steama, you dont have to apologize for your opinion. its ok and i thank you for your comments. however, let me clarify that the book is not intened to cover ALL of the new features in C5. the book is intended to teach how carrara works and to teach the fundamentals of modeling, texturing, animation and rendering in a project based format. If you look at the back of the book it clearly states that it is intended for beginner to intermediate users. however, the books does cover many new features such as SSS, displacement mapping, advanced rendering, advnaced modeling and so on. For those that are not familiar with publishing we authors work with stringent, budgets, deadlines and page limits. Often we do not get to put everything we want in the book because we run out of space or time. And in this case several new features were added after the manuscript was turned in (or those chapters were turned in). Thankfully new software books are published roughly every 18 months to two years. please send me a list of features that you would like to see in the next edition and I will do my best to include. Better yet if you are up to it you can be a contributing author if like. I use contributing authors so that the reader benefits from the experience of many experts. I have written books where I am the only author but I like collaborating with several experts, it makes it more fun :-) Thanks again Mike