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Danny Yee wrote this review of a classic work (from way back in 1968) from one of the classic science fiction authors, Roger Zelazny. A third of a century later, Danny seems to think it holds up pretty well.

Lord of Light author Roger Zelazny pages 261 publisher Methuen rating 10 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 0-413-58250-7 summary epic science fiction using Hindu and Buddhist themes

Colonists from Earth, using a mix of mental powers and high technology, have long ago subjugated the native inhabitants -- and are now making themselves into gods, ruling over their descendants within a framework set up in imitation of Hinduism and ancient India. But even as the "Deicrat" consensus firms, there is dissent: Sam, one of the First, the crew of the original spaceship, remains an "Accelerationist," wanting to spread scientific knowledge to everyone. He starts a one-man crusade to bring down Heaven, a crusade that will lead him to the depths of Hellwell and to Nirvana and back.

Lord of Light is a lively novel with plenty of action -- duels, battles, confrontations, defiances, and repartee. Following the structure of Indian epics, elaborated sub-stories adorn a simple overall plot, with each chapter an episode in Sam's war against Heaven: his taking up arms against Heaven, his revival of Buddhism and the attempts to kill him, his loosing of the demons and possession by one of them, his capture and imprisonment in the Celestial City, his escape and defeat in a climactic battle, his return from Nirvana, and his final victory. (The first chapter is chronologically the second-last, which is a little confusing at first.) While few of the characters have much depth, they manage to be both human and (when they take on their Aspects and wield their Attributes) embodiments of fundamental forces. Sam himself is a crotchety old-timer and a con-man and a trickster - but also an embodiment of military prowess and defiance against odds.

The scientific scaffolding always remains visible -- Shiva's trident is a device, "reincarnation" is done through body farms and mind transfer machinery, the Christian heretic Nirriti uses guided missiles -- and Lord of Light is clearly science fiction rather than fantasy. This is affirmed explicitly within the story by Yama, engineer and god of Death, explaining that demons are "malefic, possessed of great powers, life span, and the ability to temporarily assume virtually any shape" - but not "supernatural".

"It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy - it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either."

Which is a sentiment to warm the hearts of hard science fiction devotees, even without the "technology good, theocracy bad" plot elements.

Despite the underlying epistemology, however, the dominant "mode" of Lord of Light is mythic rather than scientific. Zelazny does more than raid Hinduism and Buddhism for props - he ends up touching on the genuinely numinous, evoking through language and mood something of the power of real religion and myth. Buddhism, for example, is introduced by Sam as a counter to Hinduism, but his own beliefs are ambiguous and when one of his disciples (originally an assassin sent to kill him) attains enlightenment, it is obvious that Buddhism has taken on a life of its own. Lord of Light sports quotations from Indian scriptures at the beginning of each chapter and uses themes and language and ideas taken from them throughout. At one point Sam delivers a three page sermon, for example, and the penultimate paragraph of the novel is

"Death and Light are everywhere, always, and they begin, end, strive, attend, into and upon the Dream of the Nameless that is the world, burning words within Samsara, perhaps to create a thing of beauty."

This could easily have been tedious or trite but in Zelazny's hands it actually works. Myth and religion never actually break free from the scientific scaffolding, but they manage to make it irrelevant -- one could almost consider Lord of Light a demonstration that their symbolic power does not rest on their metaphysical claims.

Despite its serious approach to religion and its success as epic, Lord of Light is at the same time rather light-hearted, sometimes verging on the flippant.

"It was early morning. Near the pool of the purple lotus, in the Garden of Joys, at the foot of the statue of the blue goddess with the veena, Brahma was located.

The girl who found him first thought him to be resting, for his eyes were still open. After a moment, though, she realized that he was not breathing; and his face, so contorted, underwent no changes of expression.

She trembled as she awaited the end of the universe. God being dead, she understood that this normally followed. But after a time she decided that the internal cohesiveness of things might serve to hold the universe together for another hour or so; and such being the case, she thought it advisable to bring the matter of the imminent Yuga to the attention of someone better suited to cope with it."

Zelazny also includes a few truly terrible puns.

Somehow all the disparate components of Lord of Light -- humour and epic, science and religion, action and philosophy -- come together in an successful novel. The result is my favourite Zelazny work and indeed one of my favourite science fiction novels of all time. Though it won the Hugo award in 1968, it has I think been relatively neglected; it can bear comparison with the much better known Dune (and I suspect Zelazny was inspired by Frank Herbert's use of Sufism in that work).

Purchase this book from FatBrain. Check out Danny Yee's other book reviews, especially the science fiction and India sections.

Danny Yee popped up this review from down under of the provacatively titled Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters: What I Learned in Ten Years as a Microsoft Programmer . This sounds like a fun read, but not without flaws.

Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters author Adam Barr pages 342 publisher Writers Club Press rating 8 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 0-595-16128-6 summary What Adam Barr Learned in Ten Years as a Microsoft Programmer

Barr worked as a low-level developer at Microsoft and his account in Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters, built around his firsthand experience, offers a perspective on the company "from the ranks". This is combined with more general commentary on recent computing issues, with reflections on evangelism, community, and open source. The result has something for a range of people: those curious about Microsoft, involved in debates about the merits of open source, responsible for recruitment and management of programmers, or just interested in computing history.

Barr begins by describing how he came to work for Microsoft. This is the start of four chapters on Microsoft's recruitment system, covering both the initial selection on campus, the interview system, and the overall effectiveness. There is also an introduction to how work is structured at Microsoft, in particular the division between developers, program managers, and testers. Three chapters then describe Barr's time at SoftImage, a Microsoft acquisition producing digital editing software. Here we are introduced to the different types of "demos" (from carefully scripted sessions presented by special "demo artists" to genuine "hands-on" demos) and the complexities of dealing with third-party hardware suppliers.

Three chapters then present a potted history of computing over the last twenty years or so, beginning with an account Barr wrote as a teenager back in 1982, after visiting ComDex. Barr focuses on evangelism - on the factors that contribute to one platform or operating system winning out over others - and in particular why IBM PC hardware became ubiquitous, why MSDOS beat CP/M-86, and why Windows beat OS/2. None of this is particularly novel, but it's a nice lively account.

This leads naturally to more recent conflicts and debates which pit (as flagship icons) Microsoft against Linux. Again, there is nothing spectacular here, but Barr offers an intelligent, informed, and balanced perspective, coming up with some points that were new to me. Of the claim that it will be difficult to find programmers to do the "unsexy" work with Linux, for example, he writes

"Microsoft, being a company with salaries and a supervisory hierarchy, has the ability to order someone to work on something he or she doesn't want to work on, but I never recall this happening. People worked on things that interested them and projects still got complete coverage. There is no reason that the same should not be true of Linux, especially given the size of the Linux community."

Two chapters evaluate attacks against Microsoft, the first addressing popular criticisms and the second the various legal attacks. Here Barr is level-headed, calmly rebutting some of the sillier attacks while accepting valid criticisms.

A major weakness of this material is that Barr only ever talks about "open source" (a development methodology) and never about "free software" (a much broader movement). One major reason for techs ranting at Microsoft is their unhappiness with loss of choice, freedom, and control - and this has been articulated as an ethical and political position by the Free Software Foundation and others. But Barr never considers this argument against Microsoft at all.

A chapter on online community is really a digression. The final two chapters then consider the future of Microsoft. Barr argues that Microsoft should stick to its core PC business and not get distracted by ventures such as the XBox. He ends where he started, arguing that the key to Microsoft's future lies in its handling of employees, in its ability to attract, recruit, and retain good people.

Proudly Serving is nicely laid out and has obviously been carefully edited. Barr avoids most technical details (an exception is some discussion of buses and video hardware in the chapters on SoftImage) and offers separate digressions on Code, APIs, and Middleware. A minor complaint is that the workings of Microsoft stock options are only explained in the last chapter, by which point the reader will either have worked it out for themselves or decided they don't care.

Purchase this book from FatBrain. Visit the author's web site or check out Danny Yee's five hundred other book reviews.

Credit card numbers? Personal correspondence? Medical information? If you've ever sent anything you'd like kept private over the profligate and global Internet, be grateful there are good guys devoted to keeping private information private. The long-suffering RantyDave reviews here for your learning pleasure Eric Rescorla's SSL and TLS: Designing and Building Secure Systems; readers should also check out the amazingly prolific Danny Yee's review of the same book. Both reviewers indicate that this is a book whose learning curve is worth tackling. SSL and TLS: Designing and Building Secure Systems author Eric Rescorla pages 499 publisher AddisonWesley rating 9 reviewer RantyDave ISBN 0-201-61598-3 summary Eric Rescorla talks us through SSL, from firstconcepts thru protocol all the way to example code.

The Scoop Until recently SSL was the black art on the Internet. The (not incidental) details were passed around almost as word of mouth leaving only a few individuals actually able to implement secure services and the rest of us staring at ethereal in bewilderment. It stops right here. Eric Rescorla starts at the very beginning and takes us at breakneck pace through to full byte-by-byte implementation of SSL, HTTP over SSL and anything halfway relevant along the way. Written in the tradition of 'TCP/IP Illustrated' expect clear diagrams, copious code samples (OpenSSL and Java) and ruthless attention to detail. What's to Like? Two words: Horse's mouth. Rescorla is the author of RFC's 2659, 2660 and 2818 (HTTP over TLS). Also the Java PureTLS toolkit (free), ssldump (free), some commercial toolkits and parts of Nokia's SSL offload boxes. In short, he knows his stuff and it shows.

One way it shows is that you'll never be short of an explaination. Every third paragraph seems to be why it is that we do something, and for me at least this is almost as relevant as what. This leads naturally over to discussion of the historical perspective of SSL/TLS and a surprisingly neutral standpoint with even our friends in Redmond getting credit where it's due. The correctness also shows with the book being fully up-to-date with the patent and export situations, although obviously this may be subject to a sell by date.

The performance chapter gives actual figures on a variety of algorithms and platforms (mostly FreeBSD and OpenSSL) and is major slashdot fodder.

What's to not Like? Very little. I would have liked to have seen a brief mention of (/usr/ports/security/)stunnel as a quick'n'dirty SSL wrapper or offload box. I also found the line-by-line coverage of mod_ssl's session caching code (end of appendix A) a bizarre choice - or are we being given hints towards transparent failover? What's to Consider? This is a large, complex subject and although the writing is clear, you're looking at a long and fairly steep learning curve. If your hope is to get mod_ssl up and going on a cable modem, this is not what you need. If, OTOH, you were looking to contribute to mod_ssl, this would probably be a good starting point.

This is no quick fix or howto, it's about understanding. Be prepared to take a little while and let it all sink in.

The Summary Hard work, but worth it. Worth the price of admission just to use Chapter 1 as a companion to Cryptonomicon.

Table of Contents

Security Concepts

Introduction to SSL

Basic SSL

Advanced SSL

SSL Security

SSL Performance

Designing with SSL

Coding with SSL

HTTP over SSL

SMTP over TLS

Contrasting Approaches

1. Example Code
2. SSLv2

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Credit card numbers? Personal correspondence? Medical information? If you've ever sent anything you'd like kept private over the profligate and global Internet, be grateful there are good guys devoted to keeping private information private. The long-suffering RantyDave reviews here for your learning pleasure Eric Rescorla's SSL and TLS: Designing and Building Secure Systems; readers should also check out the amazingly prolific Danny Yee's review of the same book. Both reviewers indicate that this is a book whose learning curve is worth tackling. SSL and TLS: Designing and Building Secure Systems author Eric Rescorla pages 499 publisher AddisonWesley rating 9 reviewer RantyDave ISBN 0-201-61598-3 summary Eric Rescorla talks us through SSL, from firstconcepts thru protocol all the way to example code.

The Scoop Until recently SSL was the black art on the Internet. The (not incidental) details were passed around almost as word of mouth leaving only a few individuals actually able to implement secure services and the rest of us staring at ethereal in bewilderment. It stops right here. Eric Rescorla starts at the very beginning and takes us at breakneck pace through to full byte-by-byte implementation of SSL, HTTP over SSL and anything halfway relevant along the way. Written in the tradition of 'TCP/IP Illustrated' expect clear diagrams, copious code samples (OpenSSL and Java) and ruthless attention to detail. What's to Like? Two words: Horse's mouth. Rescorla is the author of RFC's 2659, 2660 and 2818 (HTTP over TLS). Also the Java PureTLS toolkit (free), ssldump (free), some commercial toolkits and parts of Nokia's SSL offload boxes. In short, he knows his stuff and it shows.

One way it shows is that you'll never be short of an explaination. Every third paragraph seems to be why it is that we do something, and for me at least this is almost as relevant as what. This leads naturally over to discussion of the historical perspective of SSL/TLS and a surprisingly neutral standpoint with even our friends in Redmond getting credit where it's due. The correctness also shows with the book being fully up-to-date with the patent and export situations, although obviously this may be subject to a sell by date.

The performance chapter gives actual figures on a variety of algorithms and platforms (mostly FreeBSD and OpenSSL) and is major slashdot fodder.

What's to not Like? Very little. I would have liked to have seen a brief mention of (/usr/ports/security/)stunnel as a quick'n'dirty SSL wrapper or offload box. I also found the line-by-line coverage of mod_ssl's session caching code (end of appendix A) a bizarre choice - or are we being given hints towards transparent failover? What's to Consider? This is a large, complex subject and although the writing is clear, you're looking at a long and fairly steep learning curve. If your hope is to get mod_ssl up and going on a cable modem, this is not what you need. If, OTOH, you were looking to contribute to mod_ssl, this would probably be a good starting point.

This is no quick fix or howto, it's about understanding. Be prepared to take a little while and let it all sink in.

The Summary Hard work, but worth it. Worth the price of admission just to use Chapter 1 as a companion to Cryptonomicon.

Table of Contents

Security Concepts

Introduction to SSL

Basic SSL

Advanced SSL

SSL Security

SSL Performance

Designing with SSL

Coding with SSL

HTTP over SSL

SMTP over TLS

Contrasting Approaches

1. Example Code
2. SSLv2

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Slashback is back this evening with more on censorship down under, games that you'll brag to your grandchildren you were glad to be beaten with a hot iron while playing, and more. Enjoy with care.

"Luxury!" DagBot writes: "TW2002 is still alive and can also be played as TCPIP telnet No BBS need to log into. Its called TWGS (Trade Wars Game Server). There is Still TW2002 communities going strong and I run a TWGS server now and have about 40 regular players playing. There is no large time-wasting BBS to log into, but its quick and easy to get into a game and get back to the good old days where you had to know how to read and have quick fingers to play.

There are also 2 TW2002 helpers that will run right out of the box with full telnet and ANSI support along with user-edited and scripts. Both are great programs Attac uses REXX scripts and Swath uses a Java based script for user defined scripts. Both will get you up and playing in a few minutes thinking about the good old days. My TW2002 stand alone server can be found [here] login, play, get a feel for the good old days."

Until everyone has one, it will keep being submitted, and maybe even then. azephrahel writes: "I am sure almost all of Slashdot's readers have drooled over the possibilities that many of the pc-on-a-stick products now offer. You can buy the uCsimm for $300, the matchbox PC for only $1,495, from emj you can get a 386 on a stick for $130 but you have to fit all your os & code & drivers into .9 Megs. Still that is probably the most reasonable, and made by Jumptech. They make fun toys, but there hard to buy peicemeal at a decent price.

Anyway after all that rambling, I just found this companies site, there called i-Button. They sell java computers called TINI, in a 72 pin simm format, and little button shaped devices called i-buttons (yes the thing in the java ring featured on slashdot in March) The important part, they sell peicemeal, reasonably. I just blew $120 bucks on their site and ended up with a java computer on a stick (TINI, complete with an ethernet controller onboard), a javabutton, a tempterature probe, and a project board to hook up and play with these toys on.
I figured that a few others here would like to hear they can get these toys without selling a spleen."

All these things have been mentioned on Slashdot before, but it looks like the era of ubiquitous little tiny parts has arrived, and at a price level sustainable by occasional weekend medical experiments, too.

Fraidja can't see that w'out p'mission, bub. For those of you unhappy with the apparent moves toward censorship in South Australia, Danny Yee writes: "Electronic Frontiers Australia has put online analysis of the South Australian legislation and suggestions for action."

Thanks to danny of danny's reviews for pointing that the full text of Against Intellectual Property (which we ran a chapter of back in July is online in full now.

Thanks to danny of danny's reviews for pointing that the full text of Against Intellectual Property (which we ran a chapter of back in July is online in full now.

If your life is an acronym soup of protocols like IPX and CLNP, and you sometimes feel like you need a cot in the wiring closet, you probably ought to keep reading -- more so if finding a fount of information neither too abstruse nor too patronizing is important. For the networking professional, inveterate reader and reviewer Danny Yee here briefly takes on a book called Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking, which could be that fount.

Interconnections author Radia Perlman pages 537 publisher Addison-Wesley rating 8.5 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 0-201-63448-1 summary Well-grounded introduction for the technically astute to the hardware which carries your data and how to communicate with it. Interconnections is aimed at computer science students studying networking: it covers fundamental concepts and basic theory, and includes a set of "homework" problems with each chapter. But it is solidly grounded in real-life experience -- Perlman has spent years designing and implementing network protocols and algorithms (most notably the spanning tree algorithm used in most bridges) and uses that experience to provide practical illustrations of the theory. She is also fun to read, being prepared to laugh at things that deserve it and to offer personal opinions, sometimes quite bluntly.

"I find BGP scary. It is configuration-intensive. Routes can be permanently unstable. It solves only whatever it happens to solve rather than providing a general-purpose solution. But we're stuck with it."

Perlman roughly follows the protocol stack upwards. Four chapters cover general data-link layer issues, transparent and source-routing bridges, the various categories of hub/switch/bridge, and VLANs. Five chapters cover the network layer cover connection-oriented protocols (X25 and ATM) and general issues, addressing, and packet formats in connectionless networks, with examples from a range of protocols including IP, IPX, IPv6, CLNP, Appletalk, and DECnet. A single chapter covers autoconfiguration and endnode issues (protocols such as ARP). And there are five chapters on routing, covering general routing concepts (distance vector and link state algorithms, link costs and types of service), implementation (algorithms for fast packet forwarding), and specific routing protocols (from RIP to BGP), as well as the more specialised topics of WAN multicast and "sabotage-proof routing."

The bulk of Interconnections may be too detailed for most network administrators or programmers, but those without an interest in the theory may want to track down a copy just for the last two chapters. "To Route, Bridge, or Switch: Is That the Question?" is a good overview of networking terminology and its connection with reality, while "Protocol Design Folklore" attempts

"to capture the tricks and 'gotchas' in protocol design learned from years of layer 2 and layer 3 protocols. Interspersed among the text are boxes containing 'real-world bad protocols.' They share with you the warped way I look at the world, which is to notice and be distracted by suboptimal protocols in everyday life."

Interconnections will do much to improve understanding of networks and network protocols: as well as being an excellent textbook, it should command a general audience among computing professionals.

Purchase this book from Fatbrain. You can read more of Danny Yee's reviews at his site.

Jon Lasser is the author of ThinkUnix a new learning UNIX/how-to. While Danny Yee of dannyreviews actually wrote the review, I've read the book as well. It's good -- it's different from other learning Unix books because he really wants you to learn the concepts behind Unix -- to grok it. ThinkUnix author Jon Lasser pages 294 publisher Que 2000 rating 8 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 0-7897-2376-x summary Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking.

In a world full of volumes like Linux: The Complete Reference, Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 Unleashed, Corel Linux for Dummies and so forth, Lasser's Think Unix is a breath of fresh air. Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking. He also captures something of the way in which Unix is a way of life and a culture, not just an operating system, with a good leavening of humour, history, and hackish lore. One consequence of this approach is that Think Unix will date far less quickly than most operating system books. I recommend it to computer science students, techies coming from non-Unix backgrounds, or anyone more interested in understanding the underlying ideas of Unix than solving particular problems.

Lasser starts with a chapter on documentation, explaining how to use "man" to read manual entries and touching on other forms of documentation. He then introduces the building blocks of Unix - files and processes and redirection and pipes. A brief look at TCP/IP networking, showing how to interact directly with some common network services using telnet, is followed by an introduction to vi and sed and basic regular expressions. Four chapters then deal with shell scripting in more detail, touching on differences between shells, variables and quoting, control structures, and aliases, functions, and scripts. A quick look at X explains its general design, something of the variety of window managers and desktops available, and basic configuration of startup, resources, and fonts.

Obviously a lot is left out of this (there is nothing about system administration, for example), but it provides solid foundations for further learning. And a number of topics sneak in "in passing": a mention of ssh (and associated legal issues) and a little bit about termcap and terminfo, among other things. Some practice problems are included, simple exercises to test understanding and help learning; answers to these are provided in the appendices, along with a short glossary (which includes pointers to other resources).

Think Unix has an unfortunate number of typos, including a few in code examples. And there are a few things I might have done differently (I'd have ditched most of the grainy greyscale half-page screenshots of different window managers and desktop environments, for example). Overall, however, it's a great book and the biggest problem it poses me is working out which of my "clueful but not Unix-literate" friends to pass my review copy on to.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>
Reviews of more than five hundred other books: Subjects | Titles | Authors | Latest

Jon Lasser is the author of ThinkUnix a new learning UNIX/how-to. While Danny Yee of dannyreviews actually wrote the review, I've read the book as well. It's good -- it's different from other learning Unix books because he really wants you to learn the concepts behind Unix -- to grok it. ThinkUnix author Jon Lasser pages 294 publisher Que 2000 rating 8 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 0-7897-2376-x summary Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking.

In a world full of volumes like Linux: The Complete Reference, Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 Unleashed, Corel Linux for Dummies and so forth, Lasser's Think Unix is a breath of fresh air. Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking. He also captures something of the way in which Unix is a way of life and a culture, not just an operating system, with a good leavening of humour, history, and hackish lore. One consequence of this approach is that Think Unix will date far less quickly than most operating system books. I recommend it to computer science students, techies coming from non-Unix backgrounds, or anyone more interested in understanding the underlying ideas of Unix than solving particular problems.

Lasser starts with a chapter on documentation, explaining how to use "man" to read manual entries and touching on other forms of documentation. He then introduces the building blocks of Unix - files and processes and redirection and pipes. A brief look at TCP/IP networking, showing how to interact directly with some common network services using telnet, is followed by an introduction to vi and sed and basic regular expressions. Four chapters then deal with shell scripting in more detail, touching on differences between shells, variables and quoting, control structures, and aliases, functions, and scripts. A quick look at X explains its general design, something of the variety of window managers and desktops available, and basic configuration of startup, resources, and fonts.

Obviously a lot is left out of this (there is nothing about system administration, for example), but it provides solid foundations for further learning. And a number of topics sneak in "in passing": a mention of ssh (and associated legal issues) and a little bit about termcap and terminfo, among other things. Some practice problems are included, simple exercises to test understanding and help learning; answers to these are provided in the appendices, along with a short glossary (which includes pointers to other resources).

Think Unix has an unfortunate number of typos, including a few in code examples. And there are a few things I might have done differently (I'd have ditched most of the grainy greyscale half-page screenshots of different window managers and desktop environments, for example). Overall, however, it's a great book and the biggest problem it poses me is working out which of my "clueful but not Unix-literate" friends to pass my review copy on to.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>
Reviews of more than five hundred other books: Subjects | Titles | Authors | Latest

Jon Lasser is the author of ThinkUnix a new learning UNIX/how-to. While Danny Yee of dannyreviews actually wrote the review, I've read the book as well. It's good -- it's different from other learning Unix books because he really wants you to learn the concepts behind Unix -- to grok it. ThinkUnix author Jon Lasser pages 294 publisher Que 2000 rating 8 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 0-7897-2376-x summary Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking.

In a world full of volumes like Linux: The Complete Reference, Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 Unleashed, Corel Linux for Dummies and so forth, Lasser's Think Unix is a breath of fresh air. Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking. He also captures something of the way in which Unix is a way of life and a culture, not just an operating system, with a good leavening of humour, history, and hackish lore. One consequence of this approach is that Think Unix will date far less quickly than most operating system books. I recommend it to computer science students, techies coming from non-Unix backgrounds, or anyone more interested in understanding the underlying ideas of Unix than solving particular problems.

Lasser starts with a chapter on documentation, explaining how to use "man" to read manual entries and touching on other forms of documentation. He then introduces the building blocks of Unix - files and processes and redirection and pipes. A brief look at TCP/IP networking, showing how to interact directly with some common network services using telnet, is followed by an introduction to vi and sed and basic regular expressions. Four chapters then deal with shell scripting in more detail, touching on differences between shells, variables and quoting, control structures, and aliases, functions, and scripts. A quick look at X explains its general design, something of the variety of window managers and desktops available, and basic configuration of startup, resources, and fonts.

Obviously a lot is left out of this (there is nothing about system administration, for example), but it provides solid foundations for further learning. And a number of topics sneak in "in passing": a mention of ssh (and associated legal issues) and a little bit about termcap and terminfo, among other things. Some practice problems are included, simple exercises to test understanding and help learning; answers to these are provided in the appendices, along with a short glossary (which includes pointers to other resources).

Think Unix has an unfortunate number of typos, including a few in code examples. And there are a few things I might have done differently (I'd have ditched most of the grainy greyscale half-page screenshots of different window managers and desktop environments, for example). Overall, however, it's a great book and the biggest problem it poses me is working out which of my "clueful but not Unix-literate" friends to pass my review copy on to.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>
Reviews of more than five hundred other books: Subjects | Titles | Authors | Latest

Jon Lasser is the author of ThinkUnix a new learning UNIX/how-to. While Danny Yee of dannyreviews actually wrote the review, I've read the book as well. It's good -- it's different from other learning Unix books because he really wants you to learn the concepts behind Unix -- to grok it. ThinkUnix author Jon Lasser pages 294 publisher Que 2000 rating 8 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 0-7897-2376-x summary Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking.

In a world full of volumes like Linux: The Complete Reference, Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 Unleashed, Corel Linux for Dummies and so forth, Lasser's Think Unix is a breath of fresh air. Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking. He also captures something of the way in which Unix is a way of life and a culture, not just an operating system, with a good leavening of humour, history, and hackish lore. One consequence of this approach is that Think Unix will date far less quickly than most operating system books. I recommend it to computer science students, techies coming from non-Unix backgrounds, or anyone more interested in understanding the underlying ideas of Unix than solving particular problems.

Lasser starts with a chapter on documentation, explaining how to use "man" to read manual entries and touching on other forms of documentation. He then introduces the building blocks of Unix - files and processes and redirection and pipes. A brief look at TCP/IP networking, showing how to interact directly with some common network services using telnet, is followed by an introduction to vi and sed and basic regular expressions. Four chapters then deal with shell scripting in more detail, touching on differences between shells, variables and quoting, control structures, and aliases, functions, and scripts. A quick look at X explains its general design, something of the variety of window managers and desktops available, and basic configuration of startup, resources, and fonts.

Obviously a lot is left out of this (there is nothing about system administration, for example), but it provides solid foundations for further learning. And a number of topics sneak in "in passing": a mention of ssh (and associated legal issues) and a little bit about termcap and terminfo, among other things. Some practice problems are included, simple exercises to test understanding and help learning; answers to these are provided in the appendices, along with a short glossary (which includes pointers to other resources).

Think Unix has an unfortunate number of typos, including a few in code examples. And there are a few things I might have done differently (I'd have ditched most of the grainy greyscale half-page screenshots of different window managers and desktop environments, for example). Overall, however, it's a great book and the biggest problem it poses me is working out which of my "clueful but not Unix-literate" friends to pass my review copy on to.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>
Reviews of more than five hundred other books: Subjects | Titles | Authors | Latest

Jon Lasser is the author of ThinkUnix a new learning UNIX/how-to. While Danny Yee of dannyreviews actually wrote the review, I've read the book as well. It's good -- it's different from other learning Unix books because he really wants you to learn the concepts behind Unix -- to grok it. ThinkUnix author Jon Lasser pages 294 publisher Que 2000 rating 8 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 0-7897-2376-x summary Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking.

In a world full of volumes like Linux: The Complete Reference, Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 Unleashed, Corel Linux for Dummies and so forth, Lasser's Think Unix is a breath of fresh air. Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking. He also captures something of the way in which Unix is a way of life and a culture, not just an operating system, with a good leavening of humour, history, and hackish lore. One consequence of this approach is that Think Unix will date far less quickly than most operating system books. I recommend it to computer science students, techies coming from non-Unix backgrounds, or anyone more interested in understanding the underlying ideas of Unix than solving particular problems.

Lasser starts with a chapter on documentation, explaining how to use "man" to read manual entries and touching on other forms of documentation. He then introduces the building blocks of Unix - files and processes and redirection and pipes. A brief look at TCP/IP networking, showing how to interact directly with some common network services using telnet, is followed by an introduction to vi and sed and basic regular expressions. Four chapters then deal with shell scripting in more detail, touching on differences between shells, variables and quoting, control structures, and aliases, functions, and scripts. A quick look at X explains its general design, something of the variety of window managers and desktops available, and basic configuration of startup, resources, and fonts.

Obviously a lot is left out of this (there is nothing about system administration, for example), but it provides solid foundations for further learning. And a number of topics sneak in "in passing": a mention of ssh (and associated legal issues) and a little bit about termcap and terminfo, among other things. Some practice problems are included, simple exercises to test understanding and help learning; answers to these are provided in the appendices, along with a short glossary (which includes pointers to other resources).

Think Unix has an unfortunate number of typos, including a few in code examples. And there are a few things I might have done differently (I'd have ditched most of the grainy greyscale half-page screenshots of different window managers and desktop environments, for example). Overall, however, it's a great book and the biggest problem it poses me is working out which of my "clueful but not Unix-literate" friends to pass my review copy on to.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>
Reviews of more than five hundred other books: Subjects | Titles | Authors | Latest

Jon Lasser is the author of ThinkUnix a new learning UNIX/how-to. While Danny Yee of dannyreviews actually wrote the review, I've read the book as well. It's good -- it's different from other learning Unix books because he really wants you to learn the concepts behind Unix -- to grok it. ThinkUnix author Jon Lasser pages 294 publisher Que 2000 rating 8 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 0-7897-2376-x summary Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking.

In a world full of volumes like Linux: The Complete Reference, Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 Unleashed, Corel Linux for Dummies and so forth, Lasser's Think Unix is a breath of fresh air. Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking. He also captures something of the way in which Unix is a way of life and a culture, not just an operating system, with a good leavening of humour, history, and hackish lore. One consequence of this approach is that Think Unix will date far less quickly than most operating system books. I recommend it to computer science students, techies coming from non-Unix backgrounds, or anyone more interested in understanding the underlying ideas of Unix than solving particular problems.

Lasser starts with a chapter on documentation, explaining how to use "man" to read manual entries and touching on other forms of documentation. He then introduces the building blocks of Unix - files and processes and redirection and pipes. A brief look at TCP/IP networking, showing how to interact directly with some common network services using telnet, is followed by an introduction to vi and sed and basic regular expressions. Four chapters then deal with shell scripting in more detail, touching on differences between shells, variables and quoting, control structures, and aliases, functions, and scripts. A quick look at X explains its general design, something of the variety of window managers and desktops available, and basic configuration of startup, resources, and fonts.

Obviously a lot is left out of this (there is nothing about system administration, for example), but it provides solid foundations for further learning. And a number of topics sneak in "in passing": a mention of ssh (and associated legal issues) and a little bit about termcap and terminfo, among other things. Some practice problems are included, simple exercises to test understanding and help learning; answers to these are provided in the appendices, along with a short glossary (which includes pointers to other resources).

Think Unix has an unfortunate number of typos, including a few in code examples. And there are a few things I might have done differently (I'd have ditched most of the grainy greyscale half-page screenshots of different window managers and desktop environments, for example). Overall, however, it's a great book and the biggest problem it poses me is working out which of my "clueful but not Unix-literate" friends to pass my review copy on to.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>
Reviews of more than five hundred other books: Subjects | Titles | Authors | Latest

Jon Lasser is the author of ThinkUnix a new learning UNIX/how-to. While Danny Yee of dannyreviews actually wrote the review, I've read the book as well. It's good -- it's different from other learning Unix books because he really wants you to learn the concepts behind Unix -- to grok it. ThinkUnix author Jon Lasser pages 294 publisher Que 2000 rating 8 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 0-7897-2376-x summary Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking.

In a world full of volumes like Linux: The Complete Reference, Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 Unleashed, Corel Linux for Dummies and so forth, Lasser's Think Unix is a breath of fresh air. Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking. He also captures something of the way in which Unix is a way of life and a culture, not just an operating system, with a good leavening of humour, history, and hackish lore. One consequence of this approach is that Think Unix will date far less quickly than most operating system books. I recommend it to computer science students, techies coming from non-Unix backgrounds, or anyone more interested in understanding the underlying ideas of Unix than solving particular problems.

Lasser starts with a chapter on documentation, explaining how to use "man" to read manual entries and touching on other forms of documentation. He then introduces the building blocks of Unix - files and processes and redirection and pipes. A brief look at TCP/IP networking, showing how to interact directly with some common network services using telnet, is followed by an introduction to vi and sed and basic regular expressions. Four chapters then deal with shell scripting in more detail, touching on differences between shells, variables and quoting, control structures, and aliases, functions, and scripts. A quick look at X explains its general design, something of the variety of window managers and desktops available, and basic configuration of startup, resources, and fonts.

Obviously a lot is left out of this (there is nothing about system administration, for example), but it provides solid foundations for further learning. And a number of topics sneak in "in passing": a mention of ssh (and associated legal issues) and a little bit about termcap and terminfo, among other things. Some practice problems are included, simple exercises to test understanding and help learning; answers to these are provided in the appendices, along with a short glossary (which includes pointers to other resources).

Think Unix has an unfortunate number of typos, including a few in code examples. And there are a few things I might have done differently (I'd have ditched most of the grainy greyscale half-page screenshots of different window managers and desktop environments, for example). Overall, however, it's a great book and the biggest problem it poses me is working out which of my "clueful but not Unix-literate" friends to pass my review copy on to.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>
Reviews of more than five hundred other books: Subjects | Titles | Authors | Latest

Jon Lasser is the author of ThinkUnix a new learning UNIX/how-to. While Danny Yee of dannyreviews actually wrote the review, I've read the book as well. It's good -- it's different from other learning Unix books because he really wants you to learn the concepts behind Unix -- to grok it. ThinkUnix author Jon Lasser pages 294 publisher Que 2000 rating 8 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 0-7897-2376-x summary Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking.

In a world full of volumes like Linux: The Complete Reference, Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 Unleashed, Corel Linux for Dummies and so forth, Lasser's Think Unix is a breath of fresh air. Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking. He also captures something of the way in which Unix is a way of life and a culture, not just an operating system, with a good leavening of humour, history, and hackish lore. One consequence of this approach is that Think Unix will date far less quickly than most operating system books. I recommend it to computer science students, techies coming from non-Unix backgrounds, or anyone more interested in understanding the underlying ideas of Unix than solving particular problems.

Lasser starts with a chapter on documentation, explaining how to use "man" to read manual entries and touching on other forms of documentation. He then introduces the building blocks of Unix - files and processes and redirection and pipes. A brief look at TCP/IP networking, showing how to interact directly with some common network services using telnet, is followed by an introduction to vi and sed and basic regular expressions. Four chapters then deal with shell scripting in more detail, touching on differences between shells, variables and quoting, control structures, and aliases, functions, and scripts. A quick look at X explains its general design, something of the variety of window managers and desktops available, and basic configuration of startup, resources, and fonts.

Obviously a lot is left out of this (there is nothing about system administration, for example), but it provides solid foundations for further learning. And a number of topics sneak in "in passing": a mention of ssh (and associated legal issues) and a little bit about termcap and terminfo, among other things. Some practice problems are included, simple exercises to test understanding and help learning; answers to these are provided in the appendices, along with a short glossary (which includes pointers to other resources).

Think Unix has an unfortunate number of typos, including a few in code examples. And there are a few things I might have done differently (I'd have ditched most of the grainy greyscale half-page screenshots of different window managers and desktop environments, for example). Overall, however, it's a great book and the biggest problem it poses me is working out which of my "clueful but not Unix-literate" friends to pass my review copy on to.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>
Reviews of more than five hundred other books: Subjects | Titles | Authors | Latest

Jon Lasser is the author of ThinkUnix a new learning UNIX/how-to. While Danny Yee of dannyreviews actually wrote the review, I've read the book as well. It's good -- it's different from other learning Unix books because he really wants you to learn the concepts behind Unix -- to grok it. ThinkUnix author Jon Lasser pages 294 publisher Que 2000 rating 8 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 0-7897-2376-x summary Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking.

In a world full of volumes like Linux: The Complete Reference, Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 Unleashed, Corel Linux for Dummies and so forth, Lasser's Think Unix is a breath of fresh air. Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking. He also captures something of the way in which Unix is a way of life and a culture, not just an operating system, with a good leavening of humour, history, and hackish lore. One consequence of this approach is that Think Unix will date far less quickly than most operating system books. I recommend it to computer science students, techies coming from non-Unix backgrounds, or anyone more interested in understanding the underlying ideas of Unix than solving particular problems.

Lasser starts with a chapter on documentation, explaining how to use "man" to read manual entries and touching on other forms of documentation. He then introduces the building blocks of Unix - files and processes and redirection and pipes. A brief look at TCP/IP networking, showing how to interact directly with some common network services using telnet, is followed by an introduction to vi and sed and basic regular expressions. Four chapters then deal with shell scripting in more detail, touching on differences between shells, variables and quoting, control structures, and aliases, functions, and scripts. A quick look at X explains its general design, something of the variety of window managers and desktops available, and basic configuration of startup, resources, and fonts.

Obviously a lot is left out of this (there is nothing about system administration, for example), but it provides solid foundations for further learning. And a number of topics sneak in "in passing": a mention of ssh (and associated legal issues) and a little bit about termcap and terminfo, among other things. Some practice problems are included, simple exercises to test understanding and help learning; answers to these are provided in the appendices, along with a short glossary (which includes pointers to other resources).

Think Unix has an unfortunate number of typos, including a few in code examples. And there are a few things I might have done differently (I'd have ditched most of the grainy greyscale half-page screenshots of different window managers and desktop environments, for example). Overall, however, it's a great book and the biggest problem it poses me is working out which of my "clueful but not Unix-literate" friends to pass my review copy on to.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>
Reviews of more than five hundred other books: Subjects | Titles | Authors | Latest

Jon Lasser is the author of ThinkUnix a new learning UNIX/how-to. While Danny Yee of dannyreviews actually wrote the review, I've read the book as well. It's good -- it's different from other learning Unix books because he really wants you to learn the concepts behind Unix -- to grok it. ThinkUnix author Jon Lasser pages 294 publisher Que 2000 rating 8 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 0-7897-2376-x summary Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking.

In a world full of volumes like Linux: The Complete Reference, Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 Unleashed, Corel Linux for Dummies and so forth, Lasser's Think Unix is a breath of fresh air. Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking. He also captures something of the way in which Unix is a way of life and a culture, not just an operating system, with a good leavening of humour, history, and hackish lore. One consequence of this approach is that Think Unix will date far less quickly than most operating system books. I recommend it to computer science students, techies coming from non-Unix backgrounds, or anyone more interested in understanding the underlying ideas of Unix than solving particular problems.

Lasser starts with a chapter on documentation, explaining how to use "man" to read manual entries and touching on other forms of documentation. He then introduces the building blocks of Unix - files and processes and redirection and pipes. A brief look at TCP/IP networking, showing how to interact directly with some common network services using telnet, is followed by an introduction to vi and sed and basic regular expressions. Four chapters then deal with shell scripting in more detail, touching on differences between shells, variables and quoting, control structures, and aliases, functions, and scripts. A quick look at X explains its general design, something of the variety of window managers and desktops available, and basic configuration of startup, resources, and fonts.

Obviously a lot is left out of this (there is nothing about system administration, for example), but it provides solid foundations for further learning. And a number of topics sneak in "in passing": a mention of ssh (and associated legal issues) and a little bit about termcap and terminfo, among other things. Some practice problems are included, simple exercises to test understanding and help learning; answers to these are provided in the appendices, along with a short glossary (which includes pointers to other resources).

Think Unix has an unfortunate number of typos, including a few in code examples. And there are a few things I might have done differently (I'd have ditched most of the grainy greyscale half-page screenshots of different window managers and desktop environments, for example). Overall, however, it's a great book and the biggest problem it poses me is working out which of my "clueful but not Unix-literate" friends to pass my review copy on to.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>
Reviews of more than five hundred other books: Subjects | Titles | Authors | Latest

A few years ago, knowing just a few html tags and tricks could probably have gotten you a job as a full-fledged Web designer, or at least Web coder. As things get more complicated and Web sites more dynamic, the tools you need to create that all-singing, all-dancing user-interactive content have gotten more complex than carets and single letter tags. Danny Yee wrote these reviews of two of the many available books on PHP programming; to see Danny's hundreds of other reviews, check out the links provided at the bottom.

Web Application Development with PHP 4.0; The PHP Pocket Refere author see each pages see publisher see each rating 8;6 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN see each summary Both of these books are intended to serve as references for PHP programmers, but take different approaches in doing to.

Web Application Development with PHP 4.0 is a book one can actually read: it contains no undigestible slabs of reference material or code (these are relegated to the accompanying CD). Coverage of a wide range of largely independent topics also makes it a great volume for browsing in. And as a system administrator who does only a little bit of programming, in a variety of languages, I appreciated its "broad overview" approach.

The opening chapter of Web Application Development is a very brief look at some general programming issues - code formatting, documentation, APIs - that are all too rarely mentioned in programming language books. The second chapter covers PHP "advanced syntax": lists and arrays, object-oriented programming, and a bit on polymorphism and self-modifying code. (I finally got a handle on PHP's slightly odd handling of lists from this.) And chapter three presents a development example, coding an IRC interface in PHP.

Chapters four through seven cover a large selection of topics: sessions and session-handling, security, usability, validating form data, CVS, COM and Java interfaces, database integration, authentication, templates, XML, and WDDX. Much of this is not at all PHP-specific. Of the thirty-two pages on XML, for example, the first twelve are a general introduction that is not at all language-specific (the remainder describe how to use the Expat and LibXML parsers built into PHP, with examples). And the material on CVS presents some PHP scripts for automating notifications, but is otherwise completely generic.

I found the last two chapters less interesting. Chapter eight contains three case studies of organisations using PHP, but these are more sales pitch than substance (I really don't think it makes sense to be "marketing" PHP three hundred pages into a book on the language). The final chapter of Web Application Development is about modifying the C code at PHP's core. I skipped quickly over this and suspect the vast majority of readers will do the same.

Title; Authors Web Application Development with PHP 4.0; Tobias Ratschiller, Till Gerken Publisher, ISBN New Riders, 0-7357-0997-1 Other 384 pages, includes CD

(Order Web Application Development with PHP 4.0 from Fatbrain.)

The PHP Pocket Reference is right at the other end of the readable/reference continuum. It has two tiny discursive examples (of form handling and database integration) but otherwise is pretty solid: thirty pages introducing PHP syntax are followed by eighty pages of function prototypes with one sentence descriptions. And yes, it will fit into a (large) pocket. I have used the Pocket Reference occasionally, but I suspect only because it has been sitting next to my computer while I write this review -- once it goes onto more distant shelves, using the online documentation will probably be faster.

Title; Authors The PHP Pocket Reference; Rasmus Lerdorf Publisher, ISBN O'Reilly & Associates, 1-56592-769-9 Other 114 pages

(Order The PHP Pocket Reference from Fatbrain.)

Danny Yee's Book Reviews
Home | Subjects | Titles | Authors | Publishers | Latest A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>, Copyright © 2000

A few years ago, knowing just a few html tags and tricks could probably have gotten you a job as a full-fledged Web designer, or at least Web coder. As things get more complicated and Web sites more dynamic, the tools you need to create that all-singing, all-dancing user-interactive content have gotten more complex than carets and single letter tags. Danny Yee wrote these reviews of two of the many available books on PHP programming; to see Danny's hundreds of other reviews, check out the links provided at the bottom.

Web Application Development with PHP 4.0; The PHP Pocket Refere author see each pages see publisher see each rating 8;6 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN see each summary Both of these books are intended to serve as references for PHP programmers, but take different approaches in doing to.

Web Application Development with PHP 4.0 is a book one can actually read: it contains no undigestible slabs of reference material or code (these are relegated to the accompanying CD). Coverage of a wide range of largely independent topics also makes it a great volume for browsing in. And as a system administrator who does only a little bit of programming, in a variety of languages, I appreciated its "broad overview" approach.

The opening chapter of Web Application Development is a very brief look at some general programming issues - code formatting, documentation, APIs - that are all too rarely mentioned in programming language books. The second chapter covers PHP "advanced syntax": lists and arrays, object-oriented programming, and a bit on polymorphism and self-modifying code. (I finally got a handle on PHP's slightly odd handling of lists from this.) And chapter three presents a development example, coding an IRC interface in PHP.

Chapters four through seven cover a large selection of topics: sessions and session-handling, security, usability, validating form data, CVS, COM and Java interfaces, database integration, authentication, templates, XML, and WDDX. Much of this is not at all PHP-specific. Of the thirty-two pages on XML, for example, the first twelve are a general introduction that is not at all language-specific (the remainder describe how to use the Expat and LibXML parsers built into PHP, with examples). And the material on CVS presents some PHP scripts for automating notifications, but is otherwise completely generic.

I found the last two chapters less interesting. Chapter eight contains three case studies of organisations using PHP, but these are more sales pitch than substance (I really don't think it makes sense to be "marketing" PHP three hundred pages into a book on the language). The final chapter of Web Application Development is about modifying the C code at PHP's core. I skipped quickly over this and suspect the vast majority of readers will do the same.

Title; Authors Web Application Development with PHP 4.0; Tobias Ratschiller, Till Gerken Publisher, ISBN New Riders, 0-7357-0997-1 Other 384 pages, includes CD

(Order Web Application Development with PHP 4.0 from Fatbrain.)

The PHP Pocket Reference is right at the other end of the readable/reference continuum. It has two tiny discursive examples (of form handling and database integration) but otherwise is pretty solid: thirty pages introducing PHP syntax are followed by eighty pages of function prototypes with one sentence descriptions. And yes, it will fit into a (large) pocket. I have used the Pocket Reference occasionally, but I suspect only because it has been sitting next to my computer while I write this review -- once it goes onto more distant shelves, using the online documentation will probably be faster.

Title; Authors The PHP Pocket Reference; Rasmus Lerdorf Publisher, ISBN O'Reilly & Associates, 1-56592-769-9 Other 114 pages

(Order The PHP Pocket Reference from Fatbrain.)

Danny Yee's Book Reviews
Home | Subjects | Titles | Authors | Publishers | Latest A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>, Copyright © 2000

A few years ago, knowing just a few html tags and tricks could probably have gotten you a job as a full-fledged Web designer, or at least Web coder. As things get more complicated and Web sites more dynamic, the tools you need to create that all-singing, all-dancing user-interactive content have gotten more complex than carets and single letter tags. Danny Yee wrote these reviews of two of the many available books on PHP programming; to see Danny's hundreds of other reviews, check out the links provided at the bottom.

Web Application Development with PHP 4.0; The PHP Pocket Refere author see each pages see publisher see each rating 8;6 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN see each summary Both of these books are intended to serve as references for PHP programmers, but take different approaches in doing to.

Web Application Development with PHP 4.0 is a book one can actually read: it contains no undigestible slabs of reference material or code (these are relegated to the accompanying CD). Coverage of a wide range of largely independent topics also makes it a great volume for browsing in. And as a system administrator who does only a little bit of programming, in a variety of languages, I appreciated its "broad overview" approach.

The opening chapter of Web Application Development is a very brief look at some general programming issues - code formatting, documentation, APIs - that are all too rarely mentioned in programming language books. The second chapter covers PHP "advanced syntax": lists and arrays, object-oriented programming, and a bit on polymorphism and self-modifying code. (I finally got a handle on PHP's slightly odd handling of lists from this.) And chapter three presents a development example, coding an IRC interface in PHP.

Chapters four through seven cover a large selection of topics: sessions and session-handling, security, usability, validating form data, CVS, COM and Java interfaces, database integration, authentication, templates, XML, and WDDX. Much of this is not at all PHP-specific. Of the thirty-two pages on XML, for example, the first twelve are a general introduction that is not at all language-specific (the remainder describe how to use the Expat and LibXML parsers built into PHP, with examples). And the material on CVS presents some PHP scripts for automating notifications, but is otherwise completely generic.

I found the last two chapters less interesting. Chapter eight contains three case studies of organisations using PHP, but these are more sales pitch than substance (I really don't think it makes sense to be "marketing" PHP three hundred pages into a book on the language). The final chapter of Web Application Development is about modifying the C code at PHP's core. I skipped quickly over this and suspect the vast majority of readers will do the same.

Title; Authors Web Application Development with PHP 4.0; Tobias Ratschiller, Till Gerken Publisher, ISBN New Riders, 0-7357-0997-1 Other 384 pages, includes CD

(Order Web Application Development with PHP 4.0 from Fatbrain.)

The PHP Pocket Reference is right at the other end of the readable/reference continuum. It has two tiny discursive examples (of form handling and database integration) but otherwise is pretty solid: thirty pages introducing PHP syntax are followed by eighty pages of function prototypes with one sentence descriptions. And yes, it will fit into a (large) pocket. I have used the Pocket Reference occasionally, but I suspect only because it has been sitting next to my computer while I write this review -- once it goes onto more distant shelves, using the online documentation will probably be faster.

Title; Authors The PHP Pocket Reference; Rasmus Lerdorf Publisher, ISBN O'Reilly & Associates, 1-56592-769-9 Other 114 pages

(Order The PHP Pocket Reference from Fatbrain.)

Danny Yee's Book Reviews
Home | Subjects | Titles | Authors | Publishers | Latest A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>, Copyright © 2000

A few years ago, knowing just a few html tags and tricks could probably have gotten you a job as a full-fledged Web designer, or at least Web coder. As things get more complicated and Web sites more dynamic, the tools you need to create that all-singing, all-dancing user-interactive content have gotten more complex than carets and single letter tags. Danny Yee wrote these reviews of two of the many available books on PHP programming; to see Danny's hundreds of other reviews, check out the links provided at the bottom.

Web Application Development with PHP 4.0; The PHP Pocket Refere author see each pages see publisher see each rating 8;6 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN see each summary Both of these books are intended to serve as references for PHP programmers, but take different approaches in doing to.

Web Application Development with PHP 4.0 is a book one can actually read: it contains no undigestible slabs of reference material or code (these are relegated to the accompanying CD). Coverage of a wide range of largely independent topics also makes it a great volume for browsing in. And as a system administrator who does only a little bit of programming, in a variety of languages, I appreciated its "broad overview" approach.

The opening chapter of Web Application Development is a very brief look at some general programming issues - code formatting, documentation, APIs - that are all too rarely mentioned in programming language books. The second chapter covers PHP "advanced syntax": lists and arrays, object-oriented programming, and a bit on polymorphism and self-modifying code. (I finally got a handle on PHP's slightly odd handling of lists from this.) And chapter three presents a development example, coding an IRC interface in PHP.

Chapters four through seven cover a large selection of topics: sessions and session-handling, security, usability, validating form data, CVS, COM and Java interfaces, database integration, authentication, templates, XML, and WDDX. Much of this is not at all PHP-specific. Of the thirty-two pages on XML, for example, the first twelve are a general introduction that is not at all language-specific (the remainder describe how to use the Expat and LibXML parsers built into PHP, with examples). And the material on CVS presents some PHP scripts for automating notifications, but is otherwise completely generic.

I found the last two chapters less interesting. Chapter eight contains three case studies of organisations using PHP, but these are more sales pitch than substance (I really don't think it makes sense to be "marketing" PHP three hundred pages into a book on the language). The final chapter of Web Application Development is about modifying the C code at PHP's core. I skipped quickly over this and suspect the vast majority of readers will do the same.

Title; Authors Web Application Development with PHP 4.0; Tobias Ratschiller, Till Gerken Publisher, ISBN New Riders, 0-7357-0997-1 Other 384 pages, includes CD

(Order Web Application Development with PHP 4.0 from Fatbrain.)

The PHP Pocket Reference is right at the other end of the readable/reference continuum. It has two tiny discursive examples (of form handling and database integration) but otherwise is pretty solid: thirty pages introducing PHP syntax are followed by eighty pages of function prototypes with one sentence descriptions. And yes, it will fit into a (large) pocket. I have used the Pocket Reference occasionally, but I suspect only because it has been sitting next to my computer while I write this review -- once it goes onto more distant shelves, using the online documentation will probably be faster.

Title; Authors The PHP Pocket Reference; Rasmus Lerdorf Publisher, ISBN O'Reilly & Associates, 1-56592-769-9 Other 114 pages

(Order The PHP Pocket Reference from Fatbrain.)

Danny Yee's Book Reviews
Home | Subjects | Titles | Authors | Publishers | Latest A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>, Copyright © 2000

A few years ago, knowing just a few html tags and tricks could probably have gotten you a job as a full-fledged Web designer, or at least Web coder. As things get more complicated and Web sites more dynamic, the tools you need to create that all-singing, all-dancing user-interactive content have gotten more complex than carets and single letter tags. Danny Yee wrote these reviews of two of the many available books on PHP programming; to see Danny's hundreds of other reviews, check out the links provided at the bottom.

Web Application Development with PHP 4.0; The PHP Pocket Refere author see each pages see publisher see each rating 8;6 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN see each summary Both of these books are intended to serve as references for PHP programmers, but take different approaches in doing to.

Web Application Development with PHP 4.0 is a book one can actually read: it contains no undigestible slabs of reference material or code (these are relegated to the accompanying CD). Coverage of a wide range of largely independent topics also makes it a great volume for browsing in. And as a system administrator who does only a little bit of programming, in a variety of languages, I appreciated its "broad overview" approach.

The opening chapter of Web Application Development is a very brief look at some general programming issues - code formatting, documentation, APIs - that are all too rarely mentioned in programming language books. The second chapter covers PHP "advanced syntax": lists and arrays, object-oriented programming, and a bit on polymorphism and self-modifying code. (I finally got a handle on PHP's slightly odd handling of lists from this.) And chapter three presents a development example, coding an IRC interface in PHP.

Chapters four through seven cover a large selection of topics: sessions and session-handling, security, usability, validating form data, CVS, COM and Java interfaces, database integration, authentication, templates, XML, and WDDX. Much of this is not at all PHP-specific. Of the thirty-two pages on XML, for example, the first twelve are a general introduction that is not at all language-specific (the remainder describe how to use the Expat and LibXML parsers built into PHP, with examples). And the material on CVS presents some PHP scripts for automating notifications, but is otherwise completely generic.

I found the last two chapters less interesting. Chapter eight contains three case studies of organisations using PHP, but these are more sales pitch than substance (I really don't think it makes sense to be "marketing" PHP three hundred pages into a book on the language). The final chapter of Web Application Development is about modifying the C code at PHP's core. I skipped quickly over this and suspect the vast majority of readers will do the same.

Title; Authors Web Application Development with PHP 4.0; Tobias Ratschiller, Till Gerken Publisher, ISBN New Riders, 0-7357-0997-1 Other 384 pages, includes CD

(Order Web Application Development with PHP 4.0 from Fatbrain.)

The PHP Pocket Reference is right at the other end of the readable/reference continuum. It has two tiny discursive examples (of form handling and database integration) but otherwise is pretty solid: thirty pages introducing PHP syntax are followed by eighty pages of function prototypes with one sentence descriptions. And yes, it will fit into a (large) pocket. I have used the Pocket Reference occasionally, but I suspect only because it has been sitting next to my computer while I write this review -- once it goes onto more distant shelves, using the online documentation will probably be faster.

Title; Authors The PHP Pocket Reference; Rasmus Lerdorf Publisher, ISBN O'Reilly & Associates, 1-56592-769-9 Other 114 pages

(Order The PHP Pocket Reference from Fatbrain.)

Danny Yee's Book Reviews
Home | Subjects | Titles | Authors | Publishers | Latest A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>, Copyright © 2000

A few years ago, knowing just a few html tags and tricks could probably have gotten you a job as a full-fledged Web designer, or at least Web coder. As things get more complicated and Web sites more dynamic, the tools you need to create that all-singing, all-dancing user-interactive content have gotten more complex than carets and single letter tags. Danny Yee wrote these reviews of two of the many available books on PHP programming; to see Danny's hundreds of other reviews, check out the links provided at the bottom.

Web Application Development with PHP 4.0; The PHP Pocket Refere author see each pages see publisher see each rating 8;6 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN see each summary Both of these books are intended to serve as references for PHP programmers, but take different approaches in doing to.

Web Application Development with PHP 4.0 is a book one can actually read: it contains no undigestible slabs of reference material or code (these are relegated to the accompanying CD). Coverage of a wide range of largely independent topics also makes it a great volume for browsing in. And as a system administrator who does only a little bit of programming, in a variety of languages, I appreciated its "broad overview" approach.

The opening chapter of Web Application Development is a very brief look at some general programming issues - code formatting, documentation, APIs - that are all too rarely mentioned in programming language books. The second chapter covers PHP "advanced syntax": lists and arrays, object-oriented programming, and a bit on polymorphism and self-modifying code. (I finally got a handle on PHP's slightly odd handling of lists from this.) And chapter three presents a development example, coding an IRC interface in PHP.

Chapters four through seven cover a large selection of topics: sessions and session-handling, security, usability, validating form data, CVS, COM and Java interfaces, database integration, authentication, templates, XML, and WDDX. Much of this is not at all PHP-specific. Of the thirty-two pages on XML, for example, the first twelve are a general introduction that is not at all language-specific (the remainder describe how to use the Expat and LibXML parsers built into PHP, with examples). And the material on CVS presents some PHP scripts for automating notifications, but is otherwise completely generic.

I found the last two chapters less interesting. Chapter eight contains three case studies of organisations using PHP, but these are more sales pitch than substance (I really don't think it makes sense to be "marketing" PHP three hundred pages into a book on the language). The final chapter of Web Application Development is about modifying the C code at PHP's core. I skipped quickly over this and suspect the vast majority of readers will do the same.

Title; Authors Web Application Development with PHP 4.0; Tobias Ratschiller, Till Gerken Publisher, ISBN New Riders, 0-7357-0997-1 Other 384 pages, includes CD

(Order Web Application Development with PHP 4.0 from Fatbrain.)

The PHP Pocket Reference is right at the other end of the readable/reference continuum. It has two tiny discursive examples (of form handling and database integration) but otherwise is pretty solid: thirty pages introducing PHP syntax are followed by eighty pages of function prototypes with one sentence descriptions. And yes, it will fit into a (large) pocket. I have used the Pocket Reference occasionally, but I suspect only because it has been sitting next to my computer while I write this review -- once it goes onto more distant shelves, using the online documentation will probably be faster.

Title; Authors The PHP Pocket Reference; Rasmus Lerdorf Publisher, ISBN O'Reilly & Associates, 1-56592-769-9 Other 114 pages

(Order The PHP Pocket Reference from Fatbrain.)

Danny Yee's Book Reviews
Home | Subjects | Titles | Authors | Publishers | Latest A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>, Copyright © 2000

A few years ago, knowing just a few html tags and tricks could probably have gotten you a job as a full-fledged Web designer, or at least Web coder. As things get more complicated and Web sites more dynamic, the tools you need to create that all-singing, all-dancing user-interactive content have gotten more complex than carets and single letter tags. Danny Yee wrote these reviews of two of the many available books on PHP programming; to see Danny's hundreds of other reviews, check out the links provided at the bottom.

Web Application Development with PHP 4.0; The PHP Pocket Refere author see each pages see publisher see each rating 8;6 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN see each summary Both of these books are intended to serve as references for PHP programmers, but take different approaches in doing to.

Web Application Development with PHP 4.0 is a book one can actually read: it contains no undigestible slabs of reference material or code (these are relegated to the accompanying CD). Coverage of a wide range of largely independent topics also makes it a great volume for browsing in. And as a system administrator who does only a little bit of programming, in a variety of languages, I appreciated its "broad overview" approach.

The opening chapter of Web Application Development is a very brief look at some general programming issues - code formatting, documentation, APIs - that are all too rarely mentioned in programming language books. The second chapter covers PHP "advanced syntax": lists and arrays, object-oriented programming, and a bit on polymorphism and self-modifying code. (I finally got a handle on PHP's slightly odd handling of lists from this.) And chapter three presents a development example, coding an IRC interface in PHP.

Chapters four through seven cover a large selection of topics: sessions and session-handling, security, usability, validating form data, CVS, COM and Java interfaces, database integration, authentication, templates, XML, and WDDX. Much of this is not at all PHP-specific. Of the thirty-two pages on XML, for example, the first twelve are a general introduction that is not at all language-specific (the remainder describe how to use the Expat and LibXML parsers built into PHP, with examples). And the material on CVS presents some PHP scripts for automating notifications, but is otherwise completely generic.

I found the last two chapters less interesting. Chapter eight contains three case studies of organisations using PHP, but these are more sales pitch than substance (I really don't think it makes sense to be "marketing" PHP three hundred pages into a book on the language). The final chapter of Web Application Development is about modifying the C code at PHP's core. I skipped quickly over this and suspect the vast majority of readers will do the same.

Title; Authors Web Application Development with PHP 4.0; Tobias Ratschiller, Till Gerken Publisher, ISBN New Riders, 0-7357-0997-1 Other 384 pages, includes CD

(Order Web Application Development with PHP 4.0 from Fatbrain.)

The PHP Pocket Reference is right at the other end of the readable/reference continuum. It has two tiny discursive examples (of form handling and database integration) but otherwise is pretty solid: thirty pages introducing PHP syntax are followed by eighty pages of function prototypes with one sentence descriptions. And yes, it will fit into a (large) pocket. I have used the Pocket Reference occasionally, but I suspect only because it has been sitting next to my computer while I write this review -- once it goes onto more distant shelves, using the online documentation will probably be faster.

Title; Authors The PHP Pocket Reference; Rasmus Lerdorf Publisher, ISBN O'Reilly & Associates, 1-56592-769-9 Other 114 pages

(Order The PHP Pocket Reference from Fatbrain.)

Danny Yee's Book Reviews
Home | Subjects | Titles | Authors | Publishers | Latest A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>, Copyright © 2000

A few years ago, knowing just a few html tags and tricks could probably have gotten you a job as a full-fledged Web designer, or at least Web coder. As things get more complicated and Web sites more dynamic, the tools you need to create that all-singing, all-dancing user-interactive content have gotten more complex than carets and single letter tags. Danny Yee wrote these reviews of two of the many available books on PHP programming; to see Danny's hundreds of other reviews, check out the links provided at the bottom.

Web Application Development with PHP 4.0; The PHP Pocket Refere author see each pages see publisher see each rating 8;6 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN see each summary Both of these books are intended to serve as references for PHP programmers, but take different approaches in doing to.

Web Application Development with PHP 4.0 is a book one can actually read: it contains no undigestible slabs of reference material or code (these are relegated to the accompanying CD). Coverage of a wide range of largely independent topics also makes it a great volume for browsing in. And as a system administrator who does only a little bit of programming, in a variety of languages, I appreciated its "broad overview" approach.

The opening chapter of Web Application Development is a very brief look at some general programming issues - code formatting, documentation, APIs - that are all too rarely mentioned in programming language books. The second chapter covers PHP "advanced syntax": lists and arrays, object-oriented programming, and a bit on polymorphism and self-modifying code. (I finally got a handle on PHP's slightly odd handling of lists from this.) And chapter three presents a development example, coding an IRC interface in PHP.

Chapters four through seven cover a large selection of topics: sessions and session-handling, security, usability, validating form data, CVS, COM and Java interfaces, database integration, authentication, templates, XML, and WDDX. Much of this is not at all PHP-specific. Of the thirty-two pages on XML, for example, the first twelve are a general introduction that is not at all language-specific (the remainder describe how to use the Expat and LibXML parsers built into PHP, with examples). And the material on CVS presents some PHP scripts for automating notifications, but is otherwise completely generic.

I found the last two chapters less interesting. Chapter eight contains three case studies of organisations using PHP, but these are more sales pitch than substance (I really don't think it makes sense to be "marketing" PHP three hundred pages into a book on the language). The final chapter of Web Application Development is about modifying the C code at PHP's core. I skipped quickly over this and suspect the vast majority of readers will do the same.

Title; Authors Web Application Development with PHP 4.0; Tobias Ratschiller, Till Gerken Publisher, ISBN New Riders, 0-7357-0997-1 Other 384 pages, includes CD

(Order Web Application Development with PHP 4.0 from Fatbrain.)

The PHP Pocket Reference is right at the other end of the readable/reference continuum. It has two tiny discursive examples (of form handling and database integration) but otherwise is pretty solid: thirty pages introducing PHP syntax are followed by eighty pages of function prototypes with one sentence descriptions. And yes, it will fit into a (large) pocket. I have used the Pocket Reference occasionally, but I suspect only because it has been sitting next to my computer while I write this review -- once it goes onto more distant shelves, using the online documentation will probably be faster.

Title; Authors The PHP Pocket Reference; Rasmus Lerdorf Publisher, ISBN O'Reilly & Associates, 1-56592-769-9 Other 114 pages

(Order The PHP Pocket Reference from Fatbrain.)

Danny Yee's Book Reviews
Home | Subjects | Titles | Authors | Publishers | Latest A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>, Copyright © 2000

Jakob Nielsen is no Web-designer-come-lately. He's a respected, thoughful researcher and educator. When he speaks, (smart) people listen. The first review below is one of more than five hundred by reviewer Danny Yee. Likely to interest Slashdotters are reviews in the categories popular science, science fiction, and computing. Our second reviewer is Cliff Lampe, who brings his own expertise in human-computer relationships to the table. Readers may also want to read the Slashdot interview with Nielsen.

Designing Web Useability (The Practice Of Simplicity) author Jakob Nielsen pages 417 publisher New Riders 1999 rating 8/10 reviewer Danny Yee, Cliff Lampe ISBN ISBN 1-56205-810-X summary Down-to-earth, practical advice on making Web sites work at all levels.

Review One: Danny Yee

Designing Web Usability is the most important book on Web publishing yet to appear. While it contains little that is novel, at least to those who have read Nielsen's www.useit.com Web site and other such resources, the lessons it teaches have not reached widely enough: there are all too many Web sites that are a continual source of frustration and stress to users. (Nielsen begins by explaining why he chose to write a printed book on Web design: for comprehensive, sustained arguments online reading is not yet as effective as print. Another consideration is that, going by the utter un-usability of so many corporate Web sites, there must be many web site managers who don't actually use the Web: some of these might read a printed volume.)

At the core of Designing Web Usability, and two thirds of it by page-count, are chapters on page, content, and site design. The first covers cross-platform design, the importance of minimizing response times, how to use links effectively, and the advantages and disadvantages of style-sheets and frames. The second covers writing for the Web, micro-content (titles, headlines and so forth), and multimedia content (images, animation, audio, and video). The last covers navigation, home pages ("splash screens must die"), search support, and "URL design." Other chapters cover special usability issues with intranets, accessibility for users with disabilities, and internationalization and localization; in a final chapter Nielsen takes a stab at predicting the future of the Web.

Because Designing Web Usability addresses underlying ideas rather than specific technologies, it will date far less rapidly than most books on Web publishing. It doesn't contain as much as its 400 pages would suggest, since a lot of space is used for screen shots of example Web pages. (These are not, however, gratuitous, as is often the case with books on HTML.) Web publishing is very different from paper publishing, but Designing Web Usability is a high quality, usable book -- only a few minor things got past the proof-readers. Check Danny's Other 500 Reviews

Review Two: Cliff Lampe

The Scenario

In Designing Web Usability, Jakob Nielsen codifies his ideas and wisdom on user-centered design. This is the first book in a two-parter, to be followed by Ensuring Web Usability, which will be more analysis centered.When I first was reading through this book, the irony of reviewing a usability book for Slashdot absolutely thrilled me. A common complaint about Linux, whether deserved or not, is that it is completely unusable. Except for a few shots at both the Windows and Mac OS, Nielsen obviously stays away from this topic. On the other hand, his advice on Web design is well researched, sensible, and right on target. Since human/computer interaction is what may be referred to as my "bag," I found this book impressively concise and comprehensive.

For those who may have missed the usability boat, Nielsen advocates user-centered design. This is the radical idea that a computer is a tool for managing information, not an end in itself. As many of us know, this concept is remarkably easy to lose in the rush to make everything work in the first place. When it comes to usability, everyone has their ideas about what they like, and tend to include them in their own designs. The problem is, we creators of Web sites may be too far removed from our users by experience or some other perspective to be designing in their best interest.

Eminently practical, Nielsen gives step-by-step advice on how to design with your user in mind. His examples are backed by screenshot examples and extensive user studies. The first section deals with page-level design, with advice on colors, layout and use of special features. Further sections of the book deal with site and intranet design, usability issues surrounding various disabilities and the future of Web design. One especially welcome chapter deals with actual creation of content in a Web environment. Writing for the Web is vastly different from writing for other media, like newspapers or magazines, but this is rarely recognized.

Once Nielsen has dispensed with the advice that is applicable to the Web environment we all deal with today, he spends the last section discussing the future. As the author says, we tend to overestimate the short-term effects of technological change and underestimate the long term effects. Keeping this in mind, Nielsen makes some stabs at predictions of his own (like the gradual erosion of the Post Office) that seem accurate and eerie at the same time. He makes the good point that most of the user interfaces we deal with today are descendents of the 1984 Mac. That's like using your little aquarium net to snare salmon. With the eventual dissolution of Web browsers will come a need for user interfaces that more capably deal with a glut of information.

I have some advice for reading this book. Treat it like a computer manual, and don't necessarily read it from cover to cover. Read the section on content design for sure, but depending on your familiarity with human/computer interaction principles, you may want to poke around a little more. Fortunately, and in typical Nielsen fashion, the book is laid out perfectly to make this kind of browsing convenient. That being said, if you do read straight though it, you won't be disappointed.

What's Bad?

There are a couple of concerns I had with the book. One is that the layout is wacky, though I understand this is more the fault of the publisher than Nielsen. There is a straight narrative, like in any other manual, but it is broken frequently by screenshots and pull-out comments that attract attention away from the main narrative. The integration is good enough that you can pick up where you left off easily enough, but a tighter bundling of content with the visuals would have been welcome.

Secondly, the last chapter should have had some content stolen for the preface. Many of the limitations mentioned by Nielsen immediately beg the question of higher bandwidth on the horizon or more powerful computers. The book is so practical I almost found myself playing devil's advocate in response. At the same time, the advice is so well backed up by research, that to rail against it feels a little bit like yelling at your mom for telling you vegetables are good for you.

What's Good?

This book is so efficiently packed with tons of great advice that I read some sections again and again to make sure I didn't miss anything. Nielsen does not waste time over-elaborating his points, which is a welcome change from most books of this sort. The data from actual user studies are important to prove to a skeptical web developer that these considerations are real, and the actual examples of the Web pages and sites give incredible insight to the point being made. One of the pages captured even has a Jon Katz article on it.

So What's In It For Me?

If you are responsible for developing Web sites, or just a duffer who makes his greeting card collection available on the Web, read this book. The advice is sound, researched and proven over and over. If you are a usability engineer, this book may be on the general side for you, but otherwise it is the best introduction to these concepts assembled in one place that I have even seen.

As I was reading through this book, I kept thinking of various pages and sites that I had designed. What would be said if one of those pages had been captured and displayed? Would it be an example of what to do, or what only an idiot would do? These are good questions for any of us.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Jakob Nielsen is no Web-designer-come-lately. He's a respected, thoughful researcher and educator. When he speaks, (smart) people listen. The first review below is one of more than five hundred by reviewer Danny Yee. Likely to interest Slashdotters are reviews in the categories popular science, science fiction, and computing. Our second reviewer is Cliff Lampe, who brings his own expertise in human-computer relationships to the table. Readers may also want to read the Slashdot interview with Nielsen.

Designing Web Useability (The Practice Of Simplicity) author Jakob Nielsen pages 417 publisher New Riders 1999 rating 8/10 reviewer Danny Yee, Cliff Lampe ISBN ISBN 1-56205-810-X summary Down-to-earth, practical advice on making Web sites work at all levels.

Review One: Danny Yee

Designing Web Usability is the most important book on Web publishing yet to appear. While it contains little that is novel, at least to those who have read Nielsen's www.useit.com Web site and other such resources, the lessons it teaches have not reached widely enough: there are all too many Web sites that are a continual source of frustration and stress to users. (Nielsen begins by explaining why he chose to write a printed book on Web design: for comprehensive, sustained arguments online reading is not yet as effective as print. Another consideration is that, going by the utter un-usability of so many corporate Web sites, there must be many web site managers who don't actually use the Web: some of these might read a printed volume.)

At the core of Designing Web Usability, and two thirds of it by page-count, are chapters on page, content, and site design. The first covers cross-platform design, the importance of minimizing response times, how to use links effectively, and the advantages and disadvantages of style-sheets and frames. The second covers writing for the Web, micro-content (titles, headlines and so forth), and multimedia content (images, animation, audio, and video). The last covers navigation, home pages ("splash screens must die"), search support, and "URL design." Other chapters cover special usability issues with intranets, accessibility for users with disabilities, and internationalization and localization; in a final chapter Nielsen takes a stab at predicting the future of the Web.

Because Designing Web Usability addresses underlying ideas rather than specific technologies, it will date far less rapidly than most books on Web publishing. It doesn't contain as much as its 400 pages would suggest, since a lot of space is used for screen shots of example Web pages. (These are not, however, gratuitous, as is often the case with books on HTML.) Web publishing is very different from paper publishing, but Designing Web Usability is a high quality, usable book -- only a few minor things got past the proof-readers. Check Danny's Other 500 Reviews

Review Two: Cliff Lampe

The Scenario

In Designing Web Usability, Jakob Nielsen codifies his ideas and wisdom on user-centered design. This is the first book in a two-parter, to be followed by Ensuring Web Usability, which will be more analysis centered.When I first was reading through this book, the irony of reviewing a usability book for Slashdot absolutely thrilled me. A common complaint about Linux, whether deserved or not, is that it is completely unusable. Except for a few shots at both the Windows and Mac OS, Nielsen obviously stays away from this topic. On the other hand, his advice on Web design is well researched, sensible, and right on target. Since human/computer interaction is what may be referred to as my "bag," I found this book impressively concise and comprehensive.

For those who may have missed the usability boat, Nielsen advocates user-centered design. This is the radical idea that a computer is a tool for managing information, not an end in itself. As many of us know, this concept is remarkably easy to lose in the rush to make everything work in the first place. When it comes to usability, everyone has their ideas about what they like, and tend to include them in their own designs. The problem is, we creators of Web sites may be too far removed from our users by experience or some other perspective to be designing in their best interest.

Eminently practical, Nielsen gives step-by-step advice on how to design with your user in mind. His examples are backed by screenshot examples and extensive user studies. The first section deals with page-level design, with advice on colors, layout and use of special features. Further sections of the book deal with site and intranet design, usability issues surrounding various disabilities and the future of Web design. One especially welcome chapter deals with actual creation of content in a Web environment. Writing for the Web is vastly different from writing for other media, like newspapers or magazines, but this is rarely recognized.

Once Nielsen has dispensed with the advice that is applicable to the Web environment we all deal with today, he spends the last section discussing the future. As the author says, we tend to overestimate the short-term effects of technological change and underestimate the long term effects. Keeping this in mind, Nielsen makes some stabs at predictions of his own (like the gradual erosion of the Post Office) that seem accurate and eerie at the same time. He makes the good point that most of the user interfaces we deal with today are descendents of the 1984 Mac. That's like using your little aquarium net to snare salmon. With the eventual dissolution of Web browsers will come a need for user interfaces that more capably deal with a glut of information.

I have some advice for reading this book. Treat it like a computer manual, and don't necessarily read it from cover to cover. Read the section on content design for sure, but depending on your familiarity with human/computer interaction principles, you may want to poke around a little more. Fortunately, and in typical Nielsen fashion, the book is laid out perfectly to make this kind of browsing convenient. That being said, if you do read straight though it, you won't be disappointed.

What's Bad?

There are a couple of concerns I had with the book. One is that the layout is wacky, though I understand this is more the fault of the publisher than Nielsen. There is a straight narrative, like in any other manual, but it is broken frequently by screenshots and pull-out comments that attract attention away from the main narrative. The integration is good enough that you can pick up where you left off easily enough, but a tighter bundling of content with the visuals would have been welcome.

Secondly, the last chapter should have had some content stolen for the preface. Many of the limitations mentioned by Nielsen immediately beg the question of higher bandwidth on the horizon or more powerful computers. The book is so practical I almost found myself playing devil's advocate in response. At the same time, the advice is so well backed up by research, that to rail against it feels a little bit like yelling at your mom for telling you vegetables are good for you.

What's Good?

This book is so efficiently packed with tons of great advice that I read some sections again and again to make sure I didn't miss anything. Nielsen does not waste time over-elaborating his points, which is a welcome change from most books of this sort. The data from actual user studies are important to prove to a skeptical web developer that these considerations are real, and the actual examples of the Web pages and sites give incredible insight to the point being made. One of the pages captured even has a Jon Katz article on it.

So What's In It For Me?

If you are responsible for developing Web sites, or just a duffer who makes his greeting card collection available on the Web, read this book. The advice is sound, researched and proven over and over. If you are a usability engineer, this book may be on the general side for you, but otherwise it is the best introduction to these concepts assembled in one place that I have even seen.

As I was reading through this book, I kept thinking of various pages and sites that I had designed. What would be said if one of those pages had been captured and displayed? Would it be an example of what to do, or what only an idiot would do? These are good questions for any of us.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Jakob Nielsen is no Web-designer-come-lately. He's a respected, thoughful researcher and educator. When he speaks, (smart) people listen. The first review below is one of more than five hundred by reviewer Danny Yee. Likely to interest Slashdotters are reviews in the categories popular science, science fiction, and computing. Our second reviewer is Cliff Lampe, who brings his own expertise in human-computer relationships to the table. Readers may also want to read the Slashdot interview with Nielsen.

Designing Web Useability (The Practice Of Simplicity) author Jakob Nielsen pages 417 publisher New Riders 1999 rating 8/10 reviewer Danny Yee, Cliff Lampe ISBN ISBN 1-56205-810-X summary Down-to-earth, practical advice on making Web sites work at all levels.

Review One: Danny Yee

Designing Web Usability is the most important book on Web publishing yet to appear. While it contains little that is novel, at least to those who have read Nielsen's www.useit.com Web site and other such resources, the lessons it teaches have not reached widely enough: there are all too many Web sites that are a continual source of frustration and stress to users. (Nielsen begins by explaining why he chose to write a printed book on Web design: for comprehensive, sustained arguments online reading is not yet as effective as print. Another consideration is that, going by the utter un-usability of so many corporate Web sites, there must be many web site managers who don't actually use the Web: some of these might read a printed volume.)

At the core of Designing Web Usability, and two thirds of it by page-count, are chapters on page, content, and site design. The first covers cross-platform design, the importance of minimizing response times, how to use links effectively, and the advantages and disadvantages of style-sheets and frames. The second covers writing for the Web, micro-content (titles, headlines and so forth), and multimedia content (images, animation, audio, and video). The last covers navigation, home pages ("splash screens must die"), search support, and "URL design." Other chapters cover special usability issues with intranets, accessibility for users with disabilities, and internationalization and localization; in a final chapter Nielsen takes a stab at predicting the future of the Web.

Because Designing Web Usability addresses underlying ideas rather than specific technologies, it will date far less rapidly than most books on Web publishing. It doesn't contain as much as its 400 pages would suggest, since a lot of space is used for screen shots of example Web pages. (These are not, however, gratuitous, as is often the case with books on HTML.) Web publishing is very different from paper publishing, but Designing Web Usability is a high quality, usable book -- only a few minor things got past the proof-readers. Check Danny's Other 500 Reviews

Review Two: Cliff Lampe

The Scenario

In Designing Web Usability, Jakob Nielsen codifies his ideas and wisdom on user-centered design. This is the first book in a two-parter, to be followed by Ensuring Web Usability, which will be more analysis centered.When I first was reading through this book, the irony of reviewing a usability book for Slashdot absolutely thrilled me. A common complaint about Linux, whether deserved or not, is that it is completely unusable. Except for a few shots at both the Windows and Mac OS, Nielsen obviously stays away from this topic. On the other hand, his advice on Web design is well researched, sensible, and right on target. Since human/computer interaction is what may be referred to as my "bag," I found this book impressively concise and comprehensive.

For those who may have missed the usability boat, Nielsen advocates user-centered design. This is the radical idea that a computer is a tool for managing information, not an end in itself. As many of us know, this concept is remarkably easy to lose in the rush to make everything work in the first place. When it comes to usability, everyone has their ideas about what they like, and tend to include them in their own designs. The problem is, we creators of Web sites may be too far removed from our users by experience or some other perspective to be designing in their best interest.

Eminently practical, Nielsen gives step-by-step advice on how to design with your user in mind. His examples are backed by screenshot examples and extensive user studies. The first section deals with page-level design, with advice on colors, layout and use of special features. Further sections of the book deal with site and intranet design, usability issues surrounding various disabilities and the future of Web design. One especially welcome chapter deals with actual creation of content in a Web environment. Writing for the Web is vastly different from writing for other media, like newspapers or magazines, but this is rarely recognized.

Once Nielsen has dispensed with the advice that is applicable to the Web environment we all deal with today, he spends the last section discussing the future. As the author says, we tend to overestimate the short-term effects of technological change and underestimate the long term effects. Keeping this in mind, Nielsen makes some stabs at predictions of his own (like the gradual erosion of the Post Office) that seem accurate and eerie at the same time. He makes the good point that most of the user interfaces we deal with today are descendents of the 1984 Mac. That's like using your little aquarium net to snare salmon. With the eventual dissolution of Web browsers will come a need for user interfaces that more capably deal with a glut of information.

I have some advice for reading this book. Treat it like a computer manual, and don't necessarily read it from cover to cover. Read the section on content design for sure, but depending on your familiarity with human/computer interaction principles, you may want to poke around a little more. Fortunately, and in typical Nielsen fashion, the book is laid out perfectly to make this kind of browsing convenient. That being said, if you do read straight though it, you won't be disappointed.

What's Bad?

There are a couple of concerns I had with the book. One is that the layout is wacky, though I understand this is more the fault of the publisher than Nielsen. There is a straight narrative, like in any other manual, but it is broken frequently by screenshots and pull-out comments that attract attention away from the main narrative. The integration is good enough that you can pick up where you left off easily enough, but a tighter bundling of content with the visuals would have been welcome.

Secondly, the last chapter should have had some content stolen for the preface. Many of the limitations mentioned by Nielsen immediately beg the question of higher bandwidth on the horizon or more powerful computers. The book is so practical I almost found myself playing devil's advocate in response. At the same time, the advice is so well backed up by research, that to rail against it feels a little bit like yelling at your mom for telling you vegetables are good for you.

What's Good?

This book is so efficiently packed with tons of great advice that I read some sections again and again to make sure I didn't miss anything. Nielsen does not waste time over-elaborating his points, which is a welcome change from most books of this sort. The data from actual user studies are important to prove to a skeptical web developer that these considerations are real, and the actual examples of the Web pages and sites give incredible insight to the point being made. One of the pages captured even has a Jon Katz article on it.

So What's In It For Me?

If you are responsible for developing Web sites, or just a duffer who makes his greeting card collection available on the Web, read this book. The advice is sound, researched and proven over and over. If you are a usability engineer, this book may be on the general side for you, but otherwise it is the best introduction to these concepts assembled in one place that I have even seen.

As I was reading through this book, I kept thinking of various pages and sites that I had designed. What would be said if one of those pages had been captured and displayed? Would it be an example of what to do, or what only an idiot would do? These are good questions for any of us.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Jakob Nielsen is no Web-designer-come-lately. He's a respected, thoughful researcher and educator. When he speaks, (smart) people listen. The first review below is one of more than five hundred by reviewer Danny Yee. Likely to interest Slashdotters are reviews in the categories popular science, science fiction, and computing. Our second reviewer is Cliff Lampe, who brings his own expertise in human-computer relationships to the table. Readers may also want to read the Slashdot interview with Nielsen.

Designing Web Useability (The Practice Of Simplicity) author Jakob Nielsen pages 417 publisher New Riders 1999 rating 8/10 reviewer Danny Yee, Cliff Lampe ISBN ISBN 1-56205-810-X summary Down-to-earth, practical advice on making Web sites work at all levels.

Review One: Danny Yee

Designing Web Usability is the most important book on Web publishing yet to appear. While it contains little that is novel, at least to those who have read Nielsen's www.useit.com Web site and other such resources, the lessons it teaches have not reached widely enough: there are all too many Web sites that are a continual source of frustration and stress to users. (Nielsen begins by explaining why he chose to write a printed book on Web design: for comprehensive, sustained arguments online reading is not yet as effective as print. Another consideration is that, going by the utter un-usability of so many corporate Web sites, there must be many web site managers who don't actually use the Web: some of these might read a printed volume.)

At the core of Designing Web Usability, and two thirds of it by page-count, are chapters on page, content, and site design. The first covers cross-platform design, the importance of minimizing response times, how to use links effectively, and the advantages and disadvantages of style-sheets and frames. The second covers writing for the Web, micro-content (titles, headlines and so forth), and multimedia content (images, animation, audio, and video). The last covers navigation, home pages ("splash screens must die"), search support, and "URL design." Other chapters cover special usability issues with intranets, accessibility for users with disabilities, and internationalization and localization; in a final chapter Nielsen takes a stab at predicting the future of the Web.

Because Designing Web Usability addresses underlying ideas rather than specific technologies, it will date far less rapidly than most books on Web publishing. It doesn't contain as much as its 400 pages would suggest, since a lot of space is used for screen shots of example Web pages. (These are not, however, gratuitous, as is often the case with books on HTML.) Web publishing is very different from paper publishing, but Designing Web Usability is a high quality, usable book -- only a few minor things got past the proof-readers. Check Danny's Other 500 Reviews

Review Two: Cliff Lampe

The Scenario

In Designing Web Usability, Jakob Nielsen codifies his ideas and wisdom on user-centered design. This is the first book in a two-parter, to be followed by Ensuring Web Usability, which will be more analysis centered.When I first was reading through this book, the irony of reviewing a usability book for Slashdot absolutely thrilled me. A common complaint about Linux, whether deserved or not, is that it is completely unusable. Except for a few shots at both the Windows and Mac OS, Nielsen obviously stays away from this topic. On the other hand, his advice on Web design is well researched, sensible, and right on target. Since human/computer interaction is what may be referred to as my "bag," I found this book impressively concise and comprehensive.

For those who may have missed the usability boat, Nielsen advocates user-centered design. This is the radical idea that a computer is a tool for managing information, not an end in itself. As many of us know, this concept is remarkably easy to lose in the rush to make everything work in the first place. When it comes to usability, everyone has their ideas about what they like, and tend to include them in their own designs. The problem is, we creators of Web sites may be too far removed from our users by experience or some other perspective to be designing in their best interest.

Eminently practical, Nielsen gives step-by-step advice on how to design with your user in mind. His examples are backed by screenshot examples and extensive user studies. The first section deals with page-level design, with advice on colors, layout and use of special features. Further sections of the book deal with site and intranet design, usability issues surrounding various disabilities and the future of Web design. One especially welcome chapter deals with actual creation of content in a Web environment. Writing for the Web is vastly different from writing for other media, like newspapers or magazines, but this is rarely recognized.

Once Nielsen has dispensed with the advice that is applicable to the Web environment we all deal with today, he spends the last section discussing the future. As the author says, we tend to overestimate the short-term effects of technological change and underestimate the long term effects. Keeping this in mind, Nielsen makes some stabs at predictions of his own (like the gradual erosion of the Post Office) that seem accurate and eerie at the same time. He makes the good point that most of the user interfaces we deal with today are descendents of the 1984 Mac. That's like using your little aquarium net to snare salmon. With the eventual dissolution of Web browsers will come a need for user interfaces that more capably deal with a glut of information.

I have some advice for reading this book. Treat it like a computer manual, and don't necessarily read it from cover to cover. Read the section on content design for sure, but depending on your familiarity with human/computer interaction principles, you may want to poke around a little more. Fortunately, and in typical Nielsen fashion, the book is laid out perfectly to make this kind of browsing convenient. That being said, if you do read straight though it, you won't be disappointed.

What's Bad?

There are a couple of concerns I had with the book. One is that the layout is wacky, though I understand this is more the fault of the publisher than Nielsen. There is a straight narrative, like in any other manual, but it is broken frequently by screenshots and pull-out comments that attract attention away from the main narrative. The integration is good enough that you can pick up where you left off easily enough, but a tighter bundling of content with the visuals would have been welcome.

Secondly, the last chapter should have had some content stolen for the preface. Many of the limitations mentioned by Nielsen immediately beg the question of higher bandwidth on the horizon or more powerful computers. The book is so practical I almost found myself playing devil's advocate in response. At the same time, the advice is so well backed up by research, that to rail against it feels a little bit like yelling at your mom for telling you vegetables are good for you.

What's Good?

This book is so efficiently packed with tons of great advice that I read some sections again and again to make sure I didn't miss anything. Nielsen does not waste time over-elaborating his points, which is a welcome change from most books of this sort. The data from actual user studies are important to prove to a skeptical web developer that these considerations are real, and the actual examples of the Web pages and sites give incredible insight to the point being made. One of the pages captured even has a Jon Katz article on it.

So What's In It For Me?

If you are responsible for developing Web sites, or just a duffer who makes his greeting card collection available on the Web, read this book. The advice is sound, researched and proven over and over. If you are a usability engineer, this book may be on the general side for you, but otherwise it is the best introduction to these concepts assembled in one place that I have even seen.

As I was reading through this book, I kept thinking of various pages and sites that I had designed. What would be said if one of those pages had been captured and displayed? Would it be an example of what to do, or what only an idiot would do? These are good questions for any of us.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Jakob Nielsen is no Web-designer-come-lately. He's a respected, thoughful researcher and educator. When he speaks, (smart) people listen. The first review below is one of more than five hundred by reviewer Danny Yee. Likely to interest Slashdotters are reviews in the categories popular science, science fiction, and computing. Our second reviewer is Cliff Lampe, who brings his own expertise in human-computer relationships to the table. Readers may also want to read the Slashdot interview with Nielsen.

Designing Web Useability (The Practice Of Simplicity) author Jakob Nielsen pages 417 publisher New Riders 1999 rating 8/10 reviewer Danny Yee, Cliff Lampe ISBN ISBN 1-56205-810-X summary Down-to-earth, practical advice on making Web sites work at all levels.

Review One: Danny Yee

Designing Web Usability is the most important book on Web publishing yet to appear. While it contains little that is novel, at least to those who have read Nielsen's www.useit.com Web site and other such resources, the lessons it teaches have not reached widely enough: there are all too many Web sites that are a continual source of frustration and stress to users. (Nielsen begins by explaining why he chose to write a printed book on Web design: for comprehensive, sustained arguments online reading is not yet as effective as print. Another consideration is that, going by the utter un-usability of so many corporate Web sites, there must be many web site managers who don't actually use the Web: some of these might read a printed volume.)

At the core of Designing Web Usability, and two thirds of it by page-count, are chapters on page, content, and site design. The first covers cross-platform design, the importance of minimizing response times, how to use links effectively, and the advantages and disadvantages of style-sheets and frames. The second covers writing for the Web, micro-content (titles, headlines and so forth), and multimedia content (images, animation, audio, and video). The last covers navigation, home pages ("splash screens must die"), search support, and "URL design." Other chapters cover special usability issues with intranets, accessibility for users with disabilities, and internationalization and localization; in a final chapter Nielsen takes a stab at predicting the future of the Web.

Because Designing Web Usability addresses underlying ideas rather than specific technologies, it will date far less rapidly than most books on Web publishing. It doesn't contain as much as its 400 pages would suggest, since a lot of space is used for screen shots of example Web pages. (These are not, however, gratuitous, as is often the case with books on HTML.) Web publishing is very different from paper publishing, but Designing Web Usability is a high quality, usable book -- only a few minor things got past the proof-readers. Check Danny's Other 500 Reviews

Review Two: Cliff Lampe

The Scenario

In Designing Web Usability, Jakob Nielsen codifies his ideas and wisdom on user-centered design. This is the first book in a two-parter, to be followed by Ensuring Web Usability, which will be more analysis centered.When I first was reading through this book, the irony of reviewing a usability book for Slashdot absolutely thrilled me. A common complaint about Linux, whether deserved or not, is that it is completely unusable. Except for a few shots at both the Windows and Mac OS, Nielsen obviously stays away from this topic. On the other hand, his advice on Web design is well researched, sensible, and right on target. Since human/computer interaction is what may be referred to as my "bag," I found this book impressively concise and comprehensive.

For those who may have missed the usability boat, Nielsen advocates user-centered design. This is the radical idea that a computer is a tool for managing information, not an end in itself. As many of us know, this concept is remarkably easy to lose in the rush to make everything work in the first place. When it comes to usability, everyone has their ideas about what they like, and tend to include them in their own designs. The problem is, we creators of Web sites may be too far removed from our users by experience or some other perspective to be designing in their best interest.

Eminently practical, Nielsen gives step-by-step advice on how to design with your user in mind. His examples are backed by screenshot examples and extensive user studies. The first section deals with page-level design, with advice on colors, layout and use of special features. Further sections of the book deal with site and intranet design, usability issues surrounding various disabilities and the future of Web design. One especially welcome chapter deals with actual creation of content in a Web environment. Writing for the Web is vastly different from writing for other media, like newspapers or magazines, but this is rarely recognized.

Once Nielsen has dispensed with the advice that is applicable to the Web environment we all deal with today, he spends the last section discussing the future. As the author says, we tend to overestimate the short-term effects of technological change and underestimate the long term effects. Keeping this in mind, Nielsen makes some stabs at predictions of his own (like the gradual erosion of the Post Office) that seem accurate and eerie at the same time. He makes the good point that most of the user interfaces we deal with today are descendents of the 1984 Mac. That's like using your little aquarium net to snare salmon. With the eventual dissolution of Web browsers will come a need for user interfaces that more capably deal with a glut of information.

I have some advice for reading this book. Treat it like a computer manual, and don't necessarily read it from cover to cover. Read the section on content design for sure, but depending on your familiarity with human/computer interaction principles, you may want to poke around a little more. Fortunately, and in typical Nielsen fashion, the book is laid out perfectly to make this kind of browsing convenient. That being said, if you do read straight though it, you won't be disappointed.

What's Bad?

There are a couple of concerns I had with the book. One is that the layout is wacky, though I understand this is more the fault of the publisher than Nielsen. There is a straight narrative, like in any other manual, but it is broken frequently by screenshots and pull-out comments that attract attention away from the main narrative. The integration is good enough that you can pick up where you left off easily enough, but a tighter bundling of content with the visuals would have been welcome.

Secondly, the last chapter should have had some content stolen for the preface. Many of the limitations mentioned by Nielsen immediately beg the question of higher bandwidth on the horizon or more powerful computers. The book is so practical I almost found myself playing devil's advocate in response. At the same time, the advice is so well backed up by research, that to rail against it feels a little bit like yelling at your mom for telling you vegetables are good for you.

What's Good?

This book is so efficiently packed with tons of great advice that I read some sections again and again to make sure I didn't miss anything. Nielsen does not waste time over-elaborating his points, which is a welcome change from most books of this sort. The data from actual user studies are important to prove to a skeptical web developer that these considerations are real, and the actual examples of the Web pages and sites give incredible insight to the point being made. One of the pages captured even has a Jon Katz article on it.

So What's In It For Me?

If you are responsible for developing Web sites, or just a duffer who makes his greeting card collection available on the Web, read this book. The advice is sound, researched and proven over and over. If you are a usability engineer, this book may be on the general side for you, but otherwise it is the best introduction to these concepts assembled in one place that I have even seen.

As I was reading through this book, I kept thinking of various pages and sites that I had designed. What would be said if one of those pages had been captured and displayed? Would it be an example of what to do, or what only an idiot would do? These are good questions for any of us.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Jakob Nielsen is no Web-designer-come-lately. He's a respected, thoughful researcher and educator. When he speaks, (smart) people listen. The first review below is one of more than five hundred by reviewer Danny Yee. Likely to interest Slashdotters are reviews in the categories popular science, science fiction, and computing. Our second reviewer is Cliff Lampe, who brings his own expertise in human-computer relationships to the table. Readers may also want to read the Slashdot interview with Nielsen.

Designing Web Useability (The Practice Of Simplicity) author Jakob Nielsen pages 417 publisher New Riders 1999 rating 8/10 reviewer Danny Yee, Cliff Lampe ISBN ISBN 1-56205-810-X summary Down-to-earth, practical advice on making Web sites work at all levels.

Review One: Danny Yee

Designing Web Usability is the most important book on Web publishing yet to appear. While it contains little that is novel, at least to those who have read Nielsen's www.useit.com Web site and other such resources, the lessons it teaches have not reached widely enough: there are all too many Web sites that are a continual source of frustration and stress to users. (Nielsen begins by explaining why he chose to write a printed book on Web design: for comprehensive, sustained arguments online reading is not yet as effective as print. Another consideration is that, going by the utter un-usability of so many corporate Web sites, there must be many web site managers who don't actually use the Web: some of these might read a printed volume.)

At the core of Designing Web Usability, and two thirds of it by page-count, are chapters on page, content, and site design. The first covers cross-platform design, the importance of minimizing response times, how to use links effectively, and the advantages and disadvantages of style-sheets and frames. The second covers writing for the Web, micro-content (titles, headlines and so forth), and multimedia content (images, animation, audio, and video). The last covers navigation, home pages ("splash screens must die"), search support, and "URL design." Other chapters cover special usability issues with intranets, accessibility for users with disabilities, and internationalization and localization; in a final chapter Nielsen takes a stab at predicting the future of the Web.

Because Designing Web Usability addresses underlying ideas rather than specific technologies, it will date far less rapidly than most books on Web publishing. It doesn't contain as much as its 400 pages would suggest, since a lot of space is used for screen shots of example Web pages. (These are not, however, gratuitous, as is often the case with books on HTML.) Web publishing is very different from paper publishing, but Designing Web Usability is a high quality, usable book -- only a few minor things got past the proof-readers. Check Danny's Other 500 Reviews

Review Two: Cliff Lampe

The Scenario

In Designing Web Usability, Jakob Nielsen codifies his ideas and wisdom on user-centered design. This is the first book in a two-parter, to be followed by Ensuring Web Usability, which will be more analysis centered.When I first was reading through this book, the irony of reviewing a usability book for Slashdot absolutely thrilled me. A common complaint about Linux, whether deserved or not, is that it is completely unusable. Except for a few shots at both the Windows and Mac OS, Nielsen obviously stays away from this topic. On the other hand, his advice on Web design is well researched, sensible, and right on target. Since human/computer interaction is what may be referred to as my "bag," I found this book impressively concise and comprehensive.

For those who may have missed the usability boat, Nielsen advocates user-centered design. This is the radical idea that a computer is a tool for managing information, not an end in itself. As many of us know, this concept is remarkably easy to lose in the rush to make everything work in the first place. When it comes to usability, everyone has their ideas about what they like, and tend to include them in their own designs. The problem is, we creators of Web sites may be too far removed from our users by experience or some other perspective to be designing in their best interest.

Eminently practical, Nielsen gives step-by-step advice on how to design with your user in mind. His examples are backed by screenshot examples and extensive user studies. The first section deals with page-level design, with advice on colors, layout and use of special features. Further sections of the book deal with site and intranet design, usability issues surrounding various disabilities and the future of Web design. One especially welcome chapter deals with actual creation of content in a Web environment. Writing for the Web is vastly different from writing for other media, like newspapers or magazines, but this is rarely recognized.

Once Nielsen has dispensed with the advice that is applicable to the Web environment we all deal with today, he spends the last section discussing the future. As the author says, we tend to overestimate the short-term effects of technological change and underestimate the long term effects. Keeping this in mind, Nielsen makes some stabs at predictions of his own (like the gradual erosion of the Post Office) that seem accurate and eerie at the same time. He makes the good point that most of the user interfaces we deal with today are descendents of the 1984 Mac. That's like using your little aquarium net to snare salmon. With the eventual dissolution of Web browsers will come a need for user interfaces that more capably deal with a glut of information.

I have some advice for reading this book. Treat it like a computer manual, and don't necessarily read it from cover to cover. Read the section on content design for sure, but depending on your familiarity with human/computer interaction principles, you may want to poke around a little more. Fortunately, and in typical Nielsen fashion, the book is laid out perfectly to make this kind of browsing convenient. That being said, if you do read straight though it, you won't be disappointed.

What's Bad?

There are a couple of concerns I had with the book. One is that the layout is wacky, though I understand this is more the fault of the publisher than Nielsen. There is a straight narrative, like in any other manual, but it is broken frequently by screenshots and pull-out comments that attract attention away from the main narrative. The integration is good enough that you can pick up where you left off easily enough, but a tighter bundling of content with the visuals would have been welcome.

Secondly, the last chapter should have had some content stolen for the preface. Many of the limitations mentioned by Nielsen immediately beg the question of higher bandwidth on the horizon or more powerful computers. The book is so practical I almost found myself playing devil's advocate in response. At the same time, the advice is so well backed up by research, that to rail against it feels a little bit like yelling at your mom for telling you vegetables are good for you.

What's Good?

This book is so efficiently packed with tons of great advice that I read some sections again and again to make sure I didn't miss anything. Nielsen does not waste time over-elaborating his points, which is a welcome change from most books of this sort. The data from actual user studies are important to prove to a skeptical web developer that these considerations are real, and the actual examples of the Web pages and sites give incredible insight to the point being made. One of the pages captured even has a Jon Katz article on it.

So What's In It For Me?

If you are responsible for developing Web sites, or just a duffer who makes his greeting card collection available on the Web, read this book. The advice is sound, researched and proven over and over. If you are a usability engineer, this book may be on the general side for you, but otherwise it is the best introduction to these concepts assembled in one place that I have even seen.

As I was reading through this book, I kept thinking of various pages and sites that I had designed. What would be said if one of those pages had been captured and displayed? Would it be an example of what to do, or what only an idiot would do? These are good questions for any of us.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.