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There *ARE* some good New Riders books - it's just that they tend to deal with digital art:

"Digital Texturing and Painting"
"Digital Lighting & Rendering"

New Rider's focus is more on the artist / animator / illustrator side of things - and at that they excel (the above two are those I'm most familar with, and they are excellent).

I'm sure they'll gradually improve their hardcore technical books, but it's stupid to dismiss "all" their books as being bad. Just like O'Reilly has a reputation in some circles for being overly dry and out of date - *some* people find their books useful.

A fellow San Diego Perl Monger has written a book about Perl and the web, including a chapter about web services.

It's a New Riders book, but the entire contents are available free on the web.

Well, the windows stuff is pretty lame. It has lots of pages dedicated to it, but mostly describes things that were old before they started compiling (not writing) the book.

The linux part is laughable. Lists of cracks that are worthless on any machine that was installed in the last five years. Does anyone run WU-FTPD from before 1995 now? I don't think so. Why waste the space? Besides, we want to understand how to hack/crack systems, not how to run an outdated exploit. If he took time to teach how an exploit worked, that'd be one thing, but as is this book is really really lame on the unix side. THe windows readers probably don't care, since they'd best be able to be script kiddies anyway.

My recomendations are as follows:

Hacking Linux Exposed second edition for all thing Linux/Unix. Can't be beat.

Hacking Windows 2000 Exposed. Do not get Hacking exposed, it tries to cover everything, and does them all poorly. The Windows 2000 edition is the only one you should get if you need windows information. (Applies to older and XP also in many cases.)

Hack Proofing your Network, edited by Blue Boar. Covers many of the same topics of the two books above, but by different experts. Multiple voices is good...

Any of the SANS books put out by NewRiders, most of which are written in part by Steven Northcutt. Lots of IDS and security titles by that publisher.

And you can't go wrong with Building Internet Firewalls, now out in a second edition.

I'd recommend any of the books above - they are accurate, informaaive, and either up to date or timeless. Any of these is worth 500 copies of Hack Attacks Revealed.

That was my thought exactly. I could get more depth by going to the publisher's website than I can get out of this review. At least the publisher gives me a couple of sample chapters to form an opinion around.

• Designing SVG Web Graphics (amazon.com)
• Teach Yourself Svg in 24 Hours (site, amazon.com)
• SVG Essentials (amazon.com)
• SVG Unleashed (amazon.com)
• Svg Programming (amazon.com)
• SVG For Designers

Some online demos from SVG Unleashed

and whoever published the first book on using Gimp
Yes, Grokking the Gimp is published by New Riders. They have quite a few free books in their catalog. Some of them are really good (e.g., Grokking the Gimp), while others have, mmm, shall we say... low production values :-)

Also those books with the black shiny covers... 'Orilios' I think may be the publisher
You mean Coriolis? Do you know of any of their titles that are free?

At work, WROX books usually sit on the desks of people that are the most clueless. Their size is often ridiculous. Like trying to say: see, it's a really big book, I know a lot. Finally, I find their covers really really bad. I understand how flattering it must be for the authors, but it's of the worst taste. It's not Oprah magazine, people. It's a tech book!

Wanna try some cool books: try out New Riders. I own 2 of their 'Essential Reference' titles and they're both excellents. The Jakob Nielsen book is also a classic. Give them a shot.

I honestly will not buy a technical book in the 1,000+ page range, especially if the title:

• Includes the words "bible", "unleashed", or "secrets"
• Is entitled Learn x in y days/hours

Why? Because I know I'm unlikely digest the contents of 1000+ pages of text on one subject, if I manage to finish it. I also generally suspect large books of rehashing FAQs or other widely-available docs just to fill pages.

I don't consider myself an O'Reilly bigot, though I do lean towards their books since they tend to publish smaller, focused books. If a book is pure reference, I may consider buying it if it's 1000+ pages. Following are examples of some great books I've bought that I found very useful and readable due to their small size:

• Mastering Regular Expressions, 484 pages
• Linux Routing, 350 pages
• A Programmer's Introduction to PHP 4.0, 453 pages

The Internet already offers me an overwhelming, disorganized pile of information on any subject--and at least it's searchable via Google. Dead tree books have use when they're usable and organized, and I've found that generally translates into a smaller book.

First, Northcutt's Network Intrusion Detection (published with SANS) is a great introduction to using simple tools like TCPDump to understand network traffic. Second, although I refuse to buy books with 'Hackers!' in the title on principle, one slipped by: Hack Proofing Your Network. Each chapter is by a different author, most of whom are very reputable, and it give an excellent introduction to an array of different topics. And of course you have a copy of Applied Cryptography...

I will never buy a QUE book. They publish a lot of "me too" crap, so they can jump on the bandwagon and make money off of whatever is the hot new thing. New Riders and Wrox, on the other hand, have a number of valuable titles on programming. I've bought a few, including: "Beginning Java" (WROX), "Beginning Linux Programming" (WROX), "Advanced Linux Programming" (New Riders), "VI Improved - VIM" (New Riders). These are all very high quality books (especially the VIM book - absolutely outstanding!!!). Well organized and easy to follow. I've noticed that QUE books have the appearance of containing a lot of information, but are disorganized when you sit down to read the material, and they just don't do a good thorough job of covering the topic.

Interestingly, you can read online the full versions of the New Riders books I mentioned here.

(If you have trouble with that link, go through the New Riders home page and search for the titles.)

I will never buy a QUE book. They publish a lot of "me too" crap, so they can jump on the bandwagon and make money off of whatever is the hot new thing. New Riders and Wrox, on the other hand, have a number of valuable titles on programming. I've bought a few, including: "Beginning Java" (WROX), "Beginning Linux Programming" (WROX), "Advanced Linux Programming" (New Riders), "VI Improved - VIM" (New Riders). These are all very high quality books (especially the VIM book - absolutely outstanding!!!). Well organized and easy to follow. I've noticed that QUE books have the appearance of containing a lot of information, but are disorganized when you sit down to read the material, and they just don't do a good thorough job of covering the topic.

Interestingly, you can read online the full versions of the New Riders books I mentioned here.

(If you have trouble with that link, go through the New Riders home page and search for the titles.)

Alot of books about programming and administrating are produced by New Riders. Their books are cheap also so I buy them instead of Oreilly books. Its good to see them get some Slashdotting. =)

http://www.newriders.com

For those on a budget (or cheap) New Riders has released the book here

can be found here

At the time I read it, I didn't know much about MySQL, but I had finished my battery of database design classes and I knew a little Perl & Python, and it was obvious that the book was riddled with errors, from poor explanations of normalization in early chapters to Perl scripts that, had the reader been so industrious as to type them in verbatim, wouldn't even compile, nevermind produce the intended result if the syntax bugs were ironed out.

To be fair to the generally excellent staff at O'Reilly, I'm sure there were later editions that ironed out many of those flaws, but the fact that not one but two Slashdot reviewers gave the book high marks says a lot more about the quality of the reviewers Slashdot is able to produce than it does about the rare splot on O'Reilly's otherwise fine record.

A year or so ago, the authors of the current rewrite of the book were soliciting peer feedback on the Perl section in particular, because of the bad reputation the original version got . I'm sure they worked very hard to make a better book this time around, but did they succeed? Who knows? This reviewer makes no mention of the original edition, and apparently doesn't realize how awful it was.

I'm interested in the update, but unfortunately will not trust this review in its assessment. I wasted thirty bucks on the last version, regretted it, later found the New Riders book, titled simply MySQL, and was for the most part happy. The Perl sections there are a little odd -- this author's code doesn't feel very idiomatically "native" to me, more like things a long time C hacker would prefer -- but as a reference & manual it is far better than the first edition of the O'Reilly book. I hope that with this edition they're catching up, but as far as I'm concerned the definitive reference manual for MySQL is already out, and like it or not there are no animals on the cover. Even if you wouldn't realize that from the reviews you see on Slashdot....

The problem with this approach is that the vast majority of lusers out there have no idea whatsoever what a file format even is. They just write a document, or prepare a presentation and save it for later use and dissemination. If you tell someone at XYZ Corp to send you the file in a different format, they'll look at you like you're from Lalande 21185B or some other equally outlandish place.

Like it or not, Microsoft owns the document market right now, to the point where a book called
Building Linux Virtual Private Networks was written using Microsoft Word.

In my experience (10 years as a programmer, DP manager, et al., 10 years as an educator) ideas which are well-developed and clearly explained always seem like commonsense. I've worked with people like your boss. In general they are big on what they could've done, but don't have alot to show for it. Hopefully that doesn't describe your boss...

I think the book looks quite useful. Check out the Table of Contents and this Sample Chapter

Steve Oualline's book "Vi IMproved--Vim" is pretty good both as an introduction to vi, and to the vim-specific things as well. It's also released under the Open Publication License.

NewRiders just published second edition of amazing "Python Essential Reference", updated and expanded for Python 2.1 it's the best Python book money can buy...

NewRiders just published second edition of amazing "Python Essential Reference", updated and expanded for Python 2.1 it's the best Python book money can buy...

There's a good book about security on Linux: "Linux Firewalls", by Robert Ziegler, New Riders editors. It talks about ipfw, ipchains and all that stuff about setting up a "formal" firewall. You might want to take a look at it.

As for the book, have a look at Web Application Development with PHP.

I'd be very interested in hearing the experiences of both authors and publishers about how well open licenses work for books. There are now at least three publishers that I am aware of who have published books that are licensed in whole or in part under an open license: O'Reilly, Coriolis, and New Riders. I am not counting the various publishers who have printed the Linux HOWTOs, Guides, manpages, etc. because those were not new material at the time they were published in printed form. For the same reason, I have also omitted the Free Software Foundation, which has been publishing printed copies of its own manuals for years.

Obviously, from the point of view of the publishers, it works well enough to stick their financial necks out to print the copies. It would be interesting to hear the pros and cons from a financial viewpoint. But what I really want to know is whether anyone has found a way to blend an open license with a print book in such a way that the open source community feedback has continued to improve the text after print publication. There are a lot of worthwhile documentation projects that are too big for a single person working part time on them. A positive answer to this question could encourage them to happen.

I think the Open Content License has been shown to work quite well. Take, for example, Havoc Pennington's GTK+/Gnome Application Development, released from New Riders earlier this year.

Havoc has a page online with errata for the book, an online version is available, and there's even a CVS version available. That's the power of an open publication license - I think it's great.
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I think the Open Content License has been shown to work quite well. Take, for example, Havoc Pennington's GTK+/Gnome Application Development, released from New Riders earlier this year.

Havoc has a page online with errata for the book, an online version is available, and there's even a CVS version available. That's the power of an open publication license - I think it's great.
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Just wanted to point out that the link under Publisher says D3 but I have _no_ affiliation with New Riders publishing. Also, the proper link should be: www.newriders.com

One possible solution to the complaints about out of date or inaccurate HOW-TOs is to follow the Open Content model. With their Open Publication License, their basic goals are to have book source files open and kept in CVS. It seems like they still have some kinks in the license, but as long as I get my copy of GTK+/GNOME Application Development (Havoc Pennington) which is released under this license, I'll be happy.

David

New Riders Publishing has become enlightened about the whole Free Documentation thing. They've already published two books under Free licenses, and they seem ready to do more. AFAIK, they are still giving the authors (or Debian in this case) royalties on the book sales.