Thank you St. Martin's press for sending us a review copy of this book!

CNN is doing a six-part series titled Finding Jesus and it discusses prominent figures and relics associated with Jesus and Christianity.  Finding Jesus: Fact. Faith. Forgery. is the companion book written by David Gibson and Michael McKinley.  The book covers John the Baptist's role and remains, The James Ossuary, Mary Magdalene's roles and remains,  the Gospel of Judas, the True Cross, and the Shroud and Sudarium.  

Each chapter discusses the relic or person's history, significance and authenticity.  According to the book, early churches were required to possess a relic in order to be considered credible.   The black market for Christian relics thrived then and it's still alive and well in the twenty-first century.  There are many verified hoaxes when it comes to bones of supposed prophets.  While some churches unknowingly acquired pig bones, other churches like one in Bulgaria, has a bone  from a Middle Eastern man.  Could it really be from John the Baptist?

The James Ossuary is another hot topic for several reasons.  Since Catholics believe that Mary remained a virgin, how could Jesus have a brother named James as the ossuary claims? The Catholic author(s?) suggests that Jesus had step brothers from a possible previous marriage of Joseph's.  The relic itself is a bit questionable since the inscription has two different authors and writing styles.   While the ossuary is genuine, the inscription on it could very well be fake.  The forgery was taken to court, but the accused forger was acquitted.

The gnostic gospels are brought up on two occasions with the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Jesus' Wife.  The Gospel of Judas paints the relationship of Jesus and Judas in a different light and shows them working together on the betrayal instead of it being one-sided as the other gospels proclaim.  The gospel claiming that Mary Magdalene was Jesus' wife is just as sketchy with many words and context missing from the text used to base this argument on.   While that argument isn't very convincing, the book suggests that Mary Magdalene could have been the woman who had demons expelled from her, and possibly the adulterer that Jesus pardoned.  

Thank you Thomas Nelson for sending us this book to review!

The world can be a pretty depressing place with natural disasters, murders and needless deaths occurring everywhere on a daily basis.  Turning on the evening news shows more bad news than good.  It doesn't take much for anybody, Christian or not, to lose heart with all of the negative media we're bombarded with.  

Dr. David Murray writes about ten ways Christians can be a joyful believer in a gloomy world.  To back up his claims he provides both Biblical and scientific anecdotes.    The foundation verse of this book is Nehemiah 8:10: "...for the joy of the LORD is your strength." No matter how down in the dumps we are, we can always call upon the Lord's strength.   Another verse referenced is Philippians 4:8: "Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."   How true is that verse?  Dr. David Murray suggests that Christians meditate on it daily.  I agree with him.  Not only can it improve our outlook on life, it can strengthen our bond with God and improve our physical and mental health. After all, happiness is 10% circumstance, 50% genetic and 40% choice.

Other suggestions from the book include forgetting the negative things and focusing on the positive influences in our lives.   No matter where we are: at church, at home, or at work.  We are to be biblical examples of being thankful, forgiving, praying, and celebrating diversity.  There is no sense in constantly reflecting on past mistakes, we are to live in the here and now and make the best of it.   The Happy Christian also tells us that we should actively praise people and to pray before criticizing people.  The healthiest balance of criticism to praise ratio is 1:5.  This is especially true in marriages and in the work place.  Positive workers have proven to be better performers.  Marriages last longer if spouses know that they are loved more than they are criticized.

Even though I consider myself pretty happy and laid back in general, I enjoyed my time in this book and learned a lot from it.  The Happy Christian is a great book for any believer who can use a little morale boost.

Thank you No Starch Press for sending us this book to review!

After our ten year old finished JavaScript For Kids (highly recommend this book BTW!), our seven year old wanted to try Ruby Wizardry.  Not only is the programming language completely different, the formatting is as well.  This book is laid out like a story with snippets of code and complete ruby scripts woven throughout.

Ruby Wizardry teaches the basics such as variables, symbols, arrays, strings, loops, conditionals, case statements, opening/writing/adding to files,  and more.  The first chapter is dedicated to downloading and configuring the Ruby interpreter to correctly associate .rb files.  

Some of the code will need to be typed beforehand in notepad (or notepad++) and renamed as a .rb file while other bits of code will  need to be executed directly in IRB (command line interpreter).  My son got confused at times and occasionally typed code in the wrong program.

Adult supervision is strongly advised for younger kids to make sure they are "getting it."  Many scripts are playful including a text maze game, a monkey counting script, and a password checker.  Like all programming languages, a single typo can break the whole program.  A second set of eyes may be needed when helping your kids debug their programs.  A computer science degree isn't required to help locate spelling errors and the book's code examples are easy to understand.

Thank you Alpha for sending us this book to review!

Having read many translations of the Bible cover to cover, I'm still amazed by how much I have yet to learn from this divine book.  The Idiot's Guides: The Bible gives the back-story of each book of the Bible including its author, origin,  location, key verses, and characters.    This book is 346 pages and is broken down into five parts: Understanding The Bible, The Old Testament, History Between The Old and New Testaments, The New Testament, The Apocrypha.  

This book isn't meant to be a replacement for the Bible, but it is a nice compliment and it tells you the key verses and themes in each book. You won't find heavy theological breakdowns as the commentary in Ezekiel doesn't begin until chapter three.  This is an Idiot's Guides book after all.  ;)  I did find the play by play break down of Song of Solomon insightful though.  

There are colorful illustrations for all of the books and many of them have helpful maps too.  Each book has a highlighted verse quoted from the HCSB translation; you'll have to crack open your own Bible to read the rest of the key verses though.  

I appreciate the explanation and history of the Bible, its canonization and the Apocrypha's account.   There are helpful timelines for the chronological order of the Old and New testament books.  I may try reading the Bible in chronological order next time!

Thank you No Starch Press for sending us this book to review!

My oldest daughter is 10 and has a knack for math and an interest in game development.  When I heard about the release of JavaScript for Kids, I knew it would be right up her alley.  I was right.  After completing the seventeen chapters, she's still cracking open the book and tweaking her code.  I like how the book has challenges at the end of the chapters to encourage the kids to take their coding skills to the next level.  If you're not an IT major, you can download the code solutions from their website.

This 309 page book is broken down into three parts: Fundamentals, Advanced JavaScript, and Canvas. In parts one and two your kids will learn about syntax, comments, variables, strings, booleans, arrays, objects, HTML, loops, conditionals, prompts, functions, ODM elements, jQuery, animations, and time outs.  The last section focuses on the canvas element and drawing objects like squares, arcs, circles, and later controlling them with keyboard input.

There's definitely a lot to learn in this book and I like how they made it fun to put these concepts into practice.  Throughout my daughter's learning adventure she has created a text based Hang Man game, a random insult generator (what kid can resist that?), a treasure hunt game with a map, and the final program was a Snake game.

The Notepad++ editor that this book recommends is free and will catch some, but not all syntax errors.  Debugging broken programs takes just as much (if not more) time to fix than they do to write.  Sometimes the show stopping errors are typos, other times it's a misplaced space or semicolon.  Fortunately, my computer science major husband was able to catch some of the errors in my daughter's programs when I couldn't find everything.  

Thank you Kelly and Hall Book Publicity for sending us a copy of this book!

Kristiane Cates was living the dream with a successful, handsome, and doting husband.  After three years of marriage they were having some difficulty getting pregnant and prayed to have children to which the Lord provided them with a boy, and later on a girl.  Things continued to go well for them - in fact too well as they had a feeling that they were soon going to weather a difficult time in their lives.  While their premonition was correct, looking back on it all, Kristiane recollects how the Lord was with them every step of the way.  It's amazing how He dropped several hints of His presence in the most trying of times.  

Just because we're Christians, we're not entitled to an easy life.  After losing her son in a car accident in which she was the driver, Kristiane struggled to cope with the grieving process and hold her family and marriage together.  It was a long and difficult journey that doesn't have a fairy tale ending.   While the book ending seems a little rushed, it was cool seeing how the Lord turned her into a powerful prayer warrior.  

There are many lessons to be learned from The Golden Thread.  Just because somebody looks like they have it all together on the outside doesn't mean that is the case.  If you're blessed with a wonderful family, do not take them for granted and thank God for them DAILY.  As a happily married mother of three, this book made me give thanks for my many blessings and it made me cry on several occasions.  While there were moments where I didn't want to put it down, other times I was afraid to pick it up in fear of it making me cry again.