to make it very clear to them this be better none of their business, Sean is sure something is terribly wrong here.

As a side story the reader also learns one of Michelle's secrets. There is a reason why the interior of her truck always looks like the inside of a dumpster.

Just like the other Baldacci books featuring the winning team Michelle Maxwell and Sean King, Simple Genius is a very captivating book, well written, well plotted and full of action.

Shaw is a man who can walk into a room full of terrorists, do whatever he does and walk away alive -- a winner.
Nicolas Creel is behind Ares Corp., a company selling weaponry to governments all over the world. Creel highly successful in what he does and one of the richest men in the world -- a winner.
Katie James is a journalist through and through and won two Pulitzers already -- a winner. Before she started drinking, that is.

Some allegations are made against the Russian government. It is accused of torturing and getting rid of uncomfortable individuals. Lots of them. These allegations are followed up by bits and pieces of evidence. The whole world is at rage. And the Russians are denying everything. The only problem is that nobody knows where exactly all the information is coming from. But who cares about the sources when the facts given are so outrageous. Outrageous enough so a war could start.

Shaw, Creel and James somehow are all connected to these events, but each of them from different angles. For Creel, the situation increases sales, Shaw holds a personal grudge about whoever is behind this and for James this could be the story, which finally helps her to get a grip on her life again.

The story, playing in an international setting, is very well written and constructed from start to end. It often kept me up reading longer than I initially intended to. However, both Shaw and Creel are just a little too good and capable for my liking, kind of almost superhuman. Probably the story could also have been told by leaving the reader much longer in the dark about who is behind the Red Menace, making it even more interesting and almost impossible to put the book away.

I have read several of David Baldacci's books and he is a very gifted thriller author. But he really excels and outshines himself when he's writing a non-thriller. This is the second non-thriller by Baldacci which I read and just as "The Wishing Well", it is simply superb.

In the book, Tom Langdon, a journalist, travels by train from Washington D.C to Los Angeles during Christmas season. To do so, he has to take the ''Capitol Limited'' from Washington D.C. to Chicago, and from there the ''Southwest Chief'' to LA. Even though it is one single story, when Langdon changes the train, the flow of the story also changes.

In the first part Baldacci plays a lot with language and expressions in a pleasant way. And he does a terrific job of capturing the atmosphere of such a multi-day train ride. I can't speak for American railroad travel, but I have myself done a fair bit of longhaul travel by train in Europe and Asia, among others also along one of the venerable Trans-Siberian routes. And the way this journey is described by the author, it caused me to remember my own journeys and often I had to say "Yes, this is exactly the way it is on the train."

The second part of the book is then more kept on the exciting side with action and unexpected happenings.

Even though it is a fabulous book, I do have a small complaint: do yourself a favour and read only the first paragraph of the last chapter (about one page) and just skip the last four pages. They are fine, but the story is simply nicer without them.

Shortly after the dead body of a woman is found in Wrigthsburg, more murders happen. The handywork of some maniac serial killer. But neither the police, nor the FBI can put the pieces together. Also Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, two ex-Secret Service agents can't make sense out of it at first. And some additional murders, which seem not to be performed by the serial killer, don't make things easier either...

After their first adventure in ''Split Second'', Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, now partners in a private investigation firm, solve another mistery crime. The story makes for a good read, but is somewhat cruel at times and it is not always so clear how the hero jumps to the conclusions which help to solve the mistery.

author: David Carasso    (1 book) go to top

You're using Splunk? I think you want to get this book.

Exploring Splunk is not a thorough tutorial teaching you everything there is to know, but it is both, a fairly good introduction and a reference you may often reach for. Therefor it is a book for newbies and old hands alike.

Chapter 1 is about the history of Splunk and why you might want to use it. If you're already using it, not much to gain from.
Chapter 2 gives an overview of how data can be fed to Splunk and details what happens when the data is read in and indexed. How to install and start the software is explained too.
Chapter 3 has lots of useful information about the GUI elements and the basics of how searches work in general.
Chapter 4 shines with a lot of samples on how searches can be built. It is nice to see a book which not only explains things in text, but also gives numerous samples in code and as a big bonus visualizes what it explains. The visualizations are generally easy to understand and thus very useful. Well done!
Chapter 5 then goes on to move beyond mere simple searches: field extraction, reporting, visualizations and alerts.

Part 2 of the book, chapters 6 to 8, take a problem-solution approach. Each chapter presents a number of "problems" (or simply tasks) you may want to solve with Splunk and one or more ways to achieve that goal. Each solution is well explained and along the way you will how to use more of the capabilities of Splunk. Many of the solutions mentioned here are things, which you are likely to need sooner or later when trying to solve a non-trivial task. Even experienced Splunk users are likely to flip these pages from time to time. This part covers areas such as concurrency, comparing different time ranges, identifying spikes, identifying and reporting on transactions, lookup tables and more.

Appendix E contains an useful Quick Reference Guide. You may have seen something similar as a short PDF sheet or in printed form, but it certainly is useful to have it in the book so this can be your one-stop Splunk reference.

So is this the perfect all-you-need-to-know Splunk book? No. Neither does it cover configuration, nor advanced charting or menu creation, etc. But at around 150 pages, it does an excellent job and for many users it will be all they ever need. However, there is one detail I absolutely hate about this book: there is no index!

author: David Flanagan & Yukihiro Matsumoto    (1 book) go to top

Ruby definitely has won a firm place in the list of commonly used scripting/programming languages these days. So even if you don't want to become a ruby guru, you might want to have a good book covering the important parts of the language. And as there are differences between ruby 1.8 and ruby 1.9, your reference ideally covers both. If so, then this book certainly is a good choice, even if you decide to skip the more advanced chapters or save them for when you need them. And if you intend to become the local ruby guru, then you definitely should have this book and read it two or three times, until you also understand the more advanced topics.

If your goal is to learn programming, then this book is not for you. It is not intended for programming beginners, but assumes that you know how to program in at least one other language. You should also know at least the basics about object oriented programming.

Flanagan does a very good job explaining how ruby works, not only in words, but also with code snippets. I found the book to be very well balanced; not too much lengthy explanation but enough to make things clear; short samples of code which demonstrate just the features being explained. This style creates a book densely packed with information. The topics are presented mainly in logical order, starting with lexical and syntactic structures, explaining data types, covering expressions and operators, going on with statements and control structures before getting involved in the more advanced topics like methods, classes, modules and metaprogramming. Personally I'd have preferred to have the last two chapters "The Ruby Platform" and "The Ruby Environment" placed somewhere before the heavyweights. The more difficult chapters may well scare a lot of folks off and if they don't jump to those two chapters at the end, they'll miss some of the more important and easier information.

All in all: Definitely no easy reader, densely packed but well done and well balanced.

author: David Lagercrantz    (1 book) go to top

This is a continuation of Stieg Larsson's famous Millennium Series. But can another author continue the series and do it justice? Well, yes, Lagercrantz does quite a good job. He manages to keep the characteristics of the main players and builds on the original story. He also opens the field for more to come and rather cleverly reveals some more things about Lisbeth Salanders past. In some respects, this book is even better than the original series: it does away with much of the unnecessary stuff and stays much more focussed on the story it wants to tell. Thanks to this, the story it tells fits within one book. But it clearly has more the feel of a commercially engineered book than the previous ones. This is not necessarily bad, but makes it more alike books by other successful authors. If you liked the characters in the original books, give it a try, they stay mostly the same. If the original books were too slow-moving for your taste, you surely will like this one better.

Mikael Blomkvist has not published anything too interesting in a while. Not only is Millennium magazine in a financially tight spot again, but also Mikael himself is under heavy criticism for not having had any good articles in a long time. But this all changes quite suddenly, when a top Swedish researcher is murdered. As it happens, a break in into a highly guarded computer system Lisbeth Salander recently performed reveals some information which might be connected to this murder, even though Lisbeth was looking for other information.

author: David Mertz    (2 books) go to top

You hate regular expressions? Don't ever touch this book.
You want to learn how to use regular expressions? Use another book (for example, Jeffrey Friedl's excellent "Mastering Regular Expressions") and maybe come back to this book later.
You like to solve regular expression challenges? This is what you are looking for.

This is quite a unique book. First of all, there are not too many books dealing specifically with regular expressions; this one does so exclusively. Second, it is a book full of challenges for the reader. The author calls them "puzzles" and there are 24 of them. Some are related to the previous ones, so it's not 24 completely distinct challenges. And third, it picks up the buzz of the time when it was written: AI (Artificial Intelligence). Each challenge is also presented to AI engines and their proposed solutions are analyzed.

The cover has a handy overview of the most important regex patterns. The appendix sports a short introduction of regex patterns. The main part of the book is the puzzles and uses python and its "re" package.

If you want a short regex reminder before diving in to the challenges, it is best to start with the appendix. If you are new to regular expressions, the appendix can serve a a short introduction. But it is nowhere complete or thorough (and neither intended to be so). If you are after something to practice and improve your existing regex knowledge, this book may be a good choice. And if you are looking for some fun with regex challenges, "Regular Expression Puzzles and AI Coding Assistants" is an excellent choice.

What is especially interesting with this book, too, is the sometimes clever way AI produces code to solve the problems at hand and how, at other times, it utterly fails to do so but quite boldly boasts a so called "solution".

Even though I am not a programmer, I do know my way around python well enough to get things done. My code very rarely is object oriented. Functional programming? I was wondering, what does that mean. Is it the way I usually program? Does it help me to improve my style?

In four short chapters, (Avoiding) Flow Control / Callables / Lazy Evaluations / Higher-Order Functions, David gives an overview of functional programming. (Yes, it definitely is closer to my favoured style than OO techniques are.)While at first I could still follow the various examples, I got more and more lost after a third of the book. Too many lambdas (which I hate and never really understand to this day). And heavily stacked stuff like

do_all_funcs = lambda fns, *args: [ list (map(fn, *args)) for fn in fns]

makes my head spin when I try to figure out what it is supposed to do.

While I believe the book might be a treasure trove for a python programmer much more advanced than me, at least half of this stuff was simply over my head. My rating for the book is seen from an occasional python user; had I understood more of it, the rating would probably be better.

author: Dionne Lister    (2 books) go to top

In the first book of the PIB (Paranormal Investigation Bureau) series, Lily came over from Australia to help rescue her brother James. And she stayed. Not long after her first adventure, Lily is asked to assist in another investigation with her awesome photography skills. Sure enough, she is pulled into it much further than she ever planned.

Like the first book in the series, it is easy and light reading, not too long, with lots of humour. A perfect book if you simply want to get some easy entertainment.

What do you think does it feel like, when, on your 24th birthday, you discover you're a witch, your whole family consists of witches and your brother, the only relative alive and on the opposite side of the globe, has been abducted? A lot to stomach. This is exactly what happens to Lily Bianchi. And all this she's told by a complete stranger, literally popping out of nowhere. What to do in such a situation? Of course: Make sure you get back your beloved brother well and kicking.

The book is written in a refreshing style, very easy to read and sprinkled with humour. It is not too long and more or less straightforward. It would have been easy to double the size of the book, but it's also good to have read less complicated stories once in a while. I'm definitely going to check out the next adventure of Lily Bianchi.

author: Doris Knop    (1 book) go to top

Ein einigermassen ausführlicher und doch kompakter Reiseführer für eine Trans-Sibirien Reise.

Ich habe die Reise noch nicht gemacht, sondern beginne mich erst darauf vorzubereiten und zu freuen; somit kann ich die Korrektheit und und Nützlichkeit der Informationen in diesem Reiseführer noch nicht richtig beurteilen. Zumindest für die Vorbereitung scheint es mir aber ein sehr nützlicher Ratgeber zu sein, zumal für so eine Reise doch einige spezielle Vorbereitungen nötig sind. Gerade in den ersten drei Kapiteln findet man vielerlei Hinweise worauf bei den Vorbereitungen und während der Reise zu achten ist, inclusive Ein- und Ausreisebestimmungen und ausführliche Informationen zur Beschaffung der nötigen Visas (in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz).

Die nachfolgenden Kapitel beziehen sich dann auf die einzelnen Streckenabschnitte, wobei alle drei Routen, nach Wladiwostok, nach Peking über die Mongolei und nach Peking über die Mandschurei, kurz beschrieben werden.

Dem rund vierzigseitigen Anhang kann ich persönlich nicht viel abgewinnen.

Obwohl die Autorin selber Veranstalterin von entsprechenden Reisen ist, wird das TransSib-Reisehandbuch nicht für Eigenwerbung misbraucht. Natürlich gibt es an der einen oder anderen Stelle Hinweise, dass beschriebene Touren zum Teil über die Autorin gebucht werden können. Der Leser empfindet diese wenigen Einschübe aber nicht als Werbung, sondern als Information. Schliesslich ist man ja froh zu wissen, wo man entsprechende Arrangements buchen kann und es werden auch andere Agenturen genannt.

Fazit: Kurz und büdig, die wichtigsten Informationen im handlichen Format.

author: Douglas Adams    (1 book) go to top

For very early internet adopters like me, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is legend. But I have to confess, up to 2007 (lightyears in internet timecounting) I never attempted to read this book. After it was highly recommended to me again by some people, I finally dug into it.

Even though some very few lines are funny I just can't get the hang of Adams' writing style. Too disintegrated, too nebulous, no story line visible. Actually this is one of the few books I put away again unfinished after having slaved through the first 50 to 100 pages.

author: Dov Alfon    (1 book) go to top

An Israeli tech professional vanishes at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Has he been abducted? Murdered? Simply taken the chance to disappear? For Commissaire Léger from the French police, it is not clear, but it does become clear that this is not a simple case when an Israeli Intelligence officer joins the investigation and Chinese assassins, having been picked up by a surveillance camera, are assassinated themselves.

The book is very captivating. It often switches between Paris, Israel. Half of the story plays in Paris, half of it, at the same time, in Israel. The chapters are short and each chapter always takes place at one of the locations, so the constant switching back and forth is no problem and easy to follow. Actually, the bigger story in this book is less about what happens in Paris, but more about what is, and was, going on inside of Israeli Intelligence.

With "A Long Night in Paris" Alfon has published a good book which keeps you reading and reading. It is also refreshing to have a female main figure in the story who is there not for her looks (which are supposed to be well above average), but for her brains and boldness.

author: Drew Neil    (1 book) go to top

Probably everybody hated vi when first met. And yet, once you understand the modes of this editor and learn only half a percent of its features, you come to love it. Even though many of my friends consider me a vim-half-wizard, I myself think I'm not that far beyond knowing those 0.5 percent of its numerous features and commands. There are always many more useful tricks and commands and settings to explore. That's where Drew Neil's book fits in very nicely.

If you are new to vi / vim / nvi and want to learn the basics, then stay away from this book for the moment. It definitely is not meant for the beginner and assumes you already know enough for everyday basic use. Once you feel comfortable editing text or code in vim, it is a good time to lay your hands on Practical Vim; your efficiency will skyrocket. And even if you are a seasoned hand at vimming, you'll certainly find a number of new useful features and commands.

The book is unique in that it is not a text which builds up your skills while you go from page to page in a linear way. It is rather a collection of many recipes which can be picked at random, just as you need them. Finding what you need is not difficult, as everything is organized and with the help of the table of contents you quickly find the right section to solve your problem or challenge at hand. Of course, you can also read it from cover to cover to generally extend your vim-savviness.

All recipes are kept short while covering what you need to know. Enough examples are given, often with step-by-step explanations of how to do it and why to do it this way.

I definitely enjoyed this well researched, properly organized and very informative book and picked up several new tricks up my sleeve. (And tons more which I marked and intend to remember over time; it's just too much good stuff to get it all into my head at once.)

author: Eliot Pattison    (3 books) go to top

A female teacher has been killed and a Tibetan lama disappeared. Shan Tao Yun, the former Beijing investigator who now lives with Tibetan monks and for the Chinese government technically is an escaped prisoner, is asked by his monk-friends to go with them to where this happened. They want him to help find out what happened. Already on the way to Yoktian they find out that somebody is out to kill the teachers students, all orphans, too.

Like the other books in this series, "Water Touching Stone" is full of peaceful places, the struggle between China and Tibet, the differences between cultures. And this book is especially international, as the story is situated in a cultural melting pot: Tibetan, Chinese, Uighur, Kazakh, Russian, even American.

If you want a fast-paced 'Hollywood-style' thriller, get another book. If you are open for an equally interesting alternative setting, try this one.

Another adventure for Shan Tao Yun. Shan once was a Chinese investigator, then was sentenced to do time a Chinese prison and labour camp from which we managed to to be released early but without proper papers. Since then, Shan has been in Tibet, mostly moving around with his befriended lamas Lokesh and Gendun.

This time Shan finds himself in some situation which he does not really understand why it developed this way. The stone eye of a deity was stolen from Tibet by Chinese many decades ago and now it has been stolen back. Of course the Chinese are mad. Why is it Shan, a Han Chinese, which has been chosen to bring back this holy artefact to its original place? Even though the whole journey has been well planned, it does not go smooth. Multiple Chinese groups are in pursuit of the small Tibetan caravan, all for different reasons, as it turns out. On multiple occasions, Shan is thinking about giving up.

Pattison again wonderfully succeeds to not only tell a story, but also literally paint a picture of Tibet, of the problems between the two nations, of the people's mindset... This is a thriller, but one of a different kind; instead of fast paced car chases through busy city streets there are dangerous trails in high mountains, instead of high tech equipment to get through dangerous situations there are prayer beads, and the wounded can not be rushed to some emergency room but must be healed with herbs. At times, however, I did have some trouble keeping the many characters straight.

Shan Tao Yun, once a successful Chinese investigator, was put in prison and working camp, because of his success. Since his release he lives in the mountains of Tibet.

Shan planned to go on a retreat for meditation after the festival. However, during the festival something happens in the cave and seems to have driven the lama Surya mad. There is also a pond of blood deep down in the cave, but no injury or body to go with it. When then finally some helicopters with troops arrive, Shan decides he could not possibly find peace in meditation until he knows more about what has happened in the cave, not expecting the kind of troubles and dangers he is about to face.

A well written thriller in a different setting from the mainstream. Sometimes I did not really see how the characters in the story came to their conclusions, but this well structured story makes still for a good read.

author: Elizabeth George    (1 book) go to top

Wie toll wär das wohl, wenn man die gedanden der menschen um sich herum hören könnte? Becca King findet das überhaupt nicht toll. Es bereitet ihr nicht nur mühe, sich auf das wirklich ausgesprochene zu konzentrieren, sondern es bringt sie auch in so grosse gefahr, dass sie untertauchen muss.

Nachdem sie flüchten, setzt ihre mutter Becca an der fähre zu Whisper Island ab. Die mutter will ihnen ein neues zuhause suchen und sie dann abholen. Bis dahin soll Becca bei einer freundin der mutter auf der insel unterschlupf finden. Als Becca beim haus dieser frau ankommt stellt sie aber fest, dass sie sich erst mal selber durchschlagen muss, und das länger, als gedacht. Als dann noch ein unfall in einem wald dazukommt, wird die situation für Becca zunehmend schwieriger.

Eine interessante geschichte, bei der eine besondere fähigkeit nicht in erster linie hilfreich ist für die heldin, sondern ihr vor allem immer wieder in die quere kommt. Auf der insel leben noch weitere personen mit problemen, was unter umständen guten stoff bieten könnte für fortsetzungen der geschichte.

author: Ellen Heidböhmer    (1 book) go to top

Dass Ingwer wärmt und mir in gewissen Situationen gut tut, hab ich selber schon gemerkt. Beim herumstöbern in der Buchhandlung bin ich auf dieses phantastische Buch gestossen. Häufig findet man Ratgeber-Bücher, welche nur einen Teil eines Themas abhandeln. Nicht so "Gesund mit Ingwer". Ellen Heidböhmer beleuchtet das Thema Ingwer ausführlich von verschiedenen Seiten. Es wird nicht nur erklärt wo Ingwer herkommt, welche Sorten es gibt und wie er verwendet werden kann, sondern auch auf die Inhaltsstoffe und deren Wirkung wird eingegangen und als Krone obendrauf wird das ganze mit einem grosszügigen Rezeptteil abgerundet.

Der Verwendung als Heilmittel wird gut ein Viertel des Buches gewidmet, der Rezeptteil füllt etwas weniger als die Hälfte der 206 Seiten. Die Rezepte sind sehr breit gefächert und reichen von Vorspeisen, über Hauptgerichte, Saucen, Desserts, Backwaren bis hin zu Getränken. Wie allerdings Irish Coffee in den Rezeptteil hineingerutscht ist, kann ich mir nicht erklären, kommt doch in diesem Rezept überhaupt kein Ingwer vor. Und bei den Ingwerwaffeln muss wohl der letzte Absatz irgendwo untergegangen sein, denn irgendwie sollte der Teig doch sicher noch gebacken werden. Ansonsten ist das Buch äusserst sorgfältig und übersichtlich gestaltet. Die Themen sind farblich gekennzeichnet, das Inhaltsverzeichnis nützlich unterteilt und alles so angeordnet, dass man sehr rasch zum Ziel kommt, wenn man nach etwas bestimmtem sucht.

Dies vom Format her handliche Buch ist Gesundheitsratgeber und Rezeptebuch in einem und eines der ausgewogensten Bücher dieser Art, das mir bis jetzt in die Finger gekommen ist.

author: Emily R. King    (1 book) go to top

The monasteries take in orphans. Kalinda is one of the sisters in a monastery in the mountains. She has been an orphan and taken in when she was young. Kalinda has always been prone to fevers and is rather slim, not the physically strongest. But she is very head-strong and determined.

What she does not know is about her special powers, about the Rajahs's plans for her, about how despicable humans can be and about love. All things she will learn before long.

The story is quite predictable and reading it without knowing who is the author, I could tell, from the love story, it was written by a woman. The ending is not a real ending, making it more desirable to get the next book in the series. All in all I think of this book more in terms of a love story with a little fantasy sprinkled in than the other way round.

author: Ethan McCallum    (1 book) go to top

A concise introduction to kickstarting Red Hat based Linux distributions and how to keep them patched and up to date with the exact same infrastructure used for installations.

If you have been managing systems through kickstart, satellite server and the like for some time, there is not much new information, even if you haven't worked with yum before. If you are new to kickstart, however, you will find a good introduction to the topic, complete with a suggestion on how to layout your environment. In this respect, this O'Reilly Short Cut does exactly what it says: giving you a short cut to a workable environment.

author: Franz Brandl    (1 book) go to top

Dieses 624 seiten starke buch von Franz Brandl ist ein spirituosenlexikon und rezeptbuch in einem. Die spirituosen sind aufgeteilt in verscheidene klassen, angefangen von anisgetränken über champagner, gin, portwein, rum und vielen anderen bis wodka. In jedem dieser kapitel erklärt Brandl zuerst etwas über geschichte und herstellung dieses spirituosentyps, gibt dann informationen zu bekannten marken und schliesst das kapitel meist mit mehreren rezepten ab. Am schluss des buches gibt er noch informationen und tipps zur eigenen bar und dem mixen.

Was dieses tolle buch auszeichnet ist nicht nur die zusatzinformation, welches es zu den getränken bietet, sondern auch die breite der getränkeklassen, welche es abdeckt.

Wer einfach nur ein rezeptebuch für cocktails und ähnliches sucht, kann massenweise dünnere bücher mit nur rezepten finden. Wer aber hin und wieder auch mal ein bisschen information zu den ingredienzen der mixgetränke wünscht, ist mit diesem tollen buch sehr gut bedient.

author: Franz Hohler    (1 book) go to top

Die Rückeroberung ist nicht nur der titel des buches, sondern auch eine der neun kurzen erzählungen in diesem band. Erzählt wird stets aus dem ganz normalen leben, ohne grosses getue, einfach was halt grad so passiert. Wobei natürlich das, was halt grad so passiert, nicht immer das ist, was man für gewöhnlich als "normal" bezeichnen würde. Aber es wird erzählt, als wär es mehr oder weniger gewöhnlich, oder zumindest nicht so extrem aussergewöhnlich.

Wer ein paar kurzgeschichten für zwischendrin sucht und keine erzählungen mit fulminanten pointen braucht, darf sich ruhig an diesen lesestoff heranwagen. Einfach nicht alles glauben, was da schwarz auf weiss geschrieben steht.

author: Frederick Forsyth    (1 book) go to top

Law enforcement has been battling against drug trafficking for a long time. An uphill battle. What would it take to wipe out the cocaine trade? Really wipe it out? The answer is: a lot of study and a lot of money. And a carte blanche.

In this fictional book, Paul Devereux, a CIA special ops veteran, is given, by presidential order, a lot of money, quite some time and a big carte blanche in order to make the US cocaine free. Interestingly, Devereux only goes after THE cocaine baron, not any of the smaller ones. Interestingly he really is hardly challenged by any agency and allowed to use any resources he sees fit to achieve the goal. And indeed, he brings the imports of this drug basically to a standstill. But does he really succeed? And is the country who asked him to take on this job really ready to bear the consequences?

author: Garr Reynolds    (1 book) go to top

Presentations these days are mostly done with powerpoint slides containing bullet list after bullet list full of text and numbers. And it seems this terrible presentation style is getting worse and worse.

Have you ever paid attention to how you listen to such a presentation yourself? Joe average tries to decipher the text which actually is much too small to read while attempting to listen to the presenter at the same time and by the time Joe average managed to get through half of the slide's text, the next one is put on. At the end? Instead of any wiser Joe average is tired and irritated.

Garr Reynolds is one of the seemingly diminishing number of people who (still) know that a presentation is not the same as a documentation. While his book is not a step by step cookbook for better presentations, he clearly points out the principles and shows examples. Principles, which lead to much better, less tiring, more memorable presentations which are not only more enjoyable, but also have a much better chance to bring your key points clearly to your audience. Simplicity, strong visuals, planning, story and less text.

While I knew and tried to apply part of the principles to a certain degree, reading this book really encourages me to even much much more go against the common-non-sense and again apply more commonsense, to use more radical deviations from the usual malpractice. It also opened my eyes for things I had not yet considered.

Presentations would be so much better if it was impossible to open powerpoint before having read this book...

author: Gary John Bishop    (1 book) go to top

Broken down to its very bare essentials, what Bishop preaches in this book is two things:
# There are things in life which you can not change, but you are free to choose how you want to react to them.
# To actually change something, you have to act.

Even though I completely agree with the message of the book, I still don't like it at all. The writing style is terribly "chatty". And especially in the later chapters, Bishop starts to "yell" at the reader. There may well be people who enjoy this kind of writing or even need it to get the message through. But for me, this style is OK for a discussion among friends having a drink, not for a book which is supposed to help people improve their life.

author: Gaston C. Hillar    (1 book) go to top

There are good things about this book and not so good things. At around 200 pages, the book is not too big. It is easy to read, kept in understandable language. But at this page count, it feels overly repetitive: "We are going to see how to do X", "To do X do X.1", "To do X do X.2", "To do X, do X.3", "We have seen how to do X".

The story used in the book to go along is about monitoring and/or controlling drones, small vehicles or surfboards. But it does not require you to actually own one of the boards or devices mentioned, everything is kept in 'simulation mode' and can be run on a PC.

What I definitely like about the book is, that it shows you how to perform everything you need to follow along. The author does not assume that you know how to install a Mosquitto server or how to setup a venv environment in Python, or how to create self signed SSL certificates. He explains all these steps detailed in an easy to follow way for those readers who may not be familiar with these tasks. So to follow along, you don't really need to know much, you'll really be guided well through everything required. Before the book starts with the actual programming (after more than half the page count), it does explain MQTT and shows how it works and how to use it. So it is, in my opinion, mostly a book about MQTT and explains how this protocol works and how to use it with Python code. If your main goal is to learn about MQTT, a good choice.

If you are more interested in how to write Python code interacting with MQTT, rather than how MQTT works, then I would not really recommend this book. I am not a professional programmer, but neither is Python something new for me. Although the code presented and built step by step does work, it is, in my opinion, quite flawed. Connections to the MQTT server are stored as class variables, rather than instance variables (which I still could see as useful in certain specific situations); class methods are declared as static methods (normally used if the method does not need anything from the class) but then access things in the class by referencing the class name; a method is created which builds a non-changing dictionary from scratch each time the method is called... Again, I am not a professional programmer, but to me the code looks like a mess. Personally, I only used a few lines from it, had a look at the paho.mqtt.client help and successfully and quickly built my project in a way I think is more sensible.

You want an introduction to MQTT and/or the Mosquitto Server? This book is OK for you. You want to learn how to write Python code accessing an MQTT server? Don't use this book.

author: Gene Kim    (1 book) go to top

This is a book along the lines of "The Phoenix Project" by the same author. It plays in the same company, at the same time. But they are two completely independent books and yet they complement each other in some way. The Unicorn Project picks up topics which were not covered by The Phoenix Project.

The Unicorn Project is a business/developer book written in the style of an interesting story. It's in the perspective of Maxine, one of the best developers the company has. For some stupid reason, Maxine is transferred to a different section. Even though she is told to lay low for some time and later come back, she still wants to be useful in her exile. To be useful, she must be able to compile the code everybody is working on. But nobody seems to know the details needed to setup a working development environment. Maxine is not only skilled, but also persistent. And bit by bit she uncovers inadequacies after inadequacy and finds solutions for them or people with solutions.

Basically the book, by telling a story, teaches some important principles of modern software (and business) development. At times it seems like Maxine and her friends are inhumanly strong superheroes, but I can easily see how making the characters more humanly possible would require more characters and a more complicated setup in the story; the chosen setup therefor is in line with the main goal of the book: to teach some good principles.

If you have read and enjoyed "The Phoenix Project", you'll like this book as well. If you haven't read it, try either of the two and read the other if you liked the one you chose to read. Oh, and of course, try to apply the principles you learn from this book in your own environment; you might not be blessed with the same overly incredible success our superheros have, but hopefully you don't need to start out in such a hopeless environment either.

author: Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Sapfford    (1 book) go to top

An extraordinary book! In essence, it is a management book. But it is written like a fascinating novel. If you have worked in IT for some time, be it as a manager or as a non-manager, you will find yourself right at home. The authors manage to tell a fascinating story of a company where Murphy is omnipresent in the IT department and how the crew gradually takes care of things and dramatically improves the situation. But it is not only a story for pleasure. It also very cleverly tells what is needed to convert to and run a successful IT organization based on the DevOps principle. The story takes up 90% of the book. The remaining 10% sum up the core information in concise format and give detailed information about some further reading.

I've never before read a management or technical book which was so interesting to read. And it still gives you all the relevant information. Just brilliant.

author: George Mikes    (1 book) go to top

How to be a Brit actually is a collection of three books written by George Mikes over the time of thirty years (1940-ies to 1970-ies): How to be an Alien, How to be Inimitable and How to be Decadent. All three books are full of British humor and make fun of the difference between the British and foreigners. But the books differ considerably, it is very obvious how Mikes, originally a Hungarian, having come to the Great country of Britain as a young man and staying on, has changed over the years and become a true Brit himself. While the first book is written with the eyes of a foreigner and shows in a very humorous way how Brits are different, the last book clearly is written with the eyes of a Briton and shows in the same humorous way where foreigners differs. There is also some repetition among the books, which can even be good: one joke from the first book I didn't get till the topic was picked up again in the next book.

Unfortunately there are many jokes I did not really get, possibly due to some special meaning of some expressions (which not even my dictionary was willing to share with me), probably due to not being able to see some references to certain events or people (Neither am I British, nor is English my native language. I only have lived in the UK myself for a very short time many years ago and even though I am definitely no youngster any more, that was years after the last book of the three was written.) Nevertheless, many of these very short stories are entertaining. It is also refreshing to see something where people clearly can freely make fun of themselves and their peers, something which these days (I write this in 2020) is more and more drowned in the overwhelming movement of "political correctness".

author: Gilad Rosner    (1 book) go to top

Whether we like it or not, the Internet of Thing is coming, coming in a massively larger scale than most of us imagine. And with it come also a lot of privacy challenges. While you might be OK with your car communicating technical vehicle health data back to the manufacturer, what about data tracking all your motorized movements? Do you agree with your employer having access to the data generated by your health monitoring wristband?

What we deem acceptable and what not changes with circumstances, culture, intended use, etc. and it even changes over time. So there is not one correct way to protect privacy, be it with the Internet of Things or elsewhere.

This report shines a light on the issue from different angles. First it shows that "IoT" is not one clearly defined technology, but a banner for a variety of definitions and trends. Then Gilad Rosner does a splendid job of explaining what we conceive as privacy and shows that privacy and security are two different things, before going into the specific privacy risks that come with the land of IoT. There is also a chapter talking about the different ways of privacy protection (mandatory vs. optional, law vs. self-regulation, etc. before coming to the methods available to protect privacy.

All in all a very well researched report which gives a lot of insight in not only privacy related to the IoT, but is helpful in general to think about an help address privacy concerns in technology.

author: Golo Weiss    (1 book) go to top

Der siebzehnjährige Kai Decker ist sich nicht so sicher, ob er das abitur schafft. Aber das kümmert ihn nicht zu sehr, solange er sich regelmässig mit drogen zudröhnen und in die virtuelle welt eintauchen kann. Für Kai ist diese virtuelle welt, die sich nur auf dem screen abspielt, nicht nur zufluchtsort, sondern auch der realen welt überlegen. Aber menschen können sich ändern...

Das ganze buch ist in der ich-form, mit den augen von Kai geschrieben, so als würde er dem leser sein leben, seine gedankengänge, seine gefühle erzählen. Und erst mal kämpft man sich sehr lange durch nichts als negative aussagen: die schule ist scheisse, die eltern nerven, die reale welt an und für sich ist öde... Wenn man sich für die möglichen gedankengänge eines jugendlichen interessiert, dann mag das interessant sein. Möchte man das buch jedoch zur unterhaltung lesen, so fragt man sich doch, ob man es nicht besser weglegen und ein anderes hervor nehmen soll; es gibt erst mal überhaupt keine handlung und auch nicht viel aussicht, dass irgendwann dann doch mal was geschieht. Erst nach etwa einem fünftel oder einem viertel des buches, beginnt sich endlich eine geschichte abzuzeichnen, die dann tatsächlich auch bis am schluss durchgezogen wird und ein richtiges ende hat. Allerdings wird die geschichte vor allem am schluss so unglaubwürdig, dass man sich zu fragen beginnt, ob man durch lesen des buches selber in einen drogenrausch verfallen sein könnte.

Das buch, welches übrigens immer mal wieder doppelte worte, hin und wieder falsche fälle etc. aufweist (ist der/die korrekturleser/in bei der arbeit wohl auch in den drogenrausch gefallen?), kann ich einfach nicht richtig einordnen. Wer sich in die gedankengänge eines jugendlichen versetzen möchte, findet hier vielleicht was er sucht, darf sich aber nicht an der komischen geschichte stören. Wer zur unterhaltung liest, wird wohl am schreibstil und der am schluss überdrehten handlung nicht wirklich gefallen finden und den langen einstieg als mühsam empfinden.

author: Gregory Fell and Mike Barlow    (1 book) go to top

This is only a short report addressing, or rather, slightly touching on topics like value of data, the dangers and merits of merging data from different sources, privacy and data security. In the few pages it is not possible to cover the topics in depth and thus is more to be seen as a rough management summary. As a thought initiating management primer it does bring up some major points and thanks to its minimal length does ot take long to read through.

author: Hans Bemmann    (1 book) go to top

Hans Bemmann erzählt das leben von Lauscher, von seinen jungen jahren bis hin zu seinem tod. Es ist ein märchen, eine fantasy geschichte mit allerlei zauber, ungewöhnlichen fähigkeiten etc. Das buch ist unterteilt in drei teile (der autor nennt sie bücher), von denen der dritte rund die hälfte des ganzen buches ausmacht und selbst aus wiederum drei teilen besteht. Ich selber empfinde den dritten teil als zwei und verwende hier meine eigene vierteilung.

Der erste teil beschreibt Lauschers lehrjahre. Wie er sich aufmacht zu seinem entfernt lebenden grossvater, dem "sanften Flöter", und unterwegs auf schloss Barleboog stecken bleibt. Was er dort anstellt bestimmt praktisch sein ganzes weiteres leben. Nachdem er schliesslich seinen grossvater doch noch erreicht hat, muss er mehrere jahre lang mit Barlo durch die welt ziehen.

Der zweite teil widmet sich Lauschers wanderjahren. Wie er alleine weiter in der welt herumzieht und heil oder unheil anrichtet. Lauscher hat viele gaben, weiss sie aber nicht immer alle richtig zu nutzen.

Der dritte teil unterscheidet sich deutlich von den ersten zwei. Er beschreibt quasi eine zeit der suche nach sich selbst. Lauscher wendet sich notgedrungen von der welt ab, die er bis jetzt gesehen und gekannt hat.

Im vierten teil kehrt Lauscher zu einem gewissen teil in die zivilisation zurück. Ob er zu sich selbst gefunden hat sei dahingestellt. Verändert hat er sich aber allemal.

Der erste teil ist sehr kurzweilig und interessant zu lesen. Auch der zweite teil ist weitgehend spannend, wenn sich der leser zuweilen auch etwas über Lauschers benehmen wundern mag. Der dritte teil schlägt einen ganz anderen ton an und hat mich nur begrenzt zum weiterlesen animiert. Und den vierten teil hätte man meiner meinung nach komplett weglassen können. Bei mir entstand der eindruck, dieser seit eher widerstrebend geschrieben worden unter der selbst auferlegten pflicht, die geschichte zu einem geordneten abschluss zu bringen. Mich hätte es nicht gestört, ja ich hätte gar bevorzugt, die geschichte nach dem dritten teil beendet zu wissen und mir somit die freiheit zu bewahren, selber zu entscheiden, wie für mich die geschichte noch weiter ginge.

author: Hans Christian Andersen    (1 book) go to top

Es kommt nur sehr selten vor, dass ich ein buch nicht bis zum schluss lese, besonders wenn ich mich schon durch mehr als die hälfte "durchgekämpft" habe. Kurz vor dreiviertel des buches hab ich es endgültig beiseite gelegt.

Die meisten der geschichten sind todlangweilig, oftmals recht bizarr nicht richtig unverständlich. Angesichts der tatsache, dass Hans Chrisitan Andersen ein sehr berühmter schriftsteller ist frage ich mich, ob einfach die auswahl der geschichten für dieses buch schlecht ist.

Das ist allerdings nicht das einzige manko dieses buches. An zahlreichen stellen finden sicht fehler. Falsche buchstaben. Neue abschnitte mitten in einem satz. Es macht sehr stark den anschein, als wäre der text von einer nicht einwandfreien vorlage her gescannt und mittels OCR "gesetzt" worden.

Ich kann das buch weder zum eigenen lesevergnügen empfehlen, und schon gar nicht als "bettlektüre buch" für kinder. Dafür eignen sich die gebrüder Grimm wesentlich besser.

author: Hans Engberding, Bodo Thöns    (1 book) go to top

Eine Sammlung von Reiseberichten mit der Transsibirischen Eisenbahn von 1901 bis 2001, geschrieben von mehr und weniger bekannten Personen. Die Berichte sind vielfältig, teils enthalten sie viel geschichtliches oder politisches oder auch persönliches.

Man kann zwar ein wenig herauslesen wie sich die Eisenbahnstrecke und das Reisen darauf im Laufe der Zeit verändert hat, darf aber keinesfalls erwarten, irgendwelche Reisetipps zu bekommen. Dies ist ein Buch zur Unterhaltung oder allenfalls fü den geschichtlich / politisch interessierten Leser, aber kein Buch zur Reisevorbereitung.

Mir selber hat das Buch nicht so sehr gefallen, die Reise jedoch schon.

author: Harlan Coben    (2 books) go to top

Myron Bolitar arbeitet als sportagent mit eigener agentur. Als ehemaliger footballspieler hat er selber erfahrung wie es zu und her get im profi sport, was sehr nützlich ist. Als ausgebildeter anwalt weiss er wo die legalität aufhört, was ihm in manchen vertragsverhandlungen zugute kommt. Und als ehemaliger FBI agent hat er ermittler-instinkt, was seinen freunden zugute kommt und seinen feinden und den feinden seiner freunde und klienten kopfzerbrechen bereiten kann.

Myron konnte den aufstrebenden football spieler Christian Steele unter seine fittiche nehemen und sie stehen kurz vor dem abschluss eines profi vertrages mit einem der grossen teams. Aber nicht nur die verantwortlichen des teams versuchen mit allen erlaubten und weniger erlaubten tricks einen tieferen preis zu erlangen, auch Christian's vergangenheit meldet sich plötzlich zurück: seine verschwundene und vermutlich einem gewaltverbrechen zum opfer gefallene freundin lebt vielleicht doch noch. Niemand weiss genau, was damals genau passiert ist, wie Kathy verschwunden ist. Wenn sie aber lebt und gefunden werden soll, dann müssen die puzzleteile von damals gesucht und richtig zusammengesetzt werden.

Die figur von Myron Bolitar ist eigentlich mehr privatdetektiv als sportagent. Gegen aussen strotzt er nur so von selbstvertrauen, ist aber ein gutmütiger und fairer typ. Und er ist nicht nur selber ein überflieger, sondern er hat auch einen sehr hilfreichen freund, der ihm in gefährlichen situationen zur seite steht.

Durchaus kurzweilig zu lesen, aber alles in allem kein buch, dass sich merklich vom durchschnitt solcher geschichten abheben würde.

Grace Lawson, a happily married mother of two, picks up a pack of freshly developed photos from the Photomat. Between the shots recently taken there is a single old picture. She does not know the picture or how it came there, but one of the five people in it might be her husband at a time before she met him. When her husband has just one look at the odd photograph, he makes a call, gets into his car and disappears. She does not know what might have happened to him, but the police assumes he simply ran away due to some marital problems or the like. Some people from Grace's own past start showing up; a past, she had hoped would be history and stay history.

The book starts out with several seemingly unconnected events and these separate lines of the story go on for quite some time. Sure, it is one book and they must somehow be connected, but it takes a long time until it becomes apparent in what way. And it is only in the very end that things start to make at least some sense. Even in the very end, all the glue to put the pieces of the puzzle together seems rather far fetched and unlikely.

author: Helen Harper    (7 books) go to top

The seventh (and final) book in the Firebrand series. If you haven't read the other books in the series, then you should do so first, otherwise you'll miss a lot of background information.

Emma somehow has gotten a new ability: seeing glimpses of things before they actually happen. But does that mean she has lost her Phoenix ability? Especially since another individual comes up and claims to be the Phoenix. And there only can be one Phoenix at a time.

Both, her new abilities and the Phoenix claim bring Emma into trouble. So much that she is restricted to working cold cases and eventually suspended. But not only that, the whole supe squad is facing more and more problems. Not from supe side, though. The whole supe community firmly stands behind both Emma and the rest of the supe squad. Suspended or not, it is up to Emma to uncover what is going on. And she better does so without being killed...

It's a pity this fine series is coming to an end here. However, certainly better to stop while it's good, rather than continue and degrade.

You know who Emma Bellamy is, right? If not you should go back and read "The Firebrand Series" from the beginning. This is book 6 in the series and without knowing at least a few things from the previous books, it would be difficult to understand many things in this book.

A request is made to Supe Squad to support an investigation of a murder. Somewhat unusual, since Supe Squad usually deals with supernaturals and the murdered person is human. But there is one detail which, in the public perception, could suggest supes are involved. In the course of the investigation, Emma stumbles upon another murder which seems to be linked. And before long, a whole series of murders unfolds with both, human and supe victims.

Not only Emma must see that she is not invincible, but also some other known characters must learn to handle situations where they are not as much in control as they are used to.

This book neatly fits into the style of the previous ones, not revealing too much to the reader at once so you want to keep reading on to find out more.

This is the fifth book in Helen Harper's Firebrand series. To fully understand the characters and how they are interconnected, it is strongly recommended to read the books in the correct order. So if you haven't read books 1-4 in this series yet, I suggest you do so before reading this one.

Emma has spent a lot of time and effort to organize the first ever supe summit. It is intended to improve tolerance and understanding of supes by humans and vice versa, as well as between the different species of supes. Of course, with so much misunderstanding, misinformation and fear, especially on the human side, the whole summit is a rather delicate endeavor. Tension is high, on both sides, and even small things have the potential to do a lot of harm in such a charged atmosphere. It is not a good sign, when Bella is called away from the champagne reception on the opening night...

As the previous books in the series, Dark Whispers is easy to read and follow and with enough open possibilities so you don't know who did it too early. The other characters of Supe Squad are developed further in this book, possibly for more involvement in the coming books.

It is highly recommended to read the first three books in "The Firebrand Series" before this one; knowing what happened up to now goes a long way to appreciate what is going on in this fourth book.

Emma always has been wondering why she can resurrect and what exactly happened when she was a child and her parents were killed. When a mysterious murder, which might include supernaturals, happens in her hometown of that time, it is a good chance to lend a hand in the current investigation and at the same time have a look into a few things from her childhood time.

Before long, Emma stumbles upon a detail of her parents' murder, which changes most of what she has known about it. And indeed, some folks might know more about it than they let on. The victim of the recent murder could have been one of them.

This book has a completely new setting, temporarily away from London and the usual supe community Constable Detective Emma Bellamy is familiar with. By doing so, Helen Harper prevents the book to be "just another story of the same kind". It has a lot to do with Emma herself. The character of Lord Horvath is gradually evolving and changing, opening up the potential for uncertain paths in the future.

If you haven't read the previous two books in "The Firebrand Series", then do yourself a favour and read them first. You will much more enjoy this third story in the series.

From the first two books, the reader got used to Emma dying and resurrecting twelve hours later. She's the only supe with this knack and by now, every other supe knows it. In this book, however, one of the other main figures dies in connection with a crime. And even though the crime involves supes, it is performed by humans and therefore Emma it's no longer Emma's jurisdiction. However, neither is she going to easily accept that nor is DS Collier the right person to deal with anything that has remotely a supe-connection. And as a longer-term side story, Emma somewhat loosens up to some personal matters. It will be interesting to see what becomes out of that in the future.

As already the first two books in this series, it is well written, easy to read and never gets boring. Some of the conclusions Emma comes to are not quite clear to the reader at first, but they are explained later.

Emma Bellamy, Lord Horvath, Lady Sullivan, you know them, right? If not, please take one step back and read the first book in "The Firebrand Series" first, you'll enjoy this second book in the series more that way.

Emma is now a full detective and working at Supe Squad, the only Supe Squad detective after Tony's gone. She is still learning a lot but also earned some respect in the Supernatural Community. Her job not only involves dealing with the wolves, the vampires and whatever else is out there but also with humans. Like the Clarkes. They have lots of complaints because their deceased son Julian chose to be turned into a werewolf. He did so of his own free will and there was no foul play involved. Neither in his death, that was an accident. However, one by one, various supe species get blamed for what happened after Julian's death. A lot of false accusations, a lot of superstition, but when digging deep enough, there indeed are signs of foul play. And Emma is not one to let things go easily when she's on to something.

One more well written and easy to read story involving various human-like species living amongst humans in the middle of modern London. The story involves a few dead ends, but they always lead to the next turn. It does become rather clear who the culprit is long before the end, but you want to know why and how things have come to this, so you keep reading end enjoying the book to the end.

Emma Bellamy is only one two-week stint away from making full London Metropolitan Police Detective. Piece of cake. She did not, however, even dream about being dumped at Supernatural Squad for her last assignment. Well, Emma is a fighter and as bad as Supe Squad's reputation is, she tries to make the best of it and still learn something useful. Not much trying, though, since at the blink of an eye she is dredged into a hell of a case up to her nose. There definitely is a lot to learn about the ways of vampires, werewolves and other species.

This is the first book in Helen Harper's Firebrand series. It nicely sets the stage for further adventures of Emma Bellamy and kind of explains how she comes to work as detective for Supernatural Squad. It's entertaining, well written, with a straight story and does not easily let the reader guess who the bad guys are. Definitely good enough a book so I ordered the seconds book in the series straight away.

author: Hilmar Gernet & Michael Klein    (1 book) go to top

Im ersten Teil des Buches beschreibt Hilmar Gerner das Wirken von Johann Evangelist Traber, vor allem seine Rolle als Begründer der Schweizer Raiffeisenbanken. Der zweite, kürzere Teil stammt von Michael Klein und ist quasi eine Kurzbiographie über Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen, dem ursprünglichen Erfinder der Raiffeisenbanken.

Der zweite Teil liest sich recht flüssig und gibt die wichtigsten Stationen in Raiffeisen's Leben wieder. Hier und dort werden ein paar Auszüge aus anderen Quellen zitiert.

Der erste Teil ist mühsam zu lesen. Er mutet an wie eine wissenschaftliche Arbeit, welche vor allem aus Zitaten und Auszügen aus vielen verschiedenen Quellen besteht. In der Tat reihen sich in diesem Teil oft Auszug (Quellenangabe) an Auszug (Quellenangabe) an Auszug (Quellenangabe).

Bestimmt gibt es bessere Bücher über die Urväter der Raiffeisenbanken in Deutschland und der Schweiz.

author: Ian Rankin    (1 book) go to top

In Edinburgh, Philippa Balfour, a 20 year old student of art history, disappears. She is not only a student, but also the daughter of a very influential merchant banker, which does not necessarily make the police work any easier. There isn't really much which could help to find the whereabouts of Philippa or to indicate whether she is still alive or not. An email found on her computer from someone calling himself 'Quizmaster' suggests, she was playing some kind of game through the internet. The investigation becomes more interesting when, after a few days, a small coffin with a wooden doll is found not too far from where Philippa grew up. All these things seem rather far fetched, but they are the only straws John Rebus and Siobhan Clarke have to clutch at.

The story wouldn't make for an action-rich Hollywood movie, but nevertheless it is not only well written, but also interesting. Quite a number of seemingly dead ends which are followed by the main characters and which finally all come together. It's also nice to not only have the crime to follow, but also being given an insight into the main investigators lives, with all their good sides and their faults.

author: Ilona Andrews    (1 book) go to top

Recently numerous dogs are kill in the place Dina lives. Nobody knows why, nobody knows who, nobody knows anything. Soon enough Dina finds more strange things happening, things which do not fit into normal earthling behaviour. But what is it? As a neutral individual Dina should not get involved but who else would? And then, out of a sudden more non-earthlings stand at the threshold of Dina's inn...

Witches, werewolves, vampires, these are well known species from various other books. This new series defines them a bit differently. And the area is wider too, earth is only one of many places, and obviously a rather minor one.

This first book in a new series might be a start to a new, great interpretation of vampires, werewolves, witches and more or it might be a nice try. Which way it will go is not yet clear. The story in this book is rather simple, interesting enough to read, but not much more. Of course, it has to set the ground first for this new interpretation. If you like to stay in the conventional world of fantasy around said magical creatures, then there are numerous other books which adhere to that "common set of rules". If, however, you'd like to try a new angle to it, you might want to consider to have a look at this series.

author: Iris Johansen    (1 book) go to top

When she was a child, Megan Blair heard voices. Sometimes they drove her almost crazy. Her mother always insisted that Megan does not need to see a doctor about it and that the voices will go away when she grows up.

As a grown up, Megan indeed does not hear voices any longer. Until the day she is almost murdered and Neal Grady appears in her life, again. Megan must learn to accept the shocking news, that she does have a very special gift. A gift which can also be a curse. That gift is valuable to some and it makes others want to eliminate her. A cat and mouse race begins.

Iris Johansen has written a real page turner. The prologue is short, leaves many questions open, but it is a necessary part to avoid lengthy explanations inside of the main story; thus, right from the first chapter, the action can and does start.

author: Ivan Ristić    (1 book) go to top

This is a small book and definitely does not cover all the ins and outs of openssl. It is not the intention of this book. What this book does, and does pretty well, is to teach the basics a sysadmin might need to know about openssl and SSL/TLS. Chapter 1 contains a nice step-by-step guide if you want to create certificates, say for your webserver, or even for building your own very simple PKI. It also gives recommendations on selecting cipher suites and discusses some performance considerations. Chapter 2 shows how to use openssl to test and verify various SSL/TLS aspects for your servers. Appendix A is equally informative and gives you real recommendations for working out a good the transport layer security concept you might need. It shows which ciphers to use and which to avoid, how to prefer stronger encryption standards for clients which support it, while still allowing older clients to connect and also performance is taken into consideration.

All in all, Ristić offers a very valuable guide for anybody who occasionally has to deal with SSL/TLS certificates. The guide is short enough to easily find what you need and even to read everything in a relatively short time. At the same time it is comprehensive enough to be useful in many situations.

A guide like this would have been helpful way back in the days when I designed a simple PKI for an enterprise. And I can recommend it to anybody who needs to create certificate or certificate sign requests on the command line without any special tools.

author: J.D. Robb    (1 book) go to top

Eve Dallas, lieutenant bei der New Yorker polizei, ist hart im nehmen und mindestens ebenso hart im austeilen. Und sie ist ausgesprochen gut in dem, was sie tut: verbrecher jagen, aber auch ganz schön besessen davon.

Eine ganze familie wird eines nachts ausgelöscht. Kaltblütig, sehr sauber und effizient. Perfekter mord. Ausser, dass das ermordete mädchen nicht die neunjährige tochter ist. Diese hat als einzige überlebt, dürfte aber in höchster gefahr sein. Eve verspricht ihr, die mörder ihrer familie zu finden.

Wer, wie ich, nicht weiss, dass dies der zwanzigste band in einer ganzen serie von büchern ist, dem wird das beim lesen rasch auffallen. Es gibt sehr viele referenzen zu vorherigen geschehnissen und fällen. Das buch ist trotzdem lesbar und die geschichte verständlich. Aber ein bisschen das gefühl bleibt schon, dass einem an einigen stellen die tieferen zusammenhänge aus den vorhergehenden büchern fehlen.

Die hauptfigur, Eve Dallas, ist selber psychisch nicht 100% stabil, was offenbar mit ihrer vergangenheit zusammenhängt. Und sie ist, zumindest gewissen leuten gegenüber, äusserst aggressiv, ungehalten und geradezu beleidigend. Vielleicht geht man im jahre 2059, in dem die geschichte spielt, so mit anderen um, aber mich hat dies beim lesen immer wieder irritiert.

author: J.K. Rowling    (2 books) go to top

The final part of the Harry Potter story. Lord Voldermort has returned and risen again. He is about to take over the whole wizarding world. Of course, not everybody agrees with the new ruler, but putting up resistance becomes more and more difficult by the day. Even Harry Potter has to go into hiding. Before Professor Dumbledore died, he gave Harry a task, but Harry feels he has not be taught enough about what he is supposed to do...

Again, Rowling easily succeeds to catch the reader's interest, to keep everyone's nose sticking to the pages. There are, however, quite a number of references made to the part of the story which happened in the preceding books, so don't attempt to read this book without having read the rest of the story.

This is the sixth volume of the Harry Potter series, a story about a boy-wizard chosen to fight the evil and highly skilled dark wizard Voldemort.

Don't attempt to read this without having read the previous volumes; quite a lot of knowledge from the other books is presumed. This sixth book in the series sports less action and surprises than the previous ones. While I still consider it an enjoyable read and can recommend it, I also got the feeling that this volume was somehow fabricated and constructed. In my opinion, the previous five books of this series were better.

author: Jacek Artymiak    (1 book) go to top

I am, and have been so for many years, a heavy user of vim. Over the years I've picked up many a trick and shortcut. Nevertheless, there are so many features you'll always only be using and remembering a more or less small subset of them and usually every book and most articles about vim cover some stuff which I haven't known before. Also this one.

What I liked about this book when I saw it is the fact that it is not too daunting to a newbie at vim. It is not a huge volume trying to teach you everything in the vim-universe, it just covers the basics. The information is split up in very small, easily digestible junks of information; each junk very short, teaching just one small task and mostly concluded with an easy to follow example. The table of contents makes it very easy to immediately find the information you're looking for. And yes, even as a long time intensive vim user I could learn new tricks again. So also for seasoned users it may be interesting to browse through.

On one hand I would like to recommend this book to vim newcomers for the conciseness and because of the approach which makes it simple to find specific information. On the other hand I have some big warnings as well. There isn't really any explanation about the working philosophy of vim. No spelled out information about the way counters are combined in vim with movement or other commands; which I think is a key concept to really understand things. Some of the commands are just plain wrong (:ZZ does not exist, that is ZZ). Others are introduced in a wrong context (CTRL-^ is explained as switching to the previous file; that would be :prev; CTRL-^ is to toggle between two buffers/files only). cursor movement is not explained before chapter 3, while file operations are already explained in chapter 2. While the short info and samples are great for looking something up, it would be much more useful to explain things after them. Often there are just some examples which you can type just according to the book but you won't really know what you're doing or why. In some places there are lots of examples with regular expressions but no information about what regular expressions are and how to really use their power.

So for some things I would like to give the book high marks, for others low. All in all, a medium mark is probably what's appropriate. There is good stuff in this book for both, the vim newcomer and for long time users, but background information is completely missing and all the samples have to be taken with a pinch of salt, they may not be quite accurrate.

author: Jack Stack    (1 book) go to top

Jack Stack has not only saved a company from closing down, but at the same time developed a different way of managing a business. His way is an approach of openness, fairness and involvement right down to the bottom. An approach, which I think can work very well and actually do wonders for the health of an enterprise, even though, by only having read the book and not seen this in action, I'm a bit sceptical of the constantly described enthusiasm of every employee.

This definitely is an "American book", full of enthusiasm and lots of repetitions (tell the readers a hundred times and the hundred and first time they'll start to believe it), but it is better than many other "guides"; it is not only a list of "do this, do that", but also the story of the first successful implementation of this approach. What I found refreshing, compared with other "guides", is the fact that it also openly shows some wrong paths taken by Jack himself, the worries he had, etc. This helps a lot to understand why he recommends to do some things this and not another way. It also makes him more human by openly acknowledging that he had fears too and took a few wrong turns.

If you read the book, please do yourself a favour and read it all. Some things are only explained in the later chapters (such as downsizing, which I think is one of the most important aspects). This "explaining later" is not at all a shortcoming, it fits perfectly; the sequencing is very logical, exactly in the order you're likely to hit the various issues.

I've read the updated edition, which has an additional part in the form of a story detailing the introduction of this system in a fictious company. There's nothing new in this part and the book does not gain any more value from it, except, maybe, the references to online tools strewn throughout the part. However, I have not checked these tools and references and can not comment on them.

author: Jakub Korab    (1 book) go to top

This smalll booklet gives an introduction into what a message broker is and what it is not and how it works. It does an amazing job in explaining the concepts in an easy to understand way and simple language. There are two completely different types of Message Brokers explained: Apache ActiveMQ and Apache Kafka. Their workings are both explained, as well as their differences. There are various samples what to watch out for in your own application when involving the services of a message broker.

Korab not only gives a good introduction of Message Brokers, but, I believe, also a valuable guide for people who want to write applications interacting with a message broker, what to do or not to do, what to pay attention to, what you can expect from which type of message broker and what you can not expect from it. I'm sure, reading this booklet before coding your application is well worth your time because it can save you a lot of troubleshooting and debugging time by doing away with some misconceptions.

author: James M. Cain    (1 book) go to top

Frank Chambers is a vagabond, here today and somewhere else tomorrow. When he tries to cheat a Greek restaurant owner for a meal he is unexpectely offered a job. But in this job he stays much longer than usual, the reason being the pretty wife of Nick, the Greek. Frank and Cora fall in love and are looking for a way to get rid of Nick.

This is a rather old book and no doubt had the stuff to be scandalous in its time. But more than seventy years later it is rather tame. Interesting, however, some of the wording used. Good I did not study English from this book or my marks for grammar would have suffered.

author: James Patterson    (3 books) go to top

Max ist kein gewöhnliches mädchen. Sie ist speziell. Speziell erschaffen worden. Ein experiment. Ein produkt. Ein forschungsobjekt. Aber mit ihren 11 jahren verfügt sie nicht nur über überaus erstaunliche fähigkeiten, sondern auch über einen eigenen willen. Und einen starken überlebensinstinkt. Und den willen zu überleben. Trotz allem.

Max gelingt die flucht aus der hochgeheimen forschungsanstalt, was eigentlich ihr todesurteil wäre. Denn es kann und darf nicht sein, dass die experimente, welche hier durchgeführt werden, auf irgend eine weise publik werden. Aber die forscher haben bei Max wirklich gute arbeit geleistet, so einfach lässt sie sich nicht einfangen und eine regelrechte hetzjagt beginnt. Viel steht auf dem spiel. Für Max "nur" ihr leben, für andere ihr lebenswerk.

Die geschichte ist sehr spannend, erzählt aus mehreren perspektiven, unterteilt in viele kurze kapitel (127 kapitel auf 380 seiten), so dass man häufig, statt ins bett zu gehen, noch rasch 2-3 kapitel weiter liest. Anfangs braucht es ein bisschen zeit, bis man sich in all den perspektiven zurecht findet, aber es fügt sich rasch genug alles zu einem grossen gesamtbild zusammen.

The book is written in the voice of Ochs Jones, a newspaper journalist who covered the shooting of Jimmie Lee Horn. Jimmie Horn is, or better was, a black man being mayor and running for governor. Thoroughly investigating the shooting and the people involved, Ochs (supposedly) writes a book about it. It's as much the story of the shooting, as it is the story of collecting the information for the book, as it is the story of the assassin Thomas Berryman, as it is the story of Ochs Jones. Sounds complicated? Then it sounds right. The story jumps back and forth in time, halfway back again, fast forward, switches between Ochs Jones, Thomas Berryman, Jimmie Horn and a number of other people. It is confusing and hard to read, feels like bits and badly matching pieces wildly mixed together in an annoying order.

You definitely won't miss anything by not reading this book. There are tons of better books to pick up.

Private is a top notch private investigation enterprise. The best on staff, the wealthy and the rich on the client list. It's kind of busy at Private, as they are working several urgent cases at once.

The people in the story work on several investigations at once and the book does no deep dive into any of them; they all are presented too shallow. And it's not only the number of parallel cases being worked on, it's also other sidelines which distract: the romances of Jack Morgan, his differences with his brother, his past, some Mafia business. Certainly these ideas could all be built up into individual interesting stories of a series, but trying to fit it all into a single book of just under 500 pages simply does not give any of the ideas enough room. As a result, the story feels crowded and rushed and the main characters are too good and efficient, so they can solve everything before running out of those almost 500 pages.

author: James Turnbull    (1 book) go to top

Puppet, being a great tool for system administrators, unfortunately suffers, at least in my opinion, from a lack of good documentation. Sure, the wiki at reductivelabs.com has a good amount of information, but it is neither easy to read, nor complete and the structure is not suitable for learning the ropes.

Does this book fill the gap? Only partially. What struck me at first was the complete lack of an index. The index in 'Red Hat RPM Guide' is of poor quality, but still better than none at all. Very often the author references to the wiki at reductivelabs.com for further reading and more details. I really would have liked more depth in the book. Especially a more extensive coverage of the various types, functions and configuration items used by puppet, including samples, would be in order, possibly in a separate chapter. Even if this meant duplicating much of the information in the wiki, it would avoid having to switch back and forth bewteen the book and the online reference.

On the bright side, Turnbull's writing style is easy to read. What is covered in the book mostly is explained by showing a sample followed by text explaining what's going on in the sample code. This makes it easy for newcomers to follow along. This covers mainly the basics plus some first steps beyond. I'm sure with puppet you can do much more, but here we're on our own again.

If you are new to puppet, get the book; it will help you get up to speed more quickly than the wiki. If you have puppet up and running with basics only, you might get some ideas from the book on how to get beyond the basics. If you are a slightly advanced puppeteer already you'll probably not gain anything from reading this book.

I'm still waiting for a good book on puppet, but meanwhile this is probably the best you can get and thus it gets a small bonus in my rating simply for the fact of being available.

author: Jan Janowski    (1 book) go to top

In einem fremden land kann man schon mal in das eine oder andere fettnäpfchen treten. Und in einer fremden kultur erst recht. Ich habe selber mehrere jahre in einem asiatischen land gelebt und weiss das aus erster hand. Einige sitten und gebräuche der asiatischen kulturen sind uns Europäern nicht nur fremd, sondern können auch durchaus falsch verstanden werden. Genauso kann unser benehmen, so gut wir es auch meinen und wie richtig es bei uns auch wäre, in einigen situationen falsch verstanden werden. Auch wertvorstellungen können komplett unterschiedlich sein und zu grossen missverständnissen und peinlichen situationen führen.

Dieser fettnäpfchenführer zeigt auf kurzweilige und unterhaltsame weise, was einem in Korea so alles passieren kann, in welche benimm-dich-fallen man schnell man hineinschlittert und wie man gewisse sachen zu verstehen hat. Der autor verwendet dabei zwei charaktere, die studentin Julia und den Praktikanten Nico, welche einen austauschaufenthalt in Seoul machen. In vielen kurzen geschichten erleben die beiden viele typische situationen, auf die man treffen kann. Der autor beschränkt sich aber nicht darauf solche situationen bloss aufzuzeigen, sondern er analysiert sie am schluss immer. Es werden erklärungen abgegeben, wie die sachen zu verstehen sind, manchmal auch wie diese verhaltensweisen entstanden sind und vor allem auch, wie man sich in solchen situationen am besten verhält.

Wer sich länger in Korea aufenthalten möchte ist sicher nicht schlecht beraten, sich die geschichten in diesem führer vorgängig zu gemüte zu führen. Der kulturschock dürfte dadurch leicht abgefedert werden, man versteht die Koreaner vielleicht von anfang an ein bisschen besser und ein paar peinlichkeiten lassen sich sicher mit dem angesammelten wissen vermeiden oder zumindest abschwächen.

author: Janet Evanovich    (3 books) go to top

Stephanie Plum somehow is always getting into trouble. And as a bounty hunter, trouble may also mean serious trouble with criminals. But if you get on the wrong side of a whole organized gang, then serious trouble takes on a whole new meaning.

As usual for the Stephanie Plum series, there is always something going on and things are moving fast, especially as all of the other characters are very energetic too. But some things just don't seem in place. Simple bounty hunter up against a whole organized gang? Unlikely. Bounty hunter bonding out one of the dangerous bad guys nobody else would bond out? Highly unlikely. But if you can overlook those things, the book is entertaining.

Stephanie Plum, the bounty hunter, is at work again. Mo Bedemier, the owner of the ice cream and candy store, is loved by everybody and the perfect, amiable citizen. So getting this done should be very easy, probably will only take a minute to talk to him. However, when Stephanie gets to his store it's closed. This store never was closed before... Before long Plum is finding herself hated by everybody, being shot at and constantly stumbling over new dead bodies. Not quite what she expected from this assignment.

This is the second Stephanie Plum novel I've read and what I said about the first one is true for this one as well. The beginning is very chatty and lacking in action. The action is towards the end of the book. Reading one or two books written in this style is fine, but I really can't imagine reading the whole series if everything is starting so slow and chattering.

Stephanie Plum is a bounty hunter, going after people who were bonded but did not show up in court when they should. But instead of her going after people, things turn out to be the other way round: a woman is stalking her. That woman, claiming to be the wife of Stephanie's friend Ranger, seems to be rather short tempered and quick to draw her gun. Not very easy to talk her into reason. But as Stephanie soon finds out, this woman is only a minor nuisance compared to the Ranger she married...

A good novel written in a refreshing style, humorous and easy to read. There is also a sufficiently elaborate storyline behind it. The book starts off somewhat chatty without much action, then goes over into real action and culminates very fast paced and captivating at the end.

author: Jason Santa Maria    (1 book) go to top

This book serves as a primer for (not only) web designers who are new to typography. And rightly so. These days there are so many options abound for typesetting text that the average Joe often is overwhelmed by all the possibilities, fonts, sizes, etc. and forgets to consider overall layout and legibility. All to often less variation in presentations, documents and web pages would be more. The book stresses the fact that typography should help in reading and understanding a text rather than get in the way of the reader. Very sound advice.

There are not really hard rules in typography, no clear wrongs and rights valid in all situations. So Jason starts out with a short overview of how we are reading, followed by some info on how type works. Without thinking about these 'mechanics', you'd have nothing to base your selection of typefaces, widths, sizes etc. on. The text then goes on explaining some more type-technical stuff like boxes, height, various attributes and how to choose typefaces which match or complement each other. Good advice also about creating a hierarchical typographic system for your project. Finally, some words about overall page layout (horizontal, vertical, grid), which I think is especially important in web design.

There are no hard rules given on how to typeset something, but sound advice. And this advice is not only true for web page design. In the part which talks about various typefaces (commonly called fonts), their features and their distinctions, you can easily feel the authors interest for the details of all the various fonts. For the non-professional designer this can, at times, be a bit too detailed, differences between shown fonts too small to really notice.

Don't expect to be a top notch web page layout pro after reading this book, but heeding the advice given, you should not fall prey any more to some of the most common problems. And this is not only true for web pages, take the advice for all text you produce or set.

author: Jay Kreps    (1 book) go to top

How you perceive this book probably depends on what you consider to be a 'log'. As a guy having spent the last 7 years running a company-wide log-analysis system, I find the notion of 'log' in this book rather narrow-minded. What Kreps writes about clearly is 'transaction logs' and 'message queues'. So unless this is exactly what you are looking for, it is probably not the book you're interested in. It also clearly shines through that Kreps is a big fan of Kafka.

Even though the author claims to have lots of experience with designing systems around (transaction) logs at LinkedIn, he never gives any technical advice or hard facts on how to interconnect various systems, not even on how to structure the messages you are passing between the systems. Working more than 25 years in IT building various company-wide systems and services myself, I have read dozens of books published by O'Reilly and have come to appreciate this publisher for their high quality technical books. This book definitely does not even come close to the standard I have come to expect from O'Reilly. I ♥ Logs is more suited to a blog post or one of the cheap write-ups found with some other publishers.

author: Jeaniene Frost    (1 book) go to top

Cat is half vampire and half human. She is pretty, powerful and dangerous, but has been lonely ever since she left Bones four years ago. Cat hates vampires and at the same time still loves Bones, wo himself is a Master vampire. In her undercover job, she and her team fight those creatures who go for humans. Yes, Cat is 'Red Reaper', the one no vampire knows and every vampire fears. One day, however, she lets one of the fanged creatures escape and he comes back at her, trying to add her to his collection. A tougher battle begins than what Cat is used to and she is lucky Bones, her ex, finds her before Ian does. But Ian still gets his second encounter with Cat...

Even though there is a fair amount of slaughtering in this book, it is not frightening. There are also some sexually explicit scenes which I would have guessed were written by a woman even if I hadn't known the author of the book. All in all: good entertainment.

author: Jeff Patton    (1 book) go to top

Patton gives a good introduction to user story mapping in agile development. What is it? Why do it? How to do it? What are the benefits you can expect? What are the pitfalls you should be aware of?

Basically, the book gives a good overview. If you are new to the concept, things are explained well in an easy to read, narrative way. And I guess if you've been doing this for some time, there are also parts in it you still can use to improve your user story mapping.

However, as Patton says in the very beginning of the book, it has turned out much bigger than he first intended. And quite honestly, I'd have preferred a shorter version. There are numerous examples of using story mapping from his various "friends". Half of the examples would have been sufficient. With some things, he is also repeating himself a few times. The narrative writing style makes the book easy to read, but it also blows up the volume of text. I think you can save yourself some reading time by generously ignoring some of the stories contributed by the "friends" of Patton.

author: Jeffrey E.F. Friedl    (1 book) go to top

I have read the first edition of 'Mastering Regular Expressions' many years ago and that was an enormous boost to my ability of using regular expressions. In the meantime, a lot has happened in this area and because in my current job I use non-trivial regexes frequently, I thought getting the latest version of Jeffrey's book might be a good idea. It was. Compared to the first edition, there is a lot of new and updated material.

Even though I already knew quite a bit about this topic, this is still one of the very best technical books I've ever read (and I don't give five stars easily). No light reading at all, though. But the writing style of Jeffrey helps a lot to make things interesting and approachable. At the same time he succeeds to think razor-sharp, not forgetting corner cases. Sometimes it's almost frightening how he remembers to check and point out all possibilities. And again, all this without becoming repetitive, boring or anything the like.

The 31-page index is quite complete and definitely useful and the hundreds of cross references in the text are a boon. I'd have appreciated a few more tables or, better yet, an appendix with the existing tables all collected once more in one place for easy reference. But then, this book is not a reference, it is a book from which you can learn the ins and outs of regular expressions. And it does a very good job teaching this, starting out with an introduction to regular expressions and simple examples. A complete regex beginner might stop reading after the first one or two chapters, get his or her hands dirty with regexes for a while and then continue reading after a few months of using regular expressions. Some more complex samples follow and then an overview of regular expression features and flavours. For casual users the difference between DFA and NFA engines might not be so important, but the more you use regular expressions and the more complex things you start to solve with them, the more such differences become apparent. When you start to apply your knowledge to larger amounts of data, suddenly knowing about efficiency, which has its own chapter, or the mechanics of processing (another chapter) makes a huge difference. Need to handle unicode? Yes, Jeffrey has this covered too, just as regex use in various scripting languages, such as Java, .NET, PHP, Perl, Python, Tcl. Four of them, Perl, Java, .NET and PHP, even have their own chapters (which I did not read all).

If you want to learn about regular expressions, I can not imagine a better or more complete book to turn to. And if you're just curious about regexes, then read the first one or two chapters and start being impressed by how much simpler many data manipulation tasks suddenly become. You'll definitely pull out this book again from your bookshelf and continue reading after some time.

author: Jesse Keating    (1 book) go to top

You are new to ansible and want to learn how to use it? Sorry, wrong book. But if you do have some experience with ansible already, know what the inventory is, what roles are, how to use modules, how to find which modules you need for a certain task and want to dig deeper, then this might well be for you.

This book definitely does not teach the basics, the reader is expected to already have acquired that knowledge. Rather than what, it explains how ansible does things and along the way explains how to use its more advanced features. Things like dynamic inventories, adding hosts at runtime, execution strategies, protecting sensitive information, conditionals, loops, macros and filters in Jinja2 templates, error recovery and failure handling, dynamic variable inclusion, troubleshooting, etc. For certain topics, the author not only shows how to use the feature, but also where and how to add your own custom functionality by building small and easy extensions to ansible.

For everything an example is given, showing the actual configuration/code used and what the output is. Almost all of the examples are done with the debug module, thus not actually running anything on remote hosts. Still, the author succeeds in bringing his point across, maybe even more easily than by using other modules, because this way you can concentrate on understanding the mechanics of what was done, without needing to think too much about what (would have) happened on the remote host.

If you want to learn from scratch how to use ansible, then get another book. If know the basics and want to understand more of how it works and how to use more dynamic and advanced features give it a go. The things I liked most: the chapter on Jinja2 templates, the samples on how to easily extend the functionality of ansible and the author staying strictly focussed on the topic.

author: Jhumpa Lahiri    (1 book) go to top

Have you lived in a place with a totally different culture than your own? Lived, not just gone there for a holiday? This is what the story in this book is telling. Of a husband and wife moving from India to the US, and of their kids. Two kids, both born and raised in the US, but stuck in limbo. On the one hand they are raised with an Indian background, on the other hand, they are raised in and interact with a totally different culture on the outside. Where do they really belong? And also their parents, foreigners where they live, they gradually become kind of foreigner in their original country too. And they seem to have two faces, they kind of turn into different people when going back 'home' to India for vacation.

There is no big story or artfully constructed plot in this book. It's just about the life of a family, but with interesting insights. Insights, which many people might never stop to think about. I have first-hand experience living in a different culture for several years. But not as totally as in this book, which, in some places, made think me too.

author: Jilliane Hoffman    (1 book) go to top

J.C. Townsend is a State Attorney and handles the Cupid case. A case of a brutal serial killer. But what J.C. was not prepared for is, that this murderer actually is someone from her past, someone she hoped to never meet again...

The story is well structured, well told and does have an unexpected twist at the end. But it is nothing extraordinary nor something that can't put away at night.

author: Jim Butcher    (1 book) go to top

This is the first book in a new series. Harry Dresden is a wizard and a private investigator and a consultant to the police. When some peculiar deaths occur, lieutenant Karrin Murphy asks Dresden for help, because it very much looks like magic is involved. However, Harry is not very forthcoming with what he finds out. And he brings himself and also Karrin and some others into great danger.

This first book probably should establish a base for the books following in this series. However, it feels like the author is still very much experimenting with what his main character is supposed to be like. Should he be a mostly broke PI or a knowledgeable specialist? Is he a sloppy or a fabulous wizard? Is he more of an outcast or a respectable member of the magic community?

The book is easy enough to read and sufficiently interesting to keep you reading all the way to the end. However, it does not, in my opinion, make you want to grab the next book in the series immediately. The story and setting definitely do have potential for a good series, but it needs more certainty in the role of the main character in the following books.

If you do know the fabulous "Hollows" series by Kim Harrison, then you certainly should not expect anything as captivating and sophisticated as that from this first book in the Dresden Files series. It is not a bad book, but there is room for improvement.

author: Jim Whitehurst    (1 book) go to top

Are you a manager? Or are your managed? I've been both and I'm positively certain this book appeals to both. But first things first.

Jim Whitehurst does a really great job not only describing this other way of running a company, but also in confessing that coming from a conventional top-down style management position to this more bottom-up style was not an easy transition. This confession, I believe, can be quite important for somebody new to this style of running things. Important to realize that you can not always have all the answers; more important even, to realize that nobody expects you to have the answers to all problems. Most important, probably, to realize that people will not listen to you simply because you have some fancy title on your business card but for other reasons, reasons you have to work for.

The book is easy to read, of manageable size (about 200 pages) and well structured. In the first part Jim talks about why this management style is superior in many environments. Part two explains how things are achieved the open way and in the third part he provides some samples what to do.

The fact that throughout the book Jim talks about associates, rather than employees, emphasizes the fact, that he really believes in what he writes about.

From a manager perspective, the book gives ample suggestions on how to lead (rather than boss about) people and thus have them work with you, rather than against you.
From the perspective of somebody being managed, it can give you some ideas where to challenge, where to support and when to shut up and accept some decisions.
And those sandwiched between higher-ups and subordinates can get ideas for both directions.

Myself, I strongly believe in the concept Whitehurst describes in his book. And I do know it can work and yield good results, even though I (unfortunately) have never seen it implemented as thoroughly as described in this book.

author: Joe Abercrombie    (1 book) go to top

The book starts like a few separate stories; one about Logen Ninefiners, one about Inquisitor Glokta and a third one about Captain Jezal dan Luthar. The setting sounds like several hundred years ago, in lands which have seen many wars. There are various kinds of different people: warriors, magicians, noblemen, commoners and more. Bit by bit and slowly, the stories come together and the various people meet each other. The language is good and precise, the going somewhat slow.

What is the big plot? Good question. This is the first book in a trilogy and quite honestly, after reading the first book I have hardly an idea where things are headed to. Neither have I come across something you may call a highlight of this first part. I've been patiently waiting for more things to happen, but the book has ended without rewarding me for my patience. Possibly something more interesting will happen in the next book. But somehow I have the feeling that won't be the case until the very end (or not at all). It is something I might never know, because the next book in the trilogy won't make it onto my buying list. Basically, the writing etc. would get one more star, but not having a highlight or being at least a little bit complete in itself is a reason enough for me to deduct one full star from the rating.

author: John Grisham    (1 book) go to top

Joel Backman, known as "The Broker", one of the most influential figures in Washington's political circles, is in prison, mainly for his own protection, rather than for committing a crime. When he suddenly is released way ahead of time, he is secretly brought to Italy by the CIA. For his protection, he is told. But the CIA is playing a double game; in due course, Backman's whereabouts shall be leaked to certain foreign agencies...

Even though the story is about spies and the like, most of the content describes how Joel Backman hates confinement to a small radius in Italy, hates learning a new language, starts wandering his new environment, rapidly adjusts to his new life, picks up not only the Italian way but also the language and seemingly grows fond of what he first hated. There are lots of details about the Italian city of Bologna, which the reader discovers together with Joel.

Grisham succeeds in keeping the reader glued to the pages, turning them one after another. Even though the action scenes are fewer than in many other thrillers, "The Broker" is captivating and difficult to put away for the night.

author: Jon Loeliger    (1 book) go to top

Git is a very powerful, but also a very complicated Version Control System (VCS). I have experience with Subversion and for sure subversion was much easier to understand and learn. Also the documentation available online for subversion I think is better. So I was looking forward very much to this book, hoping it would finally jumpstart me on understanding and using git.

Jon Loeliger definitely does a better job with his book than the online documentation to give the reader an understanding of git. But even after reading the book I still feel somewhat like a toddler, wobbly on my feet when walking on the git-road. Partially this definitely is due to the complexity of git and its (seemingly) dozens of sub-commands and possible ways of doing things. However, I would have preferred fewer references to the manpages. The various commit graphs used throughout the book are a big help to understand what is going on, but a consistent example repository which is used from begin to end for all the examples might make things easier. On the upside, Jon does usually show how the sample repository he is using in each step is created, so you can follow along quite easily. With some of the later chapters I felt a bit lost. For example at the end of chapter 12 'Repository Management', I really thought I had a misprinted book with some pages missing; a few possibilities on how different repositories could theoretically be connected are mentioned, but there is no information on actually how to do it, not even a hint that such information can be found further on in chapter 15 'Combining Projects'.

If you need or want to use git and are dissatisfied with the usage information you can find on the web, Version Control with Git is probably worth buying and reading, it will remove some of your struggle, but don't expect you will be proficient in git after going through this book.

author: Jonas Jonasson    (1 book) go to top

Allan Karlsson doesn't fancy attending his own birthday party. Luckily, his room at the old people's home is on the ground floor, thus the window becomes his escape route and the starting point of quite an uncommon adventure.

In his book, Jonasson jumps back and forth between the present and the past. In doing so, he tells both, the adventure Allan is having currently and the amazing life he has lived up to now. During his 100 years, ordinary Allan ran into quite a few extraordinary people and survived several adventures, sometimes more by luck and ignorance than anything else.

The book is fun to read with lovable characters.

author: Julie Kagawa    (10 books) go to top

If you don't know Meghan, Keirran, Ethan and all the others already, then you are starting this story from the wrong end. This is the seventh and last book in the Iron Fey Saga and you definitely want to have read the previous six books before this one, otherwise you'll have a very hard time trying to figure out what is happening and why.

The previous book didn't have a real end, just a very bad thing happening on the last pages, which kept the reader in limbo. So it comes as no surprise that this book has no real beginning and starts off just as if it was the next page beyond the back-cover of book six. This book too, is written in the voice of Ethan and the 'new' heroes are the main players, with the heroes from the start of the series playing their roles, but keeping to the sidelines.

Keirran has completely lost it. He is not even a shadow of his former self anymore and has become a real threat to the courts. His former friends, however, do not accept his complete change of heart and set out, however impossible it may seem, to bring him to his senses. They do so at great risk and they find themselves in some really scary situations. Possible death is lurking at every corner and they have to venture to where no human and not many Fey have gone before.

Julie Kagawa again does a very good job of telling a captivating story full of adventures. It does get darker and darker, but, without spilling the beans, let me tell you the end of the whole series is not so hopeless and gloomy as you might fear, even though there are some grave sacrifices to be made.

You do know the Iron Fey Saga, right? You have read the first five books in the series, right? If not, then go and read the first five books before starting with this one. Without knowing what has happened before, it would be very hard to figure out what happens and why.

The "old" heros, Puck, Ash, Grimalkin and Meghan, are there, but only play minor roles. All the action is really centered around Ethan, Kenzie and Keirran.

This book too, is told in the voice of Meghan's brother Ethan. It's been only a week since Ethan and Kenzie returned from the Nevernever and no dust has yet settled over that. But one of their new friends is desperately looking for help. They can hardly refuse such a plea, can they? And you can bet they get into way more trouble than they care for. Plus some of their actions trigger huge changes in the Nevernever.

As usually, Julie Kagawa writes in a very captivating way. Lots of action. Sometimes almost too many things happening. And the end is very abrupt, not like a real end of a book, but much more like the end of one part of a TV stories, leaving more questions open than it gives answers, so you basically need to continue with the next part.

Ethan Chase, the little brother of Meghan, who has become the Iron Queen, is now much older than in the adventures of Meghan. He still has the gift (or curse?) of being able to see the fey, which has influenced much of his life. Meghan has not visited her family for many years and Ethan feels somewhat betrayed by her. Even though he does have a way to get into touch with his Queen sister if there should be an emergency, Ethan is determined to master his life and problems by himself. He has done so for many years. But when a new kind of fey start to appear, a kind nobody has ever seen before, not even the common fey themselves, things start to become more difficult. Ethan finally has no other way than to do what he intended never to do. And he finds out some things which he was not supposed to discover.

This is the fifth book in the Iron Fey Saga. As the previous ones, it is full of magic, playing in much the same places, building on the previous books in this series. If you haven't read books 1-4 of this saga, many things in this book will not make much sense. So if you haven't read the previous books, go and read them first.
Yet, this book is also different from the former ones. Not only is it written from the view of Ethan and playing several years after the last story, but it also somewhat feels like a new series. The heroes of books 1-4 also play a role in this fifth one, but only an outsider role. They are no longer the main figures, no longer the heroes.

Personally I think what Julie Kagawa does here is a fragile endeavour. She takes a very good series, replaces the main figures with new ones and basically builds a new series. But you still need to know the old series to understand the new one. This could go both ways. It might work out and keep the fans reading, possibly bring new readers to the "old" series because they want to understand this new one. On the other hand, readers of books 1-4 which have attached to Meghan, Ash, Puck and Grimalkin, might not like Ethan, Keirran, Kenzie and Annwyl as much. For me this book was still worth reading and fun, but slightly less so than the previous ones.

Oh, and by the way, if you haven't read "Iron's Prophecy" yet, the short story going between "The Iron Knight" and "The Lost Prince", then don't read it. "Iron's Prophecy" is no required reading for following the story, but it does have some information which spoils the fun of reading "The Lost Prince".

Meghan Chase has gotten used to her new position as the Queen of the Iron Realm. Ash, too, has settled in his new life as Meghan's husband and knight. They have not seen either Puck, nor Grimalkin since Ash came to the Iron Realm. But their friends stand at Meghan's side again, when a prophecy lures her out to strange places in the wyldwood.

This is one of the short tales again in-between the main stories. Nothing really very important is happening and it also does not contain any major adventure or challenge. Like the other short novellas, it serves more like a (not so terribly tasty) appetizer and bridge from the previous book in the series to the following one.

This fourth book in the Iron Fey Saga is written in the eyes of Ash, the (former) Winter Prince. If this is the first book of this series, then please go back and start reading them in the correct order, which will make things clear. Starting out so far along in the whole story, you'd probably be confused and missing out a lot.

At the end of the last book, Ash has made a promise to Meghan, one she did not ask for, though. As promised, Ash sets out to find a way to set foot in the Iron Realm without being poisoned by all the iron. Puck, his arch enemy and at the same time best friend accompanies him. Together they come to places in the wyldwood they both have never been before. They gain a new new friend and protector and find a long lost love. But they also find tasks lying ahead which are tougher than what they ever experienced. Tasks and fights requiring their combined effort to barely survive. Even the invincible Ash hits his limits and finds out that he's not absolutely invincible after all, and neither so cold or able to shutout all feelings. The quest is demanding, dangerous, bringing them to their limit, and not all of them return alive.

A very good read, gradually showing another side of Ash, a transformation of the former Winter Prince and a glimpse into the past, long before Meghan came into play. Also the reasons behind the combined friendship/hate-relationship between Ash and Puck become more clear.

This is a snmall interlude between the real books of the Iron Fey Saga, some kind of teaser. It is also the first book in this series which is not written in the voice of Meghan, but Puck. To understand the events and the big story as a whole, it is no required reading.

This book, about a short "in-between-adventure" of Ash and Puck, is not up to the standard of the previous books in the series. It is short (a teaser), it is not in the voice of Meghan, the story does not feel as well constructed, etc. If it's a rainy Sunday and you're still waiting for the next real book in the series to be delivered to your dorstep, ok, read it. If, however, you already have the next real volume, simply skip this one and go on with the next real book.

It's a year now, since Meghan Chase has vanished from home and a lot has happened. Meanwhile she's banished from the Nevernever, as is Ash. But lo and behold, that does not mean she's safe from the fearies. Quite to the contrast, the new, false, Iron King is after her. Has it not been enough to kill Machina, the former Iron King? As long as the false Iron King is at loose, Meghan will not be able to rest. So... But things become more complicated than imagined. On the other hand, Meghan becomes more self-confident and trusting her own powers.

If this soulds like a riddle, they you probably have not read the previous two books in The Iron Fey series and should do so before you open this one. Otherwise many things will be hard to understand because you'll lack the context of what happened before.

Also this third book is well written and will keep you entertained. It is also interesting how Julie Kagawa uses the evolution of the Iron Kingdom to show us, between the lines, how our own world evolved over time: (the old Iron King, Ferrum) industrialization by mechanical machines, driven by pistons; (the new Iron King Machina) electrification of machines replaced the older steam-based machines, but still mechanical; (the fake Iron King) computers make a lot of the electric machines obsolete. And with each of these changes we lost some amount of the old, fully natural ways (Summer Court). It will be interesting to see, whether this analogy will continue in the next book.

Meghan is making good on her promise to go with Ash to the Unseelie Court. However on the way to Winter Court they are followed, followed by an ancient creature. A creature even Ash might not be strong enough to defeat....

This very short story plays between book 1 (The Iron King) and book 2 (The Iron Daughter) of The Iron Fey saga. It can be seen as a kind of teaser. As it definitely is written in the style the "normal" larger books of this saga are written, it does give a taste of what those books are like. However, being placed between the first and the second book rather than before the first one, it will not be of much help to somebody who is considering this to find out whether to buy the "normal" books; it is too short to bring the reader up to speed on what has happened in book 1 and without that knowledge I think it is kind of difficult to understand what is going on. Is it necessary to read this book before continuing with book 2? No. To appreciate book 2 you should have read book 1, but this interlude is not required.

This is book 2 of the Iron Fey series. If you have not read the first one, I do recommend to read The Iron King first, as there are lots of situations and things happening which are based on what went on in the first book.

Meghan Chase has come to the Winter Court willingly, but she does not really want to stay there; the winter queen does not really believe here story of the Iron Fey, Rowan, Ash's brother, is mocking her, Ash himself is ignoring her, etc.

Somehow, even though Machina is dead, the Iron Fey are still out there and they do find a way to infiltrate the courts and cause winter and summer to go to war against each other. Meghan is caught in the middle of all this and it is up to her and the very few fey who believe her more or less, to stop this war and the big betrayal behind it.

As already the first book: an interesting story told from the view of Meghan, well written and entertaining. This is a worthy continuation of the first book in the series, about as good as the first one.

Meghan Chase is a sixteen year old girl, living with her mother, stepfather and brother. An ordinary girl, she thinks of herself. Her father, whom she loved, disappeared out of the blue when she was much younger. And her little brother sometimes is afraid of the creatures coming out of the closet in his room. Well, small children do have a strong fantasy, don't they?

Meghan, however, is about to find out she is not an ordinary girl at all. Plus, one of her friends is a very well known feary. Before long, Meghan is deeply involved in matters concerning the lands of the fey, the Nevernever.

This is a very good book written from the view of Meghan. It brings to life a great many mystical creatures in a capturing story which is the beginning of a whole series. In some places Julie Kagawa successfully mixes in some criticism about our modern way of life and how we treat our environment. Having this criticism weaved in more evenly throughout would have been better; I was not quite sure whether it was planned to be part of the book from the beginning or more of an afterthought edited in later.

Hopefully Julie Kagawa can keep up the good and interesting flow of the story in the following books of the series. This first one definitely is worthwhile to read.

author: Julien Sandrel    (1 book) go to top

I find it hard to give a brief overview of the storyline without any spoilers, and spoilers, I feel, would really lessen your reading pleasure in this case. Let me try, even though you might criticize me as being too shallow: After something unexpected and unpleasant happens, the main character in the book sets out to do something unusual for someone else and in the process not only learns a lot about itself but also starts to see life from a different angle.

This book got a space in my rather short list of "best books I read". Well written, good story, heart-touching. With some things I asked myself "Would the person really have dared to do this?" The timing seems a little too tight. The unexpected links between some people are rather unlikely. But if you can ignore those and instead just enjoy the essence of the story, then it is a truly beautiful piece of writing.

Yes, I can understand the voices saying "What a terrible person acting in this way in such a situation!" Those probably will hate the book. But then, they most likely are the ones who did not open their mind and heart to what this book is all about; instead of seeing the beauty behind, among and between the lines they only focused on the black ink the letters are printed in and took them for facts. Like the people who only see trees when taking a walk in the woods but not the wonderful places where fairies, dwarfs and gnomes live.

author: Jürgen Bosbach    (1 book) go to top

Nasreddin Hodscha ist richter, gelehrter, lehrer ... und schelm. Und oftmals hält er den leuten aber auch den spiegel vor. Eine art türkischer Till Eulenspiegel (in der hundertsten geschichte behauptet er sogar, Till Eulenspiegel einst selber getroffen zu haben).

Die kleinen geschichten sind meist amüsant, regen aber auch immer wieder zum nachdenken an. Auf jeden fall sind sie kurz und bündig. Auch wenn es noch so spät ist und man schon lange hätte schlafen gehen sollen, eine dieser kurzen geschichten kann man trotzdem noch lesen als gute-nacht geschichte.

author: Kate Mosse    (1 book) go to top

During summer break 2005 Alice is visiting her friend Shelagh in France who is the deputy at an excarvation site. As Alice does not have any other plans, she helps for a couple of days and makes a discovery at her last day...

In July 1209 Alaïs finds a dead body in the river when she goes to find fresh herbs for her medicines. When she describes what she found to her father, he is rather distressed, just as if the dead might be somebody dear to him. It turns out to be somebody else, but still, something seems to be bothering her father and he passes her an ancient book of great value for safekeeping. One book of a set of three he once was asked to bring from Egypt because it supposedly was safer in France...

Is Alice the same person as Alaïs? Is she a decendant? Gradually the two stories, at first seemingly unrelated, become one. A story of religion, faith, love, all centered around the Holy Grail.

A longish book but told well enough so I kept reading even though I'm usually not too much interested in historical or religious stories.

author: Kate Pepper    (1 book) go to top

Darcy ist mit ihrem sohn einige zeit nach dem tod ihres mannes nach New York gezogen und hat ein neues Leben angefangen. Allerdings hat sie nicht damit gerechnet dass sie ein stalking-opfer werden würde. Was als ganz harmloses, scheinbar zufälliges ereignis beginnt, macht ihr rasch das leben zur hölle.

Das buch ist gut geschrieben, liest sich flüssig und hat mehrere ebenen, in denen sich die hauptfigur bewegt. Es ist aber vielleicht nicht geeignet für ängstlicher charactere, welche auch ohne das buch schon hinter jeder ecke einen mörder oder etwas anderes schreckliches vermuten.

author: Kazuo Ishiguro    (1 book) go to top

Christopher Banks is a detective in London of the 1930-ies. He has come to England from Shanghai when he was a young boy.

After having read close to half the book, I still don't have much more information on what is supposed to be going on. Ishiguro lets his main character, Christopher, reflect in his memories but does not make apparent what the story is all about. One guesses that at some point, Christopher might travel to Shanghai again and try to find out what did happen to his parents. The writing style is very descriptive without saying much. After page 138 I finally gave up hoping to find something which might make it worth to go on reading.

author: Keisuke Matsumoto    (1 book) go to top

Nein, viele nützliche tipps mit welchen hausmitteln man welche flecken am besten beseitigt gibt es nicht in diesem büchlein. Zwar geht es ums sauber machen, aber eigentlich mehr ums sauber machen in unserem geist und herzen.

Matsumoto benutzt den beschrieb des reinigens von zimmern, geräten, garten etc. mehr als mittel zum zweck und als guten vergleich. Er zeigt uns auf, wie wir mit unserem generellen äusseren verhalten auch unser inneres verhalten beeinflussen und beschreibt den umgang mit unserem geist geschickt mit etwas, das wir aus weltlicher sicht besser verstehen, eben dem putzen. Als beispiel: wenn wir den wert der dinge nicht mehr achten und abgenutzte oder minim beschädigte sachen gleich wegwerfen statt sie zu reparieren, dann beeinflusst dieses verhalten auch unsere geistige haltung: wir betrachten auch beziehungen etc mehr und mehr als wegwerf-ware; wenn sie mal etwas schwieriger werden und vielleicht einfach nur ein bisschen klebeband bräuchten, schmeissen wir sie viel zu einfach weg.

Der vergleich mit dem sauber machen im alltag und im tempel hinkt nicht und das büchlein regt durchaus an, sich über gewisse dinge (endlich wieder einmal) gedanken zu machen.

Sehr empfohlen, aber eben, ein ratgeber für den frühlingsputz ist es ganz bestimmt nicht.

author: Ken Follett    (1 book) go to top

A group of ex-hippies has been living hidden out in a valley for the last 25 years without much contact to the rest of civilization. However, now a dam should be built to flood the valley so a hydro-power plant can be built. This would mean the end of the commune. In their despair they decide to threaten the governor of California to cause earthquakes unless the plans for all new power plants in the state are abolished. A crazy, unrealistic threat? Everybody thinks so, at first, and the FBI is investigating only proforma. But when there actually is a tremor at said time and location...

Is the plot realistic? Well, unlikely yes, but maybe it would really work. I won't spoil it for you and tell you how the group intends to cause quakes.

The first half of the book solidly builds on the plot, but later on the book picks up speed and things start to become more fast paced but also a bit weird. Not to say it is a bad book and I could not really put a finger on it, but my gut feeling just says "nah, something's wrong with at least the seconds part of this book".

author: Kim Harrison    (17 books) go to top

This is book 17 in the fabulous Hollows series. If you haven't read the previous books in the series, then don't bother with this one; to really enjoy this book you need to know what happened before.

Rachel has dealt with Constance, with Finnis, with Hodin. Ivy is back in Cincinnati. So everything should be fine, except for the despelling of Pike's brother. Well, if you have read the series up to here, you'll know that something unpleasant will turn up and it's Rachel who has to deal with it. An acquaintance of the past turns up. An angry one. One who feels betrayed, cheated. One who wants to have back what he considers his. But if he does get it into his hands, all sorts of evil are likely to break out... And this old acquaintance is not even the worst of them. Somebody else is much worse behind the scenes...

As usual with the Hollow series, also this book is a good read, thrilling, funny, captivating. What I feel is a new twist is that Rachel gets much more advice and ideas from her friends than she used to. Some of the best ideas do not come from herself, but from her closest friends. And she actually takes the advice, listens. But Rachel is not the only one changing. Bis is becoming more sure of himself. David is getting involved with a werefox. There is a daemon not only quite openly backing her up, but also more and more opening up to her.

Book 16 in the Hollows Series and it is still interesting. If you haven't read the previous books in this series, do yourself a favour and start with them; they are all good and you will understand what's going on in this book much better with the knowledge of what happened before.

As we know from the previous stories, some of Rachel's friends are not at her side currently; Ivy is in DC, Bis is comatose, Al will not talk to her any more. But it gets worse. One by one, her remaining friends get distracted. And this at a time when she sure could use some help. The vampires send somebody from DC to check upon Constance and thus threaten Rachel's subrosa position. It takes Rachel a very long time to realize what is really going on and acknowledge she was wrong and others were right.

As usual, the story and writing style is very addictive, making it hard to put the book away before you've read it to the last page. However, sometimes Rachel's (and other's) abilities are a bit overdone. And some "facts" change too easily. You can get rid of your smut this easily? Smut which wants to jump to other people?

This is number 15 in the Hollows series (and you should read the other books in the series in the correct order before reading this one) and, contrary to many other series, it is still very interesting and a pleasure to read.

Rachel is still living on Kisten's old boat, the church inhabitable and she doesn't want to move in with Trent. Finding a new place to live somehow is terribly difficult. And it turns out this is not only the case for Rachel but for many Inderlanders all around Cincinnati. The new master vampire is bound to move in and seems to claim most of the properties for herself and her camarilla. Unfair? That's not the only unfair streak of the new master vampire. And Rachel hates unfair. But standing up against a master vampire? Rachel has done that once and barely survived. But for Rachel 'barely survived' is all it takes. Besides, she has friends, more than she thinks.

Rachel Mariana Morgan is back! Reading the book does not feel like there has been a publishing pause of 6 years from the previous title in the series, the story continues seamlessly, though not exactly in the usual arrangement, the church is still inhabitable, Ivy is no longer with "Vampiric Charms", Trent and Rachel are on very good terms...

Spelling in your sleep? Rachel would not have thought that was possible until she wakes up drawing connected to a line. Before long she learns that she's not the only one doing unusual and bad thing in her sleep. Bit by bit Rachel learns about yet another magical individual, one which is not to be taken lightly. One, even the daemons are afraid of and do not know how to conquer. But someone has to do it. The toll is high, though.

Having mentioned that this is a book in a whole series, if you have not read the 13 which precede this title, then you definitely should start with them. This book assumes you know what happened before. The well known characters are not explained any more and there are lots of references to the previous adventures.

If you don't feel right at home reading the next few lines and recognize the characters, then you haven't read the previous books in the Hollows series. This is the 13th book in this series and without having read the others (in correct order), it would be close to impossible to understand what's going on in this book.

A seemingly small job goes terribly wrong at a totally unexpected moment and one of our three heroes, Rachel, Jenks, Ivy, is badly hurt. There is more to this job than initially apparent: someone insists an old dept be paid. A dept which seems impossible to pay. Even though Rachel insists what she's being asked to do is impossible without sending people into suicide, she agrees to demonstrate it and prove her point. However, the required curse is out of her realm and of all the people it is Landon who might be able to help. But to trust Landon? The cunning elf who would enjoy nothing more than to see Rachel dead? Indeed, Landon can help her with the curse, but he has got his own agenda, too. A double deadly agenda, a world-shattering agenda. If he can succeed, it will not only be Rachel to perish but some whole other species too. And it is way above even Rache's limit to stop Landon. If he's to be stopped, many others have to let go of their pride and thousands-year-old hatred for their enemies...

With this book, Kim Harrison brings the Hollows series to an end. Rachel, the main character of this series, has come a long way in these thirteen books; from being a runner for the I.S. to having her own runner business together with Jenks and Ivy, to become a were alpha, to discover she's the only day-walking daemon, and even dabbling in elven magic. And none of the books ever got boring.

Never heard of Trent, Jenks, Ivy, Rachel, Kisten, Al, Newt? Then you haven't read the preceding 11 books in the Hollows series. Please go back and read them. And do read them in the correct order, because each book builds on what happened in the books before. If you'd read this book without having read the others, it would be kind of hard to understand and you'd miss out much of the fun.

Rachel is doing security for Trent when Quen is away with the kids, and she more and more enjoys working with him. When she prevents a small accident, her charm terribly backfires out of the blue. But it is not only her charm that goes wrong. Something strange is happening in the Hollows. The most dangerous part is not even so much magic going wrong, that's only a small side effect. Rachel wouldn't be Rachel if she wasn't caught right in the middle of it and seemingly the only person able to figure things out and stop it. She finds herself overwhelmed by a kind of magic not yet experienced and a phenomenon the daemons outright dismiss as non-existing while the elves believe in it but go insane when dabbling in it.

Again, a book which is hard to put away before you're at the end. So much has happened since the whole series started out. And so much changed. Some things gradually evolving and happening in this twelfth book would seem unimaginable at the beginning. But there is also a slight feeling coming up that the series is slowly coming to an end. Rachel yet doing one more kind of magic which is not her own is starting to really stretch things.

You do know Rachel, Ivy, Jenks, Ku'Sox, Bis, right? You have read the ten previous books in this series, right? If not, then here is a word of recommendation: do yourself a favour and read the previous books in the series, otherwise there will be a lot of things in this book you do can not understand and appreciate.

Ku'Sox, the artificial daemon which can not be bested by any other daemon, understandably is not happy with the spell Rachel put on him. And he is of a mind to do something about it. Not only that, Ku'Sox's plan is much, much bigger. No longer will he have to endure any humiliation, every daemon and non-daemon will pay him homage and his race will become clean, superior. It's not only Rachel which is not so happy about such a plan, but also the daemons themselves. However, they are afraid of Ku'Sox, they dare not stand up against him. So it comes that Rachel, once fighting Daemons, is now trying to protect them. But Ku'Sox is stronger than any daemon, including her. Rachel, on the other hand, has more friends. Friends, though, can also be used against her...

As with the previous books in the Hollows series, when Rachel is out on an adventure there is adventure; fast paced, funny and difficult to put the book away for the night.

Book number 10 in the Hollows series. If you haven't read the preceding books, then go and read them first; the story in this book assumes you know what has happened before. If you haven't read the previous books in the series, then you'll often not know why people behave like this, who it is they are talking about etc. Don't worry, the whole series, including this book, is very enthralling (or maybe I should rather say bewitching :-), so you'll fly through the books in no time.

Rachel has finally acknowledged that she's not a normal witch. And she willingly and physically limited the magic she can do, strictly sticking to earth magic, stirring charms in her pots. This works well until she gets involved in a hunt done by the IS. It's "only" humans they are after, but these humans are not the usual, rather harmless kind. Rachel is even less sure about the usual categorization of black, gray and white: daemon, inderlander and human. Humans obviously can be just as bad as daemons, and similarly dangerous.

Harrison includes an additional chapter at the end of the book. It is a copy of chapter nineteen, but written in the voice of Trent. As Harrison mentions, she wondered what it would be like to tell the story in a third person view, instead of the first person view of Rachel. I think the first person approach she has settled for the series does work better (of after 10 books I'm just much more used to it?).

Book number 9 in the Hollows series. If you haven't read the preceding books, then go and read them first; there are a number of back references and the story in this book generally assumes you know what has happened before.

Rachel has been shunned, but a deal was made to remove her shunning at a public hearing if she apologizes for having used black magic. Rachel would not be Rachel if getting to the west coast was easy, safe and without major problems. And as always, the whole load of her problems is not decreasing but increasing.

What happens in this book gives, I believe, the whole story a new direction for the future. Things, which up to now have been a given, get somewhat shaky and uncertain. The whole setup, which was used in books 1-9, could possibly change in the future; at least the ground is laid out for changes.

One chapter in the middle of the book, when Rachel and her companions are attacked by a dark force, are rather bloody. That scene feels much like right out of a horror movie; a little overdone. Other than that, you get what you learnt to expect after having read eight of these books already. Kim Harrison is one of the few authors which succeeds to develop an ever evolving story over a larger number of books without getting boring, too predictable or too repetitive.

Is this really already the eighth book in the Hollows series? Yes it is. And it's not getting boring at all. Fast paced, thrilling, entertaining, captivating. If you haven't read the previous seven books of the series yet, please do yourself a favour and read them first. I think you'd be utterly lost if you started out with this book, because it very much builds on what has happened up to now.

Rachel Morgan would not be Rachel Morgan if she didn't get into any kind of trouble. Anyways, trouble is like her second name and she thrives on it. Getting out of it, often in spectacular ways, being her unintended speciality. This time she gets into crossfire with her own kind: witches. Powerful witches. Influential witches. White witches. And Rachel has to learn that white magic is not always good, just as black magic does not necessarily mean it is bad. It is more what you do with your magic that makes a spell or curse good or bad.

As with the other books in this series, do yourself a favour and read them in the correct sequence. This is the seventh book in he Hollows series.

Rachel and Ivy are still trying to find out who had murdered Kisten, but not making much progress. At times, tough, small bits and pieces of Rachel's memory of that disastrous night are coming back to her. (And, how could it be different with Rachel, things are usually not straight forward.)

The hunt for the truth about the night of Kisten's murder, however, is a sideline in this book. The main part concerns Edden's request for Rachel to help with bringing in the person responsible for almost killing Edden's son Glenn. That someone turns out to be a very old and powerful Inderlander, much too powerful for a witch to deal with. But as we already got to know in the previous books, the more impossible a task looks like, the more Rachel gets involved.

The relationship with Al takes a slight turn too, after a long time Rachel meets her brother again and a new character, Pierce, enters the story. I think Pierce will turn into a main character in one of the next books...

Even after seven books of the same series, I'm still looking forward to read the next one.

As with the other books in this series, do yourself a favour and read them in the correct sequence. This is the sixth book in he Hollows series.

Rachel is mourning for Kisten, but her life as well as her adventures and her trouble with the other species, such as elves, vampires and daemons, even with some of her own species, witches, do not stop because of that. There are unexpected changes with Ceri, Al is not so securely imprisoned as expected, her relationship with Ivy takes on a new turn and most importantly, Rachel finds out some well kept secrets about herself and her family. Not everything is the way she always thought...

As already the five preceding books in the Hollows series, it is fun to read and captivating. And even though this is already the sixth book, I'm still looking forward to reading the next one. It's not getting boring or too repetitive.

First things first. This is the fifth book in a series and I highly recommend to start with the first one and read them in order.

A serial killer is at work in the Hollows, trying to make the killings look like suicides. And somehow the I.S. seems to be covering up those killings, while the FIB wants to solve them, enlisting some help from Rachel. But it would not be Rachel, the adrenaline junkie, if she didn't get into way more trouble than this warrants for, crossing demons and master vampires and were alphas along the way and doing one or the other unbelievable thing.

As always in this series, very good reading, although, at the very end, things get a bit out of hand and happen a bit fast. The buildup to get there is very enjoyable, though.

This is the fourth book in the Hollows series. If you have not read the preceding three books of this series, then this book is not for you. Go back and read the other three first, otherwise there will be too many things you will not understand. If you have read the first three books, then welcome to another fast paced adventure of Rachel Mariana Morgan.

While previously Rachel, who is an earth witch but can use ley line magic too, usually got into trouble with some daemons it's weres this time she's up against. And for once she is also operating out of her home turf, Cincinnati. Of course, many of the usual characters are on board again, at least briefly. And look forward to getting to know Jenks in a completely new and unusual form. Also some other characters show a new side to them.

The book is a great read, never getting boring, always fast paced makes you constantly want to read just one more chapter before going to bed. So if you open this book, be prepared for a long read and short sleep.

You do have read the first two books in the Hollows series, don't you? If not, my first advice: go and read the first two books before this one. Second advice, don't give up if the second book is a bit gross, this third one is better again.

Basically also this book could be read by itself and it is a whole story, but it really does build on what has happened before and not knowing the content of the first two books would make reading "Every Which Way But Dead" only half as much fun. Things are mentioned briefly again where necessary, but of course not the full details can be given.

Now, what is happening in this book? Of course Rachel is up again against some bad boy this side of the ley lines. Actually that job is not even so difficult, even though it definitely is extremely dangerous. But the big struggle is with creatures from the other side of the ley lines, especially Al. But not only Rachel is having a hard time with Al, also Al is having a hard time with Rachel and has to realize he's not dealing with the average witch here.

While Rachel makes new friends, some are also turning away from her...

This book is less bloody than the second one. It's again well written, fast paced and capturing.

Rachel Morgan, a witch, Ivy Tamwood, a vampire and Jenks, a pixy. The three of them together form the private investigation agency "Vampiric Charms". Rachel has to run from a pack of werewolfs when trying to bring back a mascot fish which has been stolen from a baseball team. But then she is not paid for her services. Rent is due, though... But soon she is, more or less unvoluntarily, involved into something much bigger and skids into it deeper and deeper.

As already the first book in the series, Kim Harrison's writing is capturing, fast paced and full of humor. Lots of fun to read and sometimes really difficult to put away for the night. However, a few passages are quite grotesque. It really would not have been necessary to describe the state of the murdered witches in so much detail akin a bad Friday night horror movie. Bad enough to not not give it a top score.

Some of the things which happen in this book seem not to be really relevant to the ending of the story. But that's because this is a whole series and I'm certain one of the next books in the series will pick these things up and then they will be relevant. Also this second book in the Hollows series is full of references to what happened in the first book "Dead Witch walking" and some things might not make so much sense if you haven't read the first book. So if you are going to read some books of this series, do yourself a favour and read them in the correct order.

Kim Harrison creates a new world. One in which humans, witches, vampires, weres and other folk live together. It really is not your typical vampire story.

Rachel Morgan is a runner for the I.S., Inderland Security, which is some kind of police dealing with non-humans. But Rachel does something which puts her on the death list of her own agency: she quits her job and opens her own agency. Hiding from the I.S. Rachel, together with her friends, soon finds herself in big trouble trying to solve a case nobody ever asked her to solve.

Besides creating a new and interesting world, Harrison also succeeds in writing a fast paced and highly capturing story. There are a few places in the book which have the slight feel of a loose end, but considering this is the first book in a series, I expect later books to eventually pick them up.

author: Klaus Schmeh    (1 book) go to top

Steganographie kannte ich bis anhin nur aus der Computerwelt. Diese Art des Botschaften Versteckens nimmt in Schmeh's Buch nur einen kleinen Teil ein. Mit zahlreichen zum Teil humorvollen Beispielen wird in den ersten drei Teilen aufgezeigt, was Steganographie ist und was für verschiedene Methoden über die Jahrhunderte angewendet wurden um Nachrichten zu verstecken. Jargon Codes, Semagramme, Zinken, Akrostichen sind nur einige der zahlreichen Techniken, auf die im Buch eingegangen wird.

Im vierten Teil räumt der Autor gnadenlos mit Steganographie-Scharlatanerei auf und zeigt wiederum anhand etlicher Beispiele, dass noch lange nicht hinter jedem vermeintlich gefundenen Code auch wirklich ein Code steckt.

Dieses Buch gibt auf humorvolle Art und Weise einen Ueberblick über die vierschiedenen Arten, wie Nachrichten versteckt werden können. Wer jedoch eine wissenschaftliche Abhandlung erwartet wird enttäuscht sein. Der Leser, der eine technische Anleitung zur Steganographie sucht findet auch nicht, sehr wohl aber vielfältige Ideen und Anhaltspunkte.

author: Kristin Cashore    (3 books) go to top

Bitterblue is the third book in the Graceling Realm series and builds on the first (Graceling) and second (Fire) one. It is possible to follow the story without having read the previous books, but having read the other two will make it much easier to understand a lot of things, such as who Katsa is, what gracelings are, who Lech was and how he became what he was, etc.

Bitterblue is the young queen of the kingdom Monsea, daughter of Ashen and Leck, both deceased. Her kingdom is not in the best of states, due to her fathers' reign. However, she does not really know the poor state of her empire because her main advisors, which all have served under king Lech, keep her too busy to find out and shield her from the truth. Until, frustrated, Bitterblue decides to venture into the city by herself at night. Eventually she realizes that she's being much lied to and her people still suffer a lot from the terrible time under king Lech. She truly wants to improve things, be a good queen to her people, give them hope for the future, but that is not a simple task when you don't know who of your staff you can trust.

The whole book is about Bitterblue and her struggle to become a worthy queen and be fair and good to her people. Even though it is a good book, reading it feels a little bit like you are locked in the castle and now allowed to go outside, take much part in what Po or Katsa are doing. But then, that's exactly the way Bitterblue herself feels.

This is book 2 in the Graceling series. However, there is only some talk of Gracelings (the people which have different coloured eyes and are graced with some special skill). The only Graceling in this book is one which is a master mind controller and happens to fall through a crack into another kingdom. Most of the talk in this book is from this other of the seven kingdoms, the Dells. There Gracelings are unknown. Instead the Dells sport monsters. Very beautiful creatures. Their beauty can take in people and they do have the ability to mind control others. So does Fire, which is a human monster. Cansrel, her father was a much feared human monster but very close to the king. Fire's line of thought is rather different from her father's...

I enjoyed the first of the Graceling books more, but also this one is worthwhile to read.

Have you ever seen a person with two differently coloured eyes? If so, you've seen a graceling, a person who is graced with a special ability. This could be a special skill in cooking, mind reading, archery, medicine, whatever. But not always is the exact nature of such a grace what it appears to be.

Katsa is graced with special fighting skills. Even though she is a girl, there is not the slightest chance even ten highly trained warriors attacking her at once could do her much harm. For Randa, the king of Middluns, her grace is a very useful tool. But Katsa has also her own agenda, unknown to Randa.

When Katsa encounters another graced fighter, for the first time in her life she meets an opponent worthy to train with her. Very soon they become good friends and they happen to become involved in an adventure that requires even them to go to the very limits of their abilities.

This is an exceptionally good book but don't even think about starting to read it in fine weather or when you have lots of other things to do; putting it down before you've read it all is tremendously hard.

I'm convinced Kristin Cashore has two differently coloured eyes herself and surely her grace it writing good books.

author: Kyle Mills    (3 books) go to top

Kyle Mills succeeds to paint a rather interwoven scenario which still feels mostly straight forward to the reader. In this book not everything is the way one would expect. The supposedly good guys are breaking at least as many laws as the bad guys. Federal agencies are the ones helping small time crooks breaking the law big time and getting away with it. The big time criminals are the ones calling the police to help them catch some bad guys...

The whole plot is based around big scale heroin trade, terrorist groups and a rocket launcher which threatens US citizens and the FBI desperately tries to find. Mark Beamon, once upon a legend at the FBI, initially only wants to help out a friend of his with a small favour but in the end finds himself at the centre of all this mess. And true to his nature he is following his instinct much more than orders from above...

Fade is a former Navy SEAL. During his time, he was the best and often risked his life for his country. But when an accident left him almost crippled, his government turned its back on him, didn't pay for the surgery he would have needed. No wonder he is not on good speaking terms with the government and when years later Hillel Strand from Homeland Security wants him to come back for some job, he declines. However, Strand is not someone taking "No" for an answer. He tries to force Fade to come back. As he soon finds out, Fade still is the best and Hillel's attempt blows up right into his own face. Even though he has the police and Homeland Security resources at his disposal, Fade is still an enormeous threat to his life.

The short chapters and easily understood language and sentences make this book easy to read. One thing is difficult, though: putting it away. Just one more chapter before going to bed, and maybe still one more, and just another one...