Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Book 5)

Amazon.com

As his fifth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry approaches, 15-year-old Harry Potter is in full-blown adolescence, complete with regular outbursts of rage, a nearly debilitating crush, and the blooming of a powerful sense of rebellion. It's been yet another infuriating and boring summer with the despicable Dursleys, this time with minimal contact from our hero's non-Muggle friends from school. Harry is feeling especially edgy at the lack of news from the magic world, wondering when the freshly revived evil Lord Voldemort will strike. Returning to Hogwarts will be a relief... or will it?

The fifth book in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series follows the darkest year yet for our young wizard, who finds himself knocked down a peg or three after the events of last year. Somehow, over the summer, gossip (usually traced back to the magic world's newspaper, the Daily Prophet) has turned Harry's tragic and heroic encounter with Voldemort at the Triwizard Tournament into an excuse to ridicule and discount the teen. Even Professor Dumbledore, headmaster of the school, has come under scrutiny by the Ministry of Magic, which refuses to officially acknowledge the terrifying truth that Voldemort is back. Enter a particularly loathsome new character: the toadlike and simpering ("hem, hem") Dolores Umbridge, senior undersecretary to the Minister of Magic, who takes over the vacant position of Defense Against Dark Arts teacher--and in no time manages to become the High Inquisitor of Hogwarts, as well. Life isn't getting any easier for Harry Potter. With an overwhelming course load as the fifth years prepare for their Ordinary Wizarding Levels examinations (O.W.Ls), devastating changes in the Gryffindor Quidditch team lineup, vivid dreams about long hallways and closed doors, and increasing pain in his lightning-shaped scar, Harry's resilience is sorely tested.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, more than any of the four previous novels in the series, is a coming-of-age story. Harry faces the thorny transition into adulthood, when adult heroes are revealed to be fallible, and matters that seemed black-and-white suddenly come out in shades of gray. Gone is the wide-eyed innocent, the whiz kid of Sorcerer's Stone. Here we have an adolescent who's sometimes sullen, often confused (especially about girls), and always self-questioning. Confronting death again, as well as a startling prophecy, Harry ends his year at Hogwarts exhausted and pensive. Readers, on the other hand, will be energized as they enter yet again the long waiting period for the next title in the marvelous, magical series. (Ages 9 and older) --Emilie Coulter

Book Description

There is a door at the end of a silent corridor. And it's haunting Harry Potter's dreams. Why else would he be waking in the middle of the night, screaming in terror?

Here are just a few things on Harry's mind:

• A Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher with a personality like poisoned honey.

• A venomous, disgruntled house-elf

• Ron as keeper of the Gryffindor Quidditch team

• The looming terror of the end-of-term Ordinary Wizarding Level exams

. . . and of course, the growing threat of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. In the richest installment yet of J. K. Rowling's seven-part story, Harry Potter is faced with the unreliability of the very government of the magical world and the impotence of the authorities at Hogwarts.

Despite this (or perhaps because of it), he finds depth and strength in his friends, beyond what even he knew, boundless loyalty; and unbearable sacrifice.

Though thick runs the plot, listeners will race through these tapes and leave Hogwarts, like Harry, wishing only for the next train back.

Customer Reviews:

Great book Fast delivery.......2007-10-05

this was a great book to read the series is starting to get good and this person delivered faster then my other book

The Order of the Phoenix rises..........2007-09-23

After reading the fourth book in the series I thought it could just not get any better... boy was I wrong! Harry staves off an attack by Dementors, saves his cousin's life, and has to face a trial at the Ministry of Magic, all before the school year even begins.

With Voldemort back, Dumbledore has recalled the Order of the Phoenix, a group of Wizards and Witches that fought against You-Know-Who the last time. Harry is hidden away for a short period of time at the secret head quarters of the Order, while awaiting his trail at the Ministry of Magic for 'Under Age Use of Magic away from School'. It soon becomes evident that the Minister of Magic is not only determined to not believe that Voldemort has returned, but has even started a compaign to discredit both Harry and Dumbledore to try and prevent people from believing them.

During the School year Harry and the other fifth years have increasingly large piles of school work to complete, and to perpare for their OWLs, which come at the end of their fifth year. Meanwhile the students, and teachers, have a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher to deal with, who has been appointed by the Ministry of Magic! Things at Hogwarts go from bad to worse, as this new teacher is given a wide range of powers over the other teachers via a stream of Ministry 'Educational Decrees'. Meanwhile Harry is plagued by troubling dreams, of traveling down a darkened hallway to a mysterious door, which leaves his scar burning more and more intensely. Perhaps even more puzzling, and disturbing, to Harry is the fact that Dumbledore seems to be going to lengths to ignore him.

Anyone who has enjoyed the past books in this series will love 'The Order of the Phoenix. This book takes the mystical fantasy elements of the earlier books, and ties them into an increasingly darkening plot line, pitting Harry and his friends against even worse dangers around every corner.

RD Williams, author of 'The Lost Gate'.

Entertaining and kept my interest.......2007-09-21

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was far darker than the previous book but kept my interest throughout. Many of the characters are either becoming more sinister or are displaying a great tenacity to fight evil. Overall, I enjoyed this book far more than the previous one although the Potter series, as a whole, still doesn't strike me a "great literature" but rather an entertaining experience. I will say that as the plot progressed, I've become more eager to find out what's going to happen next; therefore, I'm going to start book six tonight.

Adolescents at Hogwarts.......2007-09-17

In this fifth book of the Harry Potter series we join Harry at the first part of the summer after his fourth year at Hogwarts. Harry finds himself back with the Dursleys, isolated in the Muggles' world once again. But all this changes as Dementors attack him. We then move into the school year where things do not look up for Harry. It seems that the Ministry of Magic has made sure that no one would believe of Harry's encounter with Voldemort of nothing more than his imagination.

During the school year it seems our hero does not deal well with his adolescent years. He is clueless about everything; what is happening to him, his friends, relationships, and common sense nor is he able to take advice. It is his almost constant whining, inability to control his anger and ineptitude in daily teenage life that has me drop my rating to three. Even with this the plot is moved along as we are introduced to the Order of the Phoenix, Hogwarts curriculum trying to cause change by the Ministry of Magic, and Harry scar gives more warnings.

I am still going to give it five stars.........2007-09-13

I too thought the book was very drawn out, however, I understand why this needed to happen. The Order of the Phoenix takes place after the fourth (Duh) in which the readers come to find that the lovely Voldermort has come back and stronger than ever. Plagued with constant ridicule from the daily prophet and the minister of magic Harry must remain calm and continue to do as he does and fight the snickers and the sneers from the people at Hogwarts. I really liked the beginning of this book because it started off with some pretty good suspense. There is an introduction of two new characters and I thought very much that they added quite nicely to the dynamic of the story. I positivley promise that you are going to loathe one of the new people so much, it will make your head spin. The kids at Hogwarts begin to take matters in their own hands when forces are way out of their control and the book moves nicely into some history of Harry's family and professor snape. The end is a great ending and a brilliant set up for the sixth ( I have already started it, soo good). If you have seen the movie and are wondering if this book may be for you, just pick it up and enjoy it.

Average customer rating:

An introduction to Perl
Get the second edition
Great book
Enjoyable Read
Perfect introduction to Perl scripting

Learning Perl, Fourth Edition
Randal L. Schwartz , Tom Phoenix , and brian d foy
Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0596101058

Amazon.com

In this smooth, carefully paced course, a leading Perl trainer teaches you to program in the language that threatens to make C, sed, awk, and the Unix shell obsolete for many tasks. This book is the "official" guide for both formal (classroom) and informal learning. It is fully accessible to the novice programmer.

Book Description

Learning Perl, better known as "the Llama book", starts the programmer on the way to mastery. Written by three prominent members of the Perl community who each have several years of experience teaching Perl around the world, this edition has been updated to account for all the recent changes to the language up to Perl 5.8. Perl is the language for people who want to get work done. It started as a tool for Unix system administrators who needed something powerful for small tasks. Since then, Perl has blossomed into a full-featured programming language used for web programming, database manipulation, XML processing, and system administration--on practically all platforms--while remaining the favorite tool for the small daily tasks it was designed for. You might start using Perl because you need it, but you'll continue to use it because you love it. Informed by their years of success at teaching Perl as consultants, the authors have re-engineered the Llama to better match the pace and scope appropriate for readers getting started with Perl, while retaining the detailed discussion, thorough examples, and eclectic wit for which the Llama is famous. The book includes new exercises and solutions so you can practice what you've learned while it's still fresh in your mind. Here are just some of the topics covered:

Perl variable types
subroutines
file operations
regular expressions
text processing
strings and sorting
process management
using third party modules

If you ask Perl programmers today what book they relied on most when they were learning Perl, you'll find that an overwhelming majority will point to the Llama. With good reason. Other books may teach you to program in Perl, but this book will turn you into a Perl programmer.

Customer Reviews:

An introduction to Perl.......2007-10-05

This book is a gives a gentle introduction to Perll; by the time you have gone through this book, you would have touched on some very simple operations and common language idioms found in Perl. This is not a comprehensive guide; on the contrary the book is selective about covering only those constructs and issues that one is most likely to face early on in programming with Perl.

This does not collect any of the more powerful feature in Perl like Reference; Data Structures; Manipulating lists of list.

I would not recomend this book.

Get the second edition.......2007-10-05

I learned Perl from the second edition of this book a few years ago, and was very impressed. After a few years without writing a single line of Perl, I needed to learn it again, so I bought the most current version of this book, the fourth edition. I was not as impressed with the fourth edition, it seems that a lot of the more advanced, and useful, stuff has been moved out of this book into the intermediate book. This book is missing a lot of the features that makes Perl a productive language. I'd try a few online tutorials first and then see if the intermediate book would work. Or, if you can find an older edition give that a shot.

Great book.......2007-08-12

First of all, this book is only the beginning. It does teach the basics including arrays, scalars, functions and many other topics that are central to a basic understanding of Perl. It also coves regular expressions which aside from the great swatch of modules is one of Perl's greatest strengths.

Because of that and the teaching style this book earns the 5 star rating.

Toward the end it hints at some of the other 'required' topics such as references, modules and objects. After you've read this book get a copy of Intermediate Perl to read up on those topics.

Enjoyable Read.......2007-07-25

The first thing that stood out to me about the book was the humor of the authors. The footnotes were not only informative but also good ways to lighten the mood of the book.
However, the jokes do not take away from the content in any way - you will learn a lot from the llama book. I always recommend the llama to anyone who asks for a book to learn Perl.
Now, this isn't an introduction to programming, programming basics are assumed (which isn't much to ask). But that's another thing I liked about "Learning Perl" - the authors give you the information you need with no fluff. Everything is straight to the point and explained clearly & concisely.

Perfect introduction to Perl scripting.......2007-07-14

I learnt Perl scripting from the third edition of The Llama, and recently had cause to brush up my Perl for a new job, so I thought I'd check out the fourth edition. I'm pleased to say it's still an excellent work. If you want to use Perl as a scripting language, this may be all you need for your entire scripting career. Some basic programming knowledge might be helpful, but even a complete beginner could get something out of this.

The basics are covered well: strings, numbers, control structures, subroutines, arrays and hashes, and most importantly, reading and writing files, and the mighty regular expressions. In fact, I've not read a better treatment of regular expressions anywhere else. Everything is clearly explained and well-written. Basically, this is the gold standard against which all introductory books to a programming language should be judged.

However, this book makes no claim to covering all of Perl. At least the main text of the book doesn't. I don't know what happened with the blurb on the back of the book, but it mentions, among other things: threading, references, objects, modules and package implementation. Technically, these topics are indeed present, but only in that a paragraph each is devoted to them in Appendix B. You will certainly learn nothing of any value about them.

There are some other minor quibbles: you may find the constant Flintstones references tiring after a while. Also potentially wearing are the sometimes inane footnotes, which breaks the flow of the reading experience for little reward. On the other hand, I found them a lot less annoying in this edition, so perhaps I've just mellowed out in the intervening years. Finally, the last chapter does a very whistlestop tour of map, grep, exception handling with eval, and array and hash slicing. I've never found the 'cram a bunch of stuff we don't have time to talk about into one chapter' approach to be very useful, and it doesn't work here, either. Fortunately, apart from the slices, it's all covered again at slightly greater length in Intermediate Perl.

Speaking of Intermediate Perl, if you want to learn Perl as a general purpose language, rather than for short scripts, you need to go and read that one next. Many suggest that you can graduate onto The Camel straight after The Llama, but I strongly disagree -- I tried and failed miserably.

But as long as you bear in mind you're only getting half the Perl experience, this is still the book I would thrust into the hands of anyone looking to learn Perl.

Amelia Earhart's Shoes: Is the Mystery Solved?

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"The Forensic Search for Amelia Earhart"
Welcome back, TIGHARs
HOW you solve the mystery is just as important
Fantastic, not at all dry!
I Couldn't Put This Book Down!

Amelia Earhart's Shoes: Is the Mystery Solved?
King Thomas F.
Manufacturer: AltaMira Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0759101310

Book Description

Can modern science tell us what happened to Amelia Earhart? The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has spent fifteen years searching for the famous lost pilot using everything from archival research and archaeological survey to side-scan sonar and the analysis of radio wave propagation. In this spellbinding book, four of TIGHAR's scholars offer tantalizing evidence that the First Lady of the Air and her navigator Fred Noonan landed on an uninhabited tropical island but perished before they could be rescued. Do they have Amelia's shoe? Parts of her airplane? Are her bones tucked away in a hospital in Fiji? Come join their fascinating expedition and examine the evidence for yourself! The new paperback edition brings the search up to the present, including tantalizing evidence of campfires and charred bones found on remote Nikumaroro.

Customer Reviews:

"The Forensic Search for Amelia Earhart".......2007-09-04

"Amelia Earhart's Shoes: Is the Mystery Solved?", Udated 2004 Ed., Thomas F. King, et al., AltaMira Press, NY 2001, ISBN: 0-7591-0131-0, PB 374 pgs., plus 23 pg. Notes, 9 pg. Biblio., 20 pg. Index, & 104 B & W photos, illus. or maps., 6" x 9".

This is an academic work by a contingent of skilled scientific experts whose writings & basic investigative work was coordinated, in part & on behalf of TIGHAR (Int. Group of Historical Aircraft Recovery) & updated 2004. The 27 chapters describe a forensic approach to solve the mystery of aviatrix AE's disappearance enroute 2,223 miles to Howland Isle from Lae, New Guinea, July 2, 1937.

The book's format & length makes for difficult reading: -- it is based on best available scientific evidences & hypotheses of multiple disciplines of archeology, geophysics, aeronautics, anthropology, and review of both private & governmental archival information in addition to tabulating their search findings on tiny remote South Pacific Phoenix Isle "Gardner", but renamed Nikumaroro, or "Niku". Author was a principle TIGHAR investigator taking part in expeditions to Niku, & he writes with authority, -- having "been there, done that!"

Inclusion of more than 100 photos, illustrations, maps, etc., makes the reading more easily understood & tolerable: -- for it is not a book one picks up and being enchanted 'reads from cover to cover' without pause. For readers who want an up-to-date analysis of AE's disappearance this book is best read after the reader is thoroughly familiar with AE's character, avocations, skills, life experiences's and accolades by the press, politicians & the powerful, -- for Amelia was a complex person living in exciting, changing times on the cutting edge of new technologies.

Many of the chapters begin with stanzas of word parodies to be sung to certain melodies, attributable to TIGHAR but not author King. The parodies I found to be highly irregular, unsettling & not in best taste, so downgraded book from 5* to 4*.

Welcome back, TIGHARs.......2006-10-27

Those persistent TIGHARs are back with more suggestive but inconclusive research about what happened to Amelia Earhart, who disappeared in 1937 -- somewhere.
Every so often, somebody shows up in Hawaii with a kooky theory about Earhart, ranging from shot by the Japanese as a spy to still alive and keeping house in New Jersey.
The International Group for Historical Aircraft Recovery is far from kooky.
For one thing, they appear to have managed the trick of being zealous without becoming zealots. As lead author Thomas King puts it, "Most people have more pressing things to do" than hunt for a lost airplane that, given the odds, would more likely than not be under three miles of water.
The TIGHARs work, for free, in their spare time, on the assumption that, despite the geographical odds, Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan didn't just run out of gas and sink under the ocean. They think Earhart missed her target but may have crash landed on an intermittently inhabited (but in 1937 empty) island named Nikumaroro, where Earhart and Noonan might have either survived for a while or been eaten by crabs.
It's "a mystery that can't be put down," King says.
But hard to pin down.
Since the publication of "Amelia Earhart's Shoes" in 2001, the TIGHARs have run down more physical evidence, including things that look a lot like panels from a Lockheed Electra, but nothing definitive yet. The revised, 2005 edition is preferred over the first edition.
The story of the hunt also reveals a great deal of fascinating information about the South Pacific, which is big, mostly empty and weird.

HOW you solve the mystery is just as important.......2006-09-26

Who says historical research and science have to be boring? In Amelia Earhart's Shoes, Dr. Tom King and others take us on a winding (sometimes loopy, even!) journey that tries to answer the question: What happened to famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart and renowned navigator Fred Noonan in 1937 after they vanished during her around-the-world flight attempt?

Amelia Earhart's Shoes does not pretend to solve the mystery - it does show that by applying the scientific method to a popular event, you can strip away all the myths and fables and assumptions and come up with relatively simple explanations that can be tested to see if they are true or false. That the scientific method may upset a few of those legendary apple carts along the way is proof that it works - something is either true or not true, provable or not provable. In Earhart's case, the truth may turn out to be much more mundane than some of the more colorful "solutions" to her disappearance would have us believe.

There is a lot of information in Shoes, but it is presented in an easy to read, almost chatty style (think ghost stories around the campfire while making s'mores) that keeps you turning the pages to see what the heck is going to happen next. The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has now been to the South Pacific eight times to try and prove or disprove their hypothesis that Earhart and Noonan missed their destination, tiny Howland Island, and landed on another deserted island, only to die (or perhaps be completely missed) before the frantic searchers could get to them.

Amelia Earhart's Shoes is a great read that should be on the bookshelf of everyone interested in what really did happen out there in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean almost 70 years ago.

Fantastic, not at all dry!.......2006-05-02

I saw one of the people involved in this project speak at EAA's big national air show in Oshkosh, WI last summer. It was the most popular lecture session I attended while I was there. Interested, I picked up this book expecting a thorough but dry, academic read.

Was I ever wrong! This book is not only fascinating, it's funny! It's written with some dry humor that made me want to keep reading more. And the authors lay out a strong argument, to boot. It does make one wonder...

I Couldn't Put This Book Down!.......2002-05-03

I picked up this book at my library on a lark. I've always been interested in what really happened to Amelia Earhart, but always just assumed that her plane crashed into the ocean. This book, however, completely opened my eyes to a new hypothosis: that Amelia and her navigator managed to land on an island and send out radio signals for help. The information presented in this book isn't just wild guesses and conspiracy theories - the authors make a point of backing up their thoughts with cold, hard evidence. I was hooked from the first page and got so engrossed that I ended up not doing my work at my job just so that I could finish a few more chapters. The book also has a wicked sense of humor and debunks the myth that scientists are just stodgy old guys. I'd reccomend this book to anyone with even an ounce of curosity. I'm holding my breath until Dr. Tom King and the other authors put out another book on Amelia. I can't wait to see what they find!

The Gregg Reference Manual (University of Phoenix Custom Edition) (10th Volume)

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The Gregg Reference Manual (University of Phoenix Custom Edition) (10th Volume)

Manufacturer: McGraw Hill Irwin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Spiral-bound
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ASIN: 0073133485

Product Description

Gregg's manual of style, grammar, usage and formatting, specially produced for the University of Phoenix. Spirally bound with foldover page.

Average customer rating:

A worthy (as expected) successor
Good follow up to the The Llama, but poorly organised
Good Book For Classroom Setting
Good, but not great
Good sequel to Learning Perl

Intermediate Perl
Randal L. Schwartz , Tom Phoenix , and brian d foy
Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0596102062

Book Description

Perl is a versatile, powerful programming language used in a variety of disciplines, ranging from system administration to web programming to database manipulation. One slogan of Perl is that it makes easy things easy and hard things possible. Intermediate Perl is about making the leap from the easy things to the hard ones.

Originally released in 2003 as Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules and revised and updated for Perl 5.8, this book offers a gentle but thorough introduction to intermediate programming in Perl. Written by the authors of the best-selling Learning Perl, it picks up where that book left off. Topics include:

Packages and namespaces
References and scoping
Manipulating complex data structures
Object-oriented programming
Writing and using modules
Testing Perl code
Contributing to CPAN

Following the successful format of Learning Perl, we designed each chapter in the book to be small enough to be read in just an hour or two, ending with a series of exercises to help you practice what you've learned. To use the book, you just need to be familiar with the material in Learning Perl and have ambition to go further.

Perl is a different language to different people. It is a quick scripting tool for some, and a fully-featured object-oriented language for others. It is used for everything from performing quick global replacements on text files, to crunching huge, complex sets of scientific data that take weeks to process. Perl is what you make of it. But regardless of what you use Perl for, this book helps you do it more effectively, efficiently, and elegantly.

Intermediate Perl is about learning to use Perl as a programming language, and not just a scripting language. This is the book that turns the Perl dabbler into the Perl programmer.

Customer Reviews:

A worthy (as expected) successor.......2007-10-09

Successors are not always as expected. In this case you do get from this trio of authors, who are classics in their own right, just what you expect. In my own case, I needed to get good at OO Perl and fast. In three days, I covered the major chapters thoroughly, went off to my interview and in the end was told, "hey, you really know your stuff". This book intends and does indeed follow well the Learning Perl classic. If you finished the meat of the classic, this is the dessert. You'll recognize the writing style and flavour. There are no surprises. In my opinion, another classic.

Good follow up to the The Llama, but poorly organised.......2007-07-14

If you've mastered The Llama, make haste to read this one. Even if you only want to do scripting with Perl, you'll eventually find you need data structures slightly more complicated than just flat arrays and hashes, and you need to know about references for that. While The Camel does contain a fair chunk of material on just this subject, it was a bit too much for me to digest after The Llama. If Intermediate Perl (aka The Alpaca) had been around for me to read, I would have had a much easier time.

Written in the same style as The Llama, this breeze through most of the rest of Perl, in particular: references, objects, packages and modules. These are the bits that you need to use Perl as a general purpose programming language, not just for scripting. In a similar pragmatic vein, it also covers how to use tools to build your own packages in the CPAN style, and there's a good chunk of material on using Test::More for unit tests. Probably the only thing missing is material on type globs and symbol tables, although hopefully, brian d foy's forthcoming Mastering Perl will fill in these gaps.

The bottom line is this is Llama part 2, and you need to read it if you want to have any hope of understanding anyone else's Perl. But I can't give it five stars. The major problem is that the material is not very well organised. At the chapter level, objects are sandwiched between modules and packages. It would have been far preferable to keep the module and package information together. As a result, the distinction between modules and packages is rather muddied, and the introduction of objects in the middle just makes things worse. Overall, I found the explanations to lack the clarity of the Llama.

A more minor complaint is that, while there are mercifully fewer annoying footnotes, the Gilligan's Island theme (if, like me, you had no exposure to this growing up, you might want to read the Wikipedia article first!) grates far sooner than the Flintstones flavour of the Llama.

That said, make this your second book on Perl. Then, _still_ don't read The Camel yet. Avail yourself of Perl Best Practices first.

Good Book For Classroom Setting.......2007-02-20

I picked up this book for a class that I was teaching at my office. The goal of the class was to train HTML/CSS/JavaScript and/or Java programmers to code in Perl since a large portion of our code base is written in Perl. Overall, I think that the book was a good choice for the class for a number of reasons.

First of all, the book is already written with a classroom setting in mind. The authors have used previous versions of the book, titled "Learning Perl Objects, References and Modules", for their own courses. This updated version benefits from all of the hours of empirical testing that it has received in the classroom. There are many thoughtful additions like having all of the chapters close to the same size. This allowed for me to assign a single chapter per session and know that I could comfortably fit the lecture and discussion of the chapter into a two-hour session. There are also exercises at the end of each chapter and answers for those exercises (with discussion) in an appendix.

This book is good for getting people just learning the language ready for the TMTOWTDI/TIMTOWTDI aspect of Perl. Take something simple like opening files... there are at least four 'standard' ways to do it. The book prepares you for all of the different versions of annoyances/features like this that show up in Perl code by walking through the evolution of the feature.

Another reason that I like this selection of book is that data files and code examples are actually available for download. I've been shocked that some of the programming books that I've gotten lately actually don't have this addition.

Finally, the course that I'm teaching is for people who probably already know how to program, at least a little, but they don't know Perl. I didn't want to drag them through all of the picky details of the language by starting with "Learning Perl" or something equivalent. This book has been a good choice for introducing programmers to Perl. I do have to stop occasionally and explain some fundamentals of the language, but not too often... maybe I just work with smart (or shy) people :)

Of course, the book isn't perfect. As odd as it seems, one of the biggest complaints that I get is over the Gilligan references that are used in all of the examples in the book. There is also some coverage of packaging modules for CPAN. This is useful, just not for the particular class that I'm teaching, so we skipped that chapter. Of course, both of these complaints are pretty weak.

In short, this is a good book, especially if you are doing a training session about Perl.

Good, but not great.......2007-02-15

I didn't like the storyline, but I did learn how to handle anonymous arrays better.

Good sequel to Learning Perl.......2007-01-27

The first edition of this book was "Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules". I never read that previous edition, so I can't comment on how that book stacks up against this new edition. This book is intended to pick up where Learning Perl left off. Its purpose is to show you how to use Perl to write larger more complex programs. As in Learning Perl, each chapter is small enough to read in an hour or so. Each chapter ends with a series of exercises to help you practice what you've just learned, and the answers are in the appendix for your reference. You don't have to know Unix to benefit from this book. Most everything in this book applies equally well to Windows ActivePerl from ActiveState and all other modern implementations of Perl. To use this book effectively, you just need to be familiar with the material in Learning Perl and have the ambition to go further. You should read this book from beginning to end, stopping to do the exercises as you go along. The following is the structure of the book:

Chapter 1, Introduction, just goes over what you should already know and how to use the book.

Chapter 2, Intermediate Foundations, introduces some intermediate-level Perl idioms used throughout the book. These are the things that typically set apart the beginning and intermediate Perl programmers.

Chapter 3, Using Modules, is about the building blocks for Perl programs. They provide reusable subroutines, variables, and even object-oriented classes. It also looks at the basics of using modules that others have already written.

Chapter 4 introduces references, which are the basis for complex data structures, object-oriented programming (OOP), and fancy subroutine magic. They're the magic that was added between Perl version 4 and version 5 to make it all possible. A Perl scalar variable holds a single value. An array holds an ordered list of one or more scalars. A hash holds a collection of scalars as values, keyed by other scalars. Although a scalar can be an arbitrary string, which allows complex data to be encoded into an array or hash, none of the three data types are well suited to complex data interrelationships. This is a job for the reference, which enables a level of redirection that allows the same code to operate on different sets of data.

Chapter 5, References and Scoping shows how to copy and pass around references like any other scalar. At any given time, Perl knows the number of references to a particular data item. Perl can also create references to anonymous data structures and create references automatically as needed to fulfill certain kinds of operations. This chapter look at copying references and how it affects scoping and memory usage.

Chapter 6, Manipulating Complex Data Structures, starts by using the debugger to examine complex data structures and then uses Data::Dumper to show the data under programmatic control. Next, you learn to store and retrieve complex data easily and quickly using Storable, and finally you wrap up with a review of grep and map and see how they apply to complex data.

Chapter 7, Subroutine References shows how to capture behavior as an anonymous subroutine that you create dynamically and execute later. In the same way that taking a reference to an array lets you have the same code work on different arrays at different times, taking a reference to a subroutine allows the same code to call different subroutines at different times. Also, references permit complex data structures. A reference to a subroutine allows a subroutine to effectively become part of that complex data structure

Chapter 8, Filehandle References, stores filehandles in scalar variables that you can easily pass around your program or store in data structures. You've seen arrays, hashes, and subroutines passed around in references, permitting a level of indirection to solve certain types of problems. We can also store filehandles in references to create new solutions to old problems.

Chapter 9, Practical Reference Tricks,looks at optimizing sorting and dealing with recursively defined data.

Chapter 10, Building Larger Programs, looks at how to break up a program into pieces and includes some of the concerns that arise when you put those pieces back together again, or when many people work together on the same program. You learn to build larger programs by separating code into separate files and namespaces.

Chapter 11, Introduction to Objects, shows how to work with classes, method calls, inheritance, and overriding.

Chapter 12, Objects with Data, shows how to add per-instance data, including constructors, getters, and setters.

Chapter 13, Object Destruction looks at an important topic: what happens when objects go away. When the last reference to a Perl data structure goes away, Perl automatically reclaims the memory of that data structure, including destroying any links to other data. Of course, that in turn may cause Perl to destroy other ("contained") structures as well.

Chapter 14, Some Advanced Object Topics, answers the questions "Do all objects inherit from a common class?" "What if a method is missing?" "What about multiple inheritance?" or "How can I tell what sort of object I have?" and other advanced questions pertaining to objects.

Chapter 15, Exporter, shows how to decide what to export and how to create your own import routines. In Chapter 3, you learned how to use modules, some of which pulled functions into the current namespace. Now you learn how to get your own modules to do that.

Chapter 16, Writing a Distribution, shows how to package a module for sharing, including portable installation instructions. In the previous chapter, you created a fictional Island::Plotting::Maps module and built the right support for Exporter so that we could include use Island::Plotting::Maps in a program. While the resulting .pm file was useful, it wasn't very practical. There is more work to do before you can share your work, whether that means simply installing it yourselves on another machine or giving it to someone else to use.

Chapter 17, Essential Testing, covers testing your code to ensure it does what you want it to do. As briefly described in Chapter 16, a distribution contains a testing facility that you can invoke from make test. This allows you to write and run tests during development and maintenance, and it also lets your end user verify that the module works in their environment. You should look at "Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook" for in-depth coverage.

Chapter 18, Advanced Testing, gives you a taste of some of the more popular test modules. These modules are usually not part of the Perl standard distribution (unlike Test::More) and you'll need to install them yourself. You'll learn how to test complex aspects of code and also meta-code subjects such as documentation and test coverage.

Chapter 19, Contributing to CPAN, shows how you can contribute to the Perl community at large. The mechanism for sharing your work is called the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN), which has thousands of different modules.

I found this book to be a seamless continuation of "Learning Perl". Everything is explained very well and there are plenty of examples. It really is ideal for self study. Having the answers at the back of the book was helpful, too. There are not just a bunch of pieces of code as answers, but good explanations as to how and why you would take a particular path in solving an exercise. Highly recommended, especially to the self-taught.

Average customer rating:

off key
Great Book
Amazing
Complicated and overwrought
not a pleasant read

Spandau Phoenix: A Novel
Greg Iles
Manufacturer: Signet
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0451179803

Book Description

"A scorching read."--John Grisham

From the depths of World War II, a buried Nazi secret comes to terrifying life...

"An avalanche of action. . .an incredible web of intrigue."--Clive Cussler

Customer Reviews:

off key.......2007-07-14

I love every other book he has written. This one is completely different. I may not have liked it because it wasn't what I was expecting, but I could not finish it.

Great Book.......2007-01-25

I really enjoyed this book and would have given it a 5 rating, but it was about 100 pages too long. The book gives great insight not only to WW II but it also gives insight into Berlin during the time of the Berlin Wall. There were a few characters that were not necessary to the story and plot line, but Mr. Iles kept my attention throughout the overlong book. It was my 1st novel by Mr. Iles but I will definately try another.

Amazing.......2007-01-05

Its amazing what you're willing to do to pass time in the desert. Reading was never something to interest me. However, after reading Spandau Phoenix I intend to read more of Iles's work.

WWII has always been an interesting subject for me and this book is just brilliant. It educates and entertains at the same time with a believable story. The book explores the conspiracy theory of deputy fuhrer Rudolph Hess of Nazi Germany and his flight to England. It defines a master plan made by the Fuhrer himself to ultimatly control all of Europe with the help of an unlikely allie. All this and more is revealed slowely as you turn pages and get more indepth of a new secret ploy ran by a ghost from the past.

Whith so many good things to say, I did find some things to fault. There tends to be to many characters to keep track of at times, some of which roles could have been eliminated completely. As another reviewer ponited out, at the end when the character in question is faced with the question, "why?". I expected Iles to explore the reasons from the point of view of a Nazi Character. It was a dissapointment. Then again it could be brilliance not to answer "why?". Whatever happened then, whatever reasons there were, maybe its best for the dead to bury the dead.

Complicated and overwrought.......2006-03-25

Having previously read Greg Iles's "Dead Sleep" which I thoroughly enjoyed and found to be both creepy and exciting, I approached this one with a lot of eagerness and interest.

After about page 70, I was starting to get frustrated by the way the novel unfolded, but decided to stay with it. Although I was pleased to finish it, I found the story line to be overly complicated, filled with too many characters and overwrought in its execution. Things were too loose and the story although at times a bit infeasible would be of much higher quality if tightened up a bit, with more focus and less switching from scene to scene.

The subject matter was very interesting and would have been handled in a more capable manner by the likes of Ken Follett, Nelson DeMille or Frederick Forsyth.

not a pleasant read.......2006-01-22

greg iles is one of my favourite author but this book is such a downer..
i tried reading it and fell asleep twice that in the end i gave up even before reaching page 100...
if jeffrey archer was to write this story i'm sure he would;ve done a good job...
the book was too long, it;s confusing and just plain boring..
i was really dissapointed as i am a HUGE fan of his books especially blood memory and sleep no more
wish it could've been better..really do

Seven Seconds or Less: My Season on the Bench with the Runnin' and Gunnin' Phoenix Suns

Average customer rating:

Great story with a couple of flaws
Feeds every NBA fan thirst of what goes on behind the closed doors of Phoenix Suns Basketball
Phoenix Suns
If you want a good sports book, this is the one.
A gripping chronicle of a tremendous season, in retrospect

Seven Seconds or Less: My Season on the Bench with the Runnin' and Gunnin' Phoenix Suns
Jack McCallum
Manufacturer: Touchstone
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 074329811X

Book Description

In Seven Seconds or Less, Sports Illustrated's chief NBA writer, Jack McCallum, gets in the paint with the Phoenix Suns and takes a season-long look at the NBA's most exciting and controversial team.

A few weeks before the 2005-2006 NBA training camps began, Jack McCallum called the Phoenix Suns ace director of public relations to propose a story idea for Sports Illustrated. He would spend the preseason with the team as an "assistant coach" and then write a story about his experiences. He was quickly granted access, and while his role as "assistant coach" lasted only through the preseason, McCallum stayed on with the team throughout their amazing 2005-2006 season. McCallum was looking for real inside access and he certainly got it. He spent the season in the locker room and in the coaches' meetings, learning what makes this wildly popular, innovative, and international assemblage of talented players and brilliant coaches tick.

For years, NBA basketball was marked by a plodding, dull-as-dishwater style of play -- that was until coach Mike D'Antoni, point guard Steve Nash, and the high-flying Phoenix Suns set the league on fire with their old-school, run-and-gun approach to offense. Along the way they won back legions of disillusioned fans and demonstrated the virtues of team play to a league preoccupied with one-on-one theatrics.

In Seven Seconds or Less, McCallum describes his year trying to keep up with the fast-breaking Suns on and off the court. He takes readers inside the heads of Nash, the team's mercurial floor general; the maverick D'Antoni; and dozens of others who make up the close-knit Suns family. On the court, there's excitement as the Suns overcome a rash of injuries to once again battle for a conference title. Off the court, controversy rages as the team endures a major front-office change in midseason. Throughout it all, the team continues to bedevil opponents and challenge the status quo with their throwback style.

In the spirit of Buzz Bissinger's Three Nights in August and John Feinstein's A Season on the Brink, Seven Seconds or Less is an in-depth look at one of the greatest shows in sports.

Customer Reviews:

Great story with a couple of flaws.......2007-08-26

I'm an SI subscriber, so I've been reading Jack for years in the magazine. I was looking forward to this book ever since I put it on my wishlist, and I wasn't disappointed. They gave him really great access, and the coaches seemed to relax around him and give him good quotes. He has a smooth and engaging writing style, which works great for wriiting about sports.

And he did not treat the players like Gods, and that was very key. He made Shawn Marion look like he was, your typical insecure semi-superstar, and allowed Amare Stoudemire to appear as the clueless, under-educated athlete that he is. Reserve guard Eddie House wound up being the star of the book, player category, he's very entertaining without coming off like a jerk.

A couple of quibbles:

Jack really does not like Mark Cuban, and takes as many shots at him as he coould. Makes a person wonder if he tried to float this book idea by the Mavericks and was turned down.

The other, far bigger gripe, is that the book was too short. It seemed that he rushed it to get it out quickly, and thus the focus so much on the playoffs, with the preseason and regular season not touched on much. I know that this is paritially a compliment, wanting the book to be much bigger, and I mean it that way. It just seems rushed.

All in all a great buy, well worth the money I paid, and I got it right here at Amazon.

Feeds every NBA fan thirst of what goes on behind the closed doors of Phoenix Suns Basketball.......2007-08-06

Over the last 17 years that I've been watching, reading, writing, and playing everything and anything that is related to the NBA, I've never come across a book which has truly captured the very essence of the league and the game of professional basketball until I read Jack McCallum's ":07 Seconds or Less [My Season on the Bench with the Runnin' and Gunnin' Phoenix Suns].

Jack McCallum, Sports Illustrated chief NBA writer, had the unique privilege "come aboard" and take part as a member of the Phoenix Suns staff during the 2005-2006 NBA season. McCallum made the most of the opportunity and in the process penning an undaunted and realistic look at what goes on behind the closed doors of Phoenix Suns Basketball--from the coaches, players, trainers, broadcasting, management, and even the eccentric owner's perspective to the colorful metaphors (profanity laced statements) that they use as a means of self-expression from time-to-time.

McCallum captures classic moments (Gentry's Anthony Mason and B.J. Armstrong story (pp. 129); The sounds of a "jungle bird" in the Suns shower story (pp.180); The Eddie House story (pp. 74; 94); and McCallum's definition of coaching (pp.144); among others) and also meticulously explains several of the Suns basketball terminologies such as "dribble-ats" - "terms used to described when "the ball handler dribbles toward his teammate and either uses him as a screener or, more typically, hands off to him to keep the offense moving;" "Gold" - "term for fronting an offensive player, thus discouraging a pass from even being thrown;" and my favorite, "clickety" - Steve Nash's word for the "clock that clicks off the time until tip-off ."

Overall, it's one book that you can't put down. An amazing ride from start to finish and if you're not yet a Phoenix Suns fan, you will be after this book.

Phoenix Suns.......2007-08-01

Jack McCallum had an insiders look at a season with the run and gun Phoenix Suns. Very well written and informative look at the behind the scenes action of a msuccesful NBA franchise.

If you want a good sports book, this is the one........2007-07-12

This book brings you behind the scenes of the Suns during their 2006 playoff run. The best parts of the book, isn't the actual games but rather the behind the scenes dialogue between players, and even better the coaches. There are tidbits throughout the book about what went on during the regular season which are interesting also.

My only problem with the book is that I felt it peaked during the Lakers series, which was the first round. Not the authors fault, reading about Kobe, and Phil Jackson was more interesting than Elton Brand, Dirk, & Mark Cuban. & it was more dramatic than the other two series,(I give it 4 stars instead of 5, so it wasn't bad).

I would def. recommend this book to any sports fan, its better if your an NBA fan but you don't have to be. On a sidenote, (Im a Knicks fan), I always followed the Suns because of their fun up-tempo style but I will be pulling for them a little more this year.

A gripping chronicle of a tremendous season, in retrospect.......2007-06-05

It's interesting to read Jack McCallum's insider account of the Phoenix Suns 2005-2006 season in light of their heroic effort in '06 and '07. There are parallels at work, with another series against the Lakers this year and a returned sense of persecution at misguided calls - especially the already-infamous Game 4 suspensions that sidelined Stoudemire and Diaw, prompting a torrent of invective from Suns fans toward NBA Commissioner David Stern.

:07 Seconds or Less is first and foremost an inside glimpse of the way that the Suns worked in '05-'06, spotlighting the team's varied personalities. Of course there is the almost stoic, self-sacrificing Steve Nash; the bloodthirsty competitor with a heart of gold in Raja Bell; the psychologically fragile but immensely gifted Shawn Marion. There's the evolving and terminally French Boris Diaw, and the blossoming Leandro Barbosa, both of whom stepped up even more so last season, playing ferociously (especially the lightning-fast L.B., recipient of the 2006-2007 Sixth Man of the Year Award).

There's plenty of other characters on the bench as well, most notably the scene-stealing class clown Eddie House and the goofy-but-lovable Amare Stoudemire, sidelined by knee trouble.

McCallum also illuminates the dynamics of the team's formidable coaching staff, led by the casual but determined Mike D'Antoni, architect of the suns run-and-gun style. Flanked by his old-school brother Dan, video guru Marc Iavaroni, seasoned veteran Alvin Gentry, and an indomitable Phil Weber, the Suns coaching staff provide an interesting perspective on the strange blend of art, science, and superstition that is coaching an NBA team. McCallum also pays due attention to the front office, especially then-new owner Robert Sarver, whose loudmouthed antics and verbal scuffles are frequently entertaining diversions.

McCallum's book has a great narrative arc, focusing almost entirely on the playoff series against the Lakers, Clippers, and Mavericks. The tooth-and-nail battle against Kobe Bryant and the Lakers forms the book's centerpiece, and McCallum aptly frames the series into an all-out war, signified by the hand-to-hand combat between Bryant and Bell. (Bell emerges as a hero in the series and the book, with a noble if unsportsmanlike flagrant against the hated-but-seemingly-superhuman Kobe, a game-tying three against the Clippers, and a heroic return while injured against the Mavs). The drama is kept at a fever pitch throughout the series, and McCallum milks every turnaround, setback, and obstacle to keep your attention riveted.

McCallum's prose is perfectly pitched to the NBA after many years of reporting: he skips around from subject to subject, but always keeping track of the long-term themes and struggles. And along the way, he also provides thoughtful commentary on a variety of outside subjects, from the love-him-or-hate-him phenomenon that is Kobe Bryant to the NBA's dress code.

In short, :07 Seconds Or Less is a must-read for Suns fans and heartily recommended to basketball fans in general. It's an eye-opening look at the inner works of one of the league's most exciting teams, and simply a ripping good piece of sports journalism.

An Introduction to Legal Reasoning (Phoenix Books)

Average customer rating:

Not Quite an Introduction
Helpful
A Great Read
Law of the land
ambiguity made clear

An Introduction to Legal Reasoning (Phoenix Books)
Edward H. Levi
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0226474089

Book Description

This volume will be of interest and value to students of logic, ethics, and political philosophy, as well as to members of the legal profession and to everyone concerned with problems of government and jurisprudence. By citing a large number of cases, the author makes his presentation of the processes of judicial interpretation particularly lucid.

Customer Reviews:

Not Quite an Introduction.......2007-06-16

While Levi clarifies much that's uncertain about legal interpretation, I don't recommend this book for those with no previous studies in law. If you must read it -- and there ARE rewards from doing so -- be sure to have a law dictionary at hand.

Besides using legal terms that aren't explained, Levi's prose is so dense as to be almost unreadable, but worse, it lacks anything resembling clarity. He often barges straight in to lengthy analyses of concepts without explaining the basic terms he uses or even why they're relevant; these must be induced from the text while reading. Since Levi is usually demonstrating through examples how concepts change over time, however, it's difficult to pin down what the concept means at any one point, before Levi has already jumped ahead to the next point without explaining either.

It's also highly recommended that you look up the cases Levi cites, since his quotations from judges rarely contain enough critical information to piece together the actual concept involved. Finding the original and just reading the parts that he replaced with ellipses add an infinite degree of clarity.

Helpful.......2006-06-20

I found this book to be helpful but somewhat basic. I is outlined nicely and is easy to follow. Good future reference. Recommend to students.

A Great Read.......2006-01-07

I appreciate Edward Levi's attention to detail. This book definitely goes beyond the standard textbook in terms of putting together a guide that is both interesting to read and informative. I'd recommend it to anybody in my situation, planning to attend law school, or even to practicing attorneys in need of a handy, compact reference guide to the basics.

Law of the land.......2005-04-01

The power to determine the law of the land resides within every citizen of the country by means of electing the officials they choose and the judicial system only upholds the law. The citizens of a country elect their leaders and once elected they are enshrined with the right to uphold the economic and political stability but any improper actions of a government should be corrected by means of the judicial process rather than by any political process. All differing opinions should be allowed to coexist with checks and balances as determined by the judicial system.

ambiguity made clear.......2002-08-17

Legal reasoning is famously ambiguous: there's no objective way to determine the outcome of a given case as there is with a physics problem. If you know the weight of an item and the height from which it drops, you are able to determine fairly objectively (i) the rate at which it will fall to the earth and (ii) the time it will take to fall to the earth from the point at which it is dropped. Law, unfortunately, is not so straight-forward. Understanding its assumptions is absolutely critical to developing any sort of sophisticated understanding about the ways in which law affects civilization. This book provides a broad outline of those assumptions. I suggest having at least a rudimentary background in intellectual history and political philosophy to get the most out of this book.

The Phoenix Effect: 9 Revitalizing Strategies No Business Can Do Without

Average customer rating:

New Growth & Revival Possible For Ailing Companies
Rising from the Ashes...your business, that is.
Great book - I use it in for my MBA students
Bubble Gum
A PATH TO TURNING YOUR COMPANY AROUND!

The Phoenix Effect: 9 Revitalizing Strategies No Business Can Do Without
Carter Pate , and Harlan Platt
Manufacturer: Wiley
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0471062626

Book Description

International turn-around gurus describe how to rescue a company from the brink of disaster
Why, even in the best of economic times, do so many apparently healthy companies fail? The surprising answer offered by the authors of this breakthrough book is "denial," or more specifically, the inability of top management to acknowledge that they've been backing a losing strategy and to take the necessary, often traumatizing, steps required to set their companies on the right course. Using cogent case studies and lessons learned from working with Fortune 500 executives who have survived tough turnarounds, Pate and Platt vividly describe what happens when good strategies go bad. Drawing upon their experiences at top firms, they develop proven real-world turnaround strategies, tools, and techniques and show readers how to put them to work in their companies.

Customer Reviews:

New Growth & Revival Possible For Ailing Companies.......2006-11-07

This a welcome strategic and philosophical outline for reviving a business - from minor problems to the catastrophic. Human nature brings us to grab at straws in an emergency - this book brings sanity to the equation.

There are nine steps to this revival. The first two are inward looking:

1. Diagnose the problem(s) and area(s) of pain
2. Determine the scope of your business - should it be re-adjusted by expanding, contracting or by being maintained?

The next step is outward looking:

3. Determine your orientation - what level of value do you provide? what level of utility?

For growing companies:

4. Manage scale - Economies of scale should be realizing increased savings and higher profit margins.

For shrinking companies, stress:

5. Handle debt by re-structuring, re-negotiating or merging

Monitor the ebb and flow and get the most from:

6. Assetts - regularly review summary against benchmarks, maintain a good assett/liabilty ratio, and install procedures to limit knee-jerk spending.
7. Employees - Human capital - Evaluate labor force net worth, yeild vs. cost, and incentive analysis
8. Products and Services - focus on appearance, brand status and pricing. Modify cosmetically. Form new models based on the original or delete totally or by specific markets or by slenderizing
9. Manufacturing - improve efficiency, share platforms with other companies, or outsource

The book wraps up with by discussing OPIs (original process improvements). OPIs should be focused on reducing time waste, lowering cost and enhancing quality. The more employees involved and the more input during an OPI, the better.

Good Basic and General Book - 5 stars

Rising from the Ashes...your business, that is........2003-02-23

As one who practices in the business turnaround arena, I have a keen understanding of the Pate/Platt analogy of the Phoenix. In many cases, with the right timing, latitude, people and luck, a business heading south can be captured and "redefined" into one going the right direction.

For those unaware of the symmetry, the Phoenix takes is roots from classical mythology. The Phoenix, a young and strong firebird, would build a nest of frankincense and cassia twigs, ignite it, and self immolate once it became "old." A new Phoenix would rise from these fragrant flames, gather the ashes of it's predecessor, encapsulate them in a precious egg of Myrrh, and fly them to the altar of the Egyptian God of the Sun in the city of Heliopolis Egypt where they were carefully deposited. According to many scholars, this flight represented "the capacity to leave the world and its problems behind, flying towards the sun in clear pure skies." The ostensible lesson of the Phoenix is in the midst of prosperity and strength, we need a renewal phase or a recycling designed to interrupt the daily norms, allowing a rebirth and regeneration.

If there are two individuals with a strong sense of this "rebirth," it's Carter Pate and Harlan Platt. Pate is a Big Four turnaround specialist and Platt created and administers the certification exam for the Turnaround Management Association.

In THE PHOENIX EFFECT, the authors reveal the warning signs and critical pointers leading to a "real" review of one's business without the emotional denial typically present. The ability to identify trouble spots before they create trouble is the key, the authors tell us. The nine strategies described by the authors are:

1) "Determine the Scope" - where does your business sit in the industry you compete? Should you create new business lines, drop old ones, merge, etc?

2) "Orient the Business" - Are your products aimed at the right markets at the right time? Does your sales/growth strategy require some level of reorientation to generate greater effectiveness?

3) "Manage Scale Accurately" - can you grow your business from within with existing resources or should you consider a merger?

4) "Handle Debt" - restructure or renogotiate debt whenever possible. Create a credit facility meeting your business's need. {A word of caution: restructure credit facilities judiciously. Going back to the well too many times will create negativity, concern, doubt and potential retraction of your banking relationship.}

5) "Get the Most from Assets" - carefully scrutinize your asset bases, both tangible and intangible, to determine if they are working for your business. Any superfluous and underused assets should be considered dead weight.

6) "Get the Most from Employees" - identify and use creative strategies to increase the quality and productivity of your employee base.

7) "Get the Most from Products" - routinely review your product base to ascertain current pricing strategies, customer base and the quality a customer brings to your business. {I regularly review my client base to determine if I've outgrown a client. This type of renewal, while often awkward and painful, is absolutely healthy for both myself and the client.}

8) "Produce the Product" - are there alternative methods your products can be created, manufactured or offered proving more efficient and cost-effective? Is outsourcing a possibility?

9) "Change the Process" - model your own processes after those who have created a successful model. No change for the better is too small.

Pate and Platt provide an incredible number of real-life examples (certain aspects of which surprised me greatly...from a confidentiality point-of-view) of fatal mistakes and storied comebacks. This is a very solid read for any business owner, high-level manager, or consultant. It provides a blueprint for clarity in an otherwise complex web of uncertainty. Let's face it, any time a business is in trouble, you'll find more chaos, worry and "Chicken Littleisms" than you'll ever want to see. Creating a cohesive plan of attack designed to bring the pieces back together is the turnaround specialists mantra.

The only reason I didn't give this offering five stars was the authors' penchant for concentrating on the product section. While certainly not unimportant, the concept of crafting a turnaround strategy is much more than product direction and quality. Regardless, this book is quite good and extremely poignant.

Great book - I use it in for my MBA students.......2002-07-18

In Egyptian mythology, the fabled phoenix was a beautiful gold-and-purple male bird that became a Greek symbol of immortality. This book, The Phoenix Effect, is about corporate renewal or continued existence. The authors, Carter Pate & Harlan Platt, share their experiences as Certified Turnaround Professionals (CTP) to illustrate strategies that can be used in restructuring organizations that are in need of a tune up or to salvage a corporation in crisis. These turnaround professionals suggest 9 strategies that can assist in deciphering corporate health. These strategies can be used by CEOs or leaders to renew corporate profitability to ensure continued existence ----just like the fabled phoenix.
This is an excellent book and the authors provide the reader with numerous insights, examples and suggestions that have worked for other organizations to improve corporate prosperity.
I use this book with graduate students to explore organizational behavior/leadership strategies.

Bubble Gum.......2002-06-25

The experienced businessman/woman should pass on this one. The book is reminiscent of a required "bubble gum" text in a freshman level business course at a community college. I only wish the book had more pages so that it would make an even better paperweight.

A PATH TO TURNING YOUR COMPANY AROUND!.......2002-06-11

The authors, specialists in restructuring under-performing companies, present a nine-step program, to guide companies in need of renewal, ranging from minor changes to a total overhaul. The steps are: identify the most serious issues; determine if the company should stay the same, withdraw or expand in scope; clarify the orientation of the business and if the company lives up to its mission; decide if the company should grow or contract; determine the best way to handle debt; discern how to optimize resources; get the most from the workforce; maximize profit from products and customers; and pinpoint the best alternatives to producing products. A final step is to optimize process efficiency. Using numerous cases, the authors present clear, to-the-point guidelines for turning around a company. Highly recommended.

Stewart's Clinical Removable Partial Prosthodontics (Phoenix, Stewart's Clinical Removable Partial Prosthodontics)

Average customer rating:

EXCELLENT Prosth Text

Stewart's Clinical Removable Partial Prosthodontics (Phoenix, Stewart's Clinical Removable Partial Prosthodontics)
Rodney D. Phoenix , David R. Cagna , Charles F. Defreest , and Kenneth L. Stewart
Manufacturer: Quintessence Publishing (IL)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Dentistry | Medicine | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0867154179

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EXCELLENT Prosth Text.......2003-09-24

Great illustrations with clear labels, point-form summaries. Amazing review for exams/ boards. Very comprehensive and very readable. Some designs look a little esoteric but still very useful. Wish I had it when I was in dental school.

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