Slashdot Mirror

AdamBa writes: "The New Yorker is running an interesting review of the book 'The Myth of the Paperless Office', also discussing 'Scrolling Forward'. Read it and the ever-informative Malcolm Gladwell will explain why paper enables collaborative work much better than computers do, why a messy desk is a sign of productivity, and give a little background on the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System to boot."

AdamBa writes: "The New Yorker is running an interesting review of the book 'The Myth of the Paperless Office', also discussing 'Scrolling Forward'. Read it and the ever-informative Malcolm Gladwell will explain why paper enables collaborative work much better than computers do, why a messy desk is a sign of productivity, and give a little background on the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System to boot."

Peter Wayner writes: "Metaphors drawn from biology have always fascinated computer scientists. No one speaks of subroutines that cp themselves through undocumented remote procedure calls because talk of 'computer viruses' carries all of the portent and weight of polio, anthrax, German Measles and tuberculosis. Invoking these mysterious and deadly images is more colorful than tech speak, even if most of the so-called viruses are closer to the common cold than the black plague. Why use a three-letter acronym when a biological metaphor is available?" Wayner wrote the following review of Peter J. Bentley's book Digital Biology, which may just answer that question. Digital Biology author Peter J. Bentley pages 272 publisher Simon and Shuster rating 7.5 reviewer Peter Wayner ISBN 0-7432-0447-6 summary Does a good job of bridging the analogical gap between the worlds of computers and biology; may not be deep but will probably enlighten readers with an interest in either or both of these fields.

It should come as no surprise that the infatuation is requited because some biologists are just as fascinated with the bits that live in computers. They love to wonder whether the software crosses the line and become a sentient being, whatever that may be. They want to know whether a programmer can play Dr. Frankenstein and create life or at least an indistinguishable imitation. They are entranced with the computer's ability to boil vast amounts of data into a coherent answer and they want to harness this power to solve problems about truly organic creatures.

Peter J. Bentley's new book, Digital Biology is a lively tour through some of the research that joins both of these worlds. It's a quickly paced, colorful examination of how computer scientists and biologists can share metaphors like "the immune system" or "growth." If both groups sit down and compare metaphors, computer scientists may learn something about building robust, self-healing, self-reproducing software from looking at carbon- based creatures while biologists will learn something about creatures by studying them with silicon-based software software.

The book is aimed at the same market that embraced the meme of "Chaos" through reading James Gleick's book. The book is light on equations and heavy on showmanship. In many cases, this is more than satisfying. One description of digital flocks of birds describes how three simple rules can keep the birds floating and swarming with all of the coordinated rolling and swooping. There's no need to invoke numbers or distance measurements to convey what's happening.

At other times, the examples can be so tantalizing that the lack of depth can be a bit frustrating. Bentley promises "The number of different applications that we have successfully used evolution for is immense." To explain this, he offers an example of a coffee table designed by a computer program mixing, matching and cross-breeding varieties. After each generation, the computer cuts some desks apart, creates new combinations and then uses an equation to find the most fit and desirable desks. Eventually, a reasonable candidate emerges. After explaining that genetic algorithms may find patterns of credit card fraud and help us find better jet turbine blades, there's no space to tell us the finer details. We do learn that stunning results can emerge when computer programmers mix the three principles of inheritance, variation and selection. But no book can include everything.

While the book is aimed at a broad market, it does not come with many of the traditional flourishes of journalism. Bentley is research fellow at University College in London, not a newspaper hack who churns out stories for a living. So when he introduces other researchers and colleagues, he doesn't bother with dressing them up with details about their homes, their wives, or the usual chestnuts journalists offer in the hope of humanizing the subjects. The book focuses on the ideas and metaphors themselves and doesn't bother with the window dressing. The names are just incidental markers to give credit and a pointer for further research. Scientists will love the lack of distraction, but casual readers looking for colorful anecdotes about the wacky geniuses in labcoats will need to look elsewhere.

The book, as expected, is generally enthusiastic and heavily invested in the field. Software modeled on biological systems, we are told, will, "detect crime for us, identify faults, ... design new products for us, create art, and compose music."

Despite this partisan flavor, the book shines in the few paragraphs where Bentley pauses to discuss some of the limitations of the systems. "We cannot prove that evolution will find us a good solution-- but it almost invariably does. And we certainly cannot predict that solutions that evolution generates," he notes as a caveat to everyone planning to use genetic programming to solve world peace.

At one point, he discusses one of the principle criticisms of the entire area. After describing flourishing digital forests filled with fractal ferns, problem solving viruses, and swooping swarms of evolving birds and insects, he pauses and offers this quote from another biologist: "Where's the experiment?" He notes that most of these creatures are flights of our imagination untested in the lab against real ferns, viruses or birds. Nor is there any real way to test a fern hypothesis. The digital versions look real, but there's little gritty lab work to establish them as true metaphors for sussing out the secret laws of nature. Is looking real enough? Can you measure verisimilitude? Do any traditional experiments measure anything better than the quality of a simulacrum? Is appearance enough or is it only skin deep? After a pause, though, the book is on to more talk of big payoff and grand promises.

In its heart, the book is more a document that shows evolution of problem solving techniques. If you want to get the sales pitch from the computational biology world, you can turn to this book. When there were no machines, scientists used symbols, algebra, calculus and other mathematics to describe the world. Biologists have long employed differential equations to describe the booms and bust in ecologies of predators and prey. Now that we have computers capable of billions of operations in a second, we don't need the old school of mathematics to provide a closed-form solution. The computers can just simulate the world itself. There's no need to struggle for a set of equations that is both easy-to-solve and appropriate. We can just use little worlds of sims creatures, sim fronds, sim viruses, and sim antibodies.

Bentley's book is an ideal way to learn just how and why some biologists are absolute enraptured with the new powers discovered by these computer simulations of genetics, growth, flocking and other natural phenomenon. These models don't offer the kind of concrete certainty of mathematical models, but there's no denying that something is somehow there. Is it as much a breakthrough as Bentley believes? Well, maybe you the reader can create a genetic experiment to cross fertilize the ideas from the book with the ideas in your experience. After a few generations of thought, perhaps a few generations of beer, an answer might evolve.

Peter Wayner is the author of Free for All, a book on the open source software movement and Disappearing Cryptography , the second edition of a book on steganography expected to appear later this spring. He is also the author of several articles on simulation including studies of studies of the relationship between sex and AIDS , segregation , and the length of baseball games. (Each of these links includes a Java applet so you can run the simulator from your browser.) You can purchase Digital Biology from Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

Steve McLaughlin writes: "When Chris Locke isn't writing business blockbusters like The Cluetrain Manifesto and Gonzo Marketing ,his alter ego Rageboy is churning out issues of the webzine Entropy Gradient Reversals. The Bombast Transcripts: Rants and Screeds of RageBoy is a collection of EGR's best and worst musings since it first hit the Web in 1996." (Steve's review continues below.) The Bombast Transcripts: Rants and Screeds of RageBoy author Christopher Locke pages 288 publisher Perseus Publishing rating 8 reviewer Steve MacLaughlin ISBN 0738206334 summary Subversive provocateur of the business world's version of "No more Mr. Nice Guy," packaged for your convenience.

While some writers are just starting to publish on the Web, Chris Locke is already offering readers a second helping of EGR in print form. This is just the sort of brain twisting high jinks that's made Locke infamous in the business and technology world.

The Bombast Transcripts reads like a recipe for some exotic elixir: One part prose, one part poetry, a splash of marketing genius, a double-shot of volatility, and some freshly squeezed satire. But be warned. You have to take the book in a bit at a time to avoid overdosing on Locke's unorthodox style. Over and over again Locke reminds readers that "I do not Question Authority, I piss on it at every opportunity."

In one chapter Locke recounts his nightmare conversation with the Under Assistant Counsel to the Executive Vice President for Legal Affairs at the 666 Corporation. In another he proclaims that "the greatest invention of the 20th Century is not the microchip, not extra-orbital flight, not bio-engineering" but instead "rock and roll." And who could forget chapter titles like "DiChirico Fends Off the Spectral Bats of Andalusia" and "Moe Ron Hubbard on Diuretics"?

This is not to say that The Bombast Transcripts is just 288 pages of random thoughts and hallucinogenic ramblings. Locke has also sprinkled in some of the most insightful ideas and commentary about business, technology, and the media. He lends his advice to companies that still don't understand how to communicate on the Web: "Congratulations on that new corporate homepage! You sound like a sexless droid with a badly damaged Personality Module." And who could forget the passage that reads: "I think many of us would prefer that those who don't 'get it' ... would either a) do so quickly, or b) get the hell out of the way."

I'm sure a lot of people will wonder why on Earth they should pay for something that they can already get for free on the Web. (That's what people used to say about cable television.) First off, think of The Bombast Transcripts as your portable guilty pleasure. It contains some of the best EGR moments, and you can literally open it up to any chapter and then let the mind games begin. Second, EGR subscribers have been getting something for nothing for years now. Now's the time to leave some change in the give-a-penny, take-a-penny dish. Just think of it as doing your part for the cause.

The Bombast Transcripts takes readers inside the sausage factory that is Chris Locke's mind. Please, no flash photography. You see how some of the ideas from both The Cluetrain Manifesto and Gonzo Marketing first sprang to life. It's not always a pretty sight, but the end result makes it all well worth it. I highly recommend ordering a healthy serving of The Bombast Transcripts, even if you've had a taste of it before.

You can purchase The Bombast Transcripts from Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

greg pryzby writes: "A friend has been pushing me to read a number of technical books lately. After reading Building Secure Software: How to Avoid Security Problems the Right Way (BSS:HtASPtRW), I decided I needed to spread the word." Read on below for Greg's word on this one. Building Secure Software: How to Avoid Security Problems the Right Way author John Viega, Gary McGraw pages 528 publisher Addison-Wesley rating 8.5 reviewer greg pryzby ISBN 0201-72152-X summary Good information for anyone involved with the creation of software which should be secure.

BSS:HtASPtRW should be available at your favorite book outlet. It is available in hard cover from Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series (white cover with blue strip). Since it is a security book, the forward is by Bruce Schneier and displayed on the cover. When you open the book, there are three pages of "Advanced Praise" for the book. So, the stage is set and the expectations are high. Will the book live up to the hype? I thought so.

Who should read the book? Anyone who cares about security. There is information for the manager, coder and everyone in between. Throughout the book, there are plenty of examples which I found very useful. John and Gary use code to show th at what they are talking about is not 'just theory'. That is right, there is code that shows the problems. That means samples of bad code, 'secure' code and code to show exploits.

I decided to look at a few chapters and talk about them specifically. Why did I pick these chapters? Because I found them interesting and thought others would too. I can't cover each chapter because I want John and Gary to write more books , so they need to sell a few copies!

Why do they do this? Isn't this giving the bad guys what they need? The bad guys have the information already. There is belief in the security community of full disclosure. This means not keeping things security and calling it secure. "Full disclosure means that hackers publicly disseminate information about your security problem, usually including a program that can be used to exploit it (sometimes even remotely)." (page 81)

Chapter 7 is on buffer overflows. I have read about buffer overflows for years. The chapter starts by explaining what a buffer overflow is and why it is a problem (pointy headed manager stuff). At this point John and Gary talk about how to protect yourself from buffer overflows. They start by listing problems in C and show why it is a problem. A list of functions that are 'bad' are given, but as any list, this isn't comprehensive. While avoiding the list is a good idea, you need to read why the calls are a problem so you can think about any call you use and why there maybe a buffer overflow.

The chapter then turns very technical. The difference between a heap and stack o verflow is discussed. An example is given that takes a C program and shows how to smash the heap and then how to smash the stack. This is pretty technical stuff , but very interesting. Finally an exploit is given. Very informative.

Chapter 9 is on race conditions. Time-of-check, Time-of-use (TOCTOU) is used to demonstrate a race condition. There is discussion on what a race condition is. John and Gary again step through code that is vulnerable and explain why it is vulnerable. Of course they show you how to write the code securely.

Chapter 10 is on randomness and determinism and lives up the the others. I know that random() isn't really random, is a pseudo-random number generator and should not be used when you need a real randomness. John and Gary give a great example to show how an online gambling poker application was open to cheating. Using some math and educated guessing, a GUI was written that would show you everyone's hand and how to win.

The next part of the chapter talks about how to generate randomness via software and hardware solutions. A discussion on entropy and how to determine the amount of entropy from the random source is given. Things get technical (I think), but you can follow the details or skim them. Regardless of how you decide to read this section, you will walk away with a better understanding of the problem.

I hope from the chapters I discuss, your curiosity has been peaked and you pick up a copy. There is other interesting stuff, like the 10 guiding principles for software security.

Web Resources
The web site recently was overhauled. The code from the book is there as well are web resources. It is worth it to take a look at the web site for more information and to get a feel for the information the book covers.

Contents
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction to Software Security
2. Managing Software Security Risk
3. Selecting Technologies
4. On Open Source and Closed Source
5. Guiding Principles for Software Security
6. Auditing Software
7. Buffer Overflows
8. Access Control
9. Race Conditions
10. Randomness and Determination
11. Applying Cryptography
12. Trust Management and Input Validation
13. Password Authentication
14. Database Security
15. Client-side Security
16. Through the Firewall

Appendix A. Cryptography Basics
References
Index

You can purchase Building Secure Software from Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

Craig Maloney submitted this review of Addison-Wesley's entry in the tough field of books on C (book title: C), and pulls no punches in comparing it to others. He says it's slightly above average, but that "experienced programmers will likely pass on this book." Read the complete review below for his reasoning. C (Addison-Wesley Nitty Gritty Programming Series) author Klaus Schr�der pages 400 publisher Addison-Wesley rating 5.5 reviewer Craig Maloney ISBN 0-201-75878-4 summary A slightly better than average C book with some very good points, but poor delivery.

Lost in the Company of Giants

It's hard not to take a book like C and compare it to such acclaimed and trusted books as K&R, Expert C Programming, and other lesser known, but equally good tomes. Unfortunately C doesn't really compare with many of the other classic books covering the C language. For starters, the writing in this book isn't quite up to the same caliber as the other books. Part of the problem with this book is language. English does not appear to be the author's native language. There are sentences in this book that require a few glances to glean the full meaning. C is difficult enough to present without a language barrier introducing more problems. Another problem is organization. The ideas presented at the beginning of the book are muddled and disjointed, with multiple ideas introduced but not formally explained until later. Beginners will have a terrible time working through this book without becoming quickly confused, and experienced programmers will likely pass on this book in favor of the other well-known books.

Not All Bad

The book is not all bad, however. The examples in the book are plentiful and are based on tried-and-true examples found in books like K&R. There are some idioms that are used in the examples that will irk the more structured programmers (not using braces in certain areas being the biggest example), but most of the examples are pretty good. Also, the explanations of the more advanced topics are relatively good considering how confusing the more basic material is. Memory management is explained well, with clear diagrams (although the programs are a bit confusing without a careful eye).

So What's in it for Me?

Addison-Wesley is clearly marketing this book to the same crowd that purchases quick-learning books. Unfortunately beginners purchasing this book will quickly find themselves lost amid the confusing descriptions in this book. Those who manage to muddle through will find some tasty bits of information locked inside, but the work involved in getting there outweighs the rewards. Most programmers will probably want to leaf through a copy of this book before purchasing it to make sure they'll get the most out of it.

You can purchase C from Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

Reader amoon writes: "With the rise of XML-based RPC (e.g. SOAP, XML-RPC, APEX), the distributed computing world is starting to really unsettle from the CORBA-RMI-DCOM oligopoly of the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, XML-based RPC is not a panacea (though it is quite cool), especially for those of us involved in the legacy and client-server worlds. Now, what is fascinating: the publishing world is revving up the engines on not only the XML-based RPC stuff, but also the RMI and CORBA stuff -- while rarely applied to the tech industry, the old adage, "what was old is new again," seems to fit well here. This review describes this über-cool trend from the RMI perspective, with a focus on Java RMI (O'Reilly) by William Grosso." Read on for the rest of the review. Java RMI author William Grosso pages 545 publisher O'Reilly rating 8 reviewer amoon ISBN 1-56592-452-5 summary Solid practical insight into the nitty-gritty details of RMI.

The Scoop

Remote Method Invocation (RMI) is the object-oriented remote procedure call (ORPC) facility for distributed programming in Java, since the 1.1 days. RMI also served as motivation and a proof-of-concept for jini, javaspaces, and numerous other solid distributed networking technologies. Of course, anyone from the academic distributed programming world knows Wollrath, Waldo, and Riggs.

Yet, despite a myriad of books over the past five years on network programming, RMI always seemed to be the stepchild: relegated to a single chapter (buried on page 496, of course) that always said that RMI was "better" than sockets and "worse" than CORBA. Now, granted that RMI is operationally rather trivial compared with CORBA and was (prior to RMI/IIOP) a unilanguage distributed ORPC technology -- but still. For those of us who have to interoperate with RMI (whether welcome from the Java world or not), the lack of in-depth technical analysis (beyond the spec) has been a hindrance.

Fortunately, this trend is finally starting to buckle with the release of several in-depth RMI books including: Java RMI, Java.rmi, and Mastering RMI: Developing Enterprise Applications in Java and EJB. As evidence of this problem, Grosso states the same in his introduction – and actually pulls it off without sounding self-serving.

I chose Grosso's text because of the cute squirrel (aka the O'Reilly brand), Grosso's recent series of articles on the hashbelt algorithm, and his unadulterated academic knowledge management and mathematics bent. Fortunately, I was rewarded: this animal returns to O'Reilly's pre-bubble quality. Koodoos to both Grosso and his editors (Knudsen, Loukides, and Eckstein) for getting the train back on the track.

What's to Like

Bottom line is that Grosso simply covers the topics and does so with solid conceptual and code coherence – even by O'Reilly standards (over 40 animals grace my shelves). His prose and explanatory patterns make it clear that he has actually gotten into the real-world of RMI, and doesn't hesitate to highlight both good and bad parts. You cannot be dozing off when you read this (at least not if you expect to understand it) -- this is written by someone with solid analytic thinking skills and it shows. After too many years of "there are no caveats" journalism and publishing, this is a nice reversion. Further, I can only imagine that his current employment is a testament to his real-world knowledge of RMI.

Grosso hits on a vein which is not well-appreciated: when not smoothed over by marketing people, RMI is actually a mostly-capable ORPC technology. Certainly activation and RMI/IIOP really began to make things interesting, from Java2 and EJB respectively. Discussion of reference-counted distributed garbage collection, a feature missing from CORBA and other popular ORPC standards, also contributes a nice bonus (although Grosso's ardent attempt to debunk the "RMI doesn't scale" argument is rather weak, even going so far as to rehash the definition of Threads and threadpools – this complexity mismatch is an ugly giveaway that a well-intentioned editor went astray).

What sets this text apart is the tight focus on nitty-gritty implementation details of RMI itself. After all, these RMI texts are way too late to the game to reteach how to write "baby RMI" code: 5 years after the original spec, you either know how to write RMI or you don't. Grosso simply gives you a solid in-depth analysis of all the obscurities of the RMI runtime, custom sockets, dynamic classloading, activation, MarshalledObjects, and HTTP tunneling. In other words, all the interesting real-world topics whose official documentation is poor and which the various RMI tutorials (written many years ago) ignored.

While canonical, the single banking example followed through the text was well-executed, although authors continue to underestimate the prevalence of readers who consume textbooks non-linearly.

What's Not to Like

RMI/IIOP is shaping up to be a fascinating contributor to the "cleanup the EJB mess" discussion. Dedicating a measly 13 pages (beginning on page 503, no less) to this critical topic seems a bit of an oversight – but maybe that is just my CORBA sentiments speaking. Either way, the mechanics of CORBA are sufficiently intricate in real-world deployments that saying "if you can build an RMI system, you can build a CORBA system" (p. 511) is a bit brazen (or naïve) for my tastebuds. I can only chalk up this oversight to deadline pressure, which is probably a Good Thing, since the book was supposedly in production over almost 2 years.

A minor point: the top-level organization of the book (Part I, II, III) is arbitrary, ignore it -- use the chapter organization instead.

The Summary

Quality: solid practical insight into the nitty-gritty operational implementation details of RMI in the real-world. You simply are not going to find solid O'Reilly-quality coverage of the topics elsewhere.

Relevance: If you are responsible for making RMI actually work in production systems, this might well be the next animal on your shelf – either now or later. If you want a breezy afternoon saunter around RMI, skip this. Instead, google one (of the many) free tutorials online."

You can purchase Java RMI from Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

SilverStr writes: "With all the recent discussion on organizations rethinking their security strategies, I thought I would do a review on one of my favorite books. I have stayed pretty quiet on /. over the years, but security is something I don't think developers anywhere should be taking lightly. Hopefully some of them will get something out of my review and pick this book up." Read on for the rest of his review of Ross Anderson's Security Engineering. Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems author Ross Anderson pages 612 publisher Wiley Computer Publishing rating 9.5 reviewer SilverStr ISBN 0-471-38922-6 summary An exceptional book on the dynamics of security engineering. A must have on all developers shelves who care about digital security and its impact on system design.

Introduction

The complexities of security engineering go beyond the ideals of understanding buffer overflows and considering that patching your systems is not an option. Many a Slashdot article (particularly the latest one on Louis Bertrand's OpenBSD presentation) has comments on the failings of code design. In Ross Anderson's book Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems, Ross goes into impeccable detail into the aspects of building systems resilient to malicious attack, abuse and programming error.

The book is well laid out, and in my opinion Ross properly segmented the topics in a way that makes the sections easy to read. The first section is focused on the many concepts of digital security such as protocols, access control and cryptography, and is written in a way so that you do not require a technical background to understand. It was refreshing to read how Ross explains cryptography in such a non-threatening manner that you can understand it without having to refer to Applied Cryptography from Bruce Schneier. Many authors have tried this in the past, and failed.

The second part of the book goes into considerable detail about practical and important applications such as banking and network attacks and defense. I have to be honest with you, I don't read a lot of books on software engineering that go into Radar Jamming and Nuclear Command and Control systems, and I found that sort of discussion exciting. (Although I have no interest in writing security code for the next cruise missile that will move the world to a level of DefCon quicker than that in movies like War Games, I still was quite interested in the approach.) Many of the examples and case studies that Ross explains bring the whole topic together to help strengthen the point about security engineering and its application to each system. Further to this, Ross' writing made me shutter to think about just how popular applications like bankcard systems have been written to be so weak and vulnerable. Before the book's main content, Ross includes an explanation the legalities of publishing some of this information. It wasn't until I started reflecting on some of the case studies that I realized how potent and valuable some of this information is, especially when I thought of potential risks that should have been mitigated and were not. Ross' examples should be considered textbook cases, though, and not information that can be drastically abused.

The third part looks into the organizational and policy issues faced with security engineering. From office politics to security and the law, this section goes into depth about managing security engineering and its affects on business and people. Compared to the rest of this book I found some of the topics in this section too short on detail, feeling like just a glancing blow, but still giving the reader enough information to seek more in depth content if they so choose. (Check out the bibliography for such information.) Discussing issues such as Carnivore, digital copyright, and system evaluation and assurance, this section rounds out the book quite well.

Why to Consider this Book

If you are a developer considering security (which should be all developers, anyways) this book provides a good balance on security engineering, and serves as an excellent reference work. It can work well as a textbook introducing developers to security engineering, and can be used as a good introduction to many dynamics of digital security. (Hint to COMP professors outside of Cambridge: get your students to read this book -- after you do of course).

Although you might not be able to use the section on radar jamming and its countermeasures directly, you may still be able to use principles in writing protected electronic systems while working on that new wireless system for Ma Bell. And finally, you should use this book as a brick in the foundation of learning on the concepts of writing secure code.

Something else you should consider in this book is the extensive bibliography in the back. If you want to follow up with more detailed information in any one section, Ross did an tremendous job in providing pointers to research papers and work done by others to read and research on. This in itself made the book well worth the money, as for me I have already read up and used some of the works I didn't have indexed to me before.

Wrap Up

If you are going to read this book and look for samples to write secure code, you are going to pick up the wrong book. This book is a cornerstone in building a strong foundation and understanding of security engineering. This book is goes beyond understanding the practical components of buffer overflows, stack smashing and code audits for review, and takes the reader into a new plain of understanding when it comes to security engineering. It is not a cookbook for lazy script kiddies to learn how to attack weak systems, but can be used to allow you to learn from others mistakes. You don't have to be a developer working on security systems to gain some knowledge from this text. Areas in the book such as that on E-Commerce can very much help bridge the chasm of bad web application design and can help you refrain from getting in the trap of fast application development full of vulnerabilities and exposing users to unnecessary online risk.

It is the responsibility of all developers to understand the risks they expose their software and their clients to. I am sure some developers will have some excuse where their web forms and applications do not require them to learn such silly things. That's fine. Hopefully I wouldn't need to use your systems. For the rest of us though, this is a must read.

Table of Contents

Part One

1. What Is Security Engineering
2. Protocols
3. Passwords
4. Access Control
5. Cryptography
6. Distributed Systems

Part Two

1. Multilevel Security
2. Multilateral Security
3. Banking and Bookkeeping
4. Monitoring Systems
5. Nuclear Command and Control
6. Security Printing and Seals
7. Biometrics
8. Physical Tamper Resistance
9. Emission Security
10. Electronic and Information Warfare
11. Telecom System Security
12. Network Attack and Defense
13. Protecting E-Commerce Systems
14. Copyright and Privacy Protection

Part Three

1. E-Policy
2. Management Issues
3. System Evaluation and Assurance
4. Conclusions

Bibliography

You can purchase Security Engineering from Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

Richard Miller contributed this review of New Riders' entry to the field of VPN books. No suspense, he gives the book a big thumbs up -- read on below for his reasoning, in particular a comparison to the previously available alternatives. Building Linux Virtual Private Networks author Brian Hatch, Oleg Kolesnikov pages 408 publisher New Riders rating 10 reviewer Richard Miller ISBN 1578702666 summary Finally, a VPN book you can use.

Rants

I've been on the lookout for a good VPN book since I first bought the O'Reilly VPN book in 1998. Yes, that book shattered my long standing belief that O'Reilly could do no wrong. The technical descriptions of VPN technologies were flawed and confusing, and they seemed to think that the only usable VPN technologies were commercial products. They only showed you implementations via screen shots of point-and-click GUI sessions. The one potentially portable section describing PPP over SSH was practically copyright infringement from the HOWTO, but with enough errors that they could make the case they had never actually read it.

For a while the O'Reilly VPN book was the only one out there. Then a few other publishers got into the mix. Unfortunately their results were no better. I could never find a book that had both a description of the protocols that would allow you to debug problems and implementation details that weren't so vague that they could apply to the installation of my washing machine. I must have bought half a dozen VPN books, all of which were severly lacking in crucial aspects that would make them usable. I had little stickies placed in them showing me which parts were correct and helpful, and would flop between them all whenever I needed to do something, because nothing got it all right.

Now I'm not here just to flame these other books, but I must let you get an idea for how I was feeling, because only then can you understand how much happier I am now. Now I can finally throw away all those other books.

Building Linux VPNs was written by Brian Hatch (of Hacking Linux Exposed fame) and Oleg Kolesnikov, and published by the New Riders, the same guys who do the SANS publications. It's not as thick as you might expect, coming in at 408 pages, but it's remarkably dense in a good way. No wasted space for boring screen shots, instead concentrating on well tailored diagrams when needed, code listings, and command line sessions.

Overview

Part one, the first two chapters, teaches you everything you need to know about general VPN technology, and discusses all the VPN issues you're going to face: various different network topologies you could use, how to get your routing set up on both servers and clients, DNS setups, how to use VPNs with firewalls (and where they could go) and more. These are the issues that the trickiest to get right when actually setting up a VPN, and something most other VPN books leave up to the reader to figure out.

Part two discusses standard VPN protocols. The first two chapters of this section discuss creating a VPN with PPP over SSH and SSL. For those of us who have implemented PPP over SSH following the HOWTO before, you'll remember how hackish it felt. The authors have come up with a much more modular (you can have any number of VPNs easily) and secure (they teach you how to set up your SSH keys or SSL certificates securely) method, and provide you all the code to do it. Following the step-by-step instructions, you could make a PPP over (SSH/SSL) VPN in about 30 minutes. Rock on.

They then dedicate two chapters to IPSec: one for the description of the protocol itself (which definitely deserves a chapter) and then one for the implementation of FreeS/WAN. IPSec is known to be a difficult beast to ride, and they do a really great job of giving you the information needed to get it right.

The last chapter of this part covers PPTP for both server and client. I was shocked to see PPTP discussed in a Linux book, but I guess the authors say it best when they said:

"There are times when you must support PPTP, either because you are forced to connect to a server that only runs PPTP or because you need to support remote Windows machines. In either of these cases, we offer our deepest sympathies."

Part three discusses non-standard VPN protocols. In the same detailed fashion, the authors devote three chapters to alternative VPN technologies VTun, CIPE, and tinc. While these technologies do not have IETF protocol drafts, they are nonetheless well defined, and work on multiple Unix platforms.

Analysis

In this day and age of '2nd/3rd/4th Edition' it's good to see a book that really hit the nail on the head the first time. Building Linux Virtual Private Networks has all the technical information you need to understand the protocols, set up your networks, and troubleshoot, and has the implementation details to get it all done almost entirely pain free.

It's extreemly easy to read, has a consistent style and tone, and uses just the right amount of humor to keep you interested in something that could be an extreemly boring technical topic.

One nice thing is that they defined their network early in the book, and they implemented each separate VPN technology using the same network, including host names, IP addresses, etc. This consistency really pays off in clarity to the reader.

Beefs

There's a good bit of code in the book, which is a great thing. They mention throughout that you can download the code online at their website, but it doesn't seem to be there yet. Hopefully this will get rectified. (You can still get a preview, though, at the book's official website. Good to see folks who don't blindly use ".com" for everything. )

Also, a lot of the software they discuss works on *BSD, Solaris, some even on Windows. Why does every book need to include the magic 'L' word in the title nowadays?

Kudos.

You can purchase Building Linux VPNs from Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

Here's the great irony: There's more censorship -- all kinds, everywhere, involving more media and culture -- than ever before. But it's doomed to fail. As the Net and Web become more commercial, and as parents, government, schools, politicians, churches and corporations have belatedly grown interested in controlling networked computing and the speech and intellectual property therein, battles over censorship and content -- from school blocking filters to music wars to efforts to curb sexual imagery -- have raged throughout cyberspace. That's why Chicago artist Antonio Muntadas' website "The File Room" may be one of the most significant sites ever created on the Web. Despite relentless efforts to curb art, speech, software, writing, thinking and the free flow of ideas, censorship as a contemporary idea is virtually impossible. The Net killed it, and now the Web is becoming a living, global archive of ideas people want to kill.

Artist Muntadas created "The File Room" (discussed in Steven Wilson's book Information Arts: Intersections of Science, Art and Technology as an archive of censorship, a living record of society's ceaseless efforts to control culture and values. The site uses the Web's global scope to collect and store essays, speeches and artistic works from all over the world which have been subject to censorship, from the Republic of Korea's criminal code to high school newspapers to art exhibits in rural areas city halls. "The File Room" classifies its growing holdings by location, date, media and so-called grounds for censorship.

Anybody can contribute new examples of censorship by filling out a short form on the site, which is also part of an art gallery in downtown Chicago.

The strange dichotomy is that the more censors try to curb information, the bigger and richer "The File Room" grows. Sadly, the site makes clear that the United States -- the creator of the modern idea of free speech -- has become one of the world's most ubiquitous censors. "The File Room" literally feeds off censorship, its archived categories growing all the time -- explicit sexuality, language, nudity, political/economic/social opinion, racial and ethnic, religious, sexual/gender orientation and numerous others. Many of these battles involve the so-called protection of children. The access to information and opinion the Net has given kids is one of the most terrifying ideas of the 21st century.

Beautifully organized -- with sections on visual arts, film/video, print, broadcast and electronic media, public speech, personal opinion, even commercial advertising -- the site has become a trove of ideas, opinions and artworks. It also carries an emotional punch. It's truly moving and outrageous to see some of the works (and thoughts) people and institutions are still trying to kill off. What a curious time -- the most sophisticated and open information machinery in history spreading like wildfire, and narrow-minded idiots all over the planet trying to turn back the clock. There are countless governments and institutions who still believe they can impose their views and values on their children and the rest of the world, if only they can practice censorship.

Online rights is a seminal issue, but the smaller fights sometimes obscure the new and much larger reality. Censorship as we used to know it is no longer a viable option as long as there is a World Wide Web.

Two Slashdot (and Slashcode) readers -- Alex McLintock of Openweb Analysts Ltd, and Dave Aiello of CTDATA -- have graciously contributed their impressions of the new O'Reilly book Running Weblogs With Slash. Since the Slash code is now used to run sites covering a huge number of topics (fly fishing, mountain biking, "news for nerds," etc.), it's time there was at least one printed reference to it. Running Weblogs With Slash author chromatic, Brian Aker, Dave Kreiger pages 262 publisher O'Reilly rating (see each) reviewer Alex McLintock ISBN 0-596-00200-2 summary It's the first book I know about slash: That means it's the best, and the worst.

dave_aiello's review:

I have been running two small-scale Slash sites since 1999. When I began developing web sites using Slash the only code available was Version 0.3, one of the first tarballs ever released by Rob Malda. That code was almost totally undocumented and not at all modular.

The Slash project has grown and the code has improved since then. Slash has now reached the point where it is a feature-laden, open source web publishing platform. However, documentation that can help new users has always been hard to come by.

I found a paragraph near the beginning of the book that I thought was important because it may help you to decide whether this book will be helpful to you:

This book is aimed at anyone interested in setting up and running a weblog with the Slash software. This includes system administrators and programmers, but attempts have been made to keep the discussion readable for people who have no desire to compile their own kernel or to rewrite the moderation system. It concentrates much more on how to accomplish things than how things work underneath, though it doesn't shy away from the greasy gears and wheels when appropriate.

The authors' choice of audience might also be why you have seen comments from some experienced Slash site maintainers indicating that they weren't entirely satisfied with the finished product. That's OK -- it wasn't written for them. But, if you have a desire to build a web site running on Slash and you don't want to spend the months that it took me to read the code line-by-line, "Running Weblogs with Slash" is a good place to start.

The main part of the book begins with an overview chapter. It starts with a brief history of the Slash project. The next ten pages are a review of the user interface of Slashdot, including a number of screenshots. This is followed by three important short sections: The Slash Author Interface (administration), The Slash Publishing Cycle, and The Slash Architecture. These sections do not contain screenshots, but author interface is discussed in detail later in the book, and the publishing cycle and architecture parts have diagrams to help you visualize the concepts being discussed.

The next chapter, Installing Slash, may be the most important one of the book. This chapter is surprisingly short (about 21 pages) considering the difficulty that some people have installing the software. Two of the most critical pages of the chapter cover getting help with the key underlying software: mySQL, Perl, Apache, mod_perl, and Slash itself. All of the important URLs and mailing lists are documented here. A short outline of the installation process, and a set of step-by-step installation instructions follow. There are also short sections on building sites that are distributed across multiple machines, and running multiple virtual Slash sites on the same server.

Although the installation chapter is clearly written, some users may have difficulty completing it without a little frustration. For instance, the book says "Although many UNIX-like operating systems come with Perl already installed, building Apache with mod_perl requires the Perl source." It would help if the detailed installation section of the chapter indicated how to uninstall a binary version of Perl from at least one of the major Linux distributions. The authors have been consistent, however, in focusing this chapter on critical, Slash-specific installation issues.

The next five chapters of the book focus on Slash site administration. The topics covered include editing and updating stories, reviewing and approving submissions, comment-related functionality, moderation, and managing sections and topics. These chapters are important because most people who want to implement a Slash site have never seen the administration interface and need some help understanding the tools that are available. These chapters are also helpful to people who have experience with other web publishing systems, because a quick comparison can be done between the Slash author interface and the system with which the reader is more familiar.

The main part of the book concludes with chapters on managing a Slash-based community, basic and advanced customization, and advanced administration. The customization chapters are the only places in the main part of the book where the Perl code that makes up Slash is discussed in any detail. Now that Slash implements much of the web site's look and feel through the Template Toolkit, modification of the application source is much less important than it used to be. The advanced administration chapter is primarily about the Slash daemon (slashd), the tasks it performs (dailyStuff, moderatord, portald), and how tasks can be added and modified.

The appendices are easily the most technical part of the book. They begin with a detailed discussion of the Slash architecture, which includes several process diagrams, and a discussion of the Slash directory structure. The second appendix discusses the Slash database schema. The appendix on the Slash Template Language looks quite useful to people trying to modify the appearance of their Slash site. The Slash API appendix covers some of the important high-level functions that would be useful in building your own Slash plugin or theme. The last appendix covers Slash configuration variables, which can be important if you have to modify the location of Slash content in your file system, or you need to change other fundamental aspects of your site's configuration.

I would strongly recommend this book to you if you plan to build a Slash-based site and you want to develop a basic understanding of the Slash software as quickly as possible. You will also need to find resources (either in print or on-line) to help you understand administration of the underlying operating system, Perl, Apache, and mySQL, if you have little or no background in these subjects.

I'm sure that many people will be able to successfully install and operate Slash by using this book as their primary reference. And, if they have difficulty, they will have sufficient understanding of the architecture and terminology to ask "good questions" on the mailing lists or the Slashcode web site.

Alex McLintock's review:

Executive Summary:

This review basically lists the flaws and missing features in the book. But that doesn't mean it is a bad book - just that it is easier to find fault than praise. If you need a book on running a weblog with slash then buy this book.

About the Reviewer:

My slash experience is in running a book reviews website http://news.diversebooks.com/ using slashcode. I did set up a site years ago called "mines-a-pint.com" using a pre 1.0 version of slashcode but the site fell over due to lack of spare time.

I am also a perl programmer and web developer so I can figure out a huge variety of problems with Apache, mod_perl, and MySQL. This is lucky because slashcode depends quite greatly on the administrator having those skills. Sadly this book doesn't look into them in great detail. Were this a Wrox book the publishers would have copied a few chapters from different books - or at least given more details on how to troubleshoot those systems. The O'Reilly strategy is that you can perfectly well buy their book on MySQL, their Apache book, and their mod_perl book(s).

Choosing Slash:

I was expecting more of a comparison of Slash to other weblogs. Why chose slash over others? It is in fact a hard question to answer unless you require a site really quite like http://slashdot.org The big benefit of being able to cope with a lot of traffic probably don't apply to most sites just starting out.

The book assumes you have greater than Slash 2.2.0, but presumably quite a few people such as myself have 2.0 installed and not upgraded yet. (I don't know how many people are running pre 1.0 slash sites). It doesn't mention how you upgrade. Lets face it - even if you installed the latest version today (2.2.5) you *will* have to upgrade at some point.

Setting Up Sites:

I expected this section to be a lot more detailed than the basic instructions - but it isn't so much better. When setting up slash sites there are at least three different types of user (slash, unix, and database) and these are not differentiated properly. The authors of the book fall too easily into using slashcode jargon without realising that someone coming to this for the first time wont know the slash-speak. I understand it because I've been reading the mailing list for nearly a year. However, someone picking up this book may not have.

Most jargon terms are introduced but they could be better explained - perhaps with more diagrams. As a typical example, it took me ages to understand the difference between topics and sections. It would have been great to see examples of how different slashcode sites decided what their topics and sections would be. Originally I just saw topics and sections as being a matrix of slots into which one would pigeonhole each article. However there are some things you can do with sections (the columns of the matrix) which you can't do with the topics (the rows). This seemed to me to be an arbitrary limitation of slashcode which an installer needs to be aware of when choosing topics and sections.

More screenshots of the default theme are needed. For instance it talks about the various slashboxes which are configurable but doesn't show them.

Virtual Slash Sites:

I pretended I was a newbie at this and tried to follow their instructions for installing virtual slash sites (ie multiple weblogs on the same machine). The instructions for setting up virtual users aren't complete. EG how do you *add* a new user to DBIx::Password I figured it out because I know perl but others may have significant problems....

Slightly Unusual Config:

I wanted to see if the book would tell me how to put all slash URLs inside a directory of a pre-existing site. (eg http://mysite.com/newsdir/slashpages ) but no found info on doing this at all....

This is a shame because it means that if you wish to combine slashcode with some other html you have to take the approach of installing slash and then adding the extra html content rather than the other way around. It should have considered the situation where someone already has a pre-existing website which they just want to enhance with some news capability.

Running a Slash Site:

There is not much description of the workflow of submitted articles through the system. Instead it is explained by describing what slashcode editors (aka "Authors") do. Looking at the article workflow is important because many other organisations will have different workflows and thus will need to change their behaviour to match Slashcode and not vice versa. This is generally a "bad thing".

Would I Buy This Book?

If I were installing slash for someone and I wasn't being paid to do all the maintenance I would have no hesitation in buying this book to help whoever is doing first line support. However I don't feel a desperate need to keep the book myself since I've already learned most of what it contains just by running a slash site. I know how to read the docs, look at the perl and database, and use the mailing list.

Ok - I can't do entirely without the book because it has some useful reference sections: a full third of the book is made from Appendices and index! One of the most useful of these is the chapter on Andy Wardley's Template Toolkit. I have a bit of an advantage here since I have used Andy's code before in a different web project. However most of my future slash site design will be done by a more junior web developer who doesn't have any perl experience and I expect this will be his most used chapter. (Check back to http://news.DiverseBooks.com in a few days for his additions to this review). The final appendix is useful too -- the list of configuration variables and their meanings.

You can purchase Running Weblogs with Slash from Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form. (Psst! O'Reilly has also made available a 20% discount for Slashdot readers ordering by phone (800-294-4747), email (order@oreilly.com) or from the O'Reilly web site. Use discount code "#E1EW36."

-cman- writes: "The issue of human impact on the global environment is one -- if not the most --important and divisive issues of our generation. There are two key questions involved; is human activity having a major impact on the climate of the Earth? What, if anything should be done to minimize that impact? It is within the lifetimes of most of Slashdot's readers that we begin to get answers to these questions. We will either begin to make policy and economic changes to protect the environment or we won't. And towards the middle and end of this century we will begin to see real-time data to validate some of the predictions being bandied about by environmental scientists. Amid all the uncertainty that the above two questions generate comes a new book, The Skeptical Environmentalist; Measuring the Real State of the World.." Read on for the rest of -cman-'s review. The Skeptical Environmentalist author Bjorn Lomborg pages 540 publisher Cambridge University Press rating 8 reviewer -cman- ISBN 0521010683 summary This book takes a careful look at existing environmental data, with some surprising conclusions and resulting controversy.

The book has caused quite a stir in the circles of environmental activism. Bjorn Lomborg, coming from a green background, has thoroughly reviewed much of the work in the field and raised some concerns about the quality of the consensus analysis and conclusions. Sample chapters and further defense of his work can be found at www.lomborg.com

Disclosure Statement: I am a small 'g' green. I am a member of the Viridian Design Movement if not of the Green Party USA. I hold as a matter of fact that dependence on hydrocarbons is unsustainable for both the developed world and as a path to long-term growth for the developing world. I strongly believe that it is a moral imperative for humanity to preserve as much of the planet's natural beauty and habitat as possible. My general impression with the state of climate studies is that human activity is probably having an effect on the global climate. To what extent is a matter still open for debate in my opinion. But hey, its OUR PLANET we're talking about, so why take chances? That said, I also consider myself to be just as rabid an empiricist. I detest being led about by phony data or false conclusions, and I will not support any cause that cannot bring itself to tell the truth to the public about its data and agenda. If the current data does not fit my model of how life should be, I know that I shouldn't blame the data or the messenger. So, I am trying to be as objective as possible here, but I am coming from the green end and analyzing this work in that light.

Lomborg is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Aarhaus in Denmark. His specialty, indeed his only other major academic paper, is in the field of game theory. Lomborg -- once upon a time a deep green himself -- set out in 1997 to debunk the claims of economist Julian Simon, a environmental degradation doubter. He found that much of the data had a tendency to support Simon. This lead him to a thorough review of much of the major scientific work in four major areas of "the environmental litany" (Lomborg's words).

• We are depleting a finite supply of natural resources.
• The human population continues to grow, threatening our ability to feed the teeming billions.
• Species are becoming extinct at an alarming rate, deforestation is accelerating and fish stocks are collapsing.
• The air and water are becoming ever more polluted.

The result was The Skeptical Environmentalist. In each of these areas, Lomborg looks at a broad swath of the scientific work done to date to support these claims and finds them wanting. He gets very specific and points out numerous errors of omission as well as slanting of the data and just plain making up results to fit the hypothesis. Lomborg accuses environmental scientists of behaving more like lobbyists trying to put the best possible spin on an issue by manipulating the facts. He also takes to task a credulous media for swallowing this tripe hook, line, and sinker, as it were. Sadly, in some key areas Lomborg has -- either through ignorance or purposefully -- committed errors of omission and selective data use to make some of the same mistakes in analysis, and this very much reduces his credibility.

The first thing that sets the book apart from almost all nonacademic works in the area is the completeness and openness of the research. The book is copiously footnoted. Because of this it is clear from some of the attacks on Lomborg that his critics have been unable to muster the stomach to give it a thorough read, as many make totally false claims about Lomborg's inclusion or reference to specific studies and specific cases. If for no other reason, this completeness makes The Skeptical Environmentalist a valuable resource for anyone interested in environmental science. It is a very complete bibliography of the current work in the field. There are over 2,900 end notes in this 500 page book.

The thing that makes the environment such a slippery public policy subject is its uncertainty. Although the state of our understanding of climate and ecological complexity grows each year, it is still unable to predict with any certainty future events. The only thing that will prove a particular set of data is the future. At which time, of course, it is impossible to take preventative action.

It is probably quite understandable that environmental scientists would take great umbrage at both Lomborg's cheek and his conclusions; seeing how they pose a threat to a consensus of opinion about the state of the global environment and the degree of risk human activity poses. These are people with years of interest vested in their research and in using that research to try and get through to public and politicians who show a lot of reluctance to take on the problems and potential threats of human impact on the environment.

Lomborg quite correctly points out in his chapter on pollution that the worst pollution effects are the results of the early and middle stages of industrial development. Here he states that things are getting better in the developed world and as technology advances, the environmental impact of human activity will be reduced. He acknowledges that something must be done to help the developing world find a different path of development than that already taken by the developed nations. Lomborg takes the green movement to task here for trying to do everything at once; forcing developing nations to spend on "clean" technologies while spending on health and economic development for the poor nations. After wading through what must have been a mind-numbing torrent of cost-benefit analysis data, Lomborg says that choices must be made, political and financial resources are finite and some levels of protection cost more than they are worth. However, one must deeply fault Lomborg's cost-benefit analysis for not making a good attempt to elucidate the cost of environmental degradation per se but instead focusing on pure human property and health costs. What price does one put on the stability of the Gulf Stream currents? What is the actual opportunity cost of one barrel of oil considering it comes from finite supply for which the actual amount is unknown and the burning of which causes environmental costs we can only approximate? These questions have vexed economists for decades, but the answers are surely not zero.

Lomborg's big picture of the general shape of the global climate and of biodiversity is one that debunks most of the more extreme forecasts. In this he has produced valuable analysis. But by his own admission he has skipped over local trends and impacts that have profound social and economic implications. For example, while stating that the actual rate of species extinction over the next 50 years is more likely to be 0.7% rather than the 20-50% numbers bandied about by the World Wildlife Fund et. al., he misses the threat of local species crashes such as that of Atlantic Cod that nearly ruined the fishing industry Eastern North America and Northern Europe in the 1980s and the resulting threat to previously unfished stocks as industrial fishing operations switched to roughy and so on.

The big picture and long-term focus also misses the boat on another key issue. Recent analysis of deep-ice core samples at the poles and in Greenland have shown that in the past, the climate has changed very sharply and very rapidly; on the order of several degrees of average temperature in a decade or less. These changes are probably due to snap changes in the ocean currents caused by salinity levels and minute temperature deviations that, when they go over a certain level "trigger" such events as the mini-Ice Age of the 1500s to mid-1800s. Lomborg completely bypasses addressing the fact that even the minimal human environmental impact he says the data supports could be enough to tip the balance in these areas. And should such evens occur, even Lomborg would admit they would be economically and politically devastating. Perhaps it is his rigid attention to what is measurable that prevented him from addressing this issue. There is too much uncertainty involved to begin to assess whether or not we even can prevent such "trigger" events and thus begin to make cost-benefit analysis of preventative measures.

The most shocking thing about The Skeptical Environmentalist is not its heretical views (in the eyes of greens) however, but the reception it has received among the environmental movement. Instead of praising its depth and using its own errors to show the way forward the community has -- in the grand tradition of the left eating its young -- gone after Dr. Lomborg with a furious anger. Recently, when Dr. Lomborg showed up at Oxford university, the author of an environmental study with a competing view shoved a pie in his face. In its January 2002 issue, Scientific American devoted 11 pages (electronic copies are US$5.00) to attacking the book, its author and his conclusions.

Not surprisingly, the free-market loving Economist has taken up the defense of Dr. Lomborg with both a lead opinion piece and a feature in the February 6th issue. In addition, the magazine had Lomborg pen a "by invitation" piece in August, 2001, a rare honor. The New York Times has also come to his defense with a "Scientist At Work" puff piece in November, 2001.

But by attacking the book and the author so shrilly, the environmental community risks its own hard-won credibility. It acts just as Lomborg accuses it, like lobbyists with an axe to grind, not cold-eyed, empirically-minded scientists. Lomborg's study has its flaws, as does any environmental study. But those flaws should be attacked on their merits alone. At its worst, The Skeptical Environmentalist merely muddies the waters of scientific and public consensus on global human environmental impact. At its best it provides a crucial reality check for those who seek profound social and economic changes in the name of preserving environmental sustainability.

You can purchase The Skeptical Environmentalist from Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

danny writes: "The New Chemistry is a survey of the science behind many of Slashdot's technology stories - read on for my review. (An older title of related interest is Chemical Evolution: Origin of the Elements, Molecules, and Living Systems )." Read on for the rest of Danny's review. The New Chemistry author Nina Hall, ed. pages 500 publisher Cambridge University Press rating 8.5 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 0-521-45224-4 summary an overview of modern chemistry and its applications.

The New Chemistry provides an overview of modern chemistry and its applications, with seventeen review articles by specialists. Though commissioned for this volume, these take different approaches and are pitched at different levels: some are quite broadly accessible, while others assume the reader has studied chemistry at university (I found my physics and biology background helped a lot). Apart from multiple explanations of semiconduction, there is little repetition and an immense range of material is covered. The result is a fascinating picture of the science underpinning much modern technology.

The first five articles involve a fair bit of physics. "The Search for New Elements" looks at the synthesis of elements beyond uranium. "Bonding and the Theory of Atoms and Molecules" touches on a mix of theory: chemical bonds, reaction dynamics, simulation of liquids, and mathematical chemistry. "Chemistry in a New Light" and "Novel Energy Sources for Reactions" look at new tools for controlling reactions: lasers, electrosynthesis, microwaves, and ultrasound. And "What, Why and When is a Metal?" explains how the well-known criteria for distinguishing metals and insulators don't always work; this is one of the more accessible chapters, with a good selection of colour illustrations and historical "boxes."

The more "pure chemistry" chapters were the ones I had the most trouble following. These include "The Clothing of Metal Ions: Coordination Chemistry at the Turn of the Millenium," "Surface Chemistry", and "New Roads to Molecular Complexity." Other chapters connect more with biology. "Medicines from Nature" illustrates the search for new medicines through a case study of Erythromycin biosynthesis. "From Pharms to Farms" has two parts, one surveying major drugs and fragrances and the other pesticides. And "The Inorganic Chemistry of Life" is an unusual abstract overview of life from the point of view of an inorganic chemist.

A range of chapters are oriented towards engineering applications; these will be of particular interest to those following new computing technologies. "Supramolecular Chemistry" is an accessible look at the building of structures, at the chemical approach to nanotechnology. "Advanced Materials" focuses on applications to electronics - alternatives to silicon, packaging materials, liquid crystals, plastic batteries, and more - while "Molecular Electronics" focuses on actual circuits, on conductors and switches and molecular computing. "Electrochemical and Photoelectrochemical Energy Conversion" looks in detail at a range of traditional and experimental battery and fuel cell systems, and more briefly at photoelectrochemical cells and photochemical waste disposal.

"Chemistry Far from Equilibrium: Thermodynamics, Order and Chaos" is the most mathematical chapter, presenting some dynamical theory with a few examples. And a final chapter "Chemistry in Society" outlines the contributions of chemistry back to the Industrial Revolution, and urges better research both to avoid environmental problems and to correct popular misconceptions.

Purchase The New Chemistry from FatBrain or check out Danny's 600 other reviews. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

markwelch writes: "Late last year, I read a truly awful book: Stephan Paternot's A Very Public Offering, a poorly-written account of the rise and fall of TheGlobe.com. The company has consistently been cited by critics as one of the worst/best examples of absurd internet-stock mania, but this book by the company's founder offered no real apologies, and provided very little insight. I don't blame Paternot, a young man who was willingly manipulated by market-makers, and who clearly is not a professional writer." Marc is less forgiving of writer John Cassidy, whose recent book Dot.Con he dissects below -- read on as he completes the thought. Dot.Con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold author John Cassidy pages 384 publisher HarperCollins rating 4 reviewer markwelch ISBN 0060008806 summary A disappointing, meandering examination of the boom-and-bust world of Internet commerce which doesn't even deliver on the promise of its title by naming names.

But John Cassidy can make no such excuses for Dot.Con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold. Cassidy offers no insight, and even fails to identify the "con" promised by the book's title. And his sloppy writing, riddled with factual and typographical errors, ensures that the book can't be accepted even as a "digest" of the events he reports.

A much better and more insightful book in this category is Michael Lewis' Next: The Future Just Happened An earlier example of a competent "industry chronicle" is Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer, by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. For a fascinating account of the "experience" of a dot-com bubble company, read dot.bomb,by J. David Kuo, or watch the movie Startup.com.

The book's eight-page prologue was mildly promising, and led me to expect a chonological report of the rise and fall of the "internet industry." I've never read any of Mr. Cassidy's articles, but the book jacket assures that he is "one of the country's leading business journalists" and "has been a staff writer at the New Yorker for six years." My expectations were low: I expected a competent journalist's account of the stock market's dot-com bubble. I was disappointed.

First, the book is riddled with mistakes: obvious typographical errors, embarassing spelling and grammatical mistakes, confusing shifts in time, and bizarre factual errors.Clearly, this book somehow avoided the common year-long delay to publication (Cassidy discusses the impact of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, in a book that reached bookstores during the first week of February 2002). Apparently, time was saved by skipping all proofreading, editing, or fact-checking.

Cassidy's first chapter attempts an impossible yet necessary task: recounting the entire histories of computing, the internet, and the "World Wide Web" in just 16 pages. As I read this section, I was uncomfortable, because too much of what Cassidy wrote seemed incorrect. Then, I was jarredby a glaring mistake: Cassidy wrote that the Altair computer, released in 1975,was named "after a character in Star Wars." (Like most Americans, I saw Star Wars during its first year-long run in theaters in 1977, and I recall no character named "Altair." I do recall references to Altair as a star and solar system in the Star Trek TV series.) Perhaps my training as a journalist and editor make me "more aware" of the book's many spelling and grammaticalerrors,but finding such an obvious factual error on the fifth page of the first chapter made me quite anxious about the reliability of the rest of the book.

A few pages later, Cassidy writes: "In 1978, two Chicago students, Randy Seuss and Ward Christensen, invented the modem...." As a long-time computer geek, I knew this was another mistake: programmers Seuss and Christensen didn't invent the modem (which is a piece of computer hardware). In 1977, Christensen wrote Xmodem, the first computer program used to transfer files between computers equipped with modems; a year later, he teamed with Seuss tocreate the first "bulletin board system" software.

After seeing such obvious mistakes in the book's opening pages, I knew that Dot.Con would not be a reliable account of anything, but I read the book with the hope of gaining some insight into the stock market's dot-com bubble.

Second, the book's chronology keeps shifting: Dot.Con shifts between several modes. Some chapters appear to relate a chronological sequenceof events. Other chapters focus on particularcompanies (Netscape, AOL, Amazon.com).Other chapters focus on broad themes. Unfortunately, even the most "chronological" chapters don't maintain a clear chronology, often including facts and events from earlier or later years.

Often, Cassidy's "factual time-shifting" seems designed to make key events or statementslook even more foolish. But usually, it simply confuses and distracts from the real absurdity.

Finally,the book offers no new insight:Nearly everything I read in Dot.Con, I had read somewhere else before. Indeed, the book's many footnotescredit nearly all of the book's contenttomainstream news articles and other books. The main theme of the book is that the spectacular rise and fall of internet or dot-com companies in the stockmarket was a classic "speculative bubble," no different from earlier absurd bubbles. Buthundreds of critics had been saying that since the mid-1990's (and Cassidy cites many skilled analysts and brokers whose careers were ruined by their refusal to join in the feeding frenzy).

After I finished Dot.Con, I sought to identify a single fact or insight that seemed original to Cassidy, or even some fact or insight that hadn't already been recounted many times before.

I can recall only one notion that I don't recall reading elsewhere:the impact of Adam Smith's concept of"perfect competition" in an age when the internet reduces barriers to entry and removes friction from transactions. Cassidy writes: "In perfect competition, all goods sell at cost, and profits are zero." This insight helps us understand the folly of the recurring theme that because the internet is so big, it's inevitable that internet companies which holda "first mover advantage" or which capture millions of "eyeballs" will somehow earn huge profits from their vast audiences. But Cassidy doesn't seem very committed to this theory.

I expected that a book called "Dot.Con" would name names: who were the con artists, and what were the confidence schemes? Who was really to blame? Cassidy seems to waver, and I'm not sure if he intends to suggest that the dot-com crash was Alan Greenspan's fault, or whether it was the fault of brokerage-firm analysts and of journalists -- he seems to partially blame yet partially acquit each. Or perhaps it was really all just an inevitable "herd mentality" speculative bubble that was really nobody's fault.

Certainly, Cassidy does an able job of reporting that the absurd valuation of internet companies was a major aberration for the analysts and investment bankers. He often repeats that the quest for fees and profits led many investment banks to seek ever-more-absurd valuation strategies, in order to float IPOs for companies with no history of profit or even revenue. Over and over, he recounts the absurd financial figures for companies valued at billions of dollars despite short histories that promise only greater losses and virtually no prospect of profitability. He finds lots of targets for ridicule, but they are all easy targets, and the stories have been reported many times before.

Cassidy never digs below the surface, and he mostly views the rise and fall of dot-com stocks as a single cycle, one giant wave that lifted and then sank. He mostly ignores the flow of different "sub-industries" that may explain why the "bubble" continued for so long with several surges.

He ignores the impact of "buzzword investing" as venture capitalists and investors sought to stay one step ahead. (The buzzwords include: "Internet Service Providers", "e-retailing" or "business-to-consumer," "portals," "business-to-business," "Application Service Providers," and "internet infrastructure," each of which can be viewed as a separate "wave" -- or perhaps as "more hot air" that delayed the collapse of the "bubble.")

Maybe it's too soon for anyone to write a definitive account of "the Internet Mania." And maybe John Cassidy did not want to assign blame, but instead to maintain the role of an impartial reporter of the various events, and the various theories. Whatever he intended, he did a poor job. I don't recommend Dot.Con.

You really can purchase Dot.Con at Fatbrain. If you'd like to praise (or skewer) a book here yourself, it's easy. Just read our book review guidelines, then submit your own review with Slashdot's web interface.

Stalwart reviewer Duncan Lawie contributed this review of Susan Solomon's The Coldest March, the epic tale of an early and tragic polar expedition, not long after returning from an Antarctic trip of his own. (Imagine spending New Year's en route to the southern ice.) Duncan's been cooking up some other things lately, too -- like an interview with Science Fiction writer Ken Macleod and a review of the LotR movie from a "bookist" perspective. The Coldest March: Scott's Fatal Antarctic Expedition author Susan Solomon pages ~400 publisher Yale University Press (Australasia: Melbourne University Press) rating 8.5 reviewer Duncan Lawie ISBN 0-300-08967-8 summary "Cold equations" throw a new light on significant events of the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration. Susan Solomon is a senior scientist at NOAA , and an acclaimed one. In 1986 she led a scientific expedition to Antarctica to investigate the causes of the ozone hole; she subsequently received the USA's National Medal of Science for her insights. Whilst working from such locations as McMurdo Station, Solomon had the opportunity to see the bases and places discovered in the early years of the twentieth century. This led her to a new "hobby." Solomon became interested in the history of Antarctic exploration and in the disjunction between the common belief in Scott's incompetence and the apparent perceptiveness of his and his party's own writing. As an atmospheric scientist, Solomon decided to embark upon the exercise of tracking down the weather data of the era and testing it against data subsequently collected.

The Coldest March is the outcome of Solomon's interest in her hobby. It is, in essence, a history of Captain Scott's voyages to the Antarctic, a story which has been told many times in the decades since Scott's death. Yet, never before has the history been focused through the lens of true science. Science was held in high esteem by these Edwardian explorers and is the continuing basis for human occupation of the Antarctic. Solomon's close attention to the meteorological record becomes genuinely interesting as it is possible to make an intelligent comparison between the historical data and the automated data collection of recent decades. The modern route to the Pole from McMurdo Sound is close to that used by the British explorers 90 to 100 years ago. Whilst few attempt the journey on the ground, automated weather stations are vital for US Antarctic Research Program flights in the region. This data, collected every ten minutes since 1984, provides a statistically significant basis for investigation.

The technical substance of what Solomon has to say in this book first reached publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in a paper co-authored with Charles R. Stearns. Those few dense pages form a scientific data quality check and comparison, with the conclusion that the March of 1912 was significantly colder than the average, that Scott's weather forecasters had collected sufficient data to have a good idea of what that average was and that the unexpected cold was a primary factor in the deaths of the party returning from the Pole. These cold facts have been expanded into a solidly researched history of Scott's Antarctic career, with a strong focus on the collection and interpretation of weather data.

The basic point of this book should prove within the grasp of anyone capable of interpreting a graph. The historical issues, however, require a larger context. The book approaches the debate on Scott through the clever technique of "the visitor". At the start of each chapter, there is a vignette offering a view of the modern Antarctic experience which parallels the main subject of the chapter. In this space, Solomon can provide informal commentary and bind the historical discussion with description of the achievements and misunderstandings that are still possible after over 40 years of continuous human occupation of the continent. The visitor provides an access for the modern reader to a well known story. Scott's Pole party arrived at the South Pole in January 1912, five weeks after Amundsen. He and his four companions died on the return journey, Scott, Wilson and Bowers only 11 miles from a supply depot. At the time this tragedy quickly became a heroic example; some modern writers have considered Scott's whole Antarctic experience closer to farce. The heritage of the expedition often turns on the perceived reputation of Scott himself; this book reflects positively on Scott and his colleagues, principally because of the primacy of doing good science in their work. Nevertheless, it acknowledges the mistakes made by both Scott and his rival and recognises the strengths of each party. It is a decent account of the so-called "Race to the Pole", providing a setting in which the relevance of the weather thesis to Scott's death can be fully developed and strongly argued. By dredging bare facts to the surface, The Coldest March has rendered almost every published history of the period out of date.

Each generation seems to find its own vision of Scott. Solomon sees him as a frustrated scientist and, at its centre, this book is a celebration of scientific method. It is tempting to think that the author has seen most strongly the elements of Scott that a modern scientific mindset might wish to find -- as earlier generations have praised him as a heroic exemplar of the British Empire or damned him as a middle class bumbler. Countering this are the words of members of Scott's own scientific party, many of whom relished his ability to ask the right question. Coming from such an original perspective, and providing genuinely new information, this is as significant a book as Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World, published 80 years ago. The Coldest March is a wonderful (re-)introduction to the Matter of Scott.

You can The Coldest March at Fatbrain. If this review interests you, perhaps you'll enjoy the Coldest March website. More information, incuding sample chapters from the book, are available at Yale University Press.

babbage writes:"As the banner above the title of James Tisdall's Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics indicates, this book is 'an introduction to Perl for biologists.' What the banner doesn't mention is that it's also an introduction to biology and bioinformatics for Perl programmers, and it's also an introduction to both Perl *and* biology for people that have never really been exposed to either field. The author has clearly thought a lot about making one book to please these different audiences, and he has pulled it off nicely, in a way that manages to explain basic topics to people learning about each field for the first time while not coming off as condescending or slow-paced to those that might already have some exposure to it." Read on for the rest of his review. Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics author James Tisdall pages 400 publisher O'Reilly & Associates rating 8 reviewer babbage ISBN 0-596-00080-4 summary Well-balanced approach to applying Perl's sorting and analytical abilities to the field of bioinformatics.

Superficially, this book isn't all that different from a lot of introductory Perl books: the Perl material starts out with an overview of the language, followed by a crash course on installing Perl, writing programs, and running them. From there, it goes on to introduce all the various language constructs, from variables to statements to subroutines, that any programmer is going to have to get comfortable with. Pretty run of the mill so far. Tisdall starts with two interesting assumptions, though: [1] that the reader may have never written a computer program before, and so needs to learn how to engineer a robust application that will do its job efficiently and well, and [2] that the reader wants to know how to write programs that can solve a series of biological problems, specifically in genetics and proteomics.

As such, there is at least as much material about the problems that a biologist faces and the places she can go to get the data she needs as there is about the issues that a Perl programmer needs to be aware of. The author introduces the reader to the basics of DNA chemistry, the cellular processes that convert DNA to RNA and then proteins, and a little bit about how and why this is important to the biologist and what sorts of information would help a biologist's research. The main sources of public genetic data are noted, and the often confusing -- and huge -- datafiles that can be obtained from these sources are examined in detail.

With the code he presents for solving these problems, Tisdall makes a point of not falling into the indecipherable-Perl trap: this is a useful language, well-suited to the essentially text-analysis problems that bioinformatics means, and he doesn't want to encourage the kind of dense, obscure, idiomatic coding style that has given Perl an undeservedly bad reputation. Some of Perl's more esoteric constructs are useful, and they show up when they're needed, but they're left out when they would only serve to confuse the reader. This is a good decision.

Rather, the focus is on teaching readers how to solve biological problems with a carefully developed library of code that happens to leverage some of Perl's most useful properties. The result is pretty much a biologist's edition of Christiansen & Torkington's Perl Cookbook or Dave Cross' Data Munging With Perl. The author presents a series of issues that a working bioinformaticist might have to deal with daily -- parsing over BLAST, GenBank, and PDB files, finding relevant motifs in that parsed data, and preparing reports about all of it. If a bioinformaticist's job is to be able to report on interesting patterns from these various sources, then following the programming techniques that Tisdall explains in clear, easy-to-follow prose would be an excellent way to go about doing it.

And when I say "programming techniques," note that I'm not specifically mentioning Perl. The code in this book is clear and organized, and all programs are carefully decomposed into logical subroutines that are then packaged up into a library file that each later sample program gets to draw from. Each new program typically contains a main section of a dozen lines of code or less, followed by no more than two or three new subroutines, along with calls to routines written earlier and called from the BeginPerlBioinfo.pm that is built up as the book progresses. Each sample is typically preceded by a description of what it's trying to accomplish and followed by a detaild description of how it was done, as well as suggestions of other ways that might have worked or not worked.

This modular approach is fantastic -- too many Perl books seem to focus so heavily on the mechanics of getting short scripts to work that they lose sight of how to build up a suite of useful methods and, from those methods, to develop ever-more-sophisticated applications. It isn't quite object-oriented programming, but that's clearly where Tisdall is headed with these samples, and given a few more chapters he probably would have started formally wrapping some of this code into OO packages.

If I have a complaint with the book, in fact, it's that Tisdall doesn't go any further: everything is good, but it ends too soon. Seemingly important topics such as OO programming, XML, graphics (charts & GUIs), CGI, and DBI are mentioned only in passing, under "further topics" in the last chapter. I also have a feeling that some of the biology was shorted, and the book barely touches upon the statistical analysis that probably is a critical aspect of the advanced bioinformaticist's toolbox. I can understand wanting to keep the length of a beginner's book relatively short, and this was probably the right decision, but it would have been nice to see some of the earlier sample problems revisited in these new contexts by, for example, formally making an OO library, showing a sample program that provided a web interface to some of the methods already written, or presenting code that presented results as XML or exchanged them with a database.

But these are minor quibbles, and if the reader is comfortable with the material up to this point, she shouldn't have a hard time figuring out how to go a step further and do these things alone. It's a solid book, and one that should be able to get people learning Perl, genetics, or both up to speed and working on real world problems quickly.

You can purchase Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics at Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Read the review guidelines first, then use Slashdot's webform.

David Weinberger, one of the co-authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual, is one of many celebrated practitioners of what loosely came to be known as cybertheory. The Manifesto began with the memorable phrase "People of Earth" and was "aimed squarely at the solar plexus of corporate America," one reviewer alleged. (You remember those days. Everything about the Net was aimed at the solar plexus of one thing or another). The book purported to show how the Internet was turning business upside down. But that, of course, was then, and this is now. Nobody seems to have noticed that if anything has been turned upside down, it's the Net. Weinberger has struck again in his new book Small Pieces Loosely Joined , (Perseus) a "unified theory of the Web." This time, the Web is changing life itself. Is he on the same Web? Mostly, what this book suggests is the end of CyberBS. And good riddance. Small Pieces Loosely Joined author David Weinberger pages 211 publisher Perseus rating 4/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-7382-0543-5 summary the Web is changing life itself

Despite the staggering amount of hype everyone has had to endure (and some of us have contributed to), Weinberger's premise is that the Web hasn't been hyped enough. The Web, he claims, is not only altering social institutions like business and government, but transforming fundamental concepts of our culture: space, time, reality itself.

This is the sort of stuff that gets publishers, media people and academics breathing heavily, even though reality suggests that a) it simply isn't so, and b) such declarations are the intellectual equivalent of tech support: the more deeply you look, the less seems to be there. The outside world continues to see the Net as an atom-smashing alien force, when it is, in fact, a transforming technology whose future nature and impact remains unclear. There is the persistent belief out there that for the Net and the Web to be interesting, they must be portrayed as changing everything about everything, and the search for the seer who can explain how has been relentless, although not by the book-buying public. This has given rise to a whole genre of Cyber BS.

Weinberger is obviously bright and observant. And he's quite correct in suggesting that the hyperlinking era the Web begins is astounding, even revolutionary. But is it changing the nature of our lives? Decide for yourselves.

Weinberger proposes four concepts (plus the nature of life itself) that the Web is altering: he uses eBay as an illustration.

- Space. eBay is a Web space that occupies no space, whose links are based not on contiguity but on human interest. eBay demonstrates that the geography of the Web is as ephemeral as human interest iself, each of us looking across the space that is eBay and seeing vastly different landscapes -- of games, quilts, Star Wars memorabilia, battery chargers.

- Time. The real world, Weinberger says, is a series of ticks to which schedules are tied. As he investigated different kinds of eBay auctions, checking back every few hours to see if he'd been outbid on quilts, "I felt as if I were returning to a story that was in progress, waiting for me whenever I wanted. I could break off in the middle when, for example, my son came home, and go back whenever I wanted."

- Self. Buyers and sellers on eBay adopt a name by which they will be known. The real world person behind the handle firewife30 may have other eBay identities, as well. Unlike non-virtual selves, these eBay selves are intermittent and, most important, they are in writing.

- Knowledge. Weinberger began his eBay experience ignorant about quilts. But he learned by listening to other quilters and wound up knowing quite a bit.

The upshot? "If a simple auction at eBay is based on new assumptions about space, time, self and knowledge, the Web is more than a place for disturbed teen-agers to try out roles and more than a good place to buy cheap quilts."

The Web has sent an enormous jolt through our culture, he continues, zapping our economy, our ideas about the sharing of creative works, possibly even our institutions such as religion and government. Suppose that the Web is a new world we're just beginning to inhabit. We can't characterize ourselves without simultaneously drawing a picture of how the world seems to us, Weinberger says, nor can we describe our world without describing the type of people we are. If we are entering a new world, then we are also becoming new people.

Heady stuff. Weinberger, an NPR commentator and the publisher of JOHO (Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization) understands hyperlinks and their stunning impact. It isn't as if his observations are wrong. The things he sees are new, interesting and significant.

But his book also reminds us that this age of Cybertheorizing began to die with the demise of the original Wired. This is bad news for over-heated tech writers and academics feasting on cyber-culture courses. In case Weinberger hasn't noticed -- and he hasn't, if the book is any indication -- the Web these days is mostly about sex, free news, entertainment and retailing. For better or worse, we remain the same people we were. You could argue that the Web has triggered a monumental wave of hostility, self-referential blabber and commercialism. In the post dot-com era, we see that the Net and the Web aren't changing everything about the world, just taking the things people have always liked to do -- shop, read, yak, play, masturbate -- and making them easier. Business and politicians are also drearily unchanged. Even the hackers have been largely tamed by lawsuits and the numerous fences sprouting all over the cyber frontier.

"Once we are on the Web," Weinberger claims, "we find the ground has dropped out from beneath us. The normal constraints, on which we have built the common sense that guides us, fall away. And so we get to improvise and to invent... We are sharing this new world not because we have to but because we want to. We are sharing this world not because we find ourselves next to someone due to the inevitable accident of proximity but because we have chosen to join with someone based on the common ground of shared passions."

Is this your Net, your Web? I don't think so. The ground seems pretty solid where I go, and normal constraints are everywhere.

I'd like to get on Weinberger's Web. The one I can access is increasingly hard-headed and utilitarian, dominated by movie reservatiion sites, customized news delivery, retail ordering, and the ubiquity of digital communications -- mailing lists, e-mail, IM systems. Flamers and spammers have driven many underground, where we communicate in exclusive media more peacefully in peace, but with a less diverse and decidedly non-passionate group of people.

It's too bad, really, but it seems to be the contemporary reality of life online. Small Pieces Loosely Joined is not convincing. The age of the cyber-manifesto is ending. The Web isn't altering the nature of reality. It is, of course, only reflecting.

You can purchase Small Pieces Loosely Joined at Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Read the review guidelines first, then use Slashdot's webform.

WrinkledShirt contributed this review of a Professional Linux Programming, a tome he says can "bend light" by its sheer size -- 1155 pages of multi-author, multi-language instruction and examples. Read on for his thoughts on the book's shortcomings as well as its strengths, and remember, lift with your knees, not with your back. Professional Linux Programming author Neil Matthew, Richard Stones, et. al. pages 1155 publisher Wrox rating 8 reviewer WrinkledShirt ISBN 1-861003-01-3 summary A brilliant book for anyone wanting to gain new Linux programming skills.

Introduction

Large programming books have a special sort of gravitational pull to them. It's a sort of siren's song for us techie types, with lyrics promising an endless fountain of information, more than you could ever possibly hope to use, superfluous only in the same way that you don't plan on reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica cover-to-cover anytime soon, either.

Unfortunately, this branch of the publishing industry responsible for these books is well aware of this, and as such there's a veritable critical mass of crap in that corner of the bookstore, some of it reading like blood being squeezed from a stone, with any number of useless chapters thrown in there just to meet some predefined page quota. Which is why it's such a relief to get a book like Professional Linux Programming that's 1155 pages long and contains a ton of material, with very little of it page-filler. Unless you already know it all, there is something valuable in this book for just about every Linux developer out there.

The Good

This book is loaded. Go straight to the table of contents if you need to see what I mean. The book's sheer ambition almost makes it worth picking up a copy. We need more like this -- not just for Linux, not just for programming, but for computer references in general.

If you've thought about developing for Linux, you've probably rubbed up against the impression that Linux and C go together like a wink and a smile. This book delivers on that impression, and it delivers huge. There are chapters on how to use C with PostgreSQL and MySQL databases, LDAP services, GTK+/Gnome/libglade and Qt/KDE, Flex and Bison, XML, sockets, RPC and CORBA (using ORBit). There are also sections on applied professional development theory, like design, debugging, security, deployment, and encryption.

If C isn't your bag, you might not find as much to get out of this book, but there are still sections on PHP, Python, documentation, package deployment, internationalization and shell database manipulation. Ever wondered how CVS or patching worked? It's in there. There's even material on device drivers and Beowulf clusters. By the end of this book you'll have more than just proof-of-concept familiarity with just about all the topics. For all but the more exotic subjects, you start at the simplest example, and the complexity gets increased with subsequent scenario, until the point where the chapter gets applied to the book's ongoing case study, which is the development of a hypothetical system to track a DVD store's business operations.

To give you an idea about what sort of depth to expect from this book, I'll talk about what it does with PostgreSQL. It shows you how to install it and maintain it from the command line; walks you through how to create basic databases; gets you comfortable with running SQL queries from the command line or scripts from a file; shows you how to interface with it using C (using both libpq functions and embedded techniques); shows you how to handle different kinds of transactions and cursors; talks about bringing it into PHP; and uses PostgreSQL for the core engine for the case study. Now, database work is obviously going to be getting special treatment when it comes to commerce development, but that's still only one of many subjects that this book tackles, most of which are designed to get you on the ground running before needing to resort to supplementary material.

As an aside, from a coordinating standpoint, this book is a marvel. Content was contributed from 15 separate authors and yet continuity is practically a non-issue.

The Not-So-Good

Typos. Oy vey. It's like getting a buddy to lend you his Ferrari, only to discover that there's a little bit of bird crap on the windshield that nobody can wipe off. Nice car, shame about the bird crap. Now, this book isn't horribly bad for it, but you shouldn't be surprised to find the odd error at the rate of one or two per chapter, usually in the form of an incorrect diagram symbol here or there or a formatting character that didn't quite translate into a code listing. Not too bad, but it's enough to be a mentionable problem. The Wrox people were good about putting up an errata page, but, unfortunately, it's empty. This may speak to the fact that the intended audience are hackers who can probably figure out the problem for themselves anyway.

Then there's the timeliness factor. This is a review of the first edition, which came out in September 2000, and it's unfortunate that with all the new technologies coming out (Bonobo, KParts, Mono, etc.) there isn't a second edition in the works as of yet. As such, people hoping to find useful information on programming with the more volatile APIs (specifically the GUI stuff) might want to look elsewhere. The information in this area isn't completely obsolete, just not as cutting edge as it was when the book first came out. Most of the other chapters are still current, and had this review been done near the publication date, the rating would easily be a 9 out of 10. That it still merits a review at this point, after being out for almost a year and a half, hopefully says something.

There's also the fact that even though this book contains so much, it doesn't really act as a definitive reference in any area that it describes. For instance, I was toying with the idea of making a code mangler for an XML-type language, so the chapter on Flex and Bison had me drooling. It wasn't long after reading it, though, that I found myself needing to go to GNU's Flex website just to get a better listing of all the regular expressions I'd need to use. That's symptomatic of pretty much all the chapters here -- it doesn't take long to outgrow the material when you need to apply it to your personal project. In this sense the title seems misleading; if you wanted to program in some of these areas at a professional level, this book would only be a starting point to another, deeper reference.

The huge breadth of knowledge also makes some omissions seem glaring. There is nothing on Perl or some of the other popular shell languages. Outside of two chapters, C++ is avoided like the plague. The section on deployment using automake is tiny enough that it's practically not there, which is surprising given the amount of time a reader spends churning out source code throughout the rest of the book. There's also a brief section on multimedia that, given the context of the rest of the topics, just feels out of place. Some of these shortcomings are made up in the intended predecessor to this book, Beginning Linux Programming , so you might want to give that book a whirl as well (TCL, BASH, and Perl all get treatment there).

And just to leave no superficial stone unturned, the cover is just awful -- it looks like a police lineup. Although I suspect there's a focus group somewhere that needs to answer for this, maybe it bodes well knowing that, considering the slightly expensive nature of this book, none of that money went into its outer design.

Conclusion

There are some people who aren't going to want to buy this book. Specialists, or people who want to specialize, likely won't get enough of what they want on any of the subjects here. Also, this isn't so much a learning guide that will give you exercises and quizzes, so if you're still at the stage where you need that sort of thing, this book might be a bit rich. If you're hoping for bleeding-edge stuff, wait for a second edition.

Also, it's taken for granted that the reader understands C pretty well, so if you don't, invest some time in that area first.

However, if you've got the fundamentals of Linux programming down pat but don't know where you want to go next, buy this book. If you're a seasoned developer and just need to get the basics of a new area in order to apply it to your ongoing projects, buy this book. If you're a generalist or a hobbyist, buy this book. If you need to design application prototypes for the Linux platform, buy this book. If you want to compare different APIs without having to commit to buying different textbooks, buy this book. If you get off on knowing you can do more Hello Worlds than any of your friends, buy this book. And if you like your references so big and fat that they bend light, buy this book.

Table of Contents Introduction
Chapter 1: Application Design
Chapter 2: Concurrent Versions System (CVS)
Chapter 3: Databases
Chapter 4: PostgreSQL interfacing
Chapter 5: MySQL
Chapter 6: Tackling Bugs
Chapter 7: LDAP Directory Services
Chapter 8: GUI programming with GNOME/GTK+
Chapter 9: GUI Building with Glade and GTK+/GNOME
Chapter 10: Flex and Bison
Chapter 11: Testing Tools
Chapter 12: Secure Programming
Chapter 13: GUI programming with KDE/Qt
Chapter 14: Writing the dvdstore GUI using KDE/Qt
Chapter 15: Python
Chapter 16: Creating Web interfaces with PHP
Chapter 17: Embedding and extending Python with C/C++
Chapter 18: Remote Procedure Calls
Chapter 19: Multi-media and Linux
Chapter 20: CORBA.
Chapter 21: Implementing CORBA with ORBit
Chapter 22: Diskless systems
Chapter 23: XML and libxml
Chapter 24: Beowulf Clusters
Chapter 25: Documentation
Chapter 26: Device Drivers
Chapter 27: Distributing the application
Chapter 28: Internationalization
Appendix A: GTK+/GNOME Object Reference
Appendix B: DVD RPC Protocol Definition
Appendix C: Open Source Licenses
Appendix D: Support, Errata & P2P.Wrox.Com Related Links

• Wrox website
• Sample chapter from the book
• Wrox's P2P page for this book
• Linux Journal's Review of this book
• ACCU's Review of this book

You can purchase Professional Linux Programming at Fatbrain.

In the The Brave New World of Work, Ulrich Beck argues that the work society as we've known it is coming to an end. More and more people are ousted from their jobs by smart technologies. In the United States, all the but the highest-level workers are now unsure of their jobs and incomes. The idea of middle-class security is eroding, and so -- Beck believes they are related -- is worker enthusiasm for democratic practices like voting. Work here and in much of the West is increasingly resembling labor patterns in the Third World -- fluid, part-time, entrepeneurial, free-lance, self-directed. The idea of the "job for life" has disappeared, temporarily creating a political economy of insecurity. Down the road, he argues, this new kind of work society may actually be good for the world, creating a new kind of civil transnationalism, and enhancing our freedom and our civic lives. The Brave New World of Work author Ulrich Beck pages 202 publisher Polity Press rating 8/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-7456-2398-0 summary The end of the work society

Beck has written a surprising and provocative book about how working is changing radically under our very noses with little serious discussion in our media or political communities. We see stories all the time about employment rates, but most people have little or no sense of the radical changes affecting the nature of work.

Work has become unstable throughout the modern world, writes Beck, a professor of sociology at the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich. Skills can be suddenly devalued, jobs obliterated, social and welfare safety nets eroded. Companies merge, collapse, form and reform, often at the expense of their workers.

Fear and economic insecurity prevail among the middle-class majority as well as the underclass, writes Beck. "The United States is the only advanced country where productivity has constantly risen over the past twenty years, while the income of most of its citizens (eight out of ten) has either stagnated or declined. The average weekly earnings of 80 per cent of Americans in gainful employment dropped by roughly 18 per cent between l973 and l995, he reports, from $315 to $258 a week. At the same time, the real income of top managers soared by 19 per cent in just ten years between 1979 and 1989.

As entire industries rise or fall, as firms expand, shrink, separate, "downsize" and restructure, employees at all but the highest levels must go to work each day without knowing whether they will have their jobs or for how long. The newly unstable work society leads to the erosion of the middle-class and in our collective interest in civics. According to Beck, decline in civic participation and voting is directly tied to the decline of work society, which he says is closely linked to worker attitudes about democracy.

Is this all bleak? No, according to Beck. Although the loss of work security creates a temporary loss of security and social capital, he believes that down the road, this individuality and freedom -- much of it empowered by the same technology that has eroded work security -- will create a new kind of global citizen, one who is better informed, more communicative and civically-involved than before. He foresees a more inclusive kind of transnational society, with less nationalism and provincialism. The alternative facing the world is either collapse or political self-renewal, and he foresees the latter.

It's an interesting look at a subject that will affect almost every single American whose lives are being shaped by powerful technological forces they sense but don't quite understand. Work is a critical subject, and technology is changing it. In Brave New World of Work Beck helps us understand how and gives us some sense of how the new workplace might affect our futures.

You can purchase Brave New World of Work at Fatbrain.

Wrinkled Shirt writes: "If you want to be able to work either as or with a systems analyst, you're going to have to speak the same language as everyone else in your team, and in the tech industry that language is increasingly becoming the UML. The Unified Modelling Language provides ways of modelling every sort of system that you can imagine, covering everything from the relationships of your different objects to the dynamics of the system in action to the way it'll look when you physically set it up." He's reviewed below the SAMS-published Teach Yourself UML in 24 Hours; read on below for his reactions to the book, both good and bad. Teach Yourself UML in 24 Hours, 2nd Edition author Joseph Schmuller pages 397 publisher SAMS rating 5.5 reviewer WrinkledShirt ISBN 0-672-32238-2 summary Useful enough as an introductory text, but likely needs companion texts for anyone who wants to design complex systems.

Introduction

The UML was adopted by the OMG (Object Management Group) as their official method of visually representing an object-oriented design, and as such is particularly well-suited to working with CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture). Now, the OMG believes in their acronyms the way the Irish believe in their whiskey, and if you're hoping they'll give you introductory material on how to use the UML without broadening the context to all the other standards the OMG is responsible for, well, good luck. Addison Wesley has an entire series dedicated to the UML and different aspects of it, and O'Reilly's got the requisite Nutshell book, but there's definitely a void for good low-cost beginner texts, and it is this void that Schmuller's book attempts to fill.

Does it succeed? Well, sort of.

The Good

Teach Yourself UML in 24 Hours is a very thorough introduction to the language. The first fifteen chapters alone cover practically every structural and behavioural element, all the important relationships, static diagrams and dynamic diagrams, and even a little object-oriented design theory. As far as computer books go, it's not very expensive at its full price, and is even available at some discount stores. It is also loaded with sample diagrams throughout, and has a large seven-chapter case study going through a sample project design process, terminating with a couple of chapters on miscellaneous applications of the UML.

Understanding the subjective element of design, this book tries to help the reader gain their own personal take on the UML by providing lots of sample exercises to perform, and the sum total is a book that gives the reader a good idea of the effectiveness of the UML as a modelling language. In fact, if I were a systems analyst and I needed to give my team a crash course in the UML before getting them to implement my specs, I could do a lot worse than making them all read this book first.

Unfortunately, here's where the accolades stop. A book that teaches people how to read another person's diagrams written in the UML is one thing, but as an effective reference on how to design using the UML, the book comes up short in a few ways.

The Not-So-Good

Part of the power of the UML is that even though the OMG really needed to it to get their CORBA spec to make sense visually, you can basically use the UML to describe any old sort of system you want. Unfortunately, Schmuller takes a little too much advantage of this, and a disproportionate amount of the examples and diagrams involve physical systems instead of software systems. It's as though software design is a bit of an afterthought, which is fine, but the book could have been richer had it focused more on this aspect of UML implementation rather than, for instance, how to use the UML to model a soda machine.

Another shortcoming is that the book tantalizes us with the odd example proving that part of the power of the UML comes from the flexibility to combine elements from multiple diagrams into a single diagram, and yet these examples are used so sparingly and with no substantive explanation to the methodology involved that you're left with a feeling that even though the UML can do a lot of things, you're not quite sure how to make it do all those things for you.

It's admirable that Schmuller devoted so much time to the case study, and made sure that the scope was broad enough that all of the topics explained to that point got an appearance. However, one of the pitfalls of trying to come up with a case study that outlines a fundamentally subjective process is that some of the design decisions are going to seem arbitrary to some people who don't have a psychic connection to the author. It's not something unique to this book, but this book falls victim to it. Schmuller would have done better to have used those seven chapters to describe two different systems to give a broader idea and more than one context to the process of UML design. He also took a little too much creative license with scripting the hypothetical interview process. A reference book on the UML isn't the best place to try out your best David Mamet impression.

And then there are the really minor problems. Some of the diagrams could use a little cleaning up, and sometimes the basic diagram is represented a little differently in the summary section as it is in the chapter dedicated to it. Some of the more complex diagrams are handled first and the simpler ones later. There's no real explanation that makes sense to a newbie about the difference between an aggregation and a composite. And finally, even though one could argue that learning about the UML itself should be kept as a separate and distinct process from learning about how to program off a UML design, I think such a chapter would have been far more beneficial to a neophyte than the chapter on modelling for embedded systems, which is likely to be the domain of people who are far beyond the level of UML familiarity that this book is going to give you anyway.

Conclusion

Now, even though as individual criticisms these might seem minor, as a whole it adds up to a book that's going to need a couple of companion references for the reader to truly feel ready to start diagramming with the UML in a professional environment. However, as said before, it isn't too expensive and is pretty much alone in the world of introductory manuals to the UML, and even if you're hoping to become a full-fledged analyst you have to learn to crawl before you can learn to walk, and this book will help you do just that. Just don't expect to be running marathons by the end.

Table of Contents

( exploded version here)

Introduction.
Hour 1. Introducing the UML.
Hour 2. Understanding Object-Orientation.
Hour 3. Working with Object-Orientation.
Hour 4. Working with Relationships.
Hour 5. Understanding Aggregations, Composites, Interfaces, and Realizations.
Hour 6. Introducing Use Cases.
Hour 7. Working with Use Case Diagrams.
Hour 8. Working with State Diagrams.
Hour 9. Working with Sequence Diagrams.
Hour 10. Working with Collaboration Diagrams.
Hour 11. Working with Activity Diagrams.
Hour 12. Working with Component Diagrams.
Hour 13. Working with Deployment Diagrams.
Hour 14. Understanding the Foundations of the UML.
Hour 15. Fitting the UML into a Development Process.
Hour 16. Introducing the Case Study.
Hour 17. Performing a Domain Analysis.
Hour 18. Gathering System Requirements.
Hour 19. Developing the Use Cases.
Hour 20. Getting into Interactions and State Changes.
Hour 21. Designing Look, Feel, and Deployment.
Hour 22. Understanding Design Patterns.
Hour 23. Modeling Embedded Systems.
Hour 24. Shaping the Future of the UML.
Appendix A. Quiz Answers.
Appendix B. Modeling Tools for the UML.
Appendix C. A Summary in Pictures.
Index.

Related Links SAMS
Object Management Group
OMG's UML Resource Page
Google Search for Case Tools

You can purchase Teach Yourself UML in 24 Hours at Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Read the review guidelines first, then use Slashdot's webform.

Fans of Vernor Vinge know that he's a computer scientist, now retired, and science fiction writer. An interview we linked to a few months ago does a good job of discussing some of his ideas about the Singularity, the point in time when humans create a machine intelligence that is smarter than we are. Vinge's novella True Names was written in 1981, and forecast many aspects of the internet of today. True Names and The Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier is an anthology of the True Names novella and several shorter articles by other technically-inclined folk. If you haven't read the original True Names, this book is worth it for that story alone. True Names and The Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier author Vernor Vinge; ed. by James Frenkel pages 352 publisher Tor rating 8/10 reviewer michael ISBN 0-312-86207-5 summary collection of articles by computer scientists predicting the future of the network

The history of this book is a little odd. It was supposed to be published several years ago, and was delayed for some reason, unknown to me. As a result, only the introduction to the book has been written recently - even the pieces that were intended to be extremely current are now rather painfully dated.

There's an old interview with Vinge where the interviewer draws out a number of Vinge's ideas about the modern internet and the Singularity. Vinge seems to have had it in hand when writing his introduction to True Names, and you can probably got a good idea of what he tried to convey in the anthology by reading the interview. If it sounds at all interesting, read on.

Vinge's central point is that cyberspace is extremely controllable, if and only if everyone's true names are known. That's the point brought out in the essay True Names, and it's a point that the other writers featured in the anthology agree upon. It's an incredibly insightful idea, one well worth spending some time pondering.

Let's look at some of the larger pieces included in the book. Timothy May, who is perhaps best known for his ranting posts about crypto anarchy, has a lengthy and astonishingly well-written essay titled "True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy". The essay reads as if an editor with a firm hand extracted most of May's characteristic wild-eyed prose and yet kept the insightful ideas behind it - if only all of his writing was like this essay. It's a great introduction to what May means by "crypto anarchy". May is one of the most optimistic writers in the book, and he, as well as the other writers, believe that we are at a fork: either we'll move toward a surveillance state, or toward what May calls an anarcho-capitalist state, but the middle ground is unstable - we'll end up at one extreme or the other. May believes we're already firmly on the road toward anarcho-crypto-utopia.

John M. Ford, who you may recognize as a science fiction writer, has a short story wondering what the machines will think of us.

Alex Wexelblat, computer scientist, has a powerful essay looking at the internet as a tool for surveillance and control. Written only a few years ago, many of his predictions are now fact.

Richard Stallman has his essay The Right to Read. Hopefully it will reach a larger audience on dead trees than in electronic form.

Leonard Foner has an essay covering the basics of the cryptography debate. It's geared to get newcomers up to speed and should do that adequately.

Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer have a couple of essays about Habitat, a very early MUD sponsored by Lucasfilm. The essays have been published online; here's one of them and there's been plenty written about Habitat if you look. Excellent reading, brings out the challenges faced by any online community and simultaneously reminds you of the "good" old days (who here is paying by the hour for internet access today?).

And finally we come to True Names itself. Should be required reading in high school, IMHO. I won't discuss it much, either you've read it or you haven't, and if you haven't I'd rather you learn about it by reading it. If you don't want to buy the book, there are unauthorized electronic versions of the text floating around, but one way or another, read it, it's worth your time.

I'm going to go back now to Vinge's introduction. It bears quoting:

"It seems to me that it's still an open question whether computers and networks will help or hurt freedom--but this is one place where the most extreme scenarios are also the most plausible. I think we could easily go in the direction Tim May indicates, perhaps ending up with a world very like the one in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. On the other hand, there are the "Four Horsemen" that Tim, Alan, and Lenny remark upon. All four Horsemen are good excuses for the incremental tightening of regulation and enforcement (some being more effective with one constituency than another), but I think the "Terrorist Horseman" is the one that could shift our whole society toward strict controls. Just a few really ghastly terrorist incidents would be enough to cause a sea change in public opinion. It's not hard to imagine the entire country run the way airports were run in the late twentieth century. But there are worse nightmares: Imagine a government that mandated control of some part of each communicating microchip. In that case, the computing power of the Internet could be used for much tighter control than George Orwell described." -- Vernor Vinge, August 1999

Today the "Terrorist Horseman" is in full charge, whipping us toward ever-tighter controls. And Vinge's prediction is embodied in the countless initiatives to install Digital Rights Management and government surveillance in every computing device. And that is why, in the end, I gave the anthology less than a 10/10 rating. Although I know it was written before the most recent events which proved it so accurate, it feels dated, as if we've already run at top speed down the road to a Net filled with surveillance, where the government and the MPAA know everyone's True Name, and yet Vinge is behind the times in predicting it now.

You can purchase True Names at Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Read the review guidelines first, then use Slashdot's webform.

Steve MacLaughlin writes with proof that not everyone with a database wants to send you spam or sell your information to the highest bidder, even if only for the good reason that you'd be loathe to do business with them afterward. "Companies have access to more information about their customers than ever before, and customers aren't exactly jumping for joy. Purchasing habits, medical information, financial reports, favorite music groups, and millions of other bits of personal information are being captured by companies. In Making It Personal: How to Profit from Personalization without Invading Privacy, Bruce Kasanoff teaches businesses how to get closer to customers without violating their trust." Read on for the rest of his review. Making It Personal: How to Profit from Personalization without Invading Privacy author Bruce Kasanoff pages 240 publisher Perseus Books rating 8 reviewer Steve MacLaughlin ISBN 0738205362 summary Profiting from a database world without destroying everyone's privacy in the process.

But do not be confused. Personalization is not just another way to push more product out the door. Kasanoff clearly explains why personalization is not just a marketing tool, but instead an effective approach for all business relationships. Partners, shareholders, employees, and customers can all benefit from increased personalization. The purpose of implementing one-to-one personalization strategies is to benefit these stakeholders, not just the company. This is a fundamental concept that too many businesses just don't understand.

When customers give out their personal information they are taking a risk. If customers consistently feel as though their privacy is being violated, then it won't be long before they stop using the services. Companies will not be able to regain their trust easily, and worse yet the information they do receive is more likely to be false. This is a lose-lose situation for everyone involved. Making It Personal shows businesses how to make personalization a win-win situation for everyone involved.

The reality is that not all personalization "is the result of a massive computer sifting through dozens of databases to automatically deliver a certain type of treatment to a person. Most initiatives start with employees who have a good idea." Personalization starts with remembering someone's address so they don't have to retype it 50 times. Personalization starts when you remember whether someone prefers a window or an aisle seat. Personalization starts when you remember whether someone prefers charts and graphs or cold hard numbers.

Kasanoff explains how just remembering basic information about stakeholders is just the beginning of personalization. The key is to then use that information to "deliver unique benefits" to those stakeholders. That's when personalization has the power to influence behaviors and retain loyalty. But just in case this isn't crystal clear then think of it this way: Using personal information for purposes other than delivering unique benefits is exactly what scares the hell out of both stakeholders and legislators. So knock it off.

Your customers are ready and willing to use personalization, but is your company? The good news is that you already have a lot of information about stakeholders that can be used for personalization. In additional, personalization features are now appearing in software applications from companies like Oracle and Microsoft. What is missing is the "need to make personalization a central part of [your] corporate strategy, as opposed to something that simply requires awareness and sensitivity." That's because personalization says "let us learn better what a customer needs and then do something about it."

Making It Personal explains how to implement meaningful personalization strategies, but the book also covers some potential unintended consequences. While you may be dealing with mountains of information don't forget that it's comprised of individuals. We have all seen the newspaper headlines that resulted from just a few individuals having their privacy violated by companies. Now is the time to put policies and practices in place to avoid tarnishing your reputation with stakeholders.

Bruce Kasanoff does a great job of breaking down personalization into easy to understand terminology and realistic approaches. He shows that it really is possible to balance privacy concerns with profit motives. Making It Personal is worth more than a casual glance because personalization isn't just about getting the local weather forecast when you visit your favorite web site. Personalization is about delivering unique benefits to stakeholders and a means to preserve their loyalty. Violate their privacy and you risk losing them to your competitors forever.

Making It Personal will help you to understand that "personalization is about people, and the things that matter to them most." Kasanoff knows what he's talking about, and so do the numerous business and technology leaders he cites throughout the book. They confront the real issues and the real challenges facing personalization even in its infancy. Making It Personal will prepare you and your company for a world where your customers demand that you get personal. Don't disappoint them.

You can purchase Making it Personal at Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Read the review guidelines first, then use Slashdot's webform.

Craig Maloney writes with this review of The Linux Cookbook, a hope-inspiring entrant in the still too-small category of generalized, readable references for non-programmers, as well as the even-smaller category of books with a complete free version online. Craig's found some flaws as well as bright spots, but it still sounds like a good book to check out for users who aren't sure which FM to R, no matter what their level of experience. The LinuxCookbook author Michael Stutz pages 300 publisher No Starch Press rating 7 reviewer Craig Maloney ISBN 1-886411-48-4 summary Hundreds of answers (with a focus on the command-line) to commonand not-so common questions.

Allez Cuisine!

The Linux Cookbook is a collection of "recipes" for doing various tasks with your Linux machine. Where the Cookbook shines, though is the sheer number and variety of these recipes. There are plenty of varied tasks covered in the book, from the simple 'How do I copy a file?' to the more complex 'How do I archive a web site?', Six chapters deal with the various aspects of text: analyzing, searching and replacing, grammar checking, and formatting. There are even chapters dealing with the less-explored topics of customizing X, setting up reminders, and editing sound files.

Recipe Format:

The recipe format is both the book's strongest feature and its weakest point. The recipes make for a well-organized and logical structure to find information. Each point and sub-point is clearly marked, and makes for a very quick and enjoyable read. Unfortunately, topics that could benefit from a different approach are just not covered thoroughly. In the section for listing files, ls is well covered, while Midnight Commander is briefly introduced. This wouldn't bother me as much, except Midnight Commander and Mozilla URLs are given at the beginning of the section. This presentation could also lead people to think the material presented is the only way, or the best way to do these commands. There is only one method mentioned for shutting down a Linux machine; the venerable CTRL-ALT-DEL. No mention is made in the book of the shutdown command. Granted, CTRL-ALT-DEL will get the job done, but I'm not sure I would have presented it as the best, or only way to shut down a Linux machine. [T - Especially when on many distros, CTRL-ALT-DELETE is configured to restart rather than shut down the machine; this behavior, though, is configurable through /etc/inittab.]

Season to taste:

As I've mentioned in the previous section, some of the commands the author chose as his answers are quite curious to me. In the section to find hostnames from IP addresses, the author has chosen to use the command "dig" rather than the command I generally use "nslookup". Granted, "dig" gives other useful information aside from the IP and hostname, but the author doesn't seem to care about the additional information when presenting the output of the command.

This book also concentrates on using GNU and Open Source software for it's solutions. There is no mention of software that is not strictly Open Source. The only package information is for the Debian distribution by providing the apt name for retrieving the package. No other distribution is mentioned as having packages available. The author's reasoning is that Debian is the only "entirely committed to free software by design" distribution. URL's are provided only for packages that are not distributed by default with Debian, which might prove to be a nuisance for people using other distributions. I found myself trying some recipes, only to find my distribution didn't include that command by default.

Linux is a command-line operating system by default, and this book tries to work within those defaults by providing command-line methods rather than GUI methods. This gets around some of the various intricacies of the various distributions, but might prove confusing for the person who boots up the first time and can't find virtual console one because GDM is running. When appropriate, the book will defer to a GUI tool rather than a command-line tool. The GIMP is briefly discussed for several of the recipes, and GUI programs make up less than 10% of the answers to the recipe questions.

So, what's in it for me?:

It's tough for me to fully recommend this book to everyone. For the beginner, I recommend caution when starting off with this book. They may want to make this book their second book along with an installation and getting started tutorial. Beginners will find this book invaluable once they have a firm grasp on their distribution before being able to fully handle this book. For the seasoned Linux user, I recommend reading this book while putting your suppositions aside. There is plenty of good information to be had in these pages, and the author has tried painstakingly to make the answers in it as relevant to every Linux user as he can. The Linux Cookbook is a useful collection for those who don't mind getting comfortable with their shell prompt and a search engine.

There is also an electronic version of this book available at http://dsl.org/cookbook which is a living version of the printed book; for the sake of this review, only the printed book was reviewed.

You can purchase The Linux Cookbook from Fatbrain.

RichMeraz writes "Bruce Eckel has posted his first incarnation of Thinking in Patterns with Python on his website. What a wonderful Christmas present." Make sure to check the list of mirrors before downloading. As Eckel says, "This should whet your appetite to read Design Patterns " (or reread it)... classic book, I figure it can't hurt to refresh my memory once a year, and holidays seem like a good time to think in the abstract...

mfarah writes: "I've liked science-fiction ever since my mother introduced me to the genre with a couple of Asimov's books when I was ten years old. I read a decent amount of it in high school, but pretty much abandoned the whole thing in university (not enough time and no money; my Usenet addiction didn't help)." Now he's going to try to soak up some of your time (but not too much) with this review of another Science Fiction classic, below. The Forever War author Joe Haldeman pages 254 publisher Avon Books rating 9 reviewer mfarah ISBN 0380708213 summary A short but good military SF novel. After finishing university, I suddenly had money and time available. Decided to take advantage of this to re-take my hobby, I purchased an awful lot of SF books (mostly the classics), and have been catching up for the last three years.

The latest book I've taken out of my "read pending" queue is The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman. Its credits include the Nebula Award in 1975 and the Hugo Award in 1976, and being considered one of the classics of the genre.

This is a fairly short science-fiction novel (250 pages in my mass-market paperback copy), dealing with the main character William Mandela, a young physics student drafted into the UN-controlled space army when war breaks out against the Taurans, an alien species we at first know nothing about (I'll purposefully avoid getting into a detailed discussion of the plot).

The novel is told to us from Mandela's viewpoint; Mandela narrates everything that happens in a very easy to read colloquial style, with an exquisite attention to details; the short chapters the book is divided in makes it a breeze to read -- a weekend in my case (and I'm no fast reader).

The Mandela character is well constructed, and his account reads like a friend telling you the story of his life. There are other characters that barely appear in the novel, yet they also feel properly written. The plot is simple and direct, with just a couple of nasty turns at key points in the story (you'll know them when you see them).

This description may remind some people of Heinlein's Starship Troopers: young guy (Mandela/Rico) enters the army, goes through a training period, goes to war with an unknown species, kicks butt and all that. Actually, that superficial description is where the resemblance stops: the way Mandela and John Rico get into the army is distinct, the training period is quite different, the aliens have nothing in common; both novels focus mainly on different stuff, and the few common themes are treated differently. If you expect this to be a Starship Troopers clone, you'll be surprised.

Surprisingly, the treatment of science isn't -- very detailed. There is enough of it to dismiss claims of this being a war novel simply translated into a SF setting (even if the author's acknowledged that the novel deals with his experiences in the Vietnam war), but hard-SF zealots might be disappointed.

All in all, this was a very enjoyable read, and I highly recommend it. I've voted 9 for this novel in the Top100SF.

You can purchase The Forever War at Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Read the book review guidelines, then submit using Slashdot's web-submission page :)

Slashdot reader rw2 (aka Rich Wellner) writes: "I was excited about this book because rarely does one come out that so directly applies to what I do day to day. I work at a national research lab, help out at a web hosting facility and run poliglut in my spare time. So, I'm used to dealing with the cleanup that occurs after a successful attack." The book is O'Reilly's updated Web Security, Privacy and Commerce. Read on for more of Rich's take on it. Web Security, Privacy and Commerce author Simson Garfinkel, Gene Spafford (Contributor), Debby Russell pages 800 publisher O'Reillly & Associates rating 10 reviewer rw2 ISBN 0596000456 summary A needed update to a reliable classic by well respected security experts.

My single biggest problem is typically that, while highly technical , I don't do security as a full time job. Reading the literature needed to become really expert just isn't in the cards. It's enough to keep up with Java, Python, C++ and grid computing stuff. Even though there is substantial overlap between grids and security, much of grid thought is separate from the implementations that are dealt with in this book. Besides, my group does large-scale data storage. We leave the security infrastructure to specialists.

Garfinkel's book is great for a guy like me. They take every subject from a level that is trivial to understand down to as much detail as you need. Even in areas that I understand pretty well, I found this book taught me new stuff. For example, in their section dealing with the history of browsers I had a handful of false memories corrected, despite having been around for longer than the web.

They've broken the book down into four sections, Web Technology, Privacy and Security for Users, Web Server Security and Security for Content Providers.

Web Technology

This section deals with the pieces that all the other sections depend on. Particularly interesting are the parts about the different kinds of cryptographic systems. They talk about symmetric and public key systems and message digest functions. These building blocks are then put to use in chapters on SSL/TLS and digital identification. This section also gives a brief history of the web and how it was assembled.

Privacy and Security for Users

These chapters are split between mobile code, Java, ActiveX, Flash and such and all other safety/privacy issues. In the chapter on backups, the authors tell an amusing story about backups that were being done by someone who hadn't been properly trained. She would start the job, then go and read a book. The backup would throw errors, but when the session timed out the errors were lost and the screen looked like a normal termination when she returned. This apparently went on for quite some time before being caught. So check your backups, kids!

This sections also has an interesting chapter on email privacy and a couple different services/methods for using encryption to secure your mail and, better yet, send email that cannot be read after a certain date.

Web Server Security

Every sysad in the business should make sure to read this section, which starts out talking about physical security (because if you don't have that the rest may not matter), and continues all the way down to deploying certificates.

Security for Content Providers

Finally, the book finishes up with a few chapters that are mostly about the legalities of running a site. This combines client authentication with privacy policies, digital payments and intellectual property into a good if less technical ending.

Overall

One interesting aspect of the authors' overall approach is that they are so platform neutral. I didn't expect this from a team that wrote books on Unix security, but they have chapters on ActiveX issues and it isn't dealt with in the flip manner that Unix people often use toward other OSes. Even their screen shots are in Windows. You definitely get the feeling these guys know there stuff from more than one perspective.

We happen to be talking a lot about public key infrastructures at work lately, and the chapters on digital certificates were quite handy in getting up to speed on the different issues. As with other sections, they deal not only with the bit twiddling involved but also with history and policy. The human issues. Very useful stuff about an area that not many think about and about which the existing writing is fairly opaque.

So, if you're needing to learn more about this subject I can't think of another book I would recommend before it. I've been motivated enough to write a review on it, and for most of us that's probably a ringing endorsement by itself!

You can purchase Web Security, Privacy and Commerce at Fatbrain.

Slashdot reader rw2 (aka Rich Wellner) writes: "I was excited about this book because rarely does one come out that so directly applies to what I do day to day. I work at a national research lab, help out at a web hosting facility and run poliglut in my spare time. So, I'm used to dealing with the cleanup that occurs after a successful attack." The book is O'Reilly's updated Web Security, Privacy and Commerce. Read on for more of Rich's take on it. Web Security, Privacy and Commerce author Simson Garfinkel, Gene Spafford (Contributor), Debby Russell pages 800 publisher O'Reillly & Associates rating 10 reviewer rw2 ISBN 0596000456 summary A needed update to a reliable classic by well respected security experts.

My single biggest problem is typically that, while highly technical , I don't do security as a full time job. Reading the literature needed to become really expert just isn't in the cards. It's enough to keep up with Java, Python, C++ and grid computing stuff. Even though there is substantial overlap between grids and security, much of grid thought is separate from the implementations that are dealt with in this book. Besides, my group does large-scale data storage. We leave the security infrastructure to specialists.

Garfinkel's book is great for a guy like me. They take every subject from a level that is trivial to understand down to as much detail as you need. Even in areas that I understand pretty well, I found this book taught me new stuff. For example, in their section dealing with the history of browsers I had a handful of false memories corrected, despite having been around for longer than the web.

They've broken the book down into four sections, Web Technology, Privacy and Security for Users, Web Server Security and Security for Content Providers.

Web Technology

This section deals with the pieces that all the other sections depend on. Particularly interesting are the parts about the different kinds of cryptographic systems. They talk about symmetric and public key systems and message digest functions. These building blocks are then put to use in chapters on SSL/TLS and digital identification. This section also gives a brief history of the web and how it was assembled.

Privacy and Security for Users

These chapters are split between mobile code, Java, ActiveX, Flash and such and all other safety/privacy issues. In the chapter on backups, the authors tell an amusing story about backups that were being done by someone who hadn't been properly trained. She would start the job, then go and read a book. The backup would throw errors, but when the session timed out the errors were lost and the screen looked like a normal termination when she returned. This apparently went on for quite some time before being caught. So check your backups, kids!

This sections also has an interesting chapter on email privacy and a couple different services/methods for using encryption to secure your mail and, better yet, send email that cannot be read after a certain date.

Web Server Security

Every sysad in the business should make sure to read this section, which starts out talking about physical security (because if you don't have that the rest may not matter), and continues all the way down to deploying certificates.

Security for Content Providers

Finally, the book finishes up with a few chapters that are mostly about the legalities of running a site. This combines client authentication with privacy policies, digital payments and intellectual property into a good if less technical ending.

Overall

One interesting aspect of the authors' overall approach is that they are so platform neutral. I didn't expect this from a team that wrote books on Unix security, but they have chapters on ActiveX issues and it isn't dealt with in the flip manner that Unix people often use toward other OSes. Even their screen shots are in Windows. You definitely get the feeling these guys know there stuff from more than one perspective.

We happen to be talking a lot about public key infrastructures at work lately, and the chapters on digital certificates were quite handy in getting up to speed on the different issues. As with other sections, they deal not only with the bit twiddling involved but also with history and policy. The human issues. Very useful stuff about an area that not many think about and about which the existing writing is fairly opaque.

So, if you're needing to learn more about this subject I can't think of another book I would recommend before it. I've been motivated enough to write a review on it, and for most of us that's probably a ringing endorsement by itself!

You can purchase Web Security, Privacy and Commerce at Fatbrain.

jeffy124 submitted to us his review of World War 3.0 Microsoft and Its Enemies. For those of you who just can't get enough of the seemingly endless saga of legal move and countermove, this book follows this case from the beginning. It's about eight months out of date now, but has decent background. World War 3.0 Microsoft And Its Enemies author Ken Auletta pages 397 publisher Random House Publishing rating 4/10 reviewer jeffy124 ISBN 0-375-50366-8 summary A look at the antitrust case United States vs. Microsoft, it's history and the people and corporations involved.

Just in time for a possible settlement in the famous case, this book by Ken Auletta, writer for The New Yorker, takes a look at the case from before it's beginning to almost the end. Written in terms suitable for both the non-techhie and non-lawyer, he doesn't do a good job of maintaining reader interest. Chock full of details that deviate and distract from the main theme of book, it was enough such that this reader hasn't touched the book since school started back in mid-August. (The pending settlement gave me the motivation to do this review)

The book details each person involved in the case, everyone from Justice Dept Prosecutor David Boise to Judge Jackson to good 'ol Billy Gates. Every time a new individual is introduced in the story, the book goes off and tells that person's life story, causing some loss of interest and me asking "Get to the point already!"

However, this biographying of each person does have it's plusses. We see a side of Bill Gates the public is not used to seeing. Auletta describes him as a kid who must have everything go his way or else, and how that attitude worked against him in the infamous videotape. We see the pure intellect of Boise in how he had to be kicked out of Boston College's Law School because he was too smart, and how his performance in the 1970s IBM anti-trust suit applies to his superior execution of the MS case.

The book tells how Microsoft handled the initial problem of Netscape, how Gates orchestrated his company into their predicament of investigation by the Justice Dept. Auletta tells why Netscape Navigator was a "middleware" threat to the Windows platform and why Gates and Microsoft acted the way they did in order to keep Windows as a key piece of the Internet. Key point made was that publicly, Gates appeared to have no interest in the threat Netscape was having against his company while internal memos at the same were telling how MS was going to maintain control.

The case itself is fairly well told. Auletta does a decent job of explaining the Sherman Act and how previous anti-trust cases and decisions would weigh in on this case. Key points for the Justice Dept were the famous videotape of Gates repeatedly denying or not knowing knowledge of something being immediately followed by Boise showing an email sent by Gates; the program by Dr. Ed Felton of Princeton that was able to remove IE from Windows without performance loss vs. the poorly performing Windows presented by MS's developers; the infamous line by an MS Exec to a Netscape Exec "we will cut off your air supply;" and the MS Marketing Exec testimony on how MS restricted partners (like AOL) from advertising Netscape on the same webpage as IE.

Auletta does go off at some point telling about the history of anti-trust cases and how many monopoly cases have not lasted much longer than 13-15 years. He tells that by the end of IBM's anti-trust case, IBM was no longer a monopoly, and other examples. Although I havent reached it yet, the last chapter of the book is titled "Microsoft Loses Even If It Wins."

The chapter that really made me lose interest was the one entitled "Nerds In the Bunker." I was expecting a short tale of how geeks (like us slashdotters) were taking on MS with Linux and other open source and free (as in beer) software. Instead, I got a tale of the "nerds" of the press. A chapter on how the press was factoring into the case. MS was distracting themselves by trying to maintain a good public image while at the same time damaging evidence was repeatedly being presented to Judge Jackson, and the few members of the press lucky enough to get passes for that day.

Overall, if you time available to you and have an interest in this story, it may be worth your time to read the book. Sooner or later I know I'll finish it - Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks are comming :)

Final Note: The book covers the story up to last January, yet mentions the February Court of Appeals hearings that were scheduled at time of publication.

You can purchase World 3.0 at fatbrain. The TOC

Chronology
Prologue: Gilded Voctim
Ch 1: The Prosecutors
Ch 2: Hard Core
Ch 3: The First Pitch
Ch 4: Opening Salvos
Ch 5: The Government's Story
Ch 6: Microsoft's Hole Gets Deeper
Ch 7: Spin
Ch 8: The Real Bill Gates
Ch 9: Children At Play
Ch 10: Elephants and Mice
Ch 11: Micorosft's Witnesses Speak
Ch 12: Nerds In The Bunker
Ch 13: Spring Break
Ch 14: Exile
Ch 15: The Trial's Final Innings
Ch 16: The Trial Pauses, The Planet Doesn't
Ch 17: Judge Jackson's "Facts"
Ch 18: The Mediator
Ch 19: Disconnect: Washington, DC, vs. Redmond, Washington
Ch 20: Davos, Again
Ch 21: So Much Effort, So Little Result
Ch 22: Remedy, And Appeal
Ch 23: Microsoft Loses Even If It Wins
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index

Richard Jones writes: "In my opinion, the most difficult aspect of writing a good 3D game is coding complex physics. If you can take away all the flashy graphics, texture maps, light and shadows from a game, and it's still at least 75% as playable and addictive, then you have an excellent game. But too many programmers seem to be ready to concentrate on the graphics, neglecting the underlying physics which make the game playable. If you compare, say, Re-volt with its fabulously detailed models of remote-controlled cars, and Carmageddon which on the N64 at least has sucky physics, well I know which one I'm still playing." He's contributed his review (below) of a book intended to help game programmers make games that aren't sucky. Physics For Game Developers author David M. Bourg pages 326 publisher O'Reilly rating 8 reviewer Richard Jones ISBN 0-596-00006-5 summary A good introduction to the difficult subject of writing 3D games and simulations with accurate physics, let down by a few minor snags.

Programmers who want to get serious about game physics will love David M. Bourg's Physics for Game Developers. As I've said, the subject is inherently very difficult, and the book assumes that you are already familiar with vector and matrix arithmetic up to college level, integration and differentiation, and at least you hazily recall your mechanics/physics lessons from school. You also won't be afraid to wade through Bourg's carefully documented derivations of formulae for various physical effects, and his well-commented source code.

The book starts off by recapping the basic concepts of mass, centre of gravity, moment of inertia and inertia tensors. Bourg assumes that you have a working grasp of these subjects, and I admit that I had to go back to some of my A-level mechanics text books. He then goes straight into kinematics, where he uses standard (but forgotten!) integration techniques to calculate velocities from accelerations and positions from velocities. His examples are excellent, although a few exercises wouldn't have gone amiss. The chapter on forces covers a great many different types of forces such as springs and buoyancy, but curiously omits the important subject of contact forces (the normal force that a table, for instance, exerts on your computer monitor to stop it falling through the floor). In fact contact forces don't appear until much later in the book. Particles, rigid bodies and impulses (forces from collisions) are introduced in chapters 4 and 5.

At this point I have to say I was a little bit confused. What did this have to do with game programming? Everyone knows that games spend most of their time running round a single big "main loop," working out the forces on each object, looking for collisions and working out which keys the user is pressing. It doesn't seem imaginable that a game programmer could completely solve all the equations of motion by pure integration at the beginning of the game, and then just run the positions of the players through the graphics engine like a movie!

I already knew a little about this from what I'd found from the web, but what most games actually do is calculate all the forces on all the objects (players, scenery, etc.) in the game, and then integrate them at each step. Some of these forces will be generated by human players pressing keys on the keyboard or wiggling the joystick, and that's how the objects end up moving. Pure integration isn't usually possible, so the physics engine performs numerical integration - a kind of fast approximation to the pure "closed form" solution. Numerical integration is itself a tricky subject, but it's the meat-and-veg of good game programming. Surprisingly, numerical integration and a realistic main loop doesn't appear until chapter 11 (172 pages into the book). I skipped straight to this section, and I suggest you do so too...

The chapter on numerical integration is excellent and contains the first realistic gaming (or at least simulation) code. Many games I've examined use simple numerical integration, like this:

// At each step ... A = acceleration, dt = time step
Vx += Ax * dt;
Vy += Ay * dt;
Sx += Vx * dt;
Sy += Vy * dt;

Unfortunately this method (Euler's method) is very inaccurate and unstable: if you tried to simulate planets orbiting around a sun using this method, they'd soon fly off into outer space unrealistically. Bourg gives an excellent introduction to better methods such as the "improved Euler" method and the popular Runge-Kutta method, and he covers them in a context which will make it clear how to use these methods in your own programs.

The book reaches a crescendo with three fully developed simulations: two hovercraft which you can drive around and jolt into each other like bumper cars -- they spin around realistically; a flight simulator; and a 3D car which can be crashed into blocks that bounce around. Again the source code is meticulously commented and generally well written. My only two reservations about the code are: It would be nice if Bourg had chosen to use OpenGL instead of Direct3D so that those of us without regular access to Windows could actually compile and run the examples. The book would make an ideal companion to the OpenGL Red Book. And coming firmly from the Windows camp, Bourg's examples are full of all the horrors of Win32 APIs and Hungarian Notation. But maybe that's just my personal preference :-)

So in summary: The Bad Points:

• Measurement systems: Bourg moves uneasily between the English/US system and the European SI units. So we get examples which combine ft/s, meters, slugs and kilograms, uneasily converting between the two. He should have chosen one system and stuck with it.
• A common complaint about computer books: I've just spent 25 quid on a book which will sit open on my desk for months. Is it too much to ask that it be ring bound?
• Some subjects are not explained in enough depth. Particularly: moments, contact forces, impulse methods. Bourg should probably have written a chapter or three on collision detection.
• The chapters are presented in a very strange order. Move chapters 6-10 until later, or introduce numerical integration earlier.
• A few of the illustrations are inaccurate.

and The Good Points:

• Considerably better than the usual round of maths/physics text books which make up this field. In fact, this is really one of only about 2 or 3 significant books in this area which are pitched for game developers as opposed to mathematicians, and it's certainly the best.
• The areas which are covered are done well, in significant depth, with a good bibliography where you can find out more.
• The commentary on the difficult equations is good, and Bourg resists the temptation to derive many of the formulae he presents, instead referring interested readers to other references.
• Code is well documented and explained.

And now I suppose I have no excuse not to resurrect XRacer :-)

You can purchase Physics for Game Developers at Fatbrain

Danny Yee writes with the perfect background reading (once you've finished the Tolkein books, of course) before checking out the new LoTR movie: "For something completely different, reviews of The Complete Sagas of Icelanders and Seamus Heaney's Beowulf. Essential background reading for serious Tolkien fanatics! You might also want to check out my other medieval literature reviews." The Complete Sagas of Icelanders author Viar Hreinsson pages 2200+ (5 volumes) publisher Leifur Eiriksson rating 9 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 9979-9293-0-8 summary stories of Viking Age feuds, battles, legal conflicts, love affairs ...

Beginning in the 9th century, settlers from Norway created in Iceland a society of fiercely independent farmers, fishermen, and traders; in the 13th and 14th centuries their descendants wrote a whole series of stories about them. These family sagas tell of feuds, duels and battles, legal conflicts, love affairs, travels and raids to Norway and the British Isles and further afield, and the attempted settlement of Vinland. The Complete Sagas of Icelanders is the first complete coordinated translation of these into English, containing all forty family sagas and fifty shorter tales.

The focus of the sagas is always on individuals and their relationships. They offer us strong men and outlaws, legal experts and tricksters, poets and warriors serving Norwegian kings, respected leaders and arbitrators -- and powerful matriarchs, faithful wives, and trouble-stirring women. The saga writers never venture directly into the minds of their protagonists, but they produce vivid, distinctive portraits of individuals caught up in memorable events: Egil, imprisoned in York by King Eirik Bloodaxe, with one night to compose a poem to save his life; the final ridge-top stand of the outlawed Gisli; Askel working for peace, to the point of trying to arrange in advance the settlement for his own death; Kormak's life-long obsession with Steingerd; Gunnar turning back from going into exile, moved by the beauty of the landscape; the imperious Gudrun, revealing at the end of her life which of her men she had loved the most; the burning of Njal and his family and the protracted legal and armed struggle to revenge them; and many others.

The sagas draw on local family stories, older myths and legends, and the broader body of medieval literature, along with a good deal of invention and original creation. While some are awkwardly structured, others rework their sources in sophisticated ways and some are literary masterpieces. In some, unity is provided by a biographical focus, sometimes ending with a peaceful death at the end of a long life, sometimes building with tragic inevitability to a climactic killing and the resulting resolution. Others are almost political studies, tracing the shifting balance of power between leading figures in a particular region. And while this genre of sagas is defined by a realistic treatment of early Iceland, many are (or incorporate) comic stories, fantastic tales, and romances.

In their attention to the actions of individuals within social networks, and the working through of their consequences, the Icelandic sagas are important precursors of the modern novel. They directly influenced many writers, among them Walter Scott and J.R.R. Tolkien. The sagas are also a valuable source of information about medieval Iceland, a subject of interest to more than medievalists. One of its notable features is that it had a sophisticated legal system but no executive government, which makes it a magnet for political theorists -- if you search the web for information on medieval Iceland, you'll find a running fight between the libertarians and anarchists over who can best claim it as an exemplum.

Some aspects of the sagas do take a little getting used to. They are episodic, sometimes covering events over several generations and jumping across decades to continue the story of a feud or the history of a region, and they alternate between periods of tension and relaxation. Characters are often introduced with a paragraph or two of genealogical information unrelated to the main story; and the sheer density of names, often shared by several characters, can be confusing. Though they never replace human actions and decisions as explanations of events, elements of foretelling and prophecy are nearly ubiquitous in the sagas. And obviously much of the cultural context is foreign to the modern reader. One soon becomes accustomed to these things, however, and overall the sagas are among the most accessible of medieval genres.

Unless your library has a copy or will obtain one for you, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders is probably not practical for a newcomer to the sagas; cheap paperback editions of any of the better known ones should be easy to come by. But if you become seriously interested in the sagas - and I should warn you that they are addictive -- then it's hard to go past The Complete Sagas.

Firstly, the translations are good. My academic friends assure me they are mostly of high quality, accurate enough to be usable for scholarly purposes. More importantly for the lay reader, they are lively and readable, avoiding inappropriate archaism or colloquialism. The sagas are each preceded by a brief note on when they were written and their manuscript sources, but otherwise they are clean, mostly unburdened by unnecessary commentary or annotation. The only regular exceptions to this are marginal glosses for the "kennings", highly figurative stock phrases in the poetry embedded in some of the sagas, and some explanatory notes where texts are partial or put together from different sources.

For readers who do want some background information, The Complete Sagas has a really good general introduction, a glossary of terms which are likely to be unfamiliar, some maps, and an index of characters. A minor complaint here is that the maps could show more detail and that they are all at the end of volume five, instead of in the appropriate volumes - and the index of characters is useful enough that it could almost have been repeated in each volume.

Perhaps most importantly, this is the only uniform, coordinated translation of the family sagas available. Collecting alternative translations of them all would be a lot of work, if it is even possible, and the result would not offer as coherent a presentation of the genre. Places, characters, and events often feature in several sagas, and motifs, stock phrases, and thematic elements often recur; a uniform translation scheme makes these connections easier to follow. On the other hand, the sagas do vary in style, mood, and structure, and this too is easier to appreciate when not obscured by variations in translation approach.

Finally, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders is beautifully produced. The leatherbound volumes find an elegant balance between attractiveness and austerity, and are of a size, shape and heft that makes reading them a pleasure (unlike some "great books" editions which are obviously designed to look impressive on shelves rather than to be read).

One minor caveat is that the title The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, while technically accurate, may mislead some: all the sagas about early Iceland (the "family sagas") are indeed included, but not any of the "fantasy" sagas such as the Saga of the Volsungs (based on older legends) or "romances" (based on continental models) from the same period. We will just have to hope that Leifur Eiriksson Publishing takes on the translation of those as a future project. A paperback edition would obviously make The Complete Sagas much more accessible; barring that, it would be nice if the volumes were available separately, so people could collect the set over a period of time.

Purchase The Complete Sagas of Icelanders at FatBrain or Leifur Eiriksson Publishing.

Beowulf author Seamus Heaney, translator pages 106 publisher Faber & Faber rating 9 ISBN 0-571-20376-0 summary An effective verse translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic.

For those unfamiliar with Beowulf, it is a late first millennium Anglo-Saxon epic about the hero Beowulf's fights with three monsters: Grendel, Grendel's mother, and, fifty years later at the end of his life, a dragon. Since its rediscovery in the early nineteenth century, it has become a recognised classic, translated scores if not hundreds of times. Not being able to read Old English, all I can say here is that Heaney's translation gave me a better understanding of why people rave about the poem than any of the others I have read.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of Heaney's Beowulf is that it can be read almost as if it were prose - and then mined more deeply for the poetry. Heaney writes in his introduction:

"I came to the task of translating Beowulf with a prejudice in favour of forthright delivery. I remembered the voice of the poem as being attractively direct, even though the diction was ornate and the narrative method at times oblique."

So he captures something of the Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse form, but not at the expense of "the sound of sense;" he doesn't inflict awkward archaisms on the reader and is never difficult to read. Here is a brief sample, from the wait after Beowulf dives to attack Grendel's mother.

"Immediately the counsellors keeping a lookout
with Hrothgar, watching the lake water,
saw a heave-up and surge of waves
and blood in the backwash. They bowed grey heads,
spoke in their sage, experienced way
about the good warrior, how they never again
expected to see that prince returning
in triumph to their king. It was clear to many
that the wolf of the deep had destroyed him forever."

An immense body of critical work on Beowulf exists. In his introduction Heaney very briefly touches on this, offering a few hints to understanding and interpreting the work. He also discusses some translation issues, feeling obliged to justify his use of one or two obscure Irish words.

Scholars may cavil at Heaney's liberties ("an interpretation and not a translation") and there are certainly better translations for scholarly purposes. Translation is always a balance between competing concerns, however, and a verse translation that attempts to convey something of the power of the original as a poem must inevitably deviate from the literal. Tolkien's seminal essay "The Monsters and the Critics" urged scholars to approach Beowulf not just as a philological curiosity or a source document for Anglo-Saxon language and history but as a poem and a story -- and Heaney offers lay readers a chance to appreciate something of that too.

Purchase the U.S. edition of the Heaney's Beowulf from FatBrain

Danny Yee writes with the perfect background reading (once you've finished the Tolkein books, of course) before checking out the new LoTR movie: "For something completely different, reviews of The Complete Sagas of Icelanders and Seamus Heaney's Beowulf. Essential background reading for serious Tolkien fanatics! You might also want to check out my other medieval literature reviews." The Complete Sagas of Icelanders author Viar Hreinsson pages 2200+ (5 volumes) publisher Leifur Eiriksson rating 9 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 9979-9293-0-8 summary stories of Viking Age feuds, battles, legal conflicts, love affairs ...

Beginning in the 9th century, settlers from Norway created in Iceland a society of fiercely independent farmers, fishermen, and traders; in the 13th and 14th centuries their descendants wrote a whole series of stories about them. These family sagas tell of feuds, duels and battles, legal conflicts, love affairs, travels and raids to Norway and the British Isles and further afield, and the attempted settlement of Vinland. The Complete Sagas of Icelanders is the first complete coordinated translation of these into English, containing all forty family sagas and fifty shorter tales.

The focus of the sagas is always on individuals and their relationships. They offer us strong men and outlaws, legal experts and tricksters, poets and warriors serving Norwegian kings, respected leaders and arbitrators -- and powerful matriarchs, faithful wives, and trouble-stirring women. The saga writers never venture directly into the minds of their protagonists, but they produce vivid, distinctive portraits of individuals caught up in memorable events: Egil, imprisoned in York by King Eirik Bloodaxe, with one night to compose a poem to save his life; the final ridge-top stand of the outlawed Gisli; Askel working for peace, to the point of trying to arrange in advance the settlement for his own death; Kormak's life-long obsession with Steingerd; Gunnar turning back from going into exile, moved by the beauty of the landscape; the imperious Gudrun, revealing at the end of her life which of her men she had loved the most; the burning of Njal and his family and the protracted legal and armed struggle to revenge them; and many others.

The sagas draw on local family stories, older myths and legends, and the broader body of medieval literature, along with a good deal of invention and original creation. While some are awkwardly structured, others rework their sources in sophisticated ways and some are literary masterpieces. In some, unity is provided by a biographical focus, sometimes ending with a peaceful death at the end of a long life, sometimes building with tragic inevitability to a climactic killing and the resulting resolution. Others are almost political studies, tracing the shifting balance of power between leading figures in a particular region. And while this genre of sagas is defined by a realistic treatment of early Iceland, many are (or incorporate) comic stories, fantastic tales, and romances.

In their attention to the actions of individuals within social networks, and the working through of their consequences, the Icelandic sagas are important precursors of the modern novel. They directly influenced many writers, among them Walter Scott and J.R.R. Tolkien. The sagas are also a valuable source of information about medieval Iceland, a subject of interest to more than medievalists. One of its notable features is that it had a sophisticated legal system but no executive government, which makes it a magnet for political theorists -- if you search the web for information on medieval Iceland, you'll find a running fight between the libertarians and anarchists over who can best claim it as an exemplum.

Some aspects of the sagas do take a little getting used to. They are episodic, sometimes covering events over several generations and jumping across decades to continue the story of a feud or the history of a region, and they alternate between periods of tension and relaxation. Characters are often introduced with a paragraph or two of genealogical information unrelated to the main story; and the sheer density of names, often shared by several characters, can be confusing. Though they never replace human actions and decisions as explanations of events, elements of foretelling and prophecy are nearly ubiquitous in the sagas. And obviously much of the cultural context is foreign to the modern reader. One soon becomes accustomed to these things, however, and overall the sagas are among the most accessible of medieval genres.

Unless your library has a copy or will obtain one for you, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders is probably not practical for a newcomer to the sagas; cheap paperback editions of any of the better known ones should be easy to come by. But if you become seriously interested in the sagas - and I should warn you that they are addictive -- then it's hard to go past The Complete Sagas.

Firstly, the translations are good. My academic friends assure me they are mostly of high quality, accurate enough to be usable for scholarly purposes. More importantly for the lay reader, they are lively and readable, avoiding inappropriate archaism or colloquialism. The sagas are each preceded by a brief note on when they were written and their manuscript sources, but otherwise they are clean, mostly unburdened by unnecessary commentary or annotation. The only regular exceptions to this are marginal glosses for the "kennings", highly figurative stock phrases in the poetry embedded in some of the sagas, and some explanatory notes where texts are partial or put together from different sources.

For readers who do want some background information, The Complete Sagas has a really good general introduction, a glossary of terms which are likely to be unfamiliar, some maps, and an index of characters. A minor complaint here is that the maps could show more detail and that they are all at the end of volume five, instead of in the appropriate volumes - and the index of characters is useful enough that it could almost have been repeated in each volume.

Perhaps most importantly, this is the only uniform, coordinated translation of the family sagas available. Collecting alternative translations of them all would be a lot of work, if it is even possible, and the result would not offer as coherent a presentation of the genre. Places, characters, and events often feature in several sagas, and motifs, stock phrases, and thematic elements often recur; a uniform translation scheme makes these connections easier to follow. On the other hand, the sagas do vary in style, mood, and structure, and this too is easier to appreciate when not obscured by variations in translation approach.

Finally, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders is beautifully produced. The leatherbound volumes find an elegant balance between attractiveness and austerity, and are of a size, shape and heft that makes reading them a pleasure (unlike some "great books" editions which are obviously designed to look impressive on shelves rather than to be read).

One minor caveat is that the title The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, while technically accurate, may mislead some: all the sagas about early Iceland (the "family sagas") are indeed included, but not any of the "fantasy" sagas such as the Saga of the Volsungs (based on older legends) or "romances" (based on continental models) from the same period. We will just have to hope that Leifur Eiriksson Publishing takes on the translation of those as a future project. A paperback edition would obviously make The Complete Sagas much more accessible; barring that, it would be nice if the volumes were available separately, so people could collect the set over a period of time.

Purchase The Complete Sagas of Icelanders at FatBrain or Leifur Eiriksson Publishing.

Beowulf author Seamus Heaney, translator pages 106 publisher Faber & Faber rating 9 ISBN 0-571-20376-0 summary An effective verse translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic.

For those unfamiliar with Beowulf, it is a late first millennium Anglo-Saxon epic about the hero Beowulf's fights with three monsters: Grendel, Grendel's mother, and, fifty years later at the end of his life, a dragon. Since its rediscovery in the early nineteenth century, it has become a recognised classic, translated scores if not hundreds of times. Not being able to read Old English, all I can say here is that Heaney's translation gave me a better understanding of why people rave about the poem than any of the others I have read.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of Heaney's Beowulf is that it can be read almost as if it were prose - and then mined more deeply for the poetry. Heaney writes in his introduction:

"I came to the task of translating Beowulf with a prejudice in favour of forthright delivery. I remembered the voice of the poem as being attractively direct, even though the diction was ornate and the narrative method at times oblique."

So he captures something of the Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse form, but not at the expense of "the sound of sense;" he doesn't inflict awkward archaisms on the reader and is never difficult to read. Here is a brief sample, from the wait after Beowulf dives to attack Grendel's mother.

"Immediately the counsellors keeping a lookout
with Hrothgar, watching the lake water,
saw a heave-up and surge of waves
and blood in the backwash. They bowed grey heads,
spoke in their sage, experienced way
about the good warrior, how they never again
expected to see that prince returning
in triumph to their king. It was clear to many
that the wolf of the deep had destroyed him forever."

An immense body of critical work on Beowulf exists. In his introduction Heaney very briefly touches on this, offering a few hints to understanding and interpreting the work. He also discusses some translation issues, feeling obliged to justify his use of one or two obscure Irish words.

Scholars may cavil at Heaney's liberties ("an interpretation and not a translation") and there are certainly better translations for scholarly purposes. Translation is always a balance between competing concerns, however, and a verse translation that attempts to convey something of the power of the original as a poem must inevitably deviate from the literal. Tolkien's seminal essay "The Monsters and the Critics" urged scholars to approach Beowulf not just as a philological curiosity or a source document for Anglo-Saxon language and history but as a poem and a story -- and Heaney offers lay readers a chance to appreciate something of that too.

Purchase the U.S. edition of the Heaney's Beowulf from FatBrain

Lois McMaster Bujold is known for her series of space opera novels about Miles Vorkosigan, a crippled but intelligent protagonist who has been, variously, a military officer, a secret agent, commander of a mercenary fleet, diplomat... the list goes on. The Curse of Chalion is, as far as I know, her first fantasy novel. [A reader points out that it isn't.] The crippled but intelligent protagonist is a military officer who gets employed as a diplomat, secret agent, secretary... you get the idea. A fun read, the plot isn't perfect but it's still a cut above most fantasy novels these days. At the very least, it isn't a rehash of the "small company has to get [item] to destroy [dark lord]" plot. The Curse of Chalion author Lois McMaster Bujold pages 442 publisher EOS rating 8/10 reviewer michael ISBN 0-380-97901-2 summary a solid work of fantasy from an author known for solid space opera

Cazaril has had a bit of a hard life. He's a competent military captain - perhaps too competent - who has fought in every significant war of the past 20 years. And been on the losing side each time. In his most recent campaign, he held a fortress against besiegers for many months, till he and his men were reduced to eating rats and the besieging army was thoroughly annoyed with him. At the conclusion of that campaign, he was sold off as a galley slave - chained to his oar, being whipped for the slightest disobedience. The experience has left him a bit the worse for wear, but with a selection of good stories which he recounts throughout the book. When asked if he knows the local geography, he replies, "What I haven't ridden over, I've walked, what I haven't walked, I've been dragged across. Or through. I've had geography ground into my skin. And I've rowed round half the Archipelago at least." This could have been a really good book with a few more stories from Cazaril.

There's more than a bit of humor in the book. Miles' disability was such that it couldn't be laughed at, but Cazaril has the necessary self-humor about the hard times he's had.

At a loss as to where to go after his miraculous rescue from the galley, Cazaril returns to his boyhood haunts, where he is promptly employed as a tutor to a reckless young noblewoman. They are promptly thrust into a political mess, which turns out to be deeper and darker (of course) than either suspected. Cazaril has to safeguard his charge while unraveling the mess, saving the kingdom, battling evil, and all the usual troubles that a protagonist must contend with.

One highpoint of the book is a complex yet self-consistent religious system. Most western fantasy authors tend to use poorly camouflaged versions of christianity, or gloss over religion. The religious system in Chalion is nothing like any real religion that I know of, but well done - it's probably more consistent than most real religions.

If you enjoy the Vorkosigan books, you'll probably like this one. If not, probably not. Well, I guess there are some people who adore science fiction and hate fantasy or vice-versa, but aside from them... I had solved most of the plot by about half-way through, but one key detail eluded me until the very end. Although looking back, there were enough hints for me to have gotten it.

While I'm at it, I ought to mention another Bujold "book" recently released - Miles, Mystery and Mayhem. You might expect from the title that this would be a new Vorkosigan book. You would be wrong. This is one of those sneaky publishers' tricks, a book consisting entirely of several previously published works about Miles. One novel, one novella, and one short story, if I remember the word counts correctly. All of which I've read before. There was no indication of this on the online site where I purchased this book. There is no indication of it in the brief blurb from the publisher which most places use to describe the book. There is no indication of it on the cover of the book itself - ensuring that scans of the cover won't give away the ruse. I'm sorely tempted to return it, though I probably won't - I'll just read the next few Bujold books in paperback or from the library, until my irritation with this trick fades. Bujold and/or her publisher did all her readers a great disservice with this sleazy trick.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Read the book review guidelines, then submit using Slashdot's web-submission page :)

mrgrumpy contributes this review of a book which, despite the interesting subject matter, he says comes with some forgiveable but hard-to-ignore shortcomings. Emergence still sounds like an interesting read and broad introduction to the theories and subject matter at hand, but read on for more of his take on the book. Emergence - The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software author Steve Johnson pages 288 publisher Penguin rating 6 reviewer Jim Richards ISBN 0-713-99400-2 summary Seeing order and patterns in apparent chaos.

This book covers the theory of emergence, which states that within a system of what seems to be anarchy, there are underlying rules that govern the pattern of behaviour and bring order out of chaos.

This books serves as an introduction to the field of emergence. It is something that is already happening around us, but we usually cannot see. The reason for this is that you need to look at a higher level then the individual organism. Ants can not see the society as a whole that they are members of. Just as we humans may have an understanding of the local community we are in and of ourselves, we need to step outside (or above) the city to understand how it functions. A city, like an ant colony does not have rules from the top as such, but rules that each occupant obeys, and it is these rules that give order to the chaos and make the resultant community behave like an organism as a whole.

I really wanted to like this book. But the level of information within it will make me put in into the light, popular fiction section of my bookshelf. One of the aspects of the book that really wanted me to give a good review is that the author makes a good introduction to the theory behind the comments system of Slashdot, the way people are chosen to rate comments and how good comments filter to the top. As such, I would have liked a review of the editorial process on Kuro5hin as well, since the two systems as fairly similar. In fact, I think the Kuro5hin system is better, because long time readers will see that the stories have moved away from an open source/linux focus to more cultural aspects, thus reflecting the change and growth of the community. But the idea of a Daily Me portal, that serves information that would suit us is explored heavily.

As I read the book though, an uneasiness came upon me, just as I do when reading books on neo-Darwinism. There is no mention of where these rules as such come from except through evolutionary survival or initial chance. If anything, the author implies that we are in a universe that had the initial conditions set, and left running. So we'd evolve or grow into who or what we are.

The idea that a God figure could be there, tweaking the parameters as the model runs, or even setting the initial conditions works against his ideas. This view is however explored in the chapter Control Artist, where the author comments on the development of software models, notably computer games. Games such as SimCity are discussed where the rules are set, but as a player we get to choose what gets built, what gets destroyed. Although here we are playing the Mayor of the City, the notion is the same; we control the macro level and not the micro level. But at the micro level, the software developer who built the game in the first place controls each inhabitant. Nothing really, is left to chance. Given the exact same initial conditions and same set of instructions the computer will create the same environment.

So, like most popular science books currently available it will educate you, entertain you and keep you occupied while reading it or totally bore you. But it is not a book of philosophy to base life on, which thankfully, the author has not tried to provide. It is very well researched, and the author seems on top of current trends and ideas. His writing style jumps around quite a bit, and some of the connections between topics might seem a little far fetched but it is an entertaining read as an introduction to the field of emergence theory.

Pet peeve 1: Notes. The notes section at the end is fairly extensive. But there are no foot notes in the book. The notes are indexed by page and quote. So as a reader you have to constantly check the notes section to see if there is a note or reference for the page you are reading.

Pet peeve 2: There was (for me) a glaring technical error on page 120.

"Ironically, it is precisely this feedback that the Web lacks, because HTML-based links are one-directional. You can point to ten other sites from your home page, but there's no way for those pages to know that you're pointing to them, short of you taking the time to fire off an e-mail to their respective webmasters."

You can see who is visiting your site, unless they are using an anonymizer proxy, or other system to hide your headers. The HTTP-REFERER header gives you exactly this information.

You can purchase Emergence at Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Read the book review guidelines first, then use the web submissions form.

Michael Simmons contributed this review of what he claims is the best of the very few books out there for folks who want to learn Cocoa programming. The field is so small, in fact, that he can give a nutshell review along the way of the only other one he's encountered, O'Reilly's Learning Cocoa. Update: 12/13 15:45 GMT by T : Please note: Simmons is thanked in the acknowledgements of Hillegass' book. He explains: "I went to the Big Nerd Ranch, where the author teaches an amazing Cocoa course. While there, I received a pre-release copy of the book (it's the coursebook, actually.) I had found a bunch of errors and typos, and helped Aaron correct those errors and inconsistencies, so I'm guessing he is thanking me for my contributions to quality." Just to clear that up! Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X author Aaron Hillegass pages 416 publisher Addison-Wesley rating 8.5 reviewer Michael Simmons ISBN 0201726831 summary Learn to program OS X applications

Intro to Cocoa
If you're interested in programming for Mac OS X, you've definitely heard of Cocoa by now. Cocoa is the name of the library of frameworks that gives you the ability to write advanced applications with ease. The Cocoa frameworks enable you to perform tasks that used to take a decent amount of code and implement it in a very straightforward manner. The hardest thing about learning Cocoa is that because it's so simple, it takes some getting used to.

You can write Cocoa applications with either Objective-C or Java. If you aren't familiar with Objective-C, it's an extension to the C language that makes it object-oriented. I'm not sure why Apple decided to offer Java support for Cocoa, since almost every source of information on the Internet and all Cocoa resources seem to only refer to Objective-C. Since Java-written Cocoa applications will not run on any platform other than OS X, it was probably done as a marketing "thing" -- Apple is giving Java programmers the ability to program Cocoa applications, opening up the potential for more Cocoa engineers.

Until today, there was only one book if you wanted to learn Cocoa. That book is Learning Cocoa , which is published by O'Reilly and written by Apple Computer, Inc. The new kid on the block is Cocoa Programming for OS X, which is published by Addison-Wesley and written by Aaron Hillegass of the Big Nerd Ranch. With two books out, Cocoa programmers now have an actual choice of which book to buy. Which brings us to the point of this review -- which book is better?

Is it really O'Reilly?
Since Learning Cocoa was out first, I'll start with my analysis of it first. When I heard that O'Reilly was going to start publishing OS X programming books, I was stoked. O'Reilly books have historically been amazing -- very complete and straightforward sources that any programmer would be proud to have in his or her arsenal of knowledge. Unfortunately, Learning Cocoa falls short of the O'Reilly tradition, and makes me wonder if O'Reilly actually supervised the printing of this book.

There are some good points about the book. It was the first and only Cocoa book, so when I got my copy back in May, I was looking forward to learning the language. It does provide some good examples on how to write Cocoa applications, which allows one to dive straight into Cocoa programming. The introduction to Cocoa is really good -- it gives a very in-depth description of Object-Oriented and Cocoa program design, which I really like. Additionally, it gives a very good background to the concepts and techniques of using Cocoa.

However, there is a real problem with this book. This book reads more like it was meant to be an internal reference at Apple, rather than a book for the beginner. Another problem is that the layout and order of the content is confusing. Unlike past O'Reilly books and other quality programming books, it seems like this time they took a bunch of internal technical documents on Cocoa, and sent them to the binding machines without further editing. That the book credits "Apple Computer, Inc." as the author provides good evidence for my theory.

The heart of the problem is that the reader has to really dig and explore through this book to find that info that he or she wants. When learning a new language or programming concept, a book should be easy to follow and it should allow the reader to focus on learning the actual concepts, and not having to figure out the flow of the book.

Aaron hits a home run
The "flow" statement is a perfect segue into my analysis of Cocoa Programming For Mac OS X. Right away, I could tell that I was going to like this book. The author, Aaron Hillegass, wrote this book like he is a friend speaking directly to the reader -- he takes you through each concept like he is right there with you. This book teaches you Cocoa by specifically having you write applications, and in each new chapter, you add new features. As you add each new feature, you'll learn an important Cocoa concept.

O'Reilly's book also has the reader write applications and add features, one by one, but it does so in a very sporadic way. I was never really sure what the purpose of adding a certain method was, whereas with Aaron's book, each chapter is focused on an ordered and very specific concept, making it very clear what I was about to learn, and why.

Another part of this book that I really appreciate is the chapter on Objective-C. In just one chapter, I understood Objective-C. You must already know C and at least one object-oriented language (like C++ or Java,) but after reading this chapter, you will be able to write Cocoa applications in Objective-C.

This book comes with an online counterpart, powered by Techstra. Techstra is an online engine that allows you to enter any page of the book and get "extras." The extras include examples not in the book, solutions, errata, and even input from readers. It's very cool and very helpful.

A final and very strong point of Aaron's book is that it reflects the latest update of the Mac OS X development tools, Project Builder and Interface Builder. Apple just updated the development tools to version 10.1, substantially changing the UI and functionality, and the latest version is reflected in Aaron's book.

Conclusion
It's clear to see which book I'm giving the nod to. I know it appears like I'm being biased towards Cocoa Programming For OS X, but if can get to your local bookstore and actually compare the two books side by side, you'll see why I'm so enthusiastic about Aaron's book.

I think having both books is a good choice, as the O'Reilly book does offer very in-depth information, which is useful once you learn Cocoa using Aaron's book. If O'Reilly changed the title to After Learning Cocoa, I think my perception of the book would be different.

Cocoa allows programmers to write powerful applications in a very short amount of time. I am amazed at the power and simplicity of the Cocoa frameworks, and can't wait to see what myself and other programmers end up creating in the future. I'm sure other books will come out in the future, but for now all we have is two. The one I'd recommend is Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, but you already knew that. :)

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Read the book review guidelines first :)

Michael Simmons contributed this review of what he claims is the best of the very few books out there for folks who want to learn Cocoa programming. The field is so small, in fact, that he can give a nutshell review along the way of the only other one he's encountered, O'Reilly's Learning Cocoa. Update: 12/13 15:45 GMT by T : Please note: Simmons is thanked in the acknowledgements of Hillegass' book. He explains: "I went to the Big Nerd Ranch, where the author teaches an amazing Cocoa course. While there, I received a pre-release copy of the book (it's the coursebook, actually.) I had found a bunch of errors and typos, and helped Aaron correct those errors and inconsistencies, so I'm guessing he is thanking me for my contributions to quality." Just to clear that up! Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X author Aaron Hillegass pages 416 publisher Addison-Wesley rating 8.5 reviewer Michael Simmons ISBN 0201726831 summary Learn to program OS X applications

Intro to Cocoa
If you're interested in programming for Mac OS X, you've definitely heard of Cocoa by now. Cocoa is the name of the library of frameworks that gives you the ability to write advanced applications with ease. The Cocoa frameworks enable you to perform tasks that used to take a decent amount of code and implement it in a very straightforward manner. The hardest thing about learning Cocoa is that because it's so simple, it takes some getting used to.

You can write Cocoa applications with either Objective-C or Java. If you aren't familiar with Objective-C, it's an extension to the C language that makes it object-oriented. I'm not sure why Apple decided to offer Java support for Cocoa, since almost every source of information on the Internet and all Cocoa resources seem to only refer to Objective-C. Since Java-written Cocoa applications will not run on any platform other than OS X, it was probably done as a marketing "thing" -- Apple is giving Java programmers the ability to program Cocoa applications, opening up the potential for more Cocoa engineers.

Until today, there was only one book if you wanted to learn Cocoa. That book is Learning Cocoa , which is published by O'Reilly and written by Apple Computer, Inc. The new kid on the block is Cocoa Programming for OS X, which is published by Addison-Wesley and written by Aaron Hillegass of the Big Nerd Ranch. With two books out, Cocoa programmers now have an actual choice of which book to buy. Which brings us to the point of this review -- which book is better?

Is it really O'Reilly?
Since Learning Cocoa was out first, I'll start with my analysis of it first. When I heard that O'Reilly was going to start publishing OS X programming books, I was stoked. O'Reilly books have historically been amazing -- very complete and straightforward sources that any programmer would be proud to have in his or her arsenal of knowledge. Unfortunately, Learning Cocoa falls short of the O'Reilly tradition, and makes me wonder if O'Reilly actually supervised the printing of this book.

There are some good points about the book. It was the first and only Cocoa book, so when I got my copy back in May, I was looking forward to learning the language. It does provide some good examples on how to write Cocoa applications, which allows one to dive straight into Cocoa programming. The introduction to Cocoa is really good -- it gives a very in-depth description of Object-Oriented and Cocoa program design, which I really like. Additionally, it gives a very good background to the concepts and techniques of using Cocoa.

However, there is a real problem with this book. This book reads more like it was meant to be an internal reference at Apple, rather than a book for the beginner. Another problem is that the layout and order of the content is confusing. Unlike past O'Reilly books and other quality programming books, it seems like this time they took a bunch of internal technical documents on Cocoa, and sent them to the binding machines without further editing. That the book credits "Apple Computer, Inc." as the author provides good evidence for my theory.

The heart of the problem is that the reader has to really dig and explore through this book to find that info that he or she wants. When learning a new language or programming concept, a book should be easy to follow and it should allow the reader to focus on learning the actual concepts, and not having to figure out the flow of the book.

Aaron hits a home run
The "flow" statement is a perfect segue into my analysis of Cocoa Programming For Mac OS X. Right away, I could tell that I was going to like this book. The author, Aaron Hillegass, wrote this book like he is a friend speaking directly to the reader -- he takes you through each concept like he is right there with you. This book teaches you Cocoa by specifically having you write applications, and in each new chapter, you add new features. As you add each new feature, you'll learn an important Cocoa concept.

O'Reilly's book also has the reader write applications and add features, one by one, but it does so in a very sporadic way. I was never really sure what the purpose of adding a certain method was, whereas with Aaron's book, each chapter is focused on an ordered and very specific concept, making it very clear what I was about to learn, and why.

Another part of this book that I really appreciate is the chapter on Objective-C. In just one chapter, I understood Objective-C. You must already know C and at least one object-oriented language (like C++ or Java,) but after reading this chapter, you will be able to write Cocoa applications in Objective-C.

This book comes with an online counterpart, powered by Techstra. Techstra is an online engine that allows you to enter any page of the book and get "extras." The extras include examples not in the book, solutions, errata, and even input from readers. It's very cool and very helpful.

A final and very strong point of Aaron's book is that it reflects the latest update of the Mac OS X development tools, Project Builder and Interface Builder. Apple just updated the development tools to version 10.1, substantially changing the UI and functionality, and the latest version is reflected in Aaron's book.

Conclusion
It's clear to see which book I'm giving the nod to. I know it appears like I'm being biased towards Cocoa Programming For OS X, but if can get to your local bookstore and actually compare the two books side by side, you'll see why I'm so enthusiastic about Aaron's book.

I think having both books is a good choice, as the O'Reilly book does offer very in-depth information, which is useful once you learn Cocoa using Aaron's book. If O'Reilly changed the title to After Learning Cocoa, I think my perception of the book would be different.

Cocoa allows programmers to write powerful applications in a very short amount of time. I am amazed at the power and simplicity of the Cocoa frameworks, and can't wait to see what myself and other programmers end up creating in the future. I'm sure other books will come out in the future, but for now all we have is two. The one I'd recommend is Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, but you already knew that. :)

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Read the book review guidelines first :)

Duncan Lawie returns from the wilderness with another review drawn from the world of classic science fiction. Probably a romp through a good used bookstore (or a good library) may be a more satisfying way to find some of Le Guin's works than ordering online, but it is available in reissue (linked below). The Left Hand of Darkness author Ursula K Le Guin pages 250 publisher Little, Brown rating 8 reviewer Duncan Lawie ISBN 0441478123 summary A classic of science fiction's New Wave which stands up to scrutiny 30 years later.

Ursula K. Le Guin is probably the best known woman in science fiction. She made her reputation in the late 1960s and early 1970s and is certainly one of the few working 30 years ago to still be an active and instantly recognised name today. The Hainish novels she wrote in the late 1960s and early 1970s brought her early renown and awards. The science fiction universe she created is sometimes buried by the success of her Earthsea books and the different directions of her later years but Le Guin has recently revisited and extended this family of books. In the course of her career she has written over 30 novels and short story collections which have, between them, earned her every significant award that SF has to offer, often more than once. Yet, some commentators have become uncomfortable with Le Guin's ideology, allowing their view of her best science fiction to be clouded by her subsequent academic reputation

The Left Hand of Darkness was the first great book written by Le Guin, winning both the Hugo and Nebula awards. It built on her journeyman novels set in the same Hainish universe but they pale beside this book, in which Le Guin fully found both her voice and her subject. The plot is, in barest outline, a standard trope of science fiction -- a visitor from an advanced civilisation brings a message to a non-space-age people. The essential twist seems simple in hindsight but it is an indicator of the new winds blowing through science fiction at the time. The people of the planet Winter are a variant human population, neuter five sixths of the time but who become either male or female when they become sexually active in the remaining part of the month. Every normal adult can -- and most do -- both bear and sire children. The result is a society where sexual inequality is simply impossible. This thought experiment is fascinating reading yet the book does not preach. These people have much in common with the wider community of humanity and the framework of the plot is strong enough for the discursive elements of the text.

Most of the story is told from the perspective of Genly Ai, the solo Earth visitor who holds the role of "First Mobile" to Winter from the League of Worlds. His mission is to bring news of the existence of other inhabited worlds and to encourage Winter's peoples to allow contact. He is, intentionally, a virtually unsupported ambassador, bringing a message of peace and technology; attempting to convince through his words and the presence of his space ship. They seem to find it difficult to believe (or acknowledge) that he is from another planet and consider his fixed sexuality a perversion. Despite his training, it is almost impossible for Ai to understand the personal or political values of the people he deals with. As a result, he is caught up in intrigue within and between governments. The neighbouring nations with which Ai is involved are broadly painted as a stratified, feudal country and a modern but bureaucratised nation. Given the different nature of these humans, the way such societies actually work is interesting through both the similarities and the contrasts with the expectations of first impressions.

Alongside Ai's reminisences, the book includes myths and stories as well as extracts from the journal of one of the inhabitants (which reads very much like an Antarctic sledging diary from a century ago, with its distance travelled and descriptions of ice and weather conditions). These give the book greater depth as an artifact and provide further explanation of the culture without filtering through Ai's understanding. Ai himself undergoes considerable physical and emotional suffering in the course of his mission; the book's ending tells as much about how he has changed as it does of the fate of his mission.

Le Guin's explanation of how Winter and its inhabitants came about is not hard science but the development of her ideas is fascinating. She builds up Winter's human and natural environments without falling into a lecturing style, offering plenty of food for thought by leaving as many questions open as she answers. The book also packs an emotional punch. Throw away any preconceptions and enjoy The Left Hand of Darkness.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain. You may also be interested in checking out a Le Guin site that Duncan recommends. Would you like to see you review in this space? Check out our book review submission guidelines first :)

Bob Abooey writes: "SoftwareMarketSolution has an interesting interview of Joel Spolsky, of Joel on Software fame. Joel, a former programmer at Microsoft, discusses some of the reasons he thinks some very popular software companies or projects fail, including Netscape, Lotus 123, Borland, etc." This interview brings out some mild boiler-room stories which sound like they could be the basis of a good book, along the lines of Soul of a New Machine .

Lawrence Lessig's new book, The Future of Ideas: the fate of the commons in a connected world , is strongly related to his previous book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace . In Code, Lessig pursued his thesis that the computer code behind all online activities functioned as a set of laws, and the impact that that has on regulation of the online world. In Ideas, Lessig explores a related concept that was hammered on heavily during the Microsoft anti-trust cases -- that holders of intellectual property (copyrights and patents) will squelch freedom and innovation online. The Future of Ideas author Lawrence Lessig pages 352 publisher Random House rating 9/10 reviewer Michael Sims ISBN 0-375-50578-4 summary Suppressive efforts by entrenched industries threaten innovation in cyberspace

Ideas has been reviewed in Salon and in the Washington Monthly; the book has a promotional website as well.

Lessig starts off by looking at the idea of a "commons," a community resource of some sort. The traditional commons is a public park or piece of land, but Lessig is more interested in looking at less-traditional commons on the 'Net and other communications systems. He moves on to examining some of the innovations that have been spurred by the recent growth of the Net -- typically startup companies that have taken advantage of the commons represented by TCP/IP and HTTP to provide a new service or product. If you follow Slashdot religiously, you probably read about most of these companies at least twice -- once when they started offering their innovative new whizbang, and again when they were sued by Megacorp, Inc., and shut down. The final part of Ideas covers the lawsuits, or more precisely the efforts by entrenched players to keep anyone else from playing. The distinction is important, because lawsuits are not the only way to keep upstarts from being able to participate: control of the code is also an important tool. For every control through lawsuits story that Slashdot runs, there's an equivalent story about control through code.

Just as in Code, Lessig is not optimistic about the future. Why should he be? So far, despite every warning, every attempt to sound the alarm, the forces trying to shut down innovation are winning in an utterly convincing fashion. A blurb compares the book to Silent Spring, the famous book about the environmental effects of DDT. Silent Spring was more or less successful -- DDT is now banned for most uses in the U.S., and the book had great effect in raising environmental awareness, but overall, environmental quality has continued to suffer. Lessig's book is not likely to be as successful. Attacking DDT was relatively easy compared to attacking the unlimited expansion of intellectual property, which has many multi-billion dollar companies willing to fight to defend their continued erosion of the public commons.

This should suffice to summarize Lessig's book. The ideas in it should not be unfamiliar -- Lessig is hardly the only one espousing this point of view today, though he is one of the most articulate. The final chapters have Lessig's suggestions for ways to reverse this trend of quashing innovation -- different ways of managing the electromagnetic spectrum to produce a better wireless commons (it's worth noting that the unlicensed 2.4 Ghz band has been the source of most recent wireless innovation), ways to create an Internet commons on the wired network (some municipalities are already doing this, laying municipal fiber to the home and following an open access policy), changing copyright law and patent law to put more code in the public domain, changing contract law so that end-users can't be forced to sign away their rights. All are good suggestions. Despite the hopeful notes in parentheses just above, most of these suggestions stand little chance of being adopted any time soon. But perhaps Rachel Carson was looking at much the same uphill battle against DDT.

Ideas is most comparable to The Control Revolution by Andrew Shapiro, an earlier effort to explore the changing dynamics of control on the net. Shapiro was much more optimistic, and writing without much of the recent evidence that Lessig uses to make his point that innovation is being squashed thoroughly. If you will, there is an optimism scale -- John Perry Barlow defines one end of the scale, Shapiro is in the middle, and Lessig occupies the pessimistic side. Smart money is on Lessig.

All in all, it's a fine book. I think I prefer Code though, for a variety of reasons -- I find the central premise of Code to be less obvious, more ground-breaking. Or perhaps I've just read so much about "innovation" during the Microsoft trials that I can never again read the word without wincing. As with Code, Lessig has extensive footnotes, making this a scholarly work (for the scholars) but a perfectly readable book even for non-scholars. In any case, it's strongly recommended.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Read the book review guidelines, then submit using Slashdot's web-submission page :)

Beyond Contact is the definitive guide to human efforts at contacting alien civilizations. Sure, there have been various works that suggest the best way to make contact is to stand out in a cornfield on a dark night, but if you believe hard work and science (and maybe a *cough* data-crunching PCI card) is the way to go, this book will tell you everything you need to know. The author has been interviewed before; that will give you a starting point. Beyond Contact: A Guide to SETI and Communicating with Alien Civilizations author Brian McConnell pages 417 publisher O'Reilly rating 9/10 reviewer michael ISBN 0-596-00037-5 summary the definitive guide to SETI

Some readers may recall what Stephen Hawking said about his book, A Brief History of Time:

"Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. I therefore resolved not to have any equations at all. In the end, however, I did put in one famous equation, E=mc². I hope that this will not scare off half my potential readers."

Hawking was facing the same challenge as Brian McConnell faces in this book. Both are trying to turn advanced knowledge of their field of endeavour (which requires heavy math, heavy astronomy, heavy physics, heavy programming, and so forth) into a work which can be comprehended by lesser beings. McConnell has taken a different path than Hawking - his book has plenty of advanced equations, diagrams, and concepts. McConnell does a reasonable (and often very good) job at trying to bring readers up to speed when he thinks he's going to go over their heads, but it is still not a book for the faint of heart or mathematically-challenged. There are enough equations in the book to bring its readership down to (.5)ⁿ -- oh, roughly zero, give or take.

In any case, it's a good book, but technical. You were warned.

The first couple of chapters cover the history of searching for extraterrestrial life, "are we alone?", the nature of intelligence, and similar areas. Drake's Equation is the famous set of fudge-factors that would tell us whether we were likely to find other life forms, if only we knew what the values of the variables were:

N = R * f_s * f_p * n_e * f_l * f_i * f_c * L

Fill in values for all of those and you'll be famous forever. But what it means, as our knowledge stands now, is that we have no clue at all whether there is likely to be life out there or not. Comforting, isn't it?

The next several chapters cover the technical aspects of communicating over interstellar distances. The electrical engineers in the audience will have a leg up here; everyone else has the opportunity to learn the basics of signal processing and the peculiarities specific to communication across galaxies. Pretty thorough and informative, without being overwhelming.

Finally, the latter half of the book covers the 64,000 lightyear question: what to say? How to communicate with an intelligence where you can't assume even the most basic things in common? Yes, yes, you've probably heard of the idea of starting with the periodic table or basic mathematics and working up. But that's sort of like a dot-com business plan:

1. Establish Contact
2. Send Periodic Chart
3. ....
4. Communicate!

McConnell fills in the "...." part, and it's obvious that a great amount of thought has been put into it. Pretty quickly McConnell is describing how to send entire self-executing programs (see Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep).

This book is a bit of an oddity. If we're just talking about entertainment reading, it falls short - too technical. If I was grading it as a scientific work, again it would fall short - not technical enough. :) But as far as I know, this is the only work which tries to explain what SETI really is in terms that educated, reasonably bright laymen can understand, and as such, it does a fine job.

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Danny Yee writes: "Last year I reviewed Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Usability . Read on for my review of his latest book, Homepage Usability." This might make you want to go and revise your own home page. Homepage Usability author Jakob Nielsen, Marie Tahir pages 315 publisher New Riders rating 9 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 0-7357-1102-X summary high-profile homepages deconstructed in colorful detail.

You might want to read Homepage Usability just for the entertainment of watching web usability guru Jakob Nielsen deconstruct the homepages of fifty major sites. Or you could read it for some invaluable advice on web design -- I learned a lot from it, as I think even seasoned web designers will.

Homepage Usability begins with 113 tips on homepage design, some of them obvious and some not so obvious, and most of them applicable more broadly than homepages. Here are two of the shorter ones:

Use graphics to show real content, not just to decorate your homepage. For example, use photos of identifiable people who have a connection to the content as opposed to models or generic stock photos. People are naturally drawn to photos, so gratuitous graphics can distract users from critical content.

Don't use clever phrases and marketing lingo that make people work too hard to figure out what you're saying. For example, the "Dream, Plan, & Go" category on Travelcity might sound catchy to a marketing person, but it's not as straightforward as "Vacation Planning." Every time you make users ponder the meaning behind vague and cutesy phrases, your risk alienating or losing them altogether. Users quickly lose patience when they must click on a link just to figure out what it means. That isn't to say that homepage text should be bland, but it must be informative and should be unambiguous.

Nielsen and Tahir then look at some statistics on the fifty sites considered. These statistics are used to make recommendations, following Jakob's Law of the Internet User Experience, that "most users spend more of their time on other sites." Here's a sample:

Link Formatting

Next to the use of colored text, the underline is the second-most important cue to users that text is clickable, and 80% of the homepages underlined the links. We continue to recommend that links be underlined, except possibly in navigation bars that use a design that makes it more than commonly obvious where users can click.

Of the homepages in our sample, 60% used the traditional standard for link colors: blue. This is a fairly small majority, but still large enough that we continue to recommend blue as the color for unvisited links. If links are blue, users know what to do. End of story.

All this packs a remarkable amount of useful information into the first 50 pages, but the vast bulk of Homepage Usability, some 250 pages more, consists of analyses of the fifty chosen homepages. These follow a standard format. A full-page screen-shot faces a brief commentary, discussion of the page TITLE and tagline (if any), and a pictorial (overlay plus pie chart) breakdown of screen "real estate" into operating system and browser controls, welcome and site identity, navigation, content of interest, advertising and sponsorship, self promotion, and unused/filler. Then follow either two or four pages with detailed commentary: the screen-shots are repeated on the left-hand pages with elements numbered, and the right-hand pages have comments on them. Many of these are trivial and site-specific

"This Go button's color isn't noticeable enough - there should be much more contrast with the background color."

some of them amusingly so

"In general, oil companies would best avoid photos that show large dark shadows in the water next to their rigs."

Others are more general

"Don't have a special Shop link when there is a product section. The natural thing for users is to find the product first and then decide to buy it."

The sites covered are mostly those of corporates or media organisations - Ebay, ExxonMobil, ESPN, IBM, Victoria's Secret, and CNNfn, to name a few -- but some government departments are included and there's a good sprinkling of English-language sites outside the United States, such as those of the BBC and Australian supermarket chain Coles. The vast bulk of the analysis is, however, just as relevant for other kinds of organisations -- certainly for the university at which I work and the charity for which I do volunteer work, but also for my personal sites.

Finally, a comment on the physical book. A large square volume, 25cm a side, with colour everywhere, Homepage Usability is really nicely laid out. I'm not generally a fan of books with a lot of graphics and screen-shots, but here they are used to good effect, demonstrating how some things can still be done much more effectively in print than online.

You can order this book from Fatbrain. Check out Danny's other Internet and publishing reviews. Want to see your review in this space? Check out our book review guidelines first :)

As you know, we sent questions out to Bruce Campbell a few weeks ago, and his answer are below. Please note that Bruce didn't have time to reply to all of them via email as he was pretty busy, so he called and dictated answers. I've done the best I can to convey his answers below. Thanks to Bruce for the interview! Also, if you haven't picked up his book yet, you should. It is in it's 8th printing, so it's been doing well. Favorite character?
by mbessey on 07:52 PM November 12th, 2001

Bruce, you've played a number of "unconventional" heroes on TV and in films. Which character was the most fun to play?

Answer: Bruce noted that characters he portrays are pretty fun to start with. But movies are over too quickly for him to truly enjoy and develop the characters. Something like Brisco County you can have a lot more fun with, experiment more, and figure out which works and which does not over the course of many episodes. Like in spiderman, there is a 1 year distance between filming the scene and the feedback you get from seeing the finished product. With TV (Jack of All Trades and Brisco County) you can mess with the character and get immediate feedback. And then there are the ones that are completely outside the "winking-wise ass" category, like the appearance on Homicide where people come up to me and are like "You did a role where you weren't a funny guy", which is nice, he noted, because it shows that he's more than just the kookie actor.

Ideal TV Show?
by GusherJizmac on 07:56 PM November 12th, 2001

I loved Brisco County, Jr. and Jack of All Trades, and I was wondering if you had like a billion dollars to make a TV show, and there was no one else holding the purse strings, would you bring one of those two back, or make a new one (and if so, what would be it be?), or would you forget TV and make a movie, or even just lay in your bed of cash with several beautiful women?

Answer: Bruce said he would definitely revive Brisco and Jack of All tracks. With Jack of All Trades Bruce wanted to make it a more marines going in the clean up the Barbary Coast for civilization thing. But there was not the chance for that.

When asked if he would he forget TV, Bruce said "It's not about the budget it's about the creativity". "Jack of All Trades" was great because he didn't have some asshole telling him what to do for the most part. You don't need billions , Bruce notes that if he had 500k a year, he could make a movie a year. (although 2m is Bruces sweet spot).

Duke Nukem
by Sludge on 07:58 PM November 12th, 2001

I heard you were fairly choked when you heard Duke Nukem 3D ripped off some of your lines. Now, those lines weren't written by you presumably, but by a third party. How tied do actors feel to their lines? You seemed to take personal offense to this.

Answer: If they use one or two, it's not a big deal. But they used more than seems appropriate. But he felt is was kind of sad to see someone not even try to make their own one liners and instead gather up those from the a number of movies and such. So, it's not as if he was pissed about it, but he saw it more as yet another indication of a creative malaise that has gripped a number of people. He related the story of a film-maker who called him and pitched him on a movie with "John Woo action, Tarentino dialog and Kevin Smith characters" to which he replied "Save us from your shitty movie.", and added , "Right from the start he's sold out."

Being "B-Grade"
by NMerriam on 08:03 PM November 12th, 2001

What is it like to be a b-movie star, and a very successful one at that? I assume that everyone going into acting has the fantasy that they'll be the A-list guys making $20 million a picture, so are you happy to be in that "middle ground"?

Answer: Bruce is pretty happy with his position as an actor, noting that as a "b" actor, you're well-known and very liked (probably more so than the hunk-of-the-month actors). Bruce noted that B actors joke with each other in a very non-sour grapesy way that they had "dodged a bullet, as a B movie actor can do what he loves and still shop at the safeway".

For the book, B was an important qualifier, but the B world is more fun in realty. "Let's see Jim Cameron shoot a movie in 10 days" (noting that Jim Cameron did the B-movie "Pirannha") He'd love to take any of the big directors and say "you have two weeks to shoot a movie" and see who comes out on top. But he did note that it might be really cool to see a Scorsese or a Coppola return to their low budget roots.

Pseudonyms "Pete Perkinson" and "Roc Sandstorm"
by chipuni on 08:14 PM November 12th, 2001

According to the IMDB [imdb.com], you're sometimes credited as "Pete Perkinson" or "Roc Sandstorm". Where did you get those names from?

Answer: Bruce noted that Roc Sandstorm is Sam Raimi, and that the IMDB has that incorrect. Pete Perkinson is Bruce, however. He calls it his "elevator name". You see, instead of using real names in elevators when they didn't want to let on to strangers what they were doing. He and Sam would use these joke names and put them on projects they were too embarrassed to be attached too. The names they liked, but decided against included: Ida Kiein, Myra Ggrets and M. Barrass.

Brisco County Jr. on DVD
by Black Art on 08:16 PM November 12th, 2001

When are we going to see Brisco Country Jr. on DVD? It was a series ahead of its time. (I especially liked the anachronistic references. Timothy Leary as the preacher was hysterical!)

Answer: Brisco County is out on VHS right now, via Columbia House video. Bruce did the liner notes for each episode. He'd like to do the DVD mostly so he can get the commentary on it for each episode.

Batman?
by nedron on 08:32 PM November 12th, 2001

There has been a persistent rumor that you were up for the role of Batman before Burton was brought in (and subsequently selected the lamentable Michael Keaton). Is there any truth to this, or was it all wishful thinking on the part of your fans?

Answer: There is no truth whatsoever to the Batman rumor. Bruce was never called. "Cross old Batman off the superhero list." Superheros are not attractive characters to play. No character development, etc... Since everyone "knows" the character (parents dead, billionare,etc) you have a result that people develop every character but the hero. Proof is in the way they had 3 actors play Batman and no one really noticed. 3 actors, same suit, no character.

High School Question
by compugeek007 on 08:37 PM November 12th, 2001

Bruce, I went to same High School as you (Birmingham MI) and graduated about 8 - 10 years ago. You and Sam Raimi are somewhat of a legend there and my 10th grade Drama teacher choreographed the skeleton dance from Evil Dead 2. My question is rather off beat - Back in high school, what were your goals? Did you ever imagine "making it" in acting as a career?

Answer: This was answered in the book. Which everyone should read. The answer is yes. It was more towards the end of High School. It was either college or movies.

Book Signings
by thetechweenie on 08:58 PM November 12th, 2001

What's the craziest thing someones has asked you to write at a book signing?

Answer: It's not about what people asked Bruce to write, it's about what Bruce was asked to do. He's doing another chapter for the paper back edition of the book about the book signing called "Chins Across America". One guy had Bruce propose to his fiancee for him at the book signing. He sent an email, guys name was Nik, and his Fiancees name was Elizabeth. Anyhow, Nik requested that Bruce write "Gee Elizabeth, Nik would make a great husband don't cha think". She turns around and he is on his kneee. Tears all around, except for Bruce. Bruce notes that he said to Nik beforehand that "You're sure that she's gonna say yes, right buddy?"

Friends with your fans?
by FattyMcMurphy on 09:07 PM November 12th, 2001

A while back there was a terrific piece on "This American Life" where your literary agent - a self-confessed Bruce super fan - detailed how he worked his way into your life. His story ended with the bittersweet realization that he couldn't get over his "oh my God, I'm hanging out with Bruce!" feelings long enough to simply chill out and be friends with you.

Answer: With his experience in mind, have you become good friends with any of your fans, or is it just too weird?

It's not really that, Bruce has worked with fans for things like con bookings and become friends with them. The rules of becoming a pal aren't different just because someone is an actor. It should be noted that it is just not practical to become a friend with every fan, just because of the numbers involved. The "This American Life" guy in particular he considerers his pal, no matter what you might have gleaned from that taping.

Cliche
by number one duck on 09:22 PM November 12th, 2001

Its been said and said again that Evil Dead IV will not be made, simply because the studios didn't make money on the last encounter, and are unlikely to make any profit on a further sequel.

However, have you considered doing a further sequel the old fashioned, low budget way? On, say, an Evil Dead I budget?

Answer: Bruce noted that Evil Dead 4 won't be made on a an Evil Dead 1 budget. First, try and take a crane away from Sam Raimi, try to take Sam to 1 camera instead of 4. Try take away the digital effects. It's hard to rip those things out of a persons hands.

Working on Spiderman, for instance, Sam probably had not as good a time on it as on Evil Dead. With the constant financial oversight and money involved, 5 minutes down on the spider man set would pay for a week of evil dead. Evil Dead 4 not being made is financial. The Evil Dead movies made money, but not a lot and not quickly , mostly later from video.

Also, The last movie was made in 89. "Movies age like fish, not wine". Low budget isn't so fun sometimes. For Part 4, it wouldn't be charity anymore, back the truck up, there isn't a cheap part 4, and frankly, the world will live without it. Bruce asks the following of people when they ask for an Evil Dead 4 "Do you remember what happened in Nightmare on Elm Street 4? Or Friday the 13th 4?" Most people haven't, and it was my impression that Bruce felt there just wasn't a market for it, or an overwhelming desire to do it on the part of himself and the rest of the crew.

So again a big thanks to Bruce Campbell for a great interview.

Cliff Lampe contributed this review. "Derek Powazek is the designer of both fray.com and kvetch.com, fairly active web "communities" from which he spun off a consulting career, helping others to design online interactions. Being a consultant, he is consitutionally required to write a book. Powazek's book, "Design for Community: the art of connecting real people in virtual places", is an attempt to advise people on adding community features to their websites. As such, the intended readers of this book are people who are considering taking a static website and adding interactive features to it. That is, making online communities. Powazek recognizes the pitfalls of the word "community" in relation to some of these online interactions, but seems to settle on it as a handy short hand for the series of user-generated, self-organizing, deliberative, effective etc. features that have fallen under the general aegis of "online communities". For Powazek, it's enough to define community as users interacting directly on a site." Read on for the rest of Cliff's review. Design For Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places author Derek M. Powazek pages 307 publisher New Riders rating 9 reviewer Cliff Lampe ISBN 0735710759 summary Good stuff, nice to get the developers perspective.

Since this is at heart a 'how to' book Powazek arranges the chapters in a sensible manner leading the potential community-builder through a series of potential decisions. One of the strengths of the book is Powazek's clear-headed take on the need for community elements in a website, and the first chapter counsels the potential designer to seriously consider whether building an online community is really the best use of his resources. Following chapters range from the sublime to the mundane, including design elements, programming tools to consider, interaction policies, moderation and finally when to know the community is dead. That last element is often neglected in books on building online communites, and is handled with unexpected candor and grace here.

Feature building advice given in this book is typified by Powazek's treatment of design as an element of building online community. When building features for interaction into your website, the following principles need to be considered:

1. Design for your audience
2. Design for flexibility
3. Design for your experience
4. Design for simplicity
5. Design for readability
6. Design for beauty

With each exhortation the author offers screen capture and narrative examples of people who have done it well and poorly. Other features like policies and moderation also are broken into these easily digestible, rarely contentious pieces intended to allow the casual user to consider the options for building community without feeling overwhelmed by issues involved. (As a facetious aside, I thought the designs for both kvetch and fray were terrible, but "do as I say, not as I do").

The real strength of each chapter is the interview with a Real Life (tm) community builder who describes an experience that provides support for the chapter. For example, the chapter on moderation includes examples of what is done at Slashdot, and then an email interview with Rob Malda in all of his curmudgeonly glory. Other interviews include, but are not limited to, Steven Johnson (FEED and Plastic.com) talking about design, Emma Taylor (nerve.com) on barriers to entry and Matt Williams (amazon) on commerce communities. Each community-builder gives a little blurb on what they do, and then goes on to some fairly decent reflections on what it means to run an online community. It ain't all rosy "Love Thy Neighbor" crap, and the narratives really help illustrate the real and solid design issues involved.

What's Good?

The narrative, as mentioned above, makes for compelling reading. Powazek seems to have really done some thinking on the issue, and the practical tone is a nice counterbalance to the Rheingoldian tradition of lionizing online communities. All books (well, this type anyway) are very dependent on audience. If you are a person who is just beginning to think about adding interactive elements to a site that you are running, or want to convince your boss to do the same, this is a very well put together book that addresses the major practical issues.

What's Bad?

The counterbalance to the above statement is that if you are already intimately involved with online communities, this treatment will seem rather superficial. 'Yeah but...' will come often to mind. Also, Powazek speaks with the voice of Authority to comfort his intended audience, but in reality the jury is still out on a lot of the benefits of different features in online communities, as well as the value added of user interaction in the first place. Correctly for this style of book, Powazek does not address those issues, but if they are your main interest, you may be driven mad by their absence here.

So What's In It For Me?

If you are thinking of starting an online community, you should get this book. The descriptions of major considerations, with examples from the realities of what's been done before, will be a helpful starting place, though by no means the end of your research. If you are not going to start a community, or are already embroiled in one, this book still has quite a bit to offer. The interviews with various community builders makes for fascinating reading, and could be expanded into a book all its own. Overall, this is not a revolutionary work redefining our concepts of virtual community, nor does it want to be. It is a handy book on designing online interactions, with compelling examples and rich narratives that make for a quick, fun read.

Reviewer notes:

Cliff is a doctoral student at the School of Information, University of Michigan. His research involves self-organizing websites, online deliberation and social captial effects of persistent online interaction. He can be reached at cacl@umich.edu

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For all the Terry Pratchett fans reading mblase contributed this review of the illustrated The Last Hero, writing: "There are only two things a Discworld fan can think when encountering an illustrated Discworld novel. He'll either love it for giving him a concrete visual idea of his favorite people, places and things, or he'll hate it for the very same reason. You probably already know which type you are." Read on for the rest of his review. Update: 11/19 21:30 GMT by T : Note: The reference to Jack Kirby should have been to Josh Kirby instead; apologies. The Last Hero author Terry Pratchett pages 158 publisher HarperCollins rating 8 reviewer mblase ISBN 0061040967 summary A short but lavishly illustrated return to Terry Pratchett's Discworld and several of his most popular characters.

If you're the second type, though, be warned that the illustrations in this book are still incredibly, incredibly beautiful. If you're a comic book afficianado, then think of Alex Ross painting caricatures. This isn't the first time artist Paul Kidby (not to be confused with Josh Kirby, who illustrated Eric and most of the British Discworld covers) has tackled Terry Pratchett's Discworld characters, but it is the first time he's tackled an entire story. His art appears next to, above, below, and behind the story on every single page of this oversized book, and despite his habit of giving each character exactly one expression for the entire book, they're always a joy to look at. They're lavish, detailed, stylized, detailed, believable, real. You'll have to be hard-set against having your literary characters drawn for you to object to how Kidby renders them here.

Of course, as they say at Pixar, all the pretty pictures in the world won't rescue a bad story. Which brings us to Pratchett's half of the book. This is a short novel even by Discworld standards, about the same length as Eric, which is probably why the art is there (instead of vice versa). The plot goes something like this: Cohen the Barbarian and his octagenerian cohorts have decided to embark on one last heroic expedition, to return fire to the gods. Specifically, fire in the form of a very large explosive keg, which he intends to detonate inside the home of the Discworld gods atop the mountain at the center of the Disc.

Impossible, you say? Probably not -- after all, Cohen hasn't gotten as old as he is by failing to kill people. And the residents of Ankh-Morpork, magical and non-magical alike, all have reason to believe that his success will mean the end of the entire Disc. So the ingenious Leonard of Quirm is given the assignment of getting himself and a select team to the center of the Disc as quickly as possible in order to intercept Cohen before he gets what he wants.

That "select team," it turns out, consists of Carrot Ironfounderson, the six-foot-tall, red-headed, large-muscled captain of the City Watch, and Rincewind, the worst wizard the Disc has ever seen and the only citizen of Ankh-Morpork who has anything approaching a friendship with Cohen. (They spent half of The Colour of Magic and most of The Last Continent together.) It's the first "crossover" story Pratchett has written with these two major characters, and has probably been demanded by fans for years.

You'd expect the embodiments of perfect courage and perfect cowardice to have some pretty interesting dialogue in this story, but surprisingly, they don't seem to interact that much. Rincewind doesn't have much patience with brave heroes, and Carrot is too polite to force his views on Rincewind. On the other hand, Leonard's relentless imagination and total faith in his own radical inventions makes him a far, far more interesting companion for Rincewind. The two of them get along absolutely dreadfully.

There's also a new villain by the name of Evil Dark Lord Harry Dread, but he's really just a supporting role. Mostly this book is an exercise in giving Rincewind and Cohen another story together, with Leonard and Carrot thrown in to make it all possible. But as Pratchett himself has said in the past, Rincewind just isn't a compelling enough character. His gimmick is that he's a coward, and a very good one, and while it's certainly funny, it's hard to write great stories around a character that refuses to be developed. Both Eric and The Last Hero star him, and both are about half as long as Pratchett's usual novels; I doubt this is a coincidence.

So Cohen's character is really the only one that sees any interesting growth in this book, which is probably why it's named after him and why he's the only one illustrated on the cover. And while it's short, it's still plenty interesting and chock-full of the humor and insights Pratchett's fans have come to love. It's a little annoying that the two teams of characters spend almost the entire book not interacting with each other, because the lack of a united plot has wrecked a few Discworld novels for me. (Soul Music comes immediately to mind.) But this time, the ending redeems it.

Diehard Pratchett fans will buy this regardless of how it's reviewed, of course. But the non-diehards and even non-fans should enjoy it, too -- it's a solid story that gives a quick, fun look at several recurring Discworld characters, and the artwork is so lavish it's almost impossible to say "no" to. The price tag is a bit higher than an ordinary Discworld hardcover, though, so it's really not for first-timers. Give them a paperback copy of Wyrd Sisters or The Light Fantastic instead, to get them hooked on the early stuff. The Last Hero isn't a literary main course, but it's an excellent dessert.

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Reader Steve McLaughlin writes with this review: "'Built to Last' was one of the most significant business books of the nineties, but the book didn't leave much hope for companies that got off to a less-than-ideal start. What if your company wasn't lucky enough to be founded by the likes of David Packard, Sam Walton, or George Merck? Jim Collins throws these businesses a life raft in his new book 'Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don't'. Read on for the rest of Steve's take on the book.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... And Others Don't author Jim Collins pages 320 publisher HarperCollins rating 8 reviewer Steve MacLaughlin ISBN 0066620996 summary Tracking down the elusive factors that make a business do more than succeed.

Good to Great is the result of an intensive five-year project that took Collins and his team of researchers more than 15,000 hours of work to complete. The team read and coded 6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts, and created 384 megabytes of computer data in the process. Their findings are presented in a thought provoking book that answers the one question Built to Last never tackled: "Can a good company become a great company and, if so, how?"

From this perspective, Good to Great can really be seen as a prequel to Built to Last. It's about how good companies can become great ones whereas Built to Last is a book about how already great companies built an enduring "iconic stature." Collins and his team of researchers began their search by sorting through a list of 1,435 Fortune 500 companies and applied rigorous criteria to find businesses that made the leap from good to great.

At the core of Collins's criteria was that a good-to-great company had to have "fifteen-year cumulative stock returns at or below the general stock market, punctuated by a transition point, then cumulative returns at least three times the market over the next fifteen years." The screening process cut the 1,435 down to 126, then 19, and finally these 11 companies: Abbott, Circuit City, Fannie Mae, Gillette, Kimberly-Clarke, Kroger, Nucor, Philip Morris, Pitney Bowes, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo.

What, no General Electric? Where's 3M or Hewlett Packard? These stalwarts of Built to Last didn't even come close to making the final cut. Consider, for example, that from "December 31, 1975, to January 1, 2000, $1 invested in Walgreens beat $1 invested in technology superstar Intel by nearly two times, General Electric by nearly five times, and Coca-Cola by nearly eight times." Good to Great then goes beyond the numbers to explain why these companies were able to make the leap to greatness.

Good to Great does an excellent job of diagramming the framework of how these companies were able to make the good-to-great leap. Essentially all of these companies experienced a period of buildup followed by breakthrough, and all of this was fueled by something Collins calls "The Flywheel Effect." The Flywheel Effect reflects a "cumulative process -- step by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn of the flywheel -- that add up to sustained and spectacular results." These companies got knocked around now and then, but they always got back up and opened for business the next day.

Eventually these good-to-great companies picked up enough forward momentum to make the leap. Collins and his team were able to find six disciplines that each of these companies shared that helped them make the leap. Rather than use their oftentimes buzzword-ish terms I thought I would translate them into plain English.

During the buildup phase the people that led these companies were more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar. Collins dismisses the notion that only companies led by dictators and hard-asses could succeed, and that to be successful leaders need to check their egos at the door. Employees, partners, shareholders, and customers prefer leaders that are "more plow horse than show horse." Is Larry Ellison listening?

Collins and his team also found that these good-to-great companies made sure they had their ducks in a row before making a move. These companies "first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats and then they figured out where to drive it." Again, this flies in the face of how a lot of companies behave. Many companies make the mistake of putting their master plan together, and then finding the right people to execute the plan. Hiring bright people is pointless if you've already done the thinking for them.

Good to Great also notes that during the buildup period not everything is going to go your way, but you need to keep the faith. This is probably the key discipline to keep that flywheel going, and at the same time the most nebulous. Collins explains how these companies were able to face the brutal facts of their situation and trudge on, but I'm not so sure this isn't a suicide mission for some companies.

Confront the Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith) means facing the reality of your current situation and keeping the faith at the same time. The Stockdale Paradox (named after former POW Admiral Jim Stockdale) is used to illustrate the need for companies to face the facts and simultaneously keep the faith. Good to Great stresses the importance of asking the tough questions and creating an environment where the truth can be heard.

Once the good-to-great companies made the leap, they learned some new tricks that kept them on top. One of the most important is doing what you do best, and avoiding the things you don't. This sounds obvious, but we all know companies that took their eyes off the ball and then failed. Collins makes the important point that "stop doing" lists are more important than "to do" lists. Stop paying people to do things half-assed. Stop offering services in markets you know nothing about. And stop buying into every new fad technology that hits the market.

This leads to Good to Great's take on technology. Collins and his team found that "technology by itself is never a primary root cause of either greatness or decline." Great companies avoid technology fads and only use it to increase (not create) their momentum. I found the following passage to be one of the more memorable passages from the book:

"No technology, no matter how amazing -- not computers, not telecommunications, not robotics, not the Internet -- can by itself ignite a shift from good to great. ... No technology can instill the simple inner belief that leaving unrealized potential on the table -- letting something remain good when it can become great -- is a secular sin."

Good to Great wraps up by giving readers plenty of detailed explanations, diagrams, and examples straight from the companies themselves. And if you're one of those people who like to see the data, then don't worry about that either. Collins has included a comprehensive appendix to the book that includes answers to common questions, charts, an explanation of the selection process, and data uncovered during the research for the book.

Built to Last was an excellent book, but I think Good to Great does it one better. The question it tackles applies to a wider audience, and its findings are something every business can use. The language is clear and if you get off track or need a refresher then just flip to the chapter summaries for guidance.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain. Would you like to see your book review here?

Stella Daily writes: "Had Jonathan Tucker's Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox been released just a few months ago, it might have been of interest only to a few outside of the world of epidemiology, but now that anthrax scares have reawakened public interest in biowarfare, it's hardly surprising that Scourge has been flying off the shelves." Read on for the rest of her review of this sobering non-fiction technothriller. Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox author Jonathan B. Tucker pages 291 publisher Atlantic Monthly Press rating 9 reviewer Stella Daily ISBN 0-87113-830-1 summary The history and potential horrors of a vanquished killer

Tucker clearly wrote the book believing that the use of smallpox as a biological weapon was a worrisome, but not especially likely, threat, and on September 10th, most of us would not only have concurred, but would probably never have thought that such a thing could happen; after all, smallpox remains the only infectious disease to have been eradicated by humans. After reading Scourge, you will be grateful that the mysterious sender of anthrax-laced mail doesn't have the power of this infinitely worse pestilence in his or her hands.

The smallpox virus, or variola, is a biscuit-shaped bundle of DNA and protein casing, so tiny it can only be viewed with an electron microscope, yet devastating to the human body. The disease kills up to thirty percent of its victims and leaves the rest permanently scarred after battling fever, nausea, and boils so painful that thirsty patients often refused water, unable to swallow without excruciating hurt. Perhaps to be merciful, Tucker has included no photographs of suffering victims covered in the gruesome pustules of the disease, but should you have a morbid curiosity to see one, visit the Polio Eradication Photo Gallery.

Scourge is not a story about a virus, however; it is a story about people. Tucker tells of the history of smallpox and civilizations, how political machinations combined with idealism to bring about the global cooperation that removed smallpox from the earth, and the elaborate subterfuge used by the Soviet Union to hide its research on smallpox as a potential biological weapon. Fans of Laurie Garrett's (The Coming Plague, Betrayal of Trust) journalistic style will appreciate Tucker's treatment; the major figures in the history of smallpox are presented in terms of their personalities and personal struggles, rather than in simple obituary-style listings of what they did.

In describing the early history of the disease, Scourge is fascinating. You may have known that smallpox helped Hernando Cortes conquer the Aztecs in the sixteenth century, but perhaps you didn't know that smallpox may have been the Athenian epidemic Thucydides describes in his account of the Peloponnesian war. The superstitions that existed prior to the germ theory of disease - and, in some areas, long enough to hinder the last stages of the smallpox eradication campaign in the late 1970s - seem truly impossible now, but such was belief prior to the germ theory of disease.

The conquering of smallpox remains one of the great triumphs of mankind - the only infectious disease successfully eradicated by humans. The history of the eradication campaign is one of cooperation between nations and between scientists, but it is also a story of obstacles placed in the way by reluctant governments, the rapid spread of disease due to world travel, and the stubbornness of the superstitious. Here, you will meet such figures as D.A. Henderson, the reluctant leader of the World Health Organization campaign, and Viktor Zhdanov, the man who first proposed a global eradication campaign to the WHO in 1958, then, ironically, became the first chairman of the Soviet council that oversaw the secret biowarfare program beginning in the 1970s.

The clash between the traditional openness of the scientific community, where information is shared relatively freely, and the secretiveness of bureaucracies, where being in the know is a mark of power, is a recurring theme. Often, you'll find yourself rooting for the researchers, who frequently had to reason with government officials who knew nothing about science, but you may be surprised to find yourself agreeing with the government - specifically, the Department of Defense - a time or two.

The story of the Soviet Union's successful cover-up of its research into the use of smallpox as a biological weapon is unsettling, to say the least. Do you find the aftermath of a nuclear bomb impressive? Imagine that bomb followed by an ICBM bearing smallpox - a disease that kills nearly a third of its victims in a normal situation, but would be attacking survivors of a nuclear attack, whose immune systems would be severely compromised by radiation damage. Lest you think that earlier vaccinations might have helped, the smallpox vaccine is effective for only about ten years before revaccination is required, and the United States had stopped mandatory vaccinations long before the last known case of naturally occurring smallpox was diagnosed in 1978. Such a warhead was one of the foci of the Soviet program, even as facilities were carefully disguised so as to give the appearance of compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention treaty. Western governments did not learn of the full scope of the Soviet effort until 1989, and kept the information classified until former Soviet smallpox research scientist Ken Alibek (ne Kanatjan Alibekov) told the story to the American press in 1998.

Although, officially, the last remaining stores of variola virus are kept in Moscow and at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Tucker raises the possibility that other governments - particularly Iraq - may have retained secret stores of smallpox virus, citing enough circumstantial evidence to keep his speculation from being easily discounted. He also brings up the possibility that a government might, to avoid the certain retaliation that would come from launching a smallpox attack, supply the virus to a group like al-Qaeda, then deny responsibility when the terrorists release the disease. Tucker finished documenting these speculations well before the September 11th attacks; now, one hopes they aren't prophetic.

In the case of smallpox, the truth is as morbidly fascinating as any fiction could possibly be, and Tucker tells the story of those who fought to end the scourge and those who would have preserved it as a weapon with equal aplomb, yet from the perspective of a world where smallpox was a piece of history and sophisticated biological attack a back-burner phenomenon. Now that fears of biological warfare are all too real, Scourge is exceptionally relevant - and hopefully not a prediction of what is to come.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

"Hard work, no pay, eternal glory." The Mars Society needs volunteers to simulate Mars exploration, so we're better-prepared for the problems the (hopefully) real astronauts will face. If you have a month free next summer and you'd like to spend it freezing your ass off, read on.

The Mars Society is looking for "anyone in good physical condition between 18 and 60 years of age... Scientific, engineering, practical mechanical, wilderness, and literary skills are all considered a plus." Only the passionate need apply: "conditions are likely to be tough and the job will be very trying." And that's before the robot switches into hunter-killer mode.

If you prefer roasting to freezing, there's a mission somewhere in the Australian Outback next year as well. Either way, go visit the Mars Society homepage and check it out.

I spoke with a friend of mine, Daniel Slosberg, who coordinated Mission Support for the Michigan Mars Society during two similar, less-audacious experiments this year. His was the easy job of sitting at home, coordinating communications (chiefly email, with simulated 20-minute round-trip delay), answering questions from the field, and giving advice.

Daniel happens to be working on an idea for distributed mission support; if you're interested in being part of the ground crew, drop him a line.

For the team that actually goes into the wilderness and lives in the "hab," you'll be simulating Mars isolation as accurately as possible. You'll be brutally far north, for one thing. You'll wear a mock-spacesuit every time you go outside, which will help identify where the problems are in e.g. mobility or hygiene. You'll also spend an hour in the airlock when you enter or leave, which will help remind you not to forget your hammer.

The excursions get more sophisticated each year: next year will be the first with an already-completed hab and the first with more than one mock-suit. Your chance to be part of history.

In related news, Odyssey continues aerobraking, and its mission looks good -- if you've read Robinson's Red Mars series, you know how delicate orbital insertion is. Great work, JPL.

And just for kicks, here's a New Scientist article about synthesizing fuel from the Martian atmosphere to power a "hopper"-lander. If you find the practical chemistry of planetary travel interesting, go read Robert Zubrin who is just all about using whatever resources already exist outside Earth's gravity well.

"Hard work, no pay, eternal glory." The Mars Society needs volunteers to simulate Mars exploration, so we're better-prepared for the problems the (hopefully) real astronauts will face. If you have a month free next summer and you'd like to spend it freezing your ass off, read on.

The Mars Society is looking for "anyone in good physical condition between 18 and 60 years of age... Scientific, engineering, practical mechanical, wilderness, and literary skills are all considered a plus." Only the passionate need apply: "conditions are likely to be tough and the job will be very trying." And that's before the robot switches into hunter-killer mode.

If you prefer roasting to freezing, there's a mission somewhere in the Australian Outback next year as well. Either way, go visit the Mars Society homepage and check it out.

I spoke with a friend of mine, Daniel Slosberg, who coordinated Mission Support for the Michigan Mars Society during two similar, less-audacious experiments this year. His was the easy job of sitting at home, coordinating communications (chiefly email, with simulated 20-minute round-trip delay), answering questions from the field, and giving advice.

Daniel happens to be working on an idea for distributed mission support; if you're interested in being part of the ground crew, drop him a line.

For the team that actually goes into the wilderness and lives in the "hab," you'll be simulating Mars isolation as accurately as possible. You'll be brutally far north, for one thing. You'll wear a mock-spacesuit every time you go outside, which will help identify where the problems are in e.g. mobility or hygiene. You'll also spend an hour in the airlock when you enter or leave, which will help remind you not to forget your hammer.

The excursions get more sophisticated each year: next year will be the first with an already-completed hab and the first with more than one mock-suit. Your chance to be part of history.

In related news, Odyssey continues aerobraking, and its mission looks good -- if you've read Robinson's Red Mars series, you know how delicate orbital insertion is. Great work, JPL.

And just for kicks, here's a New Scientist article about synthesizing fuel from the Martian atmosphere to power a "hopper"-lander. If you find the practical chemistry of planetary travel interesting, go read Robert Zubrin who is just all about using whatever resources already exist outside Earth's gravity well.

Adam Jenkins contributes this review of The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer, the newly re-named and republished telling of Babbage's insights and struggles in creating a steam-powered calculating machine, and the modern efforts to bring his work to fruition. The Difference Engine author Doron Swade pages 342 publisher Viking Press rating 8 reviewer Adam Jenkins ISBN 0670910201 summary The story of Charles Babbage, including the work of
London�s Science Museum to build a working Difference Engine

Overview

The book was first published in 2000 by Little, Brown and Company as The Cogwheel Brain: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer to coincide with the unveiling of the printing part of the Science Museum's Difference Engine. A paperback was also released by Abacus. The book I reviewed is an American edition that published in hardcover format by Viking and Penguin in September 2001. It's the same book, just a different title.

The Difference Engine is arranged chronologically, in three parts. Part I is titled "The Difference Engine" and describes Babbage's work to build his Difference Engine, an automatic calculating machine. Part II is about an improved machine he designed, The Analytical Engine. A Modern Sequel (Part III) tells the story of the London Science Museum's project to build a working Difference Engine.

The Difference Engine In the 19th century, a "computer" was a person who performed calculations by hand, not a machine. Mass production techniques hadn't been developed yet, and making precision parts was a craft rather than an industry, where the screws one maker produced for you would all have a thread slightly different from that of screws you bought from someone else.

Swade describes Babbage's life from his early years, when he was expelled from Cambridge after presenting a formal thesis that was deemed blasphemous, and quarrelling with his father about his marriage. At age 29, sitting with his friend the astronomer John Herschel checking math tables, Babbage exclaimed "I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam!" So Babbage's quest began -- to build a machine to perform calculations automatically so that they would be less error-prone, leaving humans to think instead of labor. He wrote to Sir Humphrey Davy, the President of the Royal Society, the society for the scientific elite at the time (Babbage was himself a member), as well as to other influential friends and colleagues to try and raise interest in his project. The Society liked the proposal of this "engine" and awarded him a gold medal and funding. But after five years of work (with his component builder Joseph Clements) and no engine, people began criticising Babbage, claiming he had been unable to finish the project and was concealing this so he could keep getting paid. The Society checked up on him, decided his progress was acceptable, and kept funding him.

Babbage then wrote a controversial book criticising the decline of science in England and suggesting an overhaul of the Royal Society, which didn't win him much support. Clements went on strike over a pay and ownership of tools dispute, then finally quit. Babbage had a portion of his Difference Engine built, which he showed off at the elaborate parties he threw, and he managed to get a lot of people excited about his ideas, including his belief that miracles were just the effect of God's laws which we weren't privy to; that God is basically a programmer.

The Analytical Engine

Whereas the Difference Engine was the equivalent of a calculator and quite limited in its capabilities, the Analytical Engine was more like the modern computer. Ideas were borrowed from the looms used in the textile industry -- ideas that are now famously part of modern computers; the Mill (CPU), Store (Storage) and an input facility (punched cards). Babbage designed his own Mechanical Notation to describe the engine's design. He wasn't actively looking for funding, but rather just working on his designs. He wrote to the Duke of Wellington, complaining about how the Government has treated him, and mentioned working on a new machine. In a letter to the Prime Minister Robert Peel, he asked that the Government decide; should he continue work on the old machine or start on the Analytical Engine?

Babbage was a man with many interests and for a while during his occasional exchanges with government officials he worked as an unofficial consultant for five months working to settle the railway "gauge war" -- e.g. work out whether a broader or narrower gauge was better. Babbage believed his work was more acknowledged overseas than in England, and he was suitably encouraged when he was invited to speak about his Analytical Engine at a conference in Turin, Italy. This encouraged him to campaign for funding for it, both in England and also overseas. The first published description appeared in a Swiss journal in 1842.

Robert Peel sought a way to fob off Babbage and was given this in the form of a advice from George Biddell Airy, the Astronomer Royal. After 20 years of work, Babbage finally got a letter saying his work would no longer be funded, but that the government was withdrawing it's claim to the finished work. Babbage politely refused, but somehow interpreted the letter to mean that the government was at least keen on his Analytical Engine and should fund it, else he'd go overseas for funding. With this letter Babbage scored an audience with the Prime Minister, which didn't go very well, ending with him storming out of the interview.

Augusta Ada, the Countess of Lovelace and daughter of Lord Byron, met Babbage at a party when she was 17 and the two became friends. He gladly taught her about his work, and she translated the article from a Swiss journal on the Analytical Engine to English, adding her own comments and getting it published in a journal. Babbage wanted her article "Sketch of an Analytical Engine" to include an anonymous note describing his disputes with the Government, which he attempted to get the publishers to include without her knowledge. When they refused, Babbage asked Ada to withdraw the article, at which point she became upset, realising he was trying to use her article as a political tool. There is then some discussion about how much Ada really contributed to Babbage's work, citing Bruce Collier's notes that she is "the most overrated figure in the history of computing", and either mad or seemingly that way because of her drug abuse. Swade explains that it is not so much Ada who Collier is taking fault with, but the historians who exaggerate her contribution to celebrate her as a woman who succeeded in an area dominated by men at the time (mathematics). He also points out that some of the ideas she expressed in her article were not ideas Babbage had expressed before, and that it is a great pity she died so young, with her ideas never fully made known.

Babbage met up with Georg Scheutz and his son Edvard in 1855. They were visiting London from Sweden to display a machine they'd built, similar to the Difference Engine. Babbage welcomed the two, showed them his workshop and later helped them sell one of their machines to the Dudley Observatory in Albany, NY. Their machine caused Airy to change his mind about the usefulness of calculating machines, although ultimately the invention didn't do the Scheutzs much good; they both died bankrupt.

After 10 years break, Babbage at age 70 began working on his Analytical Engine again, finally deciding on the specifications. He also began a public attack on "vile and discordant music", which resulted in organ-grinders deliberately baiting him etc. (His autopsy revealed he had degeneration of the inner ear due to an arterial disease, so he wasn't just a party-pooper; the music really caused him some distress). Babbage died just before the age of 80, a bitter man plagued to the end by the organ-grinders' music and no working Analytical Engine.

A Modern Sequel

In 1985 Australian computer scientist Dr Allan Bromley approached London's Science Museum with the idea to build a working Difference Engine by 26 December 1991, to celebrate the bicentenary of Babbage's birth. It is an interesting story, with several unforeseen setbacks of a technical nature as well as more mundane ones like funding troubles, contractors going bankrupt and building the machine in the machine with public scrutiny. Swade was the person who ran the project, with the work and advice of several others, like Michael Wright, Neil Cossons and John Reid, also of the Museum, as well as Rhoden Partners and their design engineers Reg Crick and Barrie Holloway.

The deadline was shifted forward to June, rather than December, as part of the deal through which the final funding was made. A demonstration was "faked" to the press, after a worried Swade explained that the machine was almost ready, but they didn't want to risk breaking parts by running a real calculation at that date. The pressure was on.

The final chapter discusses whether Babbage's title of "the father of modern computing" is really very accurate. Not so much the fact that his machines weren't fully built in his time, but that they relied on the decimal system, not the binary number system. There is also a brief discussion of similar machines that were invented around the time, around the world.

The book is a comprehensive work on Charles Babbage and his work in general, so while the title is not totally accurate, it is apt, since the Difference Engine is the common link between the beginning and end parts of the book. It's also of note that the printing section of the Difference Engine is also part of the Analytical Engine, so by completing this, the Science Museum have validated not just Babbage's work on the Difference Engine, but also some of his work on the Analytical Engine. Hopefully someone will write another book or revision that details work done on the printing section; Swade actually seems to hint at this in the book ("But that is another tale for another day").

The diagrams and illustrations at the end of the book are great, but it might have been better to put them at the relevant parts of the book. For example, the pictures of Countess Lovelace in the chapter about her.

Conclusion

One review I saw states that this book is best for informed readers. I think "interested" readers would be more accurate. The book doesn't presume existing knowledge of Babbage, but if you are interested in the history of science, computing and the Difference Engine, you'll get a lot more out of it. The book is technical in parts but not overly so. It is generally more than readable, although I found the politics, both in Babbage's day and more recently, a bit tedious at times.

A common theme in the book is the set of difficulties both Babbage and Swade faced, not just technically, but also with funding, publicity and staffing. Many companies in modern times can relate to these, I'm sure! It is a sad story, because for all his brilliance and vision, Charles Babbage never lived to see his machines work and receive the accolades he deserved. That his Difference Engine has been successfully built today fittingly fulfills Babbage's vision.

Related Links

• Science Museum's Exhibit
• Printing Mechanism
• More on the Printing Mechanism
• Babbage's papers and Analytical Engine emulator

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Steve MacLaughlin writes with this review. Any book that points out bluntly that most web sites suck already has me nodding, but I wish the authors would have included all the details, instead of protecting the guilty by anonymizing individual failure stories. Business @ the Speed of Stupid author Alan Morrison and Dan Burke pages 256 publisher Perseus Books rating 8.5 reviewer Steve MacLaughlin ISBN 0738205427 summary Things not to do, unless looking stupid really is your intent.

Alan Morrison and Dan Burke have written the first meaningful post-mortem on the New Economy in their new book Business @ the Speed of Stupid. At its core the book clearly explains how the disregard for strategy and sound management principles doomed many a company and Internet project. If this sounds like a lot of other books currently hitting the shelves, then I should point out that Business @ the Speed of Stupid is one of the only books not willing to pull punches.

As you can probably tell by the title, Business @ the Speed of Stupid is not one of those cutesy sugar-coated business books. Consider the opening of Chapter 1: "Most companies of any size have a Web site. Most suck! They suck because they simply fail to communicate with the intended audience." And there's a lot more where that came from! The book is divided into two sections: "@ the Speed of Stupidity and Accelerating" and "Decelerating the Stupidity." This format proves to be a good way of presenting their observations and recommendations.

The "@ the Speed of Stupidity and Accelerating" section is filled with stories about companies that remain nameless to protect both the guilty and the innocent. Some readers may be disappointed that Morrison and Burke have chosen not to reveal the true identities of the companies and people they profile, but I think it actually strengthens the usefulness of the stories. You're not distracted by the sensationalism, and you're not fed the rose-colored version that things just didn't work out for these companies or their ventures. The stories are even more useful because they reveal the real situations, conversations, and decisions that led to failure.

Morrison and Burke are able get their ideas across without sounding like dusty old professors or techno-Latin writers trying to sound intelligent. They are quick to point out that there are no silver bullets and that cutting corners is a recipe for disaster. Consider their take on phantom sales predictions: "A common and widely held misconception is the idea of magic conversion ratios that convert the number of hits on a site to projected customer leads, e-commerce sales, or whatever. Let's be clear: This type of thinking is 100 percent crap."

A major theme in the first section of the book is how the apparent simplicity of the Web lulled business leaders into a trap. The brochureware sites that companies first launched appeared to be simple. But when it came to real e-commerce or real e-business companies quickly learned that these projects were much more complicated. The notion that you could throw together an Internet project without any planning, without any processes, and without experienced professionals was foolhardy. As the authors accurately point out, "the frequency of this type of foolishness is increasing dramatically as more and more projects are sponsored and managed by nontechnical professionals and staffed by zealously ignorant technologists."

This comment illustrates another main point of the "@ the Speed of Stupidity and Accelerating" section: "Get the right people in the right roles or you will find yourself facing insurmountable problems." The wrong people are those that consistently contradict their words through their actions. They say they want things done right, but they end up cutting corners to get the job done fast and cheap. They hire the best people or companies to do the work, but want to totally ignore the processes that create good work. The authors quip, "it is amazing how often executives hire experts and then completely ignore their advice" instead of remembering to "hire smart people and listen to them." Balancing people, processes, and systems is critical to being successful.

Business @ the Speed of Stupid also provides readers with a much needed smackdown about the importance of sticking to the "old rules" of business. Morrison and Burke contend that "technology must take a back seat to core business and customer needs, not the other way around" and that "the 'new rules' are simply a recipe for disaster, and those who continue to propagate them are completely irresponsible." The technology shakeout taught many business leaders just how important planning and communication were to developing successful initiatives. Of course Morrison and Burke get that point across in a less subtle way: "There is a generation of lemming managers who actually believe that telling people 'Just do it!' is the right way to manage because that's the way they've read it in a book or magazine."

The "Decelerating the Stupidity" section of the book tries to bring a lot of the key messages and concepts together, and offers a well-presented framework for putting the brakes on stupidity. I think the "Do's and Don'ts" at the end of each chapter of the first section will give readers more immediate solutions to their problems, but the second section takes a much more big picture approach. The framework the authors put forward is based on the concept that thinking strategically means always balancing the "Organizational Domain" and the "Competitive Domain."

The "Organizational Domain" is made up of the people, processes, and systems that allow your company to get the job done. The "Competitive Domain" is made up of your presence in the market, customers, and your competitor's presence in the market. The connection between these two domains is your strategy, and it acts as the ultimate fulcrum to keep things balanced. The authors note that "to emphasize one thing (e.g., technology) while you slight another (e.g., people) guarantees you will look stupid."

Business @ the Speed of Stupid is a well thought-out book by two people who actually know what they're talking about. The 230 pages of content move at a steady pace, and the accompanying charts and illustrations don't require a PhD in fluid mechanics to understand. Footnotes throughout point readers to other outside resources and a handy "Glossary of E-Terms and Phrases" are nice touches as well. I'm sure you could scan through a lot of the book over an over-priced cup of coffee at one of those bookstores, but I think you'll quickly find it's a book you'd be stupid not to buy.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Bruce Campbell has a new book out (If Chins Could Kill) and I thought it would be fun for Slashdot to interview him in our charming, enigmatic way. Bruce should be familiar to you though such films as the Evil Dead (include Army of Darkness) and ,well, anything Sam Raimi has ever done. The book is a lot of fun. As usual, moderate up your favorite questions, and I'll pass on the highest scoring ones to Bruce so that he can reply to 8 or so. Bruce has a website for you to check it. It's got a FAQ and bio for you to examine.