Bookpedia : Library : Location : G

ISBN: 0836204387

ListPrice: $16.95

Edition: 10th annv

Dimensions: 0.75 by 9.25 by 12 in.

Summary: Now that Bill Watterson has retired from drawing syndicated cartoons, the only way to get our Calvin and Hobbes fixes is through his book collections. The 10th Anniversary Book is particularly notable, because in addition to getting some of his most wonderful cartoons, we also gain a sense of Watterson as a person. Approximately one-tenth of the book contains essays about matters great and small--from cartooning to life--and stories about the inspiration behind some of his greatest strips. Not surprisingly, Watterson shines through as a being of considerable integrity, and the cartoons gain in depth thanks to his commentary. And, of course, the cartoons in the other 90% of the book are alternately side-splitting hilarious or touching. Happy Anniversary, Bill, and good luck with whatever it is you are doing now!

ISBN: 156389226X

ListPrice: $29.95

Edition: graphic no

Dimensions: 0.50 by 7 by 10.50 in.

Summary: The third book of the Sandman collection is a series of four short comic book stories. What's remarkable here (considering the publisher and the time that this was originally published) is that the main character of the book--the Sandman, King of Dreams--serves only as a minor character in each of these otherwise unrelated stories. (Actually, he's not even in the last story.) This signaled a couple of important things in the development of what is considered one of the great comics of the second half of the century. First, it marked a distinct move away from the horror genre and into a more fantasy-rich, classical mythology-laden environment. And secondly, it solidly cemented Neil Gaiman as a storyteller. One of the stories here, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," took home the World Fantasy Award for best short story--the first time a comic was given that honor. But for my money, another story in Dream Country has it beat hands down. "A Dream of a Thousand Cats" has such hope, beauty, and good old-fashioned chills that rereading it becomes a welcome pleasure. --Jim Pascoe

ISBN: 1563891069

ListPrice: $29.95

Summary:

ISBN: 1563891050

ListPrice: $19.95

Edition: graphic no

Dimensions: 0.50 by 7 by 10.25 in.

Summary:

ISBN: 1563890933

ListPrice: $29.95

Edition: graphic no

Dimensions: 0.50 by 7 by 10.50 in.

Summary: You may have heard somewhere that Neil Gaiman's Sandman series consisted of cool, hip, edgy, smart comic books. And you may have thought, "What the hell does that mean?" Enter A Game of You to confound the issue even more, while at the same time standing as a fine example of such a description. This is not an easy book. The characters are dense and unique, while their observations are, as always with Gaiman, refreshingly familiar. Then there's the plot, which grinds along like a coffee mill, in the process breaking down the two worlds of this series, that of the dream and that of the dreamer. Gaiman pushes these worlds to their very extremes--one is a fantasy world with talking animals, a missing princess, and a mysterious villain called the Cuckoo; the other is an urban microcosm inhabited by a drag queen, a punk lesbian couple, and a New York doll named Barbie. In almost every way this book sits at 180 degrees from the earlier four volumes of the Sandman series--although the less it seems to belong to the series, the more it shows its heart. --Jim Pascoe

ISBN: 0596004478

ListPrice: $24.95

Edition: 1st, 01

Dimensions: 23 cm

Summary: Everyone loves Google, and it's the first place many people turn to locate information on the Internet. There's a big gap, though, between knowing that you can use Google to get advance information on your blind date and having a handle on the considerable roster of fact-finding tools that the site makes available. Google Hacks reveals--and documents in considerable detail--a large collection of Google capabilities that many readers won't have even been aware of. Want to find the best price on a pair of leg warmers? Try the Froogle price-searcher that's hidden within the Google site. Interested in finding weblog commentary about a particular subject? Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest call your attention to the special Google syntaxes for that purpose. This book makes it clear that there's lots more to the Google site than typing in a few keywords and trusting the search engine to yield useful results. If you're a programmer--or even just familiar with a HTML or a scripting language--Google opens up even further. A large part of Google Hacks concerns itself with the Google API (the collection of capabilities that Google exposes for use by software) and other programmers' resources. For example, the authors include a simple Perl application that queries the Google engine with terms specified by the user. They also document XooMLe, which delivers Google results in XML form. In brief, this is the best compendium of Google's lesser-known capabilities available anywhere, including the Google site itself. --David Wall Topics covered: How to get the most from the Google search engine by using its Web-accessible features (including product searches, image searches, news searches, and newsgroup searches) and the large collection of desktop-resident toolbars available, as well as its advanced search syntax. Other sections have to do with programming with the Google API and simple "scrapes" of results pages, while further coverage addresses how to get your Web page to feature prominently in Google keyword searches.

ISBN: 0836221362

ListPrice: $14.95

Dimensions: 0.50 by 9 by 12.50 in.

Summary: The final collection of comic strips from the enormously popular, syndicated series, which ran in daily newspapers until 1996, includes full-color Sunday strips following the adventures of the inimitable boy and his stuffed tiger. Simultaneous.

ISBN: 1563890119

ListPrice: $19.95

Edition: bk&cd-rom

Dimensions: 0.50 by 6.75 by 10.25 in.

Summary: "Wake up, sir. We're here." It's a simple enough opening line--although not many would have guessed back in 1991 that this would lead to one of the most popular and critically acclaimed comics of the second half of the century. In Preludes and Nocturnes, Neil Gaiman weaves the story of a man interested in capturing the physical manifestation of Death but who instead captures the King of Dreams. By Gaiman's own admission there's a lot in this first collection that is awkward and ungainly--which is not to say there are not frequent moments of greatness here. The chapter "24 Hours" is worth the price of the book alone; it stands as one of the most chilling examples of horror in comics. And let's not underestimate Gaiman's achievement of personifying Death as a perky, overly cheery, cute goth girl! All in all, I greatly prefer the roguish breaking of new ground in this book to the often dull precision of the concluding volumes of the Sandman series. --Jim Pascoe

ISBN: 0968879306

Summary:

ISBN: 0836213122

ListPrice: $14.95

Dimensions: 23 x 31 cm

Summary: The popular comic-strip duo roam their many worlds in search of treasure and adventure, approaching warp speed, fighting off killer bicycles, conducting dad polls, and creating legions of snowmen and other not-so-alien beings

ISBN: 1565920015

ListPrice: $24.95

Edition: 2nd, 01

Dimensions: 1.25 by 6 by 9 in.

Summary: Simply the best System V and Solaris reference on the market today, Unix in a Nutshell won't steer you wrong. The book's concise style delivers the essential information on Unix, shell, and utility commands. Its command documentation is clear and complete and its examples are relevant and easy to follow. Gilly starts with a complete, alphabetized listing of core Unix commands. Each entry includes a syntax summary, a clear statement of what the command does, and a full list of options, each with commentary on its function. The author then covers shell documentation, supplying details on the Bourne, Korn, and C shells and documenting each shell's commands in the standard format. Gilly also includes a section on regular expressions as they apply to grep, egrep, text editors, and various scripting languages. Next, the book offers complete documentation of Emacs, ex, and vi, the powerful editors whose command structure proves perennially difficult to learn. The commands, once again, appear alphabetically with statements of their respective purposes. Other popular utilities--sed, awk, nroff, troff, tbl, and several macro languages--follow. Code managers SCCS and RCS, rarely documented in Unix books, bring up the rear. Users need to know what they're looking up or they won't find this book useful. Otherwise, Unix in a Nutshell's documentation is the best. --David Wall

ISBN: 1565920155

ListPrice: $34.95

Summary:

ISBN: 0596000588

ListPrice: $29.95

Edition: 1st ed.

Dimensions: 23 cm

Summary: Continuing in the tradition of the Nutshell series, XML in a Nutshell provides a dense tutorial on its subject, as well as a useful day-to-day reference. While the reader isn't expected to have prior expertise in XML, this book is most effective as an add-on to a more introductory tutorial because of its relatively fast pace. The authors set out to systematically--and rapidly--cover the basics of XML first, namely the history of the markup language and the various languages and technologies that compose the standard. In this first section, they discuss the basics of XML markup, Document Type Definitions (DTDs), namespaces, and Unicode. From there, the authors move into "narrative-centric documents" in a section that appropriately focuses on the application of XML to books, articles, Web pages and other readable content. This book definitely presupposes in the reader an aptitude for picking up concepts quickly and for rapidly building cumulative knowledge. Code examples are used--only to illustrate the particular point in question--but not in excess. The book gets into "data-centric" XML, exploring the difference between the object-driven Document Object Model (DOM) and the event-driven Simple API for XML (SAX). However, these areas are a little underpowered and offer a bit less detail about this key area than the reader will expect. At the core of any Nutshell book is the reference section, and the installment found inside this text is no exception. Here, the XML 1.0 standard, XPath, XSLT, DOM, SAX, and character sets are covered. Some material that is covered earlier in the book--such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)--is not re-articulated, however. XML in a Nutshell is not the only book on XML you should have, but it is definitely one that no XML coder should be without. --Stephen W. Plain Topics covered: <ul><li>XML history <li>Document Type Definitions (DTDs) <li>Namespaces <li>Internationalization <li>XML-based data formats <li>XHTML <li>XSL <li>XPath <li>XLink <li>XPointer <li>Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) <li>XSL-FO <li>Document Object Model (DOM) <li>Simple API for XML (SAX) </ul>