Slashdot Mirror

The first edition of this fine book, written by Neil Matthew and Richard Stones, remains one of the top-selling books that we've ever reviewed on Slashdot. At the beginning of this fall, the 2nd edition was introduced, to much fanfare, and a review by Kurt Gray. Click below to find out what's improved, or what's declined. Beginning Linux Programming (Second Edition) author Neil Matthew & Richard Stones pages 897 publisher Wrox Press, 09/1999 rating 8.5/10 reviewer Kurt Gray ISBN 1861002971 summary A big meaty serving of Linux programming know-how

What I'm reviewing here is actually a pre-press draft of the second edition of "Beginning Linux Programming", the first edition of which I reviewed here on Slashdot back in August. Unfortunately this review is two months late; enclosed in the cover jacket I found scrawled message from the publisher addressed to Hemos: "Here's the review copy ... Sept 23 is publication date so a review on Slashdot for then would be great!" ... DOH! Sorry Rob M.

So let's review what I griped about in my previous review of the first edition of this book:

• Content was not Linux specific
• Little mention of perl
• Content was dated to around 1996/97
• No mention of newer API's like GTK+

...and this edition I'd say all those issues have been addressed, in fact now we have entire chapters for Perl and GTK+.

diff first_edition second_edition: Most of the book is the same content as the first edition (with newer illustrations and some areas elaborated in more detail), which again see my previous review for more details on that, with these new sections have been added:

Foreward by Alan Cox: Yes, the king of all patch writers himself lends 5 paragraphs to kick off this new edition summing up by pointing out we now have a new final chapter (Device Drivers) that "is your chance to join the world of kernel hackers" ...so... "put on your pointy hat, grow a beard, drink Jolt Cola, and come join in the fun."

POSIX Threads: Now for Chapter 11 we have 25 pages on POSIX Threads with gotchas specific to Linux. Thread scheduling, semaphores, and mutexes are demonstrated in code.

GNOME and GIMP Toolkit: Chapter 17 is 30 pages devoted to GNOME and the GIMP Toolkit (GTK+) The code examples walk you thourgh creating a simple window, adding widgets to the window, dialogs, button bars, canvases, slider bars, then the CD includes source the ubiquitous Audio CD catalog application written in GNOME. (The authors score bonus points with me by showing a screen shot of the CD column with Nirvana's "In Utero" prominently selected in a multi-column listbox.)

Perl: Chapter 18 is a 30 page introduction to perl covering hashes, special variables, regular expressions, file I/O, etc. Bonus points to the author for explaining how to use CPAN to install modules and the perldoc command.

Device Drivers: Chapter 21 is 75 very useful pages that dig into kernel hacking. By the fourth page in this chapter we have a simple "Hello World" code snippet written as a kernel module, then simple instructions on how to compile your kernel module, load your kernel module (insmod), view messages from your module (dmesg), list loaded modules (lsmod), then unload the module (rmmod). The rest of the chapter discusses kernel API specifics such as timers, task queues, the /proc file system, interupt handling, and memory management. The chapter then discusses the simple RAM Disk Module example included on the CD, and debugging your kernel modules.

What's Good Not only does all the material from the previous edition included in this printing, but more meat, diagrams and screenshots have been added to each existing chapter. Again, I also like the style of presenting code examples right up front in each chapter rather than making the reader wade through endless pages of droning before seeing concrete examples. What's Bad I'm hard pressed to find anything outright bad about this book. I suppose I could make catty remarks about the ties the author are wearing in the cover photo, but I don't wear ties so what the hell do I know?

Purchase this book at fatbrain.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1: Getting Started
• Chapter 2: Shell Programming
• Chapter 3: Working with Files
• Chapter 4: The UNIX Environment
• Chapter 5: Terminals
• Chapter 6: Curses
• Chapter 7: Data Management
• Chapter 8: Development Tools
• Chapter 9: Debugging
• Chapter 10: Processes and Signals
• Chapter 11: POSIX Threads
• Chapter 12: Inter-process Communication: Pipes
• Chapter 13: Semaphores, Message Queues and Shared Memory
• Chapter 14: Sockets
• Chapter 15: Tcl: Tool Command Language
• Chapter 16: Programming in X
• Chapter 17: Programming GNOME using GTK+
• Chapter 18: The Perl Programming Language
• Chapter 19: Programming for the Internet: HTML
• Chapter 20: Internet Programming 2: CGI
• Chapter 21: Device Drivers
• Appendix A: Portability
• Appendix B: FSF and the GNU Project
• Appendix C: Internet Resources
• Appendix D: Bibliography

Quite a number of you out there are into Lego Mindstorms, as evidenced by the number of book reviews that have been sent my way. Below are a couple of reviews, one from Kurt DeMaagd and the other from Will Ware. Click below to get their take on the O'Reilly book The Unofficial Guide to Lego Mindstorms Robots. The Unofficial Guide to Lego Mindstorms Robots author Jonathan B. Knudsen pages 247 publisher O'Reilly & Associates rating 9/10 reviewer Will Ware & Kurt DeMaagd ISBN 1-56592-692-7 summary Get the most out of your Lego Mindstorms The Unofficial Guide to Lego Mindstorms Robots Review by Will Ware

Last year, Lego released their Mindstorms Robotics Invention System. Using this, children and adults can build simple robots whose behavior can be programmed. The Mindstorms system is a major contender for Coolest Toy on the Planet.

The system contains a RCX programmable brick containing an H8/300 microcontroller, some pushbuttons, a little LCD display, and connectors for motors and sensors (light and physical contact). The user writes a program using a graphical programming language on his Windows box, and downloads it to the RCX via infrared.

Not surprisingly, substantial reverse engineering (1, 2) has been done by hobbyists, and it is possible to develop Mindstorms programs on a Linux box and to download the RCX brick from Linux.

Now O'Reilly has joined the Mindstorms fray, with a book full of fun and useful information about how to build and program Mindstorms robots. The book describes four different robots: Hank is a bumper car robot, Trusty uses light sensors to follow a line along the floor, Minerva has a movable arm, and two identical robots play a game called RoboTag. Along the way, the author discusses the physics and mechanics of robots, programming issues, and the available development environments for Mindstorms.

What's Good? There are detailed building instructions for each of the robots, showing photos at various stages of construction. The designs are simple and appear mechanically sound. There are discussion of the physics and mechanics of tank treads, steering, gears, and other things.

The book's chapters sequentially step through several different software development environments. The first chapter starts with the Windows-based RIS environment that comes on the Mindstorms CDROM. Later chapters give programming examples for NQC (Not Quite C), pbFORTH, Visual Basic, and the legOS operating system, which uses an EGCS cross-compiler to target the H8/300. There are more development platforms available, but these give a good sense of what's possible in Mindstorms programming.

The book has dozens of useful URLs, for both official Mindstorm sites and unofficial hobbyist sites. I particularly liked the fact that the author was aware of some of the recent research in robotics. For instance there is some discussion of Rodney Brooks' subsumption architecture, which is used for the RoboTag robots.

Later chapters of the book often expand on designs from earlier chapters, building more sophistocated robots in an accessible, incremental fashion. For the more adventurous hobbyist, the final chapter talks about building your own sensors and actuators, and how to connect them to the RCX.

What's Bad? Some of the photos are too dark and lack contrast. It would also have been nice if the photography had been in color, but black-and-white photos kept the book more affordable.

This book is for the casual weekend robot-building tinkerer, and it never promised to discuss real-time embedded issues in depth. Still, a few topics might have merited at least brief mention. Systems with real-time multitasking must frequently arrange for synchronization and communication between tasks, using mutexes and mailboxes and the like, which brings the possibility of deadlocked processes. Another danger is that an aggressively efficient compiler will sometimes optimize away reads and writes to hardware registers. The fix is to declare such registers with the volatile keyword.

Review by Kurt DeMaagd

While Lego Mindstorms were officially released for a teenage crowd, they have become popular with a wide variety of technically competent people in many age groups. This widespread fascination has opened up a whole new world of opportunities for using Mindstorms. At the same time, the documentation and tutorial included with the Lego kits provide very little information about how to get the most out of the sets. This book fills the void by providing several start-to-finish robot designs, software to run them, and a wealth of other tips and tricks.

After a brief introduction to robotics and how Legos fit in, the author discusses the basics of using Mindstorms to create them. Both chapters present a problem, provide step by step building instructions, provide the necessary information to program the solution, and finally go into greater detail about the Lego features used to solve the particular problem.

While the chapters did an excellent job of presenting this information in general, they fell victim to a problem that would plague the entire book: some of the building diagrams were nigh unto unreadable. Attempting to build a robot based on fuzzy black and white photographs can be quite a chore. Fortunately, none of the robots were so complex that they robots were completely unbuildable.

The first few chapters presented robots programmed with the default RIS programming environment. In chapter four and following, he shows how to program using languages such as Not Quite C, Forth, Sprit.ocx for Visual Basic--or optionally Visual C++ or another ActiveX-aware language--and legOS. Since much of these sections was documenting API's, it was certainly not the most exciting read, but it does provide concise, easily to reference documentation.

Not Quite C, as the name implies, is a C-like language that can be used to program Mindstorms robots. It overcomes many of the limitations of the default RIS programming environment, most notably the lack of variables. One of its biggest advantages is that it does not require the user to install a new version of the firmware on their RCX unit. In general, it provides an excellent balance between power and usability.

The remaining three means of programming presented in the book are fairly mediocre options. PbForth requires the user to download a new firmware version, and the language itself is very archaic in modern software development terms. Using Sprit.ocx is a viable option for people used to programming in Visual Basic or Visual C++, but the control structures are very clunky and non-intuitive. legOS, while it is probably the most powerful option, takes a significant amount of time to set up and develop applications with.

Two of the projects referenced while discussing the various programming languages were particularly interesting, both of which outlined infrared communication. The first program creates a simple remote control for controlling a robot via the IR port on the RCX. The other example, perhaps the most interesting in the book, was creating two robots who played tag with each other. These two robots also communicated with each other via their IR ports.

The last chapter, targetted toward the hard core Mindstorms users outlined how to create additional sensors for Mindstorms. It sketched out such possibilities as a passive light sensor, a Hall effect sensor (magnetic fields), and a touch multiplexor (allowing you to have more touch sensors than normally allowed on the RCS unit).

In general, the book provides a vast array building and programming tips, tricks, and methods. He gives basic information for the person who is just starting, and introduces the advanced user to the vast network of people and product that have made Mindstorms far more than a child's toy.

Purchase this book at fatbrain.

Table of Contents

• Preface

• 1. Welcome to MINDSTORMS
• What is a Robot?
• Mobile Robots
• What is MINDSTORMS?
• What Now?
• Online Resources

• 2. Hank, the Bumper Tank
• About the Building Instructions
• Building Instructions
• A Simple Program
• Wheels
• Bumpers and Feelers
• Gears
• Multitasking
• Online Resources

• 3. Trusty, a Line Follower
• Building Instructions
• Some Tricky Programming
• The Light Sensor
• Idler Wheels
• Using Two Light Sensors
• Online Resources

• 4. Not Quite C
• A Quick Start
• RCX Software Architecture
• NQC Overview
• Trusty Revisited
• Online Resources

• 5. Minverva, a Robot with an Arms
• Building Instructions
• Programming
• Directional Transmission
• Pulleys
• Mechanical Design
• Two Sensors, One Input
• Where am I?
• Online Resources

• 6. PbFORTH
• Replacement Firmware
• pbForth Overview
• About Forth
• pbFORTH Words
• An Expensive Thermometer
• Minerva Revisited
• Debugging
• Online Resources

• 7. A Remote Control for Minerva
• Two Heads are Better Than One
• The Allure of Telerobotics
• Building Instructions
• Programming the Remote Control
• Programming Minerva
• Online Resources

• 8. Using Sprit.ocx with Visual Basic
• You May Already Have Visual Basic
• About Spirit.ocx
• Calling Spirit.ocx
• Immediate and Delayed Gratification
• Programs, Tasks, and Subroutines
• Tips
• Retrieveing the Datalog
• Online Resources

• 9. RoboTag, a Game for Two Robots
• Building Instructions
• Subsumption Architecture
• Online Resources

• 10. LegOS
• About legOS
• Development Tools
• Hello, legOS
• Function Reference
• New Brains for Hank
• Development Tips
• Online Resources

• 11. Make Your Own Sensors
• Mounting
• Passive Sensors
• Powered Sensors
• Touch Multiplexer
• Other Neat Ideas
• What About Actuators?
• Online Resources

• A. Finding Parts and Programming Environments

• B. A pbFORTH Downloader

• C. Future Directions

• Index

Duncan Lawie continues his voyage through science fiction worth reading, reviewing this week James Blish's Cites in Flight. The book itself is a compilation of: They Shall Have Stars, A Life for the Stars, Earthman, Come Home and A Clash of Cymbals (aka The Triumph of Time), all stories by Blish. Click below to read more about the good, and the not-so good in this collection. Cities in Flight author James Blish pages ? publisher Baen Books, 1991 rating 8/10 reviewer Duncan Lawie ISBN 0671720708 summary Thoughtful and intelligent themes combined with classic "sense of wonder" science fiction on a grand scale. The name of James Blish may be familiar to some readers from his Star Trek novelisations in the sixties and seventies. These are a minor part of the late work of a writer important in the development of science fiction out of the pulp era. Blish was an early science fiction critic and the author of a number of significant novels. Much of his work considers religious, moral and metaphysical questions.

Cities in Flight is an important part of science fiction's increase in breadth and complexity through the 1950s. Much of the plotting, particularly in the parts first published, displays the pulp antecedent but the ideas are grand and fully worked through. The glorious central image of Manhattan lifting from the Earth and sailing through the stars is backed by sufficient technological breakthrough and human history to be as convincing as it is wonderful.

The work is episodic and occasionally contrary as a result of its publication history. Much was originally published as short stories and the internal chronology does not closely relate to the order of book publication. Its final publication as a single work - an omnibus, strictly - occurred twenty years after the first publication of the initial short story. Despite, or perhaps because of, this, Cities in Flight manages to cover the next two thousand years of human history in a complex patchwork.

The first book, They Shall Have Stars, is a prologue. It is a short, sharp look at the development of the technology necessary for the society present in the later books. Set early in the next century, this book develops directly from the world of the 1950s. It is a powerful manifesto for the space movement and a convincing, well written, coherent novel.

A Life for the Stars, the second book, steps forward over a thousand years to a time when the exodus of cities from the solar system is almost complete. Aimed at a younger audience, it details the struggles of an Earth boy for acceptance in Manhattan. Many cities have reached a position equivalent to itinerant workers, travelling from planet to planet and taking jobs such as mining or complex manufacturing in exchange for supplies, repairs or money. These cities are referred to as "Okies", reflecting the effects of the dustbowl years of the 1930s on the Midwestern USA. While this is a central plot device it also reflects Blish's interest in the cyclical nature of history.

The next book, Earthman, Come Home, was the first to be published. It is the hub of the saga, covering the height of the freedom of the flying cities and the nature of the end of that lifestyle. In its episodic nature and action-oriented adventures the book displays its origin in science fiction magazines of the early fifties. In its overarching plot and philosophy, Earthman, Come Home shows considerable depth. This book returns to consideration of the importance of the greater good over the individual first discussed in They Shall Have Stars. Other abiding themes of the series are also present - the passage of time and the obtaining of (or failing to reach for) wisdom.

The final book in the internal chronology, A Clash of Cymbals, is more directly concerned with these philosophical questions. It continues the story of Manhattan and its inhabitants, though the city has come to the end of its journey through space. This new circumstance affects the characters as does the inevitability of the triumph of time. The book has little action and much thought but is a tense, and intense, farewell to an amazing universe.

Cities in Flight forms part of the texture of science fiction, both in standing apart from earlier works and through becoming part of the canon, influencing much of what followed. It is filled with the classic science fiction "sense of wonder". There are powerful images and ideas, many of which have been used time and again in subsequent decades; the "spindizzy", the engine of the Flying Cities, may sound almost antiquated but the concept of confusing atomic particles to do the impossible is a standard in many novels using faster than light travel; longevity as a method of carrying a single group of protagonists through an extensive history is another example. Blish uses this immunity to age to explore the nature of history. He appears to believe that only the best of humanity is capable of learning from the past and that as a result we are destined to repeat our own mistakes. The heroes are brave, strong, clever and prepared to do whatever is necessary for good to triumph. Yet, they develop. They become more rounded people, more prepared to defend their territory than their ideals and are barely able to admit the mistakes they are forced to live with. This imparts great depth to an adventure as large as the galaxy.

Duncan Lawie

Purchase this book at fatbrain

Some information on Blish.

When Hemos mentioned this book, at first I didn't realize that it had actually been published in dead-tree form - or more precisely, I didn't realize it hadn't been published in dead-tree form long ago, and I was wondering why he was talking about reviewing it now. Obviously I spend too much time on the net when I can no longer distinguish between webpages and books. The Cathedral and the Bazaar author Eric S. Raymond pages 268 publisher O'Reilly and Associates rating 9/10 reviewer Michael Sims ISBN 1565927249 summary Several of ESR's essays on open source and Linux; dressed, stuffed, and garnished Probably most slashdot readers have at least heard of Eric Raymond. This book collects several of his more famous essays into a single volume.

Raymond is intelligent and literate, and makes his arguments about the benefits of open source in ways that are calculated to convince corporations that there's more money to be made with open code than closed in many situations. He's one of the relatively few people who can write first-hand accounts of long-running, successful open source projects, and can write authoritatively about the hacker community in the early days of the internet.

The essays make good reading, if you're into computers and software at all. Sometimes there are people who are good at something who nevertheless can't write about it. Bill Gates is probably a good example - he's good at what he does, but he sure as hell can't convey his knowledge. I've read Andy Grove's book about his management experiences, and I wasn't impressed by it either - again, it seemed like there was someone who knew how to do something but couldn't explain it (and haven't we all had teachers like that?).

Raymond is not only a gifted hacker, but an excellent writer as well. He manages to convey information about the culture one has to manage, which turns out to be very good way to teach someone how to manage it; or at least it was for me, anyway.

These essays are pretty much required reading, I would say, for anyone running a software company today. If you want to set up an open source project, there's no better information available. The early history of hacking is interesting and of course he's got a good handle on how and why Linux has been so successful.

The only difficulty I have in recommending the book, in fact, is that it's available at no cost on ESR's website. Yes, the essays are all material that's previously been available - indeed, I'd read several of them before. Supposedly they've been revised and expanded for the book - I'm not going to scan them line-by-line to check - but certainly the ideas expressed in the essays haven't changed from the web versions. Frugal readers might easily decide that free documents off a website make better reading than a purchased book.

On the other hand, a book is easier to read than a web page in most cases. And you can't give webpages as holiday presents to your pointy-haired boss who wants to keep your company's code totally closed. So perhaps there's a market for it after all...

The book contains the essays "A Brief History of Hackerdom", "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", "Homesteading the Noosphere", "The Magic Cauldron", "The Revenge of the Hackers", and "How to Become a Hacker".

Pick this book up at fatbrain.

Duncan Lawie, our premier reviewer of fiction has sent us his take on William Gibson's latest effort All Tomorrow's Parties. There was a lot of press surrounding the release of this book - click below to find out more about it, or dicuss your impressions of it. All Tomorrow's Parties author William Gibson pages 277 publisher Putnam Publishing Group rating 7/10 reviewer Duncan Lawie ISBN 0399145796 summary A stylish novel, so highly polished that the surface is almost impossible to see through. William Gibson is surely an author who needs no introduction in this forum but he may need some context. Neuromancer was the first science fiction novel I ever read which had the word 'fuck' in it. This may seem insignificant but it was one tiny element of what made cyberpunk such a revelation. Whilst cyberspace, Gibson's gift to science fiction, was compiled on a typewriter, it is still the dominant public image of what the wired world is like or will become as it matures. His subsequent expansion of that world, with Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, was affected by the incredible advances in the world of computers through the intervening years. With this rate of change it is hardly surprising that Gibson chose to step back from the sharp near-future edge where even the wildest speculation can be overtaken in the time it takes to bring a book to publication. This withdrawal resulted, in Virtual Light, in the presentation of a society where computers are part of the backdrop rather than being of direct interest in the same way that atomic power underlies the science fiction of an earlier age. In Idoru, new technologies come to the fore again and were presented in a more global context.

Gibson's new book, All Tomorrow's Parties, is a capstone to both Idoru and Virtual Light, forming a trilogy of sorts out of books not explicitly tied together beforehand. The process of re-introducing characters who had reached reasonably satisfying closure feels a little forced though the minor characters from the previous two books who are brought back slip in easily and are played a little differently. There are a number of new characters but, as a whole, the cast seems older and wiser. They have dreamed and had their dreams broken or, perhaps worse, had their dreams come true.

There is a soundtrack to this novel and, to my mind, it is by Nick Cave - with an emphasis on his more recent material. There is a similar feeling of having come out of youth, where all nightmares and delights are still possible, into a maturity where having one breath followed by another is a kind of victory and where hope is balanced by experience. Nick Cave's mental landscape has changed over the years, as has Gibson's. This novelist no longer writes cyberpunk but this novel could not exist without its pure cyberpunk antecedents. The shock of the new is largely replaced by a nostalgia for the past. Whilst there are phases of sharp action these are seen as deadly interruptions to normality rather than desirable states. Death is the end, not a means.

Superficially there is very little actual plot in this book. Both character and idea are at the service of a fascinating surface rather than the constructors of genuine depth. It is a novel of style, which is not a common mode in science fiction. Gibson is often criticised for this approach but it is a natural development of the New Wave emphasis on pure literary values in science fiction. As a novel of style it is a great success: the phrasing and terminology glows, particularly in chapter titles - such as "Mariachi Static" - and the way these are incorporated into the text of the chapter; location and action are minimally but completely defined; some characters are kept as shadowy ciphers whilst others are clearly delineated through glimpses of their mental states.

What may underlie the polished surface of Gibson's writing is very difficult to determine. This has often been the case and it may be easier to simply accept that what would be central in most science fiction simply is not so important in this writer's work. In All Tomorrow's Parties however, it is plausible to suggest that Gibson is displaying how unlikely it is that anyone recognises the world-changing event even if they see it. The most significant moment of the novel is observed by an exceedingly minor character. He has no idea what it means and all the characters who might recognise it are too busy attempting to survive catastrophe elsewhere. This is a cool book (in more ways than one) verging on bleakness but saved by it's human values.

Purchase this book at fatbrain.

Nick Cave
All Tomorrow's Parties Website
William Gibson - too many to mention!

chromatic, another of our fine group of book reviewers, took some time with a draft copy of the new O'Reilly and Associates book Using Samba. Written by Robert Eckstein, David Collier-Brown & Peter Kelly, this book helps you learn how to setup Samba, as well as information on the protocol itself. Click below to learn more. Using Samba author Kelly, Peter / Collier-Brown, David / Eckstein, Robert pages 416 publisher O'Reilly & Associates, 11/1999 rating 8/10 reviewer chromatic ISBN 1565924495 summary Using Samba takes you from heterogenous network purgatory into manageable bliss by helping you install, configure, and maintain Samba installations.

Overview

Samba is a suite of software tools implementing the SMB protocol. With Samba, you can share files and printers from a Unix-based server to Windows-based clients. You can even control a Windows NT based domain with a Unix server, potentially saving thousands of dollars in software licensing fees and administration costs.

Using Samba takes you from your initial need for Samba in a heterogenous network to installation, through configuration, and ending up with performance tweaking. Most of the focus is on the server side, but there's information about the SMB protocol itself and client setup.

Note: This review is based upon a draft copy of the book. The final copy has been reorganized and some parts have been rewritten. Most of the information still applies.

What's Good?

As is Samba, Using Samba is Unix-variant agnostic, with installation tips for multiple OS's. This covers download sites, compilation, and even SWAT, the web-based configuration interface in Samba 2.0.x. The authors have a clear, clean style (as you'd expect from O'Reilly) and take a common-sense, practical approach to various issues such as security and configuration. The authors also focus on additional Samba utilties like smbclient and smbmount, which are useful for troubleshooting.

The chapter on tweaking for performance is excellent. More books deserve chapters like this. The authors go through the various bottlenecks and demonstrate how modifying one parameter affects the others. (I suspect the general principles are applicable elsewhere.)

The real gem of this book is chapter nine, the troubleshooting tree. If you're stuck with weird behavior and you have a deadline to meet, this chapter alone may be well worth the cover price. It starts by discussing Samba logs, moves into trace and tcpdump, spends pages and pages on an extremely detailed Fault Tree, and ends up with pointers to other resources.

What's not so good?

(These are really minor points. My recommendation is that if you're looking at Samba, you should read the sample chapter and then buy this book.)

The chapter on configuring Windows clients seemed a little out of place, given that this book promotes Samba as a replacement or alternative to a Windows server. That's pretty straightforward, and probably not why you'd buy a book about Samba. The NT Domain model discusison is valuable, though, given that a Samba server may have to act as a Domain Controller or a Master Browser, and that can have big implications.

Using Samba covers both versions 1.9.x and 2.0.x. It would have made more sense to me to stick with the latest stable version and cover it in detail. However, most of the options are the same between the two, and the differences are clearly marked. There are only a handful of places where this comes up. As I said, it's only a minor issue.

The Bottom Line

If you know you need Samba and want some help setting it up and configuring it, this is your book. If you're curious about what Samba can do for your network, flip through the first chapter and rest assured that this book will help you get things under control.

Purchase this book at fatbrain

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Learning the Samba
What is Samba?
What Can Samba Do For Me?
Getting Familiar with a SMB/CIFS Network
Microsoft Implementations
An Overview of the Samba Distribution
How Can I Get Samba?
What's New in Samba 2.0?
And That's Not All...

2. Installing Samba on a Unix System
Downloading the Samba Distribution
Configuring Samba
Compiling and Installing Samba
A Basic Samba Configuration File
Starting the Samba Daemons
Testing the Samba Daemons

3. Configuring Windows Clients
Setting Up Windows 95/98 Computers
Setting Up Windows NT 4.0 Computers
An Introduction to SMB/CIFS

4. Disk Shares
Learning the Samba Configuration File
Special Sections
Configuration File Options
Server Configuration
Disk Share Configuration
Networking Options with Samba
Virtual Servers
Logging Configuration Options

5. Browsing and Advanced Disk Shares
Browsing
Filesystem Differences
File Permissions and Attributes on MS-DOS and Unix
Name Mangling and Case
Locks and Oplocks

6. Users, Security, and Domains
Users and Groups
Controlling Access to Shares
Authentication Security
Passwords
Windows Domains
Logon Scripts

7. Printing and Name Resolution
Sending Print Jobs to Samba
Printing to Windows Client Printers
Name Resolution with Samba

8. Additional Samba Information
Supporting Programmers
Magic Scripts
Internationalization
WinPopup Messages
Recently Added Options
Miscellaneous Options
Backups with smbtar

9. Troubleshooting Samba
The Tool Bag
The Fault Tree
Extra Resources

A. Configuring Samba with SSL

B. Samba Performance Tuning

C. Samba Configuration Option Quick Reference

D. Summary of Samba Daemons and Commands

E. Downloading Samba with CVS

F. Sample Configuration File

cacl, who's racheting up the ranks of book reviewers, has returned with a review of the latest Neil Gaiman work Sandman: The Dream Hunters. He and Yoshitaka Amanos produced this work together, which is Gaiman's first return into the Sandman story in several years. You may remember the name recently from our review of Princess Mononoke, a recent anime film. If you've read Sandman before, you know the art of it - and if you haven't, you should. Sandman: The Dream Hunters author Neil Gaiman and Yoshitaka Amano pages 96 publisher DC Comics, 11/99 rating 10/10 reviewer cacl ISBN 1563895730 summary A beautifully written and illustrated fairy tale The Scenario

In researching his writing for the movie Princess Mononoke, Neil Gaiman ran across an old Japanese fairy tale called "The Fox, the Monk and the Mikado of All Night's Dreaming" in a compilation by Rev. B. W. Ashton. For the tenth anniversary of the first edition of the Sandman graphic novel series, Gaiman had been asked to write something, and he decided to retell this old story in his own way. The twists of fate that combined the desire to write this story with the artistic talents of Yoshitaka Amano need to be roundly thanked for the beauty of the work that resulted.

As I greedily unwrapped this book, a little like one of the bad children in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the illustrations on the inside of the cover presaged the treat that was going to be the reading of this book. The inside covers and fly pages are illustrated with these simple, elegant ink drawings that at one time flow and define the pages between them.

After starting the book, I did not stop. I walked on sidewalks, slamming into people, stubbing my toes, stopping in my tracks occasionally, until I could find a bench to finish the reading. I sat there, with my rear growing cold, and my hands red from the chill, devouring this lovely story. When I finished, I sat for several minutes, watching people walk by, until I shook my head and resumed the dirty details of my daily life.

These pages are an archetypal story of love, heroism, evil, magic, faith and revenge. A fox sacrifices herself to save the monk with whom she has fallen in love. The monk, in turn, sacrifices himself to save the fox, who then seeks revenge on the evil mage who caused the death of the one she loves. "The onmyoji who did this to you will learn what it means to take something from a fox."

Several characters from the Sandman universe appear here, old favorites like Cain and Abel, Fiddler's Green and the Gryphon, among others. Gaiman wisely chose not to saturate the story with other characters, even though a part of me cries out for Death to have at least made a cameo. Still, having tried to squeeze too many recurring characters in would have detracted from the original beauty of the tale, and I was glad to see such wisdom in this writing.

What's Bad?

If you don't like mythology, folklore, fairytales, or art, you may not enjoy this book. Because there are so many illustrations, as one might suspect, the price of the book is fairly high. If you've read Gaiman before, and absolutely hated him, avoid this book. If you've seen Amano's work before and hated it, avoid this book. If you meet either of these two prior conditions, go to your doctor and ask for enough drugs that you become human again.

What's Good?

The most impressive part of this book is that Morpheus becomes a central character without overbearing the framework of the original tale. This makes sense, since Gaiman had picked this story carefully for having a Sandman type character already in it. His inclusion of other Dreaming elements is also relatively smooth and they take on an Eastern tenor that is convincing and elegant.

Amano's illustrations are breathtaking. I'm not a serious fan of Japanese animation. I watched Voltron religiously, but that was pretty much it. I realize now I just wasn't seeing the right Japanese artwork. Amano has created a series of images that are as varied as they are beautiful, and the depth they add to the story is irreplaceable. Stark grey images with flat, monochromatic landscapes can appear on one page, while the next is a brightly colored, magical hodgepodge of elements that quicken the pulse. Delicate strokes and dainty pastels make way for violent brush marks with somber, solid colors on the next page.

So What's In It For Me?

A great book. This is something to give to the next idiot who says, when you tell them you sometimes read graphic novels, "Oh comic books." It's not a computer book. It will not explain how to hack Perl code or tell the difference between GPL and SCSL. However, as a human, you need to grow, and this is food for the brain and soul. This is the type of work that will help you in ways that you cannot measure, but are perhaps more important than those you can.

Buy this book and read it. Buy a copy for a friend, or a family member. This is a great tale with gorgeous art. You cannot lose by having this around you.

Other important links...

Buy this fine text at fatbrain.

You should also read Good Omensbecause both Hemos and I think it is one of the funniest books out there.

Visit the Vertigo Site

And for good measure, spend some time again with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

cacl, who's racheting up the ranks of book reviewers, has returned with a review of the latest Neil Gaiman work Sandman: The Dream Hunters. He and Yoshitaka Amanos produced this work together, which is Gaiman's first return into the Sandman story in several years. You may remember the name recently from our review of Princess Mononoke, a recent anime film. If you've read Sandman before, you know the art of it - and if you haven't, you should. Sandman: The Dream Hunters author Neil Gaiman and Yoshitaka Amano pages 96 publisher DC Comics, 11/99 rating 10/10 reviewer cacl ISBN 1563895730 summary A beautifully written and illustrated fairy tale The Scenario

In researching his writing for the movie Princess Mononoke, Neil Gaiman ran across an old Japanese fairy tale called "The Fox, the Monk and the Mikado of All Night's Dreaming" in a compilation by Rev. B. W. Ashton. For the tenth anniversary of the first edition of the Sandman graphic novel series, Gaiman had been asked to write something, and he decided to retell this old story in his own way. The twists of fate that combined the desire to write this story with the artistic talents of Yoshitaka Amano need to be roundly thanked for the beauty of the work that resulted.

As I greedily unwrapped this book, a little like one of the bad children in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the illustrations on the inside of the cover presaged the treat that was going to be the reading of this book. The inside covers and fly pages are illustrated with these simple, elegant ink drawings that at one time flow and define the pages between them.

After starting the book, I did not stop. I walked on sidewalks, slamming into people, stubbing my toes, stopping in my tracks occasionally, until I could find a bench to finish the reading. I sat there, with my rear growing cold, and my hands red from the chill, devouring this lovely story. When I finished, I sat for several minutes, watching people walk by, until I shook my head and resumed the dirty details of my daily life.

These pages are an archetypal story of love, heroism, evil, magic, faith and revenge. A fox sacrifices herself to save the monk with whom she has fallen in love. The monk, in turn, sacrifices himself to save the fox, who then seeks revenge on the evil mage who caused the death of the one she loves. "The onmyoji who did this to you will learn what it means to take something from a fox."

Several characters from the Sandman universe appear here, old favorites like Cain and Abel, Fiddler's Green and the Gryphon, among others. Gaiman wisely chose not to saturate the story with other characters, even though a part of me cries out for Death to have at least made a cameo. Still, having tried to squeeze too many recurring characters in would have detracted from the original beauty of the tale, and I was glad to see such wisdom in this writing.

What's Bad?

If you don't like mythology, folklore, fairytales, or art, you may not enjoy this book. Because there are so many illustrations, as one might suspect, the price of the book is fairly high. If you've read Gaiman before, and absolutely hated him, avoid this book. If you've seen Amano's work before and hated it, avoid this book. If you meet either of these two prior conditions, go to your doctor and ask for enough drugs that you become human again.

What's Good?

The most impressive part of this book is that Morpheus becomes a central character without overbearing the framework of the original tale. This makes sense, since Gaiman had picked this story carefully for having a Sandman type character already in it. His inclusion of other Dreaming elements is also relatively smooth and they take on an Eastern tenor that is convincing and elegant.

Amano's illustrations are breathtaking. I'm not a serious fan of Japanese animation. I watched Voltron religiously, but that was pretty much it. I realize now I just wasn't seeing the right Japanese artwork. Amano has created a series of images that are as varied as they are beautiful, and the depth they add to the story is irreplaceable. Stark grey images with flat, monochromatic landscapes can appear on one page, while the next is a brightly colored, magical hodgepodge of elements that quicken the pulse. Delicate strokes and dainty pastels make way for violent brush marks with somber, solid colors on the next page.

So What's In It For Me?

A great book. This is something to give to the next idiot who says, when you tell them you sometimes read graphic novels, "Oh comic books." It's not a computer book. It will not explain how to hack Perl code or tell the difference between GPL and SCSL. However, as a human, you need to grow, and this is food for the brain and soul. This is the type of work that will help you in ways that you cannot measure, but are perhaps more important than those you can.

Buy this book and read it. Buy a copy for a friend, or a family member. This is a great tale with gorgeous art. You cannot lose by having this around you.

Other important links...

Buy this fine text at fatbrain.

You should also read Good Omensbecause both Hemos and I think it is one of the funniest books out there.

Visit the Vertigo Site

And for good measure, spend some time again with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Andrew Hunt has come through with his first review for Slashdot, of David Zindell's The Broken God. Set in the distant future, the book chronicles vast, divinely created supercomputers, a humanity spread throughout the stars, and the notion of humanity achieving divine nature. Excellent science fiction. The Broken God author David Zindell pages 695 publisher Bantam Books rating 9.5/10 reviewer Andrew Hunt ISBN 0553564501 summary Story of divinity in the distance future. The Scenario

This masterful work of science fiction by David Zindell takes place several thousand years after the destruction and abandonment of Earth. Humanity now covers thousands of worlds and shares the galaxy with many races of aliens. Gods roam the universe and several inhabit huge nebulae in the Milky Way, endlessly turning dead matter into the vast supercomputers that make up their brains. Among these are Nicolas Daru Ede, who imprinted his consciousness into a computer and became humanity's first god; and Mallory Ringess, who discovered an entirely different path toward godhood embedded in human genetic memory.

Danlo wi Soli Ringess, the son of Mallory Ringess, is born on the planet Icefall, heart of civilization and home of the Order, the group of intellectuals dedicated to discovering all that is knowable about reality. However, he is born deep in the Icefall's frozen wilderness into a group of primitives who know nothing more of civilization than a rumor of an Unreal City far to the east. When he is thirteen years old, an engineered virus kills all the members of his tribe. It is his fate to journey far across Icefall's frozen waste to the Unreal City, that is properly called Neverness, to join the ranks of the most glorified profession of the Order, the Pilots, and to learn of the infinite possibilities for humans.

What's Bad?

[This section left blank intentionally.]

What's Good?

Zindell displays incredible skill and imagination in constructing this universe. Neverness is populated by many species of aliens and groups of humans, each with its own philosophy and view of reality. More importantly, Neverness is the home of the Order of Mystical Mathematicians and Other Keepers of the Ineffable Flame. There are many professions in the Order, from Pilots to Librarians, and each dedicates itself to understanding reality more deeply in a different way.

While Neverness is civilization's most important city and the setting of the novel, Zindell does not neglect to describe the rest of the galaxy. Many philosophies, religions, and wars helped shape civilization, and the author presents this background information without disrupting the flow of the story.

This universe is apprehended through the experiences of Danlo Ringess. Because of his tragic childhood, heroic journey through the wilderness, and enduring love of life, the reader sympathizes with him. Because of his combination of primitive beliefs and desire to experience the world in different ways, he continually interests the reader. Because of his genius and wildness, the reader sees him as a hero.

What does an author need other than a beautifully crafted universe and a compelling character? Zindell has not forgotten to include a plot in his novel. It involves the birth of a religion, romance, assassins, warring philosophies, flight through the stars, virtual realities, and much more.

Conclusion

Many Slashdot readers will like the computer ideas presented in this book, including his idea of "cybernetic philosophies" which view the universe as a computer program run to discover the answer to some question. There's also stuff about telepathic interfaces and virtual realities.

Much of this book can be thought of as the author discussing the difference between perception of reality and reality itself, and many other themes pervade the novel. The possibility of discussing such topics in the flow of an intriguing plot is why I enjoy science fiction so much, and why I view this book as one of the best recent examples of the genre. It's also why I think you should procede directly to mxbf.com (or your local used book store) and buy a copy of this book immediately. It's been out of print for a while now, so the big retail stores probably won't have it.

If you like this book, you should definitely read Neverness, by the same author, which might be considered the prequel to The Broken God. It's at least as good, though harder to get your hands on.

If such things offend you, you might want to know that there are occasional fairly graphic sex scenes.

Purchase this book at fatbrain.

Being the history major that I was, I was happy when Joe Mahoney offered to review Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger's new book The Year 1000 - What life was like at the turn of the first millennium. Looks back at a year in the life of a common Englishman, circa 1000 AD, in a very entertaining and informative way. The Year 1000 - What life was like at the turn of the first mil author Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger pages 230 publisher Little Brown & Company, 02/1999 rating 8/10 reviewer Joe Mahoney ISBN 0316558400 summary Fascinating glimpse at the world and life of an Englishman in the Year 1000. The Scenario I found The Year 1000 whilst browsing the shelves of the bookstore across the road from work. With all the hype and speculation about the new millennium and the infamous Y2K bug, the title grabbed my attention straight away. The subject matter also appealled to my inner-geek: what was life like in Y1K? What technology did they have? What didn't they have yet? How did the average Joe make a gold coin? What did the beer taste like back then? All important questions I'm sure you'll agree.

What's Good? The whole book is good. It answered all my questions, asked me a few more and answered those as well. Lacey and Danziger have based the book on a thousand year old document called the Julius Work Calendar. The first chapter of The Year 1000 describes the technology used to create such documents and how it has been preserved over the centuries.

With one chapter devoted to each month of the year, the narrative is based on illustrations gathered from the Julius Work Calendar. Where an picture shows men working in the fields, Lacey and Danziger discuss the importance of the harvest, and the general diet of an Anglo-Saxon family. A picture showing a man stealing planks introduces a chapter on crime and punishment in a time when technology hadn't advanced far enough to build reliable prisons.

There is also an interesting discussion about whether the common person was worried about their new millenium. The Venerable Bede had popularised the date system we use today in the 700s, so people actually knew about it. There was also a variation of the Y2K bug we have today: Arabic numerals and technology such as the Abacus were not popular yet, and those who could do arithmetic used Roman numberals. Try multiplying MCXIV by CXCIX in your head. According to The Year 1000:

The scholar Alucin said that 9,000 should be regarded as the upper limit beyound which figuring was not possible, and when that was written out as MMMMMMMMM one could understand what he means.
(Page 191)

The authors cover a wide range of topics from weapons technology to Anglo-Saxon medicine to religion to the discovery of the new world by Leif Eriksson. Whether you're a history buff or not, you won't get lost or confused reading this book. The style of writing is very accessible and you can easily read a couple of chapters in a luch break, which is how I did it.

What's Bad? These are not so much bad things as "I wish there were more things". The Year 1000 only covers Anglo-Saxon England. You will find a little information about the Vikings and the Normans, but that's all. The authors never set out to show their readers a picture of the whole world and the sub-sub title of the book is An Englisman's World.

Fortunately Lacey and Danziger provide a bibliography and source notes for those who want to find out more. I'm certainly going to finding out a bit more about Europe and Arabia.

So What's In It For Me? The Year 1000 will appeal to a wide audience. If you like reading about the past, or enjoy finding out the origins of technology, society or language, or if you just want to put the current millennium hype into perspective, this book is for you.

Purchase this book at fatbrain.

Table of Contents

1. The Julius Work Calendar - The Wonder of Survival
2. January - For All the Saints
3. February - Welcome to Enga-lond
4. March - Heads for Food
5. April - Feasting
6. May - Wealth and Wool
7. June - Life in Town
8. July - The Hungry Gap
9. August - Remedies
10. September - Pagans and Pannage
11. October - War Games
12. November - Females and the Price of Fondling
13. December - The End of Things, or a New Beginning?
14. The English Spirit
15. Acknowledgements
16. Bibliography
17. Source Notes
18. Index

Sebbo, lately of our review of The Big U is taking a crack at five of Daniel Pinkwater's books which have been gathered together in one. The stories are: Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars; Slaves of Spiegel; The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death; The Last Guru; and Young Adult Novel. Pinkwater is a great author - click below to learn more; or if you have read any of them, contribute to the discussion! Five Novels author Daniel Pinkwater pages 656 publisher Farrar Straus Giroux, 09/1997 rating 8/10 reviewer Sebbo ISBN 0374423296 summary Three works of classic subversive and hilarious writing (and two so-so stories) in one convenient volume Preamble Let's say you're in high school. Worse yet, let's say you're in junior high school. The other kids mostly ignore you, and occasionally pick on you. The teachers are about the same. The schoolwork is tedious, and Gym is a nightmare. There seems to have been some sort of terrible mixup; you're the only human in a school full of Martians, or perhaps the other way around.

But you have a secret--a message in a bottle, a communique from your fellow aliens outside your prison. There's hope--there are others; weirdos like you. You've discovered the novels of Daniel Pinkwater.

Who? Pinkwater's a prolific writer and occasional illustrator, and has cranked out dozens of children's books, a couple dozen Young Adult novels, numerous books-on-tape, a couple essay collections, a dog-training guide, an adult novel, and at least one comic strip collection in the last 30 years. 5 Novels is a collection of his work from the early '80s. How they were picked I have no idea. The works in question are: Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars; Slaves of Spiegel; The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death; The Last Guru; and Young Adult Novel. There's not much to say about the collection itself: it's a decently bound trade paperback. The foreword by Jules Feiffer is charming, but not particularly insightful, and not quite two pages long. The variation in fonts among the books suggests that very little alteration was done from the original printings before sending the collection to press.

The books are aimed at teenagers, but that's certainly not their only audience. I read Young Adult Novel to a group of 20 30-ish Boston geeks earlier this month, and they loved it and clamored for more. If the portrait at the beginning of this piece is familiar from any point in your life, I think you'll get something out of Pinkwater now.

Themes The most evident thing about Pinkwater's writing is the goofy sense of humor, as one can guess from a glance at the titles. Much of his humor derives from a childlike delight in inherently absurd objects, such as avocados. Bizzarre place names or background characters, like the town of Hogboro or the McTavish's Pickleburgers fast food chain often will reoccur from book to book. The Hoboken Chicken Emergencyclopedia is an attempt by a fan to to catalogue these references, along with everything else mentioned in Pinkwater's book.

Another source of humor is absurd justapositions of the fantastic and mundane, such as the marauding space pirates who invariably wear plaid sportscoats and white plastic shoes. A third vein is the puncturing of authority.

Adults in Pinkwater's world are--at best--pretentious buffoons. In Alan Mendelsohn, for example, first the occult bookseller Samuel Klugarsh, then the Venusian motorcyclist Clarence Yojimbo, and then the astral traveller Lance Hergeschleimer are first admired by the story's heroes, but soon prove less clever, honest, and resourceful than themselves. Teachers are overbearing petty tyrants, bored clock-punchers, or raving lunatics. Parents pursue their own petty obsessions in blithe ignorance of their children's lives. They appear in these books as inert and mostly useless creatures, like enormous ambulatory vegetables endowed with the authority to set bedtimes, but lacking the wit to effectively enforce them.

The ideal Pinkwater novel would go like this: short, fat kid of above-average but not exceptional intelligence is lonely, picked-on, and bored at high school. He makes friends with a somewhat more flamboyant and self-confident peer, and together they have adventures that discover a more strange, beautiful and exciting world than had previously been revealed to them. This is a composite picture, and most of his books don't have all those exact elements, but these are recurring themes.

Girls are generally conspicuously absent from this picture, with Rat, the James Dean-obsessed punk rocker of the Snarkout books (who our heroes find immensely intimidating) a notable exception. The important relationships are male friendships.

Dangers in Pinkwater's world come from the familiar, not the strange. Characters may be beaten-up or humiliated by their classmates, but the threats of the outside world are always mild by comparison. The master criminal in The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death immerses his enemies in vats of warm egg fu yung or forces them to watch old German comedy reels. The interdimensional tyrants Mannie, Moe, and Jack in Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars administer kicks in the tush to those who oppose them. The teenage protaganists prowl the streets of the city's seedier districts late at night sometimes with a little nervousness, but never any real sense of danger.

Virtually all Pinkwater characters have their distinctive obsessions, which they carry to the point of mania: collecting comic books, building model ships, making home movies, macrobiotic cooking, fleegix appreciation (fleegix is kinda like hot chocolate, and immensely popular on the planet of Waka-Waka), or snarking out (sneaking out to attend the midnight double bill at the Snark theater).

Place is very important to Pinkwater, and his Chicago upbringing suffuses the way he writes about it. Just as his characters are in conflict with the blowdried, athletic and suntanned culture around them, so they seek out landscapes that offer escape from the strip mall and housing development architecture that reflects that culture. They find them in the older, grittier city of brick buildings and narrow, twisting streets that lies beneath and surrounded by the shinier metropolis that sprung up around it. In Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, the narrator, Leonard Neeble, describes a return to his old neighborhood in Hogboro after having moved out to the suburb of West Kangaroo Park.

We stopped and looked in the window of the fish store. All the fish were lying dead on the crushed ice, except some crabs who were feebly waving their claws around. It smelled good. It was a good fish store. Everything was fresh. There was seaweed packed between some of the fish. People in West Kangaroo Park must think that fish came out of the sea frozen and packed in little square boxes.

The stories can be read as fables about the liberating power of fantasy. The characters excape from a world of deadening tedium and threat into one of excitement where they are included and admired, which eventually allows them to cope better with the mundane world

I wouldn't go too far with that, though. Pinkwater shows a laudable aversion for anything smacking of preachiness or "relevance." Here's the raciest passage from the book: "Rat was pretty outspoken. She had a lot of things to say about James Dean and the things she would have been willing to do with him and with no one else, if only he had not died. Winston and I got the impression that Rat knew a lot more about sex than we did, so we kept off the subject in order not to appear ignorant."

The Books Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars An excellent introduction to Pinkwater's work. Leonard Neeble's parents move from their city apartment to a ranch house in the suburbs, and Neeble finds himself at Bat Masterson Jurnior High School, where "'all you have to do is not look like everybody else, and you're instant garbage.'" He falls in with Alan Mendelsohn, an abrasive and geeky boy from the Bronx, with the odd habit of telling random people that he's actually a Martian. After a visit to an occult bookstore, they learn the secrets of mind control, but after a day of giving teachers uncontrollable cigarette joneses and making classmates trip over their own feet, they soon get bored and move on to interdimensional travel. The inhabitants of the first other dimension they visit turn out to be superstitious and cowardly, and Leonard and Alan able to rescue them from the dominion of the dread bandits Manny, Moe, and Jack (why this isn't trademark infringement, I have no idea). Slaves of Spiegel A short epistolary novel, featuring the dread Speigellian space pirates of Fat Men from Space, who roam the galaxy in search of junkfood. This book depends entirely on humor, with no memorable characters or emotional weight, and seems aimed at rather younger readers than the other four. Not actually painful to read, but not recommended. The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death Walter Gant and Winston Bongo spend their nights sneaking out of their houses to go to the Snark theater double-bill, in an attempt to escape the crushing tedium of Genghis Kahn High School, keeping scrupulous tally of successful Snarkouts, both joint and solo. One night they meet Bentley Saunders Harrison Matthews ("You can call me Rat."), a student at nearby George Armstrong Custer High School who has also independently invented the sport, and are drawn into the mystery of her kidnapped uncle, the mad scientist Flipping Hades Terwilliger, who appears to have been kidnapped by the archcriminal Wallace Nussbaum. Sherlock Holmes fans will enjoy the large number of Holmes references. Funny and evocative. The Last Guru Another fairly weak one. Harold Platz, a 13-year-old boy, becomes, through a series of improbable stock market investments, one of the richest people in the world, and is discovered to be the reincarnated founder ot the Silly Hat Sect, which appears to be loosely based on Tibetan Buddhism. The primary purpose of the book seems to make fun of the American New Age movement, which was still a fish in a barrel last time I checked. Young Adult Novel The Wild Dada Ducks--Charlie the Cat, Captain Colossal, Igor, the Indiana Zephyr, and the Honorable Venustiano Carranza (President of Mexico)--are a group of students who attempt to resurrect the Dada art movement at Himmler High school. Young Adult Novel has a very different feel to it than Pinkwater's other High School novels. There are no elements of fantasy or science fiction--the story takes place entirely on or near the Himmler campus. Rather than trying to escape the High School experience, the Wild Dada Ducks attempt to transform it through will and creativity. Their success in doing so is...limited, but the endeavor is one of the funniest damn things I've ever read. Final Notes Avocado of Death has a sequel: The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror, which is very good. Pinkwater denies rumors of a third volume, I Snarked with a Zombie.

Young Adult Novel had a sequel called Dead End Dada. The two were also published together, along with an excerpt from the proposed third volume, The Dada Boys in Collich, under the title Young Adults. Both books are extremely out of print. Any leads on obtaining them would be vastly appreciated.

Pinkwater has a semi-official web site, and is a remarkably prompt correspondent.

As a small child, I was often read The Blue Moose by my parents. Many years later, I realized that it was also by Pinkwater. I recommend it highly. Also recommended is Lizard Music.

Purchase this collection at fatbrain.

Study Questions:

1. Is Osgood Sigerson actually Walter Galt's father?
2. Would it be appropriate to call Pinkwater's books "subversive?" Why or why not?
3. Discuss the role of food in Pinkwater's books. Special emphasis may be payed to the roles of raisin toast and kosher salami. In what light is vegetarianism presented?
4. Discuss the role of Judaism in Pinkwater's books.
5. Authenticity is often a concern of Pinkwater's characters, as in the fish store scene quoted above. What constitutes authenticity for them?
6. Compare and contrast Pinkwater's approach to humor with that of Woody Allen, Douglas Adams, and Stanislaw Lem.

Stern reviewed one of the most gimme books of the year: O'Reilly's User Friendly. The whole gang is gathered together in a dead tree version, which means you can finally take UF where ever you want to be. User Friendly author J.D. "Illiad" Frazer pages 126 publisher O'Reilly & Associates, 1999 rating 9/10 reviewer Stern ISBN 1565926730 summary "Launch marketing drones!". Linux comics come of age

Stern is the president of Information Markets Corp.
Register; answer questions; get paid.

The Scenario

In the 1950s, Charles Schultz taught the world that cartoon art doesn't matter, characters do. So who are the characters of User Friendly, the greatest open-source-savvy comic strip?

Pitr and Mark: the technicians at Columbia Internet Greg: the Columbia Internet tech support guy Miranda: patronized sysadmin and tech support woman Stef: the marketing guy with slow reflexes and a cute tush Dust Puppy: a fuzzy thing which programs well and plays a mean game of quake Crud Puppy: his evil twin Erwin: the AI

Together, they have the sorts of adventures you would expect: supporting stupid clients, fighting evil corporate acquisitions, and thwarting Windows NT installations. The also cross into adventures you might not expect, including SWAT attacks on Microsoft headquarters. The collection wisely ends with User Friendly's legendary satire of the original Star Wars movie.

The naive might compare User Friendly to Dilbert, since they're both set in technology industry offices, but it's really more like Doonesbury. Illiad relies on big talking coke cans the same way Gary Trudeau brings in "Mr. Butts," the big talking cigarette. Where Trudeau has cameo appearances by Donald Trump, Richard Stallman and Eric S. Raymond pop into User Friendly. Most importantly, both cartoons are always topical. Readers of User Friendly do well to keep up with their technology and share certain technical opinions if they want to get the jokes. Among these opinions, that

• Microsoft sucks, and
• Linux is good

The cartoon assumes certain other shared beliefs as well,

• Marketing people are not particularly bright
• People who smile too much should not be trusted
• Quake is good
• Programmers work best when eating junk food and drinking caffeinated beverages

Anybody reading this review at Slashdot is probably well equipped to enjoy User Friendly. In fact, most people reading this review have probably already enjoyed the cartoon, since it is available for free over the web.

What's Bad?

Illiad from time to time pulls out a very old joke, such as the customer who can't find his power switch. The graphics are crude, but frankly that's part of the strip's charm.

What's Good?

The strip is very, very funny, especially when Illiad allows himself to daydream and the storylines become more bizarre. Follow Erwin the AI, as he suffers the successive indignities of being ported to Windows NT, then over to an iMac and a Palm III. Picture Pitr furtively buying "Evil Geniuses for Dummies." The Star Wars satire is brilliant. However strange the story grows (a fuzzball in a hockey mask attacking the marketing staff with a knife?) it never becomes unmoored, and by reading it, you will always feel like a member of the open source club.

So What's In It For Me?

Unless you have a flat panel display in every room and the bathroom, there's probably space in your life for a User Friendly collection. Leave it on the coffee table to impress your guests and to signal your membership in the Open-Source-erati. Leave it in the bathroom and you'll never lack for toilet paper.

Purchase this book at fatbrain.

Long-time reviewer Jason Bennett has sent a review of the official Sun tutorial on the new Swing GUI package called, not surprisingly, The JFC Swing Tutorial. If you are learning Java, use Java or want to learn Java, click below to learn more about this new book. JFC Swing Tutorial author Kathy Walrath & Mary Campione pages 953 publisher Addison Wesley, 06/1999 rating 8/10 reviewer Jason Bennett ISBN 0201433214 summary The official Sun tutorial on the new Swing GUI package Background

I was just finishing up my first year of university when Java burst onto the scene. As those of us who were around then can remember, the hype was intense. Actually, that would be an understatement. You would have thought Java was going to save the world and make your morning coffee all at once. Fortunately, things settled down almost as fast as they began, and Java started on its long road to maturity. In many ways, this book is the culmination of three years of Java maturation. The AWT, Java's original GUI library, has been replaced by a completely new one, Swing, with the release of Java 1.2/2.0. It promises to have more features, be more stable, and generally live up to the platform-specific libraries against which it competes. In many ways, Swing is the hope for Java on the desktop. Of course, you have to figure out all those APIs first....

What's the book about?

The JFC Swing Tutorial is the Sun-imprinted official word on how to code for the Swing API (note that this book is also available for free from Sun's web site [see the link in the title above]). Of it's 950 pages, literally the last 300 are source code to all of the examples in the text, while the first 600 delve into every aspect of Swing. As with most tutorials, things start off slow, with a "hello, world!" equivalent, but the difficulty ramps up quickly. There is a (relatively) short section giving an introduction to layouts, painting, and other GUI basics before the real meat of the book begins.

Chapters 12-17 are the heart of the tutorial, and take the reader through every part of the Swing API. This is broken up into top-level containers (frames, dialogs, applets), intermediate-level containers (panels, panes, tool bars), and atomic components (all the buttons, choosers, and menus). There are tables at the end of each section summarizing the various methods, along with their purposes. There are also example summaries, listing where to find the examples that demonstrate the various concepts presented. The section is quite thorough, with plenty of code interspersed through the text.

The final part delves into the other parts of Swing, including layouts, actions, borders, icons, look and feel, and chapters on event listeners, graphics, and converting from the AWT. These chapters continue the structure begun in the middle sections, with many code examples and handy summary tables.

What's Good?

Simply put, if you want to know how to do something in Swing, it's probably covered in this book to one extent or another. In fact, you're likely to find that your code has already been written for you to some extent, given the copious examples provided. Even if you cannot find exactly what you want, you can likely piece it together from what is provided. It's also nice being the official tutorial, as you can trust that the authors had decent references whenever they had a question or two. This is the official way to do Swing.

What's Bad?

Well, in short, more than I would like. Personally, I'm not well-grounded in doing GUIs. Not to say that I've never done them before, but I've had my struggles in the past. That's one reason I wanted to review this book, as I was hoping to strengthen my skills along the way. Unfortunately, I don't feel like that has happened. Don't misread the title. This isn't a GUI tutorial in any sense of the word; it's a Swing tutorial. The complexity of the text ramps up quite quickly after "hello, world," and if you aren't ready, you'll be lost in the dust. To be honest, I found this to be more of a reference book than a tutorial, at least to the extent that I wouldn't read this book cover-to-cover, but would pull it off the shelf any time I had a Swing question. The examples are thorough and there are plenty of them, but the style and layout do not make for an easy read-through.

So What's In It For Me?

Firstly, you have an amazing advantage of being able to try this book out for free. If you're interested, check out the URL and read through a few sections. Make your own review. You can buy it or ditch it at your leisure. Second, don't use this book as a general GUI tutorial. That's not what it is, and trying to use it as such will only frustrate you. If, however, you know GUIs, and you want to learn about all that Swing has to offer, this is an excellent book. You get an entire CD-ROM full of Java code for your use, plus the official Swing reference. Depending on your needs, this book will either be very helpful, or a very heavy paperweight.

Purchase this book at fatbrain.

• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Before You Start
• Getting Started with Swing
  1. About the JFC and Swing
  2. Compiling and Running Swing Programs
  3. Running Swing Applets
  4. A Quick Tour of a Swing Application's Code
• Features and Concepts
  1. Components and Containment Hierarchies
  2. Layout Management
  3. Event Handling
  4. Painting
  5. Threads and Swing
  6. More Swing Features and Concepts
  7. The Anatomy of a Swing-Based Program
• Using Swing Components
  1. A Visual Index to Swing Components
  2. The JComponent Class
  3. Using Top-Level Containers
  4. Using Intermediate Swing Containers
  5. Using Atomic Components
  6. Solving Common Component Problems
• Laying Out Components
  1. Using Layout Managers
  2. Creating a Custom Layout Manager
  3. Doing Without a Layout Manager
  4. Solving Common Layout Problems
• Using Other Swing Features
• Writing Event Listeners
  1. Some Simple Event-Handling Examples
  2. General Rules for Writing Event Listeners
  3. Listeners Supported by Swing Components
  4. Implementing Listeners for Commonly Handled Events
  5. Summary of Listener API
  6. Solving Common Event-Handling Problems
• Working with Graphics
  1. Overview of Custom Painting
  2. Using Graphics Primitives
  3. Using Images
  4. Performing Animation
  5. Solving Common Graphics Problems
• Converting to Swing
  1. Why to Convert
  2. How to Convert
  3. Conversion Resources
  4. Solving Common Conversion Problems
• Appendices
  1. Code Examples
  2. Reference
• Index

Boy, is this book overdue. If you're reeling from media hype about gazillion-dollar start-ups, Net billionaires, worker benefits and stock options, here's the story -- truly nailed down -- of what life is really like for many workers in the new, hi-tech workplace. NetSlaves: True Tales of Working The Web author Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin pages 246 publisher McGraw Hill rating 7/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-07-135243-0 summary Terrific Truth Telling About Hi-Tech Work

Finally. Amidst the ongoing tidal wave of Net hype, here's "NetSlaves," by Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin, which hits like a buck of ice water splashed in the face.

If you read newspapers, books, or follow Net-business coverage on TV, you might well think work on the Net is mostly about the billionaires who found Hotmail or Yahoo or Netscape, or the clean, benefit-laced, campus-like work environments they provide. You'd have no way of knowing the much more pervasive and unnerving reality: for every one of those there's a zillion companies that come into the world still-born, fail miserably, make and sell crummy stuff, and hire countless miserable, exploited, harassed and burned-out programmers, techies, geeks and nerds.

Baldwin and Lessard are combat veterans of the Net, both in terms of writing and personal experience. They are also long-standing Truth Tellers.

In addition to writing about computing for a number of magazines and websites, they also run the guerilla website NetSlaves, a running testimonial to real life for many in the hi-tech workplace.

"NetSlaves" is a terrific extension of the site, one of the few books to come off of a website that really works as a book. Lessard and Baldwin have a powerful story to tell, and they do it with a lot of punch. "NetSlaves" ought to be handed out to every graduate of every tech school, and given to every new employee of every Net company.

Baldwin and Lessard say their grand "pre-alpha" statement about the Nature of Net-Slavery is this:

"Technology has changed, but human nature hasn't. Whether it's the Gold Rush of 1849 or the Web Rush of l999, people are people. More often than not, they're miserable, nasty, selfish creatures, driven by vanity and greed, doing whatever they can to get ahead, even if it means stepping on the person next to them, crushing the weak, and destroying themselves in the process."

The authors don't have a particularly high regard for many forms of Net work, which they lambaste as the New Media Caste System, but they care about Net workers, and the book is curiously affectionate, even loving about them, as well as a hoot to read.

Both concede that one of their purposes in writing "NetSlaves" is to have the book serve as a quasi-historical, quasi-anthropological reflection of a particular moment in the culture.

Although the tone of "NetSlaves" is informal and funny, the point is pretty serious. "NetSlaves" has done what legions of reporters and authors have so far failed to do: paint a truthful picture of about the new nature of work in the techno-centered world.

For all of the media blabber about Net commerce and hi-tech startups, life in this fast lane can be brutal - insane hours, almost no employee-employer loyalty, greed and moral cowardice, help-desk geeks driven mad by enraged customers, back-stabbing, savage pressure, competiveness and the many resultant neuroses from all of the above.

Baldwin and Lessard make no pretense of objectivity. They write with almost ferocious authority and persuasiveness. They describe themselves as "two angry, cranky bastards out for blood" on behalf of their exhausted selves and the countless burnouts, geniuses, thieves, opportunists, workaholics and losers they've encountered along the way.

"NetSlaves" gives us a whole new language for the villains and back-stabbers who make up the hi-tech workplace. Particular venom is reserved for the "Fry Cooks," the "get it done at all costs" project people of the New Media Caste System. (There's also the "Garbagemen," the workers who have to get servers up and running when they crash).

My favorite chapter is about the "Cab Drivers," the haunted and hunted itinerant Web freelancers who design sites, followed closely by "Gold Diggers and Gigolos," a scathing portrait of the ambitious, night-crawling, hard-partying, butt-kissing movers and shakers and wannabees of hi-tech work world.

"Most Web sites are designed by itinerant, restless young people who have given up the constraints of working for one company in particular, in exchange for the self-determination of pursuing their own path. The rationale is that they can earn a higher hourly rate and pick and choose their projects.

"The reality, however," write Lessard and Baldwin, "is that these Cab Drivers have to constantly hustle for work and their passengers, or clients, who are also cash-crunched, are notorious for skipping out on their fares. Added to this is the lack of health benefits that Cab Drivers face - a plight which has forced many to simply neglect themselves." This is a world in which workers are terrified or despondent when forced to take a few weeks off, convinced they'll fall behind forever.

"NetSlaves" succeeds wonderfully in its goal to tell the truth about a particular culture at a critical juncture in time. It is, in fact one of the few telling looks inside the new kinds of workplaces springing up in the hi-tech, global economy. Workers beware.

Without a doubt, the Net will continue to grow and prosper. But if you even think about working there, read this book first.

Pick this book at fatbrain.

Duncan Lawie has returned with a review of Greg Egan's Teranesia, which continues his string of reviews regarding well-written science fiction. This novel, a near future adventure, is in Egan's own words, "about evolution, the Indian Rationalists Association, the break-up of Indonesia, quantum mechanics and sex". Click below to read more - and look for next week's review of Cities in Flight. Teranesia author Greg Egan pages 320 publisher London: Gollancz Aug 99; New York: HarperPrism Nov 99 rating 8.5/10 reviewer Duncan Lawie ISBN 006105092X summary A stunning near future adventure in the lush biosphere of South East Asia.

Greg Egan has been programming computers since the 1970s and writing science fiction since the 1980s. The latter has become his primary activity in the 1990s. He lives in Western Australia though the bulk of his professional sales have been made overseas. His books have been hard-edged analyses, with principal themes including consideration of many-worlds theory and the integration of technology into human evolution. Consciousness is often treated as the subject of technical manipulation in futures underpinned by the effects of increasingly sophisticated technology.

From this viewpoint the astounding clarity of the opening chapter of Egan's latest book made me wonder whether the setting was, once again, a virtual environment. In fact, Teranesia is, in Egan's own words, "about evolution, the Indian Rationalists Association, the break-up of Indonesia, quantum mechanics and sex". It is set in the early part of the next century. Indonesia continues to convulse in the throes of faction fighting while new creatures are appearing in the island chain. This is a source of considerable interest for biologists prepared to brave the dangers of potential civil war.

Egan's decision to move the focus of his writing from technology into biology provides a new range of signifiers for him to work with. The protagonist, Prabir, is typical of the author's work - highly intelligent and at ease with computers - but in this story his primary motivation is neither technical nor technological but emotional. Prabir is fully formed, well meaning but humanly flawed. In the development of this character Egan is highly successful. Prabir's traits are the natural outcome of the life story we are shown and his actions, whilst frustrating to the observer, are inevitable for Prabir himself. At least one of these observers, Prabir's sister Mahdusree, bursts from the page. In her more positive attitude she provides an effective foil to Prabir. His boyfriend also seems to share Mahdusree's opinion more than Prabir's, though in this case it seems to be a result of coming to terms with himself. Prabir's homosexuality sharpens the drama rather than being any concession to political correctness. In fact, there is a glorious series of extended jokes on political correctness. These involve Prabir's cousin and her academic environment, which are so skilfully drawn as to border on caricature. A hint of this is the cousin's belief that computers are reinforcing patriarchy due to the sexist nature of the ones and zeros which make up binary numbers.

The theme of biological research is riddled with complexity. The bulk of the science occurs outside of Prabir's speciality, allowing the writing to concentrate on time spent in the field. Egan has always been a precise writer, his clarity of description is to be awed. After a long day in the field the accumulated facts are rapidly tied together into new ideas. Scientific method is displayed as theories combine and recombine though Egan's vision of such a degree of co-operation between scientists seems somewhat optimistic. Successive ideas are thrown at the reader so fast that the progress towards a final theory feels like a game. Perhaps this is the point. Perhaps it could also be taken as an indication of how difficult it is to combine a novel of ideas with a character-led story line while retaining the fallibility of these characters.

The tale is well paced. The development of Prabir's story slows whilst scientific progress advances the plot. This leads to a sense of foreboding until the plot regathers, reaching alarming speed in the final pages and hurtling headlong into the back cover. Egan has also managed to pull together the novels themes, recapitulating the story to drive the urgency of the ending. He has taken a brave step into new territory and this is a distinctly visceral, emotional work. At the same time Egan has retained command of clear writing and profound scientific ideas.

Purchase this book from FatBrain.

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• Greg Egan's Site
• Eidolon SF
• Duncan Lawie

blindambition writes "Fatbrain announced a new initiative called eMatter. Basically, for 1$ per month, you can put your book/paper online, set a price, and people can download it, while you get the royalties (between 50 to 100%) of each copy sold. " Excellent idea, although it's still not open-source writing, like Project Gutenberg. But then again, I suppose living authors need to eat too.

This week, Amazon debuted its new toys and electronics departments. Jeff Bezos newly-revealed vision for the allegedly hip, once-revolutionary website has been revealed: a tacky online K-Mart. You're as likely to see a Pokemon critter or digital camera as a book there these days. Is this what all those investors were counting on? Get on over to Fatbrain.com immediately and sign up because the new Amazon sucks profoundly.

What do all these diverse products have in common? If you guessed nothing, you win a free Pokemon Pileup, Amazon.Toys.com's "cunning critter" of the day on Tuesday, a day on which Amazon gave a perfunctory nod to Alice Hoffman's new novel "Local Girls" but was much more excited about (and gave more space to) what it called "Aural Fixation: Superb audio performance and fine-quality construction put the Harman Kardon FL8550 five-disc CD changer on the shortlist of stellar CD players under $1,000!"

Doesn't the hipper-than-life-itself Jeff Bezos know that books, toasters and Disney marketing tie-ins don't really work together? That they are distinctly different businesses, with different identities catering to different audiences? Bezos has tossed away his biggest advantage, the sense right or wrong that he was creating a different kind of company with something resembling an ethical sensibility.

He was only kidding. (Don't forget to link to drugstore.com on Amazon's home page for some aspirin, in case this column or those CDs give you a headache, in which case your geek buddies can send you a "Friendship" or "Love" E-card from Amazon's "E-Card" section).

Amazon was always as much mythical as real, as much hype as numbers. It always said more about the inadequate way we perceive and report on technologies like the Net than about books. Few companies have ever attracted more interest and publicity and made less money. Amazon's whiz-bang software - with its recommendation programs and one-click shopping - made Net book-buying a pleasure to thousands of people for the first time. And Bezos's public relations skills were as good as anyone's on the Web. He persuaded investors, business journalists and users that Amazon was a quasi-hip, rebellious alternative to the big bad chain stores.

Guess what? Amazon is now a lot worse than they are.

But that's over. Its distinct identity squandered, Amazon is truly a millenial corporation now. It does at least five things other companies and sites - eBay, MP3, Toys R Us, Fatbrain.com, BN.com - have done first or do better, and it's doing all of them at a loss. What a formula. And a cautionary tale. When it comes to doing digital business, hype is not only obnoxious, but nobody can really afford it anymore.