The Outsiders - S. E. Hinton

Have just finished reading The Outsiders for my Year Nine English class.  What a great book!  What was really interesting was that it got even the reluctant boys involved (although not through reading it themselves - there was a bit of reading aloud in class).  Even though it is set in the 1960's it still seems to have a lot of relevance to  the modern teenage angst about belonging and identity.  We also watched the movie that seemed to have every heartthrob of my teenage years in it (Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, and more).  Manged to find quite a bit of extra footage on youtube that is not included in the final cut of the movie.  Interesting to see the different emphasis the movie places on characters and story line.  A lot of the movie was very similar to the book but the bits that were ultimately left out seemed to change the whole thrust of the story line.  Instead of it being all about Ponyboy and the gang and how they fit together it was more of a comment on the disintegration of the character of Dally.  Anyone else seen/read it?