Rating: 

After a very quick review at my local bookstore, I was very excited with the various hack descriptions.

I'm thinking that's apparently the exact thing that happened to the editor, because when you get into the actual guts of the various "hacks" you find them to be more "kludge" than anything useful.

I'm most disappointed with the "examples" zip you can download, as it seems to be missing over half of the images used in the book which makes the example code fairly useless if you want to replicate the figures from the book.

All and all, there are some useful tidbits that you can get out of the material, but it's nowhere near the "reference" quality I'm used to seeing in O'REILLY books.

Maybe I was looking for something along the O'REILLY "Cookbook" line of books, that focus on reference quality code examples.

I have to admit that the book does clearly say "Tips & Tools" right on the cover, but I'd say it leans more towards Tips than real Tools.

Just be aware,
-Zac Morris
www.zacwolf.com