The Beatles: The True Beginnings

Book Description

he Casbah Coffee Club is no longer music's best-kept secret. Closed for forty-three years, the basement club that the Beatles played more than ninety times before hitting the Cavern has now been reopened by this remarkable book. Written by Roag Best with brothers Pete and Rory, The Beatles reveals the private archive of Pete Best, the Beatles' first drummer. It features accounts from Casbah members on hear-ing the Beatles for the first time. Stunning photography show-cases the Casbah's memorabilia and rooms, where Lennon and McCartney's painted ceilings still sit. Rare photos capture the Beatles playing for their first fans. Featuring remarks from the Beatles and their closest friends of the early sixties, the Bests' account blows the dust off the Casbah (and the band's unknown past) forever.

Customer Reviews:

Welcome to the Casbah.......2007-06-09

This book is heavy with pictures on every page,including rooms The Beatles painted and played in,clothes they wore before the leather look,a diagram of The Casbah. Many stories about people and events that took place there."As was written,It was hot and sweaty.No booze,just coffee and coke and fantastic live music."If you are wondering who Roag Best is,he is the son of Mona and Neil Aspinall.

Cradle of Anglo-Rock History.......2005-08-11

A fascinating book about the inception of the Beatles, or "pre-Beatle" era, if you will. The beautiful archival photographs will certainly delight all readers as well as the memorabilia. Readers will certainly get a feel for early-1960s Liverpool (1960-62) and the environment in which the Beatles flourished.

Thanks to this book, fans can actually see the club where the Beatles' fame was soon launched. The world's number one band cut their musical teeth in the Casbah, owned and run by drummer Pete Best's mother, Mona Best. The club opened in 1959 when the Quarrymen-Silver Beatles were coming into their own. This underground rock club was the precursor to its American counterparts such as the Hard Rock Cafe and the Fillmore East and Fillmore West, to name three.

This fresh perspective of Beatle history includes Mona Best's story as well as other members of the Best family. Pete Best, the Beatles' first drummer was unceremoniously ousted from the band in August of 1962. Ringo Starr replaced him and the rest is, well, history. Fans will undoubtedly feel as if they are watching the Beatles evolve from relative local obscurity into the musical juggernaut they became and remain to this day.

A Dream Book.......2004-02-24

I love this book! Makes me want to fly to Liverpool now and visit. Pete Best, who was drummer for the Beatles before they kicked him out with no explanation, gives us a fabulous treat. His mother ran the Casbah Club in Liverpool in the family home's basement. After Pete was booted out, the club sort of died down and was closed. It remained sealed up for many, many years, until it was opened. Original murals done by the Beatles still on the walls, microphones, and other items were found, and the club reopened to people who wish to come and see the only remaining original club, with even the original walls! Let the Cavern try to claim that! Color photos, inside stories, more make this a sensational book. Beatle fans, Merseybeat fans, music historians, Scousers, etc...BUY IT!

Neil Aspinall's son with Mona Best.......2003-09-16

The story behind this book is one of the secrets in the Beatles tale. Neil Aspinall, who still works for the Beatles as director of Apple Corps, looking after their legacy and business interests, classmate of Paul McCartney's at the Liverpool Institute, was Pete Best's good friend. When the band needed someone to help them move their equipment from gig to gig, Neil was hired because he had a car. Throughout the band's story, Neil was the road manager.

Neil lived with Pete's family for a while in the early years. He had an affair with Pete and brother Rory's hip, relatively young, Indian mother, Mona. They had a child together, Roag.

When Pete was tossed out of the Beatles, he told Neil to choose between the job with the band and his living with the Best family. Neil chose the Beatles. He was not allowed to see his son grow up.

This is that son's book.

An Unfocused Book with Two Slender Ideas.......2003-07-26

Will any true Beatles fan ever admit that there is no need for any further information regarding the Fab Four? Absolutely not --- the strong popularity of THE BEATLES ANTHOLOGY is evidence enough that a voracious audience still exists for Beatles lore in all shapes and sizes.

THE BEATLES: THE TRUE BEGINNINGS really encompasses two book ideas: the Merseybeat music scene in Liverpool from which the Beatles developed, and Pete Best's experiences as an early Beatle. Either of these ideas, developed fully, would make interesting reading. As they are, however, two slender ideas are crammed into one unfocused book with big pictures and sparse text. Even so, I get the impression that this book was a stretch --- does any fan, no matter how obsessive, really require a picture of the case in which Pete Best carried his drums? How about a shot of the spare guitar strings he found inside?

A prominent outpost of the Merseybeat scene was Mrs. Best's Casbah Coffee Club, owned and operated by Pete Best's mother, Mona Best. This book is in large part a tribute to the remarkable Mona Best from her sons --- Roag, Pete, and Rory. Mrs. Best pawned her jewelry, placed a bet on a horse, and won the money to buy Number Eight Haymans Green, a giant house whose cellars were transformed into the Casbah when the Best boys discovered rock-and-roll and needed a place to perform and listen to music. The Beatles first performed at the Casbah as the Quarrymen. They played to a crowd of 1,500 and received three pounds as payment.

You probably know how the story goes. The Beatles were a huge success and got a gig playing in Hamburg, Germany where they endured a horrible, grueling performance schedule and living conditions like something from a Dickens novel (assuming Dickens might ever have written about a German red-light district). In short, the Hamburg experience was destined to make or break the Beatles. It made the Beatles, but Pete Best was not invited to continue their success.

Is the Best family bitter? Maybe a little; it is their theory that Pete Best was simply so much better looking that he was a liability to the other band members. Also, the title THE TRUE BEGINNINGS seems to imply that they are setting the record straight, but there isn't very much new information here and it's unlikely to change anyone's mind about the Beatles as individuals or as a cultural phenomenon.

--- Reviewed by Colleen Quinn

Average customer rating:
The Beatles: The True Beginnings
Roag Best Pete Best Rory Best
Manufacturer: Thomas Dunne Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OTDAXG

Average customer rating:

The Song of the Silver Bullet

Great informative read

straight up, with a twist.

Martini, Straight Up: The Classic American Cocktail
Lowell Edmunds
Manufacturer: The Johns Hopkins University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Bartending | Drinks & Beverages | Cooking, Food & Wine | Subjects | Books
Spirits | Drinks & Beverages | Cooking, Food & Wine | Subjects | Books
General | Cooking, Food & Wine | Subjects | Books
Culture | Sociology | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0801873118

Book Description

From its contested origins in nineteenth-century California; through its popularity among the smart set of the 1930s, world leaders of the 1940s, and the men in the gray flannel suits of the 1950s; to its resurgence among today's retro-hipsters: Lowell Edmunds traces the history and cultural significance of the cocktail H. L. Mencken called "the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet."

Customer Reviews:

The Song of the Silver Bullet.......2002-12-04

What a perfectly titled book! Edmunds gives us nothing but straight talk about The American Cocktail in this erudite but charming little treatise on the place of the Martini in American civilization. He uses a vast array of sources from the nineteenth century on up to prove the enduring quality of this fabled drink and the way it has come to symbolize so many things to so many different kinds of people, whether they are Presidents, bank officials, or everyday housewives. To Edmunds it is the contradictory nature of the drink that has lent it its immortality (in a time, he admits, when the traditional rituals surrounding the Martini may well be on their way out for good). The drink is civilized; it is uncivilized; it is strong; it is sensitive, etc., all depending on who is drinking it at the time. Among the sources Edmunds consults and displays are the old Thin Man movies (which, the author points out, constantly violate the accepted rules for drinking Martinis), the fiction of Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, old bartender manuals, cookbooks, magazine ads, and numerous New Yorker cartoons through the years. He mixes all these into an irresistibly lucid collage.

As intellectual as this delightful little exercise is, it nevertheless makes one year for a good stiff drink. I think I will have one. Heavy on the gin. Shaken not stirred. And straight up, of course. For, as Edmunds points out unequivocably, "a martini on the rocks is an abomination."

Read it, drink it, and enjoy.

Great informative read.......1999-09-24

This text enlightened me in history and drinking cultur

straight up, with a twist........1999-03-21

Never before has there been such a necessity for the reissuing of this book. With this so-called renaissance of The Martini, many would do well to allow themselves to be indoctrinated by Lowell Edmunds. Until recently, the previous edition of Martini: Straight Up, --The Silver Bullet: The Martini in American Civilization (1981) has been out of print. Thank goodness for the reprinting of such a studied and honest book about The Martini. Although I find the original title more elegant. Perhaps the new, shorter, title is aimed at those who have only known the classic drink in short term. Within the book, Edmunds explores the drink's historicity, political, literary, and otherwise, as well as the social complexity of this American icon. With Martini, Straight Up, Edmunds dispells myths and reassures us about a legend who's status may be on the rise, but who's golden era has long since passed.

Book Description

A fast-paced, behind-the-scenes account of how programming innovations, innovative business models, and larger-than-life risk-takers revolutionized the television industry. The story of the rise of FOX is the story of contemporary American television. A deeply researched and fast moving history. --Leo Bogart

Customer Reviews:

Tonight On Faux News.......2007-06-24

President George Bush makes a smart move by sending even more brave soldiers into the oil war!

And Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity are going to yell at a bunch of protesting liberals because they don't agree!

But first, let's look at how many cents the liberals made the gas prices go up by!

Hail Rupert Murdock for this "fair and balanced" news channel!

Great story and very interesting.......2006-12-21

The story of how the big three networks were broken to allow a fourth to develop is a great one. The stagnation of the big three combined with the drive at fox was amazing. Particularly instructive is at the start of each chapter there is a sheet that tells you how many programs they had on during primetime. You really get a sense for how important the match ups and programming are in order to get a network off the ground. This is just an all around good business book.

Not Pro-FOX Propaganda, Not a Scandalous Exposý -- Just Good Reporting.......2006-05-10

Wow! For anyone interested in the modern television landscape or anyone of my generation who grew up watching FOX (the broadcast network, mind you -- not the cable news channel) this book offers an incredibly well-researched history as well as tasteful commentaries on the network that "broke the rules and reinvented television."
The pleasure in reading comes from Kimmel's apparent respect for the network and what it has accomplished, but even so, he is not quick to shy away from the controversies and scandals that threatened to thwart FOX's climb.
The only disappointment of this book (as noted by the author in the acknowledgements) is that the FOX network itself did not help with Kimmel's research. Regardless, his many interviews with previous FOX employees and associates as well as drawing from countless newspapers and trade magazines offer more than enough information to make the book informative and consistently interesting.

Inadequate and dull.......2005-03-23

An expose of the network that replaced News with lies and deception? Not at all. Everything suggests Faux News paid for this book to draw readers away from in depth inquiries.
Kimmel must have been working from clippings, because you won't find any personalities here. The people who made Fox are characterless names. Fox may not have news but at least they are entertaining. This text provides neither one.

Excellent business book and a good read too.......2004-11-21

What a great book this is! It's a good read and successfully balances business concepts and strategies, with lively descriptions of the personalities involved. Kimmel quotes many of the participants in this venture and provides a fast pace that entertains and educates at the same time. For the business school student or anyone with an interest in business, this makes an excellent case study. It should be required reading, especially for those who know odds are against creating a new thing in established territory. The people at Fox were smart, creative and gutsy; they defied the odds, gamed the system and won. And the author, Daniel Kimmel, really conveys the fast pace and atmosphere in which the Fox team must have operated. I am not an industry insider, so I feel like I really learned a lot about how networks are run, what the regulatory environment is like and the culture that developed at Fox. Great book. Highly recommended.

Amazon.com

For anyone who writes scripts in the awk family of languages, the third edition of Effective awk Programming provides an in-depth guide to processing text files with plenty of working sample code. Whether you are starting out with awk or are an experienced developer, this book will help you extend the reach of your awk scripts.

This tutorial covers the entire spectrum of awk script development: From the basics of opening, searching, and transforming text files, to a comprehensive tutorial for regular expressions, to more advanced features like internetworking. The focus is on the practical side of creating and running awk scripts, and there's plenty of hands-on advice for installing and running today's awk (and gawk).

The book begins with the fundamentals of awk for opening and transforming text flat files. The coverage of regular expressions, from simple rules for matching text to more advanced options, is particularly solid. You learn how to add variables and expressions for more intelligent awk scripts, plus how to parse data into records and fields. You'll also find out how to redirect output from awk scripts to other programs, a useful technique that can cause awk to get a lot more done in real applications.

Later, you learn several valuable sample awk scripts that mimic existing Unix utilities (like grep, id, and split), plus samples for counting words in documents and printing mailing labels, and even a stream editor. This grab bag of sample code lets you try out the techniques presented earlier in the book. Other sections look at support for networking in today's gawk; for example, how gawk can read and write to URLs on the network almost just as easily as local files. Full sample code will teach the beginner or expert how to get productive with networks and awk. Final appendices trace the evolution of the awk language and show you how to download and install gawk.

Suitable for beginner and experienced awk developers, Effective awk Programming, Third Edition, is an extremely worthwhile source of information on a wide range of programming techniques for today's awk. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered:

Introduction to the awk programming language
Running awk scripts
Basic file processing
Tutorial for regular expressions
Strategies for matching text
Dynamic regular expressions
Parsing data into records and lines (including separating fields and handling multiple-line records)
Using print and printf for printed output with awk (including format specifiers)
Redirecting awk scripts output to other processes
Basic and advanced awk expressions (constants, variables, and function calls)
Patterns
Shell variables and actions
Arrays (including multidimensional arrays and sorting)
Built-in and custom awk functions
Internationalizing and localizing awk scripts
Advanced gawk (communicating with other processes and networking programming)
Running awk and gawk
Sample awk scripts
Internetworking with awk
History and evolution of awk
Downloading and installing gawk

Book Description

Effective awk Programming,3rd Edition, focuses entirely on awk, exploring it in the greatest depth of the three awk titles we carry. It's an excellent companion piece to the more broadly focused second edition. This book provides complete coverage of the gawk 3.1 language as well as the most up-to-date coverage of the POSIX standard for awk available anywhere. Author Arnold Robbins clearly distinguishes standard awk features from GNU awk (gawk)-specific features, shines light into many of the "dark corners" of the language (areas to watch out for when programming), and devotes two full chapters to example programs. A brand new chapter is devoted to TCP/IP networking with gawk. He includes a summary of how the awk language evolved. The book also covers:

Internationalization of gawk
Interfacing to i18n at the awk level
Two-way pipes
TCP/IP networking via the two-way pipe interface
The new PROCINFO array, which provides information about running gawk
Profiling and pretty-printing awk programs

In addition to covering the awk language, this book serves as the official "User's Guide" for the GNU implementation of awk (gawk), describing in an integrated fashion the extensions available to the System V Release 4 version of awk that are also available in gawk. As the official gawk User's Guide, this book will also be available electronically, and can be freely copied and distributed under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's Free Documentation License (FDL). A portion of the proceeds from sales of this book will go to the Free Software Foundation to support further development of free and open source software. The third edition of Effective awk Programming is a GNU Manual and is published by O'Reilly & Associates under the Free Software Foundation's Free Documentation License (FDL). A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book is donated to the Free Software Foundation to further development of GNU software. This book is also available in electronic form; you have the freedom to modify this GNU Manual, like GNU software. Copies published by the Free Software Foundation raise funds for GNU development.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent tutorial & reference that zeroes in on awk.......2007-01-17

This book explains both the awk language and how to run the awk utility. You should already be familiar with basic system commands, such as cat and ls, as well as basic shell facilities, such as input/output redirection and pipes. This book describes the awk language in general and also the particular implementation of awk called gawk. gawk runs on a broad range of Unix systems and has also been ported to Mac OS X, MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, and VMS.

Many people are familiar with O'Reilly's book on sed and awk, but not this book. If you want to zero in on awk and its capabilities, this is really the better of the two books. It makes an excellent tutorial and reference for system administrators and anyone else that wants to use awk to extract and format text. The following is a description of the book from the context of the table of contents:

Chapter 1. The awk language and gawk - talks about the basics including how to run awk, when you should use awk, and starts you off with a few simple examples.

Chapter 2. Regular expressions - introduces regular expressions in general, and in particular the flavors supported by POSIX awk and gawk.

Chapter 3 Reading Input Files - describes how awk reads your data. It introduces the concepts of records and fields, as well as the getline command. I/O redirection is first described here.

Chapter 4. Printing Output - Besides basic and formatted printing, this chapter also covers I/O redirections to files and pipes, introduces the special filenames that gawk processes internally, and discusses the close built-in function.

Chapter 5. Expressions - describes expressions, which are the basic building blocks of awk patterns and actions.

Chapter 6. Patterns, Actions, and Variables - Each awk statement consists of a pattern with an associated action. This chapter describes how you build patterns and actions, what kinds of things you can do within actions, and awk's built-in variables.

Chapter 7. Arrays in awk - describes how arrays work in awk, how to use array elements, how to scan through every element in an array, and how to remove array elements. It also describes how awk simulates multidimensional arrays, as well as some of the less obvious points about array usage. The chapter finishes with a discussion of gawk's facility for sorting an array based on its indices.

Chapter 8. Functions - describes awk's built-in functions, which fall into three categories: numeric, string, and I/O. gawk provides additional groups of functions to work with values that represent time, do bit manipulation, and internationalize and localize programs.

Chapter 9. Internationalization with gawk - describes the underlying library gawk uses for internationalization, as well as how gawk makes internationalization features available at the awk program level. Having internationalization available at the awk level gives software developers additional flexibility - they are no longer required to write in C when internationalization is a requirement.

Chapter 10. Advanced Features of gawk - a "grab bag" of items that are otherwise unrelated to each other. First, a command-line option allows gawk to recognize nondecimal numbers in input data, not just in awk programs. Next, two-way I/O, discussed briefly in earlier parts of this book, is described in full detail, along with the basics of TCP/IP networking and BSD portal files. Finally, gawk can profile an awk program, making it possible to tune it for performance.

Chapter 11. Running awk and gawk - covers how to run awk, both POSIX-standard and gawk-specific command-line options, and what awk and gawk do with non-option arguments. It then proceeds to cover how gawk searches for source files, obsolete options and/or features, and known bugs in gawk. This chapter rounds out the discussion of awk as a program and as a language. While a number of the options and features described here were discussed in passing earlier in the book, this chapter provides the full details.

Chapter 12. A Library of awk Functions - One valuable way to learn a new programming language is to read programs in that language. To that end, this chapter and Chapter 13 provide a good-sized body of code for you to read, and hopefully, to learn from.

Chapter 13. Practical awk Programs - presents a potpourri of awk programs for your reading enjoyment. The first part describes how to run the programs presented in this chapter. The second presents awk versions of several common POSIX utilities. These are programs that you are hopefully already familiar with, and therefore, whose problems are understood. By reimplementing these programs in awk, you can focus on the awk-related aspects of solving the programming problem.

Chapter 14. Internetworking with gawk - describes gawk's networking features in depth, including a number of interesting examples and the reusable core of a gawk-based web server. The chapter is adapted from "TCP/IP Internetworking with gawk", by Jürgen Kahrs and Arnold Robbins, which is a separate document distributed with gawk.

Thus chapters 1-11 form a tutorial and reference on awk itself, and the last three chapters are additional material for reference or your own personal toolchest of programs. The last chapter is more of a curiosity than anything, since I don't know anyone who does internetworking with gawk, but it is still interesting material. I highly recommend this book if you plan to use awk extensively.

really good reference.......2007-01-06

really simple to understand, and quick to get started. could have a bit more on regexp, but can easily be paired with a dedicated text. the examples are clear, the explanations are concise, and the content is well organized and presented.

This book is an essential for people writing unix scripts and doing system administration.......2006-02-22

Awk is a powerful tool to perform search, and pattern matching on the strings/files.

This book is an essential for people writing unix scripts and doing system administration.

It gives you insight on how things work, and has very nice examples and tricks to perform the tasks.

Mostly the majority of the tasks are covered in the beginning, and the deep rooted tasks, are covered in the later chapters.

Most Complete Coverage of Awk.......2002-02-02

Awk is one of those handy Unix tools with which you can easily impress people. Using a simple

/pattern/ { action }

syntax, you can construct powerful one-liners. Do you want to how much time in total you spent surfing the Internet? Here it is:

awk '/Connect time/ { s += $8 } END { print s }' /var/log/messages

It doesn't get much shorter in any other programming language, does it? Need to strip text of HTML tags? Need a frequency count of words in a text? Awk is the perfect tool for tasks like this. With its pattern-action structure, powerful regular expression mechanism, associative arrays and basic program flow control, it provides a powerful tool for manipulating flat text files. Even though other scripting languages may be richer in features, there exists a niche where Awk is just the right tool to do the job.

Arnold Robbins, the author of this book as well as of several other books on Awk, serves also as the maintainer of GNU Awk (gawk for short), the most influential version of Awk available today. With the version 3.10, released in 2001, GNU Awk became richer for a handful of new extensions over traditional Awk, most important among them are the TCP/IP networking and the support for internationalization. All new extensions are described in the book. How successful these new extensions will be is doubtful, however. Networking scripting niche is already well covered with Perl and Python, and internationalization doesn't really matter much in short throw-away scripts Awk is usually used for.

With all due respect to the creators of Awk and their book (Alfred V. Aho, Peter J. Weinberger, Brian W. Kernighan, The Awk Programming Language, Addison-Wesley, 1988), I have to say that "Effective Awk Programming" is probably the best Awk tutorial on the market today. If you are serious about learning Awk, you shouldn't be without it. If you are still hesitating whether it wouldn't be wiser investing those 28 USD elsewhere, here is chance to read it before you buy it: install GNU Awk 3.10, and the Texinfo source of the book comes with it. But sooner or later you will find O'Reilly RepKover binding too tempting...

awk programming.......2001-05-19

This book is being picked up by the O'Reilly people. I have many of the O'Reilly books on my book shelf. There will be a third edition due out in July with Robbins as the author. I read though this book and thought it as good or better than the "Sed & awk" book that O'Reilly presently has out. Robbins is also an author on this book. I thought the book to be better than the "AWK programming language" by Aho, Kerninghan and Weinberger, the original authors of the AWK language. I recommend the book to beginers as I am.

Effective Awk Programming: A User's Guide for Gnuawk

Average customer rating:

Effective Awk Programming: A User's Guide for Gnuawk
Arnold D. Robbins
Manufacturer: Specialized Systems
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Programming | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books

Effective Awk Programming: A User's Guide for Gnu Awk, Edition 1.0.3

Average customer rating:

Effective Awk Programming: A User's Guide for Gnu Awk, Edition 1.0.3
Arnold D. Robbins
Manufacturer: Iuniverse Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Programming | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books

General | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0595100341

Book Description

Effective AWK Programming teaches you about the awk language and how you can use it effectively. You should already be familiar with basic system commands, such as cat and ls, (1) and basic shell facilities, such as Input/Output (I/O) redirection and pipes.

Implementations of the awk language are available for many different computing environments. Effective AWK Programming, while describing the awk language in general, also describes a particular implementation of awk called gawk (which stands for "GNU Awk"). gawk runs on a broad range of Unix systems, ranging from 80386 PC-based computers, up through large scale systems, such as Crays. Gawk has also been ported to MS-DOS and OS/2 PC's, Atari and Amiga micro-computers, and VMS.

iUniverse.com computer books are composed of freely available online computer manuals, industry standard specifications, and electronically distributed computer programming guides. They include open documents collections of industry specifications and standards and a collection of the best open source documentation on the Web...the most complete open source library available anywhere.

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