When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It Review

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(More customer reviews)I bought this book because, having lived in China for so long, I am always happy to gain new and different perspectives on China. Therefore I bought this book in a local bookshop, yearning to gain some insights into the Chinese environmental malaise. Ever since I have come to China in the 90s I have read about the looming environmental desaster in China.
China is fashionable. They all write about it, China will be dominant, will threaten all our jobs, will collaps.... Never is there a book that simply says 'China will continue to muddle through'.
This book mostly falls into the dystopian category. China is the refuge of last resort for all poisonous garbage of the world. China will consume enough coal to singlehandedly convert the world into a greenhouse. Etc. etc. The author tries valiantly to be evenhanded. He acknowledges that the rest of the world have outsourced their environmental problems to China. Many dirty industries in richer countries have not been cleaned up, they have been closed down. Thus the West has become greener and now scolds China for being dirty. The author also acknowledges the gargantuan efforts China has undertaken to clean up its environment.
Thus he is surprisingly fair and evenhanded. Yet in the end basically his vision is a dark one. China will not be able to handle its environmental problems and thus will become a major desaster zone. Like so often, he simply extrapolates the present into the future, not taking into account that humans react to changing circumstances and have been surprisingly adept at dealing with changing circumstances.
Nevertheless the book provides a compelling picture of a China in flux, a nation which tries to find its path. And, as mentioned before, he also makes it very clear that China is not the only culprit for the environmental impact it has.


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Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance Review

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(More customer reviews)On a forum such as Amazon, book readers are free to write whatever reviews they like; but when they completely miss the point, throw in quotes out of context, and mistakenly ignore important sources of data used in a book, authors feel compelled to respond. In response to the review and exchange by "nycreader1", we suggest that readers should consider our clarifications below and also look at what we believe are more balanced and accurate book reviews provided in the Financial Times and Bloomberg:
[...]
The title "Guaranteed to Fail" refers to the fact that the GSEs took on the credit risk of almost 50% of the mortgage market with very little capital. It is also an intended pun as they were for all practical purposes guaranteed by the government.
With respect to the reviewer ("nycreader1")'s points concerning gaps and omissions, we beg to differ:
(1) The fact that the GSE mortgages were higher quality than others is discussed in the book, but unfortunately those mortgages were not sufficiently high given that the GSEs held less capital (much higher leverage), as confirmed by their eventually facing losses in the range of (at least) $200 billion.
(2) The government-sponsored hedge fund reference is only meant to describe their risk taking, with the focus on "government-sponsored" not just on hedge fund, nor to say that they were actually organized as a hedge fund. Their extensive use of derivatives to hedge some of their interest rate risk is consistent with that terminology.
(3) The reviewer's comment on interest rate risk is taken out of context. The book explains how analysts and academics missed the boat by not focusing on the credit risk of the GSEs' holdings and guarantees -- i.e., by not realizing that the mortgages were not sufficiently safe relative to the GSEs' (far too thin) capital levels.
(4) Our reference to the accounting scandals is made in passing and is used just to explain why their mortgage portfolios didn't grow. We are unsure why these scandals should be necessarily have been called "frauds". More importantly, we do make a compelling case that there were portfolio and leverage issues at the GSEs even post-accounting scandals.
(5) We do describe the GSE loan performance. The data used are primarily those of Fannie and Freddie themselves, and their regulator (the FHFA). We in fact went to great lengths to ensure our conclusions were consistent with their own data. We don't "rely" on Pinto's data (which the reviewer claims in a response to a comment) but offer it only as corroborative evidence (see pp. 37-38).
Of course, we had to rate the book to post this review and we have rated it as 5-star, but the point was to convey that we have researched hard on the GSEs before putting this book out,
unlike what the review by nycreader1 (mistakenly) asserts.
- Viral Acharya, Matthew Richardson, Stijn van Nieuwerburgh and Lawrence J. White, authors of Guaranteed to Fail

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Using Drupal Review

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(More customer reviews)This book has been eagerly awaited as the first O'Reilly volume covering Drupal, and having been written by such a rockstar team of Drupal pros.
It's also the first book to focus on a wide range of third party contributed modules rather than just Drupal core, or a narrow subject area of modules. It's written for Drupal 6, although the book would be fairly applicable to Drupal 5 (with the caveat that one of the major modules, Views, is completely different for Drupal 6 - the underlying concepts are similar though).
The first thing that struck me about this book is its fundamentally different approach from most early Drupal books, as well as the kinds of books you find in the early stages of any new technology's mainstream acceptance. It's not simply a higher quality rehashing of handbook pages and technical how-tos, but it has an incredibly cohesive and clever process through the entire book.
Every main chapter of the book will:
* Introduce an example scenario that's easy to relate to. For example, an early chapter that covers creating a simple site for a Mom & Pop shop has this sample case study: "in order to update the web page content each week, they currently pay their next-door neighbor Goldie to hand-edit the page"
* Outline what you're going to be building
* Explain why certain decisions or trade-offs were made when creating this site, and highlight alternative choices depending on your particular situation
* Explains step-by-step how to complete the site with lots of tables and screenshots, pointing out gotchas and important concepts along the way
* Ends with a "Taking It Further" section with suggestions for other features or future modules to watch that are related to the site recipe
The hands-on approach of this book takes you through a single, cohesive example in each chapter. This gets you building a site to completion at every step. This approach reminds me of the different ways to learn a musical instrument such as piano or guitar - you can start with theory and technique and practice your scales first, or you can just learn some chords and be able to whip out a few simple pop songs your first afternoon. This book is the chords.
It also has some great moments of explaining fuzzy concepts that are difficult to understand without significant Drupal experience. The Using Drupal team shows their years of expertise training users and implementing Drupal sites in gems such as this, describing whether you should use taxonomy or a CCK field for content categorization:
A general rule of thumb is that if you can remove the field and the content type still makes sense, use Taxonomy. An article filed under a "Technology" category is still an article if you remove the category association, so Taxonomy is a good fit. If the field is part of a piece of content, such as an album's recording artist, then CCK is generally a better choice.

Using Drupal will take you through building a:
* Simple website with blog for a mom & pop grocery store, including a WYSIWYG editor and uploading images to content
* Job posting board for a university, which introduces the key CCK and Views modules
* Product reviews site with user ratings, Amazon product data importing, some simple CSS tweaks using the CSS Injector module, and more CCK/Views
* Wiki, which brings in revisions, input formats, and Pathauto module
* Local arts news site, which takes you into Actions, Triggers, Workspace, Workflow (both as a concept and module), and Views Bulk Operations to create an administration page
* Photo gallery, with ImageField, ImageCache, much more Views and some site display tweaks
* Multilingual website with a strong overview of concepts, then Locale, i18n, and the Localization Client
* Event management site with calendar and attendees
* Online store using Ubercart (focuses on basic store setup, products, attributes, and orders - you'll still need to set up payment methods)
It also covers a few additional topics:
* An overview of Drupal, and where to get help
* Basic theming (this is the only time you'll see code!)
* Installing and upgrading Drupal and modules
* How to choose modules and participate in the community
So what's it missing?
Obviously Using Drupal only scratches the surface of the many, many types of sites you can build with Drupal. There are a few major topics you won't find covered in here - membership sites with protected user access, Organic Groups (a chapter that didn't quite make it due to module readiness for D6), more advanced magazine/newspaper-style sites with modules like Node Queue and Panels, multimedia (there's another book for that!), or social networking sites. However, I think they picked a great selection of site recipes to cover in a relatively small amount of space, and each recipe will get you a solid site built.
The book will also direct you to two additional resources available online: the finished demo site for each chapter for you to browse, and a download package containing installation profiles with the same versions of modules and themes used on each site. The installation profiles will set you up with a clean slate with your modules all prepared for you to start following along step-by-step in each chapter.
Other things I really love about this book:
* It isn't afraid to recommend helpful modules early, such as Administration Menu
* It highlights common newbie gotchas, such as using the blog module when you really want a story
* It points out future modules or alternatives to watch, for example, the WYSIWYG API
* It gives contrib modules such as CCK and Views the foregrounding they deserve when learning Drupal
This is the book I wish I had when learning Drupal. We're even giving away copies of it at [...] because we love it so much. I would recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone new to Drupal, intermediate users who want to take their skills to the next level or brush up on Drupal 6/Views 2, or anyone who actually needs to build a site similar to the recipes listed above. And, y'know, anyone else who's ever built or wanted to build a website :)

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With the recipes in this book, you can take full advantage of the vast collection of community-contributed modules that make the Drupal web framework useful and unique. You'll get the information you need about how to combine modules in interesting ways (with a minimum of code-wrangling) to develop a variety of community-driven websites. Each chapter describes a case study and outlines specific requirements for one of several projects included in the book -- a wiki, publishing workflow site, photo gallery, product review site, online store, user group site, and more. With Using Drupal, you will:
Get an overview of Drupal concepts and key modules introduced in each chapter, with a bird's-eye view of each module's specialty and how it works
Explore various solutions within Drupal that meet the requirements for the project, with details about which modules are selected and why
Learn how to configure modules, with step-by-step recipes for building the precise functionality the project requires
Get information on additional modules that will make the project even more powerful
Be able to access the modules used in the chapter, along with other resources

Newcomers will find a thorough introduction to the framework, while experienced Drupal developers will learn best practices for building powerful websites. With Using Drupal, you'll find concrete and creative solutions for developing the exact community website you have in mind.

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