Bentley Reviews

The book is entitled 'Wall Street City by the same name asthe Web site. But this is not just a guide tothat site. This is a versatile guide for newcomers making their first steps in personal investing.

'Wall Street City', the book, is divided into seven parts. One is an introduction to the investing process that forms the underlining structure for most of the book. Part Two tells where to find prospecting tools for stock - free lists, search engines, stock picks from market experts, and stocks unique to the Internet. Part Three discuss Web sites that offer research tools, such as company reports, earnings estimates, SEC reports, and so on. Part Four offer a brief discussion of technical analysis and where to find technical timing tools on the Internet and review 19 discount brokers. Part Five shows how to use Web resources to monitor your portfolio, the market, and industry groups, and how to plan for the optimum time to sell a stock. Part Six introduces you to Web sites that will help you to plan a portfolio through assets allocation. And Part Seven presents Web sites with educational content for investors.

The free CD-ROM in the back of the book offers free access to the Wall Street City site for 30 days and selected bookmarks from the book.

I recommend the book for beginners. But give notice: the book was published in April 1997 and the world of investing is changing very fast.

I first picked this one up a year ago and found it really useful. But then I got hold of Trading Online by Alpesh Patel. Trading Online gives you more punch for you dollar (or pound since I got it in London)

This book is an excellent introduction to investing in the stock market and researching stocks and mutual funds information through the Web. The book provides plenty of free sources of information and a few sources that I have found to be free but which you cannot find unless you pay for the Internet site subscription or read the book. Also, it briefly presents Internet resources available for analyzing options and commodities. The information in the book is well structured, clear, and interesting. I bought the book read it, reviewed it, and started applying its concepts within a week. I had three concerns in my selection of this book: given the nature of the Internet I wanted the most current information possible, I wanted information giving me choices of Internet sources without being limited to an investment system or web site, and finally I wanted a book focused on using the Internet for stocks and stocks related investments. This book met all my expectations. I specially enjoyed the information on insider trading and the performance of sectors in the market. I wholeheartedly recommend this book especially to those like me who are starting from scratch with little or no experience in using the financial, research, and assessment tools available in the Internet.

If you're interested in how people lived in rural Canada during the 1800s, this book will give a first hand account. The book is composed of the author's letters back home to England, and answering questions from friends back home. She gives detail encounters of the voyage to her new home, cultivating the land, the hardships they face with their land, diseases, and the climate, and who is best suited for this type of life. Catharine Parr Traill is a great storyteller who is engaging and very descriptive in her writings. This is a good book if you want to really see what life was like for the early pioneers in North America.

about the eairly settlers of canada and how they managed the hardships and how people felt about development in the rural areas of canada

My daughter loves this book, and makes me read it over and over. However, most of the pop-ups may be easily torn down by toddlers. If you want your kids to "touch and learn", you had better prepare glue or tape handy. At least, my book is in a terrible condition!

I do believe that there is nothing terrible than to dress toddlers. But now, for my husband and me, it is not any more. Our two-year-old son tries to get dressed by himself just as Fuzzy Bear does. It is not only interesting, but also worthy. If there are any toddlers in my family, I do think it is the best birthday present for them.

As a medical student I had a chance to study from quite a few anatomy atlases and can therefore affirm this one is the best choice you have.All doubts and vagueness you might have about different structures positions and relations when learning textual theory, become clear when viewing truly spectacular images which are, unlike doted, numbered and line-crossed ones in many other publications, spotless and have beside standing complementary colour schematic drawing explaining the image.I find fonts, paper used, weight and the way the book "reacts" when leafing through quite likable.

As a beginning student of Anatomy, and not aiming to be an MD, this is an excellent entry level text, that unlike other atlases has adequate descriptive text, has photographs with corresponding figures that are extremely extremely useful, etc. Best value for one's limited $, IMHO.

Very cute pop-up book & amazing illustrations. Extremely colorful & attention grabbing. Another great children's book by Dawn Bentley!

This is a bright, rhyming delight of a book with a variety of special effects. The bugs are preparing for a party and they don't want the spider to know!

This would be an excellent collection to have for anyone looking for a taste of Shaw's basic philosophies about socialism--and of course, a good way of finding out how his writing suits you.

Some thought provoking social statements are made in all four plays, though some of the prefaces might be more informative about the author than the plays themselves. Great witticisms and depsite the sometimes heavy philosophy, the reading is light and quick. The last play, Man And Superman, perhaps his most significant play in terms of philosophy, pure and simple, would be fun reading but the socialist's handbook given at the end would definitely not be everyone's cup of tea, unless they're philosophy students. This can be skipped without spoiling the play though, which contains some of the most excellent dialogue I've come across in a play with philosophical overtones.

All Oscar Wilde and Chesterton lovers would appreciate the epigrams and the witty one-liners. If for nothing else, Shaw is worth reading for his lovely style of execution, the flowing conversations and some uncanny insight.

This should be required reading just for the "Don Juan in Hell" act of Man and Superman --an excerpt "Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only decorated. They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched. They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dressed. They are not educated: they are only college passmen. They are not religious: they are only pewrenters. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly...."

One of my science teachers recited this famous speech in the lab one day, just to show off, and I started appreciating Shaw. Funny thing is that of all the playwrights, GBS is the best just to read. Except for Pygmalion and maybe Arms and the Man, most of Shaw's plays are too "talky" to stage well, but read like short stories. If you haven't read them, you are in for a treat.

This book, as is snowflakes, is very unique. Illustrations are fantastic and tell a story of their own!

Author Blanchard brings humor, life, and compelling energy to an eccentric and an era previously hidden under a thick layer of (snow)dust. Bentley, generally considered an eccentric -- when considered at all -- was actually a dedicated scientist with an artist's eye and heart. What could have been dull scientific treatise actually reads with the smooth pull of a good novel.

Bentley has the right idea when he states that you first write a correct, understandable and maintainable program, and then if it is not fast enough, modify it to improve the efficiency. He is also correct in pointing out that with this approach, modifications to improve efficiency, while not altering the correctness of the program, tend to reduce the clarity and maintainability of the code. However, he does miss one important point, which in his defense, is to a large extent due to the date of original publication.
With the availability of modern tools and advances in software design, it is now possible to create programs where the efficiency of the code can be part of the design. Changes in the design made to improve the efficiency can increase the maintainability and reduces the need for final alterations that lower the clarity and portability.
These points aside, the techniques that are demonstrated to improve the efficiency of code are a lesson in what is really happening as we code. Bentley starts with a simple example of making a change to a correct program that he expects to dramatically increase the speed only to see it improve by a few percent. That is exactly what happened to me when I was a commercial coder and faced with my first problem with code that was too slow and had to be improved. The problem of course was that the change does increase the speed, but that segment of code is not called often enough for the change to be dramatic.
Increasing the efficiency of code is a job to be done with a sharpshooter's rifle rather than an indiscriminate shotgun. The only really effective changes to code are those that increase the speed of the code that is actually used. Since this is often dependent on the circumstances, which includes the current data sets, this is often as much an art as it is a science. While code profilers can be an enormous help, sometimes you simply must know the circumstances where the code will be used. Bentley also gives some sound advice in that area.
Bentley's first example of code improvement, where he uses simple techniques to get an order of magnitude improvement in speed is the best example of code improvement that I have seen. The fact that it is written in the largely obsolete Pascal language does not render the example obsolete in any way. He takes an example of code to do a shortest-path search and demonstrates some of the common "mistakes" done in code that can reduce efficiency. In this case, many of the changes do not alter the clarity of the code and are an example of the point made in the first two paragraphs of this review.
The general consensus was that the best IT book of 1999 was "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" by Fowler et. al. While reading "Refactoring . . . ", I continually thought back to this book by Bentley, as many of the same ideas for code improvement appear in both books. Even though hardware continues to be dramatically improved, there are still many situations where code must be improved and this book will teach you many facets of this essential skill.

Jon Bentley is recongized as one of the great authorities on Computer Programming and also as one of the best writers in the field. In this book he gives practical advice on improving the efficiency (optimizing) and the limits there of. While showing how to trade off speed for space or vice-versa, he points out the limits that can be expected to gain. His list of techniques is a collection of practical approaches rather than theoretical possibilities.

At 158 pages (not counting index) this book is eminently readable, accessable and useful. Clearly written and well organized this is a book to keep on your shelf for when a program needs improving. It is also a book to read before a program as a reminder not to make things complicated with optimization that aren't needed.

This overall was an enjoyable horror story that was spoilt by a rather rushed ending. Like another reviewer when I read the blurb on the back it sounded very much like a Stephen King Needful Things rip-off. Luckily it turned out to be totally different. Like a good horror writer Little has taken a common fear, in this case, big business pushing out small, and multiplied it to the Nth degree. This is where my opinion diverges from other reviewers who somehow think that much of what Little has written is somehow a realistic portrayal of future economic trends. While some of the early parts of the novel are not implausible, for example the insensitivity of the Store to local environment laws, the compliant city council that exempts the store from taxes and promises other improvements it can't really afford to get it in the town, and the impact on SOME of the small businesses in the town, it quickly elevates beyond this more realistic scenario to a fascist nightmare. Little uses the supernatural elements to paper over the less plausible aspects. Why for example would the store bother to kill off the competing retailers who were just about to go out of business anyway. We find out what they do with them towards the end. The compliance with which the council does things like agree to sell the police, fire department and school district to the Store and the mute silence this is greeted with by the majority of the populace (one of the least realistic aspects of the non-supernatural elements of the story) is made to seem plausible by the cult-like effect the Store has on people associated with it.

Up to the last part of the novel, Little does a good job in showing the creeping and insidious influence that the store has on the town and the sense of isolation that the main characters feel. He seems to have run out of stamina toward the end though. The ending seems rushed and perfunctory and the ease with which the hero eventually comes through seems a bit ridiculous when you consider what he is up against. The big shock at the end for the hero is delivered with such timing that he can't really dwell on it the way you would think someone would in that position. He simply has a few paragraphs to describe his shock and then gets on with winning the battle so to speak. I rarely say this about a book but it could probably been a couple of hundred pages longer. Little has shown he can sustain interest for three hundred odd pages, it seems he has to learn to do it for 500+ if we are to get good endings from him. Overall an entertaining page turner just let down by the ending.

Without a doubt, Bentley Little is my absolute favorite little- known horror writer. The Store starts out with a sleepy little town of Juniper, Arizona becoming the home for a new discount chain store, simply known as - The Store. But strange things start to happen as soon as the groundbreaking starts. Dead animals appear in the area. By the time the store is open for business the local merchants realize that they are going to be pushed out by the new mega merchant. The store is like a cancer that takes over the town, infesting and controlling the citizens, the police and fire departments, even the local school. The store demands loyalty from its employees to the point of being a cult. Mysterious and faceless leather clad enforcers from the store known as Night Managers discipline any employee or citizen who crosses the line. Anyone who complains about the stranglehold the store is exerting on the town mysteriously disappears. One of the most vocal opponents, Bill Davis, is trying to stop the takeover, at the same time fearing for his two teen-age daughters who are now working there. When the store offers him a job as manager and flies him to Texas to meet the mysterious CEO of the store chain he has to make a decision that could free the town or cost him everything he owns. Bentley Little is totally enthralling. I've read several of his books and love his style. He combines horror, suspense, and kinky surprises to give the reader some real jolts. The Store taking over the town reminded me of what the Nazis did in Germany and I'm sure that's where Little got his inspiration. This is a great escape book and I really recommend it to any true horror connoisseur. After this book I recommend tracking down some of his other titles and enjoying them.

When The Store opened in Juniper, Arizona, the entire town turned out. The Store was supposed to help the town recover economically from the closing of the paper mills in the 80's instead it sought to destroy the small businesses all ready there, to financially break the town and then underwrite the police force, parks and recreation etc. and eventually ran its own people for mayor and town council positions easily winning the elections. Then there were the animals that kept seeking death in The Store's parking lot by causes unknown, the bloody rituals that employees were required to participate in and the strange police force that patrolled the store at night. Anyone who fought the store either was bought out or disappeared. The store stocked illegal and bizarre items on its selves and insisted upon having escorts show people through The Store allowing those so inclined to explore their darkest desires.

One man Bill Davis whose daughters Samantha and Shannon worked for the store goes to see Newman King the founder and CEO of the store, a Howard Hughes type recluse who spoke to his customers through press releases. He wants his daughter released from their ironclad contracts that won't allow them to quit without some sort of repercussions. King offers him a position as a store manager and Bill accepts thinking that he can change The Store from the inside an incredibly dangerous move. He's nearly sucked into The Store mentally but snaps out of it when he discovers a dark secret. He contacts other disgruntled managers and together they decide to take back their towns.

The Store was intense and fascinating so many points Little makes are so true of many large corporations. This text bares warnings for all of us to heed. An excellent Horror read!!!