Otherwise a great book and highly recommended.

Why no index though? This is as bad as the RCTS! They're easy enough to create these days.

It is, very obviously, a great torch. It's bright and it runs on AAAs.

Yet after a few months, I haven't switched it on in weeks and I've used my older Police Tech instead. The Police Tech is less bright, but it's still a bright torch, far better than anything we had a few years ago. It also has a focus adjustment that stays in place and doesn't shift if you bump it. Mostly though, the single switch button is just easier to use. I want a torch where clicking it on and off is that simple, not having to cycle through three different brightnesses. Being a little slimmer helps too.

The Police Tech is also a tenner cheaper, which always helps.

I bought this as a light walking daysack for my son. We're very happy with it.

Design is well thought out. There's one internal compartment and a fairly generous zipped front pocket. A zig-zag bungee on the lid can carry a hat or waterproof. Waterproofing isn't as good as some backpacks: there's a draw-cord and the lid edge is elasticated, but there's no additional rain diaphram. However this is a small daysack after all, so you don't really need that much weatherproofing.

Build quality is probably its best feature. The fabric is heavy tough stuff, the same quality as backpacks I've spent far more on. The details are good too: good sewing, good fittings, careful detailing around the corners and usual failure points. The carry handle between the straps is (for once) big enough to be useful.

Internal space is small. It's a daysack, and not a huge one. That's exactly what I wanted. Although you could use it as an urban or school backpack, it's really too small for use with A4, ring binders or laptops.

The only minor niggle is that there are no side loops or net pouch for a waterbottle.

In comparison to what I was using before it, a pair of army surplus side-pouches on a yoke, then it's larger than one pouch, smaller but much more convenient than two.

Overall I'm impressed, we're getting good use from it and the price is astonishing.

Having read the universally scathing Amazon reviews of the other planetarium projectors, I tried this one on the shaky grounds that at least nothing bad had yet been written about it. So to redress that balance, here's something bad:

First off, it does try harder than the others as it's both a star projector and a simple orrery, a model of planets rotating in the solar system. As could be seen from the box, it quite reasonably doesn't carry the moons that a better orrery would have. However a basic feature of an orrery is that it should show the inner planets rotating faster than the outer planets. This one doesn't - they all rotate together. Despite the great big box of plastic, there's no gearing in there and you might as well paint the planets onto a flat disk and rotate that.

The star projector is about as bad as the others and looks as if it was designed in the 1970s. It's a clear plastic hemisphere with stars printed in black, illuminated by a torch bulb. That's just not good enough. If it was simply replaced with a black dome and drilled holes, with a bright point-source LED inside, it could give a far better projection image. This is 2010 - LEDs are cheap, commonplace and I can buy a mobile phone for the price of this toy. There's just no excuse to still use torch bulbs.

On the whole, this thing is worthless. Now will someone please make a decent one? I have 50 quid to spend.

Minor points are that (positive) it has a 5V power supply socket, so that a spare phone charge etc. can be used instead of the 4× C cell batteries. On the negative side, the motor is noisy.

This might have been one of the best HTML guides of the late 1990s. As it is, the techniques are long out of date and certainly not to be recommended. As with far too many similar HTML books, it's a HTML 3.2 text with additions to "bring it up to date". As HTML 4 has been released for over 12 years now, that's just not good enough.

The approach here is to introduce the presentational use of HTML early on, and to think that by labeling each section and tag as "deprecated", that's an excuse - it isn't. Separation of markup and presentation needs to be explained from the outset, and when new readers are first taught presentation it should be through the use of CSS.

CSS is introduced here. It's a poor treatment, based (as usual) on explaining CSS properties one by one, rather than showing how to use the CSS tools to achieve page design tasks. In particular, the crucial technique of float is barely mentioned.

My recommendation for HTML + CSS texts is still Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML, followed up by Lie and Bos' Cascading Style Sheets. Those are two that not only teach correct descriptions of the tools, they also teach the right approaches for producing modern, best practice work.

It begins well enough in a fine old Shocking Murder! penny-dreadful style, but it never develops into what it ought to have been, nor what we expected. The characters are flimsy, the plot is predictable and there's as little sense of place generated by it as by Dick Van Dyke's cock-er-nee accent.

The final denoument is crammed hastily into a couple of pages and feels like an author who was simply bored of the whole business and wanted nothing more than to wrap it up and send it to the publisher. If the novel were twice its length, then there might be space for a little characterisation, something that's sorely lacking. The two female protagonists are sisters, yet we learn nothing of their relationship as they grew up together and their eventual crucial historical revelation is as much a surprise to them as it is to us.

It's a steamy piece of Victoriana alright, but there are so many out there far better than this - try "Necropolis Railway" for one.

This starts at an extremely simple and accessible level. If you've never handled a bare LED before, then it's pitched at exactly the right place to begin. The basics of setting up the Arduino IDE and a "Hello World"-level pushbutton to LED program are given.

The trouble is that this is about as far as the book goes. It assumes you know nothing to start with (a good thing), but doesn't leave you much further along at the end of it. If it were twice the length, then it might achieve more.

There's nothing in here that's reference material. Once you're through this book once (an evening, maybe two) you're finished with it.

There's little inspiration in here. It's not a patch on, "Making Things Talk". It tries hard enough, but there just isn't space. The integration between Processing on a desktop to analyse an RSS feed and then communicate by serial over USB to the Arduino and some LEDs is a good idea, but the clarification between Sketch and Processing could have been made more obvious (just some different typography would have helped).

This is a good book if you're running one-day workshops for kids with no hardware knowledge at all. It does handle starting from scratch very well, it just doesn't go far enough to really spark interest.

If you already knew what an Arduino was before looking at this book though, then you don't need it. Start with the online refs, and keep looking for a really good tutorial to getting started with the Arduino.

This gets close to being right, but I just couldn't recommend it.

Good:
* Nine big buttons, with photos, with single-press dialing
* Amplifier and volume control

Bad:
- Only those 9 memories
- Poor speech quality (microphone)
- Poor handset design that's too small to hold easily
- Poor handset rest so that it tends to end-up "off hook" and won't receive further calls.
- Broke with a loud buzzing noise after only a couple of months.

I not only wouldn't buy this phone, I'd think twice about buying any product from this manufacturer again. Sorry.

Absolutely essential reading for the real theory of rocket propulsion, both for generating thrust by the engine, then for successfully applying this thrust to the vehicle airframe in a controlled manner.

Sadly a bit light on hydrogen peroxide / kerosene propellants, which is a disappointment for the Brits.

This is a very good introduction to the subject, although expensive
and short on hard numbers. It contains a great many case studies of
real accidents, which make a complex subject much more approachable.

This book will not make you competent to assess hazard, as it doesn't included the necessary data for detailed calculation. However it's a good field guide for facilities managers. Hopefully it might even reduce a few of the frighteningly common accidents caused by "minor" changes to existing processes that turn out to have serious consequences.