Slashdot Mirror

Thanks to rw2 for taking some time to review Michi Henning and Steve Vinoski's Advanced CORBA Programming with C++. For more information on this book, click below. Advanced CORBA Programming with C++ author Michi Henning & Steve Vinoski pages 1120 publisher Addison-Wesley rating 9/10 reviewer rw2 ISBN summary A much anticipated book that lives up to it's promise. Waiting I've been programming in C++ for a long time and started working with distributed applications using RPCs and sockets. When I moved on to CORBA lots of things got much easier. Learning CORBA though, wasn't one of them. There has been a perpetual dearth of good materials to learn from. Through C++ Report I was familiar with Steve Vinoski's writing style and experience base. He is always an easy read. A welcome change in what can sometimes be a twisted topic.

Michi Henning doesn't know it, but he answered dozens of questions for me over the years through the archives of his hundreds of Usenet posts on dejanews. In fact, more often than not if I'm looking for information on CORBA I'll add his email address to the authors field and go straight to the authority.

With that in mind, I was quite anxious to see their book, and quite impatient when its date was pushed back a couple times. To say that these two are qualified to write on the subject is a huge understatement. Whether or not they could write a book of the magnitude that they attempted with a consistent level of accuracy and readability was another question.

Great Thud Value The first thing to know about this book is that it isn't for wimps. Which is to say that at ~1100 pages it will take a bit of effort to haul this puppy around. My laptop bag is going to be very happy to not be porting this tome around once this review is sent off to Hemos. This is one intimidating book to heft as you decide whether or not to buy your copy. For this reason, I suggest buying it through Amazon. By the time you lift it for the first time it will already be paid for and you can get on with the business of learning more about CORBA instead of wondering if you will ever get through it all. Style Lots of people have a word processor, but these two really lived up to my expectations for an accessable text. Their writing style is non-professorial and never talks down to the reader. It is clear they know their topic like a politician knows a contributor, but they also seem to still enjoy what they do. Many times reading advanced topic books it seems like the author is just waddling through in order to get publicity, a paycheck or a resume item. These guys write on the subject as if they are glad to be working with the stuff. So what's in it for me? The world of CORBA. Nothing less can tell you what the information in this book is. There is simply nothing else on it's level. Once you start sifting through this one, make sure to check out Steve Vinoski's and Michi Henning's web pages for pointers to even more information. Organization The book is partitioned into major topic areas with chapters within each. The title of the book announces the intention to focus on advances topics and, while a novice programmer would have trouble with it, a competent C++ programmer with any network experience would have little difficulty jumping in and starting with just this book. That said, it does get deep pretty quickly.

The entire book is very example heavy and the first part starts the trend with an introduction to CORBA. They walk through a simple application, presenting only the IDL and code needed to get it to compile and run. After reading this section you still feel like your in deep water then take a step back and get a more introductory book to work through first. Part I is probably sufficient to get experienced programmers up and running though.

Part II focuses on the programmers interface to CORBA, IDL and the C++ mapping. These chapters reveal the flavor of the rest of the book. Highly detailed, yet emminently readable. In particular their intermingling of the technical issues with occasional paragraphs about the workings of the standards committee and the motivations behind the design are quite elucidating. It's one thing to understand the standard, but understanding it's foundation, motivation and direction is very important to becoming one of the greats.

Part III covers the "under the hood" aspects of how CORBA communicates between applications. These chapters are insteresting, but rarely come up in normal programming. The only possible use that comes to mind is perhaps in difficult to diagnose problems between vendors. These chapter provide plenty of background and details to point fingers at the right folks.

Part IV is a look at dynamic CORBA. Dynamic CORBA allows compliant applications to assemble the structures needed to communicate with servers that were unavailable, undeveloped or not even thought of at the time the client was compiled. Like Part III this section is more useful to those with fairly specific needs.

Part V delves back into more commonly used aspects of CORBA, the services. Very few CORBA systems are implemented without the naming service and as the state of the art matures more are using trading and events also. These are all well covered, including a smattering of OMG politics.

Part VI looks superficially like a heavyweight section, but even though it is hidden in the back, it's a gold mine of information. Folks implementing there first systems of any scale should make certain to read this section to assure that they don't go down a path that is difficult to recover from later.

This book is worth the price of admission and then some.

You can pick this book up at Amazon.

Table of contents

• 1) Introduction
• Part I Introduction to CORBA
• 2) An Overview of CORBA
• 3) A Minimal CORBA Application
• Part II Cora CORBA
• 4) The OMG Interface Definition Language
• 5) IDL for a Climate Control System
• 6) Basic IDL-to-C++ Mapping
• 7) Client-Side C++ Mapping
• 8) Developing a Client for the Climate Control System
• 9) Server-Side C++ Mapping
• 10) Developing a Server for the Climate Control System
• 11) The Portable Object Adapter
• 12) Object Life Cycle
• Part III CORBA Mechanisms
• 13) GIOP, IIOP, and IORs
• 14) Implementation Repositories and Binding
• Part IV Dynamic CORBA
• 15) C++ Mapping for Type any
• 16) Type Codes
• 17) Type DynAny
• Part V CORBA Services
• 18) The OMG Naming Service
• 19) The OMG Trading Service
• 20) The OMG Event Service
• Part VI Power CORBA
• 21) Multithreaded Applications
• 22) Performance, Scalability, and Maintainability

Thanks to return reviewer Janice Wright for the following review of Terry Prachett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen's effort The Science of Discworld. The book's a fun attempt to explain the science behind Prachett's incredibly funny world, Discworld. For those of you who haven't read Prachett, I am ashamed for you. Click below for more information. The Science of Discworld author Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen & Terry Pratchett pages 311 publisher Ebury Press (Random House) rating 8/10 reviewer Janice Wright ISBN summary A combination of fact and fantasy from masters of both investigates how the magic of "narrativium" informs the science of our world and worlds beyond.

For those who haven't had the pleasure, the Discworld moves through space on the back of four giant elephants who are in turn standing on the carapace of Great A'Tuin, the interstellar turtle. The Discworld is inhabited by all manner of creatures: trolls, dwarves, elves, a number of varieties of undead, and people - some of whom are wizards.

Our story starts with the wizards (and the wizzard), who for reasons that you will discover when you read the book, begin a project to study (that's wizard for "play with") The Roundworld. It starts to go wrong almost immediately. No matter how hard they try to get the planets to form nice, proper disc shapes, they keep getting spheres, globes, or balls. And they can't find a giant space turtle anywhere. It's obvious that the world they've created isn't a proper world at all. Or is it?

Throughout this wonderful mix of hard science and funny fantasy, Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (professors of biology and physics respectively, and co-authors of Figments of Reality and The Collapse of Chaos) step in every other chapter to explain the things that are confusing the wizards. Why are the planets round? Why do they insist on travelling around the sun in predictable ellipses. Yes, it's because of gravity, every schoolchild knows that. But what, exactly is gravity?

Via the wizards' assumptions about how a world should work and Jack & Ian's delightful prose, we are taken back to the basics of the science we learned in school and then forgot, secure in the knowledge that we "understood" how our world works. As the scientists explain, this is partly because most of the science we learn in school is what they have dubbed "lies-to-children". "Lies-to-children" are the stock of vast (untrue) over-simplifications that make science easier to teach, and easier to learn. And, most of the time "lies-to-children" are necessary in order to have something to build on to learn the next bit. The problem, they seem to be saying, is when the forget that it's really a "lie", and it turns into "believing-we-understand" instead of "wanting-to-know-more".

That is certainly not to say that The Science of Discworld is a children's book. You could certainly read it to children, though beware that this will probably result in time spent running around the back yard with oranges and footballs to explain the orbit of the planets, and so on. It is packed full of complex ideas and current theories. Most chapters start with the absolute basics and then swiftly bring you right up to date with the most recent discoveries from the High-Z Supernova Search Team (or what have you).

What I liked best about the book was the way the authors mentioned just enough about a particular topic (and dropped a couple of names or events; such as Jocelyn Bell's discovery of pulsars, or Adrian Thompson's experiments with Genetic Algorithms) for me to be able to go off and find out more about the things that I found particularly interesting. On the other hand, this brevity with most of the topics might frustrate some people.

What does it cover? Everything. Ok, so that's probably not a very good answer. There's this story about these wizards who create a universe and mess about with it for a while and get things wrong and shout at each other a lot. And there's a computer. And a librarian who's an ourangutan. It's a very funny story. Terry Pratchett wouldn't have written 35 books and be the second-biggest selling author in Britain if he weren't rather good at that sort of thing. In between every chapter of the funny story about the wizards there is a chapter of "hard" science. The stuff in the science chapters goes something like this:

• Science - what does it mean to think scientifically?
• Time, space & the big bang
• The stars, the elements, and more about the stars
• Newton, Einstein, and others
• Chaos, Emergence, and Langton's Ant (Note: if anyone has the url of a good site that demonstrates Langton's Ant, please post it as a follow-up. Thanks!)
• The planets, their orbits, & more about the stars
• The Earth from magma core to the atmosphere and the moon
• Philosophy on the nature of Light & Dark
• Life. Blue-green algae, Darwin, genetic algorithms
• Some notes on statistics and probability
• The Dinosaurs
• Mammals & DNA
• Neurology & culture
• Where do we go from here?

It should be obvious by now, but just in case it's not, I'll mention explicitly (as the authors themselves do on the second page of the text) that this is not a "The Science of Star Trek" type of book that speculates about the evolutionary feasibility of flying, fire-breathing dragons or tries explains what a thaum is (as if you could explain it, which you can't because a thaum isn't real, Terry just made it up).

Should I buy this book? Yes if: Probably
not if:

• You've been meaning to start reading some Popular Science
  • You already read an awful lot of Popular Science
    • You're looking for a good introduction/
      jumping-off point into a wide variety of interesting current scientific ideas
      • You've just finished a degree in Earth Sciences
        • You've read Figments of Reality and loved it's style
          • You thought all that icky biology stuff and all that stuff about different kinds of rocks in school was terribly boring
            • You can't think of a present for your bright 10-12 year old son/daughter/
              neice/nephew/etc. who has grown out of dinosaurs and has been pestering you to explain "how the stars work."

Can I buy this book? So far The Science of Discworld has only been published in the UK. As of June 10th, the authors hadn't even started discussions with American publishers, so the UK version is likely to be the only one available for quite a while. Buy it from Amazon.co.uk with the British spellings intact.

A word of caution
...to those who have not yet read any of Mr. Terry Pratchett's books. The Science of Discworld drops a number of tantalizing hints about the other Discworld books. You might well decide to buy one, just satisfy your curiosity about a particular character or story. Discworld books are addictive, with a capital "ADD". At first you'll casually pick up a paperback next time you're at the bookstore (I recommend Feet of Clay or The Colour of Magic), then perhaps you'll order the most recent hardback(s) from Amazon.co.uk. Next thing you know you're singing the Hedgehog song in the shower and doing very strange things with tapioca. It isn't pretty, and there's no known cure, but at least you won't be alone.
You have been warned.

Note: This is not yet availible in the US, but can be ordered from Amazon.uk.

Thanks to return reviewer Janice Wright for the following review of Terry Prachett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen's effort The Science of Discworld. The book's a fun attempt to explain the science behind Prachett's incredibly funny world, Discworld. For those of you who haven't read Prachett, I am ashamed for you. Click below for more information. The Science of Discworld author Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen & Terry Pratchett pages 311 publisher Ebury Press (Random House) rating 8/10 reviewer Janice Wright ISBN summary A combination of fact and fantasy from masters of both investigates how the magic of "narrativium" informs the science of our world and worlds beyond.

For those who haven't had the pleasure, the Discworld moves through space on the back of four giant elephants who are in turn standing on the carapace of Great A'Tuin, the interstellar turtle. The Discworld is inhabited by all manner of creatures: trolls, dwarves, elves, a number of varieties of undead, and people - some of whom are wizards.

Our story starts with the wizards (and the wizzard), who for reasons that you will discover when you read the book, begin a project to study (that's wizard for "play with") The Roundworld. It starts to go wrong almost immediately. No matter how hard they try to get the planets to form nice, proper disc shapes, they keep getting spheres, globes, or balls. And they can't find a giant space turtle anywhere. It's obvious that the world they've created isn't a proper world at all. Or is it?

Throughout this wonderful mix of hard science and funny fantasy, Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (professors of biology and physics respectively, and co-authors of Figments of Reality and The Collapse of Chaos) step in every other chapter to explain the things that are confusing the wizards. Why are the planets round? Why do they insist on travelling around the sun in predictable ellipses. Yes, it's because of gravity, every schoolchild knows that. But what, exactly is gravity?

Via the wizards' assumptions about how a world should work and Jack & Ian's delightful prose, we are taken back to the basics of the science we learned in school and then forgot, secure in the knowledge that we "understood" how our world works. As the scientists explain, this is partly because most of the science we learn in school is what they have dubbed "lies-to-children". "Lies-to-children" are the stock of vast (untrue) over-simplifications that make science easier to teach, and easier to learn. And, most of the time "lies-to-children" are necessary in order to have something to build on to learn the next bit. The problem, they seem to be saying, is when the forget that it's really a "lie", and it turns into "believing-we-understand" instead of "wanting-to-know-more".

That is certainly not to say that The Science of Discworld is a children's book. You could certainly read it to children, though beware that this will probably result in time spent running around the back yard with oranges and footballs to explain the orbit of the planets, and so on. It is packed full of complex ideas and current theories. Most chapters start with the absolute basics and then swiftly bring you right up to date with the most recent discoveries from the High-Z Supernova Search Team (or what have you).

What I liked best about the book was the way the authors mentioned just enough about a particular topic (and dropped a couple of names or events; such as Jocelyn Bell's discovery of pulsars, or Adrian Thompson's experiments with Genetic Algorithms) for me to be able to go off and find out more about the things that I found particularly interesting. On the other hand, this brevity with most of the topics might frustrate some people.

What does it cover? Everything. Ok, so that's probably not a very good answer. There's this story about these wizards who create a universe and mess about with it for a while and get things wrong and shout at each other a lot. And there's a computer. And a librarian who's an ourangutan. It's a very funny story. Terry Pratchett wouldn't have written 35 books and be the second-biggest selling author in Britain if he weren't rather good at that sort of thing. In between every chapter of the funny story about the wizards there is a chapter of "hard" science. The stuff in the science chapters goes something like this:

• Science - what does it mean to think scientifically?
• Time, space & the big bang
• The stars, the elements, and more about the stars
• Newton, Einstein, and others
• Chaos, Emergence, and Langton's Ant (Note: if anyone has the url of a good site that demonstrates Langton's Ant, please post it as a follow-up. Thanks!)
• The planets, their orbits, & more about the stars
• The Earth from magma core to the atmosphere and the moon
• Philosophy on the nature of Light & Dark
• Life. Blue-green algae, Darwin, genetic algorithms
• Some notes on statistics and probability
• The Dinosaurs
• Mammals & DNA
• Neurology & culture
• Where do we go from here?

It should be obvious by now, but just in case it's not, I'll mention explicitly (as the authors themselves do on the second page of the text) that this is not a "The Science of Star Trek" type of book that speculates about the evolutionary feasibility of flying, fire-breathing dragons or tries explains what a thaum is (as if you could explain it, which you can't because a thaum isn't real, Terry just made it up).

Should I buy this book? Yes if: Probably
not if:

• You've been meaning to start reading some Popular Science
  • You already read an awful lot of Popular Science
    • You're looking for a good introduction/
      jumping-off point into a wide variety of interesting current scientific ideas
      • You've just finished a degree in Earth Sciences
        • You've read Figments of Reality and loved it's style
          • You thought all that icky biology stuff and all that stuff about different kinds of rocks in school was terribly boring
            • You can't think of a present for your bright 10-12 year old son/daughter/
              neice/nephew/etc. who has grown out of dinosaurs and has been pestering you to explain "how the stars work."

Can I buy this book? So far The Science of Discworld has only been published in the UK. As of June 10th, the authors hadn't even started discussions with American publishers, so the UK version is likely to be the only one available for quite a while. Buy it from Amazon.co.uk with the British spellings intact.

A word of caution
...to those who have not yet read any of Mr. Terry Pratchett's books. The Science of Discworld drops a number of tantalizing hints about the other Discworld books. You might well decide to buy one, just satisfy your curiosity about a particular character or story. Discworld books are addictive, with a capital "ADD". At first you'll casually pick up a paperback next time you're at the bookstore (I recommend Feet of Clay or The Colour of Magic), then perhaps you'll order the most recent hardback(s) from Amazon.co.uk. Next thing you know you're singing the Hedgehog song in the shower and doing very strange things with tapioca. It isn't pretty, and there's no known cure, but at least you won't be alone.
You have been warned.

Note: This is not yet availible in the US, but can be ordered from Amazon.uk.

Thanks to return reviewer Janice Wright for the following review of Terry Prachett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen's effort The Science of Discworld. The book's a fun attempt to explain the science behind Prachett's incredibly funny world, Discworld. For those of you who haven't read Prachett, I am ashamed for you. Click below for more information. The Science of Discworld author Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen & Terry Pratchett pages 311 publisher Ebury Press (Random House) rating 8/10 reviewer Janice Wright ISBN summary A combination of fact and fantasy from masters of both investigates how the magic of "narrativium" informs the science of our world and worlds beyond.

For those who haven't had the pleasure, the Discworld moves through space on the back of four giant elephants who are in turn standing on the carapace of Great A'Tuin, the interstellar turtle. The Discworld is inhabited by all manner of creatures: trolls, dwarves, elves, a number of varieties of undead, and people - some of whom are wizards.

Our story starts with the wizards (and the wizzard), who for reasons that you will discover when you read the book, begin a project to study (that's wizard for "play with") The Roundworld. It starts to go wrong almost immediately. No matter how hard they try to get the planets to form nice, proper disc shapes, they keep getting spheres, globes, or balls. And they can't find a giant space turtle anywhere. It's obvious that the world they've created isn't a proper world at all. Or is it?

Throughout this wonderful mix of hard science and funny fantasy, Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (professors of biology and physics respectively, and co-authors of Figments of Reality and The Collapse of Chaos) step in every other chapter to explain the things that are confusing the wizards. Why are the planets round? Why do they insist on travelling around the sun in predictable ellipses. Yes, it's because of gravity, every schoolchild knows that. But what, exactly is gravity?

Via the wizards' assumptions about how a world should work and Jack & Ian's delightful prose, we are taken back to the basics of the science we learned in school and then forgot, secure in the knowledge that we "understood" how our world works. As the scientists explain, this is partly because most of the science we learn in school is what they have dubbed "lies-to-children". "Lies-to-children" are the stock of vast (untrue) over-simplifications that make science easier to teach, and easier to learn. And, most of the time "lies-to-children" are necessary in order to have something to build on to learn the next bit. The problem, they seem to be saying, is when the forget that it's really a "lie", and it turns into "believing-we-understand" instead of "wanting-to-know-more".

That is certainly not to say that The Science of Discworld is a children's book. You could certainly read it to children, though beware that this will probably result in time spent running around the back yard with oranges and footballs to explain the orbit of the planets, and so on. It is packed full of complex ideas and current theories. Most chapters start with the absolute basics and then swiftly bring you right up to date with the most recent discoveries from the High-Z Supernova Search Team (or what have you).

What I liked best about the book was the way the authors mentioned just enough about a particular topic (and dropped a couple of names or events; such as Jocelyn Bell's discovery of pulsars, or Adrian Thompson's experiments with Genetic Algorithms) for me to be able to go off and find out more about the things that I found particularly interesting. On the other hand, this brevity with most of the topics might frustrate some people.

What does it cover? Everything. Ok, so that's probably not a very good answer. There's this story about these wizards who create a universe and mess about with it for a while and get things wrong and shout at each other a lot. And there's a computer. And a librarian who's an ourangutan. It's a very funny story. Terry Pratchett wouldn't have written 35 books and be the second-biggest selling author in Britain if he weren't rather good at that sort of thing. In between every chapter of the funny story about the wizards there is a chapter of "hard" science. The stuff in the science chapters goes something like this:

• Science - what does it mean to think scientifically?
• Time, space & the big bang
• The stars, the elements, and more about the stars
• Newton, Einstein, and others
• Chaos, Emergence, and Langton's Ant (Note: if anyone has the url of a good site that demonstrates Langton's Ant, please post it as a follow-up. Thanks!)
• The planets, their orbits, & more about the stars
• The Earth from magma core to the atmosphere and the moon
• Philosophy on the nature of Light & Dark
• Life. Blue-green algae, Darwin, genetic algorithms
• Some notes on statistics and probability
• The Dinosaurs
• Mammals & DNA
• Neurology & culture
• Where do we go from here?

It should be obvious by now, but just in case it's not, I'll mention explicitly (as the authors themselves do on the second page of the text) that this is not a "The Science of Star Trek" type of book that speculates about the evolutionary feasibility of flying, fire-breathing dragons or tries explains what a thaum is (as if you could explain it, which you can't because a thaum isn't real, Terry just made it up).

Should I buy this book? Yes if: Probably
not if:

• You've been meaning to start reading some Popular Science
  • You already read an awful lot of Popular Science
    • You're looking for a good introduction/
      jumping-off point into a wide variety of interesting current scientific ideas
      • You've just finished a degree in Earth Sciences
        • You've read Figments of Reality and loved it's style
          • You thought all that icky biology stuff and all that stuff about different kinds of rocks in school was terribly boring
            • You can't think of a present for your bright 10-12 year old son/daughter/
              neice/nephew/etc. who has grown out of dinosaurs and has been pestering you to explain "how the stars work."

Can I buy this book? So far The Science of Discworld has only been published in the UK. As of June 10th, the authors hadn't even started discussions with American publishers, so the UK version is likely to be the only one available for quite a while. Buy it from Amazon.co.uk with the British spellings intact.

A word of caution
...to those who have not yet read any of Mr. Terry Pratchett's books. The Science of Discworld drops a number of tantalizing hints about the other Discworld books. You might well decide to buy one, just satisfy your curiosity about a particular character or story. Discworld books are addictive, with a capital "ADD". At first you'll casually pick up a paperback next time you're at the bookstore (I recommend Feet of Clay or The Colour of Magic), then perhaps you'll order the most recent hardback(s) from Amazon.co.uk. Next thing you know you're singing the Hedgehog song in the shower and doing very strange things with tapioca. It isn't pretty, and there's no known cure, but at least you won't be alone.
You have been warned.

Note: This is not yet availible in the US, but can be ordered from Amazon.uk.

Thanks to return reviewer Janice Wright for the following review of Terry Prachett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen's effort The Science of Discworld. The book's a fun attempt to explain the science behind Prachett's incredibly funny world, Discworld. For those of you who haven't read Prachett, I am ashamed for you. Click below for more information. The Science of Discworld author Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen & Terry Pratchett pages 311 publisher Ebury Press (Random House) rating 8/10 reviewer Janice Wright ISBN summary A combination of fact and fantasy from masters of both investigates how the magic of "narrativium" informs the science of our world and worlds beyond.

For those who haven't had the pleasure, the Discworld moves through space on the back of four giant elephants who are in turn standing on the carapace of Great A'Tuin, the interstellar turtle. The Discworld is inhabited by all manner of creatures: trolls, dwarves, elves, a number of varieties of undead, and people - some of whom are wizards.

Our story starts with the wizards (and the wizzard), who for reasons that you will discover when you read the book, begin a project to study (that's wizard for "play with") The Roundworld. It starts to go wrong almost immediately. No matter how hard they try to get the planets to form nice, proper disc shapes, they keep getting spheres, globes, or balls. And they can't find a giant space turtle anywhere. It's obvious that the world they've created isn't a proper world at all. Or is it?

Throughout this wonderful mix of hard science and funny fantasy, Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (professors of biology and physics respectively, and co-authors of Figments of Reality and The Collapse of Chaos) step in every other chapter to explain the things that are confusing the wizards. Why are the planets round? Why do they insist on travelling around the sun in predictable ellipses. Yes, it's because of gravity, every schoolchild knows that. But what, exactly is gravity?

Via the wizards' assumptions about how a world should work and Jack & Ian's delightful prose, we are taken back to the basics of the science we learned in school and then forgot, secure in the knowledge that we "understood" how our world works. As the scientists explain, this is partly because most of the science we learn in school is what they have dubbed "lies-to-children". "Lies-to-children" are the stock of vast (untrue) over-simplifications that make science easier to teach, and easier to learn. And, most of the time "lies-to-children" are necessary in order to have something to build on to learn the next bit. The problem, they seem to be saying, is when the forget that it's really a "lie", and it turns into "believing-we-understand" instead of "wanting-to-know-more".

That is certainly not to say that The Science of Discworld is a children's book. You could certainly read it to children, though beware that this will probably result in time spent running around the back yard with oranges and footballs to explain the orbit of the planets, and so on. It is packed full of complex ideas and current theories. Most chapters start with the absolute basics and then swiftly bring you right up to date with the most recent discoveries from the High-Z Supernova Search Team (or what have you).

What I liked best about the book was the way the authors mentioned just enough about a particular topic (and dropped a couple of names or events; such as Jocelyn Bell's discovery of pulsars, or Adrian Thompson's experiments with Genetic Algorithms) for me to be able to go off and find out more about the things that I found particularly interesting. On the other hand, this brevity with most of the topics might frustrate some people.

What does it cover? Everything. Ok, so that's probably not a very good answer. There's this story about these wizards who create a universe and mess about with it for a while and get things wrong and shout at each other a lot. And there's a computer. And a librarian who's an ourangutan. It's a very funny story. Terry Pratchett wouldn't have written 35 books and be the second-biggest selling author in Britain if he weren't rather good at that sort of thing. In between every chapter of the funny story about the wizards there is a chapter of "hard" science. The stuff in the science chapters goes something like this:

• Science - what does it mean to think scientifically?
• Time, space & the big bang
• The stars, the elements, and more about the stars
• Newton, Einstein, and others
• Chaos, Emergence, and Langton's Ant (Note: if anyone has the url of a good site that demonstrates Langton's Ant, please post it as a follow-up. Thanks!)
• The planets, their orbits, & more about the stars
• The Earth from magma core to the atmosphere and the moon
• Philosophy on the nature of Light & Dark
• Life. Blue-green algae, Darwin, genetic algorithms
• Some notes on statistics and probability
• The Dinosaurs
• Mammals & DNA
• Neurology & culture
• Where do we go from here?

It should be obvious by now, but just in case it's not, I'll mention explicitly (as the authors themselves do on the second page of the text) that this is not a "The Science of Star Trek" type of book that speculates about the evolutionary feasibility of flying, fire-breathing dragons or tries explains what a thaum is (as if you could explain it, which you can't because a thaum isn't real, Terry just made it up).

Should I buy this book? Yes if: Probably
not if:

• You've been meaning to start reading some Popular Science
  • You already read an awful lot of Popular Science
    • You're looking for a good introduction/
      jumping-off point into a wide variety of interesting current scientific ideas
      • You've just finished a degree in Earth Sciences
        • You've read Figments of Reality and loved it's style
          • You thought all that icky biology stuff and all that stuff about different kinds of rocks in school was terribly boring
            • You can't think of a present for your bright 10-12 year old son/daughter/
              neice/nephew/etc. who has grown out of dinosaurs and has been pestering you to explain "how the stars work."

Can I buy this book? So far The Science of Discworld has only been published in the UK. As of June 10th, the authors hadn't even started discussions with American publishers, so the UK version is likely to be the only one available for quite a while. Buy it from Amazon.co.uk with the British spellings intact.

A word of caution
...to those who have not yet read any of Mr. Terry Pratchett's books. The Science of Discworld drops a number of tantalizing hints about the other Discworld books. You might well decide to buy one, just satisfy your curiosity about a particular character or story. Discworld books are addictive, with a capital "ADD". At first you'll casually pick up a paperback next time you're at the bookstore (I recommend Feet of Clay or The Colour of Magic), then perhaps you'll order the most recent hardback(s) from Amazon.co.uk. Next thing you know you're singing the Hedgehog song in the shower and doing very strange things with tapioca. It isn't pretty, and there's no known cure, but at least you won't be alone.
You have been warned.

Note: This is not yet availible in the US, but can be ordered from Amazon.uk.

Thanks to return reviewer Janice Wright for the following review of Terry Prachett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen's effort The Science of Discworld. The book's a fun attempt to explain the science behind Prachett's incredibly funny world, Discworld. For those of you who haven't read Prachett, I am ashamed for you. Click below for more information. The Science of Discworld author Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen & Terry Pratchett pages 311 publisher Ebury Press (Random House) rating 8/10 reviewer Janice Wright ISBN summary A combination of fact and fantasy from masters of both investigates how the magic of "narrativium" informs the science of our world and worlds beyond.

For those who haven't had the pleasure, the Discworld moves through space on the back of four giant elephants who are in turn standing on the carapace of Great A'Tuin, the interstellar turtle. The Discworld is inhabited by all manner of creatures: trolls, dwarves, elves, a number of varieties of undead, and people - some of whom are wizards.

Our story starts with the wizards (and the wizzard), who for reasons that you will discover when you read the book, begin a project to study (that's wizard for "play with") The Roundworld. It starts to go wrong almost immediately. No matter how hard they try to get the planets to form nice, proper disc shapes, they keep getting spheres, globes, or balls. And they can't find a giant space turtle anywhere. It's obvious that the world they've created isn't a proper world at all. Or is it?

Throughout this wonderful mix of hard science and funny fantasy, Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (professors of biology and physics respectively, and co-authors of Figments of Reality and The Collapse of Chaos) step in every other chapter to explain the things that are confusing the wizards. Why are the planets round? Why do they insist on travelling around the sun in predictable ellipses. Yes, it's because of gravity, every schoolchild knows that. But what, exactly is gravity?

Via the wizards' assumptions about how a world should work and Jack & Ian's delightful prose, we are taken back to the basics of the science we learned in school and then forgot, secure in the knowledge that we "understood" how our world works. As the scientists explain, this is partly because most of the science we learn in school is what they have dubbed "lies-to-children". "Lies-to-children" are the stock of vast (untrue) over-simplifications that make science easier to teach, and easier to learn. And, most of the time "lies-to-children" are necessary in order to have something to build on to learn the next bit. The problem, they seem to be saying, is when the forget that it's really a "lie", and it turns into "believing-we-understand" instead of "wanting-to-know-more".

That is certainly not to say that The Science of Discworld is a children's book. You could certainly read it to children, though beware that this will probably result in time spent running around the back yard with oranges and footballs to explain the orbit of the planets, and so on. It is packed full of complex ideas and current theories. Most chapters start with the absolute basics and then swiftly bring you right up to date with the most recent discoveries from the High-Z Supernova Search Team (or what have you).

What I liked best about the book was the way the authors mentioned just enough about a particular topic (and dropped a couple of names or events; such as Jocelyn Bell's discovery of pulsars, or Adrian Thompson's experiments with Genetic Algorithms) for me to be able to go off and find out more about the things that I found particularly interesting. On the other hand, this brevity with most of the topics might frustrate some people.

What does it cover? Everything. Ok, so that's probably not a very good answer. There's this story about these wizards who create a universe and mess about with it for a while and get things wrong and shout at each other a lot. And there's a computer. And a librarian who's an ourangutan. It's a very funny story. Terry Pratchett wouldn't have written 35 books and be the second-biggest selling author in Britain if he weren't rather good at that sort of thing. In between every chapter of the funny story about the wizards there is a chapter of "hard" science. The stuff in the science chapters goes something like this:

• Science - what does it mean to think scientifically?
• Time, space & the big bang
• The stars, the elements, and more about the stars
• Newton, Einstein, and others
• Chaos, Emergence, and Langton's Ant (Note: if anyone has the url of a good site that demonstrates Langton's Ant, please post it as a follow-up. Thanks!)
• The planets, their orbits, & more about the stars
• The Earth from magma core to the atmosphere and the moon
• Philosophy on the nature of Light & Dark
• Life. Blue-green algae, Darwin, genetic algorithms
• Some notes on statistics and probability
• The Dinosaurs
• Mammals & DNA
• Neurology & culture
• Where do we go from here?

It should be obvious by now, but just in case it's not, I'll mention explicitly (as the authors themselves do on the second page of the text) that this is not a "The Science of Star Trek" type of book that speculates about the evolutionary feasibility of flying, fire-breathing dragons or tries explains what a thaum is (as if you could explain it, which you can't because a thaum isn't real, Terry just made it up).

Should I buy this book? Yes if: Probably
not if:

• You've been meaning to start reading some Popular Science
  • You already read an awful lot of Popular Science
    • You're looking for a good introduction/
      jumping-off point into a wide variety of interesting current scientific ideas
      • You've just finished a degree in Earth Sciences
        • You've read Figments of Reality and loved it's style
          • You thought all that icky biology stuff and all that stuff about different kinds of rocks in school was terribly boring
            • You can't think of a present for your bright 10-12 year old son/daughter/
              neice/nephew/etc. who has grown out of dinosaurs and has been pestering you to explain "how the stars work."

Can I buy this book? So far The Science of Discworld has only been published in the UK. As of June 10th, the authors hadn't even started discussions with American publishers, so the UK version is likely to be the only one available for quite a while. Buy it from Amazon.co.uk with the British spellings intact.

A word of caution
...to those who have not yet read any of Mr. Terry Pratchett's books. The Science of Discworld drops a number of tantalizing hints about the other Discworld books. You might well decide to buy one, just satisfy your curiosity about a particular character or story. Discworld books are addictive, with a capital "ADD". At first you'll casually pick up a paperback next time you're at the bookstore (I recommend Feet of Clay or The Colour of Magic), then perhaps you'll order the most recent hardback(s) from Amazon.co.uk. Next thing you know you're singing the Hedgehog song in the shower and doing very strange things with tapioca. It isn't pretty, and there's no known cure, but at least you won't be alone.
You have been warned.

Note: This is not yet availible in the US, but can be ordered from Amazon.uk.

Ellen Spertus has sent us a review of Phillip (and his dog!)'s Guide to Web Publishing. Known for being an outspoken prof at MIT, with interesting ideas, his web publishing manual is similarly interesting, focusing on collabrative web sites.Piotr has updated me. Neither the man, nor the dog is a prof at MIT, although they spend time there. Mea Culpa. Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing author Philip Greenspun pages 608 publisher Academic Press/Morgan Kaufmann rating 9/10 reviewer Ellen Spertus with Keith Golden ISBN summary Entertaining and informative book on why and how to build collabrative web sites. The Scenario

Philip Greenspun - web guru, expert photographer, free software writer, and unique personality - has written an irreverent, informative, and visually attractive book on why and how to build collaborative database-backed web sites. (Alex, his photogenic co-author, is his dog.) The book is a rewrite of Greenspun's earlier Database-Backed Web Sites, whose history and flaws have been described in Greenspun's amusing Book behind the book behind the book. This time around, Greenspun got to do the book the way he wanted.

Greenspun's philosophy can be summarized as follows:

• Whenever possible, web sites should be designed to allow users to contribute material. (I think most of us at slashdot would agree.)
• Web views should be personalized for individual users. (Ditto.)
• A relational database is the best tool for accomplishing these goals. Greenspun even provides free space on his database server for people to use his collaboration tools on their own sites.
• The user interface should be optimized for the convenience of the user. This does not mean that aesthetics are unimportant, just that they should not interfere with the communication of information.

The book convincingly argues this philosophy by presenting numerous examples from high-level design to actual code. What's Bad?

The biggest negative is that parts of this book are repeats of his earlier book. While most of the material is new, reading through the old stuff can be annoying to people who have read the first.

What's Controversial?

Greenspun's sense of humor. There are many things he says that a reasonable person would find offensive or hilarious or both. (For an example of the last, see his Dating Game.) While it makes the book fun to read, I'd think twice before assigning the book to my students. Some people might be offended by the (artistic) nude pictures, although I was not.

I was at MIT at the same time as Greenspun, where he was known for always speaking his mind (to put it kindly). This same irreverance is evident throughout the book, where he is not shy about stating his dislikes. The following excerpt illustrates Greenspun's style:

Most of what I've said in this chapter goes against conventional wisdom as observed on big corporate sites and in books on Web page design. My theory is that graphic designers get interfaces so wrong because they never figured out that they aren't building CD-ROMs. With a CD-ROM, you can control the user's access to the content. Borrow a copy of David Siegel's Creating Killer Web Sites (Hayden Books 1997) and note that he urges you to have an "entry tunnel" of three pages with useless slow-to-load GIFs on them. Then there should be an "exit tunnel" with three more full-page GIFs. In between, there are a handful of "content" pages that constitute the site per se.

Siegel is making some implicit assumptions: that there are no users with text-only browsers; that users have a fast enough Net connection that they won't have to wait 45 seconds before getting to the content of a site; that there are no users who've turned off auto image loading; that there is some obvious place to put these tunnels on a site with thousands of pages. Even if all of those things are true, if the internal pages do indeed contain any content, AltaVista will roar through and wreck everything. People aren't going to enter the site by typing in "http://www.greedy.com" and then let themselves be led around by the nose by you. They will find the site by using a search engine and typing a query string that is of interest to them. The search engine will cough up a list of URLs that it thinks are of interest to them. AltaVista does not think a Dave Siegel "entry tunnel" is "killer". In fact, it might not even bother to index a page that is just one GIF. (chapter 5)

While most of his opinions are as well-supported as this one, some are more controversial, such as section headings "Java and Shockwave - The BLINK Tag Writ Large" and "CORBA: MiddleWare Meets VaporWare".

What's Good?

Greenspun is a real expert on web publishing and communicates a lot of interesting information. It is clear that his goal is evangelism, not making money: Greenspun makes his code freely available, and the entire book is available for free online (although many people will want to buy it for convenience and its stunning photographs).

So What's In It For Me?

Plenty. Reading this book (and downloading the code) makes it easy to create a database-backed web site. (I know because I did so.) You get not just the basics but real depth, such as how to create a high-performance site, capable of serving 20 or more database-backed requests per second.

Purchase this book at Amazon.

Table of Contents

1. Envisioning a site that won't be featured in suck.com
2. So you want to join the world's grubbiest club: Internet entrepreneurs
3. Scalable systems for on-line communities
4. Static site development
5. Learn to program HTML in 21 minutes
6. Adding images to your site
7. Publicizing your site
8. So you want to run your own server
9. User tracking
10. Sites that are really programs
11. Sites that are really databases
12. Database management systems
13. Interfacing a relational database to the Web
14. ecommerce
15. Case studies
16. Better living through chemistry
17. A future so bright you'll need to wear sunglasses

Thanks to SEGV for the this review of Jacobson, Booch, Rumbaugh's latest effort The Unified Software Development Process. A book designed for those of you who love process (or want to learn development process), click below for more information. The Unified Software Development Process author Ivar Jacobson, Grady Booch, and James Rumbaugh pages 512 publisher Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. rating 8/10 reviewer SEGV ISBN summary A textbook treatment on process in software development. Covers the Unified Process from product launch to architectural baseline, through initial operational capability, ultimately to product release. Information rich but occasionally dry.

The Unified Process

This book is the third by the Three Amigos this past year (the other two being the UML user and reference guides). Although recently known for their work on the UML at Rational, the Unified Process is an outgrowth of Jacobson's original work at Ericsson on the Objectory Process.

So what is the Unified Process? I'll quote from the book's glossary:

A sofware development process based on the unified modeling language that is iterative, architecture-centric, use-case driven, and risk-driven. A process that is organized around the four phases: inception, elaboration, construction, and transition, and that is further organized around the five core workflows: requirements capture, analysis, design, implementation, and test. A process that is described in terms of a business model, which in turn is structured in terms of three primitive building blocks: workers, activities, and artifacts.

Essentially, this is the 463 page textbook elaborating on what was briefly described in the second chapter of Martin Fowler's UML Distilled [related review].

Organization

The book itself is well organized. Chapters are broken into logical sections and bite-sized subsections. For example, most chapters in Part II follow this structure: introduction, role, artifacts, workers, workflow, summary, and references. That consistency is a boon to the reader (and not an albatross, as it is deviated from where necessary).

Figures help the reader to maintain a frame of reference (e.g., traveling through the phases and workflows). This is important as the Unified Process can occasionally be confusing, with its repeated iterations and workflows.

The authors provide examples where illustrative and references where beneficial. The appendices are handy, especially the 13 page overview of the UML (which is very well done).

Impartiality

One of my concerns reading this book was the degree of impartiality of the authors. Naturally, being Rational employees they have a vested interest in promoting their Unified Process and UML tools. Happily, I didn't notice an overt conflict of interest. Rational is mentioned a few times, but not obtrusively. And although they mention tool support as being an imperative, that's probably true.

Another area of impartiality is in their references. The authors don't reference their own works exclusively, but instead point the reader in other fruitful directions, including the design patterns literature and even Peter Drucker's writings on management theory.

Impressions

I found that the authors often had useful things to say. Whenever I open to a random page, I find a useful tidbit or two, and I appreciate that. There's nothing radical here, but the structured presentation benefits the content a lot.

This is a book on software process, and a fairly textbook-ish one at that, so I wasn't surprised to find the writing a little dry. In particular, I found the chapters in Part II to be particularly soporific on first read, but then I realize that the internal mechanics of software development don't necessarily make for the most thrilling read. Returning to those chapters to read in measured dosage really does them well.

Minor Drawbacks

I'd like to have seen a little more variation in the examples. I remember quite a few dealing with bank machines, and although that leads itself to a certain stability, it can be hard to get excited over such applications.

Although the index is fairly complete, I recall one omission in particular. The authors discuss three ways the Unified Process addresses the issue of "good enough" software, yet no mention is made in the index. That piqued me when I wanted to look it up.

Finally, although the authors use C++ and Java for the occasional lower level example, they use a directory as a packaging mechanism in the former. I feel a namespace is more applicable.

Applicability

While I was reading this book, I was preparing documents and presentations on software process for my employer. I did find this book to be helpful, and definitely feel that it was a worthwhile read.

This is not a recipe book. It won't lay down everything for you. But it will get you started thinking in the right direction, and aware of the issues involved in an industrial strength software development process.

However, it's important to remember that the Unified Process is not the answer to all process questions. Although it scales well, I believe it can be overkill for small teams, and I assume inadequate for some larger organizations as well.

Recommendation

If process is your thing, then you'll probably want this book. If you lead a team in a medium sized software development organization, and are interested in introducing a more formal process, then this book is a recommended read. Even if you don't end up applying the Unified Process, it simply addresses too many relevant details to be ignored.

I don't recommend this book for casual reading, unless you have an interest in process. A good example might be a developer in a medium sized organization who feels they need a more formal process. A good guideline might be whether you're still interested after reading the glossary quote in the introduction.

You will find the book web page in Addison-Wesley's Object Technology Series.

Purchase this book at Amazon.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface
Part I: The Unified Software Development Process
1. The Unified Process: Use-Case Driven, Architecture-Centric, Iterative, and Incremental
2. The Four Ps: People, Project, Product, and Process in Software Development
3. A Use-Case-Driven Process
4. An Architecture-Centric Process
5. An Iterative and Incremental Process
Part II: The Core Workflows
6. Requirements Capture: From Vision to Requirements
7. Capturing the Requirements as Use Cases
8. Analysis
9. Design
10. Implementation
11. Test
Part III: Iterative and Incremental Development
12. The Generic Iteration Workflow
13. Inception Launches the Project
14. The Elaboration Phase Makes the Architecural Baseline
15. Construction Leads to Initial Operational Capability
16. Transition Completes the Product Release
17. Making the Unified Process Work
Appendix A: Overview of the UML
Appendix B: The Unified Process-Specific Extensions of the UML
Appendix C: Glossary
Index

While I'm still making my way through my auto-graphed (thanks Chris!) copy of Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, new reviewer Nathan Bruinooge sent us over an excellent review of what it appears to be my favorite fiction of 1999. Click below - it's well worth it. Cryptonomicon author Neil Stephenson pages 900+ publisher Avon Books rating 10/10 reviewer Nathan Bruinooge ISBN summary With Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson has made two leaps at once: from cyberpunk-informed science fiction to a modern-day technothriller, and from novels of sensible length to a 900+ page whopper. He has pulled it off, and them some -- this is a book with book with both guts and soul. It is his best novel yet.

Cryptonomicon is about crypto, which is to say cryptology, which is to say it's about codes. The title is the name of a book of code-lore which has accrued over the years, though its role in this novel is actually pretty marginal. Cryptology is the glue that holds together a plot that alternates back and forth between World War Two and the present day and focuses on three (almost four) main characters:

Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, a mild-mannered midwesterner who hangs out at Princeton with Alan Turing and is playing in an army band at Pearl Harbor when it gets blown to hell. Then his mathematical mind is discovered by the military brass and he quickly becomes involved in the information war to which the actual, physical fighting is a series of inevitable afterthoughts and conclusions.

Bobby Shaftoe, the unkillable, morphine-addled China Marine who sees a vision of a Lizard at Guadacanal and ends up fighting his way through a series of inexplicable missions for the top-secret British-American Detachment 2702.

Randall Lawrence Waterhouse, Lawrence's grandson, a computer geek and crypto hobbyist who helps found the Epiphyte Corporation in the present day with some of his friends. He finds himself quickly eye-deep in data havens, underwater cabling, and buried treasure.

The other one vying for billing as a major character is Goto Dengo, a Japanese soldier. Bobby's descendants come into the mix too, as well as a motley assortment of hackers, a sultan, a U-boat commander, a Holocaust-obsessed entrepeneur, and the enigmatic, wonderful pseudo-priest Enoch Root.

So the ground is laid for a rather exciting techno-thriller, and we at least know from Snow Crash that Stephenson can deliver technology-soaked excitement with a deft hand. Cryptonomicon delivers in spades, but it goes a step or two beyond that as well. Crypto shows up again and again not just as a central element in the plots of both timelines, but as a theme that informs everything from Bobby Shaftoe's wartime haikus to Randy's attempts to decipher the love signals sent to him by Bobby's granddaughter Amy. Discovering the hidden patterns within seeming randomness, discovering the order out of chaos -- these things are not just in the book, they are what the book is. The plot works in precisely this way, following different people in different times until their lives inevitably collide and interconnect.

We also get treated to more of Stephenson's razor-sharp cultural insight. The same eye that made Snow Crash so prophetic even while it was being zany and over-the-top informs Cryptonomicon. Instead of inventing a future reality, he digs up the most unusual facts and locales of the real world, and, spinning them into his own idiosyncratic vision and prose, turns it into something so odd and scary and wonderful that we barely recognize it as our own. This is especially jarring in the World War Two scenes, probably because we are used to hearing and reading and seeing those tales in a certain mythic, grainy black & white style. Stephenson can't quite resist doing some fictionalizing of his own, as with the more-Celtic-than-the-Celts realm of Qwghlm and the South Pacific island of Kinakuta. These are fun in their own way but almost disappointments -- he is so able to bring to life the quirks of existing places that going out of his way to make up new ones is unnecessary, a frivolity.

As he was in prevous novels, Stephenson here is highly multicultural in the sense of setting his stories literally worldwide in a wide variety of cultures, and displaying a fair amount of knowledge and insight about each one. What's different and fresh (and will probably piss off some people) is that no culture is safe from his scathing observations about what is worst about it. Much of the novel takes place in the Philippines, past and present -- a cultural & economic & historical crossroads that makes a perfect setting for his melting pot plot. (He is at his best realizing and describing its complex urban & rural dynamics.) He's extremely harsh on the Germans and the Japanese, of course, and yet the two most admirable characters in the book are German and Japanese, respectively.

Cryptonomicon's World War Two subplot is timely in its arrival, what with the upsurge in interest in the period marked, for example, by Saving Private Ryan and Tom Brokaw's bestselling book The Greatest Generation. A certain amount of ancestor-worship is going on here, and this novel takes some part in it. There is a marked difference between the past and present storylines -- our WWII heroes are constantly getting into life-and-death situations, improvising brilliant ways to escape or to kill people, breaking unbreakable codes, inventing the digital computer, etc. By contrast the entrepeneurial exploits of Randy and his friends seem hopelessly mundane. Fortunately it's a good deal more subtle than that, though. For one thing, the constant juxtapositions of events past and present (a present-day corporate board meeting next to a WWII war room, for example, or the hauntingly similar sexual dilemmas of the respective Waterhouses) remind us that what separates these people is not so much essence but circumstance. And in the later pages, too, the present-day subplot gets every bit as life-threatening and globally significant. Stephenson also doesn't idolize or sugar-coat the foibles of his "greatest generation."

So what about the comparisons to Thomas Pynchon? Now that Stephenson has a World War Two novel (or at least half of one) under his belt, they are both inevitable and ubiquitous. Behind it is a larger implied question: does this novel have literary worth? (Whatever that means.) Stephenson can write well, but he's not a prose maestro in the same class as Pynchon or David Foster Wallace. You could also take him to task, perhaps, for "lack of deep character development," if you were into that sort of thing. (Interestingly, Randy is the most well-developed character in the book, probably because the others are too busy doing things for Stephenson to dwell on their inner states overmuch. It takes a certain amount -- no, a tremendous amount -- of courage to make one of your chief protagonists a nerdy UNIX hacker and ex-fantasy roleplayer who's a little soft around the middle. But he does it and it works.) What Stephenson does have is the knack for plot (in this case, an exquisitely complex one), the ability to tell a good, long story. He does it a good deal better than Pynchon or D.F. Wallace or most other big writers these days. For my money, that's the most important part of what makes good literature good, and it's what this novel does best.

Just as important, as long as we're talking about fin-de-siecle literature, is the fact that Stephenson has a flying clue about technology and computers. The world is full of modernist and postmodernist gripe about the existential dilemmas of a fragmented society and the epistemological chaos implicit in the information age. The fact of the matter is that things still seem to be trundling along pretty well -- I for one, don't feel particularly spiritually crippled because I get my news on the Web and stay in touch with most of my friends via email. Any novelist who's going to write about where we are and where we've been can only get so far as an outsider -- he or she has to have the sort of understanding of our hyperlinked world that comes from growing up inside it and around it. That's Stephenson. Bruce Sterling called him a "second-generation cyberpunk author," which is basically saying the same thing in a different context. Cryptonomicon takes us through the origins of the computer on the one hand and their fringe applications with cryptologically-obsessed hackers on the other; in both cases he knows of what he speaks. He can write about people visavis computers with specificity and circumspection.

At root and at heart, though, Cryptonomicon is a technothriller. Adventure, excitement, and discovery are its primary traits, and any status it may claim as a document of cultura insight or a novel for the end of millenium is of necessity a secondary one. This is exactly as it should be -- the person who sets out to write a "great novel" probably won't make it. The person who sets out to tell a cool story just might.

Pressing Question Number One: Does this book have any business being 900 pages long?

Opinion may vary on this one, but I think the answer is yes. We have essentially two novels here, one for each of the timelines, that eventually become fully enmeshed but each have their own arcs of development. Stephenson is not an overwriter in terms of prose -- stuff is happening all through these pages. There are certainly diversions, and maybe it's these that some people would just as soon see removed. Moby Dick had its whaling chapters; Cryptomicon has chapter-long diversions into mathematics, number theory, Van Eck phreaking, and Captain Crunch cereal. A good number of these aren't actually diversions, since you have to absorb a good bit of the cryptological theory before you can fully understand all the subtleties of the plot. Even the truly frivolous diversions are enjoyable in their own right. Sure, we didn't need to have the part where Randy meets a friend amid a bunch of collectible-card-game-playing geeks, but as a geeky gamer myself, I'm sure glad he did.

Pressing Question Number Two: Has Stephenson learned how to actually end a novel?

This question haunted me through much of Cryptonomicon's length. I tossed The Diamond Age across the room in anger when I realized, thirty pages shy of the end, that there was literally no way he could wrap it up satisfactorily. And, indeed, it didn't end so much as get dragged, half-developed, over the finish line. I didn't have as much trouble with the Snow Crash finale as others, but I could always see their points. But now, finally, he's got it right. Fittingly for a novel largely about math, it ends with an almost geometric precision, alternating timelines fleshing out the answers to our lingering questions, crucial bits of witheld information casting whole vistas of previously mysterious action suddenly and satisfyingly clear.

But this is not a novel without weaknesses. It's so big and diffuse that different people will probably be bored and annoyed by different things. My personal biggest gripe comes toward the end, when a minor character lurches onto the scene, barely justifiably, to provide an impetus of danger and climax for Randy & his companions in the jungles of the Philippines. It was, to put it mildly, a stretch. Just the sort of thing that I could imagine happening if Stephenson were desperately cranking out the final pages of the novel, stuck for just what could possibly get in Randy's way, and finally coming up with . . . this. But while a lapse of this kind completely broke the ending of The Diamond Age, here it's just an annoyance. And the annoyances that are to be found don't amount to anything more than the sum of their parts.

Word on the street is that this isn't the last big-ass crypto novel that Stephenson is going to write. There are certainly stories hinted at in here but not explored, especially regarding the mysterious Eruditorium. Yes, there are conspiracies in this novel, and even a gonzo quasi-philosophical worldview worthy of the "nam-shub of Enki." And who were the guy in dreadlocks and the Indian-looking guy, anyway? I have a feeling we'll find out in a few years. We haven't seen the last of the Cryptonomicon. I take that as a good thing.

Pick the book up at Amazon.

ErikSev has graciously submitted a review to Mathias Kalle Dalheimer's latest O'Reilly effort Programming with Qt. For those of you interested, click below to find out more about. Programming with Qt author Matthias Kalle Dalheimer pages 361 publisher O'Reilly rating 9/10 reviewer ErikSev ISBN summary An excellent book on QT programming, and a must buy. The Scenario:

The Parrot Book, as this is sure to be known, is excellent for a beginner looking to quickly learn the ins and outs of Qt programming. Some previous experience with GUI programming helps, and previous C++ experience is required.

The Layout:

Programming with Qt starts with a chapter on Qt. It addresses freedom issues, portability issues, and other miscellaneous stuff. You then go through a basic program. The next few chapters introduce lots of different widgets and layout managers. Next come all sorts of other things like focus handling, graphics, working with perl, GUI builders, 2d transformations, etc. Look at the table of contents, it pretty much tells you what's included.

The Good:

Most of it. I personally bought this book having no previous experience with Qt, but familiar with GTK, MFC, etc. Within a day or two I was writing usable programs in Qt. This book is direct and to the point. Moreover, this is NOT just Linux users, Windows coders are definately covered, and portability is addressed extensively. GUI design, plus advanced tips and tricks are addressed. As the table of contents shows, all sorts of topics, both beginner and advanced, are covered.

The Bad:

A little too brief.just in spots. The cover of the book touts, "Covers Qt 1.4x and 2.0". I honestly feel that that is almost false advertising. Qt 2.0 is covered in a sparce 4 pages, with only two lines of code. One other nitpick, alot of lines of code are repeated, when he could just show the new/changed portions of the program. Final Thoughts:

While this book isn't a reference manual, it gets you started, and to the point where you can quickly write programs, use the more advanced features, and have the skills to find what you need in the system documentation. I do wish 2.0 were covered more, and that another unique program or two were written instead of so much code repetition. If your interested in learning Qt, and like dead trees to look at, this is a great buy. Everything you expect from a book with an animal on the cover and O'Reilly on the spine.

Pick this book up at Amazon.

Preface
1: Introduction
2: First Steps in Qt Programming
3: Learning More About Qt
4: A Guided Tour Through the Simple Widgets
5: A Guided Tour Through the Qt Dialogs
6: Using Layout Managers
7: Some Thoughts on GUI Design
8: Container Classes
9: Graphics
10: Text Processing
11: Working with Files and Directories
12: Inter-Application Communication
13: Working with Date and Time Values
14: Writing Your Own Widgets
15: Focus Handling
16: Advanced Event Handling
17: Advanced Signals and Slots
18: Debugging
19: Portability
20: Using GUI Builders
21: Qt Network Programming
22: Interfacing Qt with Other Languages and Libraries
23: Using the Visual C++ IDE for Qt Programs
24: Sample Qt Projects
25: A First Look at Qt 2.0

In "The Meme Machine", psychologist Susan Blackmore has taken a brilliant and contemporary idea -- the meme -- and beaten it nearly to death with incomprehensible psycho-babble. The Selfish Meme author Susan Blackmore pages 264 publisher Oxford University Press rating 6/10 reviewer Jon Kaz ISBN summary Minds Are Memes

Oxford Professor and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins launched the idea of the meme in 1976 his now famous book "The Selfish Meme" with these words: "when you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propogation in just the same way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell."

The meme was born, one of the most interesting and timely ideas in media and/or culture.

The idea that ideas are infectious is radical and controversial. To this day, prominent scientists like Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould argue that the meme is a "meaningless metaphor." Other academics (H.Allen Orr, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Rochester) complain that memetics is nothing more than "cocktail-party science."

But the idea has taken hold, especially on the Net, where memes are launched every second and spread just like microbes. (If you want to see how memes work, study the recent writings about Weblogs, on Slashdot and elsewhere, and how the notion has spread electronically into the culture). Information viruses such as memes, wrote Dawkins, follow natural laws much like those governing the change and transmission of biological viruses.

Dawkins saw memes as a unit of cultural evolution. He considered ideas as replicators, working in the exact same way as microbiological organisms like viruses to do spread through the culture. Memes are transmittable, infectious.

Dawkins didn't have the Internet in mind when he coined the term, but new technologies like the Net and TV spread memes faster than was ever possible, elevating his theory.

Big techno-driven media are fusion meme machines: God is Dead, OJ was Framed, Video Games Turn Your Kids Into Killers, Kids Don't Need Parents, the Paparazzi killed Diana, Boris Yeltsin is crazy, a missile shot down TWA Flight 800. Monica and the dress was a nuclear meme.

But according to Dawkins and other memeticists, memes come in all shapes and sizes. They shape culture and politics, through movies, music, books, lectures and word-of-mouth.

In "Wired Style," author Constance Hale defines a meme as a "contagious idea," also as a "virus of the mind," or "unit of cultural inheritance." An especially infectious idea, she says, is a "viral meme." These replicating thoughts are to cultural inheritance what genes are to biological heredity.

When most people talk about memes, they are describing discrete units of knowledge, information, gossip, jokes, faiths. Memetics is the belief that just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes in the gene pool, cultural evolution may be driven by the most successful memes.

In his smart, useful and very clear-headed book about memes - "Thought Contagion, How Belief Spreads Through Society" - Aaron Lynch took Dawkins' idea a step farther. In memetic evolution, he wrote, the hardiest ideas aren't always the most helpful but the ones that are simply the best at replicating.

Despite their growing popularity, memes remain controversial, and they just got more so. Susan Blackmore, a professor at the University of the West of England has elevated the meme to whole other plane - with the blessing of Dawkins, who has written a foreword for her new book.

In "The Meme Machine," (Oxford University Press, US $25), Blackmore argues that memes account not only for the evolution of culture but also for consciousness itself. The mind, she believes, is essentially a nest of memes. The mind is essentially -- and almost entirely -- a vehicle for virulent notions.

"Everything that is passed from person to person is a meme," writes Blackmore. "This includes all the words in your vocabulary, the stories you know, the skills and habits you have picked up from others and the games you like to play. It includes the songs you sing and the rules you obey. So, for example, whenever you drive on the left (or the right!), eat curry with lager or pizza or coke, whistle the them tune from "Neighbors" or even shake hands, you are dealing in memes. Each of these memes has evolved in its own unique way with its own history, but each of them is using your behavior to get itself copied.

Blackmore brings us laboriously to a final point of reference and conclusion, to the nature of the inner self, the part of us that is the center of our consciousness, that feels emotions and has memories, holds beliefs and makes decisions.

Some people call this the soul, or the spirit. Blackmore calls it the "inner self." Her argument is that this inner self is an illusion, a creation of relentless memes for the sake of their own replication.

It's nearly impossible to understand this theory, or how it squares with biology or genetics, let alone buy it. We don't just transmit memes, says Blackmore. Memes 'R Us.

This book is a sorry illustration of how to take a great idea and bury it under much more weight than it can possibly bear. Blackmore's writing is academic, dry and loaded with incomprehensible notions like the "memeplex," her memetic inner self. The book reads almost as if some 12-step therapist co-opted memes for her next group therapy session.

If Dawkin's original thesis was brilliant and simple, Blackmore's is impenetrable. In his foreword, Dawkins says he is "delighted" to recommend Blackmore's book, triggering a personal meme. He's a generous man.

Humans are two kinds of thing, Blackmore has concluded: meme machines and selves. Having read this several times, I have no idea what it means. Or why anybody would care.

It's almost impossible to pay attention either to media or the Web and not believe in memes and memetics, whatever the academics say. Ideas are infectious, and they do move through the culture like viruses. In a way, columns, posts, software programs, even flames are memes - they spread precisely like viruses, and they do replicate as units of cultural evolution.

Anybody on the Net sees this almost everytime they get online.

Technologies like TV and the Net have given memes powerful new ways in which to travel and replicate. That makes them significant, a social, business and political tool as well as a cultural idea. Memetics do affect all of us, and ought to be taken more, not less, seriously.

But books like "The Meme Machine" will have the opposite effect. Memeplex theory in this form is loopy, not revealing or penetrating.

Blackmore has taken an important idea and made it obtuse, almost ridiculous. Anybody interested in the idea would do a lot better to get Dawkin's landmark The Selfish Gene or Lynch's blessedly excellent, clear and direct study (published last year by Basic Books, $US 26) of contemporary memes, and how they affect politics, media, culture and thought.

If you still want the Blackmore book, pick it up at Amazon.

In "The Meme Machine", psychologist Susan Blackmore has taken a brilliant and contemporary idea -- the meme -- and beaten it nearly to death with incomprehensible psycho-babble. The Selfish Meme author Susan Blackmore pages 264 publisher Oxford University Press rating 6/10 reviewer Jon Kaz ISBN summary Minds Are Memes

Oxford Professor and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins launched the idea of the meme in 1976 his now famous book "The Selfish Meme" with these words: "when you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propogation in just the same way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell."

The meme was born, one of the most interesting and timely ideas in media and/or culture.

The idea that ideas are infectious is radical and controversial. To this day, prominent scientists like Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould argue that the meme is a "meaningless metaphor." Other academics (H.Allen Orr, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Rochester) complain that memetics is nothing more than "cocktail-party science."

But the idea has taken hold, especially on the Net, where memes are launched every second and spread just like microbes. (If you want to see how memes work, study the recent writings about Weblogs, on Slashdot and elsewhere, and how the notion has spread electronically into the culture). Information viruses such as memes, wrote Dawkins, follow natural laws much like those governing the change and transmission of biological viruses.

Dawkins saw memes as a unit of cultural evolution. He considered ideas as replicators, working in the exact same way as microbiological organisms like viruses to do spread through the culture. Memes are transmittable, infectious.

Dawkins didn't have the Internet in mind when he coined the term, but new technologies like the Net and TV spread memes faster than was ever possible, elevating his theory.

Big techno-driven media are fusion meme machines: God is Dead, OJ was Framed, Video Games Turn Your Kids Into Killers, Kids Don't Need Parents, the Paparazzi killed Diana, Boris Yeltsin is crazy, a missile shot down TWA Flight 800. Monica and the dress was a nuclear meme.

But according to Dawkins and other memeticists, memes come in all shapes and sizes. They shape culture and politics, through movies, music, books, lectures and word-of-mouth.

In "Wired Style," author Constance Hale defines a meme as a "contagious idea," also as a "virus of the mind," or "unit of cultural inheritance." An especially infectious idea, she says, is a "viral meme." These replicating thoughts are to cultural inheritance what genes are to biological heredity.

When most people talk about memes, they are describing discrete units of knowledge, information, gossip, jokes, faiths. Memetics is the belief that just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes in the gene pool, cultural evolution may be driven by the most successful memes.

In his smart, useful and very clear-headed book about memes - "Thought Contagion, How Belief Spreads Through Society" - Aaron Lynch took Dawkins' idea a step farther. In memetic evolution, he wrote, the hardiest ideas aren't always the most helpful but the ones that are simply the best at replicating.

Despite their growing popularity, memes remain controversial, and they just got more so. Susan Blackmore, a professor at the University of the West of England has elevated the meme to whole other plane - with the blessing of Dawkins, who has written a foreword for her new book.

In "The Meme Machine," (Oxford University Press, US $25), Blackmore argues that memes account not only for the evolution of culture but also for consciousness itself. The mind, she believes, is essentially a nest of memes. The mind is essentially -- and almost entirely -- a vehicle for virulent notions.

"Everything that is passed from person to person is a meme," writes Blackmore. "This includes all the words in your vocabulary, the stories you know, the skills and habits you have picked up from others and the games you like to play. It includes the songs you sing and the rules you obey. So, for example, whenever you drive on the left (or the right!), eat curry with lager or pizza or coke, whistle the them tune from "Neighbors" or even shake hands, you are dealing in memes. Each of these memes has evolved in its own unique way with its own history, but each of them is using your behavior to get itself copied.

Blackmore brings us laboriously to a final point of reference and conclusion, to the nature of the inner self, the part of us that is the center of our consciousness, that feels emotions and has memories, holds beliefs and makes decisions.

Some people call this the soul, or the spirit. Blackmore calls it the "inner self." Her argument is that this inner self is an illusion, a creation of relentless memes for the sake of their own replication.

It's nearly impossible to understand this theory, or how it squares with biology or genetics, let alone buy it. We don't just transmit memes, says Blackmore. Memes 'R Us.

This book is a sorry illustration of how to take a great idea and bury it under much more weight than it can possibly bear. Blackmore's writing is academic, dry and loaded with incomprehensible notions like the "memeplex," her memetic inner self. The book reads almost as if some 12-step therapist co-opted memes for her next group therapy session.

If Dawkin's original thesis was brilliant and simple, Blackmore's is impenetrable. In his foreword, Dawkins says he is "delighted" to recommend Blackmore's book, triggering a personal meme. He's a generous man.

Humans are two kinds of thing, Blackmore has concluded: meme machines and selves. Having read this several times, I have no idea what it means. Or why anybody would care.

It's almost impossible to pay attention either to media or the Web and not believe in memes and memetics, whatever the academics say. Ideas are infectious, and they do move through the culture like viruses. In a way, columns, posts, software programs, even flames are memes - they spread precisely like viruses, and they do replicate as units of cultural evolution.

Anybody on the Net sees this almost everytime they get online.

Technologies like TV and the Net have given memes powerful new ways in which to travel and replicate. That makes them significant, a social, business and political tool as well as a cultural idea. Memetics do affect all of us, and ought to be taken more, not less, seriously.

But books like "The Meme Machine" will have the opposite effect. Memeplex theory in this form is loopy, not revealing or penetrating.

Blackmore has taken an important idea and made it obtuse, almost ridiculous. Anybody interested in the idea would do a lot better to get Dawkin's landmark The Selfish Gene or Lynch's blessedly excellent, clear and direct study (published last year by Basic Books, $US 26) of contemporary memes, and how they affect politics, media, culture and thought.

If you still want the Blackmore book, pick it up at Amazon.

In "The Meme Machine", psychologist Susan Blackmore has taken a brilliant and contemporary idea -- the meme -- and beaten it nearly to death with incomprehensible psycho-babble. The Selfish Meme author Susan Blackmore pages 264 publisher Oxford University Press rating 6/10 reviewer Jon Kaz ISBN summary Minds Are Memes

Oxford Professor and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins launched the idea of the meme in 1976 his now famous book "The Selfish Meme" with these words: "when you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propogation in just the same way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell."

The meme was born, one of the most interesting and timely ideas in media and/or culture.

The idea that ideas are infectious is radical and controversial. To this day, prominent scientists like Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould argue that the meme is a "meaningless metaphor." Other academics (H.Allen Orr, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Rochester) complain that memetics is nothing more than "cocktail-party science."

But the idea has taken hold, especially on the Net, where memes are launched every second and spread just like microbes. (If you want to see how memes work, study the recent writings about Weblogs, on Slashdot and elsewhere, and how the notion has spread electronically into the culture). Information viruses such as memes, wrote Dawkins, follow natural laws much like those governing the change and transmission of biological viruses.

Dawkins saw memes as a unit of cultural evolution. He considered ideas as replicators, working in the exact same way as microbiological organisms like viruses to do spread through the culture. Memes are transmittable, infectious.

Dawkins didn't have the Internet in mind when he coined the term, but new technologies like the Net and TV spread memes faster than was ever possible, elevating his theory.

Big techno-driven media are fusion meme machines: God is Dead, OJ was Framed, Video Games Turn Your Kids Into Killers, Kids Don't Need Parents, the Paparazzi killed Diana, Boris Yeltsin is crazy, a missile shot down TWA Flight 800. Monica and the dress was a nuclear meme.

But according to Dawkins and other memeticists, memes come in all shapes and sizes. They shape culture and politics, through movies, music, books, lectures and word-of-mouth.

In "Wired Style," author Constance Hale defines a meme as a "contagious idea," also as a "virus of the mind," or "unit of cultural inheritance." An especially infectious idea, she says, is a "viral meme." These replicating thoughts are to cultural inheritance what genes are to biological heredity.

When most people talk about memes, they are describing discrete units of knowledge, information, gossip, jokes, faiths. Memetics is the belief that just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes in the gene pool, cultural evolution may be driven by the most successful memes.

In his smart, useful and very clear-headed book about memes - "Thought Contagion, How Belief Spreads Through Society" - Aaron Lynch took Dawkins' idea a step farther. In memetic evolution, he wrote, the hardiest ideas aren't always the most helpful but the ones that are simply the best at replicating.

Despite their growing popularity, memes remain controversial, and they just got more so. Susan Blackmore, a professor at the University of the West of England has elevated the meme to whole other plane - with the blessing of Dawkins, who has written a foreword for her new book.

In "The Meme Machine," (Oxford University Press, US $25), Blackmore argues that memes account not only for the evolution of culture but also for consciousness itself. The mind, she believes, is essentially a nest of memes. The mind is essentially -- and almost entirely -- a vehicle for virulent notions.

"Everything that is passed from person to person is a meme," writes Blackmore. "This includes all the words in your vocabulary, the stories you know, the skills and habits you have picked up from others and the games you like to play. It includes the songs you sing and the rules you obey. So, for example, whenever you drive on the left (or the right!), eat curry with lager or pizza or coke, whistle the them tune from "Neighbors" or even shake hands, you are dealing in memes. Each of these memes has evolved in its own unique way with its own history, but each of them is using your behavior to get itself copied.

Blackmore brings us laboriously to a final point of reference and conclusion, to the nature of the inner self, the part of us that is the center of our consciousness, that feels emotions and has memories, holds beliefs and makes decisions.

Some people call this the soul, or the spirit. Blackmore calls it the "inner self." Her argument is that this inner self is an illusion, a creation of relentless memes for the sake of their own replication.

It's nearly impossible to understand this theory, or how it squares with biology or genetics, let alone buy it. We don't just transmit memes, says Blackmore. Memes 'R Us.

This book is a sorry illustration of how to take a great idea and bury it under much more weight than it can possibly bear. Blackmore's writing is academic, dry and loaded with incomprehensible notions like the "memeplex," her memetic inner self. The book reads almost as if some 12-step therapist co-opted memes for her next group therapy session.

If Dawkin's original thesis was brilliant and simple, Blackmore's is impenetrable. In his foreword, Dawkins says he is "delighted" to recommend Blackmore's book, triggering a personal meme. He's a generous man.

Humans are two kinds of thing, Blackmore has concluded: meme machines and selves. Having read this several times, I have no idea what it means. Or why anybody would care.

It's almost impossible to pay attention either to media or the Web and not believe in memes and memetics, whatever the academics say. Ideas are infectious, and they do move through the culture like viruses. In a way, columns, posts, software programs, even flames are memes - they spread precisely like viruses, and they do replicate as units of cultural evolution.

Anybody on the Net sees this almost everytime they get online.

Technologies like TV and the Net have given memes powerful new ways in which to travel and replicate. That makes them significant, a social, business and political tool as well as a cultural idea. Memetics do affect all of us, and ought to be taken more, not less, seriously.

But books like "The Meme Machine" will have the opposite effect. Memeplex theory in this form is loopy, not revealing or penetrating.

Blackmore has taken an important idea and made it obtuse, almost ridiculous. Anybody interested in the idea would do a lot better to get Dawkin's landmark The Selfish Gene or Lynch's blessedly excellent, clear and direct study (published last year by Basic Books, $US 26) of contemporary memes, and how they affect politics, media, culture and thought.

If you still want the Blackmore book, pick it up at Amazon.

As we've done before, both jonkatz and myself have read, and written reviews of Po Bronson's forthcoming book, Nudist on the Late Shift. While this book will get a huge amount of media attention - it's worth it. Click below to read more. Nudist on the Late Shift author Po Bronson pages 288 publisher Random House rating 9/10 reviewer Jeff Bates & Jon Katz ISBN summary Po Bronson does an exhaustive study of Silicon Valley People Hemos' Review

Mostly because I'm actually posting the story, I've taken the liberty of writing the first review. Katz is below.

Po Bronson is actually, almost in spite of all the hype surronding him. I was not familar with his other two books, but had heard his name and the book floating around recently, and was pleasantly suprised when Random House mailed me an advance copy.

It's difficult to quantify Bronson as writer, but for those of you familar with his work, I would say that Douglas Coupland (of Microserfs fame) and he are authors in the same intellectual space. Both of them pay attention to the people in their stories, making themselves into conduits for the stories their characters have to tell. The characters in Nudist feel real (Well, because they are real, but...) because Bronson seems to become simply the fiber optic cable that passes them down to us.

And the characters are interesting to watch and read - from French start-ups, to the founder of Hotmail, Bronson captures a wide swatch of the personalities of the Valley. The characters are seemingly always just waiting for the big break - or actually got it. It's the infectious spirit of the Valley - that this business is going to be one, or your next idea will be the one, and that no one can lose. Only occasionally do hints of worry come in, expressed in poignant ways.

The rose colored glasses of the characters is a definite theme of the book, but I don't find this to be a weakness of the book itself. It's the feeling of the times, that like Paris in 1920s, San Fransico in 1848-1849, this is a time that the whole world is looking and watching, and that there is more then enough to go around. The only well that may run dry is the well of ideas in your own mind - and that's the only real concern of possible need/shortfall.

Overall, I was quite impressed by the book - Tom Wolfe, one of the greatest American authors puts Bronson on his short list of two modern authors. I'm not quite that impressed, but Bronson is worth the read - despite the media coverage.

Jon Katz's Review

Po Bronson is one of the first serious writers to mine the human side of the second Great Goldrush that is Silicon Valley. Most journalists are drawn to the middle-aged movers and shakers at the top of giant computing companies, and the gazillion-dollar start-ups that are now a hallmark of life there.

Bronson is drawn to the young billionaires on their way up and the bizarre and oddly poignant supporting cast of wizards, visionaries, programmers, engineers and money-launderers in suits - workaholics all, that is turning a small valley in Northern California south of San Francisco into the world's next Hong Kong.

At 34, Bronson is the chairperson of Consortium Distributors and has published two novels. He is also the reigning, soccer-loving glamorpuss of the San Francisco based digerati, so brace yourself for a nauseating round of hype - cover of Wired, piece in the NY Times Magazine, slobbering profiles, TV and other media, big Web campaign on Yahoo and other portals and sites - when his first non-fiction book "The Nudist on the Late Shift," is published this summer by Random House ($US 25). ( I am published by Villard Books, a subsidiary of Random House. I don't know Bronson).

Don't let the hype run you off. Sometimes it's warranted. Silicon Valley has a heart of solid gold, and Bronson has captured it wonderfully. The book follows the lives of 15 people, from Sub-35 billionnaires (people who have made their first billion by age 35) who sleep under their desks at night until there's too much junk, to Indian immigrants who build half-billion dollar businesses, to the programmer who bursts into tears watching Babylon 5 because the show's characters have the kind of relationships with people that obsessive work has denied him.

"The Sub-35 billionaire is really a new life-form" writes Bronson, "an economic mutation that emerged from this little pond of vigorous capitalist Darwinism. It's as if dinosaurs suddenly hatched again in the Alviso mudflats off San Jose. The Sub-35 billionaire, this new species, captures the imagination not just like any zoo animal -- he's a brontosaurus." It's a fitting start to this book. "The Nudist on the Late Shift" is a wickedly-penetrating study of the biology of Silicon Valley.

Bronson doesn't miss once in his profiles. They are not only the often hilarious and surprising portrait of individual people, but of a new culture, sparingly and lovingly drawn.

My personal favorite is the journey of Sabeer Bhatia, who arrived at the Los Angeles International Airport at 6 p.m. on the evening of September 23, l988 on a flight from Bangalore India, starving, puzzling over how to get to Cal Tech, where he had been awarded a scholarship. He had $250 in his pocket. At school, he loved to attend brown bag luncheons attended by people like Scott McNealy, Steve Wozniak, and Marc Andreessen, whose basic message was always the same: you can do it too.

So he did. He founded Hotmail, the personal database and free e-mail company, despite many rejections from numerous potential investors. In l998, after coolly rejecting a series of Microsoft offers, he found himself at a meeting in Redmond with Bill Gates and a platoon of Microsoft executives. Reluctantly, he sold Hotmail to MS for $400 million.

Reading this, you can't stop asking yourself why Gates didn't do the same thing Bhatia did, rather than spend a half-billion dollars to buy him out. Bhatia, in fact, often wondered the very same thing. (To this day, some analysts think Bhatia could have gotten a billion if he'd waited a bit.) The answer, Bronson explains, lies in understanding Silicon Valley.

Bronson's book doesn't provide much insight into technology or computing, or of day-to-day live in Silicon Valley. Nor does it give much sense of the battered lives of the many losers who aren't as bold, lucky or determined as Bhatia. The strength of this book isn't only in the stories Bronson's characters tell, but in the unadorned simplicity of their telling. Even reading about the price of Valley real estate, you want to get on the next plane and give it a shot, thinking "you can do it, too".

Bronson writes with the confidence and authority of someone who really knows his stuff, from the inside out. He makes no judgements. His subjects speak for themselves, leaving us to judge for ourselves. And he recognizes that the modern-day Valley is really the latest incarnation of the ultimate American fantasy/myth - there are unimaginable riches in them hills for those who are brave and determined enough to head West, stake their claims and dig.

This is great stuff for anybody who has ever fantasized about scoring big, or who has ever come near a computer. In fact, one of the nice things about the book is that it's equally compelling whether you love the Net, or plan never to go on it.

Buy this book at Amazon.

As we've done before, both jonkatz and myself have read, and written reviews of Po Bronson's forthcoming book, Nudist on the Late Shift. While this book will get a huge amount of media attention - it's worth it. Click below to read more. Nudist on the Late Shift author Po Bronson pages 288 publisher Random House rating 9/10 reviewer Jeff Bates & Jon Katz ISBN summary Po Bronson does an exhaustive study of Silicon Valley People Hemos' Review

Mostly because I'm actually posting the story, I've taken the liberty of writing the first review. Katz is below.

Po Bronson is actually, almost in spite of all the hype surronding him. I was not familar with his other two books, but had heard his name and the book floating around recently, and was pleasantly suprised when Random House mailed me an advance copy.

It's difficult to quantify Bronson as writer, but for those of you familar with his work, I would say that Douglas Coupland (of Microserfs fame) and he are authors in the same intellectual space. Both of them pay attention to the people in their stories, making themselves into conduits for the stories their characters have to tell. The characters in Nudist feel real (Well, because they are real, but...) because Bronson seems to become simply the fiber optic cable that passes them down to us.

And the characters are interesting to watch and read - from French start-ups, to the founder of Hotmail, Bronson captures a wide swatch of the personalities of the Valley. The characters are seemingly always just waiting for the big break - or actually got it. It's the infectious spirit of the Valley - that this business is going to be one, or your next idea will be the one, and that no one can lose. Only occasionally do hints of worry come in, expressed in poignant ways.

The rose colored glasses of the characters is a definite theme of the book, but I don't find this to be a weakness of the book itself. It's the feeling of the times, that like Paris in 1920s, San Fransico in 1848-1849, this is a time that the whole world is looking and watching, and that there is more then enough to go around. The only well that may run dry is the well of ideas in your own mind - and that's the only real concern of possible need/shortfall.

Overall, I was quite impressed by the book - Tom Wolfe, one of the greatest American authors puts Bronson on his short list of two modern authors. I'm not quite that impressed, but Bronson is worth the read - despite the media coverage.

Jon Katz's Review

Po Bronson is one of the first serious writers to mine the human side of the second Great Goldrush that is Silicon Valley. Most journalists are drawn to the middle-aged movers and shakers at the top of giant computing companies, and the gazillion-dollar start-ups that are now a hallmark of life there.

Bronson is drawn to the young billionaires on their way up and the bizarre and oddly poignant supporting cast of wizards, visionaries, programmers, engineers and money-launderers in suits - workaholics all, that is turning a small valley in Northern California south of San Francisco into the world's next Hong Kong.

At 34, Bronson is the chairperson of Consortium Distributors and has published two novels. He is also the reigning, soccer-loving glamorpuss of the San Francisco based digerati, so brace yourself for a nauseating round of hype - cover of Wired, piece in the NY Times Magazine, slobbering profiles, TV and other media, big Web campaign on Yahoo and other portals and sites - when his first non-fiction book "The Nudist on the Late Shift," is published this summer by Random House ($US 25). ( I am published by Villard Books, a subsidiary of Random House. I don't know Bronson).

Don't let the hype run you off. Sometimes it's warranted. Silicon Valley has a heart of solid gold, and Bronson has captured it wonderfully. The book follows the lives of 15 people, from Sub-35 billionnaires (people who have made their first billion by age 35) who sleep under their desks at night until there's too much junk, to Indian immigrants who build half-billion dollar businesses, to the programmer who bursts into tears watching Babylon 5 because the show's characters have the kind of relationships with people that obsessive work has denied him.

"The Sub-35 billionaire is really a new life-form" writes Bronson, "an economic mutation that emerged from this little pond of vigorous capitalist Darwinism. It's as if dinosaurs suddenly hatched again in the Alviso mudflats off San Jose. The Sub-35 billionaire, this new species, captures the imagination not just like any zoo animal -- he's a brontosaurus." It's a fitting start to this book. "The Nudist on the Late Shift" is a wickedly-penetrating study of the biology of Silicon Valley.

Bronson doesn't miss once in his profiles. They are not only the often hilarious and surprising portrait of individual people, but of a new culture, sparingly and lovingly drawn.

My personal favorite is the journey of Sabeer Bhatia, who arrived at the Los Angeles International Airport at 6 p.m. on the evening of September 23, l988 on a flight from Bangalore India, starving, puzzling over how to get to Cal Tech, where he had been awarded a scholarship. He had $250 in his pocket. At school, he loved to attend brown bag luncheons attended by people like Scott McNealy, Steve Wozniak, and Marc Andreessen, whose basic message was always the same: you can do it too.

So he did. He founded Hotmail, the personal database and free e-mail company, despite many rejections from numerous potential investors. In l998, after coolly rejecting a series of Microsoft offers, he found himself at a meeting in Redmond with Bill Gates and a platoon of Microsoft executives. Reluctantly, he sold Hotmail to MS for $400 million.

Reading this, you can't stop asking yourself why Gates didn't do the same thing Bhatia did, rather than spend a half-billion dollars to buy him out. Bhatia, in fact, often wondered the very same thing. (To this day, some analysts think Bhatia could have gotten a billion if he'd waited a bit.) The answer, Bronson explains, lies in understanding Silicon Valley.

Bronson's book doesn't provide much insight into technology or computing, or of day-to-day live in Silicon Valley. Nor does it give much sense of the battered lives of the many losers who aren't as bold, lucky or determined as Bhatia. The strength of this book isn't only in the stories Bronson's characters tell, but in the unadorned simplicity of their telling. Even reading about the price of Valley real estate, you want to get on the next plane and give it a shot, thinking "you can do it, too".

Bronson writes with the confidence and authority of someone who really knows his stuff, from the inside out. He makes no judgements. His subjects speak for themselves, leaving us to judge for ourselves. And he recognizes that the modern-day Valley is really the latest incarnation of the ultimate American fantasy/myth - there are unimaginable riches in them hills for those who are brave and determined enough to head West, stake their claims and dig.

This is great stuff for anybody who has ever fantasized about scoring big, or who has ever come near a computer. In fact, one of the nice things about the book is that it's equally compelling whether you love the Net, or plan never to go on it.

Buy this book at Amazon.

Rick Franchuk - TranSpecT Consulting, has returned with a book that's a little different then the norm - Michael Langford's 35mm Handbook. For those with the photographic bent, click below to read more about fine-tuning your art. 35mm Handbook author Michael Langford pages 224 publisher Alfred A. Knopf rating 9/10 reviewer Rick Franchuk - TranSpecT Consulting ISBN summary An outstanding reference for beginner-to-intermediate level photographers, with piles of useful tidbits, tricks and techniques.
The Scenario...

My wife Lysa and I recently acquired a new Nikon 35mm SLR camera. It's been more years than I care to think of since either of us took a visual arts course in school, so we felt the best idea would be to go find a book or two that'd bring us back up to speed on how to use the little contraption.

I'll freely admit that Lysa is the more artistic element of our union, and when it comes to things like this I usually just stand back and let her work her magic. True to form, we wandered our separate ways in the bookstore and she came back with this little gem in her hand. I was initially skeptical, based purely on the compact appearance of the handbook (measuring 8" x 5" x 0.5"). It looked more like a video game manual at first glance.

What's Good?

As soon as I opened the handbook, my attitude completely changed. Just standing in line waiting to pay for it I learned a dozen or more factoids that continue to help us make our pictures simply look better. There's an incredible amount of useful tidbits and suggestions, covering nearly every photo situation a person might be faced with.

The book starts out with physical basics: What a camera is, how it works, the differences between SLR (Single Lens Reflex, the kind which you can remove the lenses on) and Compact cameras, the relationships between the amount of light available, aperture size, shutter speed, depth-of-field and so on. It then builds upon those foundations with an examination of appropriate film usage for a general classes of photo situations.

My favorite portions are just beyond the hardware how-it-works sections, moving into suggestions of how to handle specific jobs and overcome common problems. The Tackling Special Projects section contains detailed advice for more than a dozen photographic scenarios (landscapes, portraits, nudes, still life, etc) which have definitely made my shots better, and given me a new appreciation of the work which oft times needs to go into make a truly GOOD picture.

The latter third of the book explores more complex topics and add-on ideas for your camera, specifically flash and lighting usage, buying specific lenses and filters and what they're useful for, and how to round out your camera gear. Most of the information in this area is directed toward SLR camera usage and people aiming at a professional approach to photography.

As an ironic additional bonus, the book size itself is a blessing. It tucks lengthwise into the inner chamber of a standard-size camera bag perfectly, letting us take it wherever we go with the camera. =)

What's Bad?

Only a couple minor annoyances kept this book from being a perfect 10 for me. Although the text within is easy to understand and retain, the layout of the handbook is in a sort of magazine style, with side-bars, picture samples, sub-texts and various other distracting elements. Staying focused on a particular topic can be challenging, as the side-bars are usually filled with yet more interesting factoids that are hard to resist scanning. Similarly, the book seems to shift between single independent pages to where facing pages merge together to make a double-wide 'page', which can also be distracting when you're expecting left-to-right, top-to-bottom text.

Our particular copy also had some misprint glitches (ink obscuring some words, offsets on color pictures that weren't quite on top of each other)... and unless I'm going color blind, there's a couple black and white images associated with discussion about color techniques in the text. Whoops!

So What's In It For Me?

There's a large Aha factor here... that being where you read a section, grok it completely, and exclaim 'Aha!' out loud. You also don't need to be an espresso-sucking, black-jumpsuit-and-beret style artiste in order to enjoy and find this book useful. Even if you're one of the majority of camera owners who pulls it out 4 times a year to snap that obligatory family holiday photo I'd recommend it. Aunt Agnes will have never looked so good.

BEWARE - There's a very good chance that you'll read a section or two of this book and immediately want to run out and try what you've learned. Watch those film and development costs! =)

Buy this book at Amazon.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Cameras
3. Film
4. Solving Picture Problems
5. Tackling Special Projects
6. Flash
7. Accessories
8. Special Effects
9. Reference Charts

I've finally gotten off of my duff, and written my take on Erik Davis' Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism, one of the more esoteric books that we've reviewed. For those of you interested in the sociologic roots of our culture, click below to read more. Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism author Erik Davis pages 304 publisher Harmony Books rating 7.5 reviewer Erik Davis ISBN summary An interesting book, exploring the conjunction of technology and mysticism. Academic feel.

Erik Davis, a journalist in his own right, and a self-admitted geek is the author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, + Mysticism in the Age of Information, a book which purports to attempt to understand and explain how technology, magic and mysticism aren't really all that far apart. Davis makes an interesting arguement, and this is an issue that I've given some thought about to before. The perception of engineers, scientists and technical people is not one of fuzzy, soft images; it's a hard, straight edge image. But if you spend much time talking with anyone of that ilk, you soon realize that this group, like any other one, is one that has it's idosyncratic tendencies.

This image is one that hasn't come up accidentally - in many ways, the image of the technical person as a pure-logic person is one that has been built up and developed by the community of technical persons itself. This image of science as unquestionable and infalliable is one that quickly corrodes if you spend much time inside of graduate and scientific communities, watching the politics run rampant. But on a broader level, this image of science as a monolith began to fall apart with Schrodinger and Einstein and the notion of relativity. Kurt Godel also contributed to this notion in discrediting the Principa Mathematica

So, the issue of exploring this in literature, and exploring what in some ways is the unacknowledged side of the technological community. Recent issues like Joe Firmage's The Word is Truth, geeks fascination with shows like X-Files, and movies like Star Wars belies the notion of the one-sided, all logical personality.

Davis does an excellent job exploring the roots of our present technological society in the alchemical secret societes of the Middle Ages, and the present day raise in paganism amongst technologists. This is perhaps the strongest segement of the book, dealing with the religion issues, and why people like us choose alternatives or non-conformity.

The book has several drawbacks, the most glaring of which is the book's seemingly dual personality. While its research and tone are that of a book that wants to be an academic book, there are numerous points in which the facts cited, or a point is made that seems more soft-cover, and less hard-cover, if you can forgive my analogy. My other complaint, and one that shows my true colors as a history major - the book rests on itself on too few references. While I appreciate and understand Davis' points, and would recommend it to my fellow geeks, I wouldn't recommend this book to a non-technical person. The feel of the book in many ways is one of a book written for the commuity, and one that will work within the community, but not something that those outside the community would appreciate.

In the end though, for this audience, I recommend it. It's an academic read, but if you need a break from learning Perl, then this book is worth picking up. It can be slow at times, but ultimately is worth the time spent.

Buy this book at Amazon.

Winning one of the longer title awards, SEGV has returned with a review, this time of Mickey Kawick's Real Time Strategy Game Programming using MS DirectX 6. For those of you want to know how to program the next Warcraft or Age of Empires, click below. Real-Time Strategy Game Programming author Mickey Kawick pages publisher Wordware Publishing rating 6 reviewer SEGV ISBN 1-55622-644-6 summary Marred by lack of focus and inferior editing, this book is only for the serious RTS programmer who is willing to overlook its weaknesses.

Highly Anticipated

I found out about this book early this year. It was scheduled to be published in February by some small publisher I had never heard of. It was the only substantial source I could find on real-time strategy game programming, and it wasn't yet available. After a month or two of delay, it was released I ordered it directly from the publisher.

I couldn't wait for this book. It was aimed at intermediate to advanced programmers, so I had high expectations. I wanted something that would help me significantly in my own efforts to produce an RTS game for Linux. Even though the book was written using DirectX, it promised to cover game objects, landscape, pathing, and other such topics.

Initial Reactions

I was hopeful when the book arrived, after scanning through it. It had promising diagrams and meaty chapters on the topics I was interested in (Chapters 15-19, which actually comprise almost half the book). However, there was more DirectX coverage than I had bargained for.

The more I read, the more disappointed I became. I read the entire book, some parts several times, and indeed have used it while programming. It became clear to me that this book did not have the quality of an O'Reilly or Addison-Wesley product. What follows is an extensive deconstruction.

Topics

As evident from the table of contents, the book covers a lot of material. That lack of focus in itself is a flaw. I found the discussion of game ideas interesting, but I wanted a book devoted to the construction of RTS games, not their design. For the most part, Chapter 8 is composed of screenshots and descriptions of popular games in the genre, such as Age of Empires and Starcraft. You would think anyone purchasing this book would have played most of those games!

I found the discussions of the development cycle, coding style, and so forth in Chapter 3 excellent. But frankly, I have many great books on those topics and didn't need more. I think the same could probably be said for any intermediate to advanced reader. In the same vein, I didn't need information on data structures and utility libraries. Yet Chapter 6 is thrust upon me, composed of two pages of text and fifteen pages of source code from the CDROM (some of which the author admits to having never used).

Chapter 7 teaches the reader how to use the Visual C++ integrated development environment. It has screenshots of most wizard dialogs, and even gratuitous shots of the author's colour preferences and the Windows calculator. Is this intermediate to advanced fare?

While unrelated material receives valuable coverage, other important topics I was anxious to read about are shirked. There is no real coverage of multiplayer aspects or networking concerns. In addition, many topics are not covered deeply. For example, fog of war is described, yet the author presents no implementation details.

DirectX Coverage

I was hoping the DirectX material would be limited to some introductory chapters and API usage. As long as the algorithms were discussed, I could always port the code to another API myself.

Chapters 9, 10, 11, and 20 are fully DirectX specific. Chapters 12 through 14 cover additional graphics topics. That would be great, except I didn't need a graphics book. I'm not sure why the author feels a presentation of Bresenham's algorithm is in order (p222). Chapter 17, while not about DirectX, is highly Windows specific.

I can't say whether the DirectX code the author presents is quality or not, but if you are a DirectX programmer perhaps the book might appeal to you more.

Source Code

The author states in a note: "For this book, there was a lot of rewrite in order to make things more consistent and readable. I do not code this consistently or perfectly in real life."

I find that statement somewhat ironic, as I have many problems with the source code in the book. First of all, it is put forth as C++, yet makes heavy use of the preprocessor while avoiding the Standard Library. The author uses assignments in constructors where initializations are preferred. He also writes a standalone memory allocator instead of overloading operators new and delete (p579). That is not the C++ way.

The source code has absolute paths in its include directives (p106). The author employs leading underscores in his header guards (p121), and is not afraid to copy header declarations in order to decrease compile time (p159,241).

The author seems to miss the point of object-oriented programming, using inheritance to save typing (p307). The author derives from WORLDCOORDINATE such diverse classes as SINGLE_TILE and WORLDOBJECT (p426,529,531). Clearly the relationship should be containment, thereby expressing "has-a" as opposed to "is-a."

The author makes further coding errors, such as half-page-long virtual inline functions (p557-558) (see Effective C++ for details), recursive deletion of linked lists (p58) (which risks overflowing the stack), and incorrect copy constructor signatures (p631) (preventing copying of const objects).

The most intriguing error I see is premature optimization. For example (p389), the author "optimizes" a structure to 13 bytes, while noting that floating point members might increase its size. Yet padding would dictate that the structure occupy 16 bytes anyways, and indeed, that proves to be the case using the egcs-1.1.1 compiler.

One note the author writes (p363-364) is just plain wrong, apparently confusing the const and static keywords. The author also employs an incorrect syntax for bit fields (p388-389).

The author presents too much utility code. For example, not only does the author present seven and a half pages of container implementation, he repeats it later "for reference" (p336-343,629-637). Another seven pages of container implementation are, in the author's words, "nearly identical" (p678-685). Finally, if the reader needs yet another string class, one is presented (p293-300).

Editing

I'm not sure if the book was rushed or just poorly edited. Some paragraphs are just hard to understand, bordering on incomprehensible. But more often I find the author rambles, often repeating a paragraph, only slightly rephrased (p31,32,306).

The author writes in a confident tone, almost cocky. He is not afraid to tell the reader when his code is really good, although to be fair he also occasionally admits its shortcomings. Also, he seems to have an opinion on everything. I just think a little restraint would give his words more weight.

The gratuitous source listings should not have made it to publishing. I especially don't appreciate the author merely dumping unexplained untested code into the manuscript (p346-352).

I think strong editing could have helped those problems, and also imposed greater focus on the material. There seems to be a real confusion as to reader's skill level, which is supposedly intermediate to advanced. The author talks of the complexity of a doubly linked list as if the reader had never seen one before (p637).

Pedagogical Issues

The most glaring omission in this book is a sample game implementation. I would have been thrilled to have seen a tiny RTS game, even if it were implemented using DirectX on Windows. Instead, we are presented with libraries, code fragments, and demo apps.

The book could benefit from standard textbook fare: checklists, summaries, exercises, and the like. I find the index to be lacking. And although the author recommends Booch diagrams (forerunners of UML class diagrams) for understanding architecture, he only uses them twice, prefering instead to overwhelm the reader with source code.

Value

Is this book worth it? First, it's quite expensive. Although it is 700 pages long, much of that is padding. Really Chapters 15-19 are the meat of the book, and some of that information is available from other sources (eg, Game Developer articles and various web sites).

I've been extremely critical of this book, mostly because there are enough poor computer programming books without adding to their ranks, and enough excellent ones to serve as examples. Yet not all is marred. The book still has some excellent parts and good discussion. They are just overshadowed by its faults.

Unfortunately, this is the only book on real-time strategy game programming available. So, if you're really serious about programming such a beast, you'll probably want this book despite its shortcomings.

If you'd like to pick this book up, head over to Amazon.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Welcome
2. Gameplay
3. Getting Started on Your Game
4. Documents
5. Development
6. Standard Macros and Data Types
7. Background
8. Great Ideas
9. Working With DirectDraw
10. How to Draw as Easy as 1, 2, 3
11. How to do Your ABC's
12. The Drawing Manager
13. Loading Graphics
14. The Black Space and the Wild Void of Life
15. Animation
16. The Landscape
17. The Interface
18. Objects and Creatures in the World
19. Pathing
20. DirectSound

Jason Bennett has sent us a review of one of the O'Reilly staples, UNIX in a Nutshell. Click below to read more. UNIX in a Nutshell author Daniel Gilly pages publisher O'Reilly rating 9/10 reviewer Jason Bennett ISBN 1-56592-001-5 summary One of the most comprehensive UNIX handbooks on the market, and certainly one of the favorite. The ultimate reference, although not recommended for learning UNIX. Background

Greetings, all. This week I'll be "reviewing" one of the books that made the O'Reilly name, UNIX in a Nutshell, although I admit to feeling a little silly passing judgement on a book that has already been judged quite well by the community at large. The first edition of this book was published in December 1986, and has been a mainstay ever since. This particular version is dated June 1998, and professes to include typographical fixes and a new index. For reference, in December 1986 I was working on an IBM PCjr expanded to 640k of RAM and dual 360k floppy drives. My favorite games were Karateka, Flight Simulator II and F-15 Strike Eagle (the first one). How far we've come....

What's the book about?

Simply put, this book is a dictionary of UNIX. It lists every command available with a standard System V, Release 4 or Solaris 2.0 UNIX. This included everything from grep to ed to cc to troff. If you know a command exists, it's listed here along with all its options. That, however, is but a small part of the book. In addition, there are various specific sections covering shells (including sh, ksh and csh), EMACS, vi, ex, awk, sed, nroff/troff, mm/ms/me, various nroff/troff preprocessors, RCS/SCCS, make, sdb/dbx, plus a small beginner's list of important commands. In other words, this is the jack of all trades reference for UNIX (and by extension, the master of none, although I'll cover that later). There is also a transition guide (or at least a small blub) for those used to BSD instead of SysV (of which Linux is a decendent of the later). Many BSD commands included in /usr/ucb on Solaris are listed in the guide as well. In short, if it's standard UNIX (and then some), it's here.

What's Good?

If you want a kitchen-sink reference to UNIX, this is it. Any command that you have a question about is in here. Anytime you have a question about which vi command is needed, it's in here. Shell scripting is covered. Regular expressions are covered, for when you forget when to use "?" and when to use "*" (or "^" or "$"). Want a quick overview to RCS for your web files? It's right here. This is the short, short version of all your man pages that you can put under your pillow at night.

What's Bad?

If you don't know much or anything about UNIX, don't buy this book. Or at least buy an introductory one along with it. Trying to learn UNIX from this book is like trying to learn English by reading the dictionary. Not only is there not much context, you can't do a reverse lookup. If you can't guess at the command you want, you won't be able to find it. That's not necessarily a flaw, this book just wasn't designed to do that. You don't buy the OED for a Spanish speaker, and you don't buy UNIX in a Nutshell for a newbie. In addition, don't buy this book just for its EMACS or vi or RCS section. Those sections are nice, but they are more command lists than guides. O'Reilly has an excellent selection of books dedicated to helping you with one of the above programs. They're great, and I recommend them.

What's In It For Us?

Long-time UNIX fans will love this book, and probably already own a copy. Same with sysadmins. If you've been around enough to know what you're doing, but still have to look up commands, this is also a great book for you. I know I can never remember half the EMACS or vi commands when I need them. The community has voted, and this reference is it. If you need it, buy it.

Buy the book at Amazon.

Well, after a long wait and fanfare, Kurt has sent a review of John Blair's Samba effort Samba: Integrating UNIX and Windows. If you need to make those two play well together, click below for more information. Samba: Integrated UNIX and Windows author John D. Blair pages publisher Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc. rating 7 reviewer Kurt DeMaagd ISBN summary This book provides in depth detail about installing and configuring Samba. The Scenario John Blair, a member of the Samba development team, tackles the issue of integrating Windows and UNIX machines using Samba. While Samba is best known for allowing a UNIX host to act as a file server for Windows machines, it also includes services for print serving, authentication, name resolution, and other services needed for Windows networks. Blair begins with a discussion of NetBIOS and SMB, the core protocols of Windows networking, but spends a majority of the book going into excrutiating detail about how to install and configure Samba. In addition to general configuration settings, it discusses the necessary configuration settings for approximately 35 different operating systems, including Linux, OS/2, Solaris, many more obscure operating systems.

As the preface notes, this is a book primarily for UNIX systems administrators. Since it devotes a large amount of space to configuration parameters and explanation, it is definitely not a book to sit down and read on a lazy Sunday afternoon. If you are an administrator attempting to set up Samba, this is the book for you. If you are looking for a more casual reading experience, you will be quickly bogged down in the configuration details.

What's Bad? This is an extremely dry book that is about as fascinating to read as a man page. Many portions of the book are little more than a paper versions of existing documentation. For everyone who doesn't like to pay for information that is already freely distributed, all of the contents are accessable in the Samba man pages or online at Samba's web site.

What's Good? The chapter detailing the SMB and NetBIOS protocols is an interesting and valuable addition to the book. In a text that devotes a majority of its space to installation and configuration, it provides an interesting insight into the underlying workings of the server. For those who are installing Samba, it provides step-by-step installation and configuration information for a variety of operating systems.

So What's In It For Me? If you need to configure a Samba server, this book is a valuable resource. It provides in depth configuration details and examples for a variety of scenarios.

Buy this book at Amazon.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Windows Networking Protocols
3. Downloading and Building Samba
4. Components of the Samba Suite
5. Global Configuration Options
6. Service Configuration Options
7. Browser Configuration Options
8. Access Control Configuration Examples
9. Service Configuration Examples
10. Other Tricks and Techniques
11. Diagnosing Problems
12. The Linux SMB Filesystem

Andrew Shapiro has written a new book that almost perfectly -- and presciently -- captures the big idea about the Internet right now: In "The Control Revolution," he describes how the Net is putting individuals in charge of their lives and changing the world.

There are lots of books these days about the Net and the Web - what they mean, how we're drowning in too much information, how memes move around, how to design websites, make money off of e-trading, use C+++, install Linux.

But only a handful nail the big ideas down as well as Andrew L. Shapiro has in "The Control Revolution: How the Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know" (Public Affairs Books, $US 25).

"The Control Revolution" isn't exactly a stirring term for what the Net and the Web are doing to life, but Shapiro is right. The Web is a series of social as well as technological revolutions. His definitions of the "Control" part make sense:

l. The potentially monumental shift in control from institutions to individuals made possible by new technology such as the Net.

2. The conflict over such change between individuals and powerful entities (governments, corporations, the media).

3. The unexpected, and not always desirable, ways in which such change could reshape our lives.

Shapiro has a sharp eye for the politics of technology and institutions. He writes about the politics of code in shaping the Net, the sweeping political power of interactivity, and the decline of middlemen brought about by revolutionary new software advances like the MP3 player and eBay. He also writes about the inevitable resistance to many of these changes.

Few Net writers have looked at the politics of coding, and few non-programmers have ever thought about it. Shapiro writes that just as the Net's growing rapidly, it's form can also be changed very quickly. "That's because although the Net depends on physical hardware - networks of computers and wires - it is defined mostly by code."

And most Net users can't write code, have never seen it, and know nothing about it.

So control of code, he points out, may become a powerful political power. Easily altered with a few keystrokes, code may be at the heart of political power struggles in the digital age.

In "Where Do You Want to Go Today? Microsoft and the Illusion of Control" - Shapiro looks at Gates, Inc. It's a dispassionate, revealing look at a particular corporate culture that is so worshipped and demonized that it's become nearly impossible to think rationally about it.

In a detached, credible way, Shapiro writes about the strengths and weaknesses of the Internet's most loved, patronized and hated corporation. He writes, for example, about how Microsoft's executives have gotten themselves into a dangerous mindset that, "if they don't control everything, they'll control nothing," perhaps the first plausible explanation I've seen of the power-mad bumbling revealed in the company's ongoing legal nightmares in Washington.

Shapiro also writes about another controversial issue few people on the Net or Web want to deal with - how new blocking, filtering and other "convenience" and anti-spamming softwares (yes, much more sophisticated than Kill Files ever were, and much less motivated by self defense and protection) are changing the ground rules of free speech on the Net and the Web, allowing the dissenter's voice to be excluded effortlessly and instantly.

Shapiro is a scholar and a lawyer, and "The Control Revolution" is thorough, meticulously supported, sometimes dry but almost always thoughtful and dead-on.

We need to grasp, he argues, that living well in the digital age means more than just having complete dominion over life's decisions. Personal freedom requires also knowing when to relinquish authority, either to chance or to the wisdom of others. And that for the sake of democracy, the people using the Net and the Web need to consider a new kind of social and political compact - not a starry-eyed declaration of cyber-independence, but a realistic compromise between personal liberty and communal obligation.

Shapiro stumbles a bit here. His call for this kind of dialogue is stirring and sensible, but it reads more like an op-ed piece than a realistic solution to the enormous social and political challenges presented by the growth of the Network, and the particular challenges to open discussion of common issues. His appeal for a moderate rationality is too detached from reality. The kind of discussion he argues for - the kind necessary for new social compacts -- isn't even remotely likely to occur on the chaotic, free and ferociously individualistic Net or the Web, outside of a few carefully-screen websites, mailing lists or weblogs.

People who write or post publicly on the Web - even those who love it - despair of ever having rational, non-hostile public discussions. Few would believe any sort of broad, rational, civil discussion about politics or society is likely in the near future. Online discussions are quarrelsome, frequently vicious, disjointed and diverse - in a way, that's sort of the point.

They are much freer and inherently less organized and directed than the kind of forum Shapiro seems to want, and rarely, if ever, provide any sort of concensus or coherent thread on issues.

Still, if Shapiro can't solve the Net's civic problems, he's sure grasped the import of the biggest single idea emerging from the online world: the movement of power, influence and freedom away from institutions and companies and towards individuals.

This notion of individual liberty is an old, profoundly powerful idea, dating back to the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions. But the early revolutionaries were just looking to beat back monarchies. They never imagined individual people would ever have the power the Net and the Web is giving them over culture, business and information and, almost inevitably, over politics.

Shapiro has this brilliantly nailed this notion down, rising above Luddite alarms, Utopian digital fantasies, programming jargon and the media hype now surrounding computing.

It's hard to imagine a more timely book about the real significance of the Internet - how it's continuing (maybe beginning) the long and bitterly difficult process of putting individuals in charge of their world.

Pick this up at Amazon.

Doc Technical, writer of the famous Story about Ping review, which I have now seen on Amazon, and on mailing lists, can review books other then allegories. Yes, it's true-and to prove his point, Doc has taken a hard look at Kirk Waingrow's Unix Hints and Hacks, a book for the system administrators, or those who think they want to one of the few, the proud, etc. Unix Hints and Hacks author Kirk Waingrow pages 479 publisher Que rating 6.5/10 reviewer Doc Technical ISBN summary This is a somewhat flawed book that contains some useful unix information. Although it's not spelled out in the title, this book is aimed at unix system administrators. To be useful for the linux user, you'll need to be experienced enough to know when specific examples are appropriate for the linux environment.

According to the introduction, the book's examples were tested with five versions of unix, including Linux 2.x. I'm a programmer by profession, but our group maintains 70+ linux servers and workstations, and we spread the sysadmin work around. So I'm always looking for hints on how to keep the machines humming.

The book is divided into ten chapters, four appendices and a glossary. Of the ten chapters, the first eight are on the "hard" unix subjects like File Management, Networking, and Security, while the last two chapters focus on "soft" subjects: "Users" and "System Administration: The Occupation".

The book is on firmer ground with the former than it is with the latter.

Hints and Hacks The first seven chapters feature a collection of hints/hacks with one or more examples for each. A typical example is Section 6.2, "Copy Files Remotely". The author describes the problem in a brief paragraph ("...there are times when migrating files over from one host to another is necessary"). This is followed by four examples showing different techniques (using rcp, tar/rsh, nfs mount points, and ftp). Finally, the section ends with three brief sections: "Reasons", "Real World Experiences", and "Other Resources".

According to the back cover, the book is aimed at the intermediate to advanced reader (although the introduction rather contradicts this by claiming that it will be useful to beginners as well). I consider myself comfortably within the intermediate to advanced range, and I honestly did find some useful tips in this book. Most subjects are covered by several examples showing alternative approaches, and this is consistent with the unix "toolkit" philosophy. There's always more than one way to flay a feline.

While aimed at intermediate and advanced users, I suspect most of that audience will be familiar with one or more solutions to most of the problems presented in the book. Where the reader will benefit occasionally is the discovery of a third or fourth alternative to a problem.

Some of the example problems had me shaking my head. In a section called "Remove the --- Dashes ---", the author presents the legitimate problem of removing a file that begins with a dash. If you don't believe this can be a problem, run these commands:

touch /tmp/-wow; cd /tmp; rm -wow

The obvious solution to this problem is to append the directory to the file name so that it doesn't start with a dash:

rm /tmp/-wow

The author provides this solution, along with three alternatives, but the last one raised more questions for me than it answered. The author's last example suggests "rm -r directory". Remove the entire directory. In the author's defence, he does provide numerous warnings in this example, and says it "should be used only as a last resort." But he never did explain why this method would be needed. Under what circumstances would the other methods not work?

There are some factual problems in the book, as in the appendix on "Basic Scripting Concepts" where a section titled "Recursive Scripts" has nothing to do with recursion.

In the "Real World Experience" subsection of the section "Redirecting Output to Null", the author recounts how he once crashed a database application by deleting its log files with rm, and how he quickly learned to redirect /dev/null to the log files to zero them out ("cat /dev/null > logfile"). But he doesn't take the extra step of explaining why rm'ing an open log file might cause an application to crash. Understanding why something happened in the first place is as important as knowing how to fix it.

What's Left Out This book looks at solutions to specific problems, but never really attempts to teach what I'd call the hacking mentality.

In a section called "Find the Disk Hog", Waingrow shows how to use the du, sort, and head commands to find the top ten disk users like this:

du -s | sort -rn | head -10

He explains how these commands work, and he uses similar command-line examples throughout the book. This is great. Stringing together existing unix commands using pipes and filters is one of the biggest strengths of the operating system. But he never covers these meta-topics, except for a brief mention of pipes in the introduction.

Readers at a beginning level would benefit from an overview of pipes and filters, as well as such essential programs as cut, grep, egrep, head, tail, sort, wc, and tr. Many of these programs are used in examples, and some are explained in context, but a "concepts" chapter would have broadened the book's usefulness.

Perhaps the author assumes that everyone already knows these things, but I suspect many unix and linux administrators have never been explicitly taught them.

The Soft Chapters The last two chapters of the book, "Users" and "System Administration: The Occupation", are aimed at professional sysadmins. These were, for me, the least useful, but I only perform sysadmin work as an adjunct to my programming.

There are sections on topics like "The Six Types of Users", "Public Relations", and "Preparing for an Interview". These are soft subjects not related to unix per se, but they may be useful to administrators.

Some of the advice in these last two chapters will be of most benefit to those just starting out in the field. Much of the advice seemed (to me) to be common sense. In the section "Being Interviewed", Waingrow suggests "Don't ever cut the interviewer off in the middle of a sentence", and "Don't lie", and "Don't belittle, debate, disagree, or tell interviewers that they are wrong". Geez, that really screws up my interviewing strategy.

Structural Problems For me, the book suffered from several irritating structural and organizational problems. The first eight chapters are each divided into roughly a dozen sections. For example, chapter 5, "Account Management", is divided into 16 sections, starting with 5.1, "User Account Names", and running through section 5.16, "Nulling the Root Password Without vi". This is fine. But then each section is broken down again into subsections. How many? Exactly one. It may seem like a minor aesthetic point, but it makes the pages harder to scan visually, and it makes the Table of Contents much harder to read.

Another annoying point is that the book is typeset so that there is less space between the period (.) and the start of a new sentence than there is between individual words. Sentences sometimes seem to crash into one another. Again, a minor point, not the author's fault, but these things add up.

And I have more fundamental problems with the way the book is organized. Each chapter section tackles a single subject, and many of these sections make their intent quite clear: "Dealing with Unwanted Daemons", or "Monitoring at Boot Time". But other section headings are more ambiguous: "Clear and Lock" and "File Collecting" might have been better named as "Clearing and Locking the Screen" and "Finding Suspicious Files".

As a benchmark, I looked at the organization of the recent "Perl Cookbook" by Christiansen and Torkington. This book is a similar collection of brief solutions to specific problems. The Perl Cookbook avoids many of the problems that harm "Unix Hints and Hacks". Section headings are descriptive and unambiquous, and they use a consistent verb tense. The layout is clean and readable. The publishers could take some lessons from O'Reilly.

Editing In places, a little editing would have helped the prose. Here's an example from page 144:

"When a program is sent a QUIT signal, it writes out what was in memory at the time the signal was sent to disk."

I'm pretty sure the signal was not not sent to disk, but this dangling modifier could easily have been recast:

"When a program is sent a QUIT signal, it writes to disk what was in memory at the time the signal was sent."

Writers are going to make mistakes like this, it's the editor's job to find them. This editor too often didn't.

Bottom Line The weaknesses of this book get in the way of its strengths. Tighter writing, tighter editing, and a tighter focus would help this book enormously.

A focus on the hard-core unix topics presented in the first seven chapters, with some additional material on the unix toolkit mentality, could be the basis for a good second edition of this book.

I would recommend skimming through this book at your local bookstore. If, after a few minutes, you find more than two or three examples that are useful, you'll likely benefit from this book.

Else, pick it up at Amazon.

Probably a name familar to most of you, Alvin Toffler, authored the well-known book The Third Wave. This is a book that explores the emerging change in the world, called, (duh) The Third Wave. Thanks to joshy for sending this review our way. The Third Wave author Alvin Toffler pages publisher Bantam Books rating 8 reviewer joshy ISBN 0553246984 summary he Third Wave is an in-depth study of the forthcoming information economy and the rest of the civilization surrounding it. I can only recommend reading it if you plan to have a job or purchase anything in the next hundred years. Overview

Alvin Toffler is an historian and futurist. In The Third Wave he presents an historical view of our two previous civilizations types, a look at the new Third Wave economy, and an analysis of the conflicts that arise between the warring forces of these three civilization types as change sweeps across the globe. Now sure, we've all read the endless Wired articles about the New Economy with it's virtuous circles, network effects, and general cyberiffic rosy view of the future, but this book is where it all came from. The truly amazing thing is that Toffler wrote the third wave almost 20 years ago, in an era before the World Wide Web, before the IBM PC, and before anyone knew that Vader was Luke's father. While some of the ideas never came to fruition, it remains an amazingly accurate picture of the future.

Structure

The book starts off with a lengthy description of First and Second Wave civilizations. A First Wave economy is agrarian society where everyone makes their own products for their own consumption and there is little or no trading between households. A Second Wave civilization is an industrial society. Rampant specialization and economies of scale have taken over as people form into larger and larger groups like corporations and nation-states. The key indicators of a Second Wave economy are standardization, specialization, and centralization. Almost no one creates products for themselves, but instead people spend most of their time working in a factory creating products to be sold to others. This split of producer and consumer is the primary sign of a Second Wave economy and, according to Toffler, one of the major reasons for strife and chaos in the modern world.

After covering the first two economies (with most of his time spent on the second) Alvin Toffler begins his description of a Third Wave economy, which America has already started to become. (This was true at the time of the writing. I'd say it's well underway now). The key tenets of a Third Wave economy are de-massification and de-centralization. Products will no longer be standardized in huge factories, but, using new manufacturing technology, will be customized in extremely small production runs; sometimes a single unit. Consumers will have a bigger part in the creation of the products they buy, turning the producers and consumers into 'prosumers'. All bureaucratic structures will be de-centralized. National governments will divest more power to regional governments and global organizations that deal with the problems of our new world wide economy. Corporate structures will also be de-massified, giving more power (and economic payoff) to people lower on the ladder.

The key to a Third Wave civilization is flexibility: people work when they want, where they want, and for whom they want. These are all traits found in technology startups and are becoming more common in traditional industries. Flextime, tele-commuting, and stock options all fit very nicely into this future. And they are all features we should look for in prospective companies.

What's Bad?

The Third Wave is an amazing book, but it's not without it's flaws. First of all, it's too long. Minus the ninety odd pages of index, notes, and bibliography, the book weighs in at a hefty 445 pages. That's not huge, but it's pretty big for a non-fiction, non-narrative book. The Third Wave is very in-depth and covers a lot of ground in detail, but a smaller book of one to two hundred pages would give the reader the basics without being so heavy on history and examples.

Secondly, as surprisingly current as the book is, it still is dated in some areas. He had big hopes for the space and undersea industries that haven't panned out. And even with as much time as he spent talking about the possibilities of computing, he was unable (understandably) to anticipate the true growth of the industry.

So What's In It For Me?

This is a good book that should be read by anyone planning on being a part of business in the Information Economy. We can see de-centralization and de-massification all around us, and it's growing in power. Slashdot, MP3s, tele-commuting, block grants, indie-films, non-nuclear families are all signs of the coming 21st century civilization. The Third Wave may be a little out of date and a little too optimistic, but it's still the closest thing we have to a history of the last fifty years and a roadmap of the next hundred.

To purchase this book, head over Amazon.

Table of Contents

1. A Collision of Waves
   1. Super-Struggle
2. The Second Wave
   1. The Architecture of Civilization
   2. The Invisible Wedge
   3. Breaking the Code
   4. The Technicians of Power
   5. The Hidden Blueprint
   6. A Frenzy of Nations
   7. The Imperial Drive
   8. Indust-Reality
   9. CODA: The Flash Flood
3. The Third Wave
   1. The New Synthesis
   2. The Commanding Heights
   3. De-Massifying the Media
   4. The Intelligent Environment
   5. Beyond Mass Production
   6. The Electronic Cottage
   7. Families of The Future
   8. The Corporate Identity Crisis
   9. Decoding the New Rules
   10. The Rise of the Prosumer
   11. The Mental Maelstrom
   12. The Crack-Up of the Nation
   13. Gandhi with Satellites
   14. CODA: The Great Confluence
4. Conclusion
   1. The New Psycho-Sphere
   2. The Personality of the Future
   3. The Political Mausoleum
   4. Twenty-First Century Democracy

• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Andrew Gardner has reviewed a book that I'm sure sits on many shelves: Perl in a Nutshell. Designed to be your desktop reference, Ellen Siever, Stephen Spainhour, and Nathan Patwardhan have produced a multi-use tool. Click below for the review. Perl in a Nutshell author Ellen Siever, Stephen Spainhour, Nathan Patwardhan pages publisher O'Reilly & Associates rating 10 reviewer Andrew Gardner ISBN summary ood reference for the Perl monger, a good way for the experienced programmer to start getting work done in Perl Here's The Scenario

It is every nerd's righteous duty to learn to hack in Perl. And not just hack, but obfuscate, and do it well. Its a prerequisite for database interfaces, CGI, and system administration, and engineers use Perl all the time. So, figuring it was time to establish my Official Nerd status and get some work done, I set out for the book store. After wading through the piles of books on prognostications about the future of the internet and the 17 volume How to Use AOL series, I found Perl in a Nutshell. I'd done a little Perl before (certainly nothing that would qualify me as a hacker), but I've spent enough time in front of a computer staring into an Emacs buffer full of Verilog to feel like an experienced geek. I didn't want my hand held, and I didn't want a book aimed at the "Netscape for Idiots" crowd. I just wanted to start doing stuff in Perl.

What you get Just as the subtitle states, this is A Desktop Quick Reference. Right from the start, the assumption is that you are going to do something of value very quicky with the knowledge that you are acquiring. Accompanying the exhaustive list of functions, the description of the goals and functionality of each module keeps the book narrowly focused on what Perl can do for you, and what you can be doing with Perl right now. A significant portion of the book is devoted to the most popular modules available on CPAN, which greatly expands the scope of things you can do with this book. The descriptions of the entire broad spectrum of Perl that the book covers are all written in the same style. A quick introduction develops the purpose of the module, and then its straight into the function reference. There is very little fooling around here, and that's the best reason to buy this book.

A brief list of the most useful topics:

• Basic language reference (reserved words and standard modules)
• CGI and mod_perl
• Database interfaces
• Sockets and network programming
• Perl/Tk

The introduction to Perl in the first four chapters is sufficient for the experienced coder, and the function reference makes it simple to jumpstart projects in Perl. Unlike some technical books whose indices and tables of contents are as nondescript as physically possible, Perl in a Nutshell actually has a useful index and table of contents that makes it rather simple to find what you're looking for. Should you buy this book?

Perl in a Nutshell is a perfect book for its market. If you're an inexperienced programmer, or you have no use for Perl, this book will do nothing for you. If you want to get started in Perl, the authors suggest Programming Perl, which is the definitive work on the subject. That really is the place to start. If, however, you have the Camel or the Llama or the Ram, then the Camel head, as the preface names it, might just be a welcome addition to your Perl library.

So What's In It For Me?

You don't get tons of code. And it's short on philosophy. You get a reference, and you get what you paid for. So, when you're desperate to get it to work, or you've got a couple of hours to pull something out of thin air, this is the book you want on your desk because it is truly a complete reference.

Purchase this book over at Amazon.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Perl
   
2. Installing Perl
   
3. The Perl Interpreter
   
4. The Perl Language
   
5. Function Reference
   
6. Debugging
   
7. Packages, Modules, and Objects
   
8. Standard Modules
   
9. CGI Overview
   
10. The CGI.pm Module
    
11. Web Server Programming with mod_perl
    
12. Databases and Perl
    
13. Sockets
    
14. Email Connectivity
    
15. Usenet News
    
16. FTP
    
17. The LWP Library
    
18. Perl/TK
    
19. Win32 Modules and Extensions
    
20. PerlScript
    

law wrote in to tell us that Neal Stephenson has an interview over at Amazon. The author of Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash talks about assorted things from crypto to Linux. Lots of interesting bits in there.

law wrote in to tell us that Neal Stephenson has an interview over at Amazon. The author of Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash talks about assorted things from crypto to Linux. Lots of interesting bits in there.

law wrote in to tell us that Neal Stephenson has an interview over at Amazon. The author of Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash talks about assorted things from crypto to Linux. Lots of interesting bits in there.

Rounding at a full week of stern reviews, stern takes a look at Andrew Leonard's new book Bots: The Origin of New Species. You may recognize Leonard's name from Wired and Salon. Click below to get the natural selection on his new book. Bots: The Origin of New Species author Andrew Leonard pages publisher HardWired Books rating 5/10 reviewer Stern ISBN summary

Define "bot" as any long-lived software process which runs with little or no human input. Andrew Leonard tries to make them exciting.

The Scenario

Andrew Leonard is yet another Wired reporter who has written a book about the computer software that will take you into the next millennium. He discusses bots, long-lived software processes with some decision-making capability, in their native habitats of IRC, usenet, MOOs and the web.

What's Bad?

While it is safe to guess that bots, under the guise of autonomous software agents, will be major players in the computing world, in order to get a book's worth of material, Leonard had to define the class very broadly. As a result virtually anything from IRC eggdrop bots to that little dancing paperclip in Microsoft Word qualifies. The stretch becomes particularly visible when he reaches back into history to discuss the origin of bots and comes up with early backup software and 'Eliza' [Note to younger readers: Eliza was a program which faked human conversation, badly. It has been implemented in every programming language you can imagine]. In chapter 4, Leonard actually describes the Wumpus of "Hunt the Wumpus" as a bot, about as ludicrous an argument as you could imagine. [Note to younger readers: Hunt the Wumpus was a very simple, very stupid game that was played on university mainframes and the early home computers of the 1970s. You wandered (textually) through a finite network of caves. Each time you moved, the wumpus moved too, randomly. You could shoot arrows into adjoining rooms. If you hit the wumpus, you won. If you wandered into the wumpus, you lost. Look, Doom wouldn't be invented for another 20 years.]

Once he's defined 'bot' so broadly, Leonard has to contend with the universe of daemons and faceless applications which infest any modern operating system. Unfortunately, most of these are not very exciting and Leonard focusses on software which is more visible, and ideally anthropomorphic. This means that all his modern bots fall into a small number of classes: usenet monitoring programs (including cancelbots), IRC bots, MUD and MOO bots, and web spiders. This puts him in an awkward position -- this book is clearly intended for the mass market, but the vast majority of the discussion regards systems which his readers will never use.

Leonard very much wants to draw trends and lessons from the evolution of bots in these areas. Unfortunately for him, the universe of bots he chooses to discuss has been so short-lived that he can draw only the most banal conclusions. "Poorly tested bots can get into infinitely recursive conversations with each other." "AI bots do a poor job of mimicking human beings." "When evil bots are programmed, good bots are usually created to fight them. Both groups are then reprogrammed repeatedly in attempts to outsmart each other."

This book avoids the typical Wired error of quoting a bunch of "friends of Wired" as experts on whatever topic is at hand. However, it does slip into the magazine's absurd typography. Many paragraphs (selected randomly, as far as I can tell) start with an initial letter which is dramatically larger than the surrounding text, rotated sideways, and rendered in a different font. How hip.

What's Good?

The book is delightfully cerebral, drawing from Plato and Darwin, Gibson and Asimov. [Note to younger readers: Plato for his moral "demon", Darwin for the theory of evolution by natural selection (which, if you ask me, clearly does not apply), Gibson for the AIs in Neuromancer, and Asimov for the "Three Laws of Robotics"] The research is admirable, and Leonard tracks down the authors of an awful lot of the software he describes. I used MUDs a few times back in 1990 or so (and honestly never saw the point). Chapters 1 and 5 describe in amusing detail the troubles caused by bots at various MOOs, including an extended discussion of "The Barney Problem," or the 1993 swamping of Point MOOt by sloppily programmed Barney Bots singing the "I love you" song.

The discussion of Bot politics on IRC was instructive. I've been on EFnet for almost ten years now, but have always tried to avoid the undying politics of IRC-abuse and server control. As a result, I missed the inside scoop on why Alternet formed and why Nickserv went away, and so forth. Leonard fills in the gaps. Would this be as interesting to somebody who doesn't use IRC, or who uses it so much that they already know the stories? Probably not.

The material in chapter 3 on the failure of AI could form the core of its own book, a book about why AI looked so promising in 1980, the brilliant people who devoted their careers to it, and why it failed nonetheless.

"In part, the AI community doomed itself. Its own bold promises and early success led to a breathless boom period in the 1980s. Corporations rushed to adopt so-called expert systems -- programs that specialized in particular domains of knowledge and were supposed to represent the accumulated wisdom of hundreds of human experts. Unfortunately, most expert systems ended up requiring even more human resources than they replaced, and they often failed to work as promised" [stern: give me examples! juicy ones!]

"A sorry record of broken promises and the demise of the cold war dried up most AI funding and sent the artificial intelligence community reeling. Attendance at the premier artificial intelligence conferences declined. Morale sank to its lowest point when aspiring AI workers discovered that just putting the words artificial intelligence in a grant application guaranteed the kiss of death."

Those two paragraphs, on page 45, could be the first two paragraphs of a book about the past failure of AI and new methods being tried today, especially on the web. That book would probably be better than the one which Leonard has written.

Two Additional Notes

1. Curiously, Amazon.com placed this book at the top of my personalized 'recommended books' list for months. Since this list is generated by the Netperceptions affinity engine, I can only imagine that it would not have made the list unless it was selling pretty well. This makes me perplexed about how it was marketed, since its true audience seems so small.
2. One of the blurbs on the back (you know, the ones which normally say things like "A brilliant work of technical writing which I will treasure forever" -- Sylvester Stallone) reads, in its entirety,
   "Bot is short for robot, which is cooler than program."
   IRC hacker, John Leth-Nissen
   That seems rather random, doesn't it?

So What's In It For Me?

Leonard writes well, and his research can not be faulted. I look forward to reading his future books. This particular book should be of interest to people already familiar with (and curious about) robo-moderators on USENET, web spiders, IRC or MUDs/MOOs. If you do not fall into one of those categories, don't waste your time here.

If you're into this, pick up the book at Amazon.

Table of Contents

1. A Plague of Barneys
2. Daemons and Darwin
3. One Big Turing Test
4. The Bot Way of Being
5. War
6. Raising the Stakes
7. On the Brink
8. The Technodialectic

Stern has gifted us with a review of Dave Barry's In Cyberspace. The book itself is 1996, but I can attest to the sheer humour of it, simply by it's long half-life in washroom. Click below to read more. In Cyberspace author Dave Barry pages publisher Fawcett Columbine rating 7 reviewer Stern ISBN summary stselling humor book about computers and computer people, cyberporn and the net. It is funny to anybody who works with these machines, but is aimed at a slightly older and less sophisticated audience than the Slashdot crowd. The Scenario

Dave Barry is a comedy writer who makes more money than I care to think about by writing about boogers and broken appliances. If you have used the Internet longer than six months, you've probably been e-mailed his essay about the exploding whale in Oregon. Barry's humor often relies on mocking uncomfortable truths, and he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for political commentary several years ago. In this book (which contains mostly new material), Barry writes about Microsoft Word, tech support hotlines, hardware upgrades, selecting fonts, and other topics close to the heart of any computer user.

What's Bad?

Barry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a sophisticated computer user. Though amusing to just about anybody, his jokes are intended for readers with an understanding of computers similar to his own. Intepreting various comments he makes about the first computer he ever owned, he's probably been using PCs since the early 1980s (the book was published in 1996).

This computer had virtually no practical use other than to consume electricity. You know how modern personal computers contain a microchip "brain" that, despite being no larger than a Chiclet, can perform millions of mathematical calculations per second? Well, I don't think my Radio Shack computer had one of those. I think there might have been an actual Chiclet in there, calling the shots...

Most of the humor, therefore, is about the goofy error messages in Windows 95. You can generalize his jokes to apply to the goofy error messages from other operating systems, but don't expect him to talk about the particular difficulties that a typical Slashdot reader confronts. The book is also somewhat repetitive.

What's Good?

Many of Barry's jokes fall into two categories: the difficulty of getting a new computer (or new software) to work, and the sad fact that they're not very useful even once you have them working. This second point is even more true than Barry may realize. Every study I have read on the effect on introducing computers into a workplace shows a drop in productivity as a result. While computers may speed routine tasks, the time that is freed is then spent fussing with the computer, playing with fonts, chaging desktop pictures, and so forth.

Computer spending has increased essentially every year for decades. In 1996, companies in the United States spent 43% of their capital budgets on computer hardware. That is more than they invested in factories, vehicles or any other type of durable equipment. Meanwhile, productivity growth in the seven richest nations of the world has fallen precipitously in the past 30 years, from an average of 4.5% a year during the 1960s to a rate of 1.5% recently. The slowdown has hit the biggest IT spenders -- service-sector industries, especially in the U.S. -- hardest.

Barry's brilliance comes from his ability to reflect troubling truths like this in memorable quips.

You know how annoying it can be to keep a schedule on old-fashioned paper: Every time you want to record an appointment, you have to get out your schedule book and write your appointment down. Wouldn't it be easier if you simply had to go to your computer, turn it on, wait for it to "boot up," use the mouse to locate and click on the scheduling program icon, wait for the program to load, then use the mouse to get to the right day, then type in the appointment information in the proper space, and the time in the proper space, making sure to use the format allowed by the program, then close the scheduling program without being 100 percent certain that you would ever see this information again?

If you answered "Yes!" then you're ready to join the millions of cyberhumans like me who have dumped clumsy schedule-and-address books weighing as much as three ounces and are now carrying around laptop computers that can incorporate the same information in a package that -- including power cables, spare batteries, etc. -- weighs easily 25 times as much!...

While this passage may be somewhat dated by the introduction of the Palm Pilot, his larger point remains true, that many of us compulsively use computers even where they make our lives less pleasant. His descriptions of the web are funny, though dated. One chapter, widely circulated via e-mail, lists some of Barry's favorite websites and makes fun of them. Of course, he warns us that "By the time you read this, you may not be able to visit all of these pages. I visited most of them in mid-1996; some of them may have since gone out of existence for various reasons, such as that their creators were recalled to their home planets." The list includes "Mr. T Ate My Balls," the "Trojan Room Coffee Machine," the famous Oregon "Exploding Whale", and other sites you've probably visited at one point or another. Given what I have already said, it should come as no surprise that Barry describes one of the chief benefits of the net that, if it's 8pm and your 12 year old kid suddenly remembers that he has a report on the Spanish-American War due the next morning,

No problem! Your cyber-savvy youngster simple turns on your computer, activates your modem, logs on to the Internet -- the revolutionary "Information Superhighway" -- and, in a matter of minutes, is exchanging pictures of naked women with other youngsters all over North America.

The MsPtato and RayAdverb chapters represent a sharp change in style, telling in straightforward narrative the story of two adult strangers who meet in Internet chatrooms and find themselves to be soulmates. For readers who are new to the net, I think these chapters would illustrate how the net breaks down social barriers and changes peoples lives.

So What's In It For Me?

It's funny. You can read the chapters in any order. I suggest borrowing it from a library or a friend, because you'll finish it in less than an hour.

Pick this book up at Amazon.

Table of Contents

1. A Brief History of Computing from Cave Walls to Windows 95
   Not That This is Necessarily Progress
2. How Computers Work
3. How touy and Set Up a Computer
   Step One: Get Valium
4. Becoming Computer Literate
   Or: Words for Nerds
5. Comdex
   Nerdstock in the Desert
   Or; Bill Gates Is Elvis
6. Software
   Making Your Computer Come Alive So It Can Attack You
7. How to Install Software
   A 12-Step Program
8. Word Processing
   How to Press an Enormous Number of Keys Without Ever Actually Writing Anything
   Or: If God Had Wanted Us to Be Concise, He Wouldn't Have Given Us So Many Fonts
9. The Internet
   Transforming Society and Shaping the Future, Through Chat
   Or: Watch What You Write, Mr. Chuckletrousers
   Or: Why Suck is OK, Blow is Not
   Plus: Danger! Sushi Tapeworms!
10. Using Internet "Shorthand"
    How You Can Be Just as Original as Everybody Else
11. Selected Web Sites
    At Last: Proof that Civilization is Doomed
12. MsPtato and RayAdverb
    A Story of Love Online
13. Conclusion
    The Future of the Computer Revolution
    Or: Fun with Mister Johnson
14. Reprise
    MsPtato and RayAdverb

Tal Cohen has taken a close look at Douglas R. Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach -- 20th Anniversary Edition. He's returned to the book to try and explain what the book is really about-using a new foreword. Definitely a book worth checking out - click below to read more. Godel, Escher, Bach -- 20th Anniversary Edition author Douglas R. Hofstadter pages publisher Basic Books rating 12/10 reviewer Tal Cohen ISBN 0-465-02656-7 summary Twenty years after its original release, the author of this spectacular masterpiece clarifies, once and for all, what the book is actually about.

In an interview to Wired magazine a few years back, Douglas R. Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (GEB for short) complained that most people, even those who actually read the book, couldn't tell what it's really about. Yes, it talks about music and art, mathematics and zen, biochemistry and computer languages; but none of these is what the book is really about.

This seems to be a real problem, because in the new "20th Anniversary Edition" of the book, Hofstadter says that the question "so what is this book about?" haunted him since he was scribbling the first drafts, back in 1973. Now, twenty years after its first publication (in 1979), the author decided to clarify the matter once and for all, and added a new 23-page preface that, among other things, clarifies the issue.

So -- what is this book about? The New York Times bestsellers list originally summarized it as "A scientist argues that reality is a system of interconnected brains".

Hogwash.

The Jargon File (4.1.0) says it's "a brilliant tapestry themed on the concept of encoded self-reference". Brilliant, yes; but otherwise not very accurate. Another common definition is "a book that shows how math, art, and music are really all the same thing at their core". Hofstadter says he heard this one over and over again, even by people who read the book, and it is (in his own words) "a million miles off".

My own review of the book (http://www.forum2.org/tal/books/geb.html), the single most popular page on my web site, says that the book is about "the question of consciousness and the possibility of artificial intelligence. It is a book that attempts to discover what 'self' really means".

Much closer (but I had the advantage of reading that Wired interview).

"In a word," writes Hofstadter in the new preface, "GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?". His explanation goes on, and clarifies at least one thing: despite its beautiful playfulness, GEB is a serious book presenting a serious theory about consciousness. Despite its popularity, it is not a "popular science" book.

If you already read GEB, you're probably wondering what else is new in the 20th Anniversary Edition -- other than the new preface. Certainly, there were many possibilities. Most ideas were about additional chapters -- about progress made in the last twenty years in the field of artificial intelligence, or about machine translation, and more. There was also the idea of including a new dialogue, that was previously published elsewhere. Wilder suggestions went as far as releasing GEB with a CD-ROM including the Escher's art, Bach's works and recordings of all of GEB's dialogues by professional narrators.

None of that.

Not a word was changed; not a figure added; not even, the author admits, the few typos fixed. The book is a facsimile of the original release, with even page numbering left intact (the preface pages use a separate numbering, from P-1 to P-23). The CD-ROM suggestion was turned down because Hofstadter "intended GEB as a book, not as a multimedia circus, and a book it shall remain". The other suggestions were turned down for more delicate reasons.

But while the preface is the only change, it is a very important one. For first-time readers, it clears several aspects of the book before they commence reading. This is important, especially because GEB is anything but an easy read (some compared reading it to giving birth). For returning readers, the introduction clarifies many things, and sheds a new light on several aspects.

In addition to establishing, once and for all, a formal definition to what the book is about, the introduction also describes the history of the book, and the history of its authors for the last twenty years. You probably heard about the books he wrote later -- Metamagical Themas, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, The Mind's I (as a co-editor), and Le Ton beau de Marot: in Praise of the Music of Language . These books cover much of the suggested additions to GEB: Fluid Concepts, for example, covers Hofstadter's research work, while Le Ton beau de Marot includes a lengthy discussion (or rather, a lengthy attack) on machine translation -- among many other things.

The preface also talks about GEB's translations, a suggested sex-change operation for the Tortoise, a brief account of Hofstadter's recent literary efforts, and more.

Since you probably owe yourself a re-read of the book (you did read it before, right?), the new edition is a good excuse as any to start now.

For a complete review of the original Gödel, Escher, Bach, visit http://www.forum2.org/tal/books/geb.html.

To purchase this book, head over to Amazon.

For my review of Le Ton beau de Marot, see http://www.forum2.org/tal/books/marot.html.

After this most recent succesful foray into reviewing for us, Stern has sent us a review of net.wars. Written by Wendy M. Grossman, the book attempts to take a brainshot of the mid-1990s Internet. Click below to read more. net.wars author Wendy M. Grossman pages publisher New York University Press rating 6 reviewer Stern ISBN summary A cultural study of the mid-1990s Internet, concentrating on cultural and political battles online. The early, more historical chapters are particularly strong. The Scenario

Wendy Grossman is a freelance writer who has been published in Wired magazine and other periodicals. In this book, she describes various cultural and political wars involving the Internet. The book seems intended for people who missed the main thrust of the battles, or who found themselves on the wrong side of a fight they never knew they'd joined. (Imagine the poor AOL'er who sends his first "me too" over USENET and doesn't understand why people got angry).

The book has a secondary purpose of memorializing these battles for the sake of the net's own short institutional memory. In this regard, it resembles the Jargon file or the net.legends FAQ (which it quotes repeatedly).

What's Bad?

Grossman started with Compuserve in 1991 and migrated to the Internet in the summer of 1993. This book was commissioned in early 1997, and discusses the years in between. These were important days in the growth of the net, but as a relative newcomer to the world she documents, Grossman sometimes misses issues. Her perspective is further distorted by her affiliation with Wired magazine, and she tends to treat various "friends of Wired" as though they were important net.celebrities. For example, she repeatedly quotes John Perry Barlow, but never even mentions Kibo or ESR.

The book misses the mark repeatedly in later chapters, where Grossman tackles political conflicts which were not resolved at the time of writing. In some cases, she identifies minor issues (like the absence of long-distance settlement charges) as crises and, in other cases, she make broad predictions which, even in the two years since the book was published, have been proven wrong (for example, she predicted huge growth in the use of encryption and third party certification services. It didn't happen). Grossman devotes ten pages to the evils of the Communications Decency Act and the foolishness of trying to use it to "export the first amendment". In this space, she never specifies what the CDA would have required, a strange lapse.

A few conflicts are almost conspicuous in their absence. Where is "everybody versus Microsoft?" Technical battles do not appear because Grossman is not a technical person. Sometimes her lack of savvy throws itself in your face. Can you honestly imagine her sitting with a friend at a computer and failing to find pornography on the net? "We spent three hours wandering uselessly around the Web not finding shocking pictures." Even for 1995, that's a pretty astonishing claim.

What's Good?

The early chapters are strongest, in which she focusses on historical issues and conflicts which were resolved by the time of writing (early 1997). These rely on Grossman's ability to describe net.culture, which she does well and with humor. Among the stronger chapters are her discussion of Why Everybody Hates AOL (and why it may be just garden variety bigotry), Scientology vs. The Net and the awkward position of women on the net. The book is scrupulously endnoted.

So What's In It For Me?

The book is well written; Grossman is articulate, intelligent, and diligent about collecting testimony from the principals in the battles she covers. At just under 200 pages of substantive material, it's a quick and worthwhile read.

Pick this book up at Amazon.

Table of Contents

1. The Year September Never Ended
2. Make.Money.Fast
3. The Making of an Underclass: AOL
4. Guerrilla Cryptographers
5. Stuffing the Genie Back in the Can of Worms
6. Copyright Terrorists
7. Exporting the First Amendment
8. Never Wrestle a Pig
9. Unsafe Sex in the Red Page District
10. The Wrong Side of the Passwords
11. Beyond the Borderline
12. Garbage In, Garbage Out
13. Grass Roots
14. The Net is Dead
15. Networks of Trust
16. Dumping Tea in the Virtual Harbor

Janice Wright has been gracious enough to send us a review of Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works. Obviously not a programmming manual (well, perhaps more then we want to think. Hmm.), this is an insightful book into the little that is known about how the human brain functions. Click below if you like your grey matter. How The Mind Works author Steven Pinker pages publisher US: W.W. Norton; UK: Penguin Books rating 8 reviewer Janice Wright ISBN 0393318486 summary teven Pinker tackles some of the biggest questions in psychology and sociology (How did humans develop the capacity for abstract thought? Will we ever understand what it means to be self aware? Why do we fall in love?) from an evolutionary biology perspective. This book makes some worthwhile points on the nature/nurture debate.

Book reviews often start "If you only read one book this year...", but considering the slashdot readership, I'll amend that to: "If you only read one non-fiction book not published by O'Reilly this year, this one would be a good choice." The second chapter is about computers, and the second to last chapter is about sex, so a geek's gotta love it.

Though to be honest, the computer bits aren't terribly technical. They focus on the computational theory of the mind, and how as a theory, it gives us a useful, but woefully incomplete understanding of the human mind. There is, however, a fascinating technical explanation of stereo vision and how stereograms (magic-eye pictures) work, why some people can't see them, and a great explanation of how to do the trick with your eyes that you need to see them - the stereogram in the book is the first one I've ever been able to see, and it's almost worth the cover price just for that.

Reading Stephen Pinker, I always get the impression that his style comes from years of trying to keep his first-year university psychology class awake on a Monday morning at 9am. He does this with a combination of some very challenging ideas and highly entertaining writing.

In the first chapter, he makes the somewhat radical claim that innate biology has an equal, if not greater role than culture in shaping our desires, thoughts, and actions. He then spends the next 500 pages convincing us with a combination of well reasoned arguments and the results of rigorous scientific studies. He is, however, careful to remind us regularly of the limits of scientific enquiry, and of how much we still don't know "Virtually nothing is known about the functioning microcircuitry of the human brain, because there is a shortage of volunteers willing to give up their brains to science before they are dead." (p. 184)

His main thrust throughout much of the book is to debunk the "natural = good" equation that is quoted to so often these days. Aggressiveness, for instance, especially in male humans, is 'natural' in the sense that it was once adaptive (i.e. a trait that allowed it's organism to reproduce more successfully). Aggressiveness, is therefore 'natural' to male humans. This doesn't mean that men "can't help" being aggressive, or that men who beat their wives are somehow not at fault because it is "in their genes". As Pinker puts it:

"...happiness and virtue have nothing to do with what natural selection designed us to accomplish in the ancestral environment. They are for us to determine. In saying this, I am no hypocrite even though I am a conventional straight white male. Well into my procreating years I am, so far, voluntarily childless, having squandered my biological resources reading and writing, doing research, helping out friends, and jogging in circles, ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes. By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake, a pathetic looser, not one iota less than if I were a card-carrying member of Queer Nation. But I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don't like it, they can go jump in the lake."

Having explained how the brain thinks and how the eyes see, he goes on to consider how the capacity for emotion may have been adaptive (and therefore selected for) in our early evolution, and starts with a great example: "the yuck factor". We get a very cool theory of why we find certain things disgusting, why what's considered disgusting is highly cultural, and why the thing that elicits the strongest "yuck factor" response is food.

The first six chapters have covered key aspects of the human condition:

Chapter 1: The Standard Equipment talks about how the brain is wired Chapter 2: Thinking Machines covers the "human mind as computer" and the computational theory of the mind Chapter 3: Revenge of the Nerds explains Pinker's theory of how early humans prospered by exploiting what he calls the "cognitive niche" Chapter 4: The Mind's Eye explains the role that vision, and in particular colour, stereo vision as one of the factors that allowed humans to evolve such prodigious brain-power Chapter 5: Good Ideas is about how we use logic, comparison, and statistics in interpersonal relationships Chapter 6: Hotheads deals with the gamut of human emotions from altruism to envy

All this has laid the groundwork for the second to last chapter, which he calls "Family Values". Some theories in the social sciences claim that people are born as virtually "blank slates" and that their upbringing, socialisation, education, etc. accounts for the way they 'turn out'. Criminality, substance abuse, and even the more petty human failings such as greed and vanity are assumed to have psychological underpinnings that come from one's childhood experiences. Pinker claims instead that some parts of the 'dark side' of being human is genetically encoded. He emphasises that this does not in any way excuse anti-social behaviour, but is simply another way of looking at what our conscience is up against when we feel the urge to take the credit for another's idea, sneak onto the subway without paying, help ourselves to the larger piece of cake, or cheat on our partner.

It's a long book, and it may take a little perserverence to get though it, but it's worth the effort because Pinker's ideas are interesting, challenging, and thought provoking. I don't agree with everything he says, and I think he sometimes over-simplifies an example to the point where it's no longer valid. Often, I found myself thinking "But human being are more complicated than that!" when he was explaining some facet of modern human behaviour in terms of the selection pressures of hunter-gatherers on the savannah. But all-in-all it is well worth reading. And at the end of it either you'll be able to see stereograms or you'll know exactly why you can't. To pick this book, head over to Amazon.

For centuries, the faithful have been seeking the New Jerusalem, the city of radiance adorned with jewels, where God himself will wipe away every tear. For years now, more and more pilgrims think cyberspace is that radiant place. In a new book, Margaret Wertheim struggles to relate this powerful and ancient idea to the Internet. Is this the Promised Land?

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the Holy City, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God..."

--- The Book of Revelation

For faithful Christians, death isn't the end but the beginning of a journey whose final destination is the Heavenly City of New Jerusalem, wherein the elect will dwell forever in the light of the Lord. In this weightless city of "radiance," adorned with sapphire, emerald, topaz, God himself "will wipe away every tear.."

It's one of religion's loveliest images, and the promise of this radiant space has sparked countless quests, over centuries, for this new Jerusalem or its equivalent.

More and more spiritualists believe that this promised and long awaited land is cyberspace, a notion explored in Margaret Wertheim's new book "The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace" (Norton, US$24).

Cyberspace is a new kind of radiant space -- infinite, mysterious, dazzling, yet filled with countless ethereal connections between people.

This new view of the invisible world of the Internet was perhaps inevitable. From the first, the Net has, in its typically idiosyncratic and unpredictable way, attracted mystics and seekers along with techies, nerds, and engineers hammering away at the software and hardware, the infrastructure, that make the Net and the Web work.

This may be the only space in which geeks and gurus seem attracted in roughly equal numbers, doing radically different things side by side for utterly divergent reasons.

The nerd culture and the spiritual one have little to do with one another, unless you consider the Mp3 player a miracle, as I do. Their paths rarely cross, and if they are conscious of one another, it's rarely remarked on.

They probably wouldn't get along anyway. The geeks are louder, and lots more quarrelsome; they also have a lot more control and understanding of the technology of the Net and the Web. Yet the two tribes are connected; both dwell and wander in the same realm.

The culture of the geeks is increasingly well documented in articles, discussions. The seekers are more remote, as Erik Davis details so well in his book "Techgnosis; myth, magic + mysticicism in the age of information (Harmony Books, US$25)". In "Techgnosis," Davis describes how the technology of the Net and the Web has unveiled a new kind of techno-mysticism, replete with utopian dreams, apocalyptic visions, digital phantasms, and alien obsessions.

The contrast between the two worlds is sometimes staggering. The mystics are nearly incomprehensible, the programmers obsessively literal.

Although pornographers, hackers and virus-makers have always attracted most of the attention, the pilgrims have, from the first, been walking beside them. Next to sex and e-trading, nothing keeps a search engine humming longer than typing in "spirituality," or "religion."

"I have experienced soul-data through silicon," Kevin Kelly, the former executive editor of Wired, declared in a l995 forum in Harper's magazine. "You'll be surprised at the amount of soul-data we'll have in this new space." He was right. It is surprising.

Cyberspace philosopher Michael Heim agrees with Kelly. "Our fascination with computers is...more deeply spiritual than utilitarian," he wrote in an essay. In our "love affair" with computing machines, "we are searching for a home for the mind and heart."

Wertheim's thinking is provocative, imaginative. E-mailing, messaging, connecting to distant people in sometimes powerful ways across great distances has always had a spiritual feel. The ability to share a personal, sometimes intimate experience with a presence about whom one knows absolutely nothing material - looks, age, ethnicity - is sometimes astounding.

Cyberspace, writes Wertheim, has in recent years become the focal point of immense spiritual yearning, one whose roots go all the way back to the Middle Ages.

But Wertheim, a commentator and science writer, takes a densely academic approach to this potentially riveting subject. Her writing is stiff, formal. There is, she argues, an important parallel between cyberspace and "the spatial dualism of the Middle Ages." Spiritualists or philosophers might know what this means, but hardly anybody else will.

Such prose is distancing. It repeatedly stops this book in its tracks. "In the parlance of complexity theory," she writes, "cyberspace is an emergent phenomena, something that is more than the sum of its parts."

What's frustrating is that Wertheim is clearly onto something. This is a new kind of space, it often does have profoundly spiritual overtones, and we spend precious little time exploring them. Unfortunately, her highly intellectualized approach obscures the very idea she's trying to advance.

Yes, we are in a similar position to the Europeans of the sixteenth century who were just becoming aware of the physical space of the stars, a territory completely beyond their prior conception of reality. But we are also radically different from them. We already believe in science and technology, many of us are more or less free of religious dogma and monarchical tyranny, and we have already witnessed technological advances beyond anybody's wildest dreams in just a few short years. The Europeans were just heading into the world's first Enlightenment, and we - those of us privileged to be working and spending time online -- are knee-keep in the second.

The idea of the Net as a new kind of space, a New Jerusalem is tempting and haunting. At times, I confess I've thought of the Web in almost that way, as a wondrous, connecting, providing -- yes, almost spiritual - place.

We do sometimes seem so busy and harried keeping up with our own culture that we forget to stop and wonder at it, or consider its inherently spiritual dimensions.

But long-winded, sometimes turgid essays on spatial schemes this kind of pleasing fantasizing less, not more likely. The spiritual nature of cyberspace is intensely personal and diverse, seen and found in the human beings who use it: the old people on SeniorNet who say goodbye to their friends before they die, the terminally ill children who exchange hopeful messages in chat rooms, the geeks who give one another online gifts of websites ("check out my site," are four of the neatest words heard online), software and upgrades, the scholars who rush to help a colleague in need of information in a distant part of the world.

Wertheim's book is much too cold for a subject like this. For we do live in a radiant city, where we sometimes glimpse a new heaven and a new earth.

If you'd like to pick this book up, head over to Amazon.

CowboyNeal has taken some time out of his busy schedule to review Java Servlet Programming, a new ORA book out, written by Jason Hunter with William Crawford. Full of tips to extend the usage of the servlets, click below for more informatiion. Java Servlet Programming author Jason Hunter & William Crawford pages publisher O'Reilly & Associates rating 8 reviewer CowboyNeal ISBN 1-56592-391-X summary O'Reilly is known for it's in-depth, tell-all approach to computer related topics. This book doesn't disappoint and features many different ways to use Java Servlets, many of which may not occur to the average CGI scripter. What's Good?

I used Java Servlets almost immediately after their release, and always liked the idea of platform-indepent scripts that could give one the same functionality as CGI scripts. It didn't take long for me to discover that servlets aren't limited to returning only web pages, but this book explores several options that one may not think of right off.

The examples given are of use in practical real-world situations, whether it's connecting to a database to generate pages, editing images on the fly, or writing applets that connect to servlets. After reading the examples, you can easily see where you could utilize the concepts in server-parsed web pages.

Having written countless web scripts in Perl, I was pleased to see all of the major concepts of web scripting covered within the context of servlets. Java Servlet Programming includes a JDBC primer, as well as sections on session tracking and security issues.

What's Bad?

Not much. Seriously, O'Reilly books make up a large part of my personal library because they don't disappoint. The entire Java series is full of great books, and this one continues the trend. If you don't know much Java, this book isn't going to hold your hand through it, as it assumes that you're fairly secure in your knowledge of Java, and that you're comfortable using objects in Java.

Who should buy this book?

If you like Java and think that everything should be written in it, including your web scripts, then this is the book for you. I would consider this the best reference for servlet programming to date, and it beats the hell out of the standard documentation. If you're thinking about brewing up a Java servlet, this is the reference you want.

If you want to buy this book, head over to Amazon.

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Introduction
2. HTTP Servlet Basics
3. The Servlet Life Cycle
4. Retrieving Information
5. Sending HTML Information
6. Sendind Multimedia Content
7. Session Tracking
8. Security
9. Database Connectivity
10. Applet-Servlet Communication
11. Interservet Communication
12. Internationalization
13. Odds and Ends

Appendix A: Servlet API Quick Reference

Appendix B: HTTP Servlet API Quick Reference

Appendix C: HTTP Status Codes

Appendix D: Character Entities

Appendix E: Charsets

Index

Stern has written a review of Software Runaways -- Lessons Learned from Massive Software Project Failures. You know that delicious thrill you get from seeing massive destruction? Imagine that applied to software projects-click below for more information. Software Runaways -- Lessons Learned From Massive Software Project Failures author Robert L. Glass pages publisher Prentice-Hall, Inc. rating 9 reviewer Stern ISBN summary ulti-million dollar and multi-billion dollar software projects, the reasons they failed, the companies they destroyed, and the people to blame. The Scenario

Humans are drawn to scenes of carnage; we can't pass an accident on the highway without slowing to look for blood. Robert L. Glass reports on the car crashes of the computer industry -- massive software projects which failed, sometimes destroying the firms which created them.

Glass has been writing on these topics for decades, but this is his first book since 1987, and there have been a rich array of projects for him to discuss since then.

Much of the book is composed of articles written by other people, from the Wall Street Journal, Computer Decisions Magazine, and other periodicals and studies. These are uniformly well written, and Glass has selected a valuable set of outside sources.

What's Bad?

The books is not intended as a tutorial for programmers or even program managers. Those readers will find the book interesting, but I would suggest they turn to Steve McConnell's Software Project Survival Guide or similar books for how-to help. Software Runaways is intended for people operating at a political level, especially those confronted with management which believes that fundamental business problems can be solved by the deployment of new computer systems or trendy infrastructure designs.

What's Good?

Glass has no fear of assigning blame, naming the particular corporate executives, government officials or consulting companies whose incompetence or malfeasance led to disaster. He has a deep understanding of the superiority of software that works over software that is flashy or serves some conflicting interest of the decision maker or consultant. The book should be in the library of anybody who ever has to argue against the deployment of a new system.

The 1986 article "Anatomy of a 4GL Disaster", which describes the failed rollout of a new computer system at the New Jersey Division of Motor Vehicles is practically a political thriller. The 1996 article "When Things Go Wrong" describes how the failure of a $65 million inventory control system destroyed FoxMeyer Drug, a $5 billion company. Each reader will have a different favorite chapter, depending on the industries and technologies for which he has personally worked in the past.

So What's In It For Me?

Primarily, the book is fun to read. It is practically techno-porn. For those who work on massive software projects, this is also a collection of useful cautionary tales and lessons that may save you grief and money.

So, if you want to read up about all the pitfalls - and know how to avoid them, pick this book up over here.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Software Runaway War Stories
   1. Project Objectives Not Fully Specified
   2. Bad Planning and Estimating
   3. Technology New to the Organization
   4. Inadequate/No Project Management Methodology
   5. Insufficient Staff on the Team
   6. Poor Performance by Suppliers of Hardware/Software
   7. Other -- Performance (Efficiency) Problems
3. Software Runaway Remedies
4. Conclusions

Joy! Cleaning out the submissions box: Praxxus sent us a link to an article you'll swear is a joke... a new use for old computers: filling potholes. HerbieTMac wrote in to say that Ice-T has joined the fray by releasing a new MP3 single. sanpitch sent us an interesting article about facial expression recognition. polar_bear` wrote in to say that Linux Mall has an Associates Program just like CD-Now. Or Amazon, speaking of which Sevn gave me the heads up on their entry for Bill "Family Circus" Keane- check out the reader reviews of Daddy's Hat is on Backwards. Trust me. Read it. Someone had to much spare time, and I'm glad they did. [null] hooked us up with the definitive Mr. T vs. site and east sent us an offensive dilbert parody site. gseidman wrote in to tell us about an important translation project underway to decipher the alien language used on Futurama. Assorted Slashdot notes from the world: An anonymous reader linked us to a cute comment on Neal Stephenson's server about the Slashdot effect. suprax noted that Slashdot and Freshmeat have a cameo in the current dead tree edition of PC Computing. adamv sent us a link to an interview with the creator of IMDB where he says he wishes he designed Slashdot. Funny, I wish I had designed IMDB. And Lastly, Jesse Shrieve, my favorite BSD pusher and dedicated Slashdot Server whipping boy noticed that Slashdot is up to 28 on hot100.com. We're neat.

In his radical new book "The Sun, The Genome, and the Internet" Princeton's Freeman Dyson proposes that rapidly advancing new technologies -- solar energy, genetic engineering and most of all, the Internet -- are not just means of having fun or making money. They are powerful tools for social change, ones that could create a more equal distribution of the world's wealth. Your thoughts about whether his vision is technologically possible are very welcome.

Freeman Dyson is one of the great, much-honored scholars of modern science and technology. Although he admits in his new book, "The Sun, The Genome and The Internet," (Oxford University Press, $US 22) that he didn't foresee the growth of the Internet (then again, neither did Bill Gates), he hasn't been slow to grasp its implications for the world.

Teaching and studying at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (where Einstein was), Dyson has written a book that advocates using the tools of scientific revolution - especially the Internet -- to create a better world, and a more equitable distribution of the world's wealth.

Dyson's central premise is this: solar energy, advances in genetic engineering and the worldwide communications potential of the Net can have enormous social consequences, if they are seen as tools for social change, and not just for recreation and profit.

The Net and the Web draws all sorts of different people who use it for all sorts of reasons. Some collect music, others program, millions stay in touch with their kids or grandchildren, many make money or look for sex, many are looking for community. A growing number of people coming online, especially younger ones, are almost continuously rooting around ways to put the Net into some positive political or social context. Dyson has a movement for them. A good name for it would be Ethical Technology.

Solar power, he argues, could bring electricity to even the poorest and most remote communities in the world, ending the cultural isolation of the most impoverished countries. Breakthroughs in synthetic and genetic engineering could give humans healthier lives.

"?during the last fourteen years," writes Dyson, "the Internet and World Wide Web have exploded. They have become the dominating technology in modern life."

The new century, he argues, is as good as time as any, to make ethical technology a political movement. "Technology guided by ethics has the power to help the billions of poor people all over the earth. Too much of technology today is making toys for the rich. Ethics can push technology in a new direction, away from toys for the rich and towards necessities for the poor. The time is ripe for this to happen. The sun, the genome (the genetic material of an organism), and the internet are three revolutionary forces arriving with the new century. These forces are strong enough to reduce some of the worst evils in our time."

Dyson advances a radical, new and very powerful notion of the Net as a political force. It is, he argues, essential to enable business and farms in remote places to function as part of the modern global economy. It could permit people in distant places to make business deals, to buy and sell, to keep in touch with their friends, to continue their education, to follow their hobbies, with knowledge of what's happening in the rest of the world.

Dyson's vision of the Internet would be truly global and universal. It would use a network of satellites in space for communication with places that fiber optics can't reach, and would connect to local networks in even the smallest villages. The new Internet, he argues, could end the cultural isolation of poor countries and poor people.

For this to happen, writes Dyson, two technical problems would have to be solved, that of large-scale Net architecture and what he calls "the last mile." Large-scale architecture means choosing the most efficient combination of land-lines and satellite links to cover every inch of the planet. The problem of the "last mile," connecting individual homes and families, wherever they happen to be, is much more difficult, says Dyson. It would have to be solved piecemeal.

Dyson is no fuzzy-head Utopian. He doesn't claim that any of his technological advances would create a perfect or problem free world.

Still, the ideas outlined in "The Sun, The Genome and The Internet" are logical and convincing. And they are very big ideas in a tiny book just over a hundred pages.

The Internet continues to terrify much of the rest of civilization. The handful of perverts, pornographers and virus-makers who dwell online continue to generate almost insanely disproportionate attention and concern.

This distortion - with sex, hackers, crackers, cyber-vandals, online militias -- overwhelms the social and political possibilities of the vast and diverse new world taking shape here, hardly any of which are discussed in the journalistic or political culture outside of the Net. For that matter, they aren't discussed all that much online.

For many, the biggest question about the Net (increasingly being equated by scholars as the equivalent of the discovery of fire, language or the printing press), for those online or off, is whether or not this revolutionary and transformative new technology can have sweeping social or political implications beyond the machinery itself.

Dyson says yes. His credentials are astounding.

To purchase this book, head over to Amazon and help Slashdot out.

(Question: I'd be curious to know from those of you more techno-savvy than me whether the universal, global Net that Dyson proposes - the architecture and delivery, especially -- is really possible, or if's a pipe dream?) jonkatz@slashdot.org">

SEGV has returned with a review of Kernighan and Pike's latest effort, The Practice of Programming This book has both practical and method aspects, including exercises. If you're serious about your programming, read below to get the skinny on the book. The Practice of Programming author Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike pages publisher Addison-Wesley rating 9 reviewer SEGV ISBN 0-201-61586-X summary Practical and enjoyable, this book captures its authors' considerable wisdom and experience on the practice of programming.

This book is written by some heavyweights in the industry: Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike. I have not read previous efforts such as The UNIX Programming Environment or The C Programming Language, but I understand that they are excellent works. I was hoping that this book would live up to that pedigree.

I was not disappointed. The Practice of Programming is a great resource. I found the book to be a good mix of Steve McConnell's Code Complete, Steve Macguire's Writing Solid Code, and Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls: all excellent works in my experience.

Structure

The book offers nine solid chapters devoted to the practice of programming: the tasks that we perform every day to develop software. They range from the beginning of the process (eg, interface design) to the end (eg, testing); from higher-level considerations (eg, portability) to lower-level (eg, naming).

The authors provide examples culled from their real-world experience. I particularly enjoyed their debugging anecdotes, especially their hubris in discussing their own bugs. The authors also provide illustrative exercises, annotated supplementary reading, and an appendix of collected rules. The quality of these is high.

Style

Kernighan and Pike write with facility, clarity, and authority. It is easy to tell that their advice comes from wisdom and experience. I found the text to be readable and enjoyable, and the examples to be relevant and understandable.

The authors' presentation really makes this book valuable. It is neither dry nor difficult to read. In fact, even when they cover difficult material, they are careful to present it in an accessible manner. A college-level programmer should be able to absorb chapter 9, even though the authors build a toy VM with JIT compiler -- not a trivial undertaking.

Examples

The examples in this book really stand out. There are many, almost one per page. The bad examples are appropriately marked with '?' characters, the good examples are nicely commented, and each is concise and typically adapted from real code.

The authors employ many programming languages to illustrate their points. Although they have a distinct bias towards C and Awk, they also present C++, Java, and Perl code, and are careful to use idioms particular to each language.

Often, they will present several versions of the same program. When they do so, they discuss code length, clarity, and related issues, and compare performance, scrupulously noting the environments used.

For example, in chapter 3 they design a single program and implement it in C, Java, C++, Awk, and Perl. In chapter 6, they apply their testing tips to those programs. I appreciate this kind of continuity in a book.

Nitpickings

I have a few nitpicky comments regarding this book. I really don't like the authors' predilection for short local names, which seem clear in a book's example but aren't so sensible when being maintained in real-world code. The world would have been a better place with a compare_strings function instead of strcmp.

Scott Meyers counsels us (More Effective C++ Item 6) to prefer preincrement to postincrement, yet the authors continue to use the latter in loop control statements. The authors also eschew Java's boolean/false/true in favour of int/0/1; for what reason, I am not sure.

Still, these are nitpickings. Those issues are relatively minor, somewhat religious, and do not detract from the value of the book.

Summary

I think this is a good book, and I definitely recommend this sort of reading for colleagues of mine. If you've read the books I listed in the overview, then you can get by without this one. However, I feel that it doesn't hurt to be exposed to slightly different presentations of the same material, if only to reinforce the lessons learned.

While I read this book, I was engaged in a coding standards effort in my previous employment. I did find this book, in conjunction with others, to be a useful resource. In particular, I believe it is the most directly applicable book of its sort to development shops that have a lot of C code. That includes the Linux community.

The Practice of Programming is most suited to an intermediate level programmer, although beginning and advanced programmers will also find knowledge in its pages appropriate to their level.

The book's official site contains source code and other resources.

To purchase this book, head over to Amazon and help Slashdot out.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface
Chapter 1: Style
Chapter 2: Algorithms and Data Structures
Chapter 3: Design and Implementation
Chapter 4: Interfaces
Chapter 5: Debugging
Chapter 6: Testing
Chapter 7: Performance
Chapter 8: Portability
Chapter 9: Notation
Epilogue
Appendix: Collected Rules
Index

Squeezer sent us the April Edition of ext2 and Jim sent us the April Edition of FreeBSDZine . For the obsessive, Evan Vetere sent us a link to the Amazon preorder form for novelizations of the prequels. Its a 4 book set: 4 different covers, but 4 copies of the same book. Doommaker sent us linkage to info about that other cool movie coming out: Southpark is also gracing the big screen. bjb sent us a link to a applet that will Shred Any Web Page. Particular cheering after a long unsuccessful day. DaMan Penguin Pez Well, its the season for Peeps, and Italica sent us a url to a page of fun things to do to your leftover marshmellow bunnies. Not enough candy torture? frohike writes sent us another one. What did those bunnies do to deserve this? An anonymous reader alerted us to www.fishdot.org. Wierdos. Finally, an another anonymous reader sent us the most Hilarious Attorney Page Ever. Its for Leonard Crabs, Attorney At Law. "If your legal case is not won within 24 days, we''ll buy you a free combo meal at Taco Bell." Go now. Its funny.

Well, I seriously doubt any of you were going to buy the latest endeavour from Mr. Gates, but I've got two simply scintillating reviews, courtesy of Jon Katz and Doc Technical (Of The Story of Ping fame. Which, BTW, I know ended up on Amazon. We had it first *grin*.) Click below for some excellent Monday morning reading. Pass the Thorazine: A Review of "Business @ the Speed of Thought" reviewed by Doc Technical

"From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading it." - Groucho Marx

So Bill Gates has written a second book about the future of technology. It's called "Business @ the Speed of Thought", I'll call it B@TSOT for short. This is the most awaited media event since "Return of the Jedi". Oh wait. That's "The Phantom Menace". This is just another vacuous management technology book by a rich guy with nothing original to say. Sorry. My mistake.

First, in the interests of full disclosure, let me say that I didn't read the book, only the 23 chapter excerpts found at the www.microsoft.com web site. You might argue that you can't judge a book from its excerpts. My response is "Hey! You don't expect me to pay for this pap, do ya? I've got code to write!"

The thought of the number of trees that died an ignoble death just so an accidental billionaire could use an archaic technology to spread his ghostwritten pablum to the coffee tables of middle management boggles the mind.

One can almost hear the trees' psychic screams, "an O'Reilly book, a Jacqueline Susanne novel, but not THIS!"

So, if you want an in-depth review of all the details of the book, you'll have to look to someone with more fortitude than old Doc Technical.

The B@TSOT Web Site

Now, I know Mr. Gates didn't design the web site for his book, but the web splash page does provide an interesting service: it shows how to confuse a user.

It's not a visually unappealing page, I suppose, nice monochromatic scheme, pretty simple layout. A little box contains the words "click to enter", enticing me to delve deeper. I move to the box and click on the words.

And nothing happens.

I move the cursor around, looking for the little pointy-hand icon that indicates I'm over a link. I find a link over the book title and the author's name, but not over the words "click to enter".

Now that's good design.

The splash page takes me to - another splash page! So what was the first one for? At least page two has a few link options: site map, feedback, "getting @ solutions", "buying @ once", Terms of Use.

Hmmm. "Terms of Use" takes me to a lengthy license agreement that must have taken an army of lawyers months to boil down into legal tar. My favorite line:

"Microsoft reserves the right to terminate your access to any or all of the Communities at any time without notice for any reason whatsoever."

Ouch. I make sure I wipe my feet neatly on their digital doorstep, and wipe a speck of lint off my virtual shirt before entering the link "looking @ the book".

The web site has overviews and excerpts from all 23 chapters of "Business @ the Speed of Thought", including the Appendix and Glossary.

The Intended Audience

This book is aimed squarely at management, from CEOs down to middle managers. It's certainly not aimed at technical people used to reading concise, well-thought out material.

Your boss will read this book. Your boss's boss will read this book. They'll come to you in the days and weeks ahead, suggesting innovations they gleaned from this book. Innovations like... e-mail:

"Once in place, a digital nervous system is easy to build on. A good network, a good e-mail system, easy-to-build Web pages are everything you need for eliminating internal paper forms, too. You can add any number of intranet applications easily once this infrastructure is in place."

Welcome to the Future World of 1994. Mr. Gates has his fingers clutched firmly about the throat of the obvious.

This is the main problem I have with the book (well, the excerpts, at least). Gates prognosticates with all the insight of a sideshow palm reader. E-mail? Web pages?

Here's a good suggestion:

"Less developed countries may assume that a digital approach to government is out of reach, but countries without systems can start fresh with new systems, which will be less expensive than manual approaches."

Of course, if a developing nation is really short on cash, they could buy older, less powerful 486 and Pentium machines, and save a bundle in software costs by loading up Linux and open source software. I'm sure Bill was planning on getting around to saying that. He probably mentions it in the book, but it didn't make the excerpts.

Here's a prediction I found particularly ironic:

"We'll see a world in which fairly simple personal companion devices proliferate side by side with incredibly powerful general-purpose PCs that support knowledge work at home or the office. Life's going to be pretty exciting as these changes come about and within a decade it's likely that most of them will occur."

It's ironic because I read these words using AportisDoc on my PalmPilot from the webpages which I downloaded using a little perl script that I ran on my Linux box. George Jetson, eat your heart out. Doc is a radical bleeding-edge cyber-citizen. Envy him.

Gates on Privacy

Occasionally, we get an interesting text byte from the excerpts. Here's one that gave me pause:

"Many Web sites ask users for registration information, including name, address, demographic data and credit information. While this data enables businesses to offer better services and support for customers and do more targeted marketing, consumers should be able to approve in advance the use of any personal data and whether that data can be passed on to other entities."

One supposes that Mr. Gates wasn't aware of what his company has been doing lately on the privacy front. Of course those universal IDs that get embedded into OLE documents or transferred surreptitiously across the internet, well that's just for our own good. Trust Bill.

The Writing

Now Bill has gotten some flack from reviewers over his prose. What I'd say is that Gates' words had the uncanny ability to kick my brain into neutral every few sentences. Take this example:

"Among the challenges that data mining can help with are these: Predicting the likelihood of customers buying a specific item based on their ages, gender, demographics and other affinities. Identifying customers with similar browsing behaviors. Identifying specific customer preferences in order to provide improved individual service. Identifying the date and times involved in sequences of frequently visited web pages or frequent episodes of phone calling patterns. Finding all groups of items that are bought together with high frequency."

The prose in this book is almost impenetrable. Gates uses the english language like a blunt truncheon. Or maybe it's his ghostwriter. One must wonder whether the ghostwriter's going to put this little piece of detritus on his resume.

The Final Word

So, should you buy this book? I'll frame my answer this way: remember the scene in George Orwell's "1984" where the protagonist is confronted with his worst fear, rats, when his interrogators strap a cage to his face with hungry live rats separated from his flesh by a flimsy wire mesh gate?

I would rent the movie version of "1984" before I would buy B@TSOT.

Doc Technical is really a programmer who gets to work full time on Linux systems and get paid for it. Envy him. And he's still not a real doctor.

Review by: Jon Katz

There's an almost Orwellian quality to Bill Gates' new book Business@The Speed Of Thought, enormous stacks of which began appearing at chain bookstores last week, along with audio tapes and CD-Roms. Given Microsoft's much publicized troubles and challenges in recent months, the book seems especially timely.

Gates' beaming face is on the back cover of the book, over a publisher's note announcing that "Bill Gates has arranged for the author's share of the proceeds to be donated to charity." This note crystallizes what's so odd about Gates, whose outwardly genial, seer-like persona floats above his own life, that of his company, and most of the people who use computers, the Net or the Web.

Almost everything about this public persona is contradictory, if not hypocritical. He doesn't need the royalties, so why write a book at all? He could simply continue to give carefully orchestrated speeches and interviews to friendly reporters and audiences. Last week, his book was lovingly excerpted on the cover of Time Magazine (whose parent company Time Warner also owns Warner Books, Gates' publisher). Reading Gates brazen prescriptions for everybody else's digital future, it's almost possible to forget he's fighting for his own.

He uses the informal "Bill", yet is as stiff and elusive as any public figure in America.

He continuously puts himself forward as the embodiment of new thinking, yet at least so far, his authorship suggests he doesn't have many ideas at all, new or old.

He seems to cling to his public persona, but as the book makes clear, it's always on his own terms. We get no sense of his life, travails or real beliefs. This public Gates, the Millenial visionary so beloved by journalists and politicians and CEO's, seems to suggest an emotionless droid much more than a tough, dynamic business leader.

The theme of Gates' dry, ferociously detached book is his idea that the company of the future needs a digital nervous system to hire, communicate, operate and compete in the next century, that digital systems will replace their more cumbersome and expensive predecessors.

In fact, one of the very few graphics in the book sketches out this new system. At the heart is a box labeled "Digital Nervous System," and connected to it are other boxes, "Basic Operations," "Business reflexes," "Strategic Thinking" and "Customer Interaction."

For a book that presumes to guide commerce into the Millenium, Gates' ideas sound either obvious, or sometimes, even retro, more 50's than futuristic.

He sprinkles the book with self-serving anecdotes about how well-run Microsoft is, how employees are hired online, how they make their travel plans on the Net, how they avoid pointless meetings, how they use e-mail to collect and share information (the Justice Department has told us a lot more about Microsoft's e-mail than he does).

He advances the notion of the paperless office, not a new idea, and repeatedly calls for an integrated digital infrastructure companies for companies.

His ideas about creating the virtual corporation are cold and uninspiring. The book has the feel of one of those nightmare inspirational management seminars - "manage with the force of facts," is one of his shibboleths. This style invokes a Holiday Inn conference room where the captive sales force is held against its will while some motivational speaker holds forth cheerfully and interminably with graphs and charts.

Gates dispenses nearly 500 pages of digital wisdom without ever once mentioning the remarkable challenges, dramas and successes of his own company. Whether you're a friend or foe, hardly anybody would disagree with the idea that the company Gates built is at a crossroads, under pressure from everything from the federal government to IBM and Apple to Linux.

But the public Gates is like a disconnected head, floating above us like some videotaped image, relentless, bland and remote. Page by page, he seems less interesting, the book painfully tiresome and slow.

It seems almost incomprehensible that this is the man who built the most successful corporation on the planet today. How could he have done it, thinking like this? And if he is interesting and smart, why is he going to such extraordinary lengths to hide it from us? What is he missing? What are we?

For more than a decade, Gates has towered over the Digital Age, a symbol to much of America and the world of the wealth, brains and stunning growth of the computing culture. Now, as many are questioning whether Microsoft will survive into the Millenium in its current form, he writes a book that doesn't even glancingly refer to the reality of his company's life. Or his own.

Is if fun being Bill Gates? Painful? Is he angry about the government's challenge to his company? Is he bothered by Linux, open source or free software? Does he notice all those geek attacks? Does he like living in his digital castle, with all Leonardo Da Vinci and Napoleon's private stuff? Does he really wear computer chips to alter the climate and artwork of his house as he moves room to room?

The standards of the digital revolution, writes Gates - the PC, the microprocessor that will make other new digital devices possible, and the Internet - all give companies a way of implementing a "unified architecture without busting the bank."

The next steps, he adds, "are to connect these knowledge systems with existing business operations, to build new business systems on the new architecture, and, over time, to replace older business systems."

The interesting thing about these words - in fact, the only interesting thing about them - is that they end the book, usually the last chance for an author to make a final statement, leave an enduring vision.

Like him or not, Gates' ought to be one of the people in America we most want to read about. That there isn't a revealing, honest or compelling line in "Business" tells us more about him than anything he writes.

After all these pages, all those covers, all those interviews, perhaps it's finally time to take Bill Gates at his own word, and acknowledge the very remarkable fact that one of the most extraordinary companies in the history of business was built by an empty vessel, a disconnected, emotionless void at the right place in the right time with the right idea.

The paranoia, envy and anger swirling around Bill Gates and his company are all misplaced and misguided. Nobody has to break Microsoft up. It is, like him, is an illusion, the evocation of an idea rather than an idea itself.

For that comprehension alone, Businesss@The Speed Of Thought was worth the reading. But it's a sad book, after all. This is a nerd in massive denial, unwilling or unable to connect with the most compelling parts of his own life.

You can e-mail me at jonkatz@slashdot.org

And if you're a mascocist, you can purchase this book at Amazon.

Josh Baugher sent us a link to a book (that none of you ought to buy!) over at Amazon. By our good buddy Bill Gates, but Check out that List Price. So you thought he got rich simply by enforcing a monopoly on the computer industry! Update: 03/23 01:15 by CT : Doh! Its a set of 24 books- so its only $40 a book. Practically a bargain. Go pad Bills pocket if you like.

Jon Katz, known to everyone here, has sent us a review of Tom Beaudoin's book Virtual Faith, a book that explores the issue of the Internet, the Web, and Faith. Interestings stuff for the philosphical amongst us. "Losing my religion..."
"Trying to keep up with you"
--- REM

When you think about it, and despite the boom in spiritual websites and mailing lists, the Net is organized religion's worst nightmare, a true dogma-killer and heresy-spreader. Before new technologies like the Net, John and Jane's view of the world was pretty much limited to what their parents told them, and what they picked up in the school yard. Religious instruction was rarely voluntary for most kids, and religious institutions usually went to great pains to make sure that dogma and faith was deeply embedded before kids grew up and got out into the world, where they might encounter all alien faiths and points-of-view and make up their own minds.

The Net makes that a lot tougher, one of the reasons blocking software sells so well, and why so much of it is programmed to block out religious discussion.

Still, some people have always seen a strong connection between the Net and spirituality.

Are notoriously irrevent, skeptical and prickly young nerds and geeks pulled towards higher powers? Is their new and raucous liturgy the sometimes vulgar and provocative language, symbolism, imagery of computer language, programming and popular culture? Can institutionalized religion get off its high and preachy horses, embrace interactivity and minister to the cyber-young on completely different, new terms?

In "Virtual Faith", Tom Beaudoin makes a thoughtful case that Americans, especially those younger ones online -- unfortunately, he calls them Generation X, but he was a divinity student -- are up to their servers, TV shows, movies, keyboards, and Mp3's in spiritual quests. And that stuffy, top-down Churches will have to change radically to reach them. Beaudoin is a former altar boy, raised on television and video games, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School two years ago, is a bass player in a Boston area rock band, and survived Woodstock '94. His book "Virtual Faith" (Jossey-Bass Publishers, $US 22) is just the sort of book about religion we never get to see in the age of the sound-bite spouting, scolding and pious Moral Guardian, a time when people like William Bennett, ex-Education and Drug Czar, are labeled "Morals Czars" by the media and get to go on CNN twice a week to tell us how vulgar and faithless we all are.

"Virtual Faith" argues that the popular culture so celebrated by the young -- from movies and music to TV shows and the Net -- is actually suffused with spirituality and religious iconography.

Writing about REM's "Losing My Religion," for example, a hit song and video from the group's blockbuster l991 album, Beaudoin sees clear intimations of Jesus in the old man resting against an angel, both of them seated on a tree limb. Grey-haired and bearded, the old man is fitted with a pair of angelic wings and clothed in orange robes; then he is stoned to death.

"The ambiguity of the final Jesus scene is disturbing," writes Beaudoin, "in a brief shot, his associates work with rope that is wrapped around Jesus' body. Are they releasing him, or are they binding him to the beam, hoping to get him up on the cross so that he might really be the messiah they are hoping for in the end?"

Beaudoin further cites Madonna, Soundgarden, various TV shows and movies as pop culture sources brimming with spirituality, even as the citizens of cyberspace are participants in a subtle attack on rigid institutions.

"The environment of cyberspace provides resources that are ripe for upsetting hierarchies," he says. The Net and the Web is a natural leveler of powerful institutions as so many individuals get their hands on the machinery of communications, and get to make and disseminate their own personal theologies.

In the digital world, individuals don't have to accept official dogma, but are free to seek and find their own, to join virtual communities with fresh ideas about spirituality.

Cyberspace and institutional churches thus exist in constant conflict, Beaudoin writes.

This is a pretty sharp observation, obvious but rarely spoken, especially from religious quarters. Organized religions resent popular culture in general and the Net in particular, sounding alarms about addiction, the exposure of the young to so much unfiltered, uncensored information, and to pornography and violence, while the ascending geek culture is viscerally hostile to powerful institutions that tell its members what to believe.

In the same way many journalists have been almost bitterly reluctant to relinquish any part of their role as the sole purveyor of news and opinion to the raucous and individualistic voices on the Net, it's difficult to imagine religious organizations like Judaism, Islam, Christianity becoming more interactivity when their mission is to spread the word of God as revealed in sacred text.

But this doesn't mean netizens aren't spiritual, Beaudoin claims.

This isn't all that surprising an argument to anybody who's been on the Net and the Web: religion and so-called spirituality thrive here. There are tens of thousands of mailing lists, websites and newsgroups devoted to religious expression.

Moreover, Beaudoin argues in "Virtual Faith"that the provocative, irrevent, even heretical images of the age group he calls Generation X -- tattoos, body piercing, grunge, crucifixes as fashion accessories, music lyrics and videos with religious and sexual imagery -- are not rejections of religion but serious expressions of a new generation's need for a faith they can believe in, rather than one thrust upon them. He might also have included various computer language and Web imagery, from terms like Daemon to the whole idea of messaging across space and time.

Beaudoin argues that four themes underlie the new theology of his young digital contemporaries: * All institutions -- religious, political, media -- are suspect. * Personal experience is critical. Religious belief must thus also be experienced, not taught or mandated. *Suffering is spiritual. * Ambiguity and doubt aren't retreats from faith, but a new kind of faith.

In the l980's, writes Beaudoin, he began to notice the way popular culture was filled with religious references. In popular songs, music videos and movies, references to sin, salvation and redemption abounded.

"I started to suspect that popular culture increasingly trumped institutional religion in attracting Xers; we dedicated much more time to pop culture, and it had vastly more religious content that was relevant to our generation. Could it be that popular culture was our religious arena?"

Beaudoin is onto something important. Popular culture is the faith and ideology of the young (that popular culture's embrace and experience of pop culture borders on the spiritual and comprises a common language and a faith.) The failure of journalism and politics to grasp this central tenet of the young has marginalized both institutions for people under 50, along with organized religion.

Religious leaders have for years joined with newspaper editorial writers and block-headed politicians to portray the young as dumb and de-sensitized by pop culture, too wanton and weak-minded to resist its sometimes vulgar and violent imagery. Technologies like the Net are seen as gateways to Hell, doorways through which all sorts of vile and vulgar, even heretic imagery can flow.

That there is virtually no evidence to support this pervasive and oft-repeated belief suggests that these continuing alarms have much more to do with preserving the power of the institutions spreading them than they do with any heartfelt concern for the young.

Since so many younger people watch TV, go to the movies and surf the Web without becoming stupid or murdering their neighbors, many have come to view these institutions appeared dishonest as well as clueless.

"During our lifetimes, especially during the critical period of the l980's, pop culture was the amniotic fluid that sustained us," Beaudoin says. "For a generation of kids who had a fragmented or completely broken relationship to 'formal' or 'institutional' religion, pop culture filled the spiritual gaps." It was the young's surrogate clergy, usurping the role institutional clergy played for previous generations.

In fact, this embrace has gone even farther than Beaudoin suggests. Popular culture is the universal reference point of the young, a new measure of community. People understand one another by the music they like or loathe, by the movies they embrace and the TV shows that mirror or reflect their lives. "X-Files" fans share one set of values, while "Allie McBeal" lovers treasure another. "Dawson's Creek," "Felicity," "South Park," "The Simpsons" all take themes, values and attitudes of kids and mirror, re-cycle and re-work them.

It's dangerous to generalize about TV shows or their viewers, but anyone who works around younger people understands that on Monday mornings, what nearly everyone is talking about the second he or she gets to work isn't the latest news from Washington or a sermon they heard at Church but the weirdest indie film of the weekend or the gruesome battle scenes in "Private Ryan," or, in a couple of months, "Star Wars." Younger Americans might not really care to watch the impeachment proceedings, but almost all of them will know who won the Oscar for Best Picture the day after its awarded.

This passion is often cited as a prime example of how apathetic and de-civilized the young are. Look how much they care about stupid music, TV movies when there are so many serious issues, books and other things to consider?

Mostly, what's clear is that the young are creating a different kind of culture. Narrative and creativity thrive in programming, Web design and develop, online gaming, and the language and stories in chat rooms. Whether it's better or worse is for historians to sort out. Beaudoin seems to understand that institutions like journalism and religion have a fairly narrow range of choices. They can change or they can die.

"Far from residing in a cultural wasteland devoid of spiritual symbols, Generation X matured in a culture of complex and contradictory signs, some of them religious," Beaudoin claims. "Some currents within that GenX pop cultural stream carry more than mere microboes of an inchaote GenX spirituality. They are sufficient to begin funding a new theology by, for, and about a generation."

But the ferociously independent culture of the geeks challenges churches to preach and practice not from a position of power and righteousness, but from a sense of humility and weakness in the world -- a radical departure from the pious and hectoring stance taken by most religious leaders. When religious or political elders reach out to "young people," it is often in the most unbearably patronizing and ineffective of ways. Beaudoin is suggesting something much more radical and difficult.

His charge:

"By shunning the trappings or privileged social status and seeking to serve, not be served, churches will respond faithfully not only to the prophetic change brought by GenX but,more important, to the example of Jesus."

Although Beaudoin rarely uses the term, he seems in "Virtual Faith" to be advancing a new kind of spiritual interactivity.

Interactivity is very spiritual, and it's both leveling and humbling, for the columnist, the politician, the pundit or the priest. It alters the relationship between dispensers and receivers of information. It does, as Beaudoin suggests, demand a different way of thinking, a rejection of the unbalanced power relationships between so many institutions and individual human beings. If journalism considers interactivity a bitter pill, and resists it nearly to its own extinction, imagine how churches will respond.

"Being willing to sacrifice power and status for the sake of service to the gospel will do more for the Church's message about Jesus than any amount of rhetoric from pulpits," Beaudoin says. "It will also go far in addresing Xers' suspicion of religious institutions."

He's right. He understands the culture he grew up in, and its many problems with dogma and elitist institutions. It will take a lot more than humility to spread the Word in cyberspace. Even younger netizens have experienced unprecedented freedom of expression and access to diverse points of view. Why should they give that up to embrace dogma and somebody else's revealed words?

Still, real interactivity -- a realignment of the relationship between the dispensers and receivers of dogma -- would offer Christian churches (and other faiths) a radical opportunity to re-invigorate themselves and minister to netizens rather than simply wag their fingers at their naughty and irreverent ways.

The Web is, at its heart, a rationalist culture. The people in it reject fixed dogmas like conservatism or liberalism, and labels like Republican or Democrat. They have access to too much of the information in the world to take religious or political faith at its word, without question or discussiion. It's hard to imagine how fixed theologies like those of most organized religions could survive intact the online scrutiny given to ideas, opinions and proclamations online.

Religious interactivity would alter the Church, just as it would probably alter the attitudes of many netizens. And Beaudoin seems to grasp that while the young resist the proclamations, they do instinctively embrace spiritual imagery all the time, from the "the X-Files" to the poverty invoked by grunge. Spirituality seems to thrive and grow even when dogma fades. E-mail, the idea of human beings connecting powerfully to one another out in the ether, is inherently spiritual.

Beaudoin's issuing a challenge to ecclesiastical authority by asking religious institutions, moral guardians and political elders to stop fearing the irreverence of pop culture. And to listen, rather than lecture.

"The more popular culture is explored," he writes, "and the more irreverence is viewed as a legitimate mode of religiousity (in all its illegitimacy), the more Generation X will be shown as having a real religious contribution to make. GenX can also make great strides not only toward fostering its own spirituality but also toward reinvigorating religious institutions and challenging the faith of older generations."

If there is a weakness in many of Beaudoin's arguments, it is the presumption that, approached in a different, humbler and more modern way, the younger builders of the Internet will choose to make a conventional religious contribution at all. This is far from clear. If anything, this is a generation that makes up its own mind on its own terms at its own pace. Armed with new information, with the new power to communicate with one another at will all over the world, and to see and hear every imaginable point of view, Beaudoin may not grasp just how independent and different the group of people he calls Generation X really is.

But then, as a graduate of the Harvard University School of Divinity, he's supposed to have faith.

Still, he sounds like a natural heretic to me, a geek waiting to be sucked in by the lures of Half Life or Lego's Mindstsorm. If he isn't already, he'll soon be sniffing around Linux. The history of religious leaders is grim, openness wise. It's hard to imagine too many religious figures getting off their duffs and coming online to minister to the digital young. Still, Beaudoin has written a smart, provocative and compelling book. He makes much sense, and writes about his generation's culture knowingly.

At the same time, it's hard to read his very rational views and feel too optimistic about any urgent convergence of religion and the people patching together the Net and the Web. It's almost inconceivable that religion will respond to this vibrant new culture any more thoughtfully than politics or media have.

The Digital Age suggests powerful institutions would rather die than change, or voluntarily loosen their iron grip on ideas and influence. And that the young people Beaudoin is so eager for religion to reach will end up shaping new kinds of institutions rather than accepting or embracing the ones we already have, most of which have served them so poorly.

You can buy ths book here.

jonkatz@slashdot.org

The excerpting of my book "Running To The Mountain" on Slashdot last week was shockingly and surprisingly successful. Because of the excerpting here, I shot near the top of Amazon's Top 100-selling books in just a few hours, and stayed on the list all weekend. This experiment in digital literary empowerment flew in the face of just about every conventional publishing wisdom about how books and the Internet and Web do -- or don't -- interact. It suggested that for writers, as well as for so many other groups, the Net can, in fact, be just as empowering as gasbags like me have been saying for years. What happened to me wasn't supposed to happen. It shocked my publisher, and more than a few journalists. And typically,it provoked some especially ugly -- and for me, quite sad -- discussions and accusations on the site.

Last week's excerpt of a chapter from my new book "Running To The Mountain" was a Net experiment, a chance to practice what I preach, and to test the boundaries of the much-invoked idea that the Net "empowers" people in new ways.

It succeeded beyond anybody's wildest dreams, especially those of my stunned publisher. And it might have made a bit of publishing history.

The idea to publish an excerpt from this particular book on this site was always both a stretch and a gamble. Although I'd talked to several magazines last year, including Wired and Outside, about excerpting it, I decided in January to offer the first serial rights to Rob and Jeff, who founded and run Slashdot.

This site has become my spiritual and literal Web home, and I've come to see the open source and free software movements as the most significant - and appealing -- movements in media.

My publisher was wary of the idea, since the rights were being offered for free. And since mainstream books are almost never launched on the Net or the Web, at least not successfully. And even though the chapter that was being excerpted related to technology and spirituality, it wasn't exactly the daily fare of Slashdot's technologically sophisticated editorial menu.

But I argued that the Net is inherently spiritual, and that technology can sometimes fit into that impulse. And that I'd rather see any money go to Slashdot (as an Amazon associate, they get a tiny slice of every book sold from the site, a long-standing and publicly disclosed arrangement) than to some magazine or publisher. I wanted to sell books, but also to demonstrate the potential of the Net for increasingly embattled writers as well as people wanting to buy stocks and talk about sex. An open source site - my open source site - seemed the right place to do that.

Everybody has to understand that this impulse flies in the face of every conventional wisdom in publishing: Media there means "Slate" or The New York Times or NPR, the thinking goes. It does not mean a website founded by some kids from Holland, Mi., with a Penguin for a symbol and names like Cmdr Taco and Hemos.

You can't sell books on the Net, is a publishing mantra. People are so used to getting things free that they won't pay for anything. People online not only don't read, but the very existence of the Net and the Web are destroying reading.

But Rob and Jeff generously agreed to excerpt the book, a personal account of a Mid-life trek to a mountaintop partly inspired by the late (and technology-hating writer - monk) Thomas Merton. Mostly I think, Rob and Jeff published the chapter because I'm an author on the site and they wanted to help.

They didn't know that I am what's called a "mid-list" author - this means I don't sell a lot of books, Grisham or McCourt style. Those kinds of writers make a lot of money. And those at the bottom of the list are usually academic or literary writers who don't write for money. People outsideof publishing often don't know what somebody like me will never make it to Oprah, and that as a "mid-list" author, I'm something of an endangered literary species.

Given the rise of giant publishing conglomerates (like my own publisher Random House) and chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble, it increasingly isn't really worth much of anybody's time to publish writers like me. We just don't move enough books.

So for some years now, me and hundreds of writers like me, have been trapped in mid-list Hell, struggling for a way to reach readers beyond the conventional gatekeepers - publicists, marketers, reviewers, talk-show hosts and producers. Writing for some years about the Net and Web, I knew I was staring at just such an alternative possibility, but had never had the chance to put it to the test.

Fortunately for me, a number of different things converged. I started writing for Slashdot, which has, along with interest in OSS, taken off. My Random House publicist loves and understands the Net (the first publicist I've ever met at a publishing house who does). I've been experimenting for weeks now with the effects of linking my book subject to various Websites whose readers and members might be interested - Merton sites, geek sites, Boomer sites, even Yellow Lab sites, since the book prominently features my two dogs.

So last Thursday, the day the book excerpt ran on Slashdot, and I caught another break. USA Today wrote a long, enthusiastic review (www.usatoday.com/life/) .. Things really cranked into high gear. I e-mailed Jeff Bates (Hemos here) who inserted the review into the body of the excerpt. My publicist quickly e-mailed the review and the Slashdot URL to other Websites, reporters and reviewers.

Few at Random House thought this experiment had much of a chance of working, I could tell. The notion that books couldn't be sold via the Web has become an article of faith, even as the recognition that the Web is important is growing.

A week ago, my Amazon ranking was 1.2 million. (There are about three million titles offered on Amazon. The morning Slashdot excerpted my book, my ranking was 9,000. The book hadn't yet shipped to bookstores but a few hundred copies were in the Amazon warehouse. Some perspective here: Amazon is one of many thousands of booksellers in America. It takes hundreds, not tens of thousands of books to shoot up on their list. But few writers like me ever sell hundreds of books in a two or three day period, let alone a few hours.

Within two hours of the Slashdot excerpt, I had shot up to the Amazon top-selling 100 books list. The people at Random House were flabbergasted. My book had their full attention.

The people at Amazon were surprised too. One editor there sent me an e-mail in the morning that read: "What the hell is going on? Your book is taking off!" By 2 p.m, the book was in the top 50. By that night, it was at 22.

Everyone's first impulse was to cite the USA Today review. But that didn't make sense. It was obvious to me that it was Slashdot that was driving the books. For one thing, USA Today is linked to Barnes & Noble's website, not Amazon. For another, newspaper reviews, even great ones like that, rarely move that many books so quickly.

By 7 p.m. Thursday, Amazon was out of books (they've gotten more), and the order time went from 1-2 days to two weeks. They remained out of books all weekend. The book began to show up in bookstores Sunday night and Monday.

It's hard to describe just how astonishing this was. For a book about spirituality and personal experience to be launched on an open source Website and then jump to the top of the Amazon list, ahead of some of the best-selling authors in the country, was shocking. The USA Today review helped, for sure. But since the book wasn't even on bookstore shelves, the overwhelming bulk of the sales had to come off of Slashdot.

This has a lot of significance for writers and publishing. And for websites like Slashdot as well. Writers can connect directly with their own audiences and free themselves of the marketing process. Smaller and more idiosyncratic writers can escape the mass-marketing pressure of modern publishing and reach smaller, niche audiences. More people - including people familiar with how the Web works - can become writers. And those Web audiences will buy books. The fact that so many /. readers would step outside of their own specialized interests and experiences suggest an audience that will make specialized and individual decisions about what it wants to buy, see or read.

Publishers can perhaps begin to grasp that their phobic, reactionary and profoundly uncreative response to the Internet is wrong. The Net won't harm literature or books. It could very well be the salvation of both.

By Saturday, the word that something unusual had happened was buzzing around publishers and media types - fitting enough, via e-mail. I'd gotten numerous e-mails and calls from publishing executives, reporters and writers asking what had happened, and how it had happened.

I told them that I was practicing what I'd been preaching. The Net is, in fact, empowering, and wherever it goes, people like me can take more responsibility for their own work and lives, bypass the very many greedy and spiritless people who only look at numbers and stats, and create my own history.

These days, writers are viewed in much the same way welfare recipients are - a dependent culture nobody wants to subsidize any longer. To some extent, it's a brutal new reality. But to some extent, it's also fair. How many of the people reading this are subsidized and supported in their work?

The very coolest part of all this is that I hacked the Net to sell a book that wasn't a cyber-book and became a best-seller, even if it turns out to have been for just a few glorious days. I've learned on Slashdot, and especially while struggling to use my Linux operating system, that hacking isn't just about breaking into phone companies. It's about taking control, learning how to master and use the system. Very heady stuff.

The Amazon editor e-mailed me on Friday to say that if the excerpt had stayed up on Slashdot (it is still up in the book section), I would have gone to Number One, almost certainly.

This is a great launch, and it was done on the Net and Slashdot. The book is just coming out. I have the book tour, more publicity and reviews, and plenty of Net and Web mischief to make. No matter what happens with here, I'm pleased with myself, with the Net, and with Slashdot. I spent the weekend linking the excerpt and the review to more than 100 different websites, and throughout the weekend, the book stayed in the Amazon Top 100 lists.

It was definitely one of the high points of my writing life, and an affirmation of my faith in the Net and the Web as a generous, profoundly liberating place.

So thanks.

Mail-to: jonkatz@Slashdot.org *********

On a less happy, more personal note. The successful launch of "Running To The Mountain" was marred by some especially ugly public postings the day the excerpt ran. For the first time since I've been writing on Slashdot - more than three months - I've had an experience with public posts and flaming that I felt crossed the line of civility, decency and fairness. Perhaps it's a simple-minded fantasy, but I see places like Slashdot not as collections of strangers, but as new kinds of communities within which we often - always even - violently disagree, but yet still understand that we all belong here.

My transition here has been tough and rewarding. I've had copy transmission and bug problems, had to struggle with a whole new technical language, grasp a new kind of media movement, and taken on what is for me a fundamental challenge - mastering Linux. As many of you know, while I've been welcomed here by the vast majority of Slashdotters, some have argued that I hadn't proven my techno-manhood on a kick-ass site like this and shouldn't be allowed to write here.

This is something I've encountered in one form or another for much of my life, so it really hasn't bugged me. It happens on all Websites, including Hotwired, where I wrote for three years. Writing online, one can't hide behind secretaries, voice-mail or security guards. The people who are unhappy with you are sitting right there next to what you right, and that's fine with me. If you can't take it, you won't last long online.

Flaming is part of the free spirit of the Web, and nobody should feel under the least bit of pressure to like me or agree with what I write. I agree with the sentiments of many of the flamers, mostly young males, that one of their functions is to keep people like me in check.

But the ugliness and venality of some of the public postings about the excerpt descended to a new level, even though many hundreds of you expressed support in the most direct and powerful possible way - you bought my book.

Some posters argued this was Katz-worship, a bizarre suggestion given the criticism I've gotten here, and how many books are mentioned, reviewed, and referred to on this site. From the first, the people e-mailing me on Slashdot have always been intensely and very diversely literate, bombarding me daily with book recommendations and ideas, from novels to computer books.

But the public posters - a small group which dominates public discussions -- function in a different, if parallel universe. One even suggested this was some sort of a corrupt "kick-back" arrangement by which a book unrelated to OSS content was excerpted, so that the owners of the site -- and me -- could make lots of money. Others said the content of the excerpted was unrelated to a technology site and shouldn't have been published.

This was pretty tough to read, not only because it's hurtful but because it's false. First off, it's absurd. If anyone at Slashdot makes a total of $50 from the excerpting of my book I'd be stunned. We're talking about hundreds of books here, not thousands, and royalties and percentages are tiny all around. Writers like me make so little money from the books we write, can't do them full time. In fact, my book advances and royalties are almost embarrassingly small. I couldn't possibly live off them.

And that's not a complaint. I love writing, and choose freely to do it. But there's no way my book can make a lot of money, even if it sells thousands of copies. That's not how publishing works. And there's sure no way the people running Slashdot are going to get anything more than a good dinner off of publishing my excerpt, and then if they go to Taco Bell. Publishers make money off huge, Oprah-driven best-sellers and specialty books about cooking, sex, religion or the Millenium. So writers like me write for different places - magazines, Websites, plus books - in order to make a living.

Whether people like the book or not, I'm also puzzled and surprised that anybody could argue that the subject matter of the chapter - the conflict between technology and spirituality - wasn't appropriate for Slashdot (truthfully, hardly anybody did make that argument except for the posters. Almost none of my e-mail did). Wired magazine thought it was appropriate enough for them. And hundreds of people on the site bought the book, the clearest refutation of that idea. Rob and Jeff would publish excerpts from the book of any Slashdot author, and be supportive of any book in any way they could. Thanks to them for that.

I can't complain because people disagree with me or my writing. It's also perfectly appropriate to jeer at my presence and my opinions. But when posters cross the line into vicious unfounded accusations, they've entered a different place. They've just become a brutal, ignorant mob.

Anybody who sincerely had questions about this, and wanted answers, as opposed to the joy of public preening, could have simply e-mailed me, and still can. I answer all of it: jonkatz@slashdot.org.

The fact is, there was a generous intent all around here. I write for Slashdot for free, and gave the rights to Slashdot for free, hoping that might draw some attention to the site, which it did, and if it helped them pay the rent and acknowledge the vast amounts of work they do to make this site for very little money, that was great. If it sold some books, even better.

To take this impulse and try and translate into some venal, mean-spirited enterprise seemed to me to go over the boundary of civilized disagreement, to betray the spirit of any community. It was ugly and disturbing, and not at all representative of the many people who e-mailed me their support and encouragement and who bought the book. If the excerpt and the response were a high point of my writing and Net life, this small but angry and hostile group of people embodied one of the lows.

mail-to: jonkatz@Slashdot.org

You can pick up the book at Amazon.

CT : I'd like to post a tiny addendum to Katz's bit here. As usual, the postings on the original review got flamey. This time it was really bad. I often am offended by Comments posted on Slashdot, but I'm rarely sad that I work so many hours running the site. Hate filled comments are the one thing that sucks about running Slashdot. It breaks my heart to see people use something that so many people work so hard (for so little) on, as a weapon for them to scream about anything that they disagree with. It's all right to disagree, but try to be civil about it. Katz is an important part of Slashdot. You can disagree, but I'm glad to have him here, and when it is all said and done, it is my decision. And it was the correct one. The postive mail about Jon always outweighs the negative, and more importantly, I usually enjoy reading Jon's articles. That's always my first goal- posting stories I want to read. I think thats why you guys are here- what you like is similiar enough to what I like that it's all worth it.

This whole hoopla really made my day- finally Katz got a little payback for the dozens of columns he wrote for free for a rinky dink little website. We probably got a few bucks to. But hopefully- and most importantly- a few of you got a book that you'll enjoy reading. Not a bad days work for anyone. If we can ignore the flames.

I'm the first to admit that I'm the last person who should write a book review. In fact, this is the first one I've posted on Slashdot. Frankly I don't read books any more- just web pages. I just don't have time- plus that whole paper thing doesn't appeal to me any more. But when "Open Sources:Voices from the Open Source Revolution" got here, I had no option but to read it. Immediately. Edited by Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman and Mark Stone, it's a collection of essays from Open Source glitterati with an impressive roster of names including ESR, RMS, Linus, Larry Wall, Bob Young, Tim O'Reilly, Bruce Perens and more. It's a wonderful read, hit the link below to read the rest. Open Sources

Each of these essays is an interesting read. The book starts off with ESRs 'Brief History of Hackerdom' which is an enjoyable read, although its a history that most of us are already familiar with. Marshall Kirk McKusick's piece follows with an in depth history of UNIX and BSD. Much of this information was new to me- it was one of my favorite sections in the book. And Linus talks about the Linux Kernel.

RMSs piece is, well, an RMS piece. Its interesting, but nothing new if you're familiar with RMS and the FSF. But if you aren't its an excellent little primer on the topic And that is important considering that this books target isn't as much the hacker, as it is the hacker's Boss. This is especially obvious after reading the articles by Bob Young and Michael Tiemann. Each article is an interesting look at the Open Source movement, but told through the eyes of the businessman.

Bruce Perens defines Open Source, A band of folks from Netscape including Tom Paquin talk about Mozilla from Netscape's perspective, and ESR writes a nice bit on the movement from the other side.

But my personal favorite bit is 'Diligence, Patience, and Humility' by Larry Wall. It seems curiously out of place in this book. Most every essay is a good read for "Your Boss" but this one is clearly for the artsy hacker type. Wall talks about communication, programming, philosophy, and pretty much anything else that comes to his mind in this humorous but insightful rambling essay. It alone was worth the price of admission.

So anyway, if your boss asks you what Open Source is, this is the book. If he ask you why it is, this is also the book. If you want to read an interesting collection of essays by the people who made this movement happen, this is the book. It is one of the few books that I'm glad I own- taking its place besides my few other favorite (mostly Dave Barry, Douglas Adams, and various O'Reilly Animal) dead tree editions. Highly recommended. A 9 out of 10.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, click here.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, and Mark Stone

A Brief History of Hackerdom
Eric S. Raymond

Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix: From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable
Marshall Kirk McKusick

The Internet Engineering Task Force
Scott Bradner

The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement
Richard Stallman

Future of Cygnus Solutions: An Entrepreneur's Account
Michael Tiemann

Software Engineering
Paul Vixie

The Linux Edge
Linus Torvalds

Giving It Away: How Red Hat Software Stumbled Across a New Economic Model and Helped Improve an Industry
Robert Young

Diligence, Patience, and Humility
Larry Wall

Open Source as a Business Strategy
Brian Behlendorf

The Open Source Definition
Bruce Perens

Hardware, Software, and Infoware
Tim O'Reilly

Freeing the Source: The Story of Mozilla
Jim Hamerly and Tom Paquin with Susan Walton

The Revenge of the Hackers
Eric S. Raymond

Appendix A: The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate

Appendix B: The Open Source Definition, Version 1.0

As some of you might know, Jon Katz, one of our own has recently had his latest book published, Running to The Mountain. I've read an advance copy of the book, and was impressed (as I usually am) with Katz' take on life, spirituality, and what it means to be human. As he is obviously one of our own here, I won't even pretend to be able to give an objective review-I leave that to others-including the print version of USAToday, a rave review. For the reading benefit of the audience, I've included an excerpt from the new book below, along with the book cover. Read it-it's worth time. Update: 02/18 11:39 by H : The USA Today review is online.Update: 02/18 02:08 by H :Katz has written some words talking about this-look above the review to read it. Just want to report that since the Slashdot excerpt of my book went up, the Amazon.com sales ranking went from 9,000 to 200 in less than two hours. That's a pretty striking testament to the punch of this site. I fought pretty hard for the publisher to release the first serial rights here, (they didn't get any money) for several reasons:

1. I think the site is great and Rob and Jeff deserve some help with the rent money. Books fought from this site send some money back to them.
2. We write a lot on this site about empowerment, about individuals taking some responsibility for their technology. Writers need to do the same. I argued for months that I could bring my book to readers directly and bypass the hype machinery than handcuff writers and keep them dependent on reviewers and producers and marketers. So I always saw a link between an OSS site and an experiment like this.

And it worked. It probably doesn't take that many books to go from 9,000 to 200 (last week my ranking was l.2 million) but I think this is an experiment that has really worked. It shows sites like this reach people, even sell things. It gives some money back to a site that has given everybody else, including me, a hell of a lot. It suggests another empowering possibility for the Net. Writers can get off their butts and communicate directly with readers.
So thanks to those of you who have been e-mailing me those nice words. Thanks to the people who are buying the book and giving a dollar or two back to the site. And thanks even to the flamers for adding their usual free-wheeling spice.
I plan to top 100 by the end of the today. The USA Today review helped, obviously, but this is the place that made it happen.
you can e-mail me at jonkatz@slashdot.org Running to the Mountain
Written by Jon Katz

So, tentatively, with equal parts determination and terror, I set out on what Thomas Merton liked to call a journey of the soul.

Merton, a Trappist monk whose work I began when I was in the 9th grade and in sore need of solace, as did millions of others all over the world, was my guide on this trip. I'd read almost everything he'd written. He was a Catholic, I was raised a Jew; he had absolute faith, I never did. Still, for reasons I may never completely understand, he spoke to me, personally and powerfully. As a boy, I'd written him a letter that he never answered; if he had, I might have wound up in the monastery with him. Merton died thirty years ago. I never met him, but if a stranger's voice can enter one's soul, his permeated mine.

"It is absolutely impossible," he wrote all those years ago, "for a man to live without some kind of faith."

It is equally impossible to change your life without some.

A prolific author, journal keeper, letter writer and poet, Merton lived in the abbey of Gethsemani in the Kentucky woods. He was approaching 50 when he retreated to a hermitage; perhaps it's not coincidental that as I approached 50, I ran to a mountain, too.

Merton was obsessed with a central issue for our time -- figuring out how to live, trying to forge a life of balance, purpose and meaning. I've grown to share his obsession, his belief that life demands a lot of tinkering, and requires people to give birth to themselves not just once, but over and over.

Central to much of Merton's writing was the idea of these journeys, powerful images of seeking and traveling. The journey of the soul -- his term -- is to me one of his most important notions. It has enormous moral force and potent appeal to us wretched pilgrims as we struggle to find direction, to figure out what to believe, to incorporate some measure of spirituality and peace into our frantic lives.

On my own journey, in the years since I stared into those monitors, my life changed more radically than I had imagined.

I underwent years of psychoanalysis, became a writer, and swore never to work for a large institution again. Shedding ambitions, friends and colleagues of 15 years, I left the world of offices, annual evaluations, meetings, suits and expense accounts behind for good.

The world I entered -- the life of a suburban parent and solitary author -- could not have been more different. I crossed a vast cultural and social divide in months, from barking orders in a high-tech control room to holding up in the attic of my house trying to write and sell a novel, keeping one eye on the clock so I never missed a carpool.

Had I a realistic idea of what a writer's life would really be like, I would have thought a lot longer and harder.

But the point was, I began one year a big-deal producer and ended it at home, fielding calls about playdates from the other Moms, learning the ways of supermarkets, and sitting in front of an early primitive Apple computer at the dawn of the Digital Age clacking out the story of a network taken over by a heartless conglomerate.

So began the wildest ride of my life.

But as I turned 50 in the summer of l997, even before I stood on that mountain, I already suspected that I needed to take another trip, even if I didn't really know why.

A decade, seven books and countless articles later, I was driving up the New York State Thruway, my heart pounding like some eager traveler about the hit the road again.

Change, I remembered all too well, is risky and frightening. Much as you flail around seeking help, when it's all said and done, there is only one genuine source of inspiration, courage and determination -- that's you.

In fact, running to the mountain, another spiritual adventure, proved even more frightening than the first. A decade of shocks, disappointments, successes and defeats had accumulated since the last trip. If I had a heightened sense that one could successfully change one's life, being a writer had taught me time and again that rejection and failure were even greater possibilities. The first time, I'd leaped more or less blindly into the void. This time, I had a sense of what awaited me.

Only recently has it occurred to me that recounting this ongoing trek might be interesting or useful to others. But because so many people have embarked on journeys of their own -- of all sorts, from embarking on parenthood or divorce to changing a career and facing the end of life -- it may be worth telling.

E-mail jonkatz@slashdot.org with questiosns or comments.

If you want to purchase this book, head over to Amazon and help Rob and I pay rent.

Note: This is a repost of Linux Companion for System Administrators Linux Companion for System Administrators author Jochen Hein pages publisher Addison Wesley rating 9 reviewer Jabbo ISBN summary If you plan to deploy a Linux box in a commercial environment, and aren't a veteran Unix administrator, buy this book. It will save you vast amounts of time, and is admirably concise. The ScenarioLet's suppose you're an administrator. And let's suppose you run Linux. Unless you're either a grizzled Unix admin or an absolute wizard, you will eventually run into problems that seem too complex to take care of, or you might throw up your hands when there is already a perfectly good tool to handle your problem. This book will help you through such problems, and is the only decent Linux-specific administration guide I have seen. I only wish it had been available when I first started running Linux.

What's Bad?There is minimal coverage of Perl, fvwm is the sole windowmanager covered, awk is the example scripting language, and in the CVS section there is no URL given for the reader to find more information (how about www.cyclic.com for starters?). Coverage of printing is not as thorough as one might like. There is no mention made of RPM, YAST, or other package management tools, nor is there much attention to setting up Apache properly as a web server. It was written in German about a year ago, and has only now been translated, so it is not quite as up-to-date as the 1999 publication date would suggest.

What's Good?At this point it would be fair to ask why the book rates as a 9/10. The reason I feel so positively towards this book is that its coverage of DNS, NFS, RCS, groups, and kernel reconfiguration is far and away the best I've ever seen in a book with LCfSA's relatively small size and broad scope. The ideal place for this book is on a sysadmin's desk, nestled between copies of "Essential System Administration" and the K&R book, which are probably the mightiest tools an admin can wield. This slim, relatively cheap volume is enormously helpful because, unlike the O'Reilly book, it is Linux-specific -- warts and all. It is hardbound, which is nice for a book that you may end up using for years. There are excellent introductions to "why-not-a-microkernel" and other topics which have shaped the current version of Linux. XEmacs, ssh, and various emulation packages (ibcs, wine, dosemu) are all introduced. The emphasis of this book is heavily on integrating Linux into a heterogenous network, which in my experience is a minimally-documented aspect of Linux. Samba and ncpfs (serving Windows and Netware, respectively) are covered, as are the dangers of the Nightmare File System at large installations. The reader is instructed to consult the various RFCs for networking standards, which is a fine habit to acquire, as is Hein's emphasis on Linux security. Last but not least, Hein mentions slashdot.org right in the preface.

So What's In It For Me?A relatively green administrator stands to gain the most from this book; if you can set up a DNS server on your lunch break and do a hot backup of Oracle while merging a bunch of RCS branches from inside Emacs, you won't learn much from Hein's book that you don't already know. For newer admins or people who would like to use Linux's stability and modest hardware requirements to augment an existing NT or Netware installation, however, this book is packed full of handy information which is useful in a pinch. Ideally, one should also have a copy of the O'Reilly armadillo book, as this volume is in many respects complementary to that book. However, the more technically inclined could probably get by with just this volume.

To Purchase this book from Amazon, click here.

Table of Contents-- Preface

Linux -- Operating System of the Future?
The File System Hierarchy Standard
System Start-up
Configuration and Administration
The Emacs Editor
The X Window System
Backup
National Language Support
Localization
UNIX Tools
Tools (not only) For Programmers
TeX and LaTeX Under Linux
Emulators Under Linux
Linux in a Networked Environment
TCP/IP Basics
IP Addresses and Computer Names
Network Applications
Network File System (NFS)
Anonymous FTP Servers
Linux in a Heterogenous Network
Configuration and Operation of a Name Server
Network Information Service
The bootp Protocol
Connection via SLIP and PPP
Linux and the World Wide Web
Network Administration
-- Appendices
The Standard Editor vi
Generating Passwords
References
List of Important RFCs
-- Index

Tal Cohen sent in a 3 part review: The Tao of Programming, The Zen of Programming, and Computer Parables: Enlightenment in the Information Age. All of these were written by Geoffrey James, and while the first book Tao is one that has been around, the other two are interesting reading as well. Click below to find out more. REVIEW: The Tao of Programming, The Zen of Programming and Computer Parables: Enlightenment in the Information Age by Geoffrey James (Tao: InfoBooks, ISBN 0-931-13707-1) (Zen: InfoBooks, ISBN 0-931-13709-8) (Parables: InfoBooks, ISBN 0-931-13713-6) Nutshell
Review: You've probably already read The Tao of Programming -- as an e-text. It's a great book, and fun to re-read every so often; but don't buy the print version just for the illustrations. Do buy it as a gift to a friend, though.

The two sequels, The Zen of Programming and Computer Parables, are less well-known (probably because they were never transcribed and spread over usenet). They're also generally less entertaining, though you'll probably still find them enjoyable.

Rating: Outstanding (8/10), Average (4/10) and Average (4/10) Review by: Tal Cohen

Assigning more people to a programming project does not make it end earlier. There are a many explanations for this; in fact, it is the subject of one of the most important software engineering books, Fredrick Brooks's The Mythical Man Month. But experienced programmers don't need research results to tell them about this. For them, it is a fact of life -- knowledge earned by working on software projects for years. So many programmers appreciate Geoffrey James's simple way of presenting this fact in a very short story:

A manager went to the master programmer and showed him the requirements document for a new application. The manager asked the master: "How long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?"

"It will take one year," said the master promptly.

"But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it take if I assign ten programmers to it?"

The master programmer frowned. "In that case, it will take two years."

"And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?"

The master programmer shrugged. "Then the design will never be completed," he said.

The simple, humoristic representation of experienced software developers as "masters" and inexperienced ones as "apprentices", the characterization of managers as unintelligent, sometimes plain stupid people, combined with the simple wisdom of the text is just part of what makes The Tao of Programming such am amusing booklet for programmers. I think many readers will find that they are reminded of the Dilbert comic strips.

Thus spake the master programmer:

"You can demonstrate a program for an executive, but you can't make him computer literate."

The stories are presented with an aura of oriental wisdom; some of them are paraphrases of famous oriental stories. For example, the point of the story in which Grand Master Turing dreams that he is a machine (and wakes up wondering if he is really Turing, or a machine dreaming that it is Turing) will probably be missed by those not familiar with the story about Confucius and the butterfly.

The Tao of Programming contains nine "books" -- each with wisdom about a different area, such as design, coding, maintenance, and so on. All in all, there are about fifty short stories like the two quoted above, and it will probably make a great gift to any programmer. If you haven't read it yet, you should probably buy yourself this gift. In the computer programmers' Humor Hall of Fame, this book resides up there with canons such as the Jargon file ("The Hacker's Dictionary").

The Zen of Programming was published by James a year after The Tao, and it contains numerous short Koan-like stories of the same spirit -- the kind of stories only computer nerds could possibly enjoy. However, much like the stories in the third book Computer Parables: Enlightenment in the Information Age, the stories in The Zen of Programming lack the special, naive magic that made the first book so enjoyable. The stories in these two books don't try just to entertain -- they try to teach a lesson, and often fail miserably. And yet some stories (especially in Computer Parables) do hit the nail on the head. Consider, for example, the following story:

A programmer once built a vast database containing all the literature, facts, figures, and data in the world. The he built an advanced querying system that linked that knowledge together, allowing him to wander through the database at will. Satisfied and pleased, he sat down before his computer to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

After three minutes, the programmer had a headache. After three hours, the programmer felt ill. After three days, the programmer destroyed his database. When asked why, he replied: "That system put the world at my fingertips. I could go anywhere, see anything. Because I was no longer limited by external conditions, I had no excuse for not knowing everything there is to know. I could neither sleep nor eat. All I could do was wander through the database. Now I can rest."

The amazing thing is that this piece was published years before the World Wide Web came to be; it is even more amazing if you consider the fact that it is titled "The Navigator".

Other stories from Computer Parables that had a similar surprising (or should I say sobering?) effect, at least for me, include "The Computer Pornographer" and "The Museum". But apart from these rare gems, the two sequels generally do not stand up to the quality of the first.

To purchase The Tao of Programming, click here to buy it from Amazon. Otherwise, get The Zen of Programming from here, or Computer Parables: Enlightenment in the Information Age from here.

For more information about these books, please visit http://www.forum2.org/tal/books/tao.html.

For additional book reviews, please visit http://www.forum2.org/tal/books.

Tal Cohen sent in a 3 part review: The Tao of Programming, The Zen of Programming, and Computer Parables: Enlightenment in the Information Age. All of these were written by Geoffrey James, and while the first book Tao is one that has been around, the other two are interesting reading as well. Click below to find out more. REVIEW: The Tao of Programming, The Zen of Programming and Computer Parables: Enlightenment in the Information Age by Geoffrey James (Tao: InfoBooks, ISBN 0-931-13707-1) (Zen: InfoBooks, ISBN 0-931-13709-8) (Parables: InfoBooks, ISBN 0-931-13713-6) Nutshell
Review: You've probably already read The Tao of Programming -- as an e-text. It's a great book, and fun to re-read every so often; but don't buy the print version just for the illustrations. Do buy it as a gift to a friend, though.

The two sequels, The Zen of Programming and Computer Parables, are less well-known (probably because they were never transcribed and spread over usenet). They're also generally less entertaining, though you'll probably still find them enjoyable.

Rating: Outstanding (8/10), Average (4/10) and Average (4/10) Review by: Tal Cohen

Assigning more people to a programming project does not make it end earlier. There are a many explanations for this; in fact, it is the subject of one of the most important software engineering books, Fredrick Brooks's The Mythical Man Month. But experienced programmers don't need research results to tell them about this. For them, it is a fact of life -- knowledge earned by working on software projects for years. So many programmers appreciate Geoffrey James's simple way of presenting this fact in a very short story:

A manager went to the master programmer and showed him the requirements document for a new application. The manager asked the master: "How long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?"

"It will take one year," said the master promptly.

"But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it take if I assign ten programmers to it?"

The master programmer frowned. "In that case, it will take two years."

"And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?"

The master programmer shrugged. "Then the design will never be completed," he said.

The simple, humoristic representation of experienced software developers as "masters" and inexperienced ones as "apprentices", the characterization of managers as unintelligent, sometimes plain stupid people, combined with the simple wisdom of the text is just part of what makes The Tao of Programming such am amusing booklet for programmers. I think many readers will find that they are reminded of the Dilbert comic strips.

Thus spake the master programmer:

"You can demonstrate a program for an executive, but you can't make him computer literate."

The stories are presented with an aura of oriental wisdom; some of them are paraphrases of famous oriental stories. For example, the point of the story in which Grand Master Turing dreams that he is a machine (and wakes up wondering if he is really Turing, or a machine dreaming that it is Turing) will probably be missed by those not familiar with the story about Confucius and the butterfly.

The Tao of Programming contains nine "books" -- each with wisdom about a different area, such as design, coding, maintenance, and so on. All in all, there are about fifty short stories like the two quoted above, and it will probably make a great gift to any programmer. If you haven't read it yet, you should probably buy yourself this gift. In the computer programmers' Humor Hall of Fame, this book resides up there with canons such as the Jargon file ("The Hacker's Dictionary").

The Zen of Programming was published by James a year after The Tao, and it contains numerous short Koan-like stories of the same spirit -- the kind of stories only computer nerds could possibly enjoy. However, much like the stories in the third book Computer Parables: Enlightenment in the Information Age, the stories in The Zen of Programming lack the special, naive magic that made the first book so enjoyable. The stories in these two books don't try just to entertain -- they try to teach a lesson, and often fail miserably. And yet some stories (especially in Computer Parables) do hit the nail on the head. Consider, for example, the following story:

A programmer once built a vast database containing all the literature, facts, figures, and data in the world. The he built an advanced querying system that linked that knowledge together, allowing him to wander through the database at will. Satisfied and pleased, he sat down before his computer to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

After three minutes, the programmer had a headache. After three hours, the programmer felt ill. After three days, the programmer destroyed his database. When asked why, he replied: "That system put the world at my fingertips. I could go anywhere, see anything. Because I was no longer limited by external conditions, I had no excuse for not knowing everything there is to know. I could neither sleep nor eat. All I could do was wander through the database. Now I can rest."

The amazing thing is that this piece was published years before the World Wide Web came to be; it is even more amazing if you consider the fact that it is titled "The Navigator".

Other stories from Computer Parables that had a similar surprising (or should I say sobering?) effect, at least for me, include "The Computer Pornographer" and "The Museum". But apart from these rare gems, the two sequels generally do not stand up to the quality of the first.

To purchase The Tao of Programming, click here to buy it from Amazon. Otherwise, get The Zen of Programming from here, or Computer Parables: Enlightenment in the Information Age from here.

For more information about these books, please visit http://www.forum2.org/tal/books/tao.html.

For additional book reviews, please visit http://www.forum2.org/tal/books.

Tal Cohen sent in a 3 part review: The Tao of Programming, The Zen of Programming, and Computer Parables: Enlightenment in the Information Age. All of these were written by Geoffrey James, and while the first book Tao is one that has been around, the other two are interesting reading as well. Click below to find out more. REVIEW: The Tao of Programming, The Zen of Programming and Computer Parables: Enlightenment in the Information Age by Geoffrey James (Tao: InfoBooks, ISBN 0-931-13707-1) (Zen: InfoBooks, ISBN 0-931-13709-8) (Parables: InfoBooks, ISBN 0-931-13713-6) Nutshell
Review: You've probably already read The Tao of Programming -- as an e-text. It's a great book, and fun to re-read every so often; but don't buy the print version just for the illustrations. Do buy it as a gift to a friend, though.

The two sequels, The Zen of Programming and Computer Parables, are less well-known (probably because they were never transcribed and spread over usenet). They're also generally less entertaining, though you'll probably still find them enjoyable.

Rating: Outstanding (8/10), Average (4/10) and Average (4/10) Review by: Tal Cohen

Assigning more people to a programming project does not make it end earlier. There are a many explanations for this; in fact, it is the subject of one of the most important software engineering books, Fredrick Brooks's The Mythical Man Month. But experienced programmers don't need research results to tell them about this. For them, it is a fact of life -- knowledge earned by working on software projects for years. So many programmers appreciate Geoffrey James's simple way of presenting this fact in a very short story:

A manager went to the master programmer and showed him the requirements document for a new application. The manager asked the master: "How long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?"

"It will take one year," said the master promptly.

"But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it take if I assign ten programmers to it?"

The master programmer frowned. "In that case, it will take two years."

"And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?"

The master programmer shrugged. "Then the design will never be completed," he said.

The simple, humoristic representation of experienced software developers as "masters" and inexperienced ones as "apprentices", the characterization of managers as unintelligent, sometimes plain stupid people, combined with the simple wisdom of the text is just part of what makes The Tao of Programming such am amusing booklet for programmers. I think many readers will find that they are reminded of the Dilbert comic strips.

Thus spake the master programmer:

"You can demonstrate a program for an executive, but you can't make him computer literate."

The stories are presented with an aura of oriental wisdom; some of them are paraphrases of famous oriental stories. For example, the point of the story in which Grand Master Turing dreams that he is a machine (and wakes up wondering if he is really Turing, or a machine dreaming that it is Turing) will probably be missed by those not familiar with the story about Confucius and the butterfly.

The Tao of Programming contains nine "books" -- each with wisdom about a different area, such as design, coding, maintenance, and so on. All in all, there are about fifty short stories like the two quoted above, and it will probably make a great gift to any programmer. If you haven't read it yet, you should probably buy yourself this gift. In the computer programmers' Humor Hall of Fame, this book resides up there with canons such as the Jargon file ("The Hacker's Dictionary").

The Zen of Programming was published by James a year after The Tao, and it contains numerous short Koan-like stories of the same spirit -- the kind of stories only computer nerds could possibly enjoy. However, much like the stories in the third book Computer Parables: Enlightenment in the Information Age, the stories in The Zen of Programming lack the special, naive magic that made the first book so enjoyable. The stories in these two books don't try just to entertain -- they try to teach a lesson, and often fail miserably. And yet some stories (especially in Computer Parables) do hit the nail on the head. Consider, for example, the following story:

A programmer once built a vast database containing all the literature, facts, figures, and data in the world. The he built an advanced querying system that linked that knowledge together, allowing him to wander through the database at will. Satisfied and pleased, he sat down before his computer to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

After three minutes, the programmer had a headache. After three hours, the programmer felt ill. After three days, the programmer destroyed his database. When asked why, he replied: "That system put the world at my fingertips. I could go anywhere, see anything. Because I was no longer limited by external conditions, I had no excuse for not knowing everything there is to know. I could neither sleep nor eat. All I could do was wander through the database. Now I can rest."

The amazing thing is that this piece was published years before the World Wide Web came to be; it is even more amazing if you consider the fact that it is titled "The Navigator".

Other stories from Computer Parables that had a similar surprising (or should I say sobering?) effect, at least for me, include "The Computer Pornographer" and "The Museum". But apart from these rare gems, the two sequels generally do not stand up to the quality of the first.

To purchase The Tao of Programming, click here to buy it from Amazon. Otherwise, get The Zen of Programming from here, or Computer Parables: Enlightenment in the Information Age from here.

For more information about these books, please visit http://www.forum2.org/tal/books/tao.html.

For additional book reviews, please visit http://www.forum2.org/tal/books.

Doc Technical, one of our highly trained book reviewers, has submitted for us Marjorie Flack, Kurt Wiese's book The Story about Ping. A rare technical manual, this is one of the few computer books in the field in which the illustrator is as important as the author. To truly understand the glories of Ping, click below to read more. Yes, we know it's on Amazon. They stole it from us. Or Doc provided it to them. The Story About Ping author Marjorie Flack and Kurt Wiese pages 32 publisher Viking Press rating 9 reviewer Doc Technical ISBN summary New perspectives on a classic networking Using deft allegory, the authors have provided an insightful and intuitive explanation of one of Unix's most venerable networking utilities. Even more stunning is that they were clearly working with a very early beta of the program, as their book first appeared in 1933, years (decades!) before the operating system and network infrastructure were finalized.

The book describes networking in terms even a child could understand, choosing to anthropomorphize the underlying packet structure. The ping packet is described as a duck, who, with other packets (more ducks), spends a certain period of time on the host machine (the wise-eyed boat). At the same time each day (I suspect this is scheduled under cron), the little packets (ducks) exit the host (boat) by way of a bridge (a bridge). From the bridge, the packets travel onto the internet (here embodied by the Yangtze River).

The title character -- er, packet, is called Ping. Ping meanders around the river before being received by another host (another boat). He spends a brief time on the other boat, but eventually returns to his original host machine (the wise-eyed boat) somewhat the worse for wear.

The book avoids many of the cliches one might expect. For example, with a story set on a river, the authors might have sunk to using that tired old plot device: the flood ping. The authors deftly avoid this.

Who Should Buy This Book

If you need a good, high-level overview of the ping utility, this is the book. I can't recommend it for most managers, as the technical aspects may be too overwhelming and the basic concepts too daunting.

Problems With This Book

As good as it is, The Story About Ping is not without its faults. There is no index, and though the ping(8) man pages cover the command line options well enough, some review of them seems to be in order. Likewise, in a book solely about Ping, I would have expected a more detailed overview of the ICMP packet structure.

But even with these problems, The Story About Ping has earned a place on my bookshelf, right between Stevens' Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, and my dog-eared copy of Dante's seminal work on MS Windows, Inferno. Who can read that passage on the Windows API ("Obscure, profound it was, and nebulous, So that by fixing on its depths my sight -- Nothing whatever I discerned therein."), without shaking their head with deep understanding. But I digress.

For my next review, I will discuss the internals of several well-known routing protocols as described in the Old Testament. New contemporary evidence points to the possibility that Job was a sysadmin on an early MULTICS system.

Buy this book over here and Slashdot gets a little money. It'll buy Rob and I 0.5 beer.

Doc Technical is not a real doctor, nor does he play one on TV. Hell, Doc Technical could never even fit on a TV. Well, maybe a bigscreen.