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Thank reader mblumber for this review of Scott Adams's God's Debris, newly republished in hardcover after starting out life a few years ago as an e-book. For those who've never seen Adam's serious side, this is an interesting introduction. God's Debris author Scott Adams pages 128 publisher Andrew McMeel, Publishers rating 9 reviewer mblumber ISBN 0740721909 summary An existential thought experiment in the form of a dialogue.

I like reading books that make me think, but not in the same way that I think when I'm at work or doing homework. When reading for pleasure, I want something that at first glance is so strange it's absurd, but at closer examination makes a tremendous amount of sense. That depth is the essence of Scott Adams' God's Debris, A Thought Experiment.

Adams is not known for writing super-intelligent commentaries on life, at least ones without a punchline or visual gag. Creator of Dilbert, his writing to this point has focused upon the world of cubicles and shifting organizational charts where engineers and management ('induhviduals' as he often calls them) square off in battles where the engineers are right and management is wrong. Very straightforward, enjoyable reading, but nothing compared to his latest work.

God's Debris was first published in May of 1999 as an e-book. It is sold by Digital Owl and can be purchased as bits for $4.95 or in hardcover wherever books are sold. The story focuses on both the physical laws of nature (relativity, gravity, the origin of the universe) and the psychology behind religion. The story is told by a fairly educated narrator talking to an unseen second character who seems to hold a deep understanding of the universe. As I read more, I found my own questions being raised by the narrator, and addressed by the other character. This arrangement makes for a very strange read, but the unusual format enhances the overall reading experience.

This book second guesses everything one learns in school, and comes close to succeeding. I cannot think of a single statement in the book that can be proven incorrect. To a college-educated reader like me, some of the assertions may seem totally ridiculous -- the problem is that they make just as much sense as Einstein's relativistic physics. In the introduction to the book, Adams observes the fact that ' ... the simplest explanation usually sounds right and is far more convincing than any complicated explanation could hope to be.'

The protagonist makes some very peculiar assertions throughout; My favorite is a statement he makes about the true nature of gravity, specifically that it is fueled by probability. The idea his advances is that all matter is constantly switching in and out of existence, and that is how objects move. The reason that matter appears to be attracted to other matter is that, according to the rules of probability, each piece of matter will inherently appear closer to massive objects the next time it comes back into existence. If you didn't understand that, and you'd like to, then you should read the book.

If you are a religious person, I can assure that this book will be disturbing. Although not told from an atheist point of view, the protagonist rejects the traditional view of religion. There are references to religious beliefs as 'delusions' only intended to allow the less-enlightened to live in relative peace in a world which has little. Taken as a whole, the views expressed can best be summarized ala Jesse Ventura, that 'organized religion is a crutch for the weak-minded.'

I'm purposely avoiding going into detail about the contents of the book. This is not only because a small piece doesn't make sense by itself, but also because most of the fun is in the discovery. Reading this book, you feel as if you are the first and only person to truly understand the world. I wouldn't want to spoil that for you. It's only 132 pages, broken up into very short chapters, and it can be read on your lunch break. I highly recommend it.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain. Do you want to see your book review on Slashdot? Please take a look at the book review guidelines first.

Craig Maloney contributed this review, because you can't always read a 600-page, densely written technical manual without a little something to leaven the bread. The Root of All Evil author J.D. "Illiad" Frazer pages 136 publisher O'Reilly rating 9 reviewer Craig Maloney ISBN 0-596-00193-2 summary The third collection of User Friendly comic strips covering all of the strips appearing in Y2K.

Unless you've been living behind a 2400 baud modem for the past few years, you've probably heard of the tales of Columbia Internet as described in the online comic strip User Friendly. You've probably even looked at a few strips from time to time. You may even have bought the two previous books "User Friendly" and "Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell". Whatever experience you've had with User Friendly, you'll really enjoy the third printed installment "The Root of All Evil".

What's good?

"The Root of All Evil" picks up right where "Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell" left off, with the first comic being the result of a "Y2K" error. Normality returns to Columbia Internet in short order, however, with the invention of an office assistant for VI called "VIGOR" (which spawned it's own real-life equivalent). There's plenty of good story lines in this collection: Pitr challenging Crud Puppy, the introduction of Cat Five, the Coffee Ring incident, Dark Side Dave, the X-Friends, the camping trip, and many many more. But the real reason many UFies should get this book is the introduction of the character that's quickly become a fan favorite: Sid Dabster. The battles between Pitr and Sid are absolutely hysterical. If you need proof, just think what might happen to Sid who has all of his old code on punched cards neatly stacked in a room, only to have his rival Pitr waiting outside the door with a leaf blower. There's plenty of moments like this in "The Root of All Evil" to keep you smiling.

The comics are transferred to the page rather well, with only a few contrast issues. Unlike the previous books, all of the Sunday comics are in their proper height.

What's bad?

There's only two nitpicks I can level at this collection, and they're both extremely picky. The first is the Sunday comics are all in black and white. Unfortunately, to print 1/7th of this book in color would probably increase the printing costs way beyond what User Friendly's audience would pay. Fortunately if you really want to see them in their original glory, you can view them online. The second nitpick can be levelled at any collection of topical comic strips. Sometimes the jokes are too topical. A few of the Sunday sight gags (which tend to be more topical than the weekday gags) left me scratching my head. Some of the jokes are starting to show their age (this is internet time, of course :) ), but there's also a certain nostalgia in comic collections like this. It's like going back and reading Bloom County books with their references to 1980's popular culture. Sure the "I Love You" virus is remembered about as well as a Sean Penn joke, but there's a certain charm in remembering a time when "I Love You" was zipping effortlessly across the net, and X-Men was the movie everyone camped out to see. Do I think User Friendly should be less topical? Of course not. That's some of the beauty of User Friendly (and Bloom County, for that matter). The strips in this book perfectly capture the humor of the situations we all were facing at the time. Just remember you might have to bring some of those old memories back to fully enjoy this book.

What's in it for me?

If you have the previous User Friendly books, this is a no-brainer purchase. If you don't have them, you might want to get the other two books before purchasing this one. If you've never viewed User Friendly, view a few strips online or leaf through the other books first. If you're like most geeks, you'll find you'll want as much User Friendly as you can get!

You can purchase this book from FatBrain.

JT Martin writes with his review of Barrington Bayley's The Knights of the Limits. Fans of obscure science fiction should thank JT for the service thus rendered. Knights of the Limits author Barrington J. Bayley pages 218 publisher Cosmos Books rating 9 reviewer JT Martin ISBN 1587153831 summary Nine stories suffused with a sense of wonder

Obscure genius Little known even inside the genre of science fiction, Barrington Bayley has been composing tightly plotted work for almost 50 years in relative obscurity.

This astonishing selection of nine short stories has been loudly admired by almost all the stalwarts of the genre; Mike Moorcock recently named it one of his top ten sf books in an article for The Guardian. Bruce Sterling has praised it to high heavens in a piece he wrote for Cheap Truth, calling Bayley "the zen master of modern space opera." John Clute, Brian Stableford, Charles Platt and even the late, great William Burroughs have all spoken of Bayley in fervently admiring words.

Despite all the accolades, strangely and sadly nobody has even heard of the book. Originally published in 1978 it came and went in the blink of an eye, remained unavailable for the past few decades and commanded ridiculous prices in the used book market.

So why all the fuzz Bayley is one of the great ideas guys of the genre science fiction. When he actually gets mentioned, the response usually is a smile and a gasp; "Oh, he's that wild guy!" Exuberant, weird, metaphysical, astounding, thrilling are all words that apply. Trailing Borges with a serious nod to A. E. Van Vogt, his stuff perplexes and confounds you with the barrage of bizarre ideas he weaves into these stories. He belongs to the great freewheeling tradition of imaginative writers; forget Kim Stanley Robinson and Arthur C. Clarke, think Charles Harness, Olaf Stapledon and Rudy Rucker - he invents his science (that's why it's called fiction, eh?) and bounces off to the nomansland like some mutant kangaroo. This is stuff you can barely find on the shelves today as franchise poop is being pushed on all the fronts.

Bayley knows his science but isn't limited by it - his writing bellows straight from his subconscious pool of theoretical thought, winging it with gusto and joy. For an example, "Me and My Antronoscope," -- one of his signature stories -- describes a universe completely filled with rock. The existing life inhabits pockets of space within. With obvious delight Bayley pauses at the thought and starts imagining "what would it be like?" He finds the answer and runs off with the thought, goes off to describe their version of space travel and the obvious problems facing any such attempts. It is a brilliant vision, conceptualized with wonder, but as much of what is called science fiction today is really just extrapolations of current sciences many readers will simply not see the point of it.

The same is true of most of the rest of Bayley's fiction - it doesn't portray the future; it imagines, dreams and invents new cosmologies, universes, alien life and their respective philosophies. He writes existential pieces about robot consciousness, he tinkers in his workshop wondering about the nature of space, mixing and matching analytical philosophy, mathematics, physics, biology and anthropology in a melodramatic and exuberant manner.

One should be forewarned that his powers of characterization and dialogue are more restrained -- the function of people in his stories tends to simply be setting off the scenery. His love of old pulp science fiction is obvious, and the bizarre juxtaposing of robots and rayguns with rigorous metaphysical invention can be startling, but with a sly satirical touch he succeeds laudably.

It is distressing to see such a vividly entertaining thinker miss the boat -- if Bayley had been born in Poland or Argentina we'd all be reading him now alongside Stanislaw Lem and Philip K. Dick, but as Kubrick never filmed THE SOUL OF THE ROBOT (instead using it as fodder to his conception of A.I.), he remains unread in the English language while the Japanese devour his translated works. So if you feel you're attuned to this brand of extravagnce, THE KNIGHTS OF THE LIMITS is the perfect intoruction, presenting 9 of his key stories. If you decide to give it a try, keep in mind that this most certainly is not extrapolative hard science fiction. It is wildly original speculative stuff that will literally boggle the mind and open new venues of thought and invention.

Related Links:

• Astounding Worlds of Barrington Bayley

• Annihilation Factotum

• Cheap Truth

• Jorge Luis Borges

• A. E. van Vogt

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Steve MacLaughlin wrote this review of Web ReDesign: Workflow that Works , a book which transcends its title to address much more than workflow, and more generally than just on the Web. Steve promises that your copy will soon be tattered and marked -- and that's a good thing. Web ReDesign: Workflow that Works author Kelly Goto & Emily Cotler pages 253 publisher New Riders Publishing rating 9 reviewer Steve MacLaughlin ISBN 0735710627 summary Practical wisdom for Web creators on consulting, design, development and more rolled into a single readable volume.

There are books that attempt to impart the divine wisdom of consulting. There are books that detail best practices in graphic and usability design. There are books that detail the intricacies of software development. There are books that detail project management and surviving the technology lifecycle. But there are very few books that explain how all of these pieces work together successfully. Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler have pulled it off with masterful perfection in their new book Web ReDesign: Workflow that Works.

People, projects, technology, and clients do not work in a vacuum from one another. Process is the magnet that holds them all together. Goto and Cotler offer professionals a comprehensive "Core Process" to guide them through their Web projects. While other books may explain some of the tricks of the trade no book has really placed all of these best practices under the umbrella of a process or methodology. Perhaps that's because a lot of these processes have been closely guarded secrets in the highly competitive interactive services industry. It's almost as if Goto and Cotler are on a humanitarian mission to save clients and projects from future punishment under the hands of companies using poor or in some cases no processes at all.

Web ReDesign's Core Process is a five-step approach to producing successful Web projects. The five steps are Defining the Project, Developing Site Structure, Visual Design & Testing, Production & QA, and Launch & Beyond. And each phase is broken down further into steps and checkpoints in splendid detail. As someone who started out doing this kind of work I found myself making mental checkmarks throughout the book. "Did that. Did something like that. Man, it took me years to learn that I should do that. Where was this book six years ago when I needed it?"

Perhaps a book like this wasn't really possible until now. The profession had to go through its ugly duckling stages where individuals and companies tried to figure out what worked and what didn't. Grafting parts from consulting, marketing, project management, and software development into some freakish process monster that often resulted in turning clients into an angry torch-carrying mob. Thankfully Web ReDesign has finally arrived and it is certainly no Bride of Frankenstein. The processes are spelled out in clear language and the authors repeat certain key points in case you missed something along the way.

It's easy to get sidetracked reading Web ReDesign with all the sidebars, charts, sample forms, and interviews. But this is a good thing! The tips and sidebars along the way spell out in greater detail how to put the process into action, and what to do when trouble arises. The forms and charts are some of the most thorough ever published, and thankfully you can download most of them on the companion website located at www.web-redesign.com. Throughout the book Goto and Cotler call on experts like Lynda Weinman, David Siegel, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Jakob Nielsen to offer their perspective on a given topic. The overall design and layout work done by the folks at New Riders is phenomenal and the visual presentation of the book is really first rate.

The one big question I have about the books is its title: Web ReDesign. That's because this is a book that can be used for first time Internet initiatives just as well as for redesign projects. Perhaps the authors had some dual purpose in mind for the title: If you're doing this for the first time, you need to rethink the conventional wisdom that Web projects are a black art with no best practices. Or if you didn't use a process the first time, then you've probably learned how valuable it is to have a proven methodology to avoid repeating mistakes.

Goto and Cotler have produced a book that no Web professional, whether they're a consultant, project manager, designer, programmer, or specialist, should be without. Web ReDesign is one of those books that should be kept close at hand during projects of all shapes and sizes. It won't take long before your copy is either severely dog-eared or has post-it flags sticking up throughout it. Get your hands on a copy before the competition does.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain. Have your own book review to contribute? Check out the book review guidelines, then write away!

Compulsive reviewer chromatic takes a break this time from the ultra-serious by reviewing a kids' book to help fill the need for reading material aimed at kids which don't treat them as idiots. It also sounds like good reading for post-kids, in the same way that Dr. Seuss is. The Space Child's Mother Goose author Frederick Winsor pages 100 publisher Purple House Press rating 9 reviewer chromatic ISBN 1-930-900-07-4 summary Rhymes and verse for budding (or budded) cosmologists and scientists.

The Scoop

In the mid-fifties, a poetry and science fiction fan teamed up with a pen illustrator to produce The Space Child's Mother Goose. Decades later, enough people still remember this book fondly that existing copies sold for up to $150 apiece. Purple House Press, a small Texas publisher, continues to reprint influential books from that era. Their reprint of this classic doggerel (in the best sense of the word) will appeal to children of the 50s through the 00s.

What's to Like?

This is a clever, fun book. Instead of making up alien names, or substituting "robot" for characters in traditional nursery rhymes, the scientific concepts are integral to the poems themselves. Consider this excerpt:

Three jolly sailors from Blaydon-on-Tyne
They went to sea in a bottle by Klein.
Since the sea was entirely inside the hull
The scenery seen was exceedingly dull.

Fortunately, the glossary in the back has (brief) explanations of some of the weightier terms. Combined with a good encyclopedia, there's nothing here an inquisitive eight-year-old couldn't decipher.

Winsor pays tribute to the classics, postulating how the king's men could have saved Humpty Dumpty with a time machine, or waxing eloquent about the theory Jack built. There's a general air of... excitement, maybe, surrounding the book. (Something else reminds me of Kit Williams' Masquerade riddle, though I can't put my finger on it.)

The illustrations nicely complement the text. The simple, anthropomorphic birdmen seem oddly familiar, like undamned Bosch characters. They're appropriately Spartan, though with plenty of important details. The gestalt evokes the feel of an old Tom Swift novel. Maybe it's the matter of fact, "let's fly to the moonbase in our rocket car" post-Sputnik optimism.

This is a fine book for children, and adults with child-like spirits. It might stir a latent interest in astronomy or mathematics. Even if it doesn't, the new and interesting words and witty rhymes are worth memorizing. This book's been due a reprint for several years.

Be sure to catch the recurring poem about a chronologically gifted black hen. It's reprinted in French, German, Greek, Swahili, and Chinese, with pictures to match.

What's to Consider

Some kids might not like the book -- it takes a certain kind of mindset to absorb new concepts normally reserved for middle-school geometry class. It's hard to resist trying it out, though. Find an elementary school-aged friend or relative and spend an hour working through the riddles.

The Summary

Hemos recommended this book as "cute." It is. It's not cute in a saccharine way. It's almost as if the author were reciting his poems to a straight-laced Nobel committee -- before turning backstage to give the rest of us a great big wink. He's hoodwinked the establishment.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Reader Steve MacLaughlin (you can visit his blog here) contributed this review of Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices, which sounds like an interesting followup to The Cluetrain Manifesto. Whether micromarketing of this sort really takes off will depend chicken-and-egg-like on whether a few companies escape being annoying and actually get people interested in what they have to offer. Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices author Christopher Locke pages 256 publisher Perseus Publishing (2001) rating 8 reviewer Steve MacLaughlin ISBN 0738204080 summary Leaping through and thrashing about current conceptions of reaching people and making money in an inexorably more-connected world.

Christopher Locke, one of the co-conspirators of the best seller The Cluetrain Manifesto, has again set off to teach companies how to talk, not just offer lip-service, to their customers. In Gonzo Marketing: Winning through Worst Practices, Locke takes on the myths and monuments of marketing armed new ideas and a razor sharp wit. Buckle up. Hold on. Mr. Locke is going to take you on a wild ride to the new world of marketing.

While the book's frenzied style will be compared to that of Hunter S. Thompson, I view the book instead as the first real book written in hyperlink-style. Jumping all over the map and all over the mind in search of gonzo marketing. Scrolling from idea to author to tactic and back again around the horn again.

Locke devotes a portion of the book to a refresher course in The Cluetrain Manifesto?s teachings: Markets are conversations. The Web is a micromarket made up of individuals. Your mass market mind tricks won't work on us. Gonzo Marketing picks up from there with a deeper examination of how companies must understand how micromarkets operate.

Locke accomplishes this by giving readers a detailed examination of the evolution of current marketing thought. The experts and evangelists range from Marshall McLuhan to Noam Chomsky to Sergio Zyman and Seth Godin. I stopped counting books and articles Locke mentions or dissects when it hit 32. Gonzo Marketing is quick to point out when grand ideas, like Godin's "Permission Marketing," were nothing more than underhanded tactics to send us spam.

What Locke pushes forward instead is this notion of gonzo marketing. Gonzo marketing "is marketing from the market's perspective. It is not a set of tricks to be used against us. Instead, it's a set of tools to achieve what we want for a change." No more tricks. No more schemes. No more mass market messages.

Gonzo Marketing also explains the evolution of the micromarket. Mass production created the need for mass markets. But globalization has been cutting the mass market into smaller and smaller pieces for many years now. The rapid proliferation of the Internet has only increased the growth of these micromarkets. While only global giants were once exposed to the power of micromarkets now companies of every shape and size must learn to deal with them.

The bad news for companies is that micromarkets are here to stay. As Locke puts it, "The web is a non-stop planet-spanning celebration. And we ain't goin' back in the box." The good news is that companies can be active participants in these micromarkets. But Locke isn't talking about "hashbrowned or refried databases" but instead "genuinely social social groupings." Micromarkets are "collections of people, communities joined by shared interests." And the big catch is that you need to belong to these groups to have a conversation with them.

This all sounds very 1960s commune-esk. And some readers may quickly label Locke's ideas as being as foolhardy as those he criticizes himself. But the evidence of micromarkets in action are all around. Internet chat rooms allow micromarkets to flourish and communicate like never before. Interested in rare coinage from the ancient world? There's a micromarket and somewhere people are talking about it, and telling people where to buy the best Tiberius Aureus Tribune penny. Online personal Web logs, also called blogs, allow micromarkets to share ideas, discuss new products, and to speak their mind in a way that traditional journalism never allowed for. Think, Oprah Winfrey's Book Club x 50 million and growing. Get the picture

Locke points to companies like Ford Motor Company, Delta Airlines, Intel, and Bertelsmann who are already reaching out to micromarkets. In February 2000 Ford announced that it was giving each of its 350,000 employees a computer and Internet access, and it didn't take long for those other companies to follow suit. Sure, Ford wants to put technology in its people's hands, but "the real deal is that Ford has unleashed 350,000 independent and genuinely intelligent agents to fan out online and listen carefully." First people start listening, then they start talking.

Gonzo Marketing doesn't tell companies they can't market to customers -- but that they need to radically rethink how they communicate. Before the automobile, the transcontinental railroad was the only easy way to get to the west coast. Before the Internet, mass marketing was the only easy way you could communicate on a global scale. And the railroads of old were just as inefficient and costly as the bloated marketing budgets of today.

Where as Cluetrain described the disease in detail, Gonzo Marketing concludes with a cure for companies to begin using. While Locke often sounds anti-big business, he notes that it is these larger companies who have the best advantage in making the early "transition from traditional marketing to more intimate micromarket relationships." They can begin to experiment with gonzo marketing by skimming a little bit off the top of their massive advertising budgets. Companies need to value their employee?s individual interests, and to find ways to nurture those interests. Allow people to go out and be ambassadors for your company, even if their interests have nothing to do with what the company is selling. People are more likely to talk to people with whom they share common interests than to corporate talking heads that share no common ground. Think about it.

Gonzo Marketing makes for great reading because it gets the gears in your mind turning. Everyone says their employees are their best advertisers. What if you really put that kind of attitude into action? Taken individually, micromarkets may seem insignificant, but collectively they have the power to move mountains. Locke concludes Gonzo Marketing with instructions for those pioneers that want to make first contact with micromarkets: "Hook up, connect, co-create, procreate. Redeploy. Foment joy. Brothers in arms, sisters of Avalon, champions of the world get to work."

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Reader Luke Tymowski gets the credit for this review of another O'Reilly book, one whose subject probably would be useful to more people than books on any single programming language. The book is Managing Mailing Lists -- read on to see how Luke thinks this book stacks up even a few years after its release. Managing Mailing Lists author Alan Schwartz pages 261 publisher O'Reilly & Associates rating 8.5 reviewer Luke Tymowski ISBN 156592259x summary The definititive mailing list manager manual

The Scoop

You subscribe to a handful or more mailing lists. You decide to start one yourself to fill a hitherto ignored niche. Which Mailing List Manager (MLM) do you pick? Where do you find docs for them? And how best do you go about managing the list -- performing duties of list mom, keeping everyone on topic and trolls off the list?

Alan Schwartz's Managing Mailing Lists will be your trusty guide, provided, of course, you're using one of the MLMs he writes about (Majordomo, SmartList, LISTSERV Lite, Listproc). He summarises how mail and mailing lists work, the applicable RFCs, how to install and configure the MLMs, how to administer them, and provides a reference to each MLM. There's enough detail here to grow you from a basic, competent list administrator to a near-wizard.

What's to Like

Many of us may assume we already know all we need to know about the basics. I've been running my own server for several years, and I still learned a few things reading the introduction. In fact, it should be required reading for anyone running a mailing list, assuming they are not already in the wizard category. Too many list admins I know are comfortable running a list, but don't understand how all the components work together. Then they wet themselves when something doesn't work and they have no idea where to start looking for the problem.

Chapter 1 provides a quick tour of mail headers, the relevant RFCs, email programs (MUAs, eg, Mutt, Pine, Eudora), mail transport agents (MTAs, eg, Sendmail, Postfix, qmail, etc.), mail reflectors (eg, Sendmail's alias file), and, finally, mailing list managers -- what they do, don't do, what they do well, what they don't do well.

Chapter 2 describes how to design a mailing list, everything from naming a list, to posting guidelines, to moderated vs non-moderated, to exploders and newsgroups, to handling large lists, to choosing your MLM (philosophy, features, programming language and source availability). This is a long, detailed chapter with plenty of valuable tidbits for the budding list administrator.

Chapters 1 and 2 stand on their own as the best discussions of list construction, management and protocol that I've seen yet. Everyone running a list will find something of value here, whether technical or political.

Troubleshooting mailing lists is covered in Chapter 8 (why not chapter 3?), and, while it's very short, it is a good summary of what can go wrong and how to fix the problems. This is perhaps a more difficult issue today than when the book was published because in the fight to thwart spammers, it's getting more and more difficult to sort out just why some list members cannot receive or post mail.

Each MLM gets its own chapter to help you install and configure the product, a separate chapter to administer each MLM, and an appendix which summarises the commands and directory structures.

Did you know you can maintain your own lists with Sendmail? I didn't realise just how powerful it can be when combined with formail and procmail. While I use Postfix as my MTA, not Sendmail, Postfix is designed to replace Sendmail and therefore most of the tricks for managing lists with Sendmail work with Postfix. I spent a few entertaining hours exploring just what can be done with these few handy tools. Of course, neither Sendmail or Postfix are as powerful as dedicated MLMs, but you can still accomplish a great deal with them.

What's to Consider

The book is three years old. Each MLM was already a mature product when the book was written, and none have changed very much since 1998. The biggest change is perhaps with Listproc -- it's no longer free. But otherwise the products have undergone minor revisions, mostly bug fixes and small, new, features.

Mailman, the Gnu MLM isn't covered. But then Mailman either didn't exist in 1998 or it was too new to enjoy sufficient popularity to justify a chapter. qmail, which allows each user to create their own mailing lists, is mentioned, but isn't documented -- again probably because it didn't enjoy the popularity it has now.

Summary and Table of Contents

Managing Mailing Lists is still relevant despite its age. The introductory chapters are excellent and could hardly be improved upon if it were re-written today. If you're going to manage a mailing list and plan to use another MLM, Mailman for example, which is not documented in the book, it is still worthwhile buying a copy. If you already have some experience managing lists as either a list mom or server admin, you'll still learn something. It is, I think, one of the best O'Reilly books I've read -- and I've got a few shelves full of them.

1. Introduction
2. Designing a Mailing List
3. Maintaining Lists with Listproc
4. Maintaining Lists with Majordomo
5. Maintaining Lists with Smartlist
6. Maintaining Lists with LISTSERV Lite
7. Maintaining Lists with Sendmail
8. Troubleshooting Your Lists
9. Administering Listproc
10. Administering Majordomo
11. Administering Smartlist
12. Administering LISTSERV Lite

1. Listproc Reference
2. Majordomo Reference
3. LISTSERV Lite Reference

• Index

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Reader Bob Johnson wrote this detailed review of Hacking Exposed followup Hacking Linux Exposed -- especially in light of the various color-coded Windows viruses still on the loose, this might be a good present for your your local Windows administrator as well, but both Bob and the authors are clear: GNU/Linux systems may be more resistant, but are not immune to cracking. Hacking Linux Exposed author Brian Hatch, James Lee, George Kurtz pages 566 publisher Osborne/McGraw-hill rating 8.5 reviewer Bob Johnson. ISBN 0072127732 summary The definitive Linux/Unix security and hacking text; follows in the full-disclosure footsteps of Hacking Exposed. What it is

While the recent Code Red worms and their offspring have taken center stage, it is not time for Linux administrators to sit on their behinds and say 'told you so.' Yes, our Unix systems may have been immune, but let us not forget the flurry of worms that came after Ramen made the scene early this year.

Most folks have heard of Hacking Exposed, the ground-breaking security book that is now coming out with a 3rd edition. One of the HE authors, George Kurtz, teamed up with two leading security experts to bring us Hacking Linux Exposed which was released in April of this year.

Hacking Linux Exposed teaches you about security from the cracker's point of view. to give you all you need to know to protect your own systems. It is written by security experts who have seen these attacks in the wild and have been protecting their own systems from them. It gives many examples of attacks, but it also teaches you how attacks of various forms occur in general, giving you a true understanding of vulnerabilities current, future, and theoretical.

The book itself is organized into four parts, each discussing a specific aspect of system security in depth.

Contents Part I begins with Unix permission models, such as passwords, file (user/group/other) modes, capabilities, limits, and other security features built into Linux. Though the authors claim this chapter is 'to get those Windows users up to speed' I found details about things I didn't know about, having been administering Linux systems for several years.

The authors then move onto proactive measures that can be taken to protect your system, under the theory that you shouldn't be reading the entire book before you start securing your systems. This section primes you with security procedures that will be referenced later in the book multiple times, and keeping it all contained seems a very logical organization. Topics include log analysis, system security scanners, hardening tools and patches. The chapter is ended with a step-by-step discussion of what to do should you suffer a break-in. While they strongly suggest a reinstall, and describe all the problems and pitfalls that brings, they acknowledge when business needs may conflict, and how to deal with differing requirements.

Rounding out the first part we move onto a chapter showing how crackers find out information about your machines and network. Naturally it includes the standard port-scanning tools, ping sweepers, and OS detection software, as well as network (in)security scanners such as SAINT, Nessus, and SARA. New administrators will learn a lot from discussions of information leakage through SNMP, DNS, whois, and even newsgroups. I believe this is the only book I have ever read to start a chapter with a piece of email Spam for educational purposes.

Part II talks about how crackers can get into your machine from the outside. We begin with a chapter entitled "Social Engineering, Trojans, and Other Hacker Trickery." This chapter is dedicated to various methods that are not necessarily code-related. The social-engineering angle is broken down into several categories, explaining the human insecurities that are most effective at getting people to give out inappropriate access or information, complete with frighteningly simple examples. The discussion of Trojans reminds us that everything may not be what it seems, such as the trojaned version of tcpd back in 1999, and explains how not to be taken advantage of by using checksums, pgp signatures, and the like. It ends with a discussion of worms. A discussion of the Ramen worm is included (the book was published very soon after this worm was released) as is a prediction that other worms may be on the horizon, which turned out to be all too true.

Next we move onto physical attacks that are used to gain access to systems, or helpful information. You are reminded how lax your office environment is (yes, we all have at least one sticky note with some password, somewhere) perhaps more than necessary. However when discussing console access, the authors return to instantly-implementable countermeasures to keep folks from walking up, rebooting, and dropping into single user mode, including a bit on encrypted filesystems.

Next comes a chapter devoted to attacks launched over the network. True to the overall style of the book, this isn't simply a list of the various POP/IMAP/Sendmail hacks over the years, but rather examples of different classes of attacks, such as wardialing, X servers, buffer overflows, denial of service attacks, sniffers, and automated password guessers. The information provided should help you prevent the known attacks and those that haven't been written yet that operate on similar principles.

The last chapter of Part II discusses attacks based on abuse of the network and network protocols themselves. We learn about abuses of DNS, routing protocols, and advanced sniffing and session hijacking that can be used to funnel your traffic through an attacker's machine without your knowledge, often without any loss in service. Man in the middle attacks against SSH and SSL are also well explained, and critical for anyone to understand before blindly clicking 'ok' to PKI-based warnings. The chapter ends with a discussion of the hazards IP-based trust relationships, and how to properly implement ingress and egress filtering.

All the topics to this point have been geared to keeping the attacker off of your system. In Part III, the authors move on to how an attacker that has already gotten onto your machine in some way will ultimately hack the root account.

We begin with PATH and permissions problems, insecurities with suid/sgid and custom root-run scripts, and common problems with poor sudo configuration (including a script you could use to allow limited editing of /etc/passwd via sudo safely.) It continues with local buffer overflow, format string vulnerabilities, race conditions, and hard/symbolic link problems. A very good chapter for anyone writing code, in addition to security administrators.

Chapter 9 is devoted to password cracking techniques and programs, such as Crack, John the Ripper, and pointers to useful word lists. Shadow passwords, including expiration information, is explained, as well as other systems that use passwords such as Apache .htpasswd files. Lastly, they describe good methods of choosing and enforcing strong passwords via PAM.

Chapter 10 shows you all the evils an attacker can do to your system after having cracked root. This chapter reads like a ringing wake-up call if you think a machine can be properly resecured once it has been compromised. The authors show some simplistic methods a hacker can use to maintain access, such as modifications of .rhosts, read/write nfs exports, and suid root shells, to more advanced methods such as the use of SSH authorized_keys which are suprisingly still not part of most script-kiddies arsenal. It then moves onto several methods of creating a network-accessible root shell (a wacky custom one is written in perl and netcat). The rest of the chapter is devoted to trojaning a system by replacing/recompiling new versions of system programs (netstat/ls/etc) which can be used to hide an attacker's activities. Loadable kernel modules which can do the same, but are potentially undetectable are discussed, complete with code. This chapter could have been titled 'How to build your own rootkit' given the detail they provide.

The last main part of the book discusses firewalls, web, mail, and ftp servers in detail. The server room is still where Linux is most often deployed, and the authors decided to give extensive detail about how to secure these commonly-provided services.

Chapter 11 discusses mail and ftp security, services that are most frequently run by the buggiest of software. However, the authors don't waste their time listing the insecurities that have existed in each product over the years (which would have taken several books) but instead look at current problems in implementations and the protocols themselves. For the mail section, it was refreshing to see that Postfix and Qmail were given equal air time along with Sendmail The authors described attacks that affect Sendmail, Postfix, and Qmail, showing the necessary fix for each mail server. The FTP section began the actual workings of the FTP protocol in both Active and Passive modes to allow you to understand the problems with the protocol itself and how it can be used for FTP bounce attacks, penetrating poorly-designed firewalls, and how data hijacking can occur.

Chapter 12 discusses both webserver configuration issues (Apache being the most prominent) and server-side dynamic content insecurities. The authors show you how to trim overly-permissive configuration options that are enabled by default, protect your HTTP authentication files, tighten proxy settings, decide where symlinks are appropriate, and more. The CGI (mod_perl, etc) section does a good job of showing you common pitfalls you or the programmers you support make every day that can lead to a compromise.

The last chapter of the book discusses how you can enable access controls and firewall rules to keep the bad guys off of your machine. They discuss TCP Wrappers along with inetd, xinetd, and even how to integrate them into your own daemons. They give detailed examples of how you can implement packet filters on your machine. It was nice to see iptables described as prominently as ipchains, especially since the 2.4 kernel was barely out when they released the book.

The last section of the book is the appendices. The first discusses the package management systems of various Linux distributions (RedHat, Debian, Slackware) and how to install/upgrade/verify your packages. The next details how to see what services you are running and how to turn them off, again describing distribution-specific methods where appropriate. The last appendix consists of three actual-hack case studies. If you've read Hacking Exposed then you're familiar with the 1-2 page case study at the beginning of each chapter. Here they included much lengthier case studies, including the code the attackers used. The increased length works much better, and provides a good view into these attacker's methods.

Presentation This book is very well organized, and includes the right combination of discussion and code. They made frequent use of special 'Caution', 'Note' and 'Tip' graphics to emphasis specific issues, and each attack begins with a 'Risk Rating' that lets you understand which attacks should be secured first as you attempt to implement all the countermeasures they make. No issue was brought up without a specific countermeasure you can implement today.

Many security books out there focus on various tools available to attackers, and read like a shopping cart with occasional text interspersed. This book focuses on the attack methods themselves, rather than the tools. As such it contains information about cracking programs where appropriate, and reads more like an educational journey of hacking methods. When many similar tools are available, only a few are described in depth, and eliminating duplication when possible, leaving you with the right information to decide which tool or tools are best for you.

One of the things that I really appreciated about this book is how the authors will start off topics with home-grown examples before discussing advanced security tools. For example, the authors give you a simple shell script that could function as a crude file integrity checker to provide you a clear method of understanding the concept before going onto detailed configuration examples of tripwire, Aide, and others. While they do not take up much space for these primers, usually half a page or so, they are excellent examples of speaking through code, rather than magician wave-of-the-hand explanations.

Conclusion Hacking Linux Exposed is a very good read. It does a great job of staying focused and interesting, without skimping on the actual details you need to secure your systems and understand the threats. The countermeasures are real and specific, allowing administrators to use this book as a tool to secure their own systems.

At many times I wished that the book were more Unix-centric than simply Linux centric. Many of the issues are similar, and the countermeasures would simply be broken down into *BSD vs Linux vs Solaris, etc. However that would have made reading the countermeasures a bit more difficult. As it is, many of the issues have similar or identical countermeasures, regardless of OS, so administrators should be able to extend what is said to their Unix OS of choice without too much trouble.

The Linux focus allows the authors to get much more in depth than they were able to in Hacking Exposed, which was disjointed at times, unable to really probe each issue. However the opposite is also true --- since they wanted to focus on Linux-specific attacks, they do not go into general attacks, such as JavaScript, cross site scripting, and other browser-related problems, for example. For these types of attacks you should look elsewhere. I think keeping the focus clean is very much worth it.

Beginning administrators may find some of the lead-up lacking in places. For example someone who is not very knowledgeable about IP may have trouble understanding some of the sophisticated network abuses and malformed packets described. However this is to be expected. This book is not standalone, nor should it be. If the HLE authors included enough information to adequately describe every nuance of IP packets then that'd be a disservice to those who already have a copy of W. Richard Stevens, and would needlessly add weight to a book that is supposed to stay focused on hacking.

The book has a website that includes all the source code in the book, released under the GPL, as well as some tools they wrote which they didn't feel belonged in the book itself. They also have book corrections on the website, as well as sections they had wished to put in the book that were rejected by the editor, such as their stance on the "Hacking vs Cracking" semantics debate, and why "Linux is Securable" (as opposed to Windows.) Needless to say, these folks won't be employed by Microsoft in the near future.

I highly recommend this book. You'll have ready-to-implement measures that can keep you busy for some time securing your systems. You'll learn a lot on the journey. And I look forward to seeing "Hacking Windows 2000 Exposed" later this year --- I can only assume it'll say "Install Linux."

You can purchase this book at FatBrain.

Danny Yee wrote this review for everyone who likes reading physics textbooks. Danny says: "If you studied physics at uni and are interested in a different kind of text at that level, read on. If not, you might prefer my review of Measured Tones: the Interplay of Physics and Music or other popular science reviews. The Physics of Information Technology author Neil Gershenfeld pages 370 publisher Cambridge University Press rating 9 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 0-521-58044-7 summary Dense but rewarding

The Physics of Information Technology is a physics text, not a work of popular science: it assumes the reader has done a physics degree or the larger part of one. The connection with information technology is threefold: Gershenfeld takes an information-theoretic approach at a fundamental level, focuses on areas of physics relevant to information technology, and uses examples from computing systems. The result is dense but richly rewarding, covering an immense range of material and often providing a different perspective on it to that of more traditional physics textbooks. (The Physics of Information Technology might be suitable as a text for an advanced electrical engineering course.) Enhancing the work's utility for students, each chapter has a "selected references" section, which lists maybe half a dozen books along with one sentence descriptions, and a set of problems, with full worked solutions.

Gershenfeld starts with chapters on noise and information in physical systems, covering noise mechanisms, the equipartition and fluctuation-dissipation theorems, channels, Shannon's theorems, and Fisher information. A rapid electromagnetism refresher is followed by a chapter on circuits, transmission lines, and waveguides, and another on antennas. A general review of optics is followed by a chapter "Lensless Imaging and Inverse Problems", covering matched filters, coherent imaging, computed tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging. Turning towards solid state physics, a quick overview of quantum statistical mechanics and electronic structure leads to an explanation of the operation of junctions, diodes, and transistors and various kinds of semiconductor logics; a chapter on opto-electronics looks at systems for the generation, detection, and modulation of light; and a chapter covers magnetic materials and recording. Two chapters then link this back to the information theory, covering instrumentation and signal modulation, detection, and coding and, adding complexity, many-body effects (superconductivity), non-equilibrium thermodynamics (thermo- and piezo-electricity), and relativity. And a long final chapter offers a solid introduction to quantum computing and communications, starting with an explanation of the necessary quantum mechanics.

Gershenfeld packs a huge amount into The Physics of Information Technology. Though he does review background theory, he does so rapidly and then cuts straight to the essentials. The section on coding, for example, explains arithmetic and Huffmann compression in just a paragraph each, while two and a half pages on thermoelectricity explain thermocouples and Peltier coolers. The mathematics is perhaps an exception, with the bits Gershenfeld chooses to treat in detail (and it gets quite involved in places) sometimes rather arbitrary - the mathematics can usually be skipped without too much loss. So the discussion of ferro- and ferri-magnetism includes a page and a half of mathematics deriving the Heisenberg Hamiltonian and J coupling, but then drops out of "mathematics mode" pretty much entirely (with one paragraph here quoted as an example of the style):

"In an antiferromagnet such as Mn or Cr the exchange energy is negative, therefore neighbouring spins alternate orientation and there is no net movement even though there is long-range magnetic order. A ferrimagnet is a ceramic oxide that has a spontaneous moment but is a good insulator. The moment arises because it has an antiferromagnetic coupling, but there are interpenetrating spin-up and spin-down lattices that have different moments but do not cancel. Most common ferrimagnets are made from materials containing iron oxides, called ferrites. Because they do not conduct, they do not screen electric fields or have eddy current heading, and so they are useful for a range of microwave applications as well as guiding flux in coils. One example is the microwave equivalent of optical Faraday rotation, which is used in a "magic T" to steer microwave signals in different directions depending on whether they arrive at the input or the output port. This apparent violation of reversability is possible because magnetic interactions break time reversal invariance, since the sign of time appears in the velocity in the basic vxB law. Cables are often wrapped around ferrites, such as the beads on computer monitor cables, to add inductance to filter out unwanted high-frequency components."

This also illustrates the use of examples from computer hardware.

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction
2. Interactions, units, and magnitudes
3. Noise in physical systems
4. Information in physical systems
5. Electromagnetic fields and waves
6. Circuits, transmission lines, and wave guides
7. Antennas
8. Optics
9. Lensless imaging and inverse problems
10. Semiconductor materials and devices
11. Generating, detecting, and modulating light
12. Magnetic storage
13. Measurement and coding
14. Transducers
15. Quantum computing and communications

Purchase this book from FatBrain. Danny Yee has written nearly six hundred book reviews.

Stephanie Black contributes this review of a book which might be nice to have around if someone suggests that Open Source is "not for business use." Managing Open Source Projects is one of a class of books that will probably expand hugely in the next few years. Managing Open Source Projects author Jan Sandred pages 189 publisher John Wiley & Sons rating 9 reviewer Stephanie Black ISBN 0-471-40396-2 summary A HOWTO on putting the principles and advantages of Open Source programming to work.

First Impressions There is a word for this book: SWEEEET!

It's short, too, but before you grumble about paying nearly 30 bucks for something that's less than 200 pages, you might want to look at the concept of quality. It's worth every blessed dime, plus taxes (if applicable).

Managing Open Source Projects opens with a history of the movement, thus providing background information and context to prospective or actual managers of Open Source projects. In this sense alone, Sandred has set himself apart from numerous other authors on the subject, providing an overview of a movement which has been over 30 years in the making, and whose restructuring of the "old-economy" is just beginning.

The development of the browser wars is dealt with in this history, a subject not everyone is familiar with. What it amounts to is a lesson in 'instant karma' that Netscape Inc. learned after doing a lot of damage to the Mosaic browser, ("mozilla" comes from "Mosaic killer"), and subsequently having the same done unto them by the Redmond Contingent(TM). Sandred sort of implies that this lesson had more than a cursory role in the 1998 opening of the Mozilla source code, which staggered the industry all round. Obviously, Netscape learned several somethings from the experience.

The author moves on to discuss the relevance of open source to business. (You knew *that* was coming, didn't you?). Sandred raises the common assumption of business known as Brooks' Law ('the performance of programming teams does not scale so as to increase the productivity of the team'), and then uses the history of Linux development to illustrate the inadequacy of this model in describing the open source development process. In sum, Sandred asserts that the differentiating factor is what he calls the "political attitude" of the open source model, which breeds a different leadership style. The "administrative overhead" required by each member of a development team may increase with each new developer, but without the geographic restrictions posed by a code farm, there is a wider base of "administrators" to choose from. (Now you know what to tell your boss.).

Chapters 8-10 cover a variety of tools useful (and commonly used) in building open source works, and methodologies used to set up the project (including the team). You've heard of Sourceforge, right? CVS? Or maybe "The Slashdot Effect"?

Highlights There are some portions of Managing Open Source Projects that are guaranteed "feel good" items which remind any open source developer of why we do what we do.

In his discussion of open source philosophy, Sandred points out that the viability of the open source model is not restricted to software:

"With computers, perfect copies of a digital work can easily be made, modified, and distributed by others, with no loss to the original work. Individuals interact and share informa- tion,and then react and build upon it; this is not only natural, it is also the only way for individuals to succeed in a commu- nity. In essence, the idea of open source is basic to the natural propagation of digital information among humans in a society. This is why the traditional notion of copyright does not really make sense on the Internet." (p. 52)

He points out that the United Nations has adopted an open source approach to distributed assets, including (especially) information. The link between democracy and freedom of information is clear, and iterated not only by Sandred, but by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, Secretary-General of the World Health Organization.

It's not "just" a software development model anymore.

Imperfections There are some small issues this writer has to take with Mr. Sandred's pronouncements, among them the following:

"All software cannot be developed open source. Open source software tends to concentrate on infrastructural design and back-end software. Open source benefits from incremental de- sign, which means back-end systems. End-user applications are hard to write. These applications deal with graphical user interfaces, which are very complex to write, almost always customized, and comprise other skills like graphical inter- face design." (p.160)

This writer would, upon reflection, argue with pretty much everything in this paragraph, save for the self-evident last statement. Both the GNOME and KDE projects are about providing desktop applications, and the managers to go with them. Most window managers provide applications to go with their "suites". There are productivity software suites in progress.

Ah, well, it's one bad moment of two in the entire book.

Mr. Sandred makes an unwitting gaffe in his discussion of "Five Open Source Commandments" in Chapter 12: the last of these reads 'Join a project rather than starting your own.' While joining another project is helpful, even useful, it does not replace the "developer's personal itch" that Sandred quotes from Eric Raymond's 19 lessons (Cathedral and the Bazaar, O'Reilly, 1999), in Chapter 2. Do both!

Conclusion Don't just sit there -- go get the book, even if you're not currently involved in, or planning on, managing an open source project. The information is timely, the pace is lively, and Sandred has provided a wealth of insight into the open source movement's past, present and future. While some of his work has perceptual errors, these are few. The rest of it is pure gold.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

The indefatigable chromatic wrote this review of what sounds like another solid offering from the hard workers at O'Reilly & Associates. If you're in the market for dead-tree references to XML, it probably belongs on your list of candidates. XML in a Nutshell author Elliotte Rusty Harold & W. Scott Means pages 480 publisher O'Reilly & Associates rating 8.5 reviewer chromatic ISBN 0-596-00058-8 summary A solid and useful reference for XML developers.

The Scoop

While one of the original goals of XML was to create a specification simple enough that a computer science student could produce a working parser in a week, a few new developments have complicated things slightly. The sea of W3C-recommended acronyms includes namespaces, XPath, XSL, XPointers, schemas, and dozens of specific XML applications. Adopting the simple rules of well-formed data helps, but the quickly-growing stable of related technologies is enough to make the sturdiest information architect weep. The specifications aren't as easy to read as, say, the latest Terry Pratchett novel, either.

XML in a Nutshell covers just the most important concepts. Cleanly written, it walks through the XML aspects likely to be used in most projects. As it assumes existing familiarity with the subjects, it does not spend much time in tutorial mode. Instead, these are the guts of the subjects, arranged nicely in dissection jars.

The first section covers XML basics. This includes the ubiquitous grove of angle brackets, the semantic intent and implication, a good chapter on DTDs, as well as internationalization concerns. The short discussion of namespaces is the clearest explanation this author has yet encountered.

Part two delves further into the reasons for using XML, exploring documents that use the structure to explain semantic relationships. DocBook and XHTML appear, as extended examples. Further, it explores the assistive technologies of XSL, XPath, XLinks, and XPointers. Again, the discussions of XSL and XPath compare very favorably to longer works, intended as tutorials. A brief examination of CSS and XSL Formatting Objects rounds out the section.

Part three explores the use of XML as a data transport. In this section, programming languages come into play. There's a strong hint of Java in the air, though most of the discussion follows a language-neutral path. Both the DOM and SAX parsing models have a dedicated chapter. They're short, but the essential pieces are described simply and effectively.

The final section makes or breaks the book. Luckily, XML in a Nutshell won't have much chance to gather dust. The two-hundred page reference section includes the most useful information. There's an annotated copy of the XML 1.0 Reference, arranged logically. The XSL reference, in particular, is quite good. DOM and SAX programmers will also enjoy their respective chapters. Finally, it's nice to have a large set of printed character tables handy.

What's to Consider

The parsing examples don't go much beyond DOM or SAX, and there's more than a strong Java flavor. (Of course, the models are very similar in most modern languages.) As well, some of the class interfaces in the SAX reference are hard to read. This is probably due to the complexity of the information instead of any editorial decision. There's also little discussion of actual XML applications. Instead, the book covers the principles behind perhaps 90% of XML usage. Again, this is not a complaint, just a clarification of the intended audience.

The Summary

The value of XML in a Nutshell should be readily apparent to XML developers. The material is well-organized and concise. It's a quintessential Nutshell book, upholding a tradition of utility and quality. Readers who've already been exposed to the presented material will likely keep this book close at hand.

Table of Contents

1. XML Concepts
2. 1. Introducing XML
   2. XML Fundamentals
   3. Document Type Definitions
   4. Namespaces
   5. Internationalization
3. Narrative-Centric Documents
4. 1. XML as a Document Format
   2. XML on the Web
   3. XSL Transformations
   4. XPath
   5. XLinks
   6. XPointers
   7. Cascading Stylesheets (CSS)
   8. XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO)
5. Data-Centric Documents
6. 1. XML as a Data Format
   2. Programming Models
   3. Document Object Model (DOM)
   4. SAX
7. Reference
8. 1. XML 1.0 Reference
   2. XPath Reference
   3. XSLT Reference
   4. DOM Reference
   5. SAX Reference
   6. Character Sets

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Long-suffering Slashdot reader WrinkledShirt contributes this review of John Hall's Programming Linux Games, and lays out the good and the bad in a book that's one of the few of its kind. More games are always good -- hopefully books like this one will spark some inspiration.

Programming Linux Games author John Hall pages 415 publisher No Starch Press rating 7.5 reviewer WrinkledShirt ISBN 1-886411-49-2 summary Well-written guide to a wide range of game-writing tools for Linux, but not a definitive reference work for any single task.

Introduction

The potential for linux gaming has really exploded in the last couple of years. In many cases, the potential has been realized -- Unreal Tournament, SimCity 3000, Tribes 2, Quake 3, Alpha Centauri, and many other successful Windows titles, have all been brought to Linux, with Loki leading the charge. Judging by the bottom line, there's a definite shortage of true cash-cow success stories in this enigmatic part of the industry, and hence, a shortage of good reference material for naive people hoping to produce that next cash cow.

However, we've reached such a point of critical mass of knowledge and technology that books had to start appearing sometime. So, despite the fact that there's no overwhelming market demand for Linux games and a high ratio of hobbyists to dedicated game developers for the OS, here we have a book aiming at taking amateur Linux game development to the next level.

However, much of the technology out there for game programming in Linux is still heavily in development, with many of the APIs and libraries still a long way away from a 1.0 release. Allegro and Clanlib are a couple of exceptions to this trend -- both are popular APIs that sadly don't get much more than a passing mention in the book. Their sexier counterpart, Sam Lantinga's SDL, gets a fair amount of treatment (no surprise there, considering John Hall was the lead author for a team based within Loki) -- but even this fairly feature-complete library, which Loki uses to port its games over from Windows, isn't explored in its entirety.

Instead, there are also crash courses in BSD sockets, package management, TCL, the framebuffer and various sound APIs, and what we end up with here is the consummate cookbook, a jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-none tome that introduces us to a wide variety of Linux gaming topics while stopping short of being a definitive reference for any of them. Such is John Hall's work, an interesting, wide-ranging introduction to game programming for an operating system that few believed was capable of it not too long ago.

John Hall, an experienced game developer, participated in Loki's Civilization, Call to Power game hack, and is currently working for Treyarch developing that company's Spider-Man title for the PS2.

The Good

As far as cookbooks go, this is a good one, and there isn't much concerning Linux game API programming that isn't touched on. There's an ongoing case study (Penguin Warrior) that is developed over the course of the book. Each chapter introduces a fairly deep concept, gives a decent function reference related to the concept, then incorporates the knowledge into proof-of-concept code, and then uses the new-found knowledge to enrich the case study. The tone is straightforward and the execution is solid. The final game works well enough to give confidence that the reader could take the knowledge in this book and apply it to his or her own project, either to add new features or re-think old ones.

The book is also well-written -- the sample code is extremely well-commented and good error-handling is in place. He makes no assumptions about the knowledge of the reader, dealing with such introductory topics in Linux programming as vi vs Emacs, the FSH and make, although he never gets annoying or patronizing. *cough cough* LaMothe *cough*

Individual chapters stand out as being great introductory resources for material that doesn't have much in the way of documentation. The important aspects of SDL get good treatment in one complete and comprehensive unit. There's also a thorough chapter on audio programming, comparing and contrasting OpenAL, OSS, ALSA, Ogg Vorbis, and ESD (among others), and all this after showing off SDL's sound capabilities one chapter earlier. Many of the pitfalls associated with each of the different technologies, as well as the pitfalls of sound programming in general, are covered here. It's a great jumping-off point for those who don't know much about the audio end of things.

There's even a really neat chapter on incorporating TCL script interpretation within a program written in C. For anyone who's had trouble throwing together their own text parser for initialization scripts, or who's fed up with the constant recompiles needed when tweaking for the most arbitrary of changes of the game's AI, the information in this chapter is a godsend. In the Penguin Warrior case study, it's almost spooky how effective TCL turns out to be in making the computer ship chase and evade the human player.

Finally, I want to reiterate the effective use of the case study, Penguin Warrior. Having seen the way other game programming texts handle using samples to illustrate game programming concepts -- which is often a mish-mash, to say the least -- the way this book approached the issue is refreshing: there's one major project, and each chapter brings us closer to that project's completion. The code works as intended and goes a long way to convince the reader that the libraries and techniques explored in this book are near-commercial-level quality. (Networked games turned out to be choppy on my machine, but that was the only real black mark I could find in the program's execution.) If nothing else, John Hall deserves a good deal of thanks for proving that game development on Linux is a realistic and rewarding endeavor.

The Not So Good

At times, the generalist nature of the book left me wondering if Hall couldn't have gone just a little bit further in some of the topics. There's a decent enough synopsis about deployment using Loki's install tool, as well as packaging in general, although nothing related to the Penguin Warrior game itself, so we don't get to see the theory in practice as much as it could have been. Also, he teases us by early on by starting with the compiler, moving to the make utility, talking a bit about package management, and then mentions automake, but he stops short of really explaining how to bring that into an existing project. Considering all the fun little dependencies needed for multimedia programming in Linux, this would have been a valuable bit of information for anyone not used to deploying on the platform.

Another instance of this so-close-yet-so-far approach occurs when he talks about incorporating Mesa into an SDL program. He tantalizes us with a code sample illustrating how to use the SDL as a replacement for glut, but that's all -- the material doesn't really get deep enough to convince readers that a 3D neophyte really can abandon glut for the SDL, particularly when many OpenGL reference materials out there rely heavily on glut as a teaching aid for windowing and other utility functions. Loki primarily used SDL to handle its 3D utility programming, so at least we know it's possible, but given the exploding popularity of 3D games it's too bad this wasn't covered more.

It's sometimes hard to tell exactly who the book is intended for. The introductory chapters include discussions on topics such as the different gaming genres out there, despite the fact that game programming hopefuls who don't know that Quake is a first-person shooter must make up a really narrow audience. Also, it's almost enough to give one whiplash to see how quickly he dives into using ioctl() when only a couple of chapters earlier he was explaining the basics of using gcc. Next up soon after that? Strap yourself in, we'll be writing straight to /dev/fb0! It's almost comical to think about how much dangerous knowledge a newbie's been given over the course of the book. Still, like I said earlier, he never talks down to the reader, who because of this might feel compelled against better judgement to be whisked along into subject matter that really needs other support material to be of any real use.

Hall's a humble enough guy, which is great insofar as writing style is concerned, but in one of the last chapters, he starts questioning some of the choices he made while coding Penguin Warrior throughout the book. Specifically, he says he probably should have used C++ instead of C, Scheme instead of TCL, and UDP instead of TCP for the networking, and this is cold comfort for people who would have hoped that the author would have picked the best plan of attack from the beginning. That said, C, TCL, and TCP are appropriate choices due to the simplicity of execution and the fact that they introduce useful techniques from a design point of view. Still, there's no point giving readers a sense of wistful "What if?" if you don't have to. It also highlights that this book is more a beginner's API reference than a game programming book per se.

To take that point further, there also really isn't much in the way of abstract game programming theory. This book could have really distinguished itself as special if some content related strictly to game development was here. There's a mention of Gamasutra here, a method of quick division there, the equation of a distance from a point to a line thrown into the mix, and that's pretty much all there is. Topics not really covered include optimization, pathfinding, and cracker-proofing your code, and what is talked about on the subjects of artificial intelligence design, collision detection, and physics is all rudimentary ... For coverage on these sorts of topics, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Finally, and this is really not the fault of the author or the book, but one wonders if the time was right for much of this material -- or, at the very least, its highly generalist approach. DRI is making its presence felt, the various audio APIs out there are improving all the time, and the LSB is coming along nicely, but until there's a proven and stable multimedia base to work from, no definitive guide can be written, and this sort of organized dogpile is really the best we can hope for with so much stuff to cover. The SDL is a top-notch library for graphics programming, and it's likely an entire book could have been spent strictly on graphics programming using it, and the depth that such a book could have attained far surpasses what we're given here. Plus, in a year from now, who knows where any of these sound APIs will be? Of course, these might prove to be just esoteric issues in the grand scheme of this book.

Conclusion

Despite the criticisms I have of this book, I really don't want the message that is conveyed here to be anything but positive. There's a lot working for this book -- the chapters on SDL, sound programming and incorporating TCL and C are excellent, and will be especially helpful for people who are novices in these areas. Considering the alternatives (hitting dryly-written online docs or constantly shaking your Google to see what falls out), this book is a very attractive option. Programming a fully-functional multiplayer game would probably require more effort than might be suggested by the brevity of the chapter on socket programming, but that chapter is a solid introduction as well. The book as a whole is well-written and succeeds for the most part in its endeavor to make the best of a chaotic situation. I'd recommend this book to anybody who appreciates the messy-kitchen style of learning, or to anyone with decent hacking skills who just needs to break the ice when it comes to the Linux game APIs. And even though it gets slightly schizophrenic in its attempt to be both an introductory text and a definitive reference, this is the sort of book that could kickstart a new movement in Linux game development.

Table of Contents (exploded version here)

1. The Anatomy of a Game
2. Linux Development Tools
3. Linux Gaming APIs
4. Mastering SDL
5. Linux Audio Programming
6. Game Scripting Under Linux
7. Networked Gaming with Linux
8. Gaming with the Linux Console
9. Finishing Penguin Warrior
10. To Every Man a Linux Distribution

• Glossary of Terms
• Bibliography

Related Links

Sample Code
No Starch Press
Loki
SDL (List of SDL games)
OpenAL
DRI
Mesa
libsndfile
Gamasutra

You can purchase this book from Fatbrain.

Craig Maloney contributes the below review of a book he claims is long overdue -- the second edition of Gary Feld's The Book of SCSI. Probably it won't be long until someone is reviewing The Book of Firewire, but SCSI remains probably the most widespread standard for high-quality, reasonably priced storage. I know it's gotten better since the last time I struggled with termination issues and bad cables, but if you rely on SCSI every day, you may need this book.

The Book of SCSI, 2nd Edition: I/O for the New Millennium author Gary Field, Peter M. Ridge pages 456 publisher No Starch Press rating 7.5 reviewer Craig Maloney ISBN 1-886411-10-7 summary A one stop resource for the SCSI protocol.

What's Good? For those in a hurry, Appendix A (The All-Platform Technical Reference) is the entire book in a nutshell. I think Appendix A should be included with every SCSI card sold. It includes pin-out descriptions of the major and not-so-major SCSI interfaces, tables for bus timings, and a quick description of termination rules. The pages that surround Appendix A are also quite good.

The chapter on connecting devices to a PC talks at length about one of the more troubling aspects of SCSI; termination. Anyone who has had to troubleshoot SCSI installation problems will enjoy how thorough Chapter 6 deals with troubleshooting. (It even includes what a SCSI signal should look like on an oscilloscope). Programmers will find a Chapter with information on programming using ASPI, as well as protocol specifications for those looking for more low-level information. You'd be very hard pressed to find a more complete and readable treatment of the SCSI protocol than this book.

What's Bad? Unfortunately completeness can lead to information overload. Novice users will find themselves at a disadvantage with the sheer amount of material presented.

When discussing how to set up a SCSI adapter, the book mentions the various PC busses from the earliest IBM PC to draft revisions of PCI and everything in-between. Had I been a novice reader, I would have been overwhelmed with all the information about historical PC busses that are no longer in use. (When was the last time you used VLB or EISA?) In the interest of completeness, the authors also include a chart comparing these interfaces. I question whether this is really necessary. Some may also be put off by the hand-drawn diagrams in the earlier chapters.

On the CD

The CD includes items such as the SCSI FAQ, ASPI Development Files, ASPI tar, SCSI disk driver source for MSDOS, Western Digital SCSI Utilities, SCSITool, Postmark I/O benchmark source code, and Linux SCSI information. Of note, the CD also includes a PDF file of the entire book.

What's in it for me?

The Book of SCSI is definitely written by SCSI enthusiasts. On the early pages, the authors include a bit of SCSI poetry, and the CD includes a text file entitled "SCSI: A Game With Many Rules and No Rulebook?". This book reads with an excitement only an enthusiast can project. If you have ever been curious about SCSI, I encourage you to sit down and read the first few chapters of this book. If you are in a position to use SCSI components more than occasionally, I recommend you purchase this book and keep it on your reference shelf for those times when troubleshooting is necessary.

My biggest complaint? I wish the authors had written this book ten years ago. However, it is still a welcome addition to my library today.

• Chapter Listing
• Chapter 1: Welcome to SCSI
• Chapter 1.5: A Cornucopia of SCSI Devices
• Chapter 2: A Look at SCSI-3
• Chapter 3: SCSI Anatomy
• Chapter 4: Adding SCSI to Your PC
• Chapter 5: How to Connect Your SCSI Hardware
• Chapter 6: Troubleshooting Your SCSI Installation
• Chapter 7: How the Bus Works
• Chapter 8: Understanding Device Drivers
• Chapter 9: Performance Tuning Your SCSI Subsystem
• Chapter 10: RAID: redundant Array of Independent Disks
• Chapter 11: A Profile of ASPI Programming
• Chapter 12: The Future of SCSI and Storage in General
• Appendix A: All-Platform Technical Reference
• Appendix B: PC Technical Reference
• Appendix C: A Look at SCSI Test Equipment
• Appendix D: ATA/IDE versus SCSI
• Appendix E: A Small ASPI Demo Application
• Glossary
• Index

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

J.R.R.Tolkien succeeded both in creating fabulous new worlds and rendering them utterly believable. Reading his trilogy has become a rite of passage for many in several generations. An updated atlas of Middle -Earth provides a definitive guide through hundreds of maps and drawings. (In advance of the movie Lord of The Rings scheduled for release in December, we'll be writing and talking about the trilogy itself as well as other works the original books have inspired.)

The Atlas of Middle Earth author Karen Wynn Fonstad pages 210 publisher Houghton Mifflin rating 8 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-618-12699-6 summary The Geography of Middle-Earth

If you really want to know what Middle-earth is based on, it's my wonder and delight in the earth as it is," Tolkien told an interviewer, "particularly the natural earth." He also wanted to provide a new, Brit-centric mythology for the world, so he took the literal earth and changed it just enough to make it "faerie."

With the cinematic trilogy of his books under production -- three separate films are scheduled for release over the next two years -- Middle Earth is going mainstream. These films will probably be nearly as big as Star Wars, if they're half as good, touching mythological and creative nerves that revolve around what we like to call science fiction in its varied forms.

As is often the case with culture The Lord Of the Rings, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion -- provided comfort, stimulation, and escape for a particular sub-set of the human species, especially young, enchanted brainiacs growing up apart from the mainstream and eager -- desperate, maybe -- for other worlds to explore.

If you want to enter Tolkien's world, the best way is to read The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and the The Silmarillion. For hard-core Tolkien lovers who have already done that, I'd highly recommend -- there's plenty of time before the first movie in December -- The Atlas of Middle-Earth (Houghton Mifflin), by Karen Wynn Fonstad, a University of Wisconsin cartographer who has drafted unbelievably detailed maps of Middle Earth from the First Age through the Third, including thematic and other maps, guides, places and events (the mapping of the The Silarillion is astounding).

Tolkien created the details of Middle Earth for himself, for his own creativity and intellectual exercise. He was, Fonstad writes, envisioning his world much as our medieval cartographers viewed our own.

Fonstad's descriptions of the pain-staking process she used to create these hundreds of details maps are almost as interesting as the stories upon which they're based. The atlas is a composite of the physical surface with the imprint of the "Free Peoples." A number of basic map types are included -- the physical, including landforms, minerals, and climate; the political (spheres of influence); battles; migrations (closely tied with linguistics); the traveller's pathways and finally, situation maps -- towns and dwellings, all arranged roughly in sequence. Fonstad even includes detailed pathway tables -- the distance Frodo spent on his pony on dozens of trips, the length of marches, the treks of elves, the flights of refugees.

Fonstad concedes that an almost endless series of questions, assumptions and interpretations were necessary in creating these maps. But each line has been drawn with a reason behind it, she says. And she explains the reasoning.

Middle Earth was the creation of a world, and is deserving of its own geography. Fonstad's atlas is well and clearly written, even for the casual fan of Tolkien. And the hundreds of maps she created offers a new prism through which to look at these works. This is by no means a book for everybody, and even die-hard fans of the trilogy might ask why they need to know so much. The hard-core fanatic will know.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Slashdot reader Adam Jenkins contributed the review below of John P. Mulligan's Solaris 8 Essential Reference. If you operate a Solaris box for fun or profit, this book may prove be a useful reference, though Adam has some reservations about the book's completeness, especially regarding the new features you'd expect a book updated for Solaris 8 to cover.

Solaris 8 Essential Reference author John P. Mulligan pages 346 publisher New Riders Publishing rating 6.5 reviewer Adam Jenkins ISBN 0-7357-1007-4 summary An update to the Solaris 7 Essential Reference

A New Book for a New Release John Mulligan is known for his Web site SolarisGuide.com and the first Solaris Essential Reference. This is the second edition, updated for the Solaris 8 release. The technical reviewers of the book were Solaris administrators Jeffrey Meltzer and Nojan Moshiri.

Overview In the Introduction we are told that the book emphasizes the essentials of SunOS 5.x rather than Open Windows since 'anything that can be done from a GUI can also be done from a command line.' While this old adage is true, and the command line is certainly a very powerful and standard way to use Unix, many of the recent additions to Solaris are designed to make administration easier by using GUI tools.

What's in it for me? There are three main parts to the text. There is the General Use Reference, which covers text utilities, shell scripting, process control and network clients and utilities. Part II is a Developer Reference, covering compilers/interpreters, programming utilities and debugging. Part III is the Administration and Maintenance Task Reference, with sections on startup and shutdown, user management, network administration, filesystems, security, and system configuration and tuning.

The Appendices list Solaris version changes, common startup problems and solutions, Linux compatibility, the GNU Public License, list of Web resources, signals list, and a TCP/UDP port list. The Web resources list is well organized into sites covering administration, CDE, developer resources, hardware, lists of sources, magazines, online documentation (including SolarisGuide's RTFM documentation), security, software, Solaris x86 and Solaris PPP/NAT. The resources chosen seem to be tried and tested, as those that I tried were all still at the addresses given.

The port list only covers fairly standard ports, listing them both by service and by port number. The services list includes a note next to each with recommendations like disable or log for those known to have security issues.

What's good? The security section includes information on the new Role Based Access Control (RBAC) as well as how to enable the Basic Security Module although more information on what the BSM does would've been helpful. There is a section on the LDAP utilities that come with Solaris 8 and how to use them.

What's bad? Some of the examples are spaced out over two lines awkwardly. The ftp sites given in the Security section are no longer working since the directory structure at Purdue's COAST was re-arranged as CERIAS. This is not the fault of the author or publisher; it's just the nature of the Internet to be dynamic.

There is no coverage of IP Filters or firewalls, patch analyzer, Network Cache and Accelerator, the Sun Management Center, VPNs or the extra software that comes with Solaris 8 (Oracle, StarOffice, the Palm HotSync utilities, Forte, Apache and iPlanet). The Linux compatibility section was disappointing: it consists of just one page describing the utility called lxrun that lets you run Linux binaries under Solaris x86. There is also a glaring typo on the contents page: 'Admininstration.'

Conclusion The title Solaris 8 Essential Reference is a fairly tough promise to live up to. The book is good as a Solaris reference, giving general coverage of the Solaris operating system for users, developers and administrators. However, it misses a lot of the main features of Solaris 8, which are probably the reasons most people would buy version 8 in the first place.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Reader Steven MacLaughlin, CKO of Expidant, Inc, contributes this review of From Bricks to Clicks: : 5 Steps to Creating a Durable Online Brand, a book which straightforwardly appeals to readers' interest in the marketing and cash-flow side of online business rather than the programming side. If you have established (or are just working for) a site with the goal of making money from it, you may want to pay attention to this stuff, because the last year especially has shown that the best laid sites of mice and men need a lot more than a clever idea to succeed.

From Bricks to Clicks author Serge Timacheff and Douglas E. Rand pages 303 publisher McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing rating 8 reviewer Steve MacLaughlin ISBN 0071371893 summary Presents one aspect of making a prosperous online business by methodically showing the reader how to choose and establish an appropriate brand.

From Bricks to Clicks arms businesses with an effective five-step program to help take their company's brand online. Perhaps more importantly, Timacheff and Rand have authored a book that clearly explains the entire branding process from the ground up. With the help of case studies and interviews, the authors clearly explain the five essential steps of brand development: (1) Discovery, (2) Framework, (3) Verbal Articulation, (4) Visual, Physical, and Sensory Articulation, and (5) Execution.

The book makes its argument clear within the first few pages: 'A company may have the greatest support team in the world, the best products, or the most fantastic service yet available. However, if the image is presented on its home page fails to compel the viewer, if it looks cheap, if it's culturally insensitive, if it's impossible to decipher, or if it's really slow, the brand takes a direct hit admidships.'

Timacheff and Rand point out that 'the brand on the Web is like the Marines on the beach.' If you don't successfully secure the beachhead with your brand, then 'the big guns will not succeed and the troops won't be able to land.' This is something that many companies just do not fundamentally understand. Companies also need to understand that promises made by a brand in the offline world need to be carried out on the Web as well. As the book points out, 'The goal of every brand on the Web needs to be keeping promises, not making them.'

What follows next are a series of chapters that demonstrate how best to use the five steps. Each chapter takes the reader through the step-by-step process of developing their brand from scratch. Along the way Timacheff and Rand point out potential pitfalls and provide anecdotes to drive their advice home.

The 'Discovery' chapter focuses on tying the brand's promise with the company?s core message and business plan. The goal of this stage is for everyone to understand how the company's brand will uniquely position itself in the marketplace. Timacheff and Rand stress the importance of this stage because it establishes 'the foundation upon which the brand will be built.'

The Framework chapter focuses on how the brand will be structured, and what role parent or sub-brands will play in the company's future. It is at this point that the company's core message is finalized, and where clear brand standards are established. The way a company structures its brand ('branded house' vs. 'house of brands') can greatly influence the direction of their online branding activities.

The 'Verbal Articulation' chapter focuses on developing company, product, and service names. Legal issues including trademark and URL registration also take place at this stage. Several examples of company name and URL confusion are highlighted. The authors also discuss the need for consistency across all communications, including collateral materials, press releases, presentations, and the Web.

The 'Visual, Physical, and Sensory Articulation' chapter focuses on the look and feel of the brand. The corporate logo, style guide, and visual characteristics ranging from product packaging to trade show booths are developed during this stage. Designing for the Web with the brand in mind is a delicate balance of both form and function. From Bricks to Clicks emphasizes that 'launching a Web site without any serious consideration of the branding and brand process is corporate suicide in the New Economy.'

The 'Execution' chapter focuses on launching the brand to the targeted audience. The Web site is launched, the advertising appears, and all other corporate and marketing communication begins. The importance of brand 'pruning and maintenance' are highlighted to keep the Web brand healthy and thriving. Companies may occasionally need to repeat the branding process to 'understand the brand as it is now and to know what change is on the horizon.'

What makes From Bricks to Clicks such a valuable book is its detailed description of the brand development process. Do not be fooled by the cover. This book is not just for companies looking to transfer their brand online, but instead can be used by companies who are trying to either develop or resurrect their offline brands. From Bricks to Clicks is as much a book about the fundamentals of branding as it is one about taking your brand to the Web.

If you have your brand clearly defined, then this book will help you to make the right moves to leverage it online. If you have a brand that's seen better days, then this book can help you to get it back on track before going online. If you are starting out with no brand at all, this book can help you to start developing a brand for both the online and offline worlds.

Finally, From Bricks to Clicks can also be a very useful resource for companies that aren't interested in undertaking do-it-yourself branding. The book is right on target with its advice on how to choose the right firm for both branding and Web site design. I must admit to placing a red sticky-note flag on the page where the authors state: 'Look for process. Demand process. Don't pay for a design or a Web site. Pay for a process.' Amen! Anyone who seriously cares about their company's brand should add this book to their must-read list.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

With Open Source software projects, understanding why certain features are developed while others aren't, or even why entire projects split apart into contending factions, is often as simple as reading mailing list archives and web sites where the involved parties hash out (or at least air) their differences. Within a large corporation, it's a lot harder. Slashdot reader (and "former Microsoftie") Adam Barr contributes this review of Breaking Windows, which he describes as an imperfect but revealing look into the internal politics of Microsoft, and how clashing groups within the company have struggled to get their vision of Windows on the desktop -- sometimes a messy process.

Breaking Windows author David Bank pages 288 publisher Free Press rating 8 reviewer Adam Barr ISBN 0743203151 summary Tells the story of the battle that raged within Microsoft from 1997 to 2000, between those advocating sticking with the Windows strategy and those wanting a full-fledged shift to the Internet. The Scoop This is one of the best-written books about Microsoft that I have read, and as a former employee I have read most of them. Focusing on the internal battles gives a new perspective on the company. It hopefully shatters, once and for all, the myth that Microsoft is a hive community marching in line behind Bill Gates. Executives and regular employees are shown battling over issues large and small, with a consistent public story emerging only at the end, if at all. Bank also shows how Microsoft's legal strategy in the Justice Department case was affected by the political and technical battles that were simultaneously going on within the company. What's To Like The book does a great job of telling its story efficiently and clearly. Bank quotes from internal emails, but doesn't overuse them, preserving the value of these rare glimpses into the Microsoft decision-making process. He gives just the right amount of history, and avoids ill-fitting analogies to describe the various pieces of software (in most cases he simply gives a minimal explanation, which might confuse a computing novice but is perfect for a typical Slashdot reader). He also describes the right reasons for Microsoft's success: not marketing as many people say, but its strategy of defining a small number of software platforms and evangelizing them to other developers.

The battle being fought here is between the "Windows hawks," led by Microsoft Vice President Jim Allchin, and the "Internet doves," led by another Vice President, Brad Silverberg. Allchin was in charge of Windows NT; Silverberg shipped Windows 95 and early versions of Internet Explorer. The book has some great insight into how this battle proceeded and why the participants acted as they did.

For example, the book discusses Jim Allchin's famous email in early 1997, in which he discussed competing with Netscape and wrote, "I do not feel we are going to win on our current path -- I am convinced we have to use Windows, this is the one thing they don't have -- We need something with more Windows integration." This email was brought up in the Justice trial to show that Microsoft used browser integration to unfairly attack Netscape, but the book shows that Allchin at the time was trying to counteract feelings within Microsoft that the browser was all that mattered, and was therefore concerned not so much that non-integration would hurt the browser as he was concerned that non-integration would hurt Windows.

Or consider the following sentence from the book: "In the same way that Gates began to view Microsoft's Internet team as the internal representation of Netscape, he came to see Microsoft's Java team as the internal agents of Sun Microsystems." This is an extraordinarily perceptive statement, and the fact that a reader can appreciate its meaning 74 pages into the book is a tribute to the explanatory powers of Bank's writing.

What's To Consider If the terms "Internet doves" and "Windows hawks" didn't tip you off, Bank is trying to show that the "fumble" of the subtitle occurred in 1997, when Bill Gates decided against supporting a Microsoft project known as Megaserver. This would have been a platform for Internet development: a set of back-end services, tied in to the browser.

Bank also discusses another, more well-known "fumble," the mismanagement of the Justice Department lawsuit. His writing here is still excellent, but this topic has been covered elsewhere so the information is not as surprising.

In the Justice lawsuit, he does a good job of showing how Gates was the main force behind two of Microsoft's poorest showings in the case: Gates'evasive videotaped deposition, and the response to the judge's order to allow computer manufacturer to ship Windows 95 without Internet Explorer (which involved allowing them to either ship a two-year-old version of Windows 95, or one that did not work at all).

In fact Bank spends much more time talking about the legal foibles than talking about his first argument, that Gates blew his role as technical leader of Microsoft by not endorsing Megaserver in 1997. But this really needs to be the core of his argument: saying that Gates' main mistake was made in the legal arena, in which he was a novice, is not nearly as compelling as claiming that Gates, the ultimate geek, botched the kind of technical decision that should have been his strength.

Megaserver was a Brad Silverberg project, and Jim Allchin was the main opposition. In Bank's mythology, Silverberg is the hero, pushing for the Internet. Allchin is the villain, sticking with Windows. But what really went on here?

Consider a story Bank relates from a Microsoft developer named Ben Slivka, one of the most strident of the Internet doves:

Slivka recounted the experience of one Windows developer who presented Allchin with his ideas for a simply, reliable operating system suitable for home users. Instead of saying "Great idea, go do it," Allchin had insisted that the new operating system be based on Windows NT. The developer objected that the huge NT operating system wasn't suitable for the drop-dead simple appliance he had envisioned. Allchin challenged him to list the parts of Windows NT he would strip out.

To me this looks like Allchin is doing his job. What would happen if he authorized everyone who so desired to go off and write their own operating system? I/ll tell you what would happen: Windows CE. Enough said.

Allchin also had little patience for Microsoft employees who were advocating a move towards Java and free software:

I don't want to be remembered as the guy who destroyed one of the most amazing business in history. We could have done it [meaning we could have destroyed the business] with engineers who didn't understand and didn't have any responsibility for the financial aspects of the company at all. Who live in this paradise where the stock goes up, revenues keep going up, earnings keep doing up. And all they have to do is crank software. Somehow it gets into packages and makes money. Well, it doesn't work that way.

Sounds reasonable to me. The notions of first-mover advantage and trading profits for users have been discredited in the dot-com meltdown. But the quote doesn't fit into Bank's view of Allchin as the bad guy, so he simply throws it out there, with no discussion.

History is often written by the winners, but in some ways the middle of this book is history written by the losers. The path not taken is discussed, but since it exists only as a perfect creation in the minds of its inventors (who obviously had Bank's ear when he was doing his research), it is depicted as flawless. Statements claiming that the new goal "was not to get thousands of developers to adopt your arcane PC programming interfaces but rather to get tens of millions of users to use your services every day=94 are accepted as holy truth.

Bank is convinced that Megaserver would have somehow "expanded the commons" of software development, that any Internet platform would have been an open platform. But consider what the Megaserver would have been as proposed back in 1997: A set of Microsoft servers with Microsoft data, talking to a browser that was customized to talk to those servers.

In short, it would have been a clone of AOL. Furthermore, this would have been architected by the team that brought you Windows 95. Would this have been a good thing? Does integrating your browser with your Web servers produce a more open environment than integrating it with your operating system?

Thus, it is hard to fault Gates for not supporting Megaserver in 1997. In fact, Microsoft is now pushing heavily towards .Net, which is the 2001 version of Megaserver. Why support it now? As Bank himself writes, about Microsoft executive Paul Maritz, "He had long known the problem was bigger than Win32, Maritz said. But now he could articulate the message. The difference, he later said, was XML." It was not so much that Microsoft did not recognize the need to move beyond the Win32 API; it was that in 1997 it didn't have the technology to do so.

Bank makes the claim that Gates was forced out as CEO because of his "fumbles." This is arguably the big revelation in the book, but it is hard to prove this conclusively: The trial missteps certainly did happen, Microsoft was drifting from a technology perspective, and Gates stepped down. Did he fall or was he pushed? The timing of events supports either conclusion. In any event, I found the behind-the-scenes descriptions much more interesting than this particular allegation.

Furthermore, Bank points out that Gates allowed an employee to set up a hands-off incubator within Microsoft that eventually led to the company-wide adoption of XML and .NET, and was the only top executive who really understood the .NET protocols. Thus it is hard to fault him for not supporting an Internet platform in 1997, when he planted the seeds for an Internet platform in 2001.

If the middle of the book is imperfect but still fascinating, the last chapter gets really strange. After playing Brad Silverberg up as the hero, Bank suddenly cuts him down. Earlier in the book, the decision to adopt Active Desktop in Windows 98 is mentioned, but with mysterious silence on who made the final call; it merely states that after seeing Netscape demonstrate a similar product called Constellation, "the browser team was given the additional job of creating a shell for all of Windows." That shell was Active Desktop, and this particular decision got Microsoft in antitrust trouble both because it increased the amount of browser integration that Microsoft had to defend in court, and because Microsoft started leaning on computer manufacturers in an effort to freeze out Netscape's product. Furthermore, the battle was basically for naught since Channels, the big Active Desktop feature, went nowhere. Gates himself said later, "That's a case where the browser guys, they had the Internet religion, but they pushed it too far in terms of what was a practical user experience."

So who decided to go with Active Desktop? You figure it had to be Silverberg, but Bank doesn't say that. In the final chapter, however, he slips a bit, pointing out that Silverberg's team was responsible for the tying of the browser, the semi-exclusive contracts with content and access providers, and the war against Java -- the main issues that the Justice department sued over. Furthermore, if the Megaserver strategy had been pursued, Microsoft might have been in even more legal trouble.

Gates, meanwhile, gets rehabilitated in the last chapter. His tactics in 1998 and 1999 are now described as a strategic stall, waiting for the right technology to appear for Microsoft's Internet platform: "The power to control the pace of innovation is a competitive advantage at least as crucial as the ability to innovate itself." Gates is portrayed as a leader once again, planning strategy ten years out, and the book ends with a prediction (for no reason other than the author's gut feeling) that Gates will do the right thing and usher in a new age of innovation, whatever that consists of.

I'm not sure what to make of this flip-flop. I assume this book was originally proposed to a publisher in 1999, written in 2000, and polished up in early 2001. In 1999 a book about the demise of Microsoft seemed a plausible undertaking, but two years later it turned out that the story wasn't over, and Microsoft appeared to be bouncing back. So Bank had time to equivocate, modifying his original thesis and explaining how perhaps Microsoft had a future after all.

Describing this latest turn of events, however, Bank doesn't have reams of email released during a trial, or sympathetic former Microsofties to interpret it for him. As a result, he can fire off sentences like, "The infrastructure for the digital age will be based on competition on the merits and a common code of open interfaces," with apparent complete sincerity. He believes that Microsoft asking AOL to open its Instant Messaging protocol is a harbinger of this golden future, and that Microsoft's Shared Source program shows it is moving towards open source. In short, he is buying the current Microsoft PR story, hook line and sinker.

Well, let this former Microsoftie (and former Windows hawk who worked in Allchin's group) explain a few things. Statements like "Interoperability, not lock-in, has become the winning strategy" are patently false. Right now there are two Internets: The AOL one, with its own client, servers, content, email, messaging, authentication, billing, security, and all the rest; and the plain old Internet. Microsoft wants to create a third Internet, the .NET Internet, with all the stuff that the AOL Internet has. Then it will pursue a lock-in like the world has never seen before.

Summary and Table of Contents But hey, enough quibbling. Bank may be wrong about the future of Microsoft, but he does a fantastic job covering the past. I spent some time discussing what I disagreed with, but there is so much more that I agree with. I knew about a lot of the events that are described in the book, but I still learned an incredible amount. If you want to know what things are like inside Microsoft, buy this book. Table of Contents

• Prologue: The E-mail Trail

1. Track the Inevitable
2. Hawks and Doves.
3. The Path Not Taken
4. Citizen Gates
5. Vicious Cycle
6. Monopolist's Dilemma
7. Loosely Coupled

• Key Dates
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Index

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Chromatic slipped this review under our door. You need a few laughs at this point in the summer (ok, Northern hemisphere residents at least) to distract you from the heat of summer and the cost of air conditioning, and Joy of Linux has some esoteric geek humor in store, even if it's intended mostly as a mostly serious field guide to Linux nerddom for amateur anthropologists, like parents, girlfriends and bosses.

Joy of Linux author Michael Hall, Brian Proffitt pages 340 publisher Prima Tech rating 8 reviewer chromatic ISBN 0-7615-3151-3 summary A witty introduction to the wild world of Linux, suitable for the friend, relative, or significant other of a devoted geek.

The Scoop It's 2001. Do you love your operating system?

That's a silly question for the average user -- a computer's made to do stuff. The operating system hides in the background, usually dormant, sometimes hostile. Besides Solitaire at lunch, the best thing about a computer is turning it off and going home for the day. Of course, to an unrepentant Amiga, Mac, OS/2, *BSD, BeOS, or Linux fan, the question makes perfect sense. An OS has personality and history. They collect followers who put up with quirks and kinks, defending their platform even past the point of practical death.

The Joy of Linux explores this phenomenon as it relates to Linux and Open Source. It's written in a friendly, easy-reading manner, punctuated with Joy of Tech style cartoons (from Nitrozac and Snaggy). There's just enough information to teach your mother something and just enough sly innuendo to keep your brother reading. Aimed at potential and new users, die-hard penguinistas will find chuckles but few surprises.

What's to Like? Joy begins with detailed but readable looks at the allure of Linux, the history of Unix, and the growing popularity and commercial rollercoasters of Open Source in recent years. Next, the text explores the question, "What do I do now?", distilling hard experience into suggestions for finding help. More than a list of newsgroups and websites, chapter two explains the concept of sweat equity and promotes self-reliance. Chapter three talks about FUD -- both pro and contra Linux. It's fair and reasonable, with potshots reserved for the shrill faddish fanboys who spend more time complaining than contributing.

Tackling delicate topics, the next two chapters shy away from few controversies. First come three perpetual flamewars: vi versus Emacs, GNOME versus KDE, and the distribution wars. The honest assessments will disappoint everyone hovering over carefully crafted flames, ready to e-mail the authors. (That's probably a good thing, for the rest of us.) Chapter five explores the seeming juxtaposition of women and technology, with three case studies (Linux Chix, WITT, and Helix Code).

The book's second half pushes the innuendos further. Several serious discussions lie couched in metaphors and double entendres. These chapters cover system security, dual booting, migrating from Windows to Linux, hardware support, embedded devices, gaming, and multimedia. Aimed slightly above a novice level, this should be accessible to anyone capable of installing Linux.

The authors pepper their prose with personal anecdotes, some related to Linux and computers, others as analogies. They both write with a single voice, so it's difficult to tell where Hall breaks off and Proffitt starts. It makes for a mostly seamless narrative. The text is also readable, written with genial humor and occasional subtle winks.

What's to Consider? This is a book for Linux newcomers. If you can compile a kernel without having to look up directions, you may enjoy this book, but it's not aimed at you. Instead, it would serve well as a companion piece to something more technical. If 'Running Linux' is your manual, this is the cultural and philosophical guide.

Some of the cartoons require a little more insider knowledge than the rest of the book. For example, if you don't recognize aliens dressed up as maddog, ESR, Larry Wall, and Linus, you won't understand the comic on page 34. Consider that incentive to read conference speaker lists, if you dare.

The Summary Clever, but not too clever, The Joy of Linux answers two questions: "What is this Linux thing?" and "Why do you like it?" Written for home users more interested in getting things done than salivating over new hardware, it's a good introduction to a confusing, vibrant culture. If you're in the mood for a light read to amuses and inform, this book will meet that need. Table of Contents

1. Do You Know Who Your Millions of Partners Are?
2. 1. The Penguin on Top
   2. Are You Experienced?
   3. I Don't Do Windows
   4. Kissing Cousins, Lovers' Quarrels
   5. Chix Who Don't Fake It
3. Doin' It
4. 1. I'm Clean! I Swear!
   2. Switch Hitters
   3. The Joy of Toys
   4. You Want to Put That Where?
   5. Messing around: The Penguin Plays Games
   6. Loud and Graphic
   7. Breaking up Is Hard to Do
   8. The Linux Sutra: Resources
5. GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Chromatic has done it again, with his tripartite review below -- this time, he presents a trio of books designed for easy digestion. They won't teach you to program in obscure languages, how to track down (and hopefully garrote) abusive kiddies, or make better looking web sites. But hopefully, these three books from the pens of Ian McDonald, Peter Abrams and Bill Holbrook (and all from the network-aware Plan 9 publishing house) will still lighten your day.

Three Books From Plan 9 author (Various) pages (Var publisher Plan 9 Publishing rating 8.5 reviewer chromatic ISBN (Various) summary Online comics come to real life as books; unlikely scenarios that work to loosen the old laughter mucus.

Plan Nine Publishing has done a wonderful thing for the online comic. Founded in 1996, they've helped to legitimize the medium. Dedicated (and new!) fans can now purchase printed collections of their favorite comics, bringing financial stability to a new generation of artist. The books themselves are lovingly designed, if one step below mass-market professional. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a hundred pages (and several months) of art.

Bruno Most Wanted author Ian McDonald pages 168 ISBN 1-929462-22-0 summary Witty, episodic satire about Rothland's most notorious criminal.

Ian McDonald's Bruno the Bandit chronicles the misadventures of an increasingly inept thief and his micro-dragon sidekick. In this second collection of daily strips, the appropriately named Bunkleyutz tangles with everyone from the Imperial Guard to an undead, mostly evil sorcerer turned bartender. Despite (or because of) Bruno's mind-numbing incompetence, he's always a sympathetic character.

McDonald is an extremely talented artist. His detailed drawings convey a good blend of action and humor, his gags land true, and somehow everything looks easy. Logically, the comic is naturally divided into smaller stories, generally between two and seven weeks long. This gives McDonald a chance to explore an episodic format.

Bruno doesn't shy away from controversy. This collection includes McDonald's edgiest story ever, "No Offense!" It's a sympathetic look at faith, religion, and television. Other topics include unionization, syndication, the forbidden topic, fame and publicity, and raising children. (It makes more sense in stories.) A special bonus color story of Bruno's youth rounds things out.

Lavishly illustrated and wittily plotted, Bruno Most Wanted is a clever and thought provoking collection.

Yippy Skippy, the Evil! author Pete Abrams pages 154 ISBN 1-929462-23-9 summary Aliens, vampires, robots, assassins, demons, rabbits, magic, Evil, and college students.

Pete Abrams' Sluggy Freelance continues to break new ground creatively. A simple description could not do it justice -- Abrams weaves bizarre threads into twisted patterns. What kind of evil lurks in the heart of an ordinary kitten? Attempting to unravel things even further without delving into the entire twisted history is probably NP-hard. At heart, it's a simple tale about a freelance web designer and his lovable pet bunny. Think Calvin and Hobbes meets Aliens meets Red Dwarf.

Yippy Skippy, The Evil, the fifth Sluggy Freelance, picks up with a chilling tale of Y2K disaster. Ferret-spread nanobots threaten the world, and only a rogue vampire and time traveling scientist can fix things. From there, a love spell goes wrong, leading to mishaps involving a killer robot gymnast assassin and a shotgun wedding. After a brief detour explaining half of the title (and setting events in motion for the next book), Abrams raises the question, "What happens when your alien secretary eats too many potatoes?"

What follows is a fun-filled attempt to escape an enraged rabbit. (Baywatch hath charms to soothe the savage breast. No pun intended.) From there, Adams tries his hand at mostly-straightforward horror. "The Evil" tracks the adventures of several college students on vacation in a small town. Unbeknownst to them, the devil has been there already. Who will survive? What do you serve his spawn?

Admittedly, this kind of humor is not for everyone. It can be alarmingly irreverent, and the body count is surprisingly high for not being graphic. It's terribly creative, though, and Abrams continues to tell a fine story. Book 5 may not be the best place to start, but Yippy Skippy, The Evil has the potential to recruit a new army of Sluggites.

For the Birds author Bill Holbrook pages 142 ISBN 1-929462-18-2 summary Divorced herbivore + widowed carnivore = nature's truest blended family.

The unbelievably prolific (cyborg?) Bill Holbrook writes three (cyborg!) regular strips. For the Birds is his ninth Plan 9 collection, and the fifth featuring his Kevin and Kell strips. The deceptively simple artwork and matter-of-fact tranquility belie the harsh rule of nature. (Where else would a parent's biggest dilemma be whether to raise a baby hybrid rabbit/wolf to eat meat or not?)

Through the anthropomorphism, Holbrook pokes fun at modern, geeky subjects. Where else would a hunter track prey by waiting for their cell phones to ring? The gags don't get in the way of a sweet story, though. At heart, Kevin and Kell is a gentle story punctuated with several surprises. Holbrook has created a rich world with interesting characters.

The book explores several themes, including family, responsibility, and love. Though nature can be brutal, the world is full of good "people". Holbrook examines ideas of prejudice (domesticated versus wild species, love between predator and prey) but never comes across as preachy. Throughout the several storylines, he always finds time to insert a chuckle or two. (Who else but a chameleon would stoop to typo-squatting?)

After five books, there's plenty of backstory, but the characters are compelling and the humor gentle. For The Birds should appeal to a wide audience looking for something a little more compelling than the daily comics but a little tamer than the Slugfest.

You can't currently purchase Yippy Skippy, the Evil or For the Birds and Bruno Most Wanted at Fatbrain, but you may be able to special order from there or some other vendor.

Chromatic has done it again, with his tripartite review below -- this time, he presents a trio of books designed for easy digestion. They won't teach you to program in obscure languages, how to track down (and hopefully garrote) abusive kiddies, or make better looking web sites. But hopefully, these three books from the pens of Ian McDonald, Peter Abrams and Bill Holbrook (and all from the network-aware Plan 9 publishing house) will still lighten your day.

Three Books From Plan 9 author (Various) pages (Var publisher Plan 9 Publishing rating 8.5 reviewer chromatic ISBN (Various) summary Online comics come to real life as books; unlikely scenarios that work to loosen the old laughter mucus.

Plan Nine Publishing has done a wonderful thing for the online comic. Founded in 1996, they've helped to legitimize the medium. Dedicated (and new!) fans can now purchase printed collections of their favorite comics, bringing financial stability to a new generation of artist. The books themselves are lovingly designed, if one step below mass-market professional. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a hundred pages (and several months) of art.

Bruno Most Wanted author Ian McDonald pages 168 ISBN 1-929462-22-0 summary Witty, episodic satire about Rothland's most notorious criminal.

Ian McDonald's Bruno the Bandit chronicles the misadventures of an increasingly inept thief and his micro-dragon sidekick. In this second collection of daily strips, the appropriately named Bunkleyutz tangles with everyone from the Imperial Guard to an undead, mostly evil sorcerer turned bartender. Despite (or because of) Bruno's mind-numbing incompetence, he's always a sympathetic character.

McDonald is an extremely talented artist. His detailed drawings convey a good blend of action and humor, his gags land true, and somehow everything looks easy. Logically, the comic is naturally divided into smaller stories, generally between two and seven weeks long. This gives McDonald a chance to explore an episodic format.

Bruno doesn't shy away from controversy. This collection includes McDonald's edgiest story ever, "No Offense!" It's a sympathetic look at faith, religion, and television. Other topics include unionization, syndication, the forbidden topic, fame and publicity, and raising children. (It makes more sense in stories.) A special bonus color story of Bruno's youth rounds things out.

Lavishly illustrated and wittily plotted, Bruno Most Wanted is a clever and thought provoking collection.

Yippy Skippy, the Evil! author Pete Abrams pages 154 ISBN 1-929462-23-9 summary Aliens, vampires, robots, assassins, demons, rabbits, magic, Evil, and college students.

Pete Abrams' Sluggy Freelance continues to break new ground creatively. A simple description could not do it justice -- Abrams weaves bizarre threads into twisted patterns. What kind of evil lurks in the heart of an ordinary kitten? Attempting to unravel things even further without delving into the entire twisted history is probably NP-hard. At heart, it's a simple tale about a freelance web designer and his lovable pet bunny. Think Calvin and Hobbes meets Aliens meets Red Dwarf.

Yippy Skippy, The Evil, the fifth Sluggy Freelance, picks up with a chilling tale of Y2K disaster. Ferret-spread nanobots threaten the world, and only a rogue vampire and time traveling scientist can fix things. From there, a love spell goes wrong, leading to mishaps involving a killer robot gymnast assassin and a shotgun wedding. After a brief detour explaining half of the title (and setting events in motion for the next book), Abrams raises the question, "What happens when your alien secretary eats too many potatoes?"

What follows is a fun-filled attempt to escape an enraged rabbit. (Baywatch hath charms to soothe the savage breast. No pun intended.) From there, Adams tries his hand at mostly-straightforward horror. "The Evil" tracks the adventures of several college students on vacation in a small town. Unbeknownst to them, the devil has been there already. Who will survive? What do you serve his spawn?

Admittedly, this kind of humor is not for everyone. It can be alarmingly irreverent, and the body count is surprisingly high for not being graphic. It's terribly creative, though, and Abrams continues to tell a fine story. Book 5 may not be the best place to start, but Yippy Skippy, The Evil has the potential to recruit a new army of Sluggites.

For the Birds author Bill Holbrook pages 142 ISBN 1-929462-18-2 summary Divorced herbivore + widowed carnivore = nature's truest blended family.

The unbelievably prolific (cyborg?) Bill Holbrook writes three (cyborg!) regular strips. For the Birds is his ninth Plan 9 collection, and the fifth featuring his Kevin and Kell strips. The deceptively simple artwork and matter-of-fact tranquility belie the harsh rule of nature. (Where else would a parent's biggest dilemma be whether to raise a baby hybrid rabbit/wolf to eat meat or not?)

Through the anthropomorphism, Holbrook pokes fun at modern, geeky subjects. Where else would a hunter track prey by waiting for their cell phones to ring? The gags don't get in the way of a sweet story, though. At heart, Kevin and Kell is a gentle story punctuated with several surprises. Holbrook has created a rich world with interesting characters.

The book explores several themes, including family, responsibility, and love. Though nature can be brutal, the world is full of good "people". Holbrook examines ideas of prejudice (domesticated versus wild species, love between predator and prey) but never comes across as preachy. Throughout the several storylines, he always finds time to insert a chuckle or two. (Who else but a chameleon would stoop to typo-squatting?)

After five books, there's plenty of backstory, but the characters are compelling and the humor gentle. For The Birds should appeal to a wide audience looking for something a little more compelling than the daily comics but a little tamer than the Slugfest.

You can't currently purchase Yippy Skippy, the Evil or For the Birds and Bruno Most Wanted at Fatbrain, but you may be able to special order from there or some other vendor.

Chromatic has done it again, with his tripartite review below -- this time, he presents a trio of books designed for easy digestion. They won't teach you to program in obscure languages, how to track down (and hopefully garrote) abusive kiddies, or make better looking web sites. But hopefully, these three books from the pens of Ian McDonald, Peter Abrams and Bill Holbrook (and all from the network-aware Plan 9 publishing house) will still lighten your day.

Three Books From Plan 9 author (Various) pages (Var publisher Plan 9 Publishing rating 8.5 reviewer chromatic ISBN (Various) summary Online comics come to real life as books; unlikely scenarios that work to loosen the old laughter mucus.

Plan Nine Publishing has done a wonderful thing for the online comic. Founded in 1996, they've helped to legitimize the medium. Dedicated (and new!) fans can now purchase printed collections of their favorite comics, bringing financial stability to a new generation of artist. The books themselves are lovingly designed, if one step below mass-market professional. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a hundred pages (and several months) of art.

Bruno Most Wanted author Ian McDonald pages 168 ISBN 1-929462-22-0 summary Witty, episodic satire about Rothland's most notorious criminal.

Ian McDonald's Bruno the Bandit chronicles the misadventures of an increasingly inept thief and his micro-dragon sidekick. In this second collection of daily strips, the appropriately named Bunkleyutz tangles with everyone from the Imperial Guard to an undead, mostly evil sorcerer turned bartender. Despite (or because of) Bruno's mind-numbing incompetence, he's always a sympathetic character.

McDonald is an extremely talented artist. His detailed drawings convey a good blend of action and humor, his gags land true, and somehow everything looks easy. Logically, the comic is naturally divided into smaller stories, generally between two and seven weeks long. This gives McDonald a chance to explore an episodic format.

Bruno doesn't shy away from controversy. This collection includes McDonald's edgiest story ever, "No Offense!" It's a sympathetic look at faith, religion, and television. Other topics include unionization, syndication, the forbidden topic, fame and publicity, and raising children. (It makes more sense in stories.) A special bonus color story of Bruno's youth rounds things out.

Lavishly illustrated and wittily plotted, Bruno Most Wanted is a clever and thought provoking collection.

Yippy Skippy, the Evil! author Pete Abrams pages 154 ISBN 1-929462-23-9 summary Aliens, vampires, robots, assassins, demons, rabbits, magic, Evil, and college students.

Pete Abrams' Sluggy Freelance continues to break new ground creatively. A simple description could not do it justice -- Abrams weaves bizarre threads into twisted patterns. What kind of evil lurks in the heart of an ordinary kitten? Attempting to unravel things even further without delving into the entire twisted history is probably NP-hard. At heart, it's a simple tale about a freelance web designer and his lovable pet bunny. Think Calvin and Hobbes meets Aliens meets Red Dwarf.

Yippy Skippy, The Evil, the fifth Sluggy Freelance, picks up with a chilling tale of Y2K disaster. Ferret-spread nanobots threaten the world, and only a rogue vampire and time traveling scientist can fix things. From there, a love spell goes wrong, leading to mishaps involving a killer robot gymnast assassin and a shotgun wedding. After a brief detour explaining half of the title (and setting events in motion for the next book), Abrams raises the question, "What happens when your alien secretary eats too many potatoes?"

What follows is a fun-filled attempt to escape an enraged rabbit. (Baywatch hath charms to soothe the savage breast. No pun intended.) From there, Adams tries his hand at mostly-straightforward horror. "The Evil" tracks the adventures of several college students on vacation in a small town. Unbeknownst to them, the devil has been there already. Who will survive? What do you serve his spawn?

Admittedly, this kind of humor is not for everyone. It can be alarmingly irreverent, and the body count is surprisingly high for not being graphic. It's terribly creative, though, and Abrams continues to tell a fine story. Book 5 may not be the best place to start, but Yippy Skippy, The Evil has the potential to recruit a new army of Sluggites.

For the Birds author Bill Holbrook pages 142 ISBN 1-929462-18-2 summary Divorced herbivore + widowed carnivore = nature's truest blended family.

The unbelievably prolific (cyborg?) Bill Holbrook writes three (cyborg!) regular strips. For the Birds is his ninth Plan 9 collection, and the fifth featuring his Kevin and Kell strips. The deceptively simple artwork and matter-of-fact tranquility belie the harsh rule of nature. (Where else would a parent's biggest dilemma be whether to raise a baby hybrid rabbit/wolf to eat meat or not?)

Through the anthropomorphism, Holbrook pokes fun at modern, geeky subjects. Where else would a hunter track prey by waiting for their cell phones to ring? The gags don't get in the way of a sweet story, though. At heart, Kevin and Kell is a gentle story punctuated with several surprises. Holbrook has created a rich world with interesting characters.

The book explores several themes, including family, responsibility, and love. Though nature can be brutal, the world is full of good "people". Holbrook examines ideas of prejudice (domesticated versus wild species, love between predator and prey) but never comes across as preachy. Throughout the several storylines, he always finds time to insert a chuckle or two. (Who else but a chameleon would stoop to typo-squatting?)

After five books, there's plenty of backstory, but the characters are compelling and the humor gentle. For The Birds should appeal to a wide audience looking for something a little more compelling than the daily comics but a little tamer than the Slugfest.

You can't currently purchase Yippy Skippy, the Evil or For the Birds and Bruno Most Wanted at Fatbrain, but you may be able to special order from there or some other vendor.

Duncan Lawie brings to the stage another dark-and-creepy sounding Science Fiction work: this time it's Bruce Sterling's latest, Zeitgeist, which may mark a departure for someone looking for "just another Bruce Sterling book." Hint: it's set in the past, not the future.

Zeitgeist author Bruce Sterling pages 304 publisher Bantam rating 8 reviewer Duncan Lawie ISBN 0553104934 summary Strange, possibly great, probably not SF; a remarkable new book from

"Bruce Sterling" and "seminal" never seem to be too far apart. His name is one of the great peaks of cyberpunk, not least as the editor of Mirrorshades, and he is renowned in the online world for his work in writing The Hacker Crackdown. Neither can Sterling be accused of standing still, having initiated the Viridian movement. An effect of this may yet be to repeat H.G.Wells, where his fiction becomes a servant of his increasing interest in adjusting the social fabric.

Sterling's latest novel, Zeitgeist, is set in a recognisable 1999 and filled with recognisable twentieth-century character types: the hobo, the drug smuggler, the secret agent, the enforcer. In fact, its twentieth-century characteristics are at the heart of this novel. Sterling has written a requiem for a dirty, rotten century; a description of a planet gorging on its own filth, stumbling from the bizarre, to crisis, to senselessness. It is a portrait of a world in turmoil told from the perspective of Leggy Starlitz, a latter-day man of a thousand faces.

Starlitz previously appeared as a rather opaque figure in the short stories such as 'The Littlest Jackal.' He slips through the edges of an increasingly regulated world, "rewriting his own narrative" to suit the circumstances. At the start of the book, he manages G-7, an all-girl marketing troupe. The satire of a band created solely to move merchandise -- and this is no synonym for records -- could easily be lost when the pop charts seem to be full of such arrangements, but Starlitz is there as part of a bet. This doesn't work terribly well as a plot driver, but Starlitz's involvement with a Turkish pop promoter who wants to control the group lights the touchpaper, and the appearance of Starlitz's family breaks open the storyline. Involvement with his daughter deepens Starlitz's character and pushes him into much greater connection with the ordinary world.

The book is a whirlwind tour through the dominant images of late twentieth-century society and a slingshot into the potential of the twenty-first. A central idea is that after Y2K everything must change -- the new century will have different characteristics and we must adapt to survive. Starlitz's own close identification with the twentieth century seems destined to hold him back, whilst he sees his daughter as a natural denizen of the next era. To an extent, this is a reflection of Sterling's own Viridian manifesto, contrasting the dark heart of the Atomic age with the new, clear era in front of us, which will be populated by people for whom 1999 will only ever be history. His message of hope is that we can transform ourselves, but his use of a literal interpretation results in a centrepiece for the book which sounds very much as if Sokal's application of pseudo-science is accepted as reality. This is as close as the book comes to science fiction -- it is more likely to find itself marked "magic realism," or possibly even "literature."

Though slow to start, Zeitgeist has a lot to offer -- locations from Cyprus to Hawaii and Istanbul to Colorado, a glancing blow from (at?) ECHELON, and discussions on the nature of pop and the malleability of reality. Setting the book in our own world and time gives it a curious edge for an SF reader reading an SF writer -- it is framed by events recognisable from news broadcasts but already part of history. The transformations in this book must be personal, or located at the edges of consensus reality, rather than a complete inversion of society. The message floats at or near the surface and the book concentrates significantly on its own style. It is sometimes overly clever but remains taut, interesting and, occasionally, amazing. As such, Zeitgeist catches the ghost of that remarkable century we have just escaped from.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Systems administrators -- good system administrators -- are worth their weight in coffee beans weekly, probably more if you count overtime. Getting to be a competent admin for a network of GNU/Linux machines isn't easy, especially when so many organizations rely on Windows. Today, chromatic reviews a book that can give a boost to Windows administrators learning to step up. It's definitely Red Hat-centric, right down to the title, but may be useful even if you're using some other flavor of Linux.

Red Hat Linux System Adminstration Handbook author Mark F. Komarinsky & Cary Collett pages 405 publisher Prentice Hall rating 8 reviewer chromatic ISBN 0-13-025395-2 summary A good introduction to Linux, aimed at power users and current Windows administrators.

The Scoop In a bookcase-breaking extravaganza last summer, Slashdot reviewed several books intended for new Linux users. While the kernel, Free Software and Open Source applications, and distributions often undergo periods of rapid change and improvement, the basic principles of use and administration remain constant.

On those lines, Red Hat Linux System Adminstration Handbook is a solid book. Though it specifically discusses Red Hat, most of the information can be applied to other distributions. It strikes a unique balance between the needs of an end user and an administrator. Additionally, the authors go out of their way to explore proprietary and libre software for certain needs.

What's to Like The book imparts a good sense of flexibility. In just a few pages, the RPM chapter enumerates several installation options, covers SRPMs in decent detail, and lists helper applications to simplify life. Many of the other chapters are similarly dense. This doesn't detract from the book's readability, and it covers most of the common details. Readers will learn the necessary basics while being made aware of extra information available. This is also evident in the Networking chapter. While focusing on medium-sized networks, there's enough data provided to get a few boxes up and running with little fuss. The backup chapter is excellent, and so is the chapter on Samba.

This book covers several details often omitted from other books. For example, the installation chapter discusses dual booting with both FreeBSD and Windows NT. Another section outlines PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules, used to configure finer-grained access). Even the chapters on sendmail and wu-ftpd talk about more secure alternatives, such as qmail, BeroFPT, and ProFTPD.

It's hard to quantify what makes a good system administrator. Part of it is wisdom and experience, part is natural talent. Another component develops with time. Tucked into corners here and there, the authors provide useful nuggets designed to spark intuition in a budding junior administrator's mind. This is very subtle, but there's definitely an underlying theme.

What's to Consider

The book covers Red Hat 6.0. Only a few spots have gone out of date with recent releases. For example, the kernel configuration and hardware support information describes the 2.2.x family. As well, packet filtering and masquerading use ipfwadm and ipchains, instead of iptables (available in the 2.4.x family). Most configuration and administration advice still applies.

Some chapters are short. Linux handles printing much differently from Windows, but it receives only 7 pages. The material is good, if skimpy. (Luckily, the Samba chapter fills in some blanks.) Adding more links to sources of additional information would improve this. On the whole, this is a workable reference book, but it won't replace a Nutshell handbook.

Summary and Table of Contents On the whole, the Handbook packs in a lot of data. Administrators already familiar with Windows will get the most from the book. It will require some sense of exploration and adventure, but that's one of the most compelling parts of free software.

Bundled with a CD-ROM, this book forms part of a Training course. It includes several demonstration videos and animations accompanied by audio. Each course corresponds to a book chapter (minus the chapters describing available software or the programming languages) along with practice tests. Easily installed, everything runs in a web browser under Linux or Windows. It won't substitute for a live teacher, but corresponds nicely with the text. This could come in handy for a small business or group on a budget.

1. Introduction
2. Installation
3. Linux Boot and Shutdown
4. Account Administration
5. RPM
6. Networking with Linux
7. Printing and Print Sharing
8. Samba
9. Email
10. Setting up FTP Services
11. Applications for Linux
12. Linux Database Software
13. Programming Languages
14. Web Serving
15. X Windowing System
16. Securing Linux
17. Kernel Administration
18. System and Network Monitoring
19. Backing Up Your Data
20. Talking to Your Peripherals
21. Connecting to the Internet

1. Appendix A (URLs)
2. Appendix B (miscellaneous)

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain. Note: Also available with audio/video CD and tests in The Complete Red Hat Linux Training Course , available as ISBN 0-13-088223-2.

Systems administrators -- good system administrators -- are worth their weight in coffee beans weekly, probably more if you count overtime. Getting to be a competent admin for a network of GNU/Linux machines isn't easy, especially when so many organizations rely on Windows. Today, chromatic reviews a book that can give a boost to Windows administrators learning to step up. It's definitely Red Hat-centric, right down to the title, but may be useful even if you're using some other flavor of Linux.

Red Hat Linux System Adminstration Handbook author Mark F. Komarinsky & Cary Collett pages 405 publisher Prentice Hall rating 8 reviewer chromatic ISBN 0-13-025395-2 summary A good introduction to Linux, aimed at power users and current Windows administrators.

The Scoop In a bookcase-breaking extravaganza last summer, Slashdot reviewed several books intended for new Linux users. While the kernel, Free Software and Open Source applications, and distributions often undergo periods of rapid change and improvement, the basic principles of use and administration remain constant.

On those lines, Red Hat Linux System Adminstration Handbook is a solid book. Though it specifically discusses Red Hat, most of the information can be applied to other distributions. It strikes a unique balance between the needs of an end user and an administrator. Additionally, the authors go out of their way to explore proprietary and libre software for certain needs.

What's to Like The book imparts a good sense of flexibility. In just a few pages, the RPM chapter enumerates several installation options, covers SRPMs in decent detail, and lists helper applications to simplify life. Many of the other chapters are similarly dense. This doesn't detract from the book's readability, and it covers most of the common details. Readers will learn the necessary basics while being made aware of extra information available. This is also evident in the Networking chapter. While focusing on medium-sized networks, there's enough data provided to get a few boxes up and running with little fuss. The backup chapter is excellent, and so is the chapter on Samba.

This book covers several details often omitted from other books. For example, the installation chapter discusses dual booting with both FreeBSD and Windows NT. Another section outlines PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules, used to configure finer-grained access). Even the chapters on sendmail and wu-ftpd talk about more secure alternatives, such as qmail, BeroFPT, and ProFTPD.

It's hard to quantify what makes a good system administrator. Part of it is wisdom and experience, part is natural talent. Another component develops with time. Tucked into corners here and there, the authors provide useful nuggets designed to spark intuition in a budding junior administrator's mind. This is very subtle, but there's definitely an underlying theme.

What's to Consider

The book covers Red Hat 6.0. Only a few spots have gone out of date with recent releases. For example, the kernel configuration and hardware support information describes the 2.2.x family. As well, packet filtering and masquerading use ipfwadm and ipchains, instead of iptables (available in the 2.4.x family). Most configuration and administration advice still applies.

Some chapters are short. Linux handles printing much differently from Windows, but it receives only 7 pages. The material is good, if skimpy. (Luckily, the Samba chapter fills in some blanks.) Adding more links to sources of additional information would improve this. On the whole, this is a workable reference book, but it won't replace a Nutshell handbook.

Summary and Table of Contents On the whole, the Handbook packs in a lot of data. Administrators already familiar with Windows will get the most from the book. It will require some sense of exploration and adventure, but that's one of the most compelling parts of free software.

Bundled with a CD-ROM, this book forms part of a Training course. It includes several demonstration videos and animations accompanied by audio. Each course corresponds to a book chapter (minus the chapters describing available software or the programming languages) along with practice tests. Easily installed, everything runs in a web browser under Linux or Windows. It won't substitute for a live teacher, but corresponds nicely with the text. This could come in handy for a small business or group on a budget.

1. Introduction
2. Installation
3. Linux Boot and Shutdown
4. Account Administration
5. RPM
6. Networking with Linux
7. Printing and Print Sharing
8. Samba
9. Email
10. Setting up FTP Services
11. Applications for Linux
12. Linux Database Software
13. Programming Languages
14. Web Serving
15. X Windowing System
16. Securing Linux
17. Kernel Administration
18. System and Network Monitoring
19. Backing Up Your Data
20. Talking to Your Peripherals
21. Connecting to the Internet

1. Appendix A (URLs)
2. Appendix B (miscellaneous)

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain. Note: Also available with audio/video CD and tests in The Complete Red Hat Linux Training Course , available as ISBN 0-13-088223-2.

Craig Maloney writes the review below of Linux Game Programming. From the sound of it, there may be a considerable market need for more books on programming the fun stuff for GNU/Linux. This one may even suit your needs, but earns some harsh words from Craig.

Linux Game Programming author Mark "Nurgle" Collins et al. pages 331 publisher Prima Tech rating 3 reviewer Craig Maloney ISBN 0-7615-3255-2 summary A hastily compiled book with some useful tidbits, but no main course.

Overview There are precious few books which mention programming games under Linux. There even fewer that cover programming games under Linux exclusively. Linux Game Programming is the first published book exclusively dedicated to programming games under Linux. Unfortunately this book was rushed to the publishers just to obtain the dubious distinction of being the first. Worse, this book has many errors and a CD which is next to worthless.

What's good? It's very hard to find anything that's really outstanding in this book. The chapters offer what amounts to little more than a starting point for learning, with just enough to get the reader interested in the topic before moving on to the next topic. The sections on Artifical Intelligence and Porting stick out in my mind as some of the books strong sections, but even those could use some more elaboration. What's Bad? In trying to cover as many aspects of Linux game development, the book ends up giving little more than a synopsis of the material. Also, some of the choices are curious. Why have a chapter on SDL which only deals with using SDL for the input methods? There seems to be a lack of focus for the overall book for what it wishes to accomplish. Also, dedicating whole chapters printing out open source licenses (GPL, LGPL, Artistic, BSD, and Mozilla) is nothing more than fluff for a book like this (although the author does include a chapter discussing the benefits and drawbacks to chosing an open-source license verses a closed source approach.) The code is not complete, and doesn't show how to use it in a full program. Worse, there are no complete working game programs, either in the book or on the CD.

The CD is incomplete and a waste. It includes the examples from the book. Unfortunately, the examples are all in MSDOS format, so the reader will have to convert them in order to get them to run (if they'll even run at all. I had a hard time getting some to even compile). Also included on the CD is the SDL 1.1.8 kit in source and RPM format (the development RPM is missing, though, so you'll need to pick that up as well in order to actually DEVELOP SDL games). There are also source tar files for Mesa3D, OpenAL, and SVGALib. Also included is the Indrema SDK, which might be of interest for some people. There are also some strange additions on the CD. The first weird addition is the Linux Source for kernels 2.2.18, 2.4.0, and 2.4.1. Why include these on a CD for Linux game development? The second odd addition is a directory for PrettyPoly. The software is packaged as a tarball of the author's CVS root directory. How this made it onto the CD in this format is almost as inexplicable as having MSDOS formatted files destined for a Linux machine.

Conclusion This book could have been so much more. If the authors had taken the time to describe designing and developing several Linux games from the ground up, this book would have been better for it. As it is, it's barely good as a reference for what it does cover. I am very disappointed in this book. It could have been so much more, but falls way short of its potential.

There's one gripe I want to air about this series as well. Why does Andre LaMothe get his picture on the back cover of every one of these books as the 'Series Editor'? Also on the spine, his name is at the top. I'll admit that I like LaMothe's writing, but giving him top billing on the Prima Tech Game Developers series seems pretentious to me.

Table of Contents

• Introduction

1. Introduction to Game Development
2. Linux Development Tools
3. The Structure of a Game
4. 2D Graphics Under Linux
5. Input with SDL
6. 3D Graphics for Linux Games
7. Using OpenGL in Games
8. Sound Under Linux
9. Networking
10. Artificial Intelligence
11. OpenSource: Friend or Foe?

1. OpenSource License Agreements
2. Porting
3. References
4. Glossary
5. What's on the CD-ROM

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Reader Haaz contributed this review of Biohazard. Since my typical airport reading consists of lurid thrillers about either medical examiners in murder-prone counties or terrorists with nasty bioweapons stolen from secret labs in Uzbekistan, this sounds like it might be a bit too scary. In the case of bioagents, being forewarned is only partly the same as being forearmed.

Biohazard author Ken Alibek with Stephen Handelman pages 336 publisher Random House rating 8 reviewer haaz ISBN 0375502319 summary A fascinating and chilling account of the Soviet Union's bio-weapons program, by the man who ran it.

Biological warfare has usually been a nightmare constrained to the realm of theory and bad dreams. If you have read The Hot Zone, which documents people who work with the world's most deadly viruses, such as Ebola, you know how frightening even a small outbreak of a deadly disease can be. But imagine a nation carefully researching, stockpiling, and preparing to use these nightmarish weapons in a major war.

From the middle of World War II -- and possibly to the present day -- the Soviet Union (now Russia) did just that. In a super-secret military program, the country developed, stockpiled and prepared to use biological weapons in an expected ultimate war with the West. Among their tools: bacterial weapons including anthrax and tumerlia, and weaponized viruses. Enhanced smallpox was being prepared as a weapon, as were a whole host of hemmoragic fever viruses, including the famous Ebola and Marbug viruses.

Ken Alibek's Biography Mr. Alibek was a unique person in the Soviet system. As the grandson of a Kazhakstanian kahn, he was one of the few non-white Russians to achieve high ranking within the Soviet military and society. After graduating from the Tomsk Medical Institute in 1975, he joined Biopreparat, a secret Soviet military program that fronted as a pharmaceutical research organization. Their actual mission: develop the most deadly conceivable biological weapons probably meant to be used in a war with the United States.

How did a physician, originally dedicated to healing and treating illness, become one of the top researchers in harnessing infectious diseases as weapons? Mr. Alibek himself seems to be unsure of this, or at least chooses not to talk about it. He documents his entry into the Biopreparat weapons program, and gradual rise to the position of head researcher for the program, but never addresses this question.

Mr. Alibek defected to the United States in 1992 after an official visit, during which he saw how much better life in the United States was as compared to Soviet life. What he is doing now is a very good question. The cover of the book simply states that "he is now working in biodefense," but nothing is stated beyond that.

The Book Biohazard is a very easy read for anyone with the slightest medical or technical background. A great deal of time is spent describing life within the Soviet system and the secret weapons program. The book's lack of technical information and its relatively brief length make it fairly easy to read, but the continuing parade of names and people within the system does get tedious.

You may want to have a notepad handy to keep track of the long Russian names, not to mention the myriad installations for researching and preparing the agents. The authors have a tendency to jump back in time to describe an episode or sequence of events; something may start in the 1970s and end in the 1980s. This semi-constant contextual leaping can be a bit distracting. The book's details of the Soviet systems will be quite fascinating for some people. One of the first pages in the book is a two-page map of the former Soviet Union, showing the locations and functions of about forty bioweapons installations, ranging from stockpiles to testing grounds and laboratories. Several of them, including a lonely Siberian outpost, the infamous Rebirth Island, and the Sverdlosk manufacturing plant are described in detail.

Perhaps the most intriguing story is about the time an anthrax contamination in a city, and the government's official response to this. Most interesting of all: the mayor of the town was none other than Boris Yeltsin, the future president of Russia.

In summation, as long as you can deal with the relatively minor flaws, Biohazard is not difficult to read. What can be difficult to deal with is the possibility of biological warfare. It is very disturbing to read about what happened to the animals exposed to these diseases, and then to imagine the same things happening to people in a city. Let's hope that Mr. Alibek's prediction of a terrorist biological attack never happens.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Craig Maloney contributed this review of the Perl CD Bookshelf 2.0, which he calls "the most portable way to get five Perl books from here to there." Like others in the same series, this package from O'Reilly assembles several related titles onto a single, searchable disk to save endless page-thumbing, but not without a few glitches.

Perl CD Bookshelf 2.0 author (Various) pages N/A publisher O'Reilly and Associates, Inc. rating 8 reviewer Craig Maloney ISBN 0-596-00164-9 summary The update to the previous Perl CD Bookshelf with a new edition, two deletions, and a new title.

Books, but not a book

O'Reilly's Perl CD Bookshelf 2.0 includes the following books, which have all been reviewed earlier on Slashdot before:

• Perl in a Nutshell , by Ellen Siever, Stephen Spainhour & Nathan Patwardhan
• Programming Perl, 3rd Edition , by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen & Jon Orwant
• Advanced Perl Programming , by Sriram Srinivasan
• Perl Cookbook , by Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington
• Perl for System Administration , by David N. Blank-Edelman

Overview The Perl Bookshelf 2.0 is O'Reilly's updated version of its popular Perl Bookshelf. It includes five books rather than the six of the previous edition, and removes the Learning Perl and Learning Perl on Win32 Systems in favor of Perl for System Administration. It also includes a Java-based search engine to search the books, and a master index for all of the books. Like the previous Perl Bookshelf review I'll be doing a 'meta review' of the presentation of the content rather than the content itself. What's in it for me? As mentioned before, this edition includes five searchable and indexed O'Reilly Perl books. The removal of Learning Perl and Learning Perl for Win32 Systems doesn't bother me, since this bookshelf has material that can be used by everyone rather than books for just beginners, or Win32 Perl programmers. Included in the package is a CD-ROM and a paperback version of Perl in a Nutshell, the same version as the first edition. On the CD-ROM, you'll find the five books in HTML format, as well as a (proprietary) Java search engine. Unlike the first edition, the JRE is not included on the CDROM. Windows users get the added benefit of having an autorun.inf file to begin their session for them. What's good? Perl for Systems Administration is a worthy addition to this library. The other four books have proven themselves to be worthy of being in every Perl programmer's library. Having them all in one convenient searchable spot is, of course, a huge advantage. The layout for each of the books is adequate, and is very cross platform. The indexes take advantage of named tags and clicking on an index entry takes you directly to the section specified.

The inclusion of Perl in a Nutshell is also a nice touch, since Perl in a Nutshell can answer the mundane problems, while the CD can be used for the tougher ones.

What's bad? The Java search engine may be the only way to make The Perl Bookshelf cross platform, but it is very weak. Worse, if you are running Linux, the search engine won't work at all. You'll need to visit O'Reilly and download a patch, copy the CD to your hard disc, and apply the patch using a 'fixed' shell script. Windows users fortunately will not have to go through such hoops to get the search running properly. The searches themselves leave something to be desired as well, namely the lack of a highlighting of the search term or even the ability to move to the term being searched. For instance, searching on 'chomp' will bring up the Perl function page as one of it's choices. However, it brings it up without positioning the page to the function itself, so the user has to scroll through the list of functions to get to the one she wants. Thankfully, the master index is very complete, so you may not even have to bother with the search engine at all. It's a shame that something which could have been so powerful is so crippled.

Conclusion This is the most portable way to get five Perl books from here to there. While there are problems with the keyword search, the master index should be good enough to get you the information you need. If you've been considering getting these books this is the most cost effective way to bring them into your library."

You can purchase this CD at FatBrain.

Craig Maloney wrote this review of a book intended to remove some of the confusion from the powerful, free 3D modelling program Blender. Blender is fun to play with, and has been used to create some amazing 3D graphics, but it's not exactly intuitive. Just figuring out what some of the major buttons do was a triumph for me, but I haven't touched it in a few years -- I'd like to try Blender again, but with a book like this one at the ready to supplement the user interface.

The Blender Book author Carsten Wartmann pages 311 publisher No Starch Press rating 8.5 reviewer Craig Maloney ISBN 1-886411-44-1 summary One of the best books around to learn how to use Blender, the free 3D modelling and animation suite from Not A Number.

What it's about This book was originally published in German as "Das Blender Buch." I was a little wary of picking it up simply because it is a translation of the original. Thankfully, I didn't have to worry, as this translation is very fluid and natural. The topics themselves, however, might be a little dense for the first-time reader and may require several re-readings to get the full meaning.

Blender is a free (as in beer) 3D modelling and animation software package. It was developed internally by Not-A-Number (NaN) for their studio work, but was later released to the general public. Blender is very powerful, and likewise very complex. The Blender Book is a gentle introduction for anyone who is interested not only in getting the most out of Blender, but also for anyone who is curious about 3D graphics.

Chapter by chapter The book starts off with a general overview of what Blender is, how to get it, and why you would want it in the first place. It then gives a very thorough, non-mathematical synopsis of color, 3D graphics, and animation techniques. Chapter 3 begins the Blender-specific topics with a quick overview of the blender interface, culminating in a simple keyframe animation. Chapter 4 introduces the basics of the Blender interface, with descriptions of the different mouse and keyboard functions that Blender uses. Chapter 5 delves into actually modelling objects in Blender, and Chapters 6 and 7 discuss materials and lighting. Chapters 8 deals with path animation, keyframe animation, interpolation curves (IPO curves), and vertex keys. Chapter 9 is a whole chapter about Inverse Kinematics (IKAs), which have been rather troubling for some Blender users. The chapter begins with tutorials for animating a robot arm, and ends with a skeleton animation of a bottle. Chapter 10 discusses particle animation, animating not only a camp fire, but also a rocket with a smoke trail, and a school of fish.

The last sections of the book deal with putting all these concepts together. Chapter 11 introduces the sequence editor, which allows the user to integrate clips with a pretty sophisticated post-production system. The example described in this chapter is a video titling sequence for a beach vacation in Indonesia. Chapter 12 discusses Python scripting in Blender, and how to use it for your animations and as a function plotter. Chapter 13 is the big reward: rendering. Naturally rendering has been discussed before this point, but this chapter contains all the neat tricks which Blender can do with the final rendering. Chapters 14 and 15 are full-scale, top-to-bottom animation and modelling tutorials, which are very useful for both beginners and experts to see how Blender manages to take a project from concept to completion.

The appendices are very well thought out, including a keyboard reference, tips and tricks, command line arguments, a Blender/Python API reference (Overview of Blender Modules), installation instructions, a glossary, and a listing of what's included on the CD. The index is also quite useful, allowing me on several occasions to find information rather quickly.

The pages of the book are very well laid out, with a 10-page full-color insert for those images that need the added benefit of color. The CD-ROM includes the 1.8 version of Blender (an older version, since as of this review Blender is now up to 2.12), and all the .blend files used in creating the animations. It also includes a gallery of the finished animations.

The upshot I have very few gripes with this book after reading it. The Blender Book was published before the program's 2.x series came out. While little in Blender's human interface has changed, it would be nice to have had an addendum for the changes from 1.8 to 2.x. Also, it would have been nice to have this book in full color, but the cost in doing such would have made this book prohibitively expensive.

The Blender Book is a book that I would give (and have given) to any aspiring 3D artist looking to use Blender. With its rich tutorials and its clear explanations of difficult concepts, The Blender Book is the perfect companion for teaching budding and intermediate 3D artists about this exciting and powerful tool.

Chapter Listing:

1. Introduction
2. Basics of 3D Graphics
3. Quick Start
4. Blender Basics
5. Modeling Tutorials
6. Material Tutorials
7. Light, Shadows, and World Tutorials
8. Keyframe, Path, Lattice, and Vertex Key Animation Tutorials
9. Inverse Kinematics Tutorials
10. Getting Small: Particle Animation Tutorials
11. The Final Cut: Postproduction
12. Python Tutorials
13. The Big Reward: Rendering
14. Laser Tutorial
15. Animating a Torpedo Through A School of Fish

1. Keyboard Commands
2. Tips, Tricks, and Useful Programs
3. Command Line Arguments
4. Overview of Blender Modules
5. Installing Blender
6. Glossary
7. What's on the CD?

• Index

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zelazny also includes a few truly terrible puns.

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

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

Despite the title, this book will be helpful to anyone consulting in a computer-related field -- custom programming, network design or any of several related types of consulting. An assortment of helpful advice from someone who's done it successfully, intended to give you the knowledge you need to start a profitable consulting business.

From Serf to Surfer: Becoming a Network Consultant author Matthew Strebe pages 308 publisher Sybex rating 7/10 reviewer Michael Sims ISBN 0-7821-2661-8 summary good, well-rounded advice for someone starting a consulting business

Let's be frank: I didn't expect to like this book. The cover has a picture of a California surfer dude surfing (get it? surfing? get it? ha! ha!) with a laptop. At first glance, it seemed about two steps below a "for Dummies" book, and what I expected (or at least desired) from a book on this topic was serious advice, not some flippant idiot dispensing watered-down aphorisms. I wouldn't have bought this book in a store -- probably wouldn't have looked at it twice.

But hey, I thought, the publisher sent Slashdot a review copy, might as well read it. If nothing else, it might be bad enough to write a really funny review.

It wasn't as bad as I expected. The author is quite intelligible and coherent -- they just need to fire the cover artist.

The author starts with a humorous quiz designed to point out that you have to market yourself to succeed -- and that there may be quite a few non-obvious barriers to marketing yourself. If you have a foot-high purple mohawk, that may be an expression of your uniqueness to you, but it's likely to make it hard for you to get and maintain consulting jobs. He follows with "a day in the life," designed to show that though he makes good money, he works rather hard for it as well -- the job isn't to punch the clock or put in the time, but to solve particular problems, whatever it takes.

Chapter 3 is an overview of a single project from beginning to end. It's pretty informative, and gives you a good idea of what to expect. He then covers work habits and forming a personal network of contacts. His advice for getting work is to dispense business cards liberally and offer finder's fees to people who steer work to him, which is a stunningly good idea that probably isn't obvious to most people. He's also got good advice for bringing a project to a close -- when you're working on a fixed-fee basis (the approach he advocates), you need to come in, do the job, and depart without lingering around, since it only costs you time and money without any extra income.

The next chapter covers tools of the trades: computers and software. I didn't find this chapter of much use, and my guess is most of his target audience won't either. If you're competent enough to consult, you're competent enough to know what you want/need as far as computers and software go.

Chapter 7 covers setting up a business. It doesn't have enough detail to be your sole resource -- I would recommend one of the guides from Nolo Press as another good starting point.

He talks about contracts, which basically boils down to the very simple advice: write it down, all of it.

He has a few strategies for pricing services at whatever the customer is willing to pay. This is probably one of the harder tasks to master, and his advice here is good -- present a tiered proposal, with low, medium and high bids for different amounts of work. If you've estimated the customer properly, the medium bid should be on target, but if you haven't, the low or high bid may be more to their liking and may allow you to get the job anyway.

He covers project management briefly -- very briefly. If you really need to manage a large project, this book alone won't cut it. But for small jobs, sure.

Short sections on dealing with bad clients and other contractors are useful. He finishes with discussions of the law and taxes. These sections are just long enough to warn you of potential pitfalls; if you really want to deal with them, you'll need to hire an accountant or invest in some more Nolo Press books.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. There's enough humor in it to make it read quickly and painlessly, and enough good information that you don't feel like a Dummy when you're done. If you gain only a few pieces of good information from the book, you'll probably recoup the $20 price of the book in short order.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Andy Murren contributed this review of Richard Blum's Postfix. Powering mail delivery may not be as sexy as programming in exotic new languages, but it sure is important -- Andy gives you the scoop here on how well Postfix (and Postfix) do at the task.

Postfix author Richard Blun pages 542 publisher Sams rating 8 reviewer Andy Murren ISBN 0-672-32114-9 summary Guide to setting up and running Postfix as your MTA.

Postfix is a complete Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) that is meant to be a replacement for Sendmail. Wietse Venema, who works at the IBM Watson Research Center, wrote the program and released it under the IBM Public License. Richard Blum has targeted this book at Intermediate to Advanced users, but he has enough basic information so that even an MS Exchange administrator with no Unix background can get Postfix running quickly.

The book is broken into three sections:

1. Introduction to E-Mail Services and Postfix
2. Installing and Configuring Postfix
3. Advanced Postfix Server Topics

Part I is a nice overview of email, how to use Postfix, how Postfix works and a comparison of Postfix and Sendmail. In chapter 3 'Server Requirements for Postfix' an overview of Unix and Unix commands are covered along with an introduction to bash, gcc and make to bring the non-Unix user up to speed with the tools that they will need.

The chapter on DNS starts by covering the origins of DNS and the basics of how it works. Blum then gives us an explanation of DNS records and how to set them up, including the all-important MX (Mail Exchanger) record. He then gives a brief discussion on how to set up the resolv.conf, hosts and hosts.conf files. The chapter concludes with a quick look at the host, nslookup and dig programs. This chapter serves as a quick reference on getting DNS up and running on a Unix box.

Part II is a detailed section that is the heart of the book. How to set up Postfix is laid out in detail from how to install (both from an RPM file and from source), to configuring it, to logging and blocking UCE/UBE.

One of the sections of the book I was drawn to was on how to set up Postfix as an internal and external mail server for the Small Office environment. This could be for branch offices of a large company (such as insurance offices) or for a Small Office / Home Office (SOHO) that does not have a full time Internet connection. Blum explains how to set up the server for dial-up to send and retrieve mail, and how to run the mail server on the same box as your firewall.

The chapter 'Migrating from Sendmail to Postfix' is a short step-by-step on how and what to convert from Sendmail to Postfix. Since Postfix was designed to do this easily the chapter is shorter than might be expected (only 20 pages).

Rounding out Part II is a chapter on the Maildir mailbox format and a chapter on using an external MDA. The chapter on using an external MDA is a good example of why I like this book. Here is the full Table of Contents for the chapter:

1. Using MDA Programs with Postfix

1. What is a Mail Delivery Agent

1. Automatic Mail Filtering

1. Automatic Mail Replying

1. Automatic Program Initialization by Mail

1. Using an External MDA Program with Postfix

1. Configuring the main.cf file

1. Watching MDA Programs in the Postfix Log

1. The procmail MDA Program

1. Installing procmail

1. The procmail Command Line

1. User-Defined procmail Actions

1. Summary

In this chapter Blum gives a nice quick How-To on procmail. While it is not a full treatment of procmail it has enough information to download, compile, install, configure and run procmail. Coupled with the brief lessons on Unix, gcc, make and bash in the first section, an MS Exchange administrator on their first attempt in the Unix world is provided enough information to get procmail working as the MDA for their new Postfix MTA.

Section III covers advanced server topics including using MySQL, OpenLDAP and Majordomo with Postfix. Like the section on procmail, Blum covers installing and configuring each of these applications and how to make Postfix work with them. Chapter 20 covers POP3 and IMAP, which then leads nicely into the next chapter on SqWebMail. The final chapters are on performance tuning and troubleshooting.

Overall I have found this to be a well-written book that addressed several questions that I had about configuring and using Postfix (such as the SOHO section). It is clear, direct and covers each topic to a level that I found comfortable. For some people this book will be too advanced but that should not be anyone who has a working knowledge of mail servers or of Unix. I would recommend this book for someone who has started to use or wants to migrate to using Postfix.

My major complaint about this book is the price, $49.99. As much as I liked this book, 'Practical UNIX and Internet Security' was more densely packed with information and only cost $39.95.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Introduction to E-Mail Services and Postfix

1. E-Mail Services
2. Postfix Services
3. Server Requirements for Postfix
4. DNS and Postfix
5. SMTP and Postfix

Installing and Configuring Postfix

1. Installing Postfix
2. The master.cf Configuration File
3. The main.cf Configuration File
4. Postfix Lookup Tables
5. Using Postfix
6. Using Postfix as an ISP Mail Server
7. Using Postfix as an Office Mail Server
8. Postfix Server Administration
9. Migrating from Sendmail to Postfix
10. Using the Maildir Mailbox Format
11. Using MDA Programs with Postfix

Advanced Postfix Server Topics

1. Using MySQL with Postfix
2. Using OpenLDAP with Postfix
3. Using Majordomo with Postfix
4. Using POP3 and IMAP with Postfix
5. Using SqWebMail with Postfix
6. Performance Tuning Postfix
7. Common Postfix Problems

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bill Camarda contributed this review of Hack Attacks Revealed. A healthy dose of paranoia comes in handy sometimes -- and anyone with a broadband connection of any kind has reason to double the dose. And Yes, this book denies the existence of neither *NIX nor Windows systems.

Hack Attacks Revealed author John Chirillo pages 800 publisher Wiley, John & Sons rating 8.5 reviewer Bill Camarda ISBN 047141624X summary If you have a computer that's not locked underground, disconnected from any network, and powered down, it probably has some of the security holes described in this book.

"I'm going to make a virtuous hacker guru out of you."

That's how John Chirillo begins his "challenging technogothic journey," Hack Attacks Revealed. And whoever "you" are -- sysadmin, internetworking engineer, or hacker (disaffected or otherwise), you'll find that Chirillo is selling authentic goods. (He's been hired by many Fortune 1000 companies to break into their networks.) This book offers a systematic tour of network vulnerabilities, hacking tools and techniques, and a whole lot more. Be warned: "This book is sold for information purposes only. Without written consent from the target company, most of these procedures are illegal in the United States and many other countries as well. Neither the author nor the publisher will be held accountable for the use and misuse of the information contained in this book."

Whew. Now that we've got that out of the way, let's see what's really in here...

The first section of Hack Attacks Revealed reintroduces each of today's communications protocols from a hacker's point of view. For example, it's one thing to know that when IP datagrams traveling in frames cross networks with different size limits, the routers must sometimes fragment the datagrams. It's another to recognize that this introduces a potential vulnerability to both passive and intrusive attacks. It's one thing to know that Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) broadcasts packets to all the hosts attached to a physical network, which store this information for later use; it's another to recognize that this represents an opportunity for a spoofing attack.

In Part II, Chirillo moves on to the communications media that tie workstations into LANs, LANs into WANs, and WANs into internets -- Ethernet, Token Ring, FDDI, ISDN, xDSL, point-to-point links, and frame relay. Then, it's on to start attacking the most vulnerable of those 65,000 ports into your computer.

Chirillo starts with Port 7, echo, explaining echo overloads, Ping of Death attacks, and Ping flooding, which takes advantage of a computer's responsiveness by bombarding it with pings or ICMP echo requests. There's Port 19, chargen, vulnerable to a telnet connection that generates a string of characters with output redirected to a telnet connection. There's Port 53, domain, which leads to a discussion of how DNS caching servers can be spoofed, forwarding visitors to the wrong location.

And so it continues, through more than 50 vulnerable TCP and UDP ports, all the way up to Port 540, uucp, Port 543, klogin, and beyond. Chirillo exposes a veritable who's who of viruses, worms, and trojans: Executor, Cain & Abel, Satanz Backdoor, ServeU, ShadowPhyre, SubSeven Apocalypse, Voodoo Doll, Portal of Doom...

Next, you're introduced to scanning: IP, port, and service site scans, tools, and techniques -- including techniques that can penetrate or "stealth" their way past firewalls (a comforting thought).

There's detailed coverage of mail bombing, spamming, and spoofing; web page hacking, and vulnerabilities of specific *nix and Windows operating systems, as well as internetworking hardware (Cisco, 3Com, et al.). You'll find tons of useful charts (from common ports to Ethernet frame formats). There's even an introductory guide to the lingua franca of hacking, the C programming language.

The accompanying CD-ROM contains an extensive collection of security and hacking software, plus TigerSuite -- all you need to uncover, scan, penetrate, expose, control, spy, flood, spoof, sniff, infect, report, monitor, and generally prevent (or perform) all manner of havoc. We hope you'll use the software -- and the book -- for good, not evil.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

I've been fan of Neil Gaiman's work for a long time, and so it was with gleeful abandon that I got an advance copy of his latest work, American Gods. Being an advance copy, there were sections that may receive a bit of editing, but it seemed that this was just about the final form of the book. I mentioned being a fan of Gaiman's work for a long time for a reason -- I may be a bit fanboyish. That's not to say that there were not a couple problems with it -- but those were very minor issues compared with the overall strength of the book. Those who have read Gaiman's work before -- from Sandman to Good Omens (with Terry Prachett) and Neverwhere -- are familar with his knowledge of mythology and the idea that stories are extremely powerful. For those who didn't read it, well, there you go. Mythology and the Old Stories are important and powerful. With that foundation in place, on we go.

American Gods author Gaiman pages 480 publisher Morrow, William & Co. rating 8.5 reviewer hemos ISBN 0380973650 summary A Gaiman-style (and therefore surreal) walk through mythic America.

The note that Gaiman makes on the cover of my book regarding the difference between this book and Neverwhere, his book about Underground London, is a good one.

"If Neverwhere was about the London underneath, this would be about the America between, and on-top-of, and around. It's an America with strange mythic depths. Ones that can hurt you. Or kill you. Or make you mad.

American Gods will be a big book, I hope. A sort of weird, sprawling picaresque epic, which starts out relatively small and gets larger. Not horror, although I plan a few moments that are up there with anything I did in Sandman, and not strictly fantasy either. I see it as a distorting mirror, a book of danger and secrets, of romance and magic.

It's about the soul of America, really. What people brought to America; what found them when they came; and the things that lie sleeping beneath it all."

American Gods is about the mythology of America, but also about its relationship with gods, stories and what America is about. I think that's the story of this book; the story of what America is and what it is about.

The characters, mainly, are Shadow and Odin. Odin has been an frequent character throughout Gaiman's works, and as someone who memorized Odin's stats in Legends and Lore, I've always enjoyed Odin, and think that Old One Eye is an interesting historical figure -- and one who is interesting to get to know a bit more intimately, albeit through a writer's eyes. Shadow's character, is the one character I liked the least. Well, that's not quite how I mean it -- I did like Shadow the character, and I think I'd like him as a person. But it feels sometimes like the Shadow's actions and dialogue are a bit stilted, but that's only a slight flaw in an overall wonderland of reading.

The two relationships I glommed most on to are the ones between Shadow and Odin, and (in a very different way) between Shadow and the other gods and goddesses that he meets. The other curious relationship, if it can be called that, is the one between Shadow and his dead wife. Trust me. It sounds wierd, but it works really well.

In a nutshell, this is the tale of what happens to old gods when they are brought, sometimes without the believers even knowing it, to a country that doesn't really hold a belief in gods - or rather, a belief in traditions. One of the most interesting parts about America, to be nationcentric for a moment, is the lack of traditions in things, compared to the rest of the world. But America has created its own gods, of a sort, and the main plot point is about the intersection of the old gods and new gods. And the most interesting part of the story is there, I think. Because that's where the meat of the book is, and where it transcends being just a story about "god hangs out with guy, creates havoc, guy has dead wife who talks to him, old & new gods want to fight, guy solves problems." (Well, I suppose that is a pretty cool story.)

American Gods delves into larger issues of what it means to hold on to our traditions and beliefs in a world that has dramatically changed, and in which our relationships with each other and what's around us has In summary, this is a book with a good story. More then that, it's a story about relationship to the world around us, and what being human means. It's good. Really good. If you've got even a [metatarsal] of philosphy, or a modicum of interest in reading good stories, buy it.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

I've been fan of Neil Gaiman's work for a long time, and so it was with gleeful abandon that I got an advance copy of his latest work, American Gods. Being an advance copy, there were sections that may receive a bit of editing, but it seemed that this was just about the final form of the book. I mentioned being a fan of Gaiman's work for a long time for a reason -- I may be a bit fanboyish. That's not to say that there were not a couple problems with it -- but those were very minor issues compared with the overall strength of the book. Those who have read Gaiman's work before -- from Sandman to Good Omens (with Terry Prachett) and Neverwhere -- are familar with his knowledge of mythology and the idea that stories are extremely powerful. For those who didn't read it, well, there you go. Mythology and the Old Stories are important and powerful. With that foundation in place, on we go.

American Gods author Gaiman pages 480 publisher Morrow, William & Co. rating 8.5 reviewer hemos ISBN 0380973650 summary A Gaiman-style (and therefore surreal) walk through mythic America.

The note that Gaiman makes on the cover of my book regarding the difference between this book and Neverwhere, his book about Underground London, is a good one.

"If Neverwhere was about the London underneath, this would be about the America between, and on-top-of, and around. It's an America with strange mythic depths. Ones that can hurt you. Or kill you. Or make you mad.

American Gods will be a big book, I hope. A sort of weird, sprawling picaresque epic, which starts out relatively small and gets larger. Not horror, although I plan a few moments that are up there with anything I did in Sandman, and not strictly fantasy either. I see it as a distorting mirror, a book of danger and secrets, of romance and magic.

It's about the soul of America, really. What people brought to America; what found them when they came; and the things that lie sleeping beneath it all."

American Gods is about the mythology of America, but also about its relationship with gods, stories and what America is about. I think that's the story of this book; the story of what America is and what it is about.

The characters, mainly, are Shadow and Odin. Odin has been an frequent character throughout Gaiman's works, and as someone who memorized Odin's stats in Legends and Lore, I've always enjoyed Odin, and think that Old One Eye is an interesting historical figure -- and one who is interesting to get to know a bit more intimately, albeit through a writer's eyes. Shadow's character, is the one character I liked the least. Well, that's not quite how I mean it -- I did like Shadow the character, and I think I'd like him as a person. But it feels sometimes like the Shadow's actions and dialogue are a bit stilted, but that's only a slight flaw in an overall wonderland of reading.

The two relationships I glommed most on to are the ones between Shadow and Odin, and (in a very different way) between Shadow and the other gods and goddesses that he meets. The other curious relationship, if it can be called that, is the one between Shadow and his dead wife. Trust me. It sounds wierd, but it works really well.

In a nutshell, this is the tale of what happens to old gods when they are brought, sometimes without the believers even knowing it, to a country that doesn't really hold a belief in gods - or rather, a belief in traditions. One of the most interesting parts about America, to be nationcentric for a moment, is the lack of traditions in things, compared to the rest of the world. But America has created its own gods, of a sort, and the main plot point is about the intersection of the old gods and new gods. And the most interesting part of the story is there, I think. Because that's where the meat of the book is, and where it transcends being just a story about "god hangs out with guy, creates havoc, guy has dead wife who talks to him, old & new gods want to fight, guy solves problems." (Well, I suppose that is a pretty cool story.)

American Gods delves into larger issues of what it means to hold on to our traditions and beliefs in a world that has dramatically changed, and in which our relationships with each other and what's around us has In summary, this is a book with a good story. More then that, it's a story about relationship to the world around us, and what being human means. It's good. Really good. If you've got even a [metatarsal] of philosphy, or a modicum of interest in reading good stories, buy it.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

I've been fan of Neil Gaiman's work for a long time, and so it was with gleeful abandon that I got an advance copy of his latest work, American Gods. Being an advance copy, there were sections that may receive a bit of editing, but it seemed that this was just about the final form of the book. I mentioned being a fan of Gaiman's work for a long time for a reason -- I may be a bit fanboyish. That's not to say that there were not a couple problems with it -- but those were very minor issues compared with the overall strength of the book. Those who have read Gaiman's work before -- from Sandman to Good Omens (with Terry Prachett) and Neverwhere -- are familar with his knowledge of mythology and the idea that stories are extremely powerful. For those who didn't read it, well, there you go. Mythology and the Old Stories are important and powerful. With that foundation in place, on we go.

American Gods author Gaiman pages 480 publisher Morrow, William & Co. rating 8.5 reviewer hemos ISBN 0380973650 summary A Gaiman-style (and therefore surreal) walk through mythic America.

The note that Gaiman makes on the cover of my book regarding the difference between this book and Neverwhere, his book about Underground London, is a good one.

"If Neverwhere was about the London underneath, this would be about the America between, and on-top-of, and around. It's an America with strange mythic depths. Ones that can hurt you. Or kill you. Or make you mad.

American Gods will be a big book, I hope. A sort of weird, sprawling picaresque epic, which starts out relatively small and gets larger. Not horror, although I plan a few moments that are up there with anything I did in Sandman, and not strictly fantasy either. I see it as a distorting mirror, a book of danger and secrets, of romance and magic.

It's about the soul of America, really. What people brought to America; what found them when they came; and the things that lie sleeping beneath it all."

American Gods is about the mythology of America, but also about its relationship with gods, stories and what America is about. I think that's the story of this book; the story of what America is and what it is about.

The characters, mainly, are Shadow and Odin. Odin has been an frequent character throughout Gaiman's works, and as someone who memorized Odin's stats in Legends and Lore, I've always enjoyed Odin, and think that Old One Eye is an interesting historical figure -- and one who is interesting to get to know a bit more intimately, albeit through a writer's eyes. Shadow's character, is the one character I liked the least. Well, that's not quite how I mean it -- I did like Shadow the character, and I think I'd like him as a person. But it feels sometimes like the Shadow's actions and dialogue are a bit stilted, but that's only a slight flaw in an overall wonderland of reading.

The two relationships I glommed most on to are the ones between Shadow and Odin, and (in a very different way) between Shadow and the other gods and goddesses that he meets. The other curious relationship, if it can be called that, is the one between Shadow and his dead wife. Trust me. It sounds wierd, but it works really well.

In a nutshell, this is the tale of what happens to old gods when they are brought, sometimes without the believers even knowing it, to a country that doesn't really hold a belief in gods - or rather, a belief in traditions. One of the most interesting parts about America, to be nationcentric for a moment, is the lack of traditions in things, compared to the rest of the world. But America has created its own gods, of a sort, and the main plot point is about the intersection of the old gods and new gods. And the most interesting part of the story is there, I think. Because that's where the meat of the book is, and where it transcends being just a story about "god hangs out with guy, creates havoc, guy has dead wife who talks to him, old & new gods want to fight, guy solves problems." (Well, I suppose that is a pretty cool story.)

American Gods delves into larger issues of what it means to hold on to our traditions and beliefs in a world that has dramatically changed, and in which our relationships with each other and what's around us has In summary, this is a book with a good story. More then that, it's a story about relationship to the world around us, and what being human means. It's good. Really good. If you've got even a [metatarsal] of philosphy, or a modicum of interest in reading good stories, buy it.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

howardjp writes: "Ian Stewart has penned a fabulous sequel to Edwin A. Abbot's classic geometric classic, Flatland. Mr. Stewart's sequel, Flatterland, discusses the geometric advances over the preceding one hundred years and how these advances have applied in the real world. From the simplest plane geometry to passing through a wormhole, Flatterland describes the mathematics in simple and easily digestible terms." Read the rest of James' review below.

Flatterland: Like Flatland Only More So author Ian Stewart pages 294 publisher Perseus Publishing rating 8 reviewer James Howard ISBN 0-7382-0442-0 summary A one dimensional line living in a two dimensional world issuddenly thrust into three dimensional space, fractal worlds,and hyperbolicplanes.

Flatterland begins one hundred years after Flatland's end. A. Square's great-great-granddaughter, Victoria Line has found A. Square's ancient text, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. After causing some trouble with her family, Victoria reads the text and signals the third dimension. She is soon greeted by the Space Hopper, who soon teaches her about three and dimensions, fractal space, perspective, hyperbolic space, topology, time travel, wormholes, and everything else relating to geometry.

Flatland was written to warm the public up to a more complex space than the three dimensions they normally perceived. Shortly after the start of the new century, Albert Einstein proved the relationship between time and space adding a forth dimension. Flatterland is not written the same way. Rather than warming the reader up to physical possibilities, Mr. Stewart pedanticly explains the Universe as it is known today. In those areas where science has no answer, Flatterland simply says there is none and offers several possible answers.

Mr. Stewart went to great lengths to demonstrate Victoria's naivity. All names from the book are spelled as one part and even names are combined. Albert Einstein becomes Albereinstein and Felix Klein becomes Felixklien. Even planet Earth becomes Planiturth whose inhabitants are Planiturthians. First cute, by the end of the book, the nomenclature becomes dreadful and deciphering names can be difficult when the original is unknown to the reader.

Missing most from Flatterland, though, is the social satire. Flatland endlessly mocks Victorian society. The role of women was questioned along with evolutionary theories. Flatland was more of a social satire than it was a text on geometry. Flatterland's social satire is weak and confused. In Mr. Stewart's introduction, Flatland has evolved into a sixties-like era, but modern technology from the nineties has also arrived. What little social criticism there is in Flatterland addresses the women's movement. Unfortunately, the style and discourse would have been more appropriate forty years ago.

These flaws aside, Flatterland's discussion of mathematics and science is amazing. The simplicity of the breadth of material makes Flatterland helpful aid in study. The personification of mathematical concepts includes a five-sided figure with five ninety degree angles from the hyperbolic plane called a squarrel. Viewed from inside the hyperbolic plane, Victoria is confused to see a creature with the wrong measure of angles for five sides until the Space Hopper patiently explains. The personification also includes a cow whose tail flips and joins its nose named Moobius. Victoria takes to washing one side of Moobius only to discover that Moobius has only one side.

Through the Space Hopper, Mr. Stewart explains complex mathematical concepts with explicit detail but very simply and often several times from several angles to ensure the reader understands the topic. Additionally, the book includes ample diagrams from simple grapefruit stacking problems to visions of wormholes. The images are most helpful when discussing perspective.

Ideally, Flatterland would embody the mathematics, science, satire, creativity of Flatland. However, Flatterland usually sacrifices satire and creativity for science and mathematics. The book is still an exceptional read and well worth the time. It does not tarnish the reputation of Flatland, but it is not destined to become the classic that its predecessor is."

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

howardjp writes: "Ian Stewart has penned a fabulous sequel to Edwin A. Abbot's classic geometric classic, Flatland. Mr. Stewart's sequel, Flatterland, discusses the geometric advances over the preceding one hundred years and how these advances have applied in the real world. From the simplest plane geometry to passing through a wormhole, Flatterland describes the mathematics in simple and easily digestible terms." Read the rest of James' review below.

Flatterland: Like Flatland Only More So author Ian Stewart pages 294 publisher Perseus Publishing rating 8 reviewer James Howard ISBN 0-7382-0442-0 summary A one dimensional line living in a two dimensional world issuddenly thrust into three dimensional space, fractal worlds,and hyperbolicplanes.

Flatterland begins one hundred years after Flatland's end. A. Square's great-great-granddaughter, Victoria Line has found A. Square's ancient text, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. After causing some trouble with her family, Victoria reads the text and signals the third dimension. She is soon greeted by the Space Hopper, who soon teaches her about three and dimensions, fractal space, perspective, hyperbolic space, topology, time travel, wormholes, and everything else relating to geometry.

Flatland was written to warm the public up to a more complex space than the three dimensions they normally perceived. Shortly after the start of the new century, Albert Einstein proved the relationship between time and space adding a forth dimension. Flatterland is not written the same way. Rather than warming the reader up to physical possibilities, Mr. Stewart pedanticly explains the Universe as it is known today. In those areas where science has no answer, Flatterland simply says there is none and offers several possible answers.

Mr. Stewart went to great lengths to demonstrate Victoria's naivity. All names from the book are spelled as one part and even names are combined. Albert Einstein becomes Albereinstein and Felix Klein becomes Felixklien. Even planet Earth becomes Planiturth whose inhabitants are Planiturthians. First cute, by the end of the book, the nomenclature becomes dreadful and deciphering names can be difficult when the original is unknown to the reader.

Missing most from Flatterland, though, is the social satire. Flatland endlessly mocks Victorian society. The role of women was questioned along with evolutionary theories. Flatland was more of a social satire than it was a text on geometry. Flatterland's social satire is weak and confused. In Mr. Stewart's introduction, Flatland has evolved into a sixties-like era, but modern technology from the nineties has also arrived. What little social criticism there is in Flatterland addresses the women's movement. Unfortunately, the style and discourse would have been more appropriate forty years ago.

These flaws aside, Flatterland's discussion of mathematics and science is amazing. The simplicity of the breadth of material makes Flatterland helpful aid in study. The personification of mathematical concepts includes a five-sided figure with five ninety degree angles from the hyperbolic plane called a squarrel. Viewed from inside the hyperbolic plane, Victoria is confused to see a creature with the wrong measure of angles for five sides until the Space Hopper patiently explains. The personification also includes a cow whose tail flips and joins its nose named Moobius. Victoria takes to washing one side of Moobius only to discover that Moobius has only one side.

Through the Space Hopper, Mr. Stewart explains complex mathematical concepts with explicit detail but very simply and often several times from several angles to ensure the reader understands the topic. Additionally, the book includes ample diagrams from simple grapefruit stacking problems to visions of wormholes. The images are most helpful when discussing perspective.

Ideally, Flatterland would embody the mathematics, science, satire, creativity of Flatland. However, Flatterland usually sacrifices satire and creativity for science and mathematics. The book is still an exceptional read and well worth the time. It does not tarnish the reputation of Flatland, but it is not destined to become the classic that its predecessor is."

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Reader Brian Donovan contributed the review below of O'Reilly & Associates' ActionScript: The Definitive Guide, which he says is a "must have" for anyone working on Web animation with Flash. Offered under the condition that you please not make your site utterly dependent on Flash, of course;)

ActionScript : The Definitive Guide author Colin Moock pages 672 publisher O'Reilly & Associates rating 9 reviewer Brian Donovan ISBN 1565928520 summary Complete and authoritative. Check the author's site book site (http://www.moock.org/asdg) for sample chapters and code.

What it is, why you'd want it Actionscript, the programming language that's been supported in the Flash player and authoring environment since Flash version 4, is exhaustively described in a new title in the Definitive Guide series from O'Reilly. Written by widely-recognized web developer Colin Moock (http://www.moock.org) and edited by Bruce Epstein (author of Director in a Nutshell and Lingo in a Nutshell), the book lives up to the hype.

Moock divided Actionscript: the Definitive Guide (A: tDG) into 3 sections. "Actionscript Fundamentals" covers the language itself (variables, the Actionscript datatypes, how to declare and use functions, etc) in a way that's accessible to newbies without boring everyone else. "Applied Actionscript" is shorter and has a more conversational tone, explaining how to externalize your code, the ins-and-outs of making smart clips, using text fields as form fields in your movies, and debugging. The "Language Reference" is basically the Actionscript Dictionary from the Flash 5 Actionscript Reference Guide (ARG, pronounced "arrgghhh," similar to the noise that one inevitably makes when forced to refer to same) on steroids. In fact, it would almost be worth the full price of the complete book all by itself. Code is sprinkled liberally throughout. Included are four appendices (resource urls, a keycodes reference, Flash 4/Flash 5 backwards compatibility advice, and a table listing the differences between Actionscript and Javascript/ECMA-262).

What I liked Although some constructs present in both Javascript and Actionscript (like the arguments object) that managed to go completely unmentioned in the ARG are discussed, the "Actionscript Fundamentals" section is not a retread of the basics of the ECMA standard. There's a whole chapter on events and event-handling in Flash, including a comprehensive treatment of movie clip events. The chapter on OOP in Actionscript is the first real discussion of object-oriented Actionscript programming that I've seen outside of a few posts to a Flash programming mailing list. The detailed coverage of the stacking order of movies and movie clip instances is priceless -- Figure 13-4, "The complete Flash Player movie clip stack" is the clearest visual representation of movie and movie clip instance stacking available.

In the "Applied Actionscript" part of A: tDG, I got the most mileage from the discussion of the different methods of pulling code out of movies and making it more reusable (import from file, #include, shared libraries, and smart clips). Most of that material was already available in separate tech notes at the Macromedia web site (and, to a lesser extent, in the ARG), but it's great to see it brought together in book form.

When I got to the "Actionscript Language Reference," I did a quick page count. It weighed in at 50 pages lighter than the "Actionscript Dictionary" in the ARG, but manages to be more complete and more useful. This could be due to the fact that the pages in A: tDG are covered with text while the "Actionscript Dictionary" pages sport oversized inner margins and whitespace galore. Code is plentiful here, since the entry for practically every Actionscript object or class includes an example script fragment that is generally longer and more useful than the corresponding snippet (when one even exists) in the ARG. Where it's warranted, bug information is included, identifying specific problems with the implementation of the specific Actionscript element in the Flash 5 Player (pinpointing differences in behavior between builds when differences exist) and suggesting workarounds where possible -- the sort of feature that saves coders mountains of frustration of the "it's 4am and I'm tired?why isn't this working?!" variety.

The bottom line

I would have liked to have seen more space devoted to optimization/performance (somehow, code optimization got lumped in with file size considerations in the "The Bandwidth Profiler" section in Chapter 9: "Debugging"), but if it sounds as though I'm nitpicking here, it's because I am. For anyone working with Flash who is interested in taking off the training wheels and developing in "expert mode," this book is a must-have."

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Many of you have probably read books from Terry Prachett's Discworld series before; if you haven't, or if you missed out on Good Omens , one of the funniest books ever, you should begin to rectify your mistakes. I've reviewed Prachett's most recent installment in the long-running Discworld series, Thief of Time.

Thief of Time author Terry Pratchett pages 336 publisher HarperCollins rating 8 reviewer hemos ISBN 0060199563 summary Time is managed by an order of monks, who store time. However, their order is threatened with the construction of the mostaccurate clock ever -- heavy satire ensues.

As always, attempting to explain the plot behind a Prachett novel is ... difficult. Lemme do the best I can: In Discworld, where the series takes place, Time is a resource that is managed by the Monks of History. They store, divvy it out and generally make it so that the world has enough time. However, outside forces are trying to stop Time, by constructing the Discworld's most perfect clock -- if the clock starts ticking, then the world will stop.

Our heroes include one of the preeminent cleaners from the Monks of History, his young "grasshopper," Susan, the Granddaughter of Death, oh, and the fifth member of the 4 Horsemen. And I nearly forgot the Son of Time. Or Sons. Or something like that. Yes, it's a Prachett novel at it's best. Also make regular appearances are series perennials DEATH and DEATH OF MICE. Personally, I've never been a huge fan of DEATH OF MICE, but I do find DEATH to be one of the best characters.

Plot of this particular book aside, here's the lowdown on the Discworld series -- it's satire. Yes, Virginia, even in this day and age of heavy cyncism, there's still good authors writing satire. In the past, the Discworld series has dealth with such fun issues as freedom of the press, gender relations, international relations, the telephone/telegraph/internet and role of government. The thing that's fun about the Discworld series is that Prachett's usually right on, at least from my point of view. Thief of Time is a look at that resource that everyone in our day and age claims to have not enough of, and is scrambling around for. While Prachett's satirical devices can be a bit cutesy at time -- some of the Monks of History parts, in particular, I thought were a bit over the top -- the underlying point is still the same: people create the sense of time deprivation around us. We are the ones responsible for making ourselves feel like we don't have time.

Beyond just our own interactions with time, the main anatognists in the book, the people behind the scenes, also have a serious issue with human life and all that entails. In dealing with them in the book, I get the feeling that Prachett is trying to tell us to wake up and smell the morning coffee. Being human is pretty darn cool, and we should appreciate all the crazy stuff that's around us, and enjoy life.

The Discworld series is not written for those with a dour sense of life or themselves. This, and the other books in the series are easy reads, and don't take long to go through -- but you are almost always guaranteed to laugh out loud at least several times. And somehow, despite the humour, he still manages to make a point about life, and lampoon what's around us. And hopefully the next book will have Captain Carrot.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Many of you have probably read books from Terry Prachett's Discworld series before; if you haven't, or if you missed out on Good Omens , one of the funniest books ever, you should begin to rectify your mistakes. I've reviewed Prachett's most recent installment in the long-running Discworld series, Thief of Time.

Thief of Time author Terry Pratchett pages 336 publisher HarperCollins rating 8 reviewer hemos ISBN 0060199563 summary Time is managed by an order of monks, who store time. However, their order is threatened with the construction of the mostaccurate clock ever -- heavy satire ensues.

As always, attempting to explain the plot behind a Prachett novel is ... difficult. Lemme do the best I can: In Discworld, where the series takes place, Time is a resource that is managed by the Monks of History. They store, divvy it out and generally make it so that the world has enough time. However, outside forces are trying to stop Time, by constructing the Discworld's most perfect clock -- if the clock starts ticking, then the world will stop.

Our heroes include one of the preeminent cleaners from the Monks of History, his young "grasshopper," Susan, the Granddaughter of Death, oh, and the fifth member of the 4 Horsemen. And I nearly forgot the Son of Time. Or Sons. Or something like that. Yes, it's a Prachett novel at it's best. Also make regular appearances are series perennials DEATH and DEATH OF MICE. Personally, I've never been a huge fan of DEATH OF MICE, but I do find DEATH to be one of the best characters.

Plot of this particular book aside, here's the lowdown on the Discworld series -- it's satire. Yes, Virginia, even in this day and age of heavy cyncism, there's still good authors writing satire. In the past, the Discworld series has dealth with such fun issues as freedom of the press, gender relations, international relations, the telephone/telegraph/internet and role of government. The thing that's fun about the Discworld series is that Prachett's usually right on, at least from my point of view. Thief of Time is a look at that resource that everyone in our day and age claims to have not enough of, and is scrambling around for. While Prachett's satirical devices can be a bit cutesy at time -- some of the Monks of History parts, in particular, I thought were a bit over the top -- the underlying point is still the same: people create the sense of time deprivation around us. We are the ones responsible for making ourselves feel like we don't have time.

Beyond just our own interactions with time, the main anatognists in the book, the people behind the scenes, also have a serious issue with human life and all that entails. In dealing with them in the book, I get the feeling that Prachett is trying to tell us to wake up and smell the morning coffee. Being human is pretty darn cool, and we should appreciate all the crazy stuff that's around us, and enjoy life.

The Discworld series is not written for those with a dour sense of life or themselves. This, and the other books in the series are easy reads, and don't take long to go through -- but you are almost always guaranteed to laugh out loud at least several times. And somehow, despite the humour, he still manages to make a point about life, and lampoon what's around us. And hopefully the next book will have Captain Carrot.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

People who love sausage and respect the law should never watch either one being made. Law professor and copyright expert Jessica Litman takes a hard look at the process which makes copyright law, and most readers will likely finish her new book, Digital Copyright, with their respect for the law substantially lessened. This is the book for everyone who has ever gotten fed up with IANAL posts and wanted answers that were a bit more informed, everyone who's gotten tired of soundbite analysis of Napster and overheated mailing list discussions. If you're looking for one book to help you understand the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the past and future of copyright law, this is it.

Digital Copyright author Jessica Litman pages 208 publisher Prometheus Books rating 10/10 reviewer Michael Sims ISBN 1-57392-889-5 summary how copyright law is like sausage-making

For a free introduction to Professor Litman's work, you may want to see her webpage, taking special note of the various articles and papers linked at the bottom. Several of her previous articles have been revised into chapters of Digital Copyright, so if you don't find them interesting, the book isn't likely to interest you (though the book is written for a slightly more general audience than the papers).

Almost every discussion of copyright on the web degenerates into name-calling between a faction that insists "copyright is property - you're STEALING!" and a faction that insists "copyright is a bargain between the public and producers, it exists solely to promote the progress of science and the arts, and the producers are trying to gouge the public within an inch of its life". Litman's book will show you the roots of those two viewpoints, the heavy propaganda effort by the copyright industry that has made that shift in law from the second to the first and is trying to make that shift in public perception, and you'll be one up on the average copyright debater.

She goes into excruciating, fascinating, absorbing detail about the process that produced current copyright law and is highly likely to produce future copyright law - the bribes to Congress, the back-room deals, the slimy public relations tactics, the elected officials who don't want to spend the time to learn about a tangential, unimportant issue like copyright. The history of copyright law shows that this is not a new issue - these same battles have been fought over each new medium of storing or transmitting information, and Litman mentions, at least briefly, each of those battles. With each new medium came an expansion of copyright law to cover that medium and a narrowing of the rights of readers/viewers/listeners, until we've reached the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which arguably allows publishers cradle to grave control of every copyrighted work they produce.

One of the major themes expressed in the book is the disconnect between how the average layman supposes that copyright law is and how it actually works. In general, people who haven't read copyright law have many misunderstandings about it, and often refuse to accept the real law when it is presented, because it doesn't make a lot of sense and they have a fundamental belief that law should make sense. Indeed, the odds are (at least in my experience) that any individual random person asserting facts about copyright law is dead wrong.

When you have laws that have been written and revised for one hundred years with no significant input from the public, only people who want to maximize their profits from the resulting law, there's going to be a disconnect.

And that's the "sausage" aspect of this book. Most people respect the law, even copyright law, even if they don't understand it (they obey what they think the law is, or what they think it should be). But after reading this book, I think most people won't respect copyright law any more - they'll realize that copyright law is just a method for a very few companies and industries to maximize their profits at the public's expense, and they'll simply cease to respect it. I'm not at all certain this is a bad thing. A little less respect for authority would probably do American society some good. But be aware of the consequences: if you want your daughter to grow up thinking that making an MP3 from a CD you own is theft, don't use this book for bedtime reading. It will warp impressionable minds.

Chapter 1, Copyright Basics, is just as you'd expect: an overview of copyright law. It's not deep, but the rest of the book does not require in-depth knowledge of copyright law. It's a book written for a popular audience, with enough footnoted references that scholars won't be disppointed or short-changed.

Chapter 2 is available online (so is the introduction). Litman maps out where she intends to go in chapter 2, so it's really the best sales pitch for the book: read it, and you'll either be hooked or not.

Chapter 3 covers compromise - the compromise between copyright interests that creates modern copyright law. When you realize that Congress literally and explicitly (and apparently, shamelessly) rubber-stamps the law written from start to finish by corporate copyright interests, you may feel the bile rise in your throat.

Chapter 4 is a short thought experiment: if you were a lawyer representing the public, and the "bargain" of the 1976 copyright statute was presented to you, would you accept it?

Chapter 5 is an important chapter for advocacy efforts. It covers metaphors, and the important role they play in debate. We've seen this play out in recent news as perjorative terms like "pirate" are applied to organizations like 2600, which, after all, is not even accused of copying a single thing unlawfully, while the New York Times and other large publishers, which freely admit that they copied tens of thousands of articles which they had no rights to in order to sell them for a profit, are called pirates by no one (one newspaper article, in the Christian Science Monitor, mentioned that the individual writers describe this as "cyber-piracy" - that's the closest I got to an adverse characterization of the publishers' position). This "piracy gap" illustrates perfectly Litman's point - controlling the metaphor for any given debate or conflict is of utmost importance.

Chapter 6 covers the collision between copyright lawyers and computers/the internet. Imagine: a world where every single use of any piece of information involved making a copy, if only in a computer's RAM. Suddenly, the right to "make copies", which once covered only the initial production of copyrighted materials, is invoked with every single usage of a material. And instead of revising the law to have roughly the same effect as it used to, copyright interests seized on revising the law in favor of its letter, not its spirit. (Though Litman doesn't mention Lessig here, she's making exactly the same argument that Lessig is in his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace , and I wish it was expanded just a bit.) The chapter generally covers the efforts in the early 1990's that will lead up to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Chapter 7, Creation and Incentives, examines what sort of incentives are actually needed to get people to create copyrighted works. In the face of all evidence, the copyright industry argues that massive incentives are needed. There's a great hypothetical, which I won't ruin for you here, that looks at the copyright incentives needed in two major industries today.

Chapter 8 is titled "Just Say Yes to Licensing!". I don't think I really need to discuss the subject matter here, do I? She points out that the paper which led to the DMCA recommends massive citizen re-education programs - since the law didn't fit with public perceptions, clearly the public's perceptions were at fault, not the law.

Chapter 9 covers the DMCA's passage - each little bargain hammered out by one copyright interest or another, all at the public's expense.

Chapters 10 and 11 cover Napster, DeCSS, and similar areas that regular slashdot readers will be familiar with.

The final two chapters examine the requirements for a digital copyright law that will comport with the expectations of Americans - whose expectations include items like being able to read a work they've published on a device of their own choosing without violating copyright law - and yet still provide an incentive to authors. Although there is nothing wrong with the solution Litman proposes, one gets the impression that it is a sort of pro forma exercise, that she knows there is no realistic hope of her solution being implemented.

Overall, the work is both a strong piece of scholarship (Litman has been studying this for years, and it shows in every footnote) and solid read. Readers on a budget can get the flavor and most of the arguments by reading her papers online, but the work as a coherent whole is solid addition to the library of anyone who cares about copyright issues. Highly recommended.

I'd like to also mention another book about the DMCA, one that I'm not going to do a full review on. Marcia Wilbur has a self-published book titled DMCA, which can be located through various booksellers. I received a copy from the author, and it is about as different from Digital Copyright as night is from day. DMCA draws very strongly from online debates -- it's fast-paced, rushed, very much a persuasive work rather than an informative, scholarly one, and could use some serious copy-editing. Nevertheless, it's an interesting read, and the only paper work I've seen to date that accurately captures the flavor of online discussions about the DMCA.

You can purchase Digital Copyright at Fatbrain.

Reader Torulf contributed the below review of Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface .Though the book does not spend much time on Open Source software, it emphasizes ideas that every programmer probably ought to bear in mind -- at least if they wants hisprograms to have users. (And yes, he takes explicit exception to some UNIX truisms.)

The Human Interface: New Directions for Interface Design author Jef Raskin pages 233 publisher Addison-Wesley rating 9 reviewer Torulf Jernstr�m ISBN 0-201-37937-6 summary A thought-provoking book on how to design user interfaces.

Introduction

The Humane Interface: New Directions for Interface Design, by Jef Raskin, the creator of the Macintosh project, provides an interesting read chock full of controversial ideas. As the book's full title suggests, Raskin focuses mainly on how things ideally should be made, rather than offering advice and recepies that can be immediately applied to problems in today's systems.

Don't Think!

The approach taken by Raskin stems from his definition of a humane interface: "An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties." In practice, this means that the interface he suggests is based on ergonomics and cognetics (psychology).

Basically, the idea is that we can do only one thing well at a time consciously. Most of us can walk, chew bubblegum, hold our bladder and speak (semi-intelligently) with a friend, all at the same time. This is because the only thing we are consciously doing (the only thing we are concentrating on) is the semi-intelligent babble. On the other hand most of us run into trouble when trying to study calculus at the same time we're hitting on a sexy lady (make that a handsome man for those 5% of ladies here at Slashdot, or some sort of hermaphrodite freak for those 11% with doubts about their sex).

The point with this is that the one thing we're consciously working with should, with as few interruptions as possible, be the content we are producing with the computer, not the computer itself. That is, all interaction with the system should, after the initial learning phase, become habitual or automated, just like we can walk or drive a car without ever consciously thinking about it. This way we could maximize productivity and concentrate on the content of our work.

There's Only One Way to Do it

For commands to become habitual as quickly as possible some interface-guidelines are given. First of all, all modes (differing types of responses based on context) should be eliminated. The system should always react in the same way to a command. All modes generate user errors when the user isn't paying attention to what mode the system is currently in (and the user should not have to pay attention to the systems current mode, the user should only have to pay attention to the content he or she is currently producing). An example of mode error happened to me while I was writing this review, just a few lines up: I unintentionally left overwrite on when I thought I was in insert-mode and thus overwrote a word by mistake. Of course, this was no big deal, but I had to take my mind off formulating the sentence to figure out what had happened, just for a second, but long enough to derail my thoughts, and that derailing should never happen.

Another way to speed the transition to habitual use is monotony. You should never have to think about what way to do something, there should always be one, and only one, obvious way. Offering multiple ways of doing the same thing makes the user think about the interface instead of the actual work that should be done. At the very least this slows down the process of making the interface habitual.

Unorthodox Suggestions

There are of course a lot of other suggestions in the book, some expected, some very surprising and unorthodox. The more conventional wisdom includes noting that the interface should be visible. That is one of the downsides of the otherwise efficient command line interface, i.e. you cannot see the commands at your disposal by just looking at the interface. A method called GOMS, for evaluating keystroke efficiency, and Fitts' law (the time it takes for you to hit a GUI button is a function of the distance from the cursor and the size of the button) are also among the less surprising ideas in the book.

The more unorthodox suggestions include Raskin's proposal for a universal undo/redo function, not just in the different applications but in the system itself. The same gesture would always undo, no matter what application or setting you last touched.

The really controversial idea, though, is to abandon applications altogether. There would be only the system, with its commands, and the users' content. Even file-hierarchies should vanish along with the applications, according to Raskin.

Conclusions

The Humane Interface focuses on the principle of user interfaces and the theory behind them. The ideas presented in the book generally make sense, after considering the background and argument for them presented by Raskin; even if some seem very drastic when first encountered (I can hear Slashdotters firing up their flamethrowers after reading the end of last paragraph). As mentioned before, the book does not provide many ready to use recipes. It does provide a good insight into the background of user interfaces, which the reader can apply to the project at hand.

Some related ideas were dicussed about a year ago on slashdot. The Anti-Mac paper discussed then, came to pretty much the opposite conclusions from the ones that Raskin presents (Raskin makes a case against beginner/expert interface levels). After reading both sides of the story, I'm inclined to believe more in Raskin's reasoning.

The only Open Source or Free Software the book mentions is Emacs, in a discussion about string searches. (The incremental model in Emacs is preferable to systems where the search does not begin until you click the search button.) I do, however, believe that the alternative interface models could be an opportunity to the open source community and that Raskin's ideas perhaps are more likely to be implemented and tested in such an environment, compared to the possibility that Microsoft would greatly simplify the thousands of commands that MS Office consists of. I therefore warmly recommend this book to anyone doing software development and I would love to see some of the ideas used in KDE or GNOME.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

jsled contributed the below review of the fascinating Telecosm, a bound to stretch some perceptions of the world and the place that communication bandwidth plays in how we live in it. Telecosm explores the implications of information transfer as an abundant resource and no longer the bottleneck it once was, and raises the question of What's Next.

Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth will Revolutionize Our World author George Gilder pages 264 publisher Free Press rating 8 reviewer jsled ISBN 0-684-80930-3 summary A look at the effect of the coming infinite bandwidth afforded by fiber-optic and high-frequency wireless telecommunication technologies.

"The computer age is over."

In the first sentence of his book Telecosm, George Gilder seeks to garner your attention, shattering the widely held belief, especially on forums like Slashdot, that computers are still the most important development around. However, this is by no means an act of yelling "Fire" in the theatre, as Gilder goes on to explain exactly why patterned silicon [the level of the Microcosm, a previous Gilder book] is increasingly irrelevant to propelling the wave of revolution.

Gilder's thesis is relatively straightfoward: ages are defined by their scaracities and abundances. We've just gone through an age where silicon/computing power was scarce; now, it's become highly abundant. Presently, bandwidth is still relatively scarce [unless you live close to Silicon Valley or other metropolitan hubs]... but very soon, there will be a tremendous amount of bandwidth between everyone. With abundant bandwidth, things will start to change ...

Covering a lot of ground in his book, Gilder jumps casually between quantum phsyics and business sensiblities, from undersea cables laid by Global Crossing up to the LEO satellites launched by Globalstar. In between, he tells well-researched stories about Gates, Grove, Andreesen and many others. Gilder, also author of the Gilder Technology Report, has established his position in the finiancial-information world as someone who's horizon of clarity extends further than most others, and tailors his book to these readers [Appendix A, for example, is a listing of Telecosm players, with their symbols, stock prices and market caps; Appendix B consists of ~1 page detail about these companies.].

Gilder tells the stories of the invention of single-mode fiber, using the fused silica as a wave-guide for the light instead of simply a reflective-clad glass pipe. How the single-mode fiber is enhanced with erbium-doped amplifers, and how wavelength-division multiplexing brings the fiber into it's own, able to supplant the entire old intelligent networks with a simple, all-optical dumb network of enormous capacity. Gilder also quickly summarizes the difference between CDMA and TDMA, and makes more than a couple of references to Shannon, entropy and information theory.

After explaining the seven layers of the OSI model, Gilder argues that they will all be supplanted in the telecosm by the fibersphere, "eliminat[ing] virtually everything but the physical layer from the center of the network". After further proclaiming the imminent death of InterOp, Gilder talks about Metcalfe and the Ethernet as part of his larger message: the classic telecom companies have locked themselves into "copper cages," filled with expensive, intelligent and ultimately doomed control and switching equipment. As available bandwidth approaches infinity, this is not only unnecessary, but ultimately an impediment to communication [the light-into-electrons problem faced by optical-networking companies]. Later, Gilder dismisses ATM, with the statement, "Looming intelligence on the edge of the network will relieve all the current problems attributed to ethernets and will render the neatly calculated optimizations of ATM irrelevant."

While this is not to say that these companies cannot break out of their self-imposed cages, Gilder provides examples of the decisions made which allow new players to come up and stake their claims. How GE focus-grouped itself out of computers, networks and software. How AT&T can only go so far to increase their voice quality because of the cost of upgrading every component of the intelligent network. How government regulation helps create and keep the "Digital Divide" intact.

Gilder also profiles the smart decisions made -- usually by smaller, more nimble companies -- which have started to enable the fibersphere. For each, Gilder talks about the people behind these companies. How Bernard Ebbers of WorldCom flunked out of two "distinctly second-tier" colleges, then created WorldCom from scratch. How John Malone of TCI created a very veritcal arrangement of conduit and content, only to merge conduit and conduit later [merging with AT&T]. How Gary Winnick of Global Crossing, a disciple of Michael Milken, created one of the most exciting companies in the Telecosm. This is a book of names and companies, and by understanding who they are and from whence they came, Gilder allows us to understand just how powerful a force they are.

However, when it comes to predicting the changes associated with infinite bandwidth, Gilder begins to fall short. In just two fanciful chapters at the end, Gilder recaps on some themes of the work, and tells a story or two about the family of the Telecosm, reminiscent of 1950s-style "House of the Future" exhibits. Gilder here tells a story about dad listening to his computer tell him about his portfolio fluctuations while he shaves, the son getting immediate medical attention from the diagnostic sensor linked to the Internet, his daughter submiting her Calculus problems over the net, and his wife doing all the grocery shopping, online, by 9 a.m.

He does, however, have some very important words for the changing face of information delivery in the Telecosm, making promises impacting the nature of society. "The new rule is: The customer is sovereign and he knows what he wants: It is not your product; it is time." Gilder promises that businesses will be forced to abscond their implicit drive to waste your time. The average 38-month wait for the installation of a phone line, and the further telemarketing interruptions. The "supreme time waster", television. The decline of lame mass-market advertising, leaving only supremely-targeted ads which actually have a chance of being beneficial to you. Collaboration enabled by the fibersphere will be "liberated from hierarchies that often waste their time and talents," creating new cottage industries which will thrive and grow. This is a future in which the sovereign individual is freed to become as much as she allows.

Gilder's writing is quite readable, at times bordering on poetic. Though the typos in this edition are a bit annoying, they hardly detract from the quality of the content. However, Gilder does miss one important point; in the abundance of bandwidth, there becomes a new scarcity of content. In the end, Gilder's book may best be thought of as a call to arms: start wasting bandwidth, and start working on solving the next problem -- one of novel creation.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Iain Banks doesn't just write science fiction; he's also a fine writer of other sorts of novels. The Business is his recent novel about a semi-sinister keiretsu which is large, rich, powerful, invisible and nameless. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of The Business is their method for promoting talent: you get promoted to the next level of The Business when your peers agree that they want you leading them.

The Business author Iain Banks pages 393 publisher Simon and Schuster rating 9/10 reviewer Michael Sims ISBN 0-7432-0014-4 summary life in the world's most powerful and least visible corporation

The tale starts off with the protagonist getting woken up at 4AM: one of her subordinates, who is due to participate in an important deal the next day, has woken up with half of his teeth surgically removed.

Who controls the British Crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?

The Business is the world's largest and most powerful entity that you've never heard of. Supposedly predating the Christian Church, the Business once owned the Roman Empire (but only for a little while -- it didn't work out), and now has a great many fingers in a great many pies. Swiss banks? Yes. Offshore islands? Yes. Covert operations? Yes. The Business is like a sort of capitalistic fantasy come to life, the Illuminati made real.

Who keeps Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the Martians under wraps?

Kathryn Telman is a Level Three in the Business, which makes her Rather Important in the scheme of things but she still has ambitions to make it to the top. Kate is one of the Business' experts in the modern world of high technology, and this expertise has allowed her to rise quickly -- she has a natural gift for buying low and selling high, as you will see. But besides the day-to-day operations, the Business is moving strategically: they want to purchase a nation so that they can have a seat at the United Nations. This is one of the few perks that the Business does not already possess, and they are a bit envious of the other Seats ... errr, Nations.

Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?

The whole book is written in the lyrical, flowing, pleasant style that characterizes several of Banks' less gruesome books, such as Look to Windward or Inversions. It's a bit odd, since most writers would write a book like this in a very tense, clipped fashion and Banks rejects that. It's a fun read, all the way through, and even if it won't leave you with a feeling of wonder like some of Banks' books, it's still well worth your time.

Who robs cave fish of their sight?
Who rigs every Oscar night?

We do, we do!

You can find this book at Fatbrain, which also features an excerpt from the book.

Duncan Lawie rides again with this review of the audaciously titled (and written) new book from Paul McAuley, The Secret of Life. It's another entry on the bookshelf of Science Fiction works designed to provoke thought, not merely entertain.

The Secret of Life author Paul McAuley pages 390 publisher UK: HarperCollins Voyager rating 8 reviewer Duncan Lawie ISBN 076530080X summary Summary: A fascinating dissection of the values of science stirred into a near-future peregrination across Mars and America. Paul McAuley has been reviewed on this site before. In the years since Pasquale's Angel was originally published, he has switched publishers and dropped the middle J. More significantly he has become a writer full time, nurturing the continuing growth in breadth and complexity of his work. His last three novels formed the Books of Confluence, a powerfully woven trilogy set about five million years in the future. Just released in the UK, The Secret of Life has more immediate aims, and is set only a quarter of a century from now.

There is considerable potential for hubris in such a title -- and the book itself is something of a chimera, perhaps offering in its own appearance a resonance with the Chi molecule at the centre of its plot.

In the first portion of the book McAuley tempts us to believe that this is his NASA novel -- a common enough route into the near future for authors who wish to discuss conditions off Earth. This section is filled with politicking in the offices and anterooms of Washington, descriptions of NASA facilities around the USA and matter of fact inclusion of astronauts as highly qualified truck drivers.

As the plot heads for Mars the NASA guise morphs and the temptation arises to compare the book with Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy - that icon being almost unavoidable when treating Mars in a near future hard science fiction manner. However, McAuley has been to Mars before (in Red Mars) and on this occasion he sets a slingshot trajectory rather than being trapped by the KSR trilogy's mass. The book re-engineers its characteristics yet again in the final third, careering through a portfolio of political positions and potentials and echoing some of his own earlier works in the process.

Nevertheless, this book is really about science and scientists. It soon becomes apparent that the protagonist, Mariella, is a brilliant scientist but not a dedicated labcoat. Neither is she a forgetful, shock-haired eccentric, though her genius has its fair share of arrogance: her strength of self-belief almost makes the world conform to her expectations. The author's tendency to ineffectual protagonists has been rebuilt slightly closer to the model of American science fiction: Mariella is trapped as much by conspiracy as by co-incidence; by her wilfulness rather than her inaction. Having departed an anti-science Europe, she is constrained by an American model where Big Science is tied to Big Government and Big Money in an unstable bond. The volatility of this instability generates much of the action.

It also leads into arguments that have been rumbling through the research world for years and which have been brought into sharp focus again regarding research on the human genome: how much science belongs in the public domain and what rewards should be available to private research. The more obvious line of reasoning is analogous to the Open Source argument: good science is dependent upon peer review; the constraints of commercial confidentiality act against dissemination of information; compartmentalisation of science reduces the opportunity to see the Big Picture.

The Secret of Life does not go so far as to say that information wants to be free, but it does suggest that (good) scientists want all possible information. This is almost a restatement of the purpose of science -- to learn everything there is to learn. It is this mission of science which many, disparate elements of the modern world object to; though riddled with internal conflict, various Green and radical groups hold to the belief that there are things of which humanity should not wot. This anti-science cant is the subject of McAuley's second line of attack on scientific secrecy: demystification is essential to the public acceptance of the products of science. If the primary perception of scientists involves lab coats, incomprehensible equations and arcane equipment then how do they differ from white-robed druids with their incantations and ritual?

Perhaps sometimes science likes to be seen as being beyond the ken of the average individual, but such an approach can lead to fear as easily as awe. Scientists who fail to interact with such realities are almost as much a subject for Mariella's contempt as are those who allow science to be contained and controlled by commercial and political agendas. She has sympathy with the disenfranchised but she clearly believes that the solution to any practical problem involves more science, not less.

It is tempting to hang much of the thesis of this book on McAuley himself. He was a professional biologist for many years and clearly the almost anthropological insight into this tribe is a product of that time. Whilst the Chi molecule is carefully and intelligently realised, the pacing of the novel has the rhythm of scientific research. Deep discussion and demonstration upon the themes of the book fill out the flat spots in the plot. Mariella is a fascinating character, fully rounded to the degree that she can seem self-contradictory and probably very frustrating for a reader who cannot identify with her -- though such a reader will find much to disagree with in a book so thoroughly embedded in the 21st century world view. On the whole, the book does not quite manage all it sets out to achieve. Given the height at which McAuley aims, this is hardly an extreme criticism. It is a well written and engaging book with considerable food for thought.

You can purchase this book at FatBrain.

Like Open Source and p2p, "multimedia" is a term that gets tossed around a lot, but in this case it's hard to find a coherent theme behind it, or a commonly- accepted definition. As Randall Packer and Ken Jordan point out in Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, the surprisingly readable, history-minded and idealistic volume of essays published this week, multimedia by its very nature is "open, democratic, nonhierarchical, fluid, varied, inclusive -- a slippery domain that evades the critic's grasp just on the verge of definition." It's important, too. (Read more.)

Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality author Edited by Randall Packer and Ken Jordan pages 365 publisher W.W. Norton & Company rating 8/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-393-04979-5 summary The roots and meaning of multimedia

Those traits aren't accidental, the authors say. They were the product of belief and deliberate intent on the part of multimedia's pioneers, who had very specific goals, many of them outlined in this collection. In fact, this is perhaps the best collection yet assembled on the early writings about multimedia, its aesthetics, visions, social impact and astounding potential on the emerging creative relationship between technology -- especially computing -- and human beings.

Packer teaches in the Department of Digital Arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Ken Jordan is a pioneer in Web-based media, the founding editorial director of SonicNet.com and co-founder of the public-interest portal MediaChannel.org.

If you're not certain what multimedia really is or whence it came, Packer and Jordan assembled the best guide yet on a subject of central importance to anyone interested in the future of media, and the growing marriage between art and science. Some of these ideas are grounded in new thinking and research, some go back hundreds of years. The collection is historically significant, given that nobody has ever woven together the different threads, thoughts and impulses that become multimedia, a new form both of media and culture.

Packer and Jordan define the key characteristics intrinsic to computer-based multimedia as integration, interactivity, immersion, hypermedia, and narrativity.

Integration, by their definition, is the combining of artistic forms and technology into a hybrid expression. Interactivity: the ability of the user to manipulate and affect her experience of media directly, and, through media, to communicate with others.

Hypermedia, say Packer and Jordan, is the linking of separate media elements to create a trail of personal association. Immersion is "the experience of entering into the simulation or suggestion of a three-dimensional environment," and narrativity means "aesthetic strategies that derive from the above concepts, which result in nonlinear story forms and media presentation." (Blair Witch Project, for a lite example, or the book A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius, by Dave Eggers).

"With the Dynabook in the early l970's," write Packer and Jordan, "Alan Kay invented a machine that incorporated all five of these characteristics for the first time, giving birth to digital multimedia."

But it is immersion which gives the Net and the Web their most radical impact on creativity, story-telling and presentation, and education.

In "Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies: The State of the Art (l991)," which is reprinted in this book, George Landow and Paul Delany write: "Hypertext...changes our sense of authorship, authorial property, and creativity (or originality) by moving away from the constructions of page-bound technology. In so doing, it promises to have an effect on cultural and intellectual disciplines as important as those produced by earlier shifts in the technology of cultural memory that followed the invention of writing and printing."

Although few people in the off-line world yet take it seriously, Landow and Delany foresaw the revolutionary changes in narrative, story-telling, messaging, culture (like gaming) and art that are one of the most significant characteristics of recent Net history.

Almost everyone reading this has a personal or business stake in multi-media, whether he or she knows it or not. Younger Americans are raised in interactive media environments, and it isn't that big of a stretch to say multimedia is one of the most significant influences in their thinking and learning.

Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality explains how what we call multimedia came about and presents its generally untold and unappreciated history. Specifically, the book sets out in five clear and well-organized parts to explain how the interfaces, links and interactivity that are taken for granted grew out of a series of collaborations between the arts and sciences going all the way back to composer Richard Wagner, whose ideas about the immersive nature of musical theater in many ways foreshadowed the notion of virtual reality. The book flows skillfully from one idea to the next, each section building on the one that preceded it.

The authors have gathered seminal -- often unknown -- writings on the multimedia age: the Futurists' 1916 manifesto on cinema, which suggested that the new medium would unite all media and replace the book; Vannevar Bush's famous 1945 Atlantic Monthly essay that sparked the idea of hyperlinks; J.C.R. Licklider's influential l960 argument that people and computers could one day collaborate in creative work; Nam June Paik's essay proposing that satellite technology might encourage a new kind of global information art; Tim Berners-Lee's l989 proposal for the document-sharing network that became the Web; Pavel Curtis's writings on MUD's and MUDDing.

Although the tech world is usually too busy to dwell much on history, it's interesting to be reminded again that no idea is really new, and to grasp some of the fundamental principles behind multimedia, an idea whose time has definitely come, and with a bang.

You can purchase this book at FatBrain.

The next major battle between hackers and the Corporate Republic will almost surely involve the relatively unknown fields of steganography and digital watermarking, otherwise known as Information Hiding, a scientific discipline to take very seriously. This is where the big three digital policy issues -- privacy, security and copyright -- all collide head-on with corporatism. If they hated Napster, they'll really go nuts over rapidly evolving research into how to hide data inside data. (Read more.)

The engineers and nerds who still run the Tech Nation generally keep their noses to the grindstone. They're disinclined to ponder the long view when it comes to developing new technology, preparing for the many public-policy issues surrounding the things they create.

And policy and technology collide all the time, from the building of the Interstate Highway to the space program to the Net. Three particular hot points emerge, when it comes to civics and technology: security, privacy and intellectual property. Naturally, there's very little rational public or media discussion of any of them, beyond hysteria about violence, cracking, theft and porn.

Steganography is the means by which two or more parties may communicate using invisible communications -- even the act of communicating is disguised. This sort of Information hiding -- as opposed to traditional cryptography -- could upend conventional wisdom about copyright, intellectual property and control of data online. The very idea of digital information hiding is almost bitterly ironic: The Net is the most open information culture ever, yet encroachments by corporatism and government are spawning an entire movement and discipline devoted to new techniques for hiding rather than opening data.

Some parties already understand the import of this struggle. Several weeks ago, academic SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative) researchers canceled a presentation they'd planned at the Fourth Information Hiding Workshop in Pittsburgh. The reason: pressure from the Recording Industry of America (RIAA), concerned that the release of data about advances in watermarking would undermine its long, expensive and still largely unsuccessful efforts to shut down free music on the Net.

Last week, Declan McCullagh of Wired News reported from the conference that Microsoft has developed a prototype system that limits unauthorized music playback by embedding a watermark that remains permanently attached to audio files. (Note: A conventional watermark is a normally invisible pressure mark in expensive paper which can be seen only when the paper is held up to a strong light. Digital watermarks are embedded in computer files as a pattern of bits which appear to be part of the file and are not noticeable to the user. These patterns can be used to detect unauthorized copies.)

During a security panel, reported McCullagh, a Microsoft research scientist demonstrated how the hidden copyright infringement fingerprint is so securely affixed to the audio that it remains intact even if a song is played aloud on speakers in a noisy room, then re-recorded. If the recording industry begins to include watermarks in its song files, Windows would refuse to play copyrighted music that was obtained illegally (as defined by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, written by corporate lobbyists, enthusiastically passed by a Congress besotted with corporate money, and signed by a pliant President Clinton two years ago).

Every few years, the war over control of information online seems to escalate. Cryptography suddenly became critical when businesses started to buy and build networked computer systems and people began exchanging money online. Viruses and other epidemics gained widespread national attention once substantial numbers of computer users began trading programs. When the Net exploded, manufacturing firewalls became an industry.

Now the digerati are making a lot of noise about collaborative filtering and blocking and discussions systems, from weblogs to blogs to other peer-to-peer systems, but steganography is a vastly more significant development. Information Hiding, driven by the most significant policy issues of the Digital Age -- privacy, copyright protection and state surveillance -- is the battleground. It comes as the stakes rise in the conflict between proprietary and open information systems.

This week, according to the New York Times, Microsoft will unveil a broad campaign to counter the open source and free software movements, arguing that it undermines the intellectual property of nations and businesses. The campaign, says John Markoff in the Times, is part of Microsoft's new effort to raise questions about the limits of innovation in open-source approach, to advance the idea that companies who embrace open source are putting their intellectual property at risk. In this context, as the battle lines around content and property become clear, the role of Information Hiding grows more critical.

During much of its growth, the Net escaped the attention of government and politics. That's hardly the case now. Federal law enforcement agencies want the right to track information online. Businesses are terrified about the rise in free and shared data. In the Corporate Republic, business and government both grasp the essence of copyright, security and privacy issues. The war over free music has, almost from the first, been the aspect of this Information Age conflict most visible to the public, a testing ground for new technologies and applications that bring new threats and spark the reinvention of new protection philosophies and mechanisms.

Corporate lobbyists have successfully advanced the idea -- via an expensive, sophisticated media and political campaign -- that new laws and initiatives (from the SDMI to the Sonny Bono Copyright Act to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act) -- are necessary to protect intellectual property from pirates online. It's not so simple. These laws, some horrific in their impact on free speech and the fluid movements of creative works, primarily protect corporate revenues, not intellectual freedom or the rights of creators and artists.

Hiding information in modern media, sometimes in plain sight, has cropped up in music and DVD battles, especially regarding DeCSS, the program developed to allow the descrambling of DVD movies. (The writers of the program reverse-engineered the CSS scrambling methods that the Motion Picture Association of America uses to prevent DVD's from playing on unlicensed player.)

There's little published material about steganography, and what has been written costs a fortune. Information Hiding: Techniques for Steganography and Digital Watermarking edited by Stefan Katzenbeisse and Fabien A.P. Petitcolas, published by Artech House, costs nearly $100. But for anyone whose future work in the future involves information, privacy, security or copyright, you couldn't spend the money more wisely. Steganography manuals may be essential tools of the hacker nation in the coming years, as they fend off corporate and government regulations and intrusions.

The book provides an authorative overview of steganography and digital watermarking. Steganography, the book explains, studies ways to make communication invisible by hiding secrets in innocuous messages, whereas watermarking originates from the perceived need for copyright protection of digital media.

Until recently, traditional cryptography received much more attention in the tech world, but that's changing quickly. The first academic conference on stenography took place in l996, driven by concern over copyright and the growing corporate panic over the ease of making perfect digital copies of audio, video and other works. Katzenbeisse and Petitcolas have assembled reports that describe the new field of information hiding and its many possible applications, and describes watermarking systems and digital fingerprinting. The book also talks about the increasingly complex legal implications of copyright.

Anyone interested in the future of open media, or in issues related to privacy, copyright or security, will be particularly mesmerized by the chapter "Fingerprinting," written by John-Hyeon Lee. In this context, "fingerprints" are characteristics of an object that tend to distinguish it from similiar objects. The primary application of digital fingerprints is copyright protection. The techniques Lee describes don't prevent users from copying data or works, but they enable owners to track down users distributing them illegally.

Since corporate lobbyists have re-defined what is and isn't legal when it comes to copyright in the 21st Century, this kind of fingerprinting has stunning civil liberties implications. This technology goes well beyond the software programs tracking Web use and pages; it gives governments, lawyers and corporations a way to follow and identify, thus control, almost every kind of digitally transmitted information. Fingerprints can also be used for high speed searching.

"Fingerprinting," writes Lee, "is not designed to reveal the exact relationship between the copyrighted product and the product owner unless he or she violates its legal use. Compared with cryptography, this property may look incomplete and imprecise, but it may appeal to users and markets." It sure will.

Fingerprinting may not be designed to reveal relationships between copyrighted products and owners, but there's no reason it wouldn't be used for that purpose. That seems inevitable given the high priority billion dollar media and entertainment conglomerates have put on enforcing copyright online.

Information hiding arises against a backdrop of growing confusion and confrontation about security and copyright, which has no global standard. In China, intellectual property is owned by the state. In the United States, copyright is being redefined by corporatists to grant businesses total contol over ideas in perpetuity, a perversion of the original American idea, which was to give creators and the public both acess to intellectual property, never intended to fall exclusively and in perpetuity into private hands. How can these legal and technical applicatiions be handled rationally, let alone democratically, when every country that hosts the Net sets different standards for privacy and security?

Different cultures not only have radically different notions about copyright, but view culture itself very differently. What the United States considers pornographic might be perfectly acceptable in saner countries like Holland or Finland. Conversely, what is protected as free speech here isn't protected at all in much of the world.

So Information Hiding becomes politically important, as well as technologically central. Steganographers may ultimately decide whether movements like open source and free software can prosper and grow in the face of well-funded and organized attacks by corporations like Microsoft and industries like the record companies. They may give music lovers a way to defy powerful corporations and retain the right of access to the culture they've experienced freely for years. They may preserve the idea of security against state surveillance, intrusive educational systems, or even the private businesses forever collecting personal data.

It's not a huge stretch to say that steganographers may determine whether the Net -- and much of the data that moves through it -- stays free or not. All the more important to understand what they do.

Our veteran reviewer Cliff Lampe takes time from work on his PhD to give you the lowdown on one of the most unusual books about a science-fiction movie that you are likely to encounter. Ever.

Kubrick's 2001: A Triple Allegory author Leonard F. Wheat pages 162 publisher Scarecrow Press rating 7.5 reviewer Cliff Lampe ISBN 081083796x summary And you thought *you* was a crazy sumbitch The Scenario There are times when you read a book and think the author has it dead wrong. Then are times when you suspect he is right, and that thought scares gives you the cold shakes. Wheat's analysis of 2001 is exactly like that. No, this is not another whiney look at the sad differences between Kubrick's vision of what this year would be like and the McDonald's sponsored nightmare of reality television, boy bands and public disinterest in science that we ended up with. This is much crazier than that. Leonard Wheat examines 2001 from the perspective of three different allegories: the Odysseus myth, man-machine symbiosis and the Nietzschean Zarathustra legend.

Wheat is a retired economist, who has a doctorate in political economy and government from Harvard. That in itself does not qualify him to review old movies, but it does say he's used to pretty rigorous analysis. His book is an examination of the movie rather than the book. He points out that the movie was based on a Clarke short story, and the book came after the film. This being the case, Wheat is very centered on Kubrick's vision of the story rather than Clarke's. He uses scripts, director's notes, and some interviews to provide evidence for some of his claims.

So what are those claims? Alot of it makes good sense. For instance, Dave Bowman relates to Ulysses (a reknowned bowman in the myths). He goes on a long voyage and loses all his crew. Pretty neat so far, but Wheat tends to go to far in some oif his claims. Here's an example:

"In the next scene, the moon monolith scene, it becomes evident that TMA-1 symbolizes the wooden Trojan Horse: hence, we are looking for hidden meaning that refers or alludes to the Trojan Horse. And that meaning can be found in TMA-1. Spell out the figure '1' and you get TMA-ONE. These letters, like the last nine in Frank Poole, can be rearranged to form an anagram. In this case, the anagram is "No Meat." A wooden horse has no meat on its skeletal framework."

You had me at "Bowman". *sniff* But the whole "No Meat" thing is just a skoach over the top. It stays pretty topsy-turvy. For example, in the discussion of the man-machine symbiosis allegory, Wheat claims that HAL represents a new type of human called homo-machinus. I don't usually quote this much in a review, but you need to hear this from the horse's mouth. In this next passage, he is showing the anthropomorphism of the HAL-Discovery by claiming the six rockets at the back of the ship, encased in three hexagonal casings, have meaning.

"But why the hexagons? Why not circles or squares or nothing? When I was growing up in the 1930's, which is the same time Kubrick was growing up, most reasonably modern houses had white tile bathroom floors. The tile, in vogue from the turn of the century through World War II, were hexagons, one inch across and fitted together in a honeycomb pattern. The rear-end hexagons are bathroom tiles! They symbolize bathrooms. Hal-Discovery has three bathrooms, one for each mouth. And what is the only being that uses bathrooms to answer the call of nature? Homo sapiens. Once more we see that the intelligent spaceship is a humanoid." Yeah, I know.

There's much, much more where that came from. The thing is, these allegorical statements do make sense. I can see 2001 on a level as being a retelling of the Odysseus myth, and on another level being a moralistic story about the dangers of increasingly blurred lines between the mechanical and the biological. Hell, science fiction is littered with similar stories, and Kubrick is not usually without some sort of moral framework. The Zarathustra allegory obviously fits as well. The death of God, the realization that all humans could become god (or Star Children) as well, the whole schmeal. The problem is that one gets so caught up in the loony evidence like that presented above that it becomes easy to lose track on how cool the idea really is.

It reminds us how good human minds, especially smart ones, are at finding patterns in crazy shit. Reading this book you are impressed with two minds: Kubrick's and Wheat's. Wheat has the premise that Kubrick was so wicked smart that these long strings of meaning are not only possible, they are a sure thing. You also come away with the sense that Wheat is a pretty smart man himself. This book goes too far at times, but is worth reading. One thing's for sure, you'll never watch 2001 again in the same way.

Note: There is a very nice Post-It on the book I was sent saying the cover showing the HAL2000 red eye is a cover designer's screw up. I believe that, since after having read the book I doubt Wheat could have ever missed something as simple as Hal's name. Must kill him every time he looks at the cover in fact.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Duncan Lawie wrote this review of a book (a collection, really, but in a single volume) that's been more than 50 years in the making -- A good reminder that good fiction can transcend its time of origin. Maybe it helps that time of origin plays an important role in the stories collected here.

Tales of the Dying Earth author Jack Vance pages 752 publisher St. Martin's Press rating 8.5 reviewer Duncan Lawie ISBN 0312874561 summary One of the ur-books of SF and of fantasy, and a delight to read.

Jack Vance, like most of his generation, is a veteran of the second world war, during which he started to write. He has continued to be published for over half a century, garnering a worthy collection of awards along the way, including one for his detective fiction. However, his most significant contribution has been to science fiction concepts of the far future and its tropes of planetary romance. In fact, his Tales of the Dying Earth largely defined a subgenre of the distant future. Even Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, produced over 30 years later, has an apparent debt to Vance.

Tales of the Dying Earth is a recently released omnibus which begins with Vance's first published book -- The Dying Earth from 1950 -- and runs through to his last collection of stories from that setting, published in 1984. Over the extensive period in which the stories were produced, the definition of science fiction has changed, so that this omnibus is published in the UK as a "Fantasy Masterwork". However, it is apparent from the American cover that his work is still marketed within the SF mainstream there.

With the weight of opinion supporting Vance and the age of the early parts of this tome, it might seem that actually reading it would be a duty rather than a delight. Thankfully, this is not the case -- Vance has a light but sure touch. To an extent, he is making a virtue of his early inability to produce a complex plot, but the collection of vignettes and episodic stories allows a truly broad canvas.

In any case, the Dying Earth is not a place for great epics. When the bloated red sun may go out at any moment, heroics or malevolence each seem destined to go without reward. The world is a palimpsest and the rich breadth of history, whilst mostly lost or jumbled, is sufficient to ensure that few people of the last days expect to rank with the figures of the past. Nevertheless, the follies and foibles of human nature are inescapable and much of the verbiage is concerned with its wry investigation. Verbiage is used advisedly, as Vance clearly enjoys the richness of the English language and takes pleasure in the opportunity to add to what he finds. Some of his artful extensions have reached out of the book and into our usage -- the dying Earth is the native home of the grue , for example.

The first book, The Dying Earth, is a series of short stories, laying the foundations of a vast and ancient world. The next two, The Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel's Saga make up the bulk of the volume, describing Cugel's accidental journeys across the face of the planet. The final book, Rhialto the Marvellous, focuses on a coterie of magicians. The protagonists are flawed yet have a high opinion of themselves. Cugel often appears unlikely to get away with more than his life but faces both riches and poverty with equanimity. He is almost an archetypal trickster/thief and yet he is a very distinct individual. Rhialto also shows how influential Vance was in defining the idea of the magician, being both intelligent and cunning.

The magic within the book is vast and vague, allowing a reasoned approach to come to any conclusion it chooses -- perhaps deciding that the daemons have an extraterrestrial rather than a supernatural origin. Some of the stories offer the picaresque of a travelogue. Many offer a puzzle of some sort. On occasion, the narration reveals the solution before the character -- usually Cugel -- even notices the problem, allowing the reader to join in the amusement at the players' expense.

In other stories, mostly in the last book, only close reading will uncover something which the central figure considers almost too obvious to even mention. The Dying Earth has such depth and variety that both writer and reader are happy to return time and again to settings old and new. This compleat Tales of the Dying Earth is the essence of reading for pleasure.

You can purchase this book at FatBrain.