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There's a raft of books about building online communities, but Amy Jo Kim's Community Building On The Web is one of the best. From Net Noir to Ultima Online, she goes a long way towards laying out what makes successful communities work. (Read more).

Community Building On the Web author Amy Jo Kim pages 352 publisher Peachpit Press rating 7/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-201-87484-9 summary the nuts and bolts of building good community sites

I've read a raft of books on community-building on the Web in the past few years, and Amy Jo Kim's Community Building: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities may be the best one yet.

A long-time online community designer and founder of Naima, a design studio specializing in creating Web communities, Kim has worked for AOL, Adobe, eBay, iVillage, MTV, Sony, Yahoo, and Nickelodeon.

It's easy to see why. She writes clearly and authoritatively, and has culled valuable lessons about what works in building Web communities and what doesn't. As she rightly points out, community building is one of the toughest online tasks to pull off, from hostiles to competition to wary visitors, and there's some urgency about figuring out how to do it.

By 2010, she predicts, people won't even refer to "Web communities" anymore. The ubiquity and bandwidth of online communities and the standardization of Net protocols will make the Web as pervasive as the telephone or TV. Though I'm not sure I agree about bandwidth, which shows no sign yet of having the infrastructure to entice the mainstream population.

Online communities will be viewed less as isolated destinations, more as ways to meet people, stay in touch with families, do work, buy things, without doing anything more remarkable than making a phone call. This process is already underway, Kim says, as towns, schools, families, peers, and colleagues use the Web to stay in touch, do research, and share information. She points to gaming clubs as a model: communities first coalesce online, then share photos and videos, hear each other's voices, and make plans for face-to-face meetings.

Kim draws from some of the most effective websites -- Ultima Online, eBay, Slashdot (she cites the moderation systems here as a model way to control free-wheeling discussions, and to identify and promote leadership within communities), Women.com, GeoCities, MomsOnline, NetNoir, Third Age, The Motley Fool, Heat.neat, Mplayer, iVillage -- to make her case that there are three enduring principles to building successful communities:

Designing for growth and change.

Balancing the efforts of management with the ideas, suggestions and needs of members, giving members a progressively larger role to play in maintaining the culture and building the site.

Design for growth and change.

Kim is also tough on etiquette: lay down crystal clear rules of behavior, make sure people read them, and enforce them.

Every community faces a core issue, she points out: member freedom versus quality control. Balancing those sometimes competing values is one of the toughest tasks in community-building on the Web.

Kim also discusses the way successful communities develop and maintain unique personalities. Net Noir, for instance, highlights a different member on its home page each day to make it clear that the site is aimed at African-Americans (particularly singles). Other successful sites find their own ways to signal audiences what they're about.

Especially interesting and useful is the way in which Ultima Online turns each member's profile into a multi-faceted, ever-changing window into his or her online persona. (She reproduces a closeup of "Sosostris," whose clothes, skill levels and knapsack contents tell us that this character is a sophisticated player.

Convincingly organized, Community Building on the Web focuses on nine design strategies, from developing leadership programs to spawning member-run subgroups.

Community Building covers a ton of ground. In addition to being useful, the book is also a mirror into the culture and future -- even the anthropology -- of online communities.

However the Web does or doesn't evolve, the failure or success of these communities will shape the future of the Net and the Web. This book will help people who want to try.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

For those inundated with data -- numbers, names, dates, temperatures, colors, seismographic sensor output, voting records(!), or anything else -- the paltry concerns of user interface may be less important than the assurance that they can make something useful from all that stuff. Data munger extraordinaire chromatic has again delivered his insightful dissection of a programming book aimed at people with Perl knowledge and a lot of data to wade through, and No, it's not from O'Reilly. Maybe it's for you.

Data Munging with Perl author David Cross pages 283 publisher Manning Publications rating 9 reviewer chromatic ISBN 1-930110-00-6 summary Dave explores Perl's unique and compelling abilities tomanage and manipulate data of all types, sizes, and shades.

The Scoop Larry Wall, so goes the story, needed to glue together two systems on opposite sides of the country. Calling on the virtues of Laziness (why throw together something for just one job) and Hubris (why not write a new language?), he created Perl. Though it's found new niches in the post-web world, Perl earns its bread and butter munging data.

Dave Cross has put together a friendly and handy compendium of techniques, tricks, and best practices. Suitable for raw novices to experienced intermediates, Data Munging with Perl is a gentle but firm romp from flat text, past structured and binary files, to the realm of custom parsers. Clean examples and lots of modules accompany the explanations.

What's to Like? The book plots a natural course through topics ordered by complexity. It opens with a theoretical overview of data processing. This introduces terminology and outlines the general types of data one might encounger. Additionally, the author writes with the authority of experience when exploring the basic approaches and best practices. While other books aimed at novice users shy away from programs-as-filters and data structures, Cross prefers to instill good habits from the start.

Beyond munging data, the book provides a decent introduction to idiomatic and effective Perl programming. While the brief tutorial won't magically produce new JAPHs, the thoughtful and continual devotion to good technique and skill will inspire smarter programmers. More important than knowing many useful tricks is knowing when and how to use a handful of tools -- and where to go for more.

The overall level of quality is excellent. The binary data chapter stands out as the clearest explanation available, and the information on munging dates and times will save readers plenty of grief. Additionally, the entire parsing section introduces a handful of powerful but sorely-underused tools to handle HTML, XML, and even creating custom parsers. Rounding out the curriculum is an appendix that explores the larger modules, mentioned earlier, in more detail (XML::Parser, DBI, Date::Manip).

What's to Consider? Only two things might turn readers from this book. The first is its deceptive length. While the text is short, the examples are clear and the text packs a lot of wallop in what's there. Careful readers who follow the links to other resources will have little trouble supplementing their education. (On the other hand, another ten pages describing Parse::RecDescent would have been a nice addition. It's hard to fault the author for deferring to the module's voluminous documentation.)

Second, longtime Perl programmers may find little new material, particularly if they are familiar with the wealth of modules on the CPAN. The intended audience is clearly new and underexperienced programmers. While there's plenty of good advice presented well, the book falls more toward the tutorial side of the aisle than the reference section. This does not detract from the book, but it does narrow the base of potential readers slightly.

The SummaryManning Publications continues its fine line of Perl books with the consistent and powerful Data Munging with Perl. Coders looking to transform data somehow and hackers who want to take advantage of Perl's unique features will improve their knowledge and understanding. If you find yourself working with files or records in Perl, this book will save you time and trouble. Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. 1. Data, data munging, and Perl
   2. General practices to use when munging data
   3. Generally useful Perl idioms
   4. Pattern matching
3. Data Munging
4. 1. Unstructured data
   2. Record-oriented data
   3. Fixed-width & binary data
5. Simple Data Parsing
6. 1. More complex data formats
   2. HTML
   3. XML
   4. Building your own parsers
7. Conclusion
8. 1. Looking back -- and ahead
   1. Modules reference
   2. Essential Perl

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

For those inundated with data -- numbers, names, dates, temperatures, colors, seismographic sensor output, voting records(!), or anything else -- the paltry concerns of user interface may be less important than the assurance that they can make something useful from all that stuff. Data munger extraordinaire chromatic has again delivered his insightful dissection of a programming book aimed at people with Perl knowledge and a lot of data to wade through, and No, it's not from O'Reilly. Maybe it's for you.

Data Munging with Perl author David Cross pages 283 publisher Manning Publications rating 9 reviewer chromatic ISBN 1-930110-00-6 summary Dave explores Perl's unique and compelling abilities tomanage and manipulate data of all types, sizes, and shades.

The Scoop Larry Wall, so goes the story, needed to glue together two systems on opposite sides of the country. Calling on the virtues of Laziness (why throw together something for just one job) and Hubris (why not write a new language?), he created Perl. Though it's found new niches in the post-web world, Perl earns its bread and butter munging data.

Dave Cross has put together a friendly and handy compendium of techniques, tricks, and best practices. Suitable for raw novices to experienced intermediates, Data Munging with Perl is a gentle but firm romp from flat text, past structured and binary files, to the realm of custom parsers. Clean examples and lots of modules accompany the explanations.

What's to Like? The book plots a natural course through topics ordered by complexity. It opens with a theoretical overview of data processing. This introduces terminology and outlines the general types of data one might encounger. Additionally, the author writes with the authority of experience when exploring the basic approaches and best practices. While other books aimed at novice users shy away from programs-as-filters and data structures, Cross prefers to instill good habits from the start.

Beyond munging data, the book provides a decent introduction to idiomatic and effective Perl programming. While the brief tutorial won't magically produce new JAPHs, the thoughtful and continual devotion to good technique and skill will inspire smarter programmers. More important than knowing many useful tricks is knowing when and how to use a handful of tools -- and where to go for more.

The overall level of quality is excellent. The binary data chapter stands out as the clearest explanation available, and the information on munging dates and times will save readers plenty of grief. Additionally, the entire parsing section introduces a handful of powerful but sorely-underused tools to handle HTML, XML, and even creating custom parsers. Rounding out the curriculum is an appendix that explores the larger modules, mentioned earlier, in more detail (XML::Parser, DBI, Date::Manip).

What's to Consider? Only two things might turn readers from this book. The first is its deceptive length. While the text is short, the examples are clear and the text packs a lot of wallop in what's there. Careful readers who follow the links to other resources will have little trouble supplementing their education. (On the other hand, another ten pages describing Parse::RecDescent would have been a nice addition. It's hard to fault the author for deferring to the module's voluminous documentation.)

Second, longtime Perl programmers may find little new material, particularly if they are familiar with the wealth of modules on the CPAN. The intended audience is clearly new and underexperienced programmers. While there's plenty of good advice presented well, the book falls more toward the tutorial side of the aisle than the reference section. This does not detract from the book, but it does narrow the base of potential readers slightly.

The SummaryManning Publications continues its fine line of Perl books with the consistent and powerful Data Munging with Perl. Coders looking to transform data somehow and hackers who want to take advantage of Perl's unique features will improve their knowledge and understanding. If you find yourself working with files or records in Perl, this book will save you time and trouble. Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. 1. Data, data munging, and Perl
   2. General practices to use when munging data
   3. Generally useful Perl idioms
   4. Pattern matching
3. Data Munging
4. 1. Unstructured data
   2. Record-oriented data
   3. Fixed-width & binary data
5. Simple Data Parsing
6. 1. More complex data formats
   2. HTML
   3. XML
   4. Building your own parsers
7. Conclusion
8. 1. Looking back -- and ahead
   1. Modules reference
   2. Essential Perl

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

While Ruby isn't new, it's one scripting-and-everything else language which has yet to break out (in the U.S. at least) the way Perl and Python have. Chromatic may help buck that non-trend -- he says that Ruby is one polished gem of a language, and below he introduces a book on Ruby that he compares in importance with the O'Reilly Camel book.

Programming Ruby author David Thomasand Andrew Hunt pages 564 publisher Addison-Wesley rating 9 reviewer chromatic ISBN 0-201-71089-7 summary A no-nonsense, clear guide that's as clean and usable as Ruby itself.

The Scoop Ruby is a growing language that combines the power and conciseness of Perl with the Smalltalk object model. Though popular in Japan, it hasn't reached its potential in English speaking countries, lacking appropriate documentation. Enter Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt. On the heels of The Pragmatic Programmer, they've produced the Ruby equivalent of Perl's Camel. What's to Like? Programming Ruby starts with a general language overview. A dozen short and sweet chapters form this tutorial. Readers with no programming background won't feel too out of place, though they will need to be comfortable with terminology explained once and used throughout the rest of the book. Topics range from language basics to multithreading and using the debugger. Rather than starting from syntax rules, the authors introduce concepts as their context dictates. There is some conceptual overlap between chapters, but this approach is preferable to discussing one topic at a time, referring briefly to future chapters.

The next section shows how to connect Ruby to other languages and tools. Besides information on Ruby modules and the command line, chapters include CGI programming, Ruby GUI programming with Tk, and automating Windows. The chapter on embedding Ruby in C is short but comprehensive. Within the 200 pages of these two sections, experienced programmers will have learned enough Ruby to be quite productive.

Section three expands further on the core language. Though covering the same areas as the tutorial, these chapters delve into the gory details. (As gory as Ruby gets, which is to say, surprisingly little spit and bailing wire.) Thomas and Hunt write with the authority of language designers producing a standard reference. Chapter 19, Classes and Objects, particularly stands out. It describes Ruby's simple object model, using a handful of well-chosen examples and clean diagrams to punctuate the point.

The final section takes up nearly half of the book. This library reference lists Ruby's built-in and common classes and objects. Each class has a description, a named parent, and a list of mixins and class and instance methods where appropriate. Modules fare similarly. Most explanations include common usage examples.

Four appendices and an impressive index round things out.

What's to Consider? Ruby itself makes a fine starting language. To get the most benefit from the book, it's handy to have experience with OO programming and a similar scripting language. (Python and Perl hackers will have little trouble, Smalltalk coders will feel right at home, and Java and C++ fans will do well.) Beginning programmers won't have their hands held for very long.

A handful of advanced concepts are mentioned but not explained. This is only a minor gripe -- techniques like runtime code generation are beyond the scope of the average hacker's needs. The flexibility of Ruby's object model and the loose distinction between compile-time and run-time obviate the need for much of this trickery anyhow.

Some might find the class reference section slightly hard on the eyes. The repeated horizontal lines are visually distracting -- indentation would improve readability. On the positive side, the class, library, and module sections are arranged alphabetically, with a tabbed margins to improve navigation.

The Summary This attractive tome ought to be on the desk of any serious Ruby programmer -- and Ruby itself deserves consideration as a clean and powerful development language. Aimed at moderately experienced programmers, Programming Ruby is a great introduction and a handy reference. Read it online here! Table of Contents

1. Roadmap

1. Facets of Ruby
2. 1. Ruby.New
   2. Classes, Objects, and Variables
   3. Containers, Blocks, and Iterators
   4. Standard Types
   5. More About Methods
   6. Expressions
   7. Exceptions, Catch, and Throw
   8. Modules
   9. Basic Input and Output
   10. Threads and Processes
   11. When Trouble Starts
3. Ruby in Its Setting
4. 1. Ruby and Its World
   2. Ruby and the Web
   3. Ruby Tk
   4. Ruby and Microsoft Windows
   5. Extending Ruby
5. Ruby Crystallized
6. 1. The Ruby Language
   2. Classes and Objects
   3. Locking Ruby in the Safe
   4. Reflection, ObjectSpace, and Distributed Ruby
7. Ruby Library Reference
8. 1. Built-in Classes
   2. Built-in Modules
   3. Standard Library
   4. Object-Oriented Design Libraries
   5. Network and Web Libraries
   6. Microsoft Windows Support
9. Appendices
10. 1. Embedded Documentation
    2. Interactive Ruby Shell
    3. Support
    4. Bibliography

Besides reading online, you can purchase this book at ThinkGeek

While Ruby isn't new, it's one scripting-and-everything else language which has yet to break out (in the U.S. at least) the way Perl and Python have. Chromatic may help buck that non-trend -- he says that Ruby is one polished gem of a language, and below he introduces a book on Ruby that he compares in importance with the O'Reilly Camel book.

Programming Ruby author David Thomasand Andrew Hunt pages 564 publisher Addison-Wesley rating 9 reviewer chromatic ISBN 0-201-71089-7 summary A no-nonsense, clear guide that's as clean and usable as Ruby itself.

The Scoop Ruby is a growing language that combines the power and conciseness of Perl with the Smalltalk object model. Though popular in Japan, it hasn't reached its potential in English speaking countries, lacking appropriate documentation. Enter Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt. On the heels of The Pragmatic Programmer, they've produced the Ruby equivalent of Perl's Camel. What's to Like? Programming Ruby starts with a general language overview. A dozen short and sweet chapters form this tutorial. Readers with no programming background won't feel too out of place, though they will need to be comfortable with terminology explained once and used throughout the rest of the book. Topics range from language basics to multithreading and using the debugger. Rather than starting from syntax rules, the authors introduce concepts as their context dictates. There is some conceptual overlap between chapters, but this approach is preferable to discussing one topic at a time, referring briefly to future chapters.

The next section shows how to connect Ruby to other languages and tools. Besides information on Ruby modules and the command line, chapters include CGI programming, Ruby GUI programming with Tk, and automating Windows. The chapter on embedding Ruby in C is short but comprehensive. Within the 200 pages of these two sections, experienced programmers will have learned enough Ruby to be quite productive.

Section three expands further on the core language. Though covering the same areas as the tutorial, these chapters delve into the gory details. (As gory as Ruby gets, which is to say, surprisingly little spit and bailing wire.) Thomas and Hunt write with the authority of language designers producing a standard reference. Chapter 19, Classes and Objects, particularly stands out. It describes Ruby's simple object model, using a handful of well-chosen examples and clean diagrams to punctuate the point.

The final section takes up nearly half of the book. This library reference lists Ruby's built-in and common classes and objects. Each class has a description, a named parent, and a list of mixins and class and instance methods where appropriate. Modules fare similarly. Most explanations include common usage examples.

Four appendices and an impressive index round things out.

What's to Consider? Ruby itself makes a fine starting language. To get the most benefit from the book, it's handy to have experience with OO programming and a similar scripting language. (Python and Perl hackers will have little trouble, Smalltalk coders will feel right at home, and Java and C++ fans will do well.) Beginning programmers won't have their hands held for very long.

A handful of advanced concepts are mentioned but not explained. This is only a minor gripe -- techniques like runtime code generation are beyond the scope of the average hacker's needs. The flexibility of Ruby's object model and the loose distinction between compile-time and run-time obviate the need for much of this trickery anyhow.

Some might find the class reference section slightly hard on the eyes. The repeated horizontal lines are visually distracting -- indentation would improve readability. On the positive side, the class, library, and module sections are arranged alphabetically, with a tabbed margins to improve navigation.

The Summary This attractive tome ought to be on the desk of any serious Ruby programmer -- and Ruby itself deserves consideration as a clean and powerful development language. Aimed at moderately experienced programmers, Programming Ruby is a great introduction and a handy reference. Read it online here! Table of Contents

1. Roadmap

1. Facets of Ruby
2. 1. Ruby.New
   2. Classes, Objects, and Variables
   3. Containers, Blocks, and Iterators
   4. Standard Types
   5. More About Methods
   6. Expressions
   7. Exceptions, Catch, and Throw
   8. Modules
   9. Basic Input and Output
   10. Threads and Processes
   11. When Trouble Starts
3. Ruby in Its Setting
4. 1. Ruby and Its World
   2. Ruby and the Web
   3. Ruby Tk
   4. Ruby and Microsoft Windows
   5. Extending Ruby
5. Ruby Crystallized
6. 1. The Ruby Language
   2. Classes and Objects
   3. Locking Ruby in the Safe
   4. Reflection, ObjectSpace, and Distributed Ruby
7. Ruby Library Reference
8. 1. Built-in Classes
   2. Built-in Modules
   3. Standard Library
   4. Object-Oriented Design Libraries
   5. Network and Web Libraries
   6. Microsoft Windows Support
9. Appendices
10. 1. Embedded Documentation
    2. Interactive Ruby Shell
    3. Support
    4. Bibliography

Besides reading online, you can purchase this book at ThinkGeek

Robots have been around in concept for longer than the word itself has been used to describe them, and for most of this century they've had a fair hold on the public imagination as either Utopian saviors or inexorable villains. Reader mtDNA sent in the evaluation below of a book called Robo sapiens: Evolution of a new species which may be the basis for a more realistic and neutral understanding about Robots, especially well suited to non-experts in that field. (I also found the other books in the series excellent.)

Robo Sapiens author Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio pages 240 publisher MIT Press rating 8.5 reviewer mtDNA ISBN 0-262-13382-2 summary A coffee-table survey course in words and pictures on the state of robots at the turn of the century.

Robo sapiens is the latest offering in the "Material World" series produced by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio, which includes Material World: A Global Family Portrait (1995) and Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects (1998). On the outside, Robo sapiens is an ordinary coffee table book. On the inside, however, is something different. Robo sapiens sets out to document the state of the art in robotics and artificial intelligence by talking to over fifty active researchers and photographing them with the tools of their trade. The book succeeds brilliantly. With sharp, beautifully reproduced photographs and engaging, well composed text, Robo sapiens provides an overview of robotics research that is simultaneously surreal, comically entertaining and dead serious.

The book is motivated by two main questions: What are robotics researchers working on? and Where are robots headed?

The book attempts to answer these questions through a sequence of profiles. Each profile is roughly two to three pages long and includes an interview, a description of a specific robot of interest and one or more relevant photographs.

The interview with Cynthia Breazeal, the creator of Kizmet (a robot that specializes in communication through facial expression), is typical. It includes Kizmet's basic specifications, photos of Kismet partly disassembled, a photo of Breazeal working on Kismet and several photos of Kismet in action. An interview with Breazeal discusses the general motivations for making a robot use facial expressions and her general approach to artificial intelligence.

Menzel is a terrific photographer, and every shot reflects attention to detail. Menzel tried to capture each robot with its designer (preferably while they were interacting) but there are plenty of photos of bots on their own. Some of my favorites were of BIT (a baby-doll-bot), Kismet (a face-bot with expressions) and Robopike (a fish-bot that swims). Several of the pictures, like the face robot on the cover, the surgery robot in the front pages and the baby (BIT) robot on the back cover are nightmarish or psychadelic, but these are the minority. All of the photos are at least slightly staged, but for the most part they are documentary and stylized only for added interest. Several photos from the book can be found on the Robo sapiens web page.

Research-based approaches to robotics vary widely, and the range of interviews in Robo sapiens varies accordingly. Many of the major players in robotics and artificial intelligence are represented: Ronald Arkin, Rodney Brooks, Raymond Kurzweil, Hans Moravec and Marc Raibert are there, to name just a few. A number of people not usually considered to be roboticists, like Robert Full and Paul McCready, are positive additions to the book's broad scope.

The interviews are surprisingly candid and telling. At one point, Rodney Brooks concedes that he could be wrong about behavior-based subsumption being fundamental, and that he might just be "a grumpy old asshole." (his words, not mine). At another point, two researchers (Eric Baumgartner and Terry Huntsberger) scramble to explain why their Mars rover is tethered, which would seem to be a problem on an interplanetary mission (it's to allow emergency shutdowns during testing). An inspiring feature of every interview is the enthusiasm that shines through. These people are having a darn good time and they make you want to join in the fun.

The answer to the first question posed by the book, "What are robotics researchers working on?", is well answered. In a series of six chapters (Electric dreams, Robo sapiens, Bio logical, Remote possibilities, Work mates and Serious fun), Menzel and D'Aluisio document a diversity of approaches that is truly remarkable in both behavior and mechanism. They range from Mark Tilden's primitivley elegant analog BEAM-bots to Honda's computationally brutish P-series. Robots that swim, walk, crawl, roll, swing and fly are all described. The conclusion is that research in robotics and artificial intelligence is far more diverse than most people would expect: applications range from human-bot social interactions to dynamic prosthetics to meteorite hunting.

The answer to the second question posed by the book, "Where are robots headed?", is less clear. This question is asked in many of the interviews explicitly and answers vary across a spectrum. Some interviewees, like Hans Moravec and Kevin Warwick, seem convinced that robots will eventually supplant or subsume the human species. Others, like Rodney Brooks and Mark Tilden, are more skeptical. One of the funniest interviews is with Tilden, who describes how he built a robot butler that ran into trouble with cleaning. The butler-bot couldn't tell the difference between dirt and cat food, so it vacuumed up the food and the cat went hungry. Tilden's point isn't that nobody can build a bot that can distinguish dirt and cat food, but that endowing bots with the kind of abstract intelligence that comes naturally to humans is a serious problem. It is clear that future directions include the development of new forms of intelligence, but it is unclear what forms these intelligences will take.

My main critism of Robo sapiens is its treatment of points of disagreement in the field. The question of whether robots will take over the world is presented as central, but in reality that question is only of marginal (if any) real interest to professionals. More important controversies, such as about the best way to implement artificial intelligence, are easy to find. One question that could have been asked is, "How is intelligence constructed?". Hearing the perspectives of people who actually design and build serious bots would be interesting. For example, some discussion of the differences between traditional sense-model-plan-act models of intelligence and newer behavior-based subsumption models by the people that actually use them would give a good idea of the practical constraints of each approach, as well as possible compromises. It would easily have been possible to discuss some of these issues without going over the heads of ordinary readers. One simple, illustrative observation would be that increases in the performance of artifical intelligence have not been described by Moore's Law. Why not? Speculation on the answer could only be informative.

Other minor shortcomings of the book are its lack of attention to the roles of history and non-professional researchers in the field. For the ordinary person, the mention of robots and artificial intelligence evokes images of HAL, Rosie, C3PO or even Frankenstein's monster. These images are an important consideration in the development of the robots we see today and in their general role in public life. Why isn't an airplane autopilot called a robot pilot? These issues are mentioned, but only briefly. Discussions with academicians and industry specialists dominate the book but sophisticated hobbyists are a significant presence in the real world. It's a shame not to give them some space.

Most of the deficiencies of the book are resolved by a quick look on the internet. Many of the researchers profiled in Robo sapiens have homepages that provide online versions of their technical articles and further information. Information about the work of amateurs and hobbyists is abundant online as well. Fred Martin's Handyboard, for example, has been integrated into all kinds of interesting projects. While Robo sapiens is directed at the educated layman and thus not a good source of technical information by itself, the book could be a useful starting point in finding robots and researchers in specific categories.

If you're propeller-head to the point of pathology, be warned: Robo sapiens isn't a technical document and may be disappointing. For the rest of us Robo sapiens is outstanding and at $29.95 (USD) it's a bargain. I heartily recommend Robo sapiens to anyone who even has a passing interest in who robotics researchers are, what they are doing, or where robots are headed.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Robots have been around in concept for longer than the word itself has been used to describe them, and for most of this century they've had a fair hold on the public imagination as either Utopian saviors or inexorable villains. Reader mtDNA sent in the evaluation below of a book called Robo sapiens: Evolution of a new species which may be the basis for a more realistic and neutral understanding about Robots, especially well suited to non-experts in that field. (I also found the other books in the series excellent.)

Robo Sapiens author Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio pages 240 publisher MIT Press rating 8.5 reviewer mtDNA ISBN 0-262-13382-2 summary A coffee-table survey course in words and pictures on the state of robots at the turn of the century.

Robo sapiens is the latest offering in the "Material World" series produced by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio, which includes Material World: A Global Family Portrait (1995) and Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects (1998). On the outside, Robo sapiens is an ordinary coffee table book. On the inside, however, is something different. Robo sapiens sets out to document the state of the art in robotics and artificial intelligence by talking to over fifty active researchers and photographing them with the tools of their trade. The book succeeds brilliantly. With sharp, beautifully reproduced photographs and engaging, well composed text, Robo sapiens provides an overview of robotics research that is simultaneously surreal, comically entertaining and dead serious.

The book is motivated by two main questions: What are robotics researchers working on? and Where are robots headed?

The book attempts to answer these questions through a sequence of profiles. Each profile is roughly two to three pages long and includes an interview, a description of a specific robot of interest and one or more relevant photographs.

The interview with Cynthia Breazeal, the creator of Kizmet (a robot that specializes in communication through facial expression), is typical. It includes Kizmet's basic specifications, photos of Kismet partly disassembled, a photo of Breazeal working on Kismet and several photos of Kismet in action. An interview with Breazeal discusses the general motivations for making a robot use facial expressions and her general approach to artificial intelligence.

Menzel is a terrific photographer, and every shot reflects attention to detail. Menzel tried to capture each robot with its designer (preferably while they were interacting) but there are plenty of photos of bots on their own. Some of my favorites were of BIT (a baby-doll-bot), Kismet (a face-bot with expressions) and Robopike (a fish-bot that swims). Several of the pictures, like the face robot on the cover, the surgery robot in the front pages and the baby (BIT) robot on the back cover are nightmarish or psychadelic, but these are the minority. All of the photos are at least slightly staged, but for the most part they are documentary and stylized only for added interest. Several photos from the book can be found on the Robo sapiens web page.

Research-based approaches to robotics vary widely, and the range of interviews in Robo sapiens varies accordingly. Many of the major players in robotics and artificial intelligence are represented: Ronald Arkin, Rodney Brooks, Raymond Kurzweil, Hans Moravec and Marc Raibert are there, to name just a few. A number of people not usually considered to be roboticists, like Robert Full and Paul McCready, are positive additions to the book's broad scope.

The interviews are surprisingly candid and telling. At one point, Rodney Brooks concedes that he could be wrong about behavior-based subsumption being fundamental, and that he might just be "a grumpy old asshole." (his words, not mine). At another point, two researchers (Eric Baumgartner and Terry Huntsberger) scramble to explain why their Mars rover is tethered, which would seem to be a problem on an interplanetary mission (it's to allow emergency shutdowns during testing). An inspiring feature of every interview is the enthusiasm that shines through. These people are having a darn good time and they make you want to join in the fun.

The answer to the first question posed by the book, "What are robotics researchers working on?", is well answered. In a series of six chapters (Electric dreams, Robo sapiens, Bio logical, Remote possibilities, Work mates and Serious fun), Menzel and D'Aluisio document a diversity of approaches that is truly remarkable in both behavior and mechanism. They range from Mark Tilden's primitivley elegant analog BEAM-bots to Honda's computationally brutish P-series. Robots that swim, walk, crawl, roll, swing and fly are all described. The conclusion is that research in robotics and artificial intelligence is far more diverse than most people would expect: applications range from human-bot social interactions to dynamic prosthetics to meteorite hunting.

The answer to the second question posed by the book, "Where are robots headed?", is less clear. This question is asked in many of the interviews explicitly and answers vary across a spectrum. Some interviewees, like Hans Moravec and Kevin Warwick, seem convinced that robots will eventually supplant or subsume the human species. Others, like Rodney Brooks and Mark Tilden, are more skeptical. One of the funniest interviews is with Tilden, who describes how he built a robot butler that ran into trouble with cleaning. The butler-bot couldn't tell the difference between dirt and cat food, so it vacuumed up the food and the cat went hungry. Tilden's point isn't that nobody can build a bot that can distinguish dirt and cat food, but that endowing bots with the kind of abstract intelligence that comes naturally to humans is a serious problem. It is clear that future directions include the development of new forms of intelligence, but it is unclear what forms these intelligences will take.

My main critism of Robo sapiens is its treatment of points of disagreement in the field. The question of whether robots will take over the world is presented as central, but in reality that question is only of marginal (if any) real interest to professionals. More important controversies, such as about the best way to implement artificial intelligence, are easy to find. One question that could have been asked is, "How is intelligence constructed?". Hearing the perspectives of people who actually design and build serious bots would be interesting. For example, some discussion of the differences between traditional sense-model-plan-act models of intelligence and newer behavior-based subsumption models by the people that actually use them would give a good idea of the practical constraints of each approach, as well as possible compromises. It would easily have been possible to discuss some of these issues without going over the heads of ordinary readers. One simple, illustrative observation would be that increases in the performance of artifical intelligence have not been described by Moore's Law. Why not? Speculation on the answer could only be informative.

Other minor shortcomings of the book are its lack of attention to the roles of history and non-professional researchers in the field. For the ordinary person, the mention of robots and artificial intelligence evokes images of HAL, Rosie, C3PO or even Frankenstein's monster. These images are an important consideration in the development of the robots we see today and in their general role in public life. Why isn't an airplane autopilot called a robot pilot? These issues are mentioned, but only briefly. Discussions with academicians and industry specialists dominate the book but sophisticated hobbyists are a significant presence in the real world. It's a shame not to give them some space.

Most of the deficiencies of the book are resolved by a quick look on the internet. Many of the researchers profiled in Robo sapiens have homepages that provide online versions of their technical articles and further information. Information about the work of amateurs and hobbyists is abundant online as well. Fred Martin's Handyboard, for example, has been integrated into all kinds of interesting projects. While Robo sapiens is directed at the educated layman and thus not a good source of technical information by itself, the book could be a useful starting point in finding robots and researchers in specific categories.

If you're propeller-head to the point of pathology, be warned: Robo sapiens isn't a technical document and may be disappointing. For the rest of us Robo sapiens is outstanding and at $29.95 (USD) it's a bargain. I heartily recommend Robo sapiens to anyone who even has a passing interest in who robotics researchers are, what they are doing, or where robots are headed.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Reader Pseudonym contributed this review of the visually dense tome The Art of the Matrix. I spent an hour with this coffee-table-size book a few weeks ago, and even though I'm not a big fan of the film itself, the book made me appreciate it a lot more. If you did like the film or know someone who did, I recommend it, even for the art alone. WARNING: May contain spoilers for the film. But you wouldn't be reading this review if you hadn't seen it already, would you?

The Art of the Matrix author Larry & Andy Wachowski, Steve Skroce, Tani Kunitake, Geof Darrow, Warren Manser, Collin Grant, Phil Oosterhouse pages 488 publisher Newmarket Press rating 9 reviewer Pseudonym ISBN 1-55704-405-8 summary Not your average (fluffy) "book of the film," this one gets deep into the minds of the makers.

When we think of sci-fi films and the people who make them, we usually think of actors, directors, screenwriters and visual effects TDs. We rarely think of production artists, concept artists and storyboarders. But modern sci-fi films owe a lot to these people: Tight visual effects budgets (no matter how high, they're always tight) and armies of people who need to be organised mean that the planning must be meticulous, right down to the last detail.

Maurice Zuberano, production illustrator and art director for such films as Dick Tracy, has called the storyboard the "diary of the film." It's the private record of the visualisation process, and one of the reasons why you generally won't find them intact after the film is completed. Steven D. Katz, in his classic textbook on film direction, even suggested the storyboard is often "the evidence that the look of the film was the work of someone other than the director."

The storyboards and concept art for The Matrix needed to see the light of day, and only by flicking through this book can you fully appreciate why. The first and largest section of this book contains the boards and concept art for most of the key scenes in the film. The black and white boards by Steve Skroce read like a comic book without the words (Skroce used to be a comic illustrator for Marvel and the brothers Wachowski used to be writers) and truly stand out on their own. The colour boards by Tani Kunitake and Collin Grant cover several of the key sequences (the initial Layafette scenes, the Power Plant, the History Program and the final Sentinel Attack). The artwork is interspersed with comments by the artists on specific characters' shots, how they were developed (usually with the Wachowskis getting them to tweak and re-tweak until it was exactly what they had in mind) and differences between what was boarded and what was finally shot, which serious fans will certainly appreciate.

As an example, from the Government Lobby scene, Skroce notes:

Trinity was always a PVC chick. In the storyboards, Neo was a bit more army fatigues; he's definitely got more fashion sense in the film, looks cooler. The trench coats and sunglasses were always Larry and Andy's idea. Especially in this scene, the glasses were there to look cool, but also as a safety consideration for the actors in the midst of all this debris. (p 142)

After the boards are some of the conceptual designs by Geof Darrow. Most of the pages are fold-out, in order to give you a better idea of the detail of these images. Darrow also supplied comments on how the sets developed since these initial drawings. A special bonus is a mech-like battle suit which didn't make it into the first film, but may turn up in one of the sequels.

Following the concept art is the shooting script, as written by Larry & Andy Wachowski. It's not exactly what was in the theatrical release (some parts were changed during the ADR and editing phases). If you're used to reading screenplays, you know how dry they often are. Not this one. The Wachowskis know how to paint a picture with just a few well-chosen words, the sort of prose that you would normally find in a well-crafted novel. To give you a taste, here's an excerpt from scene 30, when Neo is released from the power plant:

He is standing in an oval capsule of clear alloy filled with red gelatin, the surface of which has solidified like curdled milk. The IVs in his arms are plugged into outlets that appear to be grafted to his flesh.

He feels the weight of another cable and reaches to the back of his head where he finds an enormous coaxial plugged and locked into the base of his skull. He tries to pull it out but it would be easier to pull off a finger.

To either side he sees the other tube-shaped pods filled with red gelatin; beneath the wax-like surface, pale and motionless, he sees other human beings.

Fanning out in a circle, there are more. All connected to a center core, each capsule like a red, dimly glowing petal attached to a black metal stem.

Above him, level after level, the stem rises seemingly forever. He moves to the foot of the capsule and looks out. The image assaults his mind.

Towers of glowing petals spiral up to incomprehensible heights, disappearing down into a dim murk like an underwater abyss.
(pp 304-5)

Included after the screenplay are notes on production by Phil Oosterhouse (assistant to the directors) and some parts cut from the script during pre-production, in both screenplay and storyboard form. The notes provide some great anecdotes from filming. As for the cut scenes, there are some extremely interesting ideas in there, which I won't spoil for you. You'll just have to look for yourself.

Finally, there are some miscellaneous bits and pieces to fill up the end of the book. The full credits, the acceptance speeches from the 2000 Academy Awards(R), key art (including theatrical posters) and stills from the film interspersed with the corresponding boards to show how faithfully the film emulated their comic book style.

This book is a must for any serious Matrix fan, and extremely valuable for those interested in how movies get their look. You won't find anything else quite like it, and it will remain a treasured addition to your coffee table for decades to come.

My one quibble is that I would have preferred to have the complete storyboards so I could enjoy The Matrix as a comic book, rather than just having the key scenes. However, I understand why they did it this way. Storyboards of long conversations without the dialogue written in probably aren't very interesting to look at.

I'll leave the final word to William Gibson, who writes in the the afterward:

Keanu's Neo is my favorite-ever science fiction hero, absolutely.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Reader Pseudonym contributed this review of the visually dense tome The Art of the Matrix. I spent an hour with this coffee-table-size book a few weeks ago, and even though I'm not a big fan of the film itself, the book made me appreciate it a lot more. If you did like the film or know someone who did, I recommend it, even for the art alone. WARNING: May contain spoilers for the film. But you wouldn't be reading this review if you hadn't seen it already, would you?

The Art of the Matrix author Larry & Andy Wachowski, Steve Skroce, Tani Kunitake, Geof Darrow, Warren Manser, Collin Grant, Phil Oosterhouse pages 488 publisher Newmarket Press rating 9 reviewer Pseudonym ISBN 1-55704-405-8 summary Not your average (fluffy) "book of the film," this one gets deep into the minds of the makers.

When we think of sci-fi films and the people who make them, we usually think of actors, directors, screenwriters and visual effects TDs. We rarely think of production artists, concept artists and storyboarders. But modern sci-fi films owe a lot to these people: Tight visual effects budgets (no matter how high, they're always tight) and armies of people who need to be organised mean that the planning must be meticulous, right down to the last detail.

Maurice Zuberano, production illustrator and art director for such films as Dick Tracy, has called the storyboard the "diary of the film." It's the private record of the visualisation process, and one of the reasons why you generally won't find them intact after the film is completed. Steven D. Katz, in his classic textbook on film direction, even suggested the storyboard is often "the evidence that the look of the film was the work of someone other than the director."

The storyboards and concept art for The Matrix needed to see the light of day, and only by flicking through this book can you fully appreciate why. The first and largest section of this book contains the boards and concept art for most of the key scenes in the film. The black and white boards by Steve Skroce read like a comic book without the words (Skroce used to be a comic illustrator for Marvel and the brothers Wachowski used to be writers) and truly stand out on their own. The colour boards by Tani Kunitake and Collin Grant cover several of the key sequences (the initial Layafette scenes, the Power Plant, the History Program and the final Sentinel Attack). The artwork is interspersed with comments by the artists on specific characters' shots, how they were developed (usually with the Wachowskis getting them to tweak and re-tweak until it was exactly what they had in mind) and differences between what was boarded and what was finally shot, which serious fans will certainly appreciate.

As an example, from the Government Lobby scene, Skroce notes:

Trinity was always a PVC chick. In the storyboards, Neo was a bit more army fatigues; he's definitely got more fashion sense in the film, looks cooler. The trench coats and sunglasses were always Larry and Andy's idea. Especially in this scene, the glasses were there to look cool, but also as a safety consideration for the actors in the midst of all this debris. (p 142)

After the boards are some of the conceptual designs by Geof Darrow. Most of the pages are fold-out, in order to give you a better idea of the detail of these images. Darrow also supplied comments on how the sets developed since these initial drawings. A special bonus is a mech-like battle suit which didn't make it into the first film, but may turn up in one of the sequels.

Following the concept art is the shooting script, as written by Larry & Andy Wachowski. It's not exactly what was in the theatrical release (some parts were changed during the ADR and editing phases). If you're used to reading screenplays, you know how dry they often are. Not this one. The Wachowskis know how to paint a picture with just a few well-chosen words, the sort of prose that you would normally find in a well-crafted novel. To give you a taste, here's an excerpt from scene 30, when Neo is released from the power plant:

He is standing in an oval capsule of clear alloy filled with red gelatin, the surface of which has solidified like curdled milk. The IVs in his arms are plugged into outlets that appear to be grafted to his flesh.

He feels the weight of another cable and reaches to the back of his head where he finds an enormous coaxial plugged and locked into the base of his skull. He tries to pull it out but it would be easier to pull off a finger.

To either side he sees the other tube-shaped pods filled with red gelatin; beneath the wax-like surface, pale and motionless, he sees other human beings.

Fanning out in a circle, there are more. All connected to a center core, each capsule like a red, dimly glowing petal attached to a black metal stem.

Above him, level after level, the stem rises seemingly forever. He moves to the foot of the capsule and looks out. The image assaults his mind.

Towers of glowing petals spiral up to incomprehensible heights, disappearing down into a dim murk like an underwater abyss.
(pp 304-5)

Included after the screenplay are notes on production by Phil Oosterhouse (assistant to the directors) and some parts cut from the script during pre-production, in both screenplay and storyboard form. The notes provide some great anecdotes from filming. As for the cut scenes, there are some extremely interesting ideas in there, which I won't spoil for you. You'll just have to look for yourself.

Finally, there are some miscellaneous bits and pieces to fill up the end of the book. The full credits, the acceptance speeches from the 2000 Academy Awards(R), key art (including theatrical posters) and stills from the film interspersed with the corresponding boards to show how faithfully the film emulated their comic book style.

This book is a must for any serious Matrix fan, and extremely valuable for those interested in how movies get their look. You won't find anything else quite like it, and it will remain a treasured addition to your coffee table for decades to come.

My one quibble is that I would have preferred to have the complete storyboards so I could enjoy The Matrix as a comic book, rather than just having the key scenes. However, I understand why they did it this way. Storyboards of long conversations without the dialogue written in probably aren't very interesting to look at.

I'll leave the final word to William Gibson, who writes in the the afterward:

Keanu's Neo is my favorite-ever science fiction hero, absolutely.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Reader Jim Driggers contributed this review of a book which reopens a topic considered embarrassingly closed for several years. The debate over cold fusion after a couple of Utah scientists made some startling announcements about their non-traditional fusion experiments showed how quickly new ideas can appear, be hailed as world-changing, then be abandoned by most of the scientific community. This book raises the excellent question of whether such a rush to judgement may do more harm than good, and specifically whether there's more to cold fusion than the scoffing allows.

Excess Heat author Charles G. Beaudette pages 365 publisher Oak Grove Press, LLC rating 8.5 reviewer Jim Driggers ISBN 0967854814 summary A book that casts new light on the possibilities and implications of cold fusion, and assails the too-quick rejection of that concept by the scientific community a decade ago.

Drs. Fleischmann and Pons between them had decades of academic and laboratory experience in the field of electrochemistry. Among other positions and awards, Dr. Fleischmann is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Dr. Pons was Chairman of the Chemistry Department at the University of Utah.

When they announced the discovery of 'cold fusion' in 1989, a scientific travesty occurred. Nuclear physicists declared that because no nuclear products could be demonstrated, the measurement of excess heat was flawed. This is completely irrational. The measurement of excess heat stands on it's own merit. If any assault is to be made, it must be upon the methodology used to measure the heat. The quantity of heat measured was in fact too large to be accounted for by mechanical or chemical means.

The Pons and Fleischmann experiment was never a simple 'kitchen chemistry' endeavor. The calorimetry measurements and heat accounting is difficult to master. Electrochemical knowledge and experience is an absolute must. The electrochemical cell represents a complex environment and there were unknowns associated with the palladium cathodes. As a result, early attempts at replication failed.

The nuclear physicists in question did not possess the knowledge or experience in electrochemistry and calorimetry to demonstrate any problem with the heat measurement. They did not enter the laboratory and, hands-on, find the alleged error in heat measurement. Instead, they resorted to the irrational argument above and to ridicule. They prevailed due to their prominent position in the federal government and the esteem of them held by publishers of the scientific publications. Unfortunately, they managed to derail an exciting turn in the history of science.

All of the above and more is to be found in the Charles G. Beaudette book, Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed. With the forward penned by Sir Arthur C. Clarke and introduction by David J. Nagel, Ph D, the book runs 365 pages cover to cover and is replete with references.

The book covers the initial discovery and the quick dismissal by the DOE Energy Research Advisory Board. The board issued it's final, negative report in a mere 8 months. Contrast that to the time period between the discovery of superconductivity and the decades taken to elucidate the theoretical underpinnings. Most of the points refuted by the author can be found at www.ncas.org/erab/sec1.htm.

The role of particular nuclear physicists is clearly described and dissected. The part played by the major, popular science journals, such as Nature, is elucidated.

Six cold fusion type experiments are presented, all of which produced excess power under mild conditions. Pertinent details are presented, such as a description of the apparatus and/or graphs of the measurements/results. The results of some of these experiments have been published in peer reviewed journals.

The measurement of "nuclear ash" is reported from other cold fusion experiments expressly set up for the purpose. Again, some of these results have been published in peer reviewed journals.

Other chapters consider scientific protocol, more on the role of the skeptics, and premature attempts at commercialization.

It is now obvious that any critic of cold fusion will have to do more than present illogical arguments or simply ridicule the scientists involved in the research. If they believe the calorimetry is flawed, they will have to present evidence, preferably from their own experiments, but at least from participation in a cold fusion experiment. They should have any critique peer reviewed by scientists well versed in the practice of calorimetry and/or electrochemistry, then published. Same goes for criticism of evidence of nuclear products, although this is an area where some of the skeptics could actually do some science.

The author presents detailed arguments. This is mostly good, but I found it difficult to attend to some of the more lengthy passages.

All in all, I very much enjoyed the book. If you find the neutrino problem, the Big Bang, the steady state theory, the double-slit experiment wiih only one photon in the apparatus, dark matter, more than four dimensions of space-time, or the modification of the laws of gravity to get rid of dark matter facinating, then you will enjoy this book also. It is a light directed to a partially opened door that connects what we think we know with what we don't.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek. And for a taste of what's up in cold fusion research, take a look at the May, 2000 ICCF.

Reader Jim Driggers contributed this review of a book which reopens a topic considered embarrassingly closed for several years. The debate over cold fusion after a couple of Utah scientists made some startling announcements about their non-traditional fusion experiments showed how quickly new ideas can appear, be hailed as world-changing, then be abandoned by most of the scientific community. This book raises the excellent question of whether such a rush to judgement may do more harm than good, and specifically whether there's more to cold fusion than the scoffing allows.

Excess Heat author Charles G. Beaudette pages 365 publisher Oak Grove Press, LLC rating 8.5 reviewer Jim Driggers ISBN 0967854814 summary A book that casts new light on the possibilities and implications of cold fusion, and assails the too-quick rejection of that concept by the scientific community a decade ago.

Drs. Fleischmann and Pons between them had decades of academic and laboratory experience in the field of electrochemistry. Among other positions and awards, Dr. Fleischmann is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Dr. Pons was Chairman of the Chemistry Department at the University of Utah.

When they announced the discovery of 'cold fusion' in 1989, a scientific travesty occurred. Nuclear physicists declared that because no nuclear products could be demonstrated, the measurement of excess heat was flawed. This is completely irrational. The measurement of excess heat stands on it's own merit. If any assault is to be made, it must be upon the methodology used to measure the heat. The quantity of heat measured was in fact too large to be accounted for by mechanical or chemical means.

The Pons and Fleischmann experiment was never a simple 'kitchen chemistry' endeavor. The calorimetry measurements and heat accounting is difficult to master. Electrochemical knowledge and experience is an absolute must. The electrochemical cell represents a complex environment and there were unknowns associated with the palladium cathodes. As a result, early attempts at replication failed.

The nuclear physicists in question did not possess the knowledge or experience in electrochemistry and calorimetry to demonstrate any problem with the heat measurement. They did not enter the laboratory and, hands-on, find the alleged error in heat measurement. Instead, they resorted to the irrational argument above and to ridicule. They prevailed due to their prominent position in the federal government and the esteem of them held by publishers of the scientific publications. Unfortunately, they managed to derail an exciting turn in the history of science.

All of the above and more is to be found in the Charles G. Beaudette book, Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed. With the forward penned by Sir Arthur C. Clarke and introduction by David J. Nagel, Ph D, the book runs 365 pages cover to cover and is replete with references.

The book covers the initial discovery and the quick dismissal by the DOE Energy Research Advisory Board. The board issued it's final, negative report in a mere 8 months. Contrast that to the time period between the discovery of superconductivity and the decades taken to elucidate the theoretical underpinnings. Most of the points refuted by the author can be found at www.ncas.org/erab/sec1.htm.

The role of particular nuclear physicists is clearly described and dissected. The part played by the major, popular science journals, such as Nature, is elucidated.

Six cold fusion type experiments are presented, all of which produced excess power under mild conditions. Pertinent details are presented, such as a description of the apparatus and/or graphs of the measurements/results. The results of some of these experiments have been published in peer reviewed journals.

The measurement of "nuclear ash" is reported from other cold fusion experiments expressly set up for the purpose. Again, some of these results have been published in peer reviewed journals.

Other chapters consider scientific protocol, more on the role of the skeptics, and premature attempts at commercialization.

It is now obvious that any critic of cold fusion will have to do more than present illogical arguments or simply ridicule the scientists involved in the research. If they believe the calorimetry is flawed, they will have to present evidence, preferably from their own experiments, but at least from participation in a cold fusion experiment. They should have any critique peer reviewed by scientists well versed in the practice of calorimetry and/or electrochemistry, then published. Same goes for criticism of evidence of nuclear products, although this is an area where some of the skeptics could actually do some science.

The author presents detailed arguments. This is mostly good, but I found it difficult to attend to some of the more lengthy passages.

All in all, I very much enjoyed the book. If you find the neutrino problem, the Big Bang, the steady state theory, the double-slit experiment wiih only one photon in the apparatus, dark matter, more than four dimensions of space-time, or the modification of the laws of gravity to get rid of dark matter facinating, then you will enjoy this book also. It is a light directed to a partially opened door that connects what we think we know with what we don't.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek. And for a taste of what's up in cold fusion research, take a look at the May, 2000 ICCF.

You're probably familiar with the conventional wisdom that online interactions can lead to a polarization of ideas and of people, by encouraging a culture and attitude of constant reinforcement of already-held ideas. Freematt (Matthew Gaylor) presents below a critical reaction to the interventionism Cass Sunstein proposes to counteract this perceived trend in Republic.com.

Republic.Com author Cass Sunstein pages 224 publisher Princeton University Press rating 6 reviewer Freematt (Matthew Gaylor) ISBN 0-691-07025-3 summary Sunstein argues for greater government involvement as a way to encourage societal cohesion in an age of "cybercascades."

Cass Sunstein is the Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School and Department of Political Science. A former law clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall, he has worked for the Office of Legal Counsel in the US Department of Justice.

His former works include: "Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech" (1993), which won the Goldsmith Prize from Harvard for the best book on free speech in that year. "After the Rights Revolution" (1990), "The Partial Constitution" (1993), "Free Markets and Social Justice" (1997), and "One Case at a Time: Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court" (1999). His writings have appeared in the New York Times, and the New Republic. He has also appeared on ABC's Nightline, the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, NBC and CBS evening news and other programming.

In "Republic.Com" Cass Sunstein makes the point that in cyberspace individuals now have the ability to filter out everything they don't want to read or see and filter in only those whose opinions they agree with. He calls this the "Daily Me", the ability to filter only the issues that concern you, read only the op-eds that only share your point of view. In short he fears that the Internet will bring about a lack of diversity and will amplify extremism and hate groups (Whatever that means). He writes of "cybercascades" that brings groups of people together who share similar viewpoints, a process that in turn causes group polarization and radicalization.

For example, he says, "a group whose members lean against gun control will, in discussion, provide a wide range of arguments against gun control, and the arguments made for gun control will be both fewer and weaker. The group's members, to the extent that they shift, will shift toward a more extreme position against gun control. And the group as a whole, if a group decision is required, will move not to the median position, but to a more extreme point." (Chapter 3, pages 67 68)

He does his argument great damage by using as an example of a hate and extremist group the usual left-wing target, The National Rifle Association (NRA) He trots out the usual suspects such as Skinheads and the KKK and fails to mention any of the other hate groups such as American supporters of Peru's shining path, environmental terrorists who spike logging areas, World Trade Organization protestors/rioters or other left wing extremists. In Chapter three Sunstein speaks of the gun rights movement alongside the KKK, God Hates Fags, and other hate groups in what can only be considered an attempt at guilt by association.

In Chapter seven, Sunstein writes: "FREE SPEECH IS NOT AN ABSOLUTE," -- his caps. In fact, he repeats this line several times throughout the book. He continues: "We can identify some flaws in the emerging view of the First Amendment by investigating the idea that the free speech guarantee is "an absolute", in the specific sense that government may not regulate speech at all. This view plays a large role in public debate, and in some ways it is a salutary myth." He mentions the usual examples of child pornography, copyright and threats to assassinate the President as examples of the government restricting speech. He creates what I consider a straw-man argument by prefacing these remarks for his "Policies and Proposals" in Chapter eight.

He laments the fact that in a four-station universe the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) had a significant voice. But with the advent of programming with hundreds of choices, the justification for PBS is diluted.

As a partial solution he endorses Andrew Shapiro's suggestion from the book The Control Revolution that the government should support a public website, Public.Net. Sunstein writes: "Public.Net would provide an icon, visible on your home computer. You would be under no obligation to click on it; indeed in a free society perhaps you should be permitted to remove the icon if you really do not like it." He envisions Public.Net to include sections on the "environment, civil rights, gun control, foreign affairs, and so forth." (Chapter 8, page 181)

But what I find most troubling is his idea to require websites to maintain hyperlinks to those with differing viewpoints. His example on page 188:

"We might easily imagine a situation in which textual references to organizations or institutions are hyperlinks, so that if, for example, a conservative magazine such as the National Review refers to the World Wildlife Fund or Environmental Defence, it also allows readers instant access to their sites."

Sunstein continues: "To the extent that sites do not do this, voluntary self regulation through cooperative agreements might do the job. If these routes do not work, it would be worthwhile considering content-neutral regulation, designed to ensure more in the way of both links and hyperlinks."

Princeton sent me a free review copy of Republic.Com; I'm glad they did as I would have been highly upset to have paid money for it. I can understand why Professor Sunstein makes the suggestions he does. In my opinion it has less to do with wanting to expand free and open discourse and more to do with control. Who gets to decide which links get to be included as "opposing viewpoints"? I did note that many of Sunstein's examples involved a right wing organization being forced to carry left wing links.

The celebrated civil libertarian, John Stuart Mill, contended that enlightened judgment is possible only if one considers all facts and ideas, from whatever source, and tests one's own conclusions against opposing views. Therefore, all points of view -- even those that are "bad" or socially harmful -- should be represented in the "marketplace of ideas." And the Internet is an incredibly free and eclectic smorgasbord of ideas. And just as we have freedom to choose which sites we visit or what print magazines or books we read, it would be the end of freedom as we know it if the government forced us to read or watch what they want, even if it were only a link. Thanks, but no thanks to Republic.Com.

You can read the first chapter online for free. You can also purchase this book at ThinkGeek. You may also be interested in Cass Sunstein's Homepage.

However skeptical the ads make you, it's hard to deny that what used to be considered supercomputing power keeps showing up in consumer-priced boxes, and the threshold of what really is extreme has crept steadily upward. If you're planning a project of more than average size, though, the review that chromatic contributed below of Planning Extreme Programming could be a valuable read, and the ideas in the book itself could save you a lot of money and time. Even if you have no plans to desire to install a beowulf in your broomcloset, it's interesting to consider what sort of thought must go into any large-scale programming project.

Planning Extreme Programming author Kent Beck & Martin Fowler pages 139 publisher Addison-Wesley rating 9 reviewer chromatic ISBN 0-210-71091-9 summary Guidelines, anecdotes, and tested techniques to plan and track your Extreme Programming projects.

The Scoop Last year's Extreme Programming Explained argued that all of the good activities of software engineering (planning, designing, testing, refactoring, estimating, reviewing, and releasing) ought to be done all the time. Dividing the technical and management tasks, forcing each group to work to its strengths, the technique has gathered several proponents. Until now, there's been no general presentation of the HOW of XP, suitable for management and customers.

Planning Extreme Programming covers the practice of XP, the techniques other groups have used while applying its principles. Data and anecdotes from XP practitioners contribute to this collection of lessons.

What's to Like? The book fits the XP philosophy handily, with short, simple chapters hitting a single point apiece. This is a book suitable for busy managers (weaned on slide presentations) and customers (who don't want to learn any more about programming than necessary). Without the support of both, projects will fail. An afternoon invested reading this thin tome will pay off handsomely, whether or not you use XP.

It's hard to pin down the main emphasis in the face of the gestalt. The strongest lesson relates a simple driving anecdote. Reaching your destination requires a successful combination of small steps and course corrections. You can't just point the car at Boston and accelerate. Back out of the garage first. Ready, fire, aim aim aim aim aim.

Instead, the authors suggest breaking a project into self-contained, testable components (stories). The customer creates the stories. The programmers estimate the time it will take to complete each. The customer selects the stories for the next iteration (period of time between release dates, generally three to six weeks). The programmers write their tests, write their code, ask the customer to postpone a story instead of slipping a release date. Finally, the customer runs the test and selects the stories for the next iteration.

It's a powerful concept, and just might work. The text examines each step of the process, with a consistently simple emphasis on the big picture. Of particular note are the sections on estimates (you can do as much work as you did in the last iteration) and the role of customers. The big benefit of XP is that it minimizes risk over the long term by producing working software as soon as possible, continually revising the overall plan with fresh data.

What's to Consider? This book really assumes readers already have some understanding of the part they play in Extreme Programming. (One might argue that there's no reason to read this book without having read Beck's first XP book.) The more open-minded in the audience may jump right in, while the cautious and practical will want proof to go with the manifesto. Invest in reading this and Extreme Programming Explained.

Related to the previous point, XP is not free of jargon itself. Readers unfamiliar with the role of 'stories' or the duties of the customer will have some difficulty with the first few chapters. A short glossary of terms and duties would alleviate this.

A criticism of Extreme Programming Explained also applies here -- there's still too little data about which projects and software types fit XP best. This book does present some criteria: projects running on Internet time, outsourced projects, and projects with medium-sized teams (six to twelve developers) are possible candidates. Only experience and more data can provide hard answers.

The Summary More practical and less controversial than its predecessor, Planning Extreme Programming makes the XP manifesto workable. Better for people already sold on the practice, the book is also appropriate for people considering Extreme Programming, whether programmer, manager, or customer. Improve software quality and your quality of life by embracing change. Table of Contents

1. Why Plan?
2. Fear
3. Driving Software
4. Balancing Power
5. Overviews
6. Too Much to Do
7. Four Variables
8. Yesterday's Weather
9. Scoping a Project
10. Release Planning
11. Writing Stories
12. Estimation
13. Ordering the Stories
14. Release Planning Events
15. The First Plan
16. Release Planning Variations
17. Iteration Planning
18. Iteration Planning Meeting
19. Tracking an Iteration
20. Stand-up Meetings
21. Visible Graphs
22. Dealing with Bugs
23. Changes to the Team
24. Tools
25. Business Contracts
26. Red Flags
27. Your Own Process

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

On-the-fly organization may suffice for keeping track of scripts /bin on your local machine, but larger projects have more at stake when it comes to coordinating the effort of programmers, especially when they're not even in the same timezone, never mind in the same room. CVS has become the lifeblood of many such projects. Reader Craig Pfeifer suggests CVS Pocket Reference as a good way to help keep that lifeblood flowing.

CVS Pocket Reference author Gregor N. Purdy pages 75 publisher O'Reilly & Associates rating 8 reviewer Craig Pfeifer ISBN 0596000030 summary Indispensable handbook for administrators of all but small CVS installations, and probably for the small ones as well.

The Scenario

As a former CVS repository administrator, I wish I had this book when I started, it's much easier than pawing through the canonical documentation for quick answers. CVS is the #1 choice for open source projects. If you plan on organizing or working on an Open Source project, this is reference might be for you.

What's Good?

This pocket reference is a guide to basic CVS functions (branch, merge, update) but the real strength is in the description of server and client side control files and environment variables. Gregor describes how to setup email notification when someone commits a change to the repository, how to customize the repository to treat certain files as binary (versus text), and other useful things. He even goes as far as to describe how to hack the repository to change it's structure while the project is in motion, and how to hack the sandbox (the name for a developer's work space) to change any property such as which branch or repository the files will be committed to. Of course you don't really need this because developers never make mistakes, it's always CVS' fault &ltwink wink&gt. All in all, it's a great reference for all the bits and pieces of CVS that you're supposed to mess with (and a few your aren't) and anyone who is expected to administer a moderately complex installation should own it.

Gregor also gives pointers to some great add-on modules for CVS: CVSWeb for making your source tree web-browsable, and WinCVS to make CVS look SourceSafe-esque.

What's Bad?

The organization of this pocket reference could use a little help. I've seen reviews for other O'Reilly pocket references ask for an index, but that wouldn't be helpful here. It would be helpful if they added section tabs in the outside margins of the pages (a la their java nutshell series), so that you could quickly thumb to the section you're looking for. Also, organizing the content by server side and client side instead of simply adminstrator and user would help folks to find the specific information they are looking for.

My last gripe is a small, petty one. The books binding doesn't allow it lay flat when you set it down. Yes it's petty, but I hate losing my page when working. You need to keep a medium sized object with a decent bit of heft (e.g. a stapler) within arms' reach to hold it open.

So What's In It For Me?

This reference will not make you a CVS guru, but it will help you remember the command line options (if I had a nickel for every time I typed 'cvs --help tag' I would be frequently mistaken for a Kennedy), figure out what all those little files are without breaking your CVS installation, and most importantly keep you from having to consult the the cannonical documentation for simple things.

If you have inheirited a CVS installation or plan to set one up for the first time, spend the US$9.95/CN$14.95, do it right the first time and save yourself some time and reap all the bennies that CVS offers.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Installing CVS
3. Administrator Reference
4. User Reference
5. Relata

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

On-the-fly organization may suffice for keeping track of scripts /bin on your local machine, but larger projects have more at stake when it comes to coordinating the effort of programmers, especially when they're not even in the same timezone, never mind in the same room. CVS has become the lifeblood of many such projects. Reader Craig Pfeifer suggests CVS Pocket Reference as a good way to help keep that lifeblood flowing.

CVS Pocket Reference author Gregor N. Purdy pages 75 publisher O'Reilly & Associates rating 8 reviewer Craig Pfeifer ISBN 0596000030 summary Indispensable handbook for administrators of all but small CVS installations, and probably for the small ones as well.

The Scenario

As a former CVS repository administrator, I wish I had this book when I started, it's much easier than pawing through the canonical documentation for quick answers. CVS is the #1 choice for open source projects. If you plan on organizing or working on an Open Source project, this is reference might be for you.

What's Good?

This pocket reference is a guide to basic CVS functions (branch, merge, update) but the real strength is in the description of server and client side control files and environment variables. Gregor describes how to setup email notification when someone commits a change to the repository, how to customize the repository to treat certain files as binary (versus text), and other useful things. He even goes as far as to describe how to hack the repository to change it's structure while the project is in motion, and how to hack the sandbox (the name for a developer's work space) to change any property such as which branch or repository the files will be committed to. Of course you don't really need this because developers never make mistakes, it's always CVS' fault &ltwink wink&gt. All in all, it's a great reference for all the bits and pieces of CVS that you're supposed to mess with (and a few your aren't) and anyone who is expected to administer a moderately complex installation should own it.

Gregor also gives pointers to some great add-on modules for CVS: CVSWeb for making your source tree web-browsable, and WinCVS to make CVS look SourceSafe-esque.

What's Bad?

The organization of this pocket reference could use a little help. I've seen reviews for other O'Reilly pocket references ask for an index, but that wouldn't be helpful here. It would be helpful if they added section tabs in the outside margins of the pages (a la their java nutshell series), so that you could quickly thumb to the section you're looking for. Also, organizing the content by server side and client side instead of simply adminstrator and user would help folks to find the specific information they are looking for.

My last gripe is a small, petty one. The books binding doesn't allow it lay flat when you set it down. Yes it's petty, but I hate losing my page when working. You need to keep a medium sized object with a decent bit of heft (e.g. a stapler) within arms' reach to hold it open.

So What's In It For Me?

This reference will not make you a CVS guru, but it will help you remember the command line options (if I had a nickel for every time I typed 'cvs --help tag' I would be frequently mistaken for a Kennedy), figure out what all those little files are without breaking your CVS installation, and most importantly keep you from having to consult the the cannonical documentation for simple things.

If you have inheirited a CVS installation or plan to set one up for the first time, spend the US$9.95/CN$14.95, do it right the first time and save yourself some time and reap all the bennies that CVS offers.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Installing CVS
3. Administrator Reference
4. User Reference
5. Relata

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Reader LetterJ preheated his brain, stirred in some acronyms, and sent in his review of The PHP Developer's Cookbook, which sounds like a more-than-usually-useful guide to solving specific programming problems. This "cookbook" approach is one I'd like to see in more books, too.

The PHP Developer's Cookbook author Sterling Hughes, Andrei Zmievski pages 528 publisher MacMillan Publishing Company rating 9 reviewer LetterJ ISBN 0672319241 summary A problem/solution focused guide to PHP programming that's neither condescending nor off-limits to mortals -- just right for intermediates

Escaping the remedial classes PHP books are starting to come of age. 12-18 months ago, if you wanted a book on PHP, it was as though Henry Ford was in charge of author outlines. "You can have any PHP book you want as long as it assumes you've never heard of PHP and have never done web development." Every single book, it seemed, started by explaining dynamic web sites and why you'd want to build them. It would follow with an evangelizing of PHP as a solution and lead you through a few sparse examples and leave you to your own devices. This was great (since most folks using PHP were beginners), but it left a crowd of advanced beginning and intermediate PHP programmers milling about on discussion boards and mailing lists, clueless as to how to combine the examples in the books into cohesive web applications.

Things are looking up, though: Several books released in the last 6-12 months have started to give those people some direction, including the recently published PHP Developer's Cookbook, by Sterling Hughes and Andrei Zmievski.

What's a Cookbook? Any book that calls itself a cookbook should meet a few basic requirements. In the kitchen, a cookbook provides people (who aren't gourmet chefs) with detailed instructions on how to make specific dishes. At the same time the cookbook can't assume you're an idiot. You have to know how to use a knife, pans, etc. in a basic way so that the explanations of new ways to use the tools will make sense.

This book uses that exact approach. Many of the entries would seem obvious to a seasoned programmer who is switching over to PHP from some other procedural language. At the same time, it assumes you have a functioning PHP environment and that you have a grasp of the basics of the language. Each entry solves a specific programming problem in one or more ways. When more than one way is presented, the authors also provide reasons a programmer might choose one over the other. This problem-solving orientation helps out programmers who know what they need to do, but don't know what functions to look up in the official manual.

What's Included? The book is broken into 5 parts, 4 of which will be useful to most readers:

1. Language Constructions and Techniques
2. Databases
3. Going Outside PHP
4. Generating Other Languages
5. Zend API

Part 5 focuses on building your own PHP level functions and extensions to the language. As such, it seems a bit out of place for a book that seems targeted to advanced beginners and intermediate PHP programmers. However, the section is only 35 pages and comes at the end of the book, so it won't overwhelm readers and can easily be ignored if you have no need to extend the language.

Part 1 is by far the largest portion of the book and provides the meat and basic ingredients to more elaborate programs. It covers strings, numbers, dates and times, arrays, associative arrays, regular expressions, file access, file contents, directories, functions, classes, sessions, automation and built-in constants.

At first glance, this table of contents concerned me. After all, that's pretty much the way that most language references are organized and when you aren't exactly sure what tools you need to do something, that can be hard to follow. For example, imagine you want to output the results of your script to a file. However, you want to make sure you don't overwrite an existing file. You could wander through the file functions in the regular manual and discover that there is a file_exists() function. However, if you have this book, you could look up "Testing Whether a File Exists" which phrases your situation as a problem, "You want to know whether a file exists before you try to perform any operations involving it." This straightforward approach helps you choose the appropriate method for doing something and can occasionally prevent you from misusing a function as in the "everything looks like a nail" paradigm that new programmers get into when they find a new function.

Parts 2-4 work their way through database abstraction, COM and Java objects, IMAP email, LDAP, network communication, image creation with GD, and XML documents and transformations.

What's Good? Well, as I've pounded into the ground, the problem/solution organization of this book is it's biggest asset. When I go to a book for information, I'm looking because I'm having a problem of some sort. The information is presented clearly and the design and layout of the book is pleasant with enough whitespace around the examples to take notes. The book isn't filled with wasteful screenshots of browsers containing forms. In fact, I just flipped through it and can only find one diagram of any sort. The book focuses on the code examples and explaining them.

What's to Consider?

At first, a list price of $39.99 may seem high to some folks for a 500 page book, particularly with books like WROX's PHP books next to it on the shelf at twice the thickness. However, this book doesn't try to fill pages for the sake of filling pages. I'm glad there are no wasted screenshots in this book or 125 page HTML tag references. If the publisher had wanted to, this book could have been much bigger with no real extra content.

The only other thing that concerns me is the potential for people outside the target audience to buy this book and be disappointed. If you are a novice programmer looking to learn PHP, but haven't explored functions or dynamic web applications, this book is not for you -- yet. Similarly, if it is blatantly obvious how you would step through a directory full of files and make changes to each, this book my not have any useful information in it for you. It's aimed squarely at the middle ground. Given the glut of books aimed at beginners and the experts able to read the PHP sourcecode, that's a pretty good place to be. The inclusion of Part 5 is a slight mark against it, but definitely not a showstopper

Summary

If you are using PHP to develop anything more than a simple one-page script, you are going to run into more than one of the problems presented in this book. In fact, there's a pretty good chance that your application will be a series of the problems presented in this book. You can either pick up this Cookbook and get on with your coding, or bug everyone and their brother on the discussion boards to build your algorithms for you.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Reader LetterJ preheated his brain, stirred in some acronyms, and sent in his review of The PHP Developer's Cookbook, which sounds like a more-than-usually-useful guide to solving specific programming problems. This "cookbook" approach is one I'd like to see in more books, too.

The PHP Developer's Cookbook author Sterling Hughes, Andrei Zmievski pages 528 publisher MacMillan Publishing Company rating 9 reviewer LetterJ ISBN 0672319241 summary A problem/solution focused guide to PHP programming that's neither condescending nor off-limits to mortals -- just right for intermediates

Escaping the remedial classes PHP books are starting to come of age. 12-18 months ago, if you wanted a book on PHP, it was as though Henry Ford was in charge of author outlines. "You can have any PHP book you want as long as it assumes you've never heard of PHP and have never done web development." Every single book, it seemed, started by explaining dynamic web sites and why you'd want to build them. It would follow with an evangelizing of PHP as a solution and lead you through a few sparse examples and leave you to your own devices. This was great (since most folks using PHP were beginners), but it left a crowd of advanced beginning and intermediate PHP programmers milling about on discussion boards and mailing lists, clueless as to how to combine the examples in the books into cohesive web applications.

Things are looking up, though: Several books released in the last 6-12 months have started to give those people some direction, including the recently published PHP Developer's Cookbook, by Sterling Hughes and Andrei Zmievski.

What's a Cookbook? Any book that calls itself a cookbook should meet a few basic requirements. In the kitchen, a cookbook provides people (who aren't gourmet chefs) with detailed instructions on how to make specific dishes. At the same time the cookbook can't assume you're an idiot. You have to know how to use a knife, pans, etc. in a basic way so that the explanations of new ways to use the tools will make sense.

This book uses that exact approach. Many of the entries would seem obvious to a seasoned programmer who is switching over to PHP from some other procedural language. At the same time, it assumes you have a functioning PHP environment and that you have a grasp of the basics of the language. Each entry solves a specific programming problem in one or more ways. When more than one way is presented, the authors also provide reasons a programmer might choose one over the other. This problem-solving orientation helps out programmers who know what they need to do, but don't know what functions to look up in the official manual.

What's Included? The book is broken into 5 parts, 4 of which will be useful to most readers:

1. Language Constructions and Techniques
2. Databases
3. Going Outside PHP
4. Generating Other Languages
5. Zend API

Part 5 focuses on building your own PHP level functions and extensions to the language. As such, it seems a bit out of place for a book that seems targeted to advanced beginners and intermediate PHP programmers. However, the section is only 35 pages and comes at the end of the book, so it won't overwhelm readers and can easily be ignored if you have no need to extend the language.

Part 1 is by far the largest portion of the book and provides the meat and basic ingredients to more elaborate programs. It covers strings, numbers, dates and times, arrays, associative arrays, regular expressions, file access, file contents, directories, functions, classes, sessions, automation and built-in constants.

At first glance, this table of contents concerned me. After all, that's pretty much the way that most language references are organized and when you aren't exactly sure what tools you need to do something, that can be hard to follow. For example, imagine you want to output the results of your script to a file. However, you want to make sure you don't overwrite an existing file. You could wander through the file functions in the regular manual and discover that there is a file_exists() function. However, if you have this book, you could look up "Testing Whether a File Exists" which phrases your situation as a problem, "You want to know whether a file exists before you try to perform any operations involving it." This straightforward approach helps you choose the appropriate method for doing something and can occasionally prevent you from misusing a function as in the "everything looks like a nail" paradigm that new programmers get into when they find a new function.

Parts 2-4 work their way through database abstraction, COM and Java objects, IMAP email, LDAP, network communication, image creation with GD, and XML documents and transformations.

What's Good? Well, as I've pounded into the ground, the problem/solution organization of this book is it's biggest asset. When I go to a book for information, I'm looking because I'm having a problem of some sort. The information is presented clearly and the design and layout of the book is pleasant with enough whitespace around the examples to take notes. The book isn't filled with wasteful screenshots of browsers containing forms. In fact, I just flipped through it and can only find one diagram of any sort. The book focuses on the code examples and explaining them.

What's to Consider?

At first, a list price of $39.99 may seem high to some folks for a 500 page book, particularly with books like WROX's PHP books next to it on the shelf at twice the thickness. However, this book doesn't try to fill pages for the sake of filling pages. I'm glad there are no wasted screenshots in this book or 125 page HTML tag references. If the publisher had wanted to, this book could have been much bigger with no real extra content.

The only other thing that concerns me is the potential for people outside the target audience to buy this book and be disappointed. If you are a novice programmer looking to learn PHP, but haven't explored functions or dynamic web applications, this book is not for you -- yet. Similarly, if it is blatantly obvious how you would step through a directory full of files and make changes to each, this book my not have any useful information in it for you. It's aimed squarely at the middle ground. Given the glut of books aimed at beginners and the experts able to read the PHP sourcecode, that's a pretty good place to be. The inclusion of Part 5 is a slight mark against it, but definitely not a showstopper

Summary

If you are using PHP to develop anything more than a simple one-page script, you are going to run into more than one of the problems presented in this book. In fact, there's a pretty good chance that your application will be a series of the problems presented in this book. You can either pick up this Cookbook and get on with your coding, or bug everyone and their brother on the discussion boards to build your algorithms for you.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Steven Levy's Crypto is a brief history of the men involved in developing modern cryptography. If you've read Applied Cryptography or another work with a mathematical emphasis on crypto, you've heard their names -- Diffie, Hellman, Chaum, Rivest, Shamir, Adleman, Zimmermann, and so forth. But the other books on cryptography typically neglect the human side in favor of the math. Crypto aims to fill that hole.

Crypto author Steven Levy pages 356 publisher Viking/Penguin rating 9/10 reviewer Michael Sims, drfalken, topeka ISBN 0-670-85950-8 summary A history of the people involved in developing modern cryptography

Several people were interested in reviewing this book. We try to be accomodating, so this is a mega-review by myself and slashdot readers drfalken and topeka. I'll try to be brief.

Michael's review:

I didn't expect to like Crypto. I was frankly put off by the subtitle on the front cover: "How the Code Rebels Beat the Government -- Saving Privacy in the Digital Age." Every time I send an unencrypted email (because none of my correspondents use encryption, because it isn't built-in) or think about the law (CALEA) which requires my ISP and telephone company to accomodate the government in wire-tapping my communications, I realize that this just isn't true. While the cryptographers thought they were winning battles, the government has so far been winning the war. From the sub-title, I expected the book to be a rah-rah cheerleading history of these noble crypto-knights wielding their ciphersabers with gleeful abandon against the fascist, corrupt, and evil Big Brother.

It turns out to be a much better book than I had expected. The author has collected most of his information through personal interviews, and it ends up being a very readable and very personal account of the past 30 years of cryptographic research and commercial development -- both in the public sphere, and, to some extent, in U.S. and British intelligence agencies. The author treats his subjects fairly - the government is not demonized as I expected, and the cryptographers are not idolized (much). There is essentially no math in this book, beyond the bare minimum necessary to understand the main concepts of cryptography. Together with, say, The Codebreakers for early history and Applied Cryptography for the math, it would make a comprehensive and thorough look at the history and science of cryptography.

drfalken's review: The ubiquity of encryption technology employed by everything from bank machines to e-tailers is now taken for granted. Most people fail to realize, though, the profound impact that this component of the digital world has had on the Information Age. Illumination of this point is the formidable task of Crypto.

The renowned author of Hackers and Insanely Great remains true to form, transforming an obscure, dry and complex subject into an addictive page-turning thriller. He takes us from the hippie culture of academic math research in the 70s, through the dark underworld of government intelligence, into the development of the modern information age. Each step emphasizes the central conflict of the story: American national security vs. the right to individual privacy.

While this conflict has largely been resolved, the story contains important lessons that can be applied to the contemporary struggles over technologies like DeCSS and peer-to-peer media 'sharing.' Levy doesn't make any such connections in the book, but it is impossible to read Crypto without seeing how history is repeating itself in these other areas. This makes Crypto and important book to read. Everyone from the RIAA to 2600 subscribers can learn a lot from this well organized retelling of the past 30 years of crypto history. There's a certain futility involved in trying to put the genie of progress back in a bottle. There's also a case to be made for the management of progress so that it is used with the greatest benefit and smallest detriment to all. Perhaps the most remarkable revelation in the book is how the adversarial nature of 'the geeks' vs. 'the spooks' allowed for the maturation of a sensitive technology in a safe and thoughtful manner.

Anyone who has read Wired or Newsweek over the past 5 years will have read excerpts from Crypto. Levy spent a long time researching this book, which makes sense considering the story he is telling is one that was developing during his period of research. Many of the events he recounts are ones he covered as a journalist at the time that they happened. Some time spent in the Wired archives shows the extent to which he has been one of the journalists closest to the crypto revolution since the release of PGP and the popularization of the Internet.

The book begins with the story of Whit Diffie and his wild ambition to simply learn more about the black art of electronic cryptography. In the early 70s the government monopoly on information relating to serious crypto was nearly complete. Coming from the mindset of the Open Source community, Levy's tale of the early crypto research climate describes a cathedral that makes Microsoft look like the Debian project. The resulting story, therefore, highlights the magnificence of the public key breakthrough, the boldness of the RSA discovery and the daring of Paul Zimmermann's PGP.

If you're looking for a history of Cryptography, get The Code Book by Simon Singh, or Codebreakers by David Kahn instead of this book. Crypto is a contained story dealing exclusively with the American Cryptographic Experience from Diffie-Hellman, through RSA, and PGP. It is effectively a collection of short, intertwined biographies of the saviors of privacy, from Adleman to Zimmermann. This is not to say that Levy ignores the math; on the contrary, his explanation of the magnitude of the public key concept hits home even harder than the impressive work by Simon Singh.

Especially in light of recent Slashdot stories, Crypto is highly recommended, for novices and Cypherpunks alike. It's a coming of age story for American technology, and a great addition to the bookshelf of modern American history.

topeka's review:

The first time I heard the term "elegant" applied to a technical problem was a bit of a revelation for me. Until then, elegance, to me, was a visual quality that could only be achieved by painters and poets. When I began to see the elegance in solutions to technical and mathematical problems, I was hooked into a world of intellectual curiosity. Cryptography immediately filled the mold of a highly complex and technical problem with a beautiful and elegant solution when it was first explained to me several years ago. The idea clicked again when I read Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar and equated that elegance to "scratching a particular itch". This intellectual curiosity seems to drive the open source community.

However, in 1967, when James Ellis (of the secret British agency, GCHQ) first came up with the idea of public key cryptography, his theory was buried. Until then, solutions to cryptographic problems were a dirty process. If it was easy to create a cipher, than it was just as easy to break it. As such, Ellis's breakthrough was simply too pretty to be trusted and as a result, it lay locked away until 1997. Steven Levy's new book, Crypto is the story of the individuals who transformed cryptography from a dirty art, which only the most elite governments dabbled in, to an elegant mathematical solution available to the public in hundreds of different forms. It was all done by a community of individuals who preached openness and sought out clean solutions to tough, technical problems.

Levy starts out his story in the same place as he started with an earlier famous work, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He narrates the story of Whitfield Diffie, the co-creator of public key cryptography. Starting in 1969 as Diffie sought shelter from the Vietnam war working for a defense contractor, Levy discusses Diffie's transformation from examining ideas about cryptography as merely a hobby, to an all out obsession. Diffie is transformed from a man thinking about cryptography on the weekends to a man criss-crossing the country in one run-down Datsun after another, searching for any and every piece of information about cryptography. Diffie would not broach the wall of cryptography until he was pointed to another researcher in California, who seemed to be investigating the same concepts. Levy chronicles the fateful partnership that occurred with Marty Hellman and the subsequent invention of public key cryptography, at least its theory.

At this time, there were few works published on the subject of cryptography. In fact, only government agents and a few privileged defense contractors were able to expend meaningful resources on crypto research. It seems that while Levy's work is a story of the people who waged a war to bring crypto to the public, it is also the story of that wars' enemy, the National Security Agency. The cryptography bureaucracy, gaining most of its resources during the Second World War, had built quite a palace around anything that involved codes. In the years to come, the NSA would fiercely defend its position of strength. From its early attempts to classify David Kahn's famous work, The Codebreakers, to its involvement in the creation of the Digital Encryption Standard and its invention of the Clipper Chip. As Crypto defines it, the spooks were able to keep their lock on cryptography by invoking a mentality of "if only you knew what I know..." in classified briefings to politicians and contract negotiations with defense contractors like IBM. What the NSA never expected, was for anyone to try and find out what it was that they knew. With the publishing of the Diffie-Hellman paper, "New Directions in Cryptography," one of the NSA's most viable opponents would begin their work where Diffie and Hellman's theories left off, implementation.

Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, through a four-month period of intense brainstorming, would eventually implement and patent the Diffie-Hellman concept of public key cryptography while working as faculty at MIT. As Levy chronicles it, the algorithm, which would become popularly known as RSA, was named for the order in which each mathematician gave to the project. Rivest, who spearheaded the search for the implementation was listed first and Adelman, who merely poked holes in Rivest and Shamir's proposals, had to be convinced that he had even contributed enough to the project to be listed on the paper. Until this point, the description of cryptographic algorithms in scientific texts had always been done using letters of the alphabet to depict members in a cryptographic exchange. The creators of RSA introduced the now famous cryptographic characters, Alice, Bob and the unruly Eve, to describe their new breed of algorithms. Levy is able to highlight the mentality of the three mathematicians, some of which at first, thought the problem was nothing more than a clever puzzle and too grounded in the real world to be successfully dealt with by mathematicians. He shows their transformation to the church of cryptography, as the elegance of the new algorithms would prove as beautiful as the theorems of Gauss and Euclid.

The story continues with RSA Data Security, the vehicle Rivest would use to commercialize his algorithm. To talk about RSA Data Security is to talk about patent use. Both the Diffie-Hellman algorithm, as well as RSA, were actually patented by Stanford University and MIT, respectively. When the patents were granted, those Universities then had the option to either free the patents or restrict them. As history has painfully shown, they did not choose to free them. RSA Data security was built on this decision -- an MIT patent. It was sometimes difficult to read this section of the book with the same exuberance that Levy writes about it. Nonetheless, it is a reminder of the state of our intellectual property laws today in the United States.

Levy's narration eventually leaves the story of RSA to tell that of Phil Zimmerman, someone who could rightly be called a crypto-anarchist. Once again we are treated to an in depth discussion of the motivation that created Pretty Good Privacy. Levy contrasts the use of legal patents by RSA Data Security to bring encryption to the masses, to the complete ignorance of them by Zimmerman in his creation of PGP to achieve the same goal.

Finally, in my favorite section of the book, Levy discusses the controversy that surrounded a device known as the Clipper Chip. It was originally invented by the NSA as a complete key-escrow system, named the Capstone Chip. Later, as AT&T attempted to market the first encrypted telephone device, the Capstone chip became the Clipper Chip as the FBI and other Executive branch officers rushed to implement a brain-dead subset of the original system before the AT&T device made it to market. An entirely amusing fiasco, Levy lays the entire story out from beginning to end.

Lastly, includes an epilogue telling the story of the British agents at GHCQ, who beat Whitfield-Diffie and RSA -- a story that the GCHQ refused to let surface until the mid 1990s.

Levy tells a story about people. If you are looking for a technical discussion of the different aspects of cryptography then you would be better off with Schneier's Applied Cryptography or Singh's The Code Book. However, to understand the freedom that cryptographic technologies bring us, we must understand the history that it stands on. This is what Levy provides. A comprehensive history of the events that took cryptography out of the hands of the NSA and into the hands of political dissidents, CEOs, Nazis, you and me (not to mention mozilla, pgp, ssh, and gpg).

You can purchase Crypto at ThinkGeek.

Steven Levy's Crypto is a brief history of the men involved in developing modern cryptography. If you've read Applied Cryptography or another work with a mathematical emphasis on crypto, you've heard their names -- Diffie, Hellman, Chaum, Rivest, Shamir, Adleman, Zimmermann, and so forth. But the other books on cryptography typically neglect the human side in favor of the math. Crypto aims to fill that hole.

Crypto author Steven Levy pages 356 publisher Viking/Penguin rating 9/10 reviewer Michael Sims, drfalken, topeka ISBN 0-670-85950-8 summary A history of the people involved in developing modern cryptography

Several people were interested in reviewing this book. We try to be accomodating, so this is a mega-review by myself and slashdot readers drfalken and topeka. I'll try to be brief.

Michael's review:

I didn't expect to like Crypto. I was frankly put off by the subtitle on the front cover: "How the Code Rebels Beat the Government -- Saving Privacy in the Digital Age." Every time I send an unencrypted email (because none of my correspondents use encryption, because it isn't built-in) or think about the law (CALEA) which requires my ISP and telephone company to accomodate the government in wire-tapping my communications, I realize that this just isn't true. While the cryptographers thought they were winning battles, the government has so far been winning the war. From the sub-title, I expected the book to be a rah-rah cheerleading history of these noble crypto-knights wielding their ciphersabers with gleeful abandon against the fascist, corrupt, and evil Big Brother.

It turns out to be a much better book than I had expected. The author has collected most of his information through personal interviews, and it ends up being a very readable and very personal account of the past 30 years of cryptographic research and commercial development -- both in the public sphere, and, to some extent, in U.S. and British intelligence agencies. The author treats his subjects fairly - the government is not demonized as I expected, and the cryptographers are not idolized (much). There is essentially no math in this book, beyond the bare minimum necessary to understand the main concepts of cryptography. Together with, say, The Codebreakers for early history and Applied Cryptography for the math, it would make a comprehensive and thorough look at the history and science of cryptography.

drfalken's review: The ubiquity of encryption technology employed by everything from bank machines to e-tailers is now taken for granted. Most people fail to realize, though, the profound impact that this component of the digital world has had on the Information Age. Illumination of this point is the formidable task of Crypto.

The renowned author of Hackers and Insanely Great remains true to form, transforming an obscure, dry and complex subject into an addictive page-turning thriller. He takes us from the hippie culture of academic math research in the 70s, through the dark underworld of government intelligence, into the development of the modern information age. Each step emphasizes the central conflict of the story: American national security vs. the right to individual privacy.

While this conflict has largely been resolved, the story contains important lessons that can be applied to the contemporary struggles over technologies like DeCSS and peer-to-peer media 'sharing.' Levy doesn't make any such connections in the book, but it is impossible to read Crypto without seeing how history is repeating itself in these other areas. This makes Crypto and important book to read. Everyone from the RIAA to 2600 subscribers can learn a lot from this well organized retelling of the past 30 years of crypto history. There's a certain futility involved in trying to put the genie of progress back in a bottle. There's also a case to be made for the management of progress so that it is used with the greatest benefit and smallest detriment to all. Perhaps the most remarkable revelation in the book is how the adversarial nature of 'the geeks' vs. 'the spooks' allowed for the maturation of a sensitive technology in a safe and thoughtful manner.

Anyone who has read Wired or Newsweek over the past 5 years will have read excerpts from Crypto. Levy spent a long time researching this book, which makes sense considering the story he is telling is one that was developing during his period of research. Many of the events he recounts are ones he covered as a journalist at the time that they happened. Some time spent in the Wired archives shows the extent to which he has been one of the journalists closest to the crypto revolution since the release of PGP and the popularization of the Internet.

The book begins with the story of Whit Diffie and his wild ambition to simply learn more about the black art of electronic cryptography. In the early 70s the government monopoly on information relating to serious crypto was nearly complete. Coming from the mindset of the Open Source community, Levy's tale of the early crypto research climate describes a cathedral that makes Microsoft look like the Debian project. The resulting story, therefore, highlights the magnificence of the public key breakthrough, the boldness of the RSA discovery and the daring of Paul Zimmermann's PGP.

If you're looking for a history of Cryptography, get The Code Book by Simon Singh, or Codebreakers by David Kahn instead of this book. Crypto is a contained story dealing exclusively with the American Cryptographic Experience from Diffie-Hellman, through RSA, and PGP. It is effectively a collection of short, intertwined biographies of the saviors of privacy, from Adleman to Zimmermann. This is not to say that Levy ignores the math; on the contrary, his explanation of the magnitude of the public key concept hits home even harder than the impressive work by Simon Singh.

Especially in light of recent Slashdot stories, Crypto is highly recommended, for novices and Cypherpunks alike. It's a coming of age story for American technology, and a great addition to the bookshelf of modern American history.

topeka's review:

The first time I heard the term "elegant" applied to a technical problem was a bit of a revelation for me. Until then, elegance, to me, was a visual quality that could only be achieved by painters and poets. When I began to see the elegance in solutions to technical and mathematical problems, I was hooked into a world of intellectual curiosity. Cryptography immediately filled the mold of a highly complex and technical problem with a beautiful and elegant solution when it was first explained to me several years ago. The idea clicked again when I read Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar and equated that elegance to "scratching a particular itch". This intellectual curiosity seems to drive the open source community.

However, in 1967, when James Ellis (of the secret British agency, GCHQ) first came up with the idea of public key cryptography, his theory was buried. Until then, solutions to cryptographic problems were a dirty process. If it was easy to create a cipher, than it was just as easy to break it. As such, Ellis's breakthrough was simply too pretty to be trusted and as a result, it lay locked away until 1997. Steven Levy's new book, Crypto is the story of the individuals who transformed cryptography from a dirty art, which only the most elite governments dabbled in, to an elegant mathematical solution available to the public in hundreds of different forms. It was all done by a community of individuals who preached openness and sought out clean solutions to tough, technical problems.

Levy starts out his story in the same place as he started with an earlier famous work, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He narrates the story of Whitfield Diffie, the co-creator of public key cryptography. Starting in 1969 as Diffie sought shelter from the Vietnam war working for a defense contractor, Levy discusses Diffie's transformation from examining ideas about cryptography as merely a hobby, to an all out obsession. Diffie is transformed from a man thinking about cryptography on the weekends to a man criss-crossing the country in one run-down Datsun after another, searching for any and every piece of information about cryptography. Diffie would not broach the wall of cryptography until he was pointed to another researcher in California, who seemed to be investigating the same concepts. Levy chronicles the fateful partnership that occurred with Marty Hellman and the subsequent invention of public key cryptography, at least its theory.

At this time, there were few works published on the subject of cryptography. In fact, only government agents and a few privileged defense contractors were able to expend meaningful resources on crypto research. It seems that while Levy's work is a story of the people who waged a war to bring crypto to the public, it is also the story of that wars' enemy, the National Security Agency. The cryptography bureaucracy, gaining most of its resources during the Second World War, had built quite a palace around anything that involved codes. In the years to come, the NSA would fiercely defend its position of strength. From its early attempts to classify David Kahn's famous work, The Codebreakers, to its involvement in the creation of the Digital Encryption Standard and its invention of the Clipper Chip. As Crypto defines it, the spooks were able to keep their lock on cryptography by invoking a mentality of "if only you knew what I know..." in classified briefings to politicians and contract negotiations with defense contractors like IBM. What the NSA never expected, was for anyone to try and find out what it was that they knew. With the publishing of the Diffie-Hellman paper, "New Directions in Cryptography," one of the NSA's most viable opponents would begin their work where Diffie and Hellman's theories left off, implementation.

Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, through a four-month period of intense brainstorming, would eventually implement and patent the Diffie-Hellman concept of public key cryptography while working as faculty at MIT. As Levy chronicles it, the algorithm, which would become popularly known as RSA, was named for the order in which each mathematician gave to the project. Rivest, who spearheaded the search for the implementation was listed first and Adelman, who merely poked holes in Rivest and Shamir's proposals, had to be convinced that he had even contributed enough to the project to be listed on the paper. Until this point, the description of cryptographic algorithms in scientific texts had always been done using letters of the alphabet to depict members in a cryptographic exchange. The creators of RSA introduced the now famous cryptographic characters, Alice, Bob and the unruly Eve, to describe their new breed of algorithms. Levy is able to highlight the mentality of the three mathematicians, some of which at first, thought the problem was nothing more than a clever puzzle and too grounded in the real world to be successfully dealt with by mathematicians. He shows their transformation to the church of cryptography, as the elegance of the new algorithms would prove as beautiful as the theorems of Gauss and Euclid.

The story continues with RSA Data Security, the vehicle Rivest would use to commercialize his algorithm. To talk about RSA Data Security is to talk about patent use. Both the Diffie-Hellman algorithm, as well as RSA, were actually patented by Stanford University and MIT, respectively. When the patents were granted, those Universities then had the option to either free the patents or restrict them. As history has painfully shown, they did not choose to free them. RSA Data security was built on this decision -- an MIT patent. It was sometimes difficult to read this section of the book with the same exuberance that Levy writes about it. Nonetheless, it is a reminder of the state of our intellectual property laws today in the United States.

Levy's narration eventually leaves the story of RSA to tell that of Phil Zimmerman, someone who could rightly be called a crypto-anarchist. Once again we are treated to an in depth discussion of the motivation that created Pretty Good Privacy. Levy contrasts the use of legal patents by RSA Data Security to bring encryption to the masses, to the complete ignorance of them by Zimmerman in his creation of PGP to achieve the same goal.

Finally, in my favorite section of the book, Levy discusses the controversy that surrounded a device known as the Clipper Chip. It was originally invented by the NSA as a complete key-escrow system, named the Capstone Chip. Later, as AT&T attempted to market the first encrypted telephone device, the Capstone chip became the Clipper Chip as the FBI and other Executive branch officers rushed to implement a brain-dead subset of the original system before the AT&T device made it to market. An entirely amusing fiasco, Levy lays the entire story out from beginning to end.

Lastly, includes an epilogue telling the story of the British agents at GHCQ, who beat Whitfield-Diffie and RSA -- a story that the GCHQ refused to let surface until the mid 1990s.

Levy tells a story about people. If you are looking for a technical discussion of the different aspects of cryptography then you would be better off with Schneier's Applied Cryptography or Singh's The Code Book. However, to understand the freedom that cryptographic technologies bring us, we must understand the history that it stands on. This is what Levy provides. A comprehensive history of the events that took cryptography out of the hands of the NSA and into the hands of political dissidents, CEOs, Nazis, you and me (not to mention mozilla, pgp, ssh, and gpg).

You can purchase Crypto at ThinkGeek.

The Hacker Ethic is a brilliant book.Written by young Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen, with contributions in the same volume by Linus Torvalds and Sociology Professor Manuel Castells, this little book blows away the myth that getting important things done requires stodgy and outmoded forms of organization, or a slavish devotion to work. Just the opposite -- Himanen demonstrates with modern and historical examples that there's a sea change underway in the way that work happens. (Read More.)

The Hacker Ethic author Pekka Himanen, with Linus Torvalds and Manuel Castells pages 232 publisher Random House rating 8.5 reviewer timothy ISBN 0375505660 summary How The Hacker Way has and will influence ways of thinking about life, the Universe, and Everything.

I admit it -- the first time I started to read this book, I made a mistake. I began not with Linus Torvalds' clever and funny introduction, or with Pekka Himanen's text (the central part of the book) but with the final section -- Manuell Castells' Epilogue, "Informationalism and the Network Society." Castells' piece, considerably longer than Torvalds' contribution, defines Informationalism ("a technological paradigm based on the augmentation of the human capacity in information processing around the twin revolutions in microelectronics and genetic engineering"), and both traces its rise and makes some predictions about its continued dominance for the near future.

Though Castells is careful to point out the distinction between information-dominated societies (which are nothing new, as he freely points out) and ones characterized by the more profound Informationalism, it took a second read of this section (after starting again from the beginning) to grasp his meaning more fully. It also took that second read to grudgingly accept Castells' inclusion of genetic engineering as an appropriate part of the shift to Informationalism.

The importance of complex, interactive and iterative information processing systems, though, is great enough that Castells seems justified in defining as a breaking point in history the emergence of such systems. Taken in context with the central part of the book, this final chapter is both less off-putting and more insightful than it seemed upon first visit.

The heart of the book, though, is Himanen's treatise on the broad implication of the work, play and life-in-general ideals which hackers have made famous both within and outside the computer world, and it's the most enjoyable part of the book.

First, be assured: Himanen uses "hacker" in the sense that nature intended -- curious, passionate inventors, many of whom happen to use computers as their primary tool of discovery -- rather than a word to mean malicious techno-vandals. Perhaps this book, already talked about in trade and general publications, will help erase the stigma of that word and replace it with the far more positive ideal of an outlook defined by creativity, fun and a desire for meaningful life experiences.

Readers will quickly discover that while The Hacker Ethic obviously has one eye on the tight triangle of recent history, present reality, and immediate future, the other scans a wide range of historical settings and ideas. The title is an allusion to Max Weber's famous work (and more famous idea) The Protestant Work Ethic, tracing back the idea of life centered around diligence and toil to the Protestant preacher Richard Baxter, and before that to the ordered and labor-centered life of the monastary. Bells (and now electronic clocks, timecards and even automatic sensors) decided when things should be done -- and more imporantly, things should be done! Idleness is against the Protest ethic, which holds steady work and its results as the ideals to strive for.

Himanen believes that the Protestant work ethic's replacement has arrived. Computer hackers happen to be the standard bearers, he says, for a whole new way of work, play and life, based around social networks, personal preferences for work environment and content, and a intermingling of work and play.

He points to a number of sources -- some of them may bring a smile, like Richard M. Stallman's Free Software Song, and the sometimes outrageous definitions in Eric S. Raymond's Jargon File -- to demonstrate the way that these non-traditional or even anti-traditional ways of thinking and doing manifest themselves among computer hackers. Hackers, especially the idealized hackers as mythologized in documents like the Jargon File but certainly not only these, tend to ignore social conventions of behavior, when those conventions get in the way of doing what they want. Because of the realities of cheap long-distance communications, electric lights allowing all-night hacking sessions, and other particulars of the electronic-dominated world which has been available to an increasing number of people for more than a generation, they've built their own rules about proper behavior on a computer, on a network, and in the real world. By so doing, they haven't created a world inhabited solely by selfish slobs -- instead, the world of the hacker has simply become one with a far more elastic (and less predictable) matrix of social and professional roles.

Computer hackers may have led the way to this, but Himanen believes that the widespread growth of Net culture is having and will have a permanent effect on the way work is looked at, and the way people approach leisure and work time. The more types of work that can be done by people collaborating and associating with each other (and the networking of the world means that more and more can), the less dependent people will be on rigid schedules, traditional workplaces and alarm bells to announce the end of lunch. In short, the hacker ethic has the potential to improve people's lives by removing the driving impulse to work unbound to real individual preferences.

That doesn't mean that life for hackers results only in advantages to them as individuals -- far from it. Throughout the book, Himanen refers the development of distributed projects, notably the Linux kernel. Despite its utterly voluntary nature, the freeform development of the kernel and of the GPLd software which made it useful resulted in a project involving millions of people. The idea that voluntary distributed actions can have such far-flung, elaborately evolved and evolving results puts the lie to the idea that only noses well rubbed by grindstones can create projects of meaning and substance. The hacker ethic is neither theoretical nor self-absorbed: it's more of a grand restatement of enlightened self-interest.

I did have one major point of contention with Himanen's central thesis, but one which did not really detract from reading the book. Throughout the text, the implication is both hinted at and stated outright that creativity is anathama to the Protestant work ethic. In chapter 7 ("Rest"), Himanen states outright:

"Creativity does not feature prominently in the Protestant ethic, the typical creations of which are the government agency and the monasterylike business enterprise. Neither one of them encourages the individual to engage in creative activity."

While a lack of creativity may be widely associated with the Protestant work ethic, its absence hardly seems implicit to it. In social behavior, unlike mathematics, a single counterexample does not necessarily disprove a theory, but there are many individuals and even entire fields of endeavor predating the emergence of hackers (or an ethic for them to claim) which show the vast potential for creative human living even within societies living undeniably within that ethic. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, I think of as a great hacker of his time: he jumped smoothly from endeavor to endeavor, and in fact exhibited many of the same characteristics that Himanen points out as shared by modern day hackers. But Franklin undeniably ascribed to the Protestant ethic. Perhaps this is mostly a semantic issue, but it never stopped nagging me.

How realistic is Himanen's assesment of changing work values? As someone who went from a relatively straight office job with timesheets, a regular desk, repetitive tasks and forehead-tightening deadlines to one with no timesheets, a desk wherever I have internet access and work that changes and flows with the day, the analysis struck me as personally insightful -- but nowhere near universally applicable, not yet. The Hacker Ethic has arrived, in fact, and to a startling degree, in certain specialized fields and among a few individuals. But offices, factories and retail stores aren't going away. Some enlightened employers have practiced (or attempted) for years to create just the kind of creative environment which would draw people to be simultaneously productive -- in whatever terms that business requires -- and passionate enough to continue for the sake of more than a paycheck.

Linus' introduction is icing on the cake -- Linus writes in the same way he does in emails to the kernel mailing list: wry, biting, self-effacing, quick. He even manages to abbreviate most complex theories of social behavior (remember Maslow's heirarchy of needs?) into just three basic human desires: Survival, social life, and entertainment. Sounds right to me.

After establishing that "survival" is usually taken care of by time one has a computer, electricity and the lower-order goods that make having a computer possible, he says (and you can remove "Linux" for a more universal statement), "The reason that Linux hackers do something is that they find it to be very interesting, and they like to share this interesting thing with others."

Linus' few pages will be just as fun to read, I think, even if his essay boils down mostly to just that single line.

A section of notes at the close of the book is a valuable addition: some of the pithiest explanations are found here, such as examples of hacker humor and a short but insightful historical overview of the development of hypertext.

And for a relatively short book, the bibliography is extensive and eclectic -- reading the list of cited works, of everything from Aristotle to Bill Joy, Plato to Max Weber -- will probably spark some reading lists to expand as well.

This book will be read, re-read and passed on -- if you're employed by someone else, I suggest reading it and (as applicable) giving your copy to your boss, former boss or future boss.

The Hacker Ethic
Preface
Prologue: What Makes Hackers Tick? aka Linus' Law, by Linus Torvalds
Part One: The Work Ethic
Chapter 1: The Hacker Work Ethic
Chapter 2: Time is Money?
Part Two: The Money Ethic
Chapter 3: Money As Motive
Chapter 4: The Academy and the Monastery
Part Three: The Nethic
Chapter 5: From Nettiquette to a Nethic
Chapter 6: The Spirit of Informationalism
Conclusion
Chapter 7: Rest
Epilogue: Informationalism and the Network Society, by Manuell Castells
Appendix: A Brief History of Computer Hackerism Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements

You can purchase The Hacker Ethic at ThinkGeek.

The Hacker Ethic is a brilliant book.Written by young Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen, with contributions in the same volume by Linus Torvalds and Sociology Professor Manuel Castells, this little book blows away the myth that getting important things done requires stodgy and outmoded forms of organization, or a slavish devotion to work. Just the opposite -- Himanen demonstrates with modern and historical examples that there's a sea change underway in the way that work happens. (Read More.)

The Hacker Ethic author Pekka Himanen, with Linus Torvalds and Manuel Castells pages 232 publisher Random House rating 8.5 reviewer timothy ISBN 0375505660 summary How The Hacker Way has and will influence ways of thinking about life, the Universe, and Everything.

I admit it -- the first time I started to read this book, I made a mistake. I began not with Linus Torvalds' clever and funny introduction, or with Pekka Himanen's text (the central part of the book) but with the final section -- Manuell Castells' Epilogue, "Informationalism and the Network Society." Castells' piece, considerably longer than Torvalds' contribution, defines Informationalism ("a technological paradigm based on the augmentation of the human capacity in information processing around the twin revolutions in microelectronics and genetic engineering"), and both traces its rise and makes some predictions about its continued dominance for the near future.

Though Castells is careful to point out the distinction between information-dominated societies (which are nothing new, as he freely points out) and ones characterized by the more profound Informationalism, it took a second read of this section (after starting again from the beginning) to grasp his meaning more fully. It also took that second read to grudgingly accept Castells' inclusion of genetic engineering as an appropriate part of the shift to Informationalism.

The importance of complex, interactive and iterative information processing systems, though, is great enough that Castells seems justified in defining as a breaking point in history the emergence of such systems. Taken in context with the central part of the book, this final chapter is both less off-putting and more insightful than it seemed upon first visit.

The heart of the book, though, is Himanen's treatise on the broad implication of the work, play and life-in-general ideals which hackers have made famous both within and outside the computer world, and it's the most enjoyable part of the book.

First, be assured: Himanen uses "hacker" in the sense that nature intended -- curious, passionate inventors, many of whom happen to use computers as their primary tool of discovery -- rather than a word to mean malicious techno-vandals. Perhaps this book, already talked about in trade and general publications, will help erase the stigma of that word and replace it with the far more positive ideal of an outlook defined by creativity, fun and a desire for meaningful life experiences.

Readers will quickly discover that while The Hacker Ethic obviously has one eye on the tight triangle of recent history, present reality, and immediate future, the other scans a wide range of historical settings and ideas. The title is an allusion to Max Weber's famous work (and more famous idea) The Protestant Work Ethic, tracing back the idea of life centered around diligence and toil to the Protestant preacher Richard Baxter, and before that to the ordered and labor-centered life of the monastary. Bells (and now electronic clocks, timecards and even automatic sensors) decided when things should be done -- and more imporantly, things should be done! Idleness is against the Protest ethic, which holds steady work and its results as the ideals to strive for.

Himanen believes that the Protestant work ethic's replacement has arrived. Computer hackers happen to be the standard bearers, he says, for a whole new way of work, play and life, based around social networks, personal preferences for work environment and content, and a intermingling of work and play.

He points to a number of sources -- some of them may bring a smile, like Richard M. Stallman's Free Software Song, and the sometimes outrageous definitions in Eric S. Raymond's Jargon File -- to demonstrate the way that these non-traditional or even anti-traditional ways of thinking and doing manifest themselves among computer hackers. Hackers, especially the idealized hackers as mythologized in documents like the Jargon File but certainly not only these, tend to ignore social conventions of behavior, when those conventions get in the way of doing what they want. Because of the realities of cheap long-distance communications, electric lights allowing all-night hacking sessions, and other particulars of the electronic-dominated world which has been available to an increasing number of people for more than a generation, they've built their own rules about proper behavior on a computer, on a network, and in the real world. By so doing, they haven't created a world inhabited solely by selfish slobs -- instead, the world of the hacker has simply become one with a far more elastic (and less predictable) matrix of social and professional roles.

Computer hackers may have led the way to this, but Himanen believes that the widespread growth of Net culture is having and will have a permanent effect on the way work is looked at, and the way people approach leisure and work time. The more types of work that can be done by people collaborating and associating with each other (and the networking of the world means that more and more can), the less dependent people will be on rigid schedules, traditional workplaces and alarm bells to announce the end of lunch. In short, the hacker ethic has the potential to improve people's lives by removing the driving impulse to work unbound to real individual preferences.

That doesn't mean that life for hackers results only in advantages to them as individuals -- far from it. Throughout the book, Himanen refers the development of distributed projects, notably the Linux kernel. Despite its utterly voluntary nature, the freeform development of the kernel and of the GPLd software which made it useful resulted in a project involving millions of people. The idea that voluntary distributed actions can have such far-flung, elaborately evolved and evolving results puts the lie to the idea that only noses well rubbed by grindstones can create projects of meaning and substance. The hacker ethic is neither theoretical nor self-absorbed: it's more of a grand restatement of enlightened self-interest.

I did have one major point of contention with Himanen's central thesis, but one which did not really detract from reading the book. Throughout the text, the implication is both hinted at and stated outright that creativity is anathama to the Protestant work ethic. In chapter 7 ("Rest"), Himanen states outright:

"Creativity does not feature prominently in the Protestant ethic, the typical creations of which are the government agency and the monasterylike business enterprise. Neither one of them encourages the individual to engage in creative activity."

While a lack of creativity may be widely associated with the Protestant work ethic, its absence hardly seems implicit to it. In social behavior, unlike mathematics, a single counterexample does not necessarily disprove a theory, but there are many individuals and even entire fields of endeavor predating the emergence of hackers (or an ethic for them to claim) which show the vast potential for creative human living even within societies living undeniably within that ethic. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, I think of as a great hacker of his time: he jumped smoothly from endeavor to endeavor, and in fact exhibited many of the same characteristics that Himanen points out as shared by modern day hackers. But Franklin undeniably ascribed to the Protestant ethic. Perhaps this is mostly a semantic issue, but it never stopped nagging me.

How realistic is Himanen's assesment of changing work values? As someone who went from a relatively straight office job with timesheets, a regular desk, repetitive tasks and forehead-tightening deadlines to one with no timesheets, a desk wherever I have internet access and work that changes and flows with the day, the analysis struck me as personally insightful -- but nowhere near universally applicable, not yet. The Hacker Ethic has arrived, in fact, and to a startling degree, in certain specialized fields and among a few individuals. But offices, factories and retail stores aren't going away. Some enlightened employers have practiced (or attempted) for years to create just the kind of creative environment which would draw people to be simultaneously productive -- in whatever terms that business requires -- and passionate enough to continue for the sake of more than a paycheck.

Linus' introduction is icing on the cake -- Linus writes in the same way he does in emails to the kernel mailing list: wry, biting, self-effacing, quick. He even manages to abbreviate most complex theories of social behavior (remember Maslow's heirarchy of needs?) into just three basic human desires: Survival, social life, and entertainment. Sounds right to me.

After establishing that "survival" is usually taken care of by time one has a computer, electricity and the lower-order goods that make having a computer possible, he says (and you can remove "Linux" for a more universal statement), "The reason that Linux hackers do something is that they find it to be very interesting, and they like to share this interesting thing with others."

Linus' few pages will be just as fun to read, I think, even if his essay boils down mostly to just that single line.

A section of notes at the close of the book is a valuable addition: some of the pithiest explanations are found here, such as examples of hacker humor and a short but insightful historical overview of the development of hypertext.

And for a relatively short book, the bibliography is extensive and eclectic -- reading the list of cited works, of everything from Aristotle to Bill Joy, Plato to Max Weber -- will probably spark some reading lists to expand as well.

This book will be read, re-read and passed on -- if you're employed by someone else, I suggest reading it and (as applicable) giving your copy to your boss, former boss or future boss.

The Hacker Ethic
Preface
Prologue: What Makes Hackers Tick? aka Linus' Law, by Linus Torvalds
Part One: The Work Ethic
Chapter 1: The Hacker Work Ethic
Chapter 2: Time is Money?
Part Two: The Money Ethic
Chapter 3: Money As Motive
Chapter 4: The Academy and the Monastery
Part Three: The Nethic
Chapter 5: From Nettiquette to a Nethic
Chapter 6: The Spirit of Informationalism
Conclusion
Chapter 7: Rest
Epilogue: Informationalism and the Network Society, by Manuell Castells
Appendix: A Brief History of Computer Hackerism Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements

You can purchase The Hacker Ethic at ThinkGeek.

Fire In the Valley is not about the computer or software industry in toto -- this book is about the evolution of the PC, including well before it was called the PC. Forget being able to pick up the phone and order a speedy machine with plenty of RAM (for overnight delivery, no less!) from any of several vendors, for less than a month of the minimum wage: this was a time when the very idea of a machine for casual or home use, or even have a full-featured computer on one's work desktop was radical, even laughable. A personal computer? There was no such animal, until the people in this book invented it. (Read more below.)

Fire In the Valley author Freiberger, Paul and Swaine, Michael pages 448 publisher McGraw-Hill rating 8.0 reviewer timothy ISBN 0071358951 summary A look into the the personal computer revoluition; lots of history straight from the mouths of the revolutionaries.

In that light, it's not as wide-ranging a book as Steven Levy's Hackers, but Fire does a good job of getting into the details of the sometimes bizarre culture of programmers and hardware gurus who decided that -- however impractical it seemed at the time -- eventually people were going to want computers to communicate, to track their bills, to play games. They knew there was money in that line of thought, even if a few of them though that the real benefit of personal computers would be in a new and lasting sense of community. And some of them wanted machines just to play with, too. In short, it illustrates the wildcat beginnings of the industry which brings you the screen in front of you.

Positive vibrations Many of the names in the pages of this book -- of people, machines and organizations -- are ones that computer history buffs will recognize, whether from a stack of dusty documents in the basement, from old copies of BYTE, or from the covers of Time and Newsweek. Some of them, in fact, are names that you would be hard pressed not to know as a modern computer user -- Gates, Jobs, Ellison. Others are obscure outside of computer-geek circles -- people like John Draper ("Cap'n Crunch"), Lee Felsenstein, David Bunnell (founder of PC Magazine and a host of other computer publications), and Steve Dompier.

After a whirlwind historical introduction to the context in which the personal computer became possible -- including appropriate obligatory mentions of Babbage, ENIAC, and the invention of the integrated circuit -- Freiberger and Swaine land us in a chapter called "Critical Mass" in early 1969. That's when a fateful piece of business landed at then-memory manufacturer Intel: a piece of contract work for a Japanese calculator manufacturer led to the development of 4004 microprocessor, then the 8008, which gave way in turn to ever more complex and capable microprocessors. While Intel did not remain alone in this field for long, the introduction of cheap integrated chips is what set the stage for everything else that happened in the years afterward.

But what did happen afterward? The authors concentrate on the first successful home or hobbiest computers, like the MITS Altair, the Osborne and the Apple I, as well as the generation of corporate fueled projects which emerged once it was clear that people would indeed pay to have a computer on their desk or on the fiddle-with workbench in the basement. They also get into quite a few of the ships that sank as fast as they were launched, and some of these spectacular failures make interesting reading even if you're not thinking about starting a business, but sobering if you are. (Radio Shack, TI, HP, and others probably all regretted not listening sooner to the scruffy hobbiests who swore that people would buy them.)

Unlike certain other techno-hagiographies, most of the action in Fire takes place west of the Missisppi (the Valley in the title is the one you'd think -- Silicon Valley), with only passing references to much of the East Coast action going on at the time at universities and at corporations like DEC. That bias is not accidental, and really doesn't constitute a sin of omission. The boards of big corporations like HP, DEC, and IBM saw little profit in putting many of their precious dollars or engineers on low-margin personal machines: they liked to make big iron (or at least medium iron) that they could sell in hefty chunks to tech-savvy companies to help do large corporate tasks. Selling to individuals, in a world where the necessity for a personal or household computer was not yet established, would have been an odd move. All of those companies later saw the error in their ways and did enter the field of PCs, of course -- ironically (and past the time frame this book primarily addresses) the once-giant DEC was eventually subsumed -- by personal-computer maker Compaq.

But out there in the heady Wild West, when computers were still mostly room-sized beasts which needed constant tending by a full-time staff, grew the makings of The Homebrew Computer Club, which drew people whose names would eventually adorn magazine covers and company letterheads. Right from its start in 1975, the Club started attracting cantankerous circuit designers, switch-flippers and other hackers who wanted to have their very own computer room.

With surprising ease, the story moves among Silicon Valley to Washington State (home of Bill Gates, and eventually, Microsoft -- a whole story in itself, well covered here) and Ed Roberts' operation MITS, creators of the Altair hobbiest computer.

It's a rush to read, and for most of the ride you may forget to stop reading.

A few sour notes For most of the ride, I said. The story telling is crisp and enjoyable for the most part, but in book this size there are bound to be a few dips. I could have done with a lot less information, for instance, about the role of est at once-promising computer maker IMSAI. While it's certainly an interesting influence (hey, this was California in the 70s, what do you expect? Puritanism?), it didn't turn me on for as many pages as it seemed to have the authors. Perhaps in an effort to make each one readable as an independent section, certain of the chapters read almost as if written for separate publication; how many times do we need to be reminded how Bill Gates and Paul Allen started working together, and that both went to Harvard?

Perhaps because as someone who grew up mostly in the 80s and has spent most of the 90s with at least one personal computer at all times, the story of Jobs split from Apple, the development of Windows, and many of the other later developments covered in the last third of the book were all much less enjoyable to me than the "ancient history" portion. While it's interesting to see these things put in the context of the personal computer revolution as a whole, it was much less informative simply because the history is so close.

Likewise, the brief treatment of the World Wide Web, and in particular the conflicts (still ongoing) outlined in the chapter called "The Browser Wars," I could have skipped and enjoyed the book just as much. It's in this chapter that the most mention of Open Source and Free Software is made, and it may be a decent introduction to the topic to someone unfamiliar with it, but I suspect most Slashdot readers will find themselves skimming for information they didn't already know in this portion.

What it's not If you're looking for hard-core information on early circuit designs, or code snippets from the programs which launched the rise of the PC, this is probably the wrong book -- though there is a satisfyingly large reproduction of the circuit board of the Apple I. The infectuous spirit of invention and a strange ort of aggressive computer-based fun comes through clearly, because Freiberger and Swaine concentrate on the personalities and business realities of the early days of the PC more than they do the technological advances which made it possible. Whether you find this more engaging or annoying is of course up to you; I found the stories and interactions of the early PC pioneers fascinating, less so the business machinations of the 80s and 90s.

Bonus Play My favorite aspect of the book is probably all the history of the Altair, the West Coast Computer Faire; I consider these a bonus even though they're a normal part of the book.

This book is labelled a "collectors edition," though (the book was first published in 1984; all the information about the late 80s and 90s is obviously added since then), and it does come with a few nice extras to justify that: For one thing, it's a nice, heftily large book (nearly 450 pages, not counting the massive index); there's a great selection of photos in the middle of the book, too, with some shots that will make you either smile or cringe to see how young these people really were.

A timeline at the beginning of the book is great reading all by itself, and an included CD-ROM contains more audio clips, pictures and history as well.It's well suited to your coffee table or mantle for pleasant evening reading.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Fire In the Valley is not about the computer or software industry in toto -- this book is about the evolution of the PC, including well before it was called the PC. Forget being able to pick up the phone and order a speedy machine with plenty of RAM (for overnight delivery, no less!) from any of several vendors, for less than a month of the minimum wage: this was a time when the very idea of a machine for casual or home use, or even have a full-featured computer on one's work desktop was radical, even laughable. A personal computer? There was no such animal, until the people in this book invented it. (Read more below.)

Fire In the Valley author Freiberger, Paul and Swaine, Michael pages 448 publisher McGraw-Hill rating 8.0 reviewer timothy ISBN 0071358951 summary A look into the the personal computer revoluition; lots of history straight from the mouths of the revolutionaries.

In that light, it's not as wide-ranging a book as Steven Levy's Hackers, but Fire does a good job of getting into the details of the sometimes bizarre culture of programmers and hardware gurus who decided that -- however impractical it seemed at the time -- eventually people were going to want computers to communicate, to track their bills, to play games. They knew there was money in that line of thought, even if a few of them though that the real benefit of personal computers would be in a new and lasting sense of community. And some of them wanted machines just to play with, too. In short, it illustrates the wildcat beginnings of the industry which brings you the screen in front of you.

Positive vibrations Many of the names in the pages of this book -- of people, machines and organizations -- are ones that computer history buffs will recognize, whether from a stack of dusty documents in the basement, from old copies of BYTE, or from the covers of Time and Newsweek. Some of them, in fact, are names that you would be hard pressed not to know as a modern computer user -- Gates, Jobs, Ellison. Others are obscure outside of computer-geek circles -- people like John Draper ("Cap'n Crunch"), Lee Felsenstein, David Bunnell (founder of PC Magazine and a host of other computer publications), and Steve Dompier.

After a whirlwind historical introduction to the context in which the personal computer became possible -- including appropriate obligatory mentions of Babbage, ENIAC, and the invention of the integrated circuit -- Freiberger and Swaine land us in a chapter called "Critical Mass" in early 1969. That's when a fateful piece of business landed at then-memory manufacturer Intel: a piece of contract work for a Japanese calculator manufacturer led to the development of 4004 microprocessor, then the 8008, which gave way in turn to ever more complex and capable microprocessors. While Intel did not remain alone in this field for long, the introduction of cheap integrated chips is what set the stage for everything else that happened in the years afterward.

But what did happen afterward? The authors concentrate on the first successful home or hobbiest computers, like the MITS Altair, the Osborne and the Apple I, as well as the generation of corporate fueled projects which emerged once it was clear that people would indeed pay to have a computer on their desk or on the fiddle-with workbench in the basement. They also get into quite a few of the ships that sank as fast as they were launched, and some of these spectacular failures make interesting reading even if you're not thinking about starting a business, but sobering if you are. (Radio Shack, TI, HP, and others probably all regretted not listening sooner to the scruffy hobbiests who swore that people would buy them.)

Unlike certain other techno-hagiographies, most of the action in Fire takes place west of the Missisppi (the Valley in the title is the one you'd think -- Silicon Valley), with only passing references to much of the East Coast action going on at the time at universities and at corporations like DEC. That bias is not accidental, and really doesn't constitute a sin of omission. The boards of big corporations like HP, DEC, and IBM saw little profit in putting many of their precious dollars or engineers on low-margin personal machines: they liked to make big iron (or at least medium iron) that they could sell in hefty chunks to tech-savvy companies to help do large corporate tasks. Selling to individuals, in a world where the necessity for a personal or household computer was not yet established, would have been an odd move. All of those companies later saw the error in their ways and did enter the field of PCs, of course -- ironically (and past the time frame this book primarily addresses) the once-giant DEC was eventually subsumed -- by personal-computer maker Compaq.

But out there in the heady Wild West, when computers were still mostly room-sized beasts which needed constant tending by a full-time staff, grew the makings of The Homebrew Computer Club, which drew people whose names would eventually adorn magazine covers and company letterheads. Right from its start in 1975, the Club started attracting cantankerous circuit designers, switch-flippers and other hackers who wanted to have their very own computer room.

With surprising ease, the story moves among Silicon Valley to Washington State (home of Bill Gates, and eventually, Microsoft -- a whole story in itself, well covered here) and Ed Roberts' operation MITS, creators of the Altair hobbiest computer.

It's a rush to read, and for most of the ride you may forget to stop reading.

A few sour notes For most of the ride, I said. The story telling is crisp and enjoyable for the most part, but in book this size there are bound to be a few dips. I could have done with a lot less information, for instance, about the role of est at once-promising computer maker IMSAI. While it's certainly an interesting influence (hey, this was California in the 70s, what do you expect? Puritanism?), it didn't turn me on for as many pages as it seemed to have the authors. Perhaps in an effort to make each one readable as an independent section, certain of the chapters read almost as if written for separate publication; how many times do we need to be reminded how Bill Gates and Paul Allen started working together, and that both went to Harvard?

Perhaps because as someone who grew up mostly in the 80s and has spent most of the 90s with at least one personal computer at all times, the story of Jobs split from Apple, the development of Windows, and many of the other later developments covered in the last third of the book were all much less enjoyable to me than the "ancient history" portion. While it's interesting to see these things put in the context of the personal computer revolution as a whole, it was much less informative simply because the history is so close.

Likewise, the brief treatment of the World Wide Web, and in particular the conflicts (still ongoing) outlined in the chapter called "The Browser Wars," I could have skipped and enjoyed the book just as much. It's in this chapter that the most mention of Open Source and Free Software is made, and it may be a decent introduction to the topic to someone unfamiliar with it, but I suspect most Slashdot readers will find themselves skimming for information they didn't already know in this portion.

What it's not If you're looking for hard-core information on early circuit designs, or code snippets from the programs which launched the rise of the PC, this is probably the wrong book -- though there is a satisfyingly large reproduction of the circuit board of the Apple I. The infectuous spirit of invention and a strange ort of aggressive computer-based fun comes through clearly, because Freiberger and Swaine concentrate on the personalities and business realities of the early days of the PC more than they do the technological advances which made it possible. Whether you find this more engaging or annoying is of course up to you; I found the stories and interactions of the early PC pioneers fascinating, less so the business machinations of the 80s and 90s.

Bonus Play My favorite aspect of the book is probably all the history of the Altair, the West Coast Computer Faire; I consider these a bonus even though they're a normal part of the book.

This book is labelled a "collectors edition," though (the book was first published in 1984; all the information about the late 80s and 90s is obviously added since then), and it does come with a few nice extras to justify that: For one thing, it's a nice, heftily large book (nearly 450 pages, not counting the massive index); there's a great selection of photos in the middle of the book, too, with some shots that will make you either smile or cringe to see how young these people really were.

A timeline at the beginning of the book is great reading all by itself, and an included CD-ROM contains more audio clips, pictures and history as well.It's well suited to your coffee table or mantle for pleasant evening reading.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Some of you may find it odd to see your own experiences and memories presented as social history. But according to a meticulously reported (but somewhat dry) new book Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Open Source has changed the world and isn't done yet. If you want to read a top-to-bottom account of how it happened, author Glyn Moody offers a good one. (Read more)

Rebel Code: Inside Linux And The Open Source Revolution author Glyn Moody pages 333 publisher Perseus rating 7/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-7382-0333-5 summary How Linus started it all

The author has a point: Open Source did turn out to be a revolution whose impact and implications went beyond the wildest dreams of its idealistic, obsessive creators and are ballooning beyond the software community and the Net.

Rebel code helped end the Microsoft era, is challenging the proprietary notions of commerce, intellectual property and censorship that have dominated business and information for a long time.

Rebel Code, by British author Glyn Moody is one of the first serious histories of this movement. It's an important story, and also a useful primer for anybody interested in how this increasingly complicated phenomenon came about.

Moody begins the book at the peak of Microsoft's rule, with the primal beginnings of Linux at the hands of Linus Torvalds, then a college student in Finland. He takes us through the development of the new system, all the way up to the newly-emerging business implications of GNU/Linux.

Today, he writes, the "open source revolution has moved on from the pioneers. Today, mainstream companies -- IBM, HP, COmpaq and SGI -- have all taken up open source in various ways. They depend critically neither on Unix, as Sun does, nor on open source, as Red Hat and other distributions do. Instead, they use both as elements of a broader strategy: selling hardware and services."

The central issue now, isn't whether Open Source companies can flourish and blossom into billion-dollar concerns, but whether free software can continue to grow and progress as it has for the last 15 years. He suggests the answer is yes.

Moody, a London-based writer who has used and written about Linux since its creation, has written for Wired, Computer Weekly and The London Financial Times. He knows his stuff. The book is crammed with OS arcania and minutiae: microkernels versus monolithic kernels and probability, and even the story of Eric Raymond's search for a new name that would be less ambiguous than "free software." (Moody credits Christine Peterson, president of the Foresight Institute, with coming up with the term "open source.")

This is probably the most definitive social chronicle of the creation of Linux and the evolution of the free software movement. It also explains why Open Source has become so important in terms of economics and business models.

Rebel Code is an investigative book with a distinctly-behind-the-scenes feel to it. It moves from tense programming breakthroughs to the cliques, feuds, business influences, ancillary discoveries and sometimes nasty politics that have marked the OS universe. All of the major players are interviewed here: Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Larry Wall, Brian Behlendorf, Michael Tiemann, and Eric Raymond among many others.

Moody belives that Torvalds is unique in part because he was able to serve as a focal point for complicated programming advances, a methodology that has allowed the delegation of software programming and architectural decisions to ever expanding circles of contributors and experts. Thanks to this style -- Moody calls it "power wielded in subservience to the user base" -- software can be written and distributed much more widely.

The author also believes that Stallman will be the leader of the Free Software movement for as long as he wishes to be, but, he says, "a worthy successor who has the rare mix of qualities necessary may already be emerging in the person of Miguel de Icaza."

It turns out that Rebel Code is the perfect name for the social upheaval that Torvalds touched off.

This is a good book to mark the end of the Microsoft Era, and good preparation for the beginning of another, hopefully more open one. If Rebel Code has a flaw, it is that it's dry reading. Moody has crammed so much reporting and information into this book, and moves so relentlessly from one event, programming advance, breakthrough and benchmark to another, the real implications and human drama of what's happening sometimes sometimes slips by. If you don't know the significance of code and programming breakthroughs, they can slide by. But those of you who've lived it will enjoy seeing your own experience morphed into a historical perspective by a skilled journalist.

The book has an authentic-in-the-trenches feel to it. And no matter how technical, the Open Source revolution is exciting far beyond the techie fold. Hollywood has even made a lousy movie about it -- "Antitrust." Reading Rebel Code, you're left with the feeling that this story is just beginning.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Some of you may find it odd to see your own experiences and memories presented as social history. But according to a meticulously reported (but somewhat dry) new book Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Open Source has changed the world and isn't done yet. If you want to read a top-to-bottom account of how it happened, author Glyn Moody offers a good one. (Read more)

Rebel Code: Inside Linux And The Open Source Revolution author Glyn Moody pages 333 publisher Perseus rating 7/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-7382-0333-5 summary How Linus started it all

The author has a point: Open Source did turn out to be a revolution whose impact and implications went beyond the wildest dreams of its idealistic, obsessive creators and are ballooning beyond the software community and the Net.

Rebel code helped end the Microsoft era, is challenging the proprietary notions of commerce, intellectual property and censorship that have dominated business and information for a long time.

Rebel Code, by British author Glyn Moody is one of the first serious histories of this movement. It's an important story, and also a useful primer for anybody interested in how this increasingly complicated phenomenon came about.

Moody begins the book at the peak of Microsoft's rule, with the primal beginnings of Linux at the hands of Linus Torvalds, then a college student in Finland. He takes us through the development of the new system, all the way up to the newly-emerging business implications of GNU/Linux.

Today, he writes, the "open source revolution has moved on from the pioneers. Today, mainstream companies -- IBM, HP, COmpaq and SGI -- have all taken up open source in various ways. They depend critically neither on Unix, as Sun does, nor on open source, as Red Hat and other distributions do. Instead, they use both as elements of a broader strategy: selling hardware and services."

The central issue now, isn't whether Open Source companies can flourish and blossom into billion-dollar concerns, but whether free software can continue to grow and progress as it has for the last 15 years. He suggests the answer is yes.

Moody, a London-based writer who has used and written about Linux since its creation, has written for Wired, Computer Weekly and The London Financial Times. He knows his stuff. The book is crammed with OS arcania and minutiae: microkernels versus monolithic kernels and probability, and even the story of Eric Raymond's search for a new name that would be less ambiguous than "free software." (Moody credits Christine Peterson, president of the Foresight Institute, with coming up with the term "open source.")

This is probably the most definitive social chronicle of the creation of Linux and the evolution of the free software movement. It also explains why Open Source has become so important in terms of economics and business models.

Rebel Code is an investigative book with a distinctly-behind-the-scenes feel to it. It moves from tense programming breakthroughs to the cliques, feuds, business influences, ancillary discoveries and sometimes nasty politics that have marked the OS universe. All of the major players are interviewed here: Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Larry Wall, Brian Behlendorf, Michael Tiemann, and Eric Raymond among many others.

Moody belives that Torvalds is unique in part because he was able to serve as a focal point for complicated programming advances, a methodology that has allowed the delegation of software programming and architectural decisions to ever expanding circles of contributors and experts. Thanks to this style -- Moody calls it "power wielded in subservience to the user base" -- software can be written and distributed much more widely.

The author also believes that Stallman will be the leader of the Free Software movement for as long as he wishes to be, but, he says, "a worthy successor who has the rare mix of qualities necessary may already be emerging in the person of Miguel de Icaza."

It turns out that Rebel Code is the perfect name for the social upheaval that Torvalds touched off.

This is a good book to mark the end of the Microsoft Era, and good preparation for the beginning of another, hopefully more open one. If Rebel Code has a flaw, it is that it's dry reading. Moody has crammed so much reporting and information into this book, and moves so relentlessly from one event, programming advance, breakthrough and benchmark to another, the real implications and human drama of what's happening sometimes sometimes slips by. If you don't know the significance of code and programming breakthroughs, they can slide by. But those of you who've lived it will enjoy seeing your own experience morphed into a historical perspective by a skilled journalist.

The book has an authentic-in-the-trenches feel to it. And no matter how technical, the Open Source revolution is exciting far beyond the techie fold. Hollywood has even made a lousy movie about it -- "Antitrust." Reading Rebel Code, you're left with the feeling that this story is just beginning.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

In his new book Pride Before The Fall, John Heilemann explains how Microsoft was brought down by the arrogant, delusional monomania of its founder, a man who had clearly come to believe in his own immortality and was unable to grasp the realities of the world. For years, programmers perceived Microsoft as nearly satanic because of its staggering monopoly, questionable products and ruthless practices. Turns out they saw what nobody offline could or did. Heilemann talks to everybody involved, including Gates. This is a book you literally will not be able to put down.

For his new book Pride Before The Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era, " author John Heilemann got to do what many people reading this must have fantasized about a thousand times:

He flew out to Redmond, sat across from Bill Gates, and asked if he regretted his handling of the Microsoft antitrust trial, during which he alienated state attorneys general, the public and Justice Department trial lawyers, and enraged the federal judge trying the case with a series of provocative and intemperament public statements. Gates and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had told reporters the trial was a "travesty of justice," that "we are absolutely confident we will win on appeal", and that they would "never" allow Microsoft to be broken up -- comments that helped convince Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson that Gates was unrepentant and that no solution short of a breakup could change Microsoft's predatory, monopolistic behavior.

To this day, neither Gates nor any of his aides has admitted an iota of wrongdoing before, during or after the catastrophic trial.

In one of the many dramatic incidents recounted in this astoundingly well reported book, Heilemann said he understood that Gates had "the right"..to make such statements.

"What I'm asking here is a tactical question. It was a moment of great political sensitivity. Wouldn't it have been better to keep your mouths shut?"

The look on Gates' face, recounts Heilemann, fairly radiated contempt. "We are defending principles of greated importance," he harrumphed. "Our right of appeal. Our right to innovate. Our right to have an appeals court sit and judge that." Even to mention tactics and sensibilities, he told Heilemann, was to sully those great principles with the grubbiness of politics.

Gates was unwavering. The company had done nothing wrong, the judge's findings were baseless, he had made no mistakes of any kind. He and Microsoft would be fully vindicated by the appeals process.

Pride Before The Fall is the best account we're likely to see of the downfall of Bill Gates, the wealthiest and most successful businessperson in the world, and until the antitrust trial, one of the most fawned-over. Heilemann sheds some piercing light on how the debacle that engulfed Microsoft could have been allowed to happen -- something analysts, competitors, geeks, CEO's, journalists, coders and Microsoft employees have been wondering for years and have never quite been able to explain. This book and story give credence to the old saw that has it that just because you're paranoid about somebody doesn't mean you're wrong.

Media coverage of Microsoft of is so riddled with hype and hysteria -- an exception has been Joseph Nocera of Fortune Magazine -- that Heilemann's account comes as a brilliant jolt, even to Microsoft-haters. He seems to have penetrated every nook and corner of the trial to tell this story.

The impending break-up of Microsoft was quite avoidable, according to almost every principal close to the case. Gates could have changed some of Microsoft's practices early on, especially those relating to the relationship between IE and Windows and PC makers. He could have settled. He could have accepted relatively generous mediation terms. He could have lobbied for support in Washington, instead of treating bureaucrats with contempt. He could have told DOJ lawyers and the judge the truth in his testimony. He could have avoided gratuituously offending the judge, members of Congress and the public, thereby tarnishing the previously wholesome image of his company, perhaps for good.

Why didn't he?

The patterns of powerful men (my only squawk with this book is that Heilemann didn't go into this history at all, but it is helpful) brought low by hubris -- Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, now Gates -- are eerily similiar. They all seem to have believed that the rules that govern other people didn't apply to them. They underestimated their enemies, and lacked friends who could tell them the truth. They surrounded themselves with people who told them what they wanted to hear. They were unable, when things went wrong, to apologize, acknowledge wrongdoing or change their behavior or tactics, or avert looming disaster that everyone else could see coming right at them.

Although his wrongdoings are not comparable, and there are plenty of serious questions about U.S. antitrust laws as they relate to a new kind of economy, Gates hubris fits the pattern. Despite the conclusions of every principal in the trial that Microsoft engaged in predatory, illegal and reprehensible business practices, Gates still can't accept it.

Before the trial, Heilemann points out, Gates was more than a high-tech billionaire. "He was the pristine embodiment of the high-tech myth. At an impossibly young age, he'd come out of nowhere, consumed with ideas and a pure burning passion. He had launched a company that unleashed an industry, and then led that industry as it transformed an economy. For a long time, Gates represented everything that was inspiring about this protean phenomenon taking shape in our midst -- its freshness and its ambition, its sense of possibility and its connection to the future. But like a figure lifted from classical tragedy, Gates sowed the seeds of his own undoing."

If anything, Heilemann understates Gates' unique public position during the late 80's and early 90's. Vice-presidents of the U.S. flew out to Redmond for his parties, editors of Time, The New Yorker and other magazines and publications visited him to write worshipful tributes and gather up his wisdom. Gates wrote a series of vapid and self-aggrandizing books that became instant best-sellers. The historical function of media, to harry and probe the powerful and famous, broke down.

Gates created a company that reflected his image, says Heilemann, and that fostered a worshipful culture of Gatesian omnipotence. He mastered a complex business, but failed to develop any peripheral vision, political sensibility, flexibility, or public relations antennae.

"In his arrogance, he lost whatever perspective he once had, and in his monomania he was unwise to the ways of the world....When his reckoning came, it was shocking and final."

Strong stuff, but Heilemann, a special correspondent for Wired and a former staff writer for The New Yorker , backs it up. He not only interviewed Gates, he had access to nearly every other important figure in the trial, from the judge and his clerk to Justice Department officials and lawyers on both sides. He also is clearly well-connected with the increasingly organized and embittered coalition of anti-Gates executives, lawyers and activists in Silicon Valley, seething for years over the way Microsoft did business.

One of the book's many triumphs is a penetrating look at the Valley's craven and incestuous corporate culture, which increasingly resembles not the new but the old order, the bitter, back-stabbing and opportunism of Washington. In the headquarters of the new economy, the old-fashioned laws of butt-covering and money-grubbing capitalism seemed to dominate. A couple of isolated oddballs did the right thing, but only a couple. Everyone else ducked or ran for cover.

Whatever the ultimate outcome of the appeals under way, it's hard to overstate the significance of the Microsoft trial. The case was a watershed. At times, Gates seemed very nearly broken, and the halo surrounding the company he built has vanished. The case will shape the nature of competition, innovation and law in the high-tech markets pushing aside the practices of the old economy. Economists believe that the outcome will set the rules for years to come. What's amazing is that everybody involved seemed to grasp what was at stake except for the primary target: Gates himself.

Heilemann nails Gates, and more importantly, explains him. Microsoft was brought down by the arrogant, delusional monomania of its founder, traits not perceived by his legions of profilers or challenged by his hordes of subordinates, a man who had clearly come to believe in his own immortality and was unable to grasp the realities of the world beyond his own company. For a man who believes in his own omnipotence, some bitter pills. The phrase "tech-smart but world dumb" is sometimes used to describe even brilliant programmers and computing executives. It captures Gates perfectly. In fact, he embodies it.

One of Heilemann's most telling scenes -- in one of the best books yet written about power and the new economy -- shows Gates, just as Microsoft lawyers readied their case, leaving other MS execs in charge, and heading off on a weeks-long vacation accompanied by his wife and bigwigs like financier Warren Buffet and new media scion William Randolph Hearst III. Gates had chartered a train to ferry his troupe around the American West on a sightseeing tour. Heilemann reports that Gates was surrounded by adoring minions and acolytes who made sure he never got bored or testy, who arranged for a string of experts -- archaeologists, historians -- to suddenly appear out of nowhere and describe a canyon or town.

The image is not of a new kind of leader for the new economy, but of a standard tycoon losing touch with reality, the Citizen Kane of cyberspace, his every whim satisfied, the number of people who can say "you're wrong" dwindling. Small wonder he couldn't bring himself to believe some geek programmers, Silicon Valley whiners and a handful of underpaid Justice Department lawyers could pose much threat.

Many developers, programmers and workers in the tech industry had for years perceived Microsoft as nearly satanic because of its staggering monopoly, its products of questionable quality, its ferociously proprietary ethic. They were right, able to see their world from a vantage point the off-line world still hasn't quite grasped. Many, many stories circulated about the company's arrogance and brutal business style.

Ironic that these sometimes paranoid-seeming notions turned out to be largely valid. The Microsoft culture that Heilemann presents was actually worse than many believed.

The feelings that many Microsoft employees had for their boss went beyond respect or loyalty, writes Heilemann, "and crept right up to the brink of infatuation: in one way or another, everyone in Redmond seemed to have a crush on Bill. Gates inspired this intense following without being, in any conventional sense, a charismatic or especially winning figure."

What he was, the book says, was very smart, and in the universe that he had personally created, "to be deemed smart -- or, better still, super smart -- was to be awarded the greatest accolade in the Microsoft lexicon."

But Gates' behavior before, during and after the antitrust case was anything but smart. At every critical juncture when a friend, colleague, attorney or ally needed to grab him by the threat and force him to come to his senses, nobody did -- either because he was considered above reproach or because, as Heilemann seems to suspect, he simply wouldn't have listened and won't to this day.

Microsoft is still a powerful corporation, and Gates still has many billions in the bank. There are tougher ways to fall. But Heilemann is dead on when he says the Microsoft era is over, done in by the same smart and flawed many who created it.

As for Pride Before the Fall, it's timely, economical and powerful. Skillfully reported, it captures better than any other our transition from one historic period to other. It has enormous moral and human punch, and is convincing and unsparing. It's gripping reading.

P.S. Full disclosure: Heilemann and I worked together as columnists at Hotwired several years ago.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

In his new book Pride Before The Fall, John Heilemann explains how Microsoft was brought down by the arrogant, delusional monomania of its founder, a man who had clearly come to believe in his own immortality and was unable to grasp the realities of the world. For years, programmers perceived Microsoft as nearly satanic because of its staggering monopoly, questionable products and ruthless practices. Turns out they saw what nobody offline could or did. Heilemann talks to everybody involved, including Gates. This is a book you literally will not be able to put down.

For his new book Pride Before The Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era, " author John Heilemann got to do what many people reading this must have fantasized about a thousand times:

He flew out to Redmond, sat across from Bill Gates, and asked if he regretted his handling of the Microsoft antitrust trial, during which he alienated state attorneys general, the public and Justice Department trial lawyers, and enraged the federal judge trying the case with a series of provocative and intemperament public statements. Gates and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had told reporters the trial was a "travesty of justice," that "we are absolutely confident we will win on appeal", and that they would "never" allow Microsoft to be broken up -- comments that helped convince Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson that Gates was unrepentant and that no solution short of a breakup could change Microsoft's predatory, monopolistic behavior.

To this day, neither Gates nor any of his aides has admitted an iota of wrongdoing before, during or after the catastrophic trial.

In one of the many dramatic incidents recounted in this astoundingly well reported book, Heilemann said he understood that Gates had "the right"..to make such statements.

"What I'm asking here is a tactical question. It was a moment of great political sensitivity. Wouldn't it have been better to keep your mouths shut?"

The look on Gates' face, recounts Heilemann, fairly radiated contempt. "We are defending principles of greated importance," he harrumphed. "Our right of appeal. Our right to innovate. Our right to have an appeals court sit and judge that." Even to mention tactics and sensibilities, he told Heilemann, was to sully those great principles with the grubbiness of politics.

Gates was unwavering. The company had done nothing wrong, the judge's findings were baseless, he had made no mistakes of any kind. He and Microsoft would be fully vindicated by the appeals process.

Pride Before The Fall is the best account we're likely to see of the downfall of Bill Gates, the wealthiest and most successful businessperson in the world, and until the antitrust trial, one of the most fawned-over. Heilemann sheds some piercing light on how the debacle that engulfed Microsoft could have been allowed to happen -- something analysts, competitors, geeks, CEO's, journalists, coders and Microsoft employees have been wondering for years and have never quite been able to explain. This book and story give credence to the old saw that has it that just because you're paranoid about somebody doesn't mean you're wrong.

Media coverage of Microsoft of is so riddled with hype and hysteria -- an exception has been Joseph Nocera of Fortune Magazine -- that Heilemann's account comes as a brilliant jolt, even to Microsoft-haters. He seems to have penetrated every nook and corner of the trial to tell this story.

The impending break-up of Microsoft was quite avoidable, according to almost every principal close to the case. Gates could have changed some of Microsoft's practices early on, especially those relating to the relationship between IE and Windows and PC makers. He could have settled. He could have accepted relatively generous mediation terms. He could have lobbied for support in Washington, instead of treating bureaucrats with contempt. He could have told DOJ lawyers and the judge the truth in his testimony. He could have avoided gratuituously offending the judge, members of Congress and the public, thereby tarnishing the previously wholesome image of his company, perhaps for good.

Why didn't he?

The patterns of powerful men (my only squawk with this book is that Heilemann didn't go into this history at all, but it is helpful) brought low by hubris -- Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, now Gates -- are eerily similiar. They all seem to have believed that the rules that govern other people didn't apply to them. They underestimated their enemies, and lacked friends who could tell them the truth. They surrounded themselves with people who told them what they wanted to hear. They were unable, when things went wrong, to apologize, acknowledge wrongdoing or change their behavior or tactics, or avert looming disaster that everyone else could see coming right at them.

Although his wrongdoings are not comparable, and there are plenty of serious questions about U.S. antitrust laws as they relate to a new kind of economy, Gates hubris fits the pattern. Despite the conclusions of every principal in the trial that Microsoft engaged in predatory, illegal and reprehensible business practices, Gates still can't accept it.

Before the trial, Heilemann points out, Gates was more than a high-tech billionaire. "He was the pristine embodiment of the high-tech myth. At an impossibly young age, he'd come out of nowhere, consumed with ideas and a pure burning passion. He had launched a company that unleashed an industry, and then led that industry as it transformed an economy. For a long time, Gates represented everything that was inspiring about this protean phenomenon taking shape in our midst -- its freshness and its ambition, its sense of possibility and its connection to the future. But like a figure lifted from classical tragedy, Gates sowed the seeds of his own undoing."

If anything, Heilemann understates Gates' unique public position during the late 80's and early 90's. Vice-presidents of the U.S. flew out to Redmond for his parties, editors of Time, The New Yorker and other magazines and publications visited him to write worshipful tributes and gather up his wisdom. Gates wrote a series of vapid and self-aggrandizing books that became instant best-sellers. The historical function of media, to harry and probe the powerful and famous, broke down.

Gates created a company that reflected his image, says Heilemann, and that fostered a worshipful culture of Gatesian omnipotence. He mastered a complex business, but failed to develop any peripheral vision, political sensibility, flexibility, or public relations antennae.

"In his arrogance, he lost whatever perspective he once had, and in his monomania he was unwise to the ways of the world....When his reckoning came, it was shocking and final."

Strong stuff, but Heilemann, a special correspondent for Wired and a former staff writer for The New Yorker , backs it up. He not only interviewed Gates, he had access to nearly every other important figure in the trial, from the judge and his clerk to Justice Department officials and lawyers on both sides. He also is clearly well-connected with the increasingly organized and embittered coalition of anti-Gates executives, lawyers and activists in Silicon Valley, seething for years over the way Microsoft did business.

One of the book's many triumphs is a penetrating look at the Valley's craven and incestuous corporate culture, which increasingly resembles not the new but the old order, the bitter, back-stabbing and opportunism of Washington. In the headquarters of the new economy, the old-fashioned laws of butt-covering and money-grubbing capitalism seemed to dominate. A couple of isolated oddballs did the right thing, but only a couple. Everyone else ducked or ran for cover.

Whatever the ultimate outcome of the appeals under way, it's hard to overstate the significance of the Microsoft trial. The case was a watershed. At times, Gates seemed very nearly broken, and the halo surrounding the company he built has vanished. The case will shape the nature of competition, innovation and law in the high-tech markets pushing aside the practices of the old economy. Economists believe that the outcome will set the rules for years to come. What's amazing is that everybody involved seemed to grasp what was at stake except for the primary target: Gates himself.

Heilemann nails Gates, and more importantly, explains him. Microsoft was brought down by the arrogant, delusional monomania of its founder, traits not perceived by his legions of profilers or challenged by his hordes of subordinates, a man who had clearly come to believe in his own immortality and was unable to grasp the realities of the world beyond his own company. For a man who believes in his own omnipotence, some bitter pills. The phrase "tech-smart but world dumb" is sometimes used to describe even brilliant programmers and computing executives. It captures Gates perfectly. In fact, he embodies it.

One of Heilemann's most telling scenes -- in one of the best books yet written about power and the new economy -- shows Gates, just as Microsoft lawyers readied their case, leaving other MS execs in charge, and heading off on a weeks-long vacation accompanied by his wife and bigwigs like financier Warren Buffet and new media scion William Randolph Hearst III. Gates had chartered a train to ferry his troupe around the American West on a sightseeing tour. Heilemann reports that Gates was surrounded by adoring minions and acolytes who made sure he never got bored or testy, who arranged for a string of experts -- archaeologists, historians -- to suddenly appear out of nowhere and describe a canyon or town.

The image is not of a new kind of leader for the new economy, but of a standard tycoon losing touch with reality, the Citizen Kane of cyberspace, his every whim satisfied, the number of people who can say "you're wrong" dwindling. Small wonder he couldn't bring himself to believe some geek programmers, Silicon Valley whiners and a handful of underpaid Justice Department lawyers could pose much threat.

Many developers, programmers and workers in the tech industry had for years perceived Microsoft as nearly satanic because of its staggering monopoly, its products of questionable quality, its ferociously proprietary ethic. They were right, able to see their world from a vantage point the off-line world still hasn't quite grasped. Many, many stories circulated about the company's arrogance and brutal business style.

Ironic that these sometimes paranoid-seeming notions turned out to be largely valid. The Microsoft culture that Heilemann presents was actually worse than many believed.

The feelings that many Microsoft employees had for their boss went beyond respect or loyalty, writes Heilemann, "and crept right up to the brink of infatuation: in one way or another, everyone in Redmond seemed to have a crush on Bill. Gates inspired this intense following without being, in any conventional sense, a charismatic or especially winning figure."

What he was, the book says, was very smart, and in the universe that he had personally created, "to be deemed smart -- or, better still, super smart -- was to be awarded the greatest accolade in the Microsoft lexicon."

But Gates' behavior before, during and after the antitrust case was anything but smart. At every critical juncture when a friend, colleague, attorney or ally needed to grab him by the threat and force him to come to his senses, nobody did -- either because he was considered above reproach or because, as Heilemann seems to suspect, he simply wouldn't have listened and won't to this day.

Microsoft is still a powerful corporation, and Gates still has many billions in the bank. There are tougher ways to fall. But Heilemann is dead on when he says the Microsoft era is over, done in by the same smart and flawed many who created it.

As for Pride Before the Fall, it's timely, economical and powerful. Skillfully reported, it captures better than any other our transition from one historic period to other. It has enormous moral and human punch, and is convincing and unsparing. It's gripping reading.

P.S. Full disclosure: Heilemann and I worked together as columnists at Hotwired several years ago.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Would you believe a book review written by someone who calls himself "bs" about a book called The Truth? Believe it. Terry Pratchet is hard to pin down -- is this humor? Unadulterated absurdity? Clever satire? More real than real? Whatever it is, it's The Truth.

The Truth author Terry Pratchett pages 336 publisher Harper Collins rating 9/10 reviewer bs ISBN 0380978954 summary A refreshing new perspective on yet another romp through the streets of the greatest city on the disc, Ankh-Morpork.

The Truth, which is Terry Pratchett's 25th entry into the hopefully never-ending discworld saga, features yet another Ankh-Morpork mystery. Only this time, there's a twist -- Instead of focusing on how The Watch again save the city, The Truth tells the tale from the perspective of William de Worde, founder, editor, and investigative reporter for the city's first newspaper. With the news that The Watch is investigating an attempted murder by the ruler of the city, William's fledgling newspaper quickly grows and just as quickly attracts the attention of many important city citizens.

For those who have yet to encounter Terry Pratchett's Discworld, here's the short version. The Discworld is a fantasy world which is most definitely flat. In fact, it rides on the backs of four giant elephants, who in turn stand atop a giant turtle. Pratchett's world parodies any and every element of our world that he can put his pen on, from movies to music, from fairy tales to opera. All along, Pratchett's razor sharp wit supplies innumerable references to pop culture, and he has a seemingly endless supply of puns.

When recommending any of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, I'm faced with the issue of continuity. You see, with 25 novels in the series so far, references to earlier novels in the series are practically inevitable, and The Truth is no different. However, thanks to the nature of the narrative, The Truth should be relatively accessible to new readers. Because William and his employees on the newspaper are all characters newly introduced to the Discworld, no prior knowledge is needed. However, the cast of characters with which William deals -- from Lord Vetinari to Commander Vimes to Gaspode the Wonder Dog -- might seem a little shallow if you don't have the background supplied by previous books in the series. Don't let that deter you, however, as there is still a lot in this book to find funny, even without the heaps of background that is assumed.

The entire telling of this tale is solid. From the subtle clues sprinkled throughout as to what is happening to the parodies of cameras and palm pilots, the narrative doesn't have a piece out of place.

The only major flaws in the book are the aforementioned Pratchett learning curve and the eclipsing of our hero, William, by the supporting characters in the novel. From a villain by the name of Mr. Tulip, whose wallet reads "Not a very nice person at all" and believes that a potato will save his soul, to Otto Von Chrek, the newspaper's photographer and a recovering vampire, who occasionally finds himself a pile of dust when his flash goes off, William simply doesn't stand out. William is just an ordinary guy who wants to know the truth about what is happening and wants to share that truth with anyone willing to read or be read to. William is very easy to relate to, and for that reason makes an excellent main character, but when push comes to shove, William is finds himself better suited as an observer than a saviour."

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Would you believe a book review written by someone who calls himself "bs" about a book called The Truth? Believe it. Terry Pratchet is hard to pin down -- is this humor? Unadulterated absurdity? Clever satire? More real than real? Whatever it is, it's The Truth.

The Truth author Terry Pratchett pages 336 publisher Harper Collins rating 9/10 reviewer bs ISBN 0380978954 summary A refreshing new perspective on yet another romp through the streets of the greatest city on the disc, Ankh-Morpork.

The Truth, which is Terry Pratchett's 25th entry into the hopefully never-ending discworld saga, features yet another Ankh-Morpork mystery. Only this time, there's a twist -- Instead of focusing on how The Watch again save the city, The Truth tells the tale from the perspective of William de Worde, founder, editor, and investigative reporter for the city's first newspaper. With the news that The Watch is investigating an attempted murder by the ruler of the city, William's fledgling newspaper quickly grows and just as quickly attracts the attention of many important city citizens.

For those who have yet to encounter Terry Pratchett's Discworld, here's the short version. The Discworld is a fantasy world which is most definitely flat. In fact, it rides on the backs of four giant elephants, who in turn stand atop a giant turtle. Pratchett's world parodies any and every element of our world that he can put his pen on, from movies to music, from fairy tales to opera. All along, Pratchett's razor sharp wit supplies innumerable references to pop culture, and he has a seemingly endless supply of puns.

When recommending any of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, I'm faced with the issue of continuity. You see, with 25 novels in the series so far, references to earlier novels in the series are practically inevitable, and The Truth is no different. However, thanks to the nature of the narrative, The Truth should be relatively accessible to new readers. Because William and his employees on the newspaper are all characters newly introduced to the Discworld, no prior knowledge is needed. However, the cast of characters with which William deals -- from Lord Vetinari to Commander Vimes to Gaspode the Wonder Dog -- might seem a little shallow if you don't have the background supplied by previous books in the series. Don't let that deter you, however, as there is still a lot in this book to find funny, even without the heaps of background that is assumed.

The entire telling of this tale is solid. From the subtle clues sprinkled throughout as to what is happening to the parodies of cameras and palm pilots, the narrative doesn't have a piece out of place.

The only major flaws in the book are the aforementioned Pratchett learning curve and the eclipsing of our hero, William, by the supporting characters in the novel. From a villain by the name of Mr. Tulip, whose wallet reads "Not a very nice person at all" and believes that a potato will save his soul, to Otto Von Chrek, the newspaper's photographer and a recovering vampire, who occasionally finds himself a pile of dust when his flash goes off, William simply doesn't stand out. William is just an ordinary guy who wants to know the truth about what is happening and wants to share that truth with anyone willing to read or be read to. William is very easy to relate to, and for that reason makes an excellent main character, but when push comes to shove, William is finds himself better suited as an observer than a saviour."

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Code Breaking: A History and Exploration has joined Simon Singh's The Code Book on my bookshelf, and it's hard to read either of these books without comparing it to the other. If you've read the Singh book, though, you'll certainly find that the material covered overlaps heavily. Read on to find out if you'd enjoy checking out Kippenhahn's work.

Code Breaking: A History and Exploration author Rudolf Kippenhahn pages 283 publisher The Overlook Press rating 8.5 reviewer timothy ISBN 1-58567-089-8 summary A readable, lucid introduction to encryption with an emphasis on WWII applications, but with a range from Caesar to PGP.

The Big Picture Lucidly, and in the way of great teachers who neither baffle nor condescend, Kippenhahn tells the story of how encryption and cryptanalysis has evolved through the ages, and sprinkles examples and reader exercises throughout. Unlike Singh's book, though, which starts its historical wanderings with Mary, Queen of Scots, Kippenhahn's draws the largest chunk of its examples from World War II. Given the scope and innovation in encryption that occurred in WWII, this can hardly be seen as a limitation. In fairness, that's not to say that many of his examples don't come from other times before or since World War II. Some of the hard to overlook techniques of encryption, as well several of the famous coded messages on which some of the turns of modern history have hinged are represented here. For instance, the Zimmerman telegram, probably one the most-pivotal, least-talked-about-in-school transmissions of the century, draws several pages explaining how the American and British espionage services ended up cracking the message which could have led to war between Mexico and the U.S.

As the book progresses, examples from newer and older times (and contexts from literature to lovers' secret messages) are presented with enough panache to make you forget that this is a book about a topic which is often rendered dry as dust.

In taking this broad-sighted approach, Kippenhahn has opened his book to a wider audience than likely browse the computer-books section in the local Barnes & Noble.

Revisiting the two big wars of this century provides an excellent backdrop, but modern developments in secret writing are not neglected; the latter parts of the book include a description of several modern encryption schemes (usually using DES as the example), and a comprehensible explanation of public-key encryption.

Points to Consider Everything is not perfect, though: Kippenhahn, for example, does not touch on some of the newest developments in encryption and cryptanalysis. The book was first published in English only in 1998, though, and it's hard to fault him for not attempting to delve into the possibilities of quantum computers for either side of the secrecy game.

Interestingly, this work in a translation of a German text (Kippenhahn collaborated in Ewald Osers' translation), but as Kippenhahn points out in his introduction, it's more than a simple translation; the examples in many cases have been transformed from the original to work well with English words and frequency tables rather than German.

This book is definitely not aimed at experts who wish to pick up subtle points or learn the latest developments in encryption; instead, it's a historical overview which happens to teach the classic techniques of encryption and decryption through examples. If you want Applied Cryptography, buy that instead. (Or in addition -- no reason not to be well-rounded!)

The Upshot: Back to the inevitable comparison to The Code Book: If you've read Singh's book, and enjoyed it, you won't regret reading Code Breaking, but it might be wise to browse it before buying, to make sure that similarities won't leave you with too bad a sense of deja vu. If you've read neither one, Kippenhahn's work is no less stimulating.

1. Secret Writing in War and Peace
2. Hidden Messages and Codebooks
3. Codebooks in World War I
4. He Came, He Saw, He Encoded
5. How a Monalphabetic Code is Cracked
6. Caesars in Rank and File
7. Keywords Without End
8. Shuffled Texts
9. From Coding Disk To Enigma
10. Enigma's Secret is Revealed
11. The Arrival of the Computer
12. Encryption Quite Publicly
13. Smart Cards, One-way Functions, and Mousetraps

• Appendix A: A homemade encrypting machine
• Appendix B: Your computer as Enigma
• Appendix C: How the three magic keys are determined
• Appendix D: PGP, the encryption program from the Internet

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Code Breaking: A History and Exploration has joined Simon Singh's The Code Book on my bookshelf, and it's hard to read either of these books without comparing it to the other. If you've read the Singh book, though, you'll certainly find that the material covered overlaps heavily. Read on to find out if you'd enjoy checking out Kippenhahn's work.

Code Breaking: A History and Exploration author Rudolf Kippenhahn pages 283 publisher The Overlook Press rating 8.5 reviewer timothy ISBN 1-58567-089-8 summary A readable, lucid introduction to encryption with an emphasis on WWII applications, but with a range from Caesar to PGP.

The Big Picture Lucidly, and in the way of great teachers who neither baffle nor condescend, Kippenhahn tells the story of how encryption and cryptanalysis has evolved through the ages, and sprinkles examples and reader exercises throughout. Unlike Singh's book, though, which starts its historical wanderings with Mary, Queen of Scots, Kippenhahn's draws the largest chunk of its examples from World War II. Given the scope and innovation in encryption that occurred in WWII, this can hardly be seen as a limitation. In fairness, that's not to say that many of his examples don't come from other times before or since World War II. Some of the hard to overlook techniques of encryption, as well several of the famous coded messages on which some of the turns of modern history have hinged are represented here. For instance, the Zimmerman telegram, probably one the most-pivotal, least-talked-about-in-school transmissions of the century, draws several pages explaining how the American and British espionage services ended up cracking the message which could have led to war between Mexico and the U.S.

As the book progresses, examples from newer and older times (and contexts from literature to lovers' secret messages) are presented with enough panache to make you forget that this is a book about a topic which is often rendered dry as dust.

In taking this broad-sighted approach, Kippenhahn has opened his book to a wider audience than likely browse the computer-books section in the local Barnes & Noble.

Revisiting the two big wars of this century provides an excellent backdrop, but modern developments in secret writing are not neglected; the latter parts of the book include a description of several modern encryption schemes (usually using DES as the example), and a comprehensible explanation of public-key encryption.

Points to Consider Everything is not perfect, though: Kippenhahn, for example, does not touch on some of the newest developments in encryption and cryptanalysis. The book was first published in English only in 1998, though, and it's hard to fault him for not attempting to delve into the possibilities of quantum computers for either side of the secrecy game.

Interestingly, this work in a translation of a German text (Kippenhahn collaborated in Ewald Osers' translation), but as Kippenhahn points out in his introduction, it's more than a simple translation; the examples in many cases have been transformed from the original to work well with English words and frequency tables rather than German.

This book is definitely not aimed at experts who wish to pick up subtle points or learn the latest developments in encryption; instead, it's a historical overview which happens to teach the classic techniques of encryption and decryption through examples. If you want Applied Cryptography, buy that instead. (Or in addition -- no reason not to be well-rounded!)

The Upshot: Back to the inevitable comparison to The Code Book: If you've read Singh's book, and enjoyed it, you won't regret reading Code Breaking, but it might be wise to browse it before buying, to make sure that similarities won't leave you with too bad a sense of deja vu. If you've read neither one, Kippenhahn's work is no less stimulating.

1. Secret Writing in War and Peace
2. Hidden Messages and Codebooks
3. Codebooks in World War I
4. He Came, He Saw, He Encoded
5. How a Monalphabetic Code is Cracked
6. Caesars in Rank and File
7. Keywords Without End
8. Shuffled Texts
9. From Coding Disk To Enigma
10. Enigma's Secret is Revealed
11. The Arrival of the Computer
12. Encryption Quite Publicly
13. Smart Cards, One-way Functions, and Mousetraps

• Appendix A: A homemade encrypting machine
• Appendix B: Your computer as Enigma
• Appendix C: How the three magic keys are determined
• Appendix D: PGP, the encryption program from the Internet

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Duncan Lawie, stalwart science fiction reviewer, this time steps up to the plate with what you might call a meta-science fiction book, Thomas Disch's The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. Considering that SF has been around as such for far shorter than many other types of literature, a book like this sounds like it may be useful in explaining its disproportionate hold on the public imagination. (Personally, I'd like to read the stuff on Heinlein.)

The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of author Thomas M. Disch pages 255 publisher Touchstone rating 8.5 reviewer Duncan Lawie ISBN 0684859785 summary Pyrotechnics and solid research build a thoroughly readable and opinionated book.

Thomas M. Disch was raised in Minnesota and started publishing science fiction in the early 1960s. His close involvement with the New Wave meant much of his early work was more closely associated with the UK than with the country of his birth. From the mid-1970s, he has been as well known for his poetry. Though he has not ceased to write, his increasingly large sphere of interest has reduced his science fictional output considerably, though he clearly remains in close contact with the authors and trends of the genre. His literate, intelligent approach is apparent in all he does.

The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of sets out to present a critical history of science fiction but is perhaps more interesting instead as a critical view of the American psyche. Disch's thesis is built on twin foundations -- that science fiction is an American form and that Americans believe they have a "right to lie." The first pillar is not thoroughly investigated -- at least, the argument is unlikely to convince non-Americans. The second idea is approached from almost every angle; its corollary -- and the reason for Disch's subtitle -- is that people want to believe. Disch's exploration of science fiction can decide that Edgar Allen Poe is "our embarrassing ancestor" because he has already reached the decision that SF is itself an American form. He dismisses Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a progenitor because her science is "fast talking and stage props" which serves to set the stage for classic melodrama, rather than as the real core of the book. Against this, Poe is set up as a prototypical American hoaxer and that his 'science fiction' is defined by a genuine desire to convince readers that what he writes is not mere fiction. It is thanks to this root stock that Disch feels able to discuss science fiction beyond its existence as a literary and visual form.

The book is primarily structured as a series of thematic essays, without much emphasis on timeline. Disch assumes a reasonably well-read audience, while making considerable room for those unfamiliar with his more obscure subjects. This is, of course, a necessary approach as it is often through early authors (with works unavailable to the general public) that Disch builds his background. Nevertheless, he does not rely on them to provide him with sacrificial victims; he would far rather tear pieces off the big names we are already familiar with. There is no shortage of diatribe in these pages. The invective is principally concentrated on those who have come to use the form for their own propaganda and those who present their fictions as fact. In the first camp, his principle targets are famous names who have spent the latter parts of their career attempting to reshape their work or the history of the field itself. Heinlein is an obvious target; Disch provides a good serving on this author's long march from Radical Socialist to Radical Libertarian. He has even less good to say for the "military strategist" members of Heinlein's circle and very little to the benefit of Ursula Le Guin. His concerns with Le Guin are based on her apparent attempt to mould not just science fictional histories and futures to her own ends but the history and future of science fiction. According to Disch, Le Guin has gained vertiginous regard in academic circles and is using this position to influence the manner in which SF is taught academically. A particularly tasty element of his case against Le Guin involves his Aunt Cecilia's recipe for lemon pudding -- you too can cook a footnote.

Disch prefers to see the blemishes of the field he loves than to remake it in his own image but he retains his greatest scorn for those who attempt to remake the world in the image of their own fictions. This is where SF is indeed in danger of conquering the world. The principal natures of this particular megalomania are the UFOlogists and the home-made religions. Readers familiar with Disch will know of his long-standing disgust at Whitley Strieber and can enjoy the thorough dismantling of Strieber's alien encounters. Disch returns again and again to the UFOlogists and their increasing hold on the American mind: he compares the nature of these tales with the stories of science fiction itself, he discusses the increasing complexity of the scam which constitutes the average abduction tale, he considers the place of such beliefs alongside other modern manias for recovered memory. The ability of the human mind to "entertain" belief is a vital element for the success of these alien tales. The desire to actually believe is essential to the success of the 'science fiction religions' and, Disch suggests, the most successful of these in the late twentieth century is Scientology. Like Strieber, he recalls, L. Ron Hubbard started out as a science fiction writer. Like Strieber, Hubbard wanted more. Unlike Strieber, though, Hubbard was supported -- at first -- by the SF community from which he came. His first public presentation of Dianetics was in Astounding Science Fiction, after Hubbard had apparently already suggested that "if a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be start his own religion." Disch's final position is that, amongst the many deluded minds, there are those who have realized that the best way to make money from fiction is to present it as fact, and the fiction that people most want to believe in our era are fictions of a better future -- science fiction.

The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of offers hugely entertaining detail and such incisive insight that it earns forgiveness for its inevitable moments of contrariness.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek, and you may want to check out Thomas M. Disch's website as well. Me:

Duncan Lawie, stalwart science fiction reviewer, this time steps up to the plate with what you might call a meta-science fiction book, Thomas Disch's The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. Considering that SF has been around as such for far shorter than many other types of literature, a book like this sounds like it may be useful in explaining its disproportionate hold on the public imagination. (Personally, I'd like to read the stuff on Heinlein.)

The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of author Thomas M. Disch pages 255 publisher Touchstone rating 8.5 reviewer Duncan Lawie ISBN 0684859785 summary Pyrotechnics and solid research build a thoroughly readable and opinionated book.

Thomas M. Disch was raised in Minnesota and started publishing science fiction in the early 1960s. His close involvement with the New Wave meant much of his early work was more closely associated with the UK than with the country of his birth. From the mid-1970s, he has been as well known for his poetry. Though he has not ceased to write, his increasingly large sphere of interest has reduced his science fictional output considerably, though he clearly remains in close contact with the authors and trends of the genre. His literate, intelligent approach is apparent in all he does.

The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of sets out to present a critical history of science fiction but is perhaps more interesting instead as a critical view of the American psyche. Disch's thesis is built on twin foundations -- that science fiction is an American form and that Americans believe they have a "right to lie." The first pillar is not thoroughly investigated -- at least, the argument is unlikely to convince non-Americans. The second idea is approached from almost every angle; its corollary -- and the reason for Disch's subtitle -- is that people want to believe. Disch's exploration of science fiction can decide that Edgar Allen Poe is "our embarrassing ancestor" because he has already reached the decision that SF is itself an American form. He dismisses Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a progenitor because her science is "fast talking and stage props" which serves to set the stage for classic melodrama, rather than as the real core of the book. Against this, Poe is set up as a prototypical American hoaxer and that his 'science fiction' is defined by a genuine desire to convince readers that what he writes is not mere fiction. It is thanks to this root stock that Disch feels able to discuss science fiction beyond its existence as a literary and visual form.

The book is primarily structured as a series of thematic essays, without much emphasis on timeline. Disch assumes a reasonably well-read audience, while making considerable room for those unfamiliar with his more obscure subjects. This is, of course, a necessary approach as it is often through early authors (with works unavailable to the general public) that Disch builds his background. Nevertheless, he does not rely on them to provide him with sacrificial victims; he would far rather tear pieces off the big names we are already familiar with. There is no shortage of diatribe in these pages. The invective is principally concentrated on those who have come to use the form for their own propaganda and those who present their fictions as fact. In the first camp, his principle targets are famous names who have spent the latter parts of their career attempting to reshape their work or the history of the field itself. Heinlein is an obvious target; Disch provides a good serving on this author's long march from Radical Socialist to Radical Libertarian. He has even less good to say for the "military strategist" members of Heinlein's circle and very little to the benefit of Ursula Le Guin. His concerns with Le Guin are based on her apparent attempt to mould not just science fictional histories and futures to her own ends but the history and future of science fiction. According to Disch, Le Guin has gained vertiginous regard in academic circles and is using this position to influence the manner in which SF is taught academically. A particularly tasty element of his case against Le Guin involves his Aunt Cecilia's recipe for lemon pudding -- you too can cook a footnote.

Disch prefers to see the blemishes of the field he loves than to remake it in his own image but he retains his greatest scorn for those who attempt to remake the world in the image of their own fictions. This is where SF is indeed in danger of conquering the world. The principal natures of this particular megalomania are the UFOlogists and the home-made religions. Readers familiar with Disch will know of his long-standing disgust at Whitley Strieber and can enjoy the thorough dismantling of Strieber's alien encounters. Disch returns again and again to the UFOlogists and their increasing hold on the American mind: he compares the nature of these tales with the stories of science fiction itself, he discusses the increasing complexity of the scam which constitutes the average abduction tale, he considers the place of such beliefs alongside other modern manias for recovered memory. The ability of the human mind to "entertain" belief is a vital element for the success of these alien tales. The desire to actually believe is essential to the success of the 'science fiction religions' and, Disch suggests, the most successful of these in the late twentieth century is Scientology. Like Strieber, he recalls, L. Ron Hubbard started out as a science fiction writer. Like Strieber, Hubbard wanted more. Unlike Strieber, though, Hubbard was supported -- at first -- by the SF community from which he came. His first public presentation of Dianetics was in Astounding Science Fiction, after Hubbard had apparently already suggested that "if a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be start his own religion." Disch's final position is that, amongst the many deluded minds, there are those who have realized that the best way to make money from fiction is to present it as fact, and the fiction that people most want to believe in our era are fictions of a better future -- science fiction.

The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of offers hugely entertaining detail and such incisive insight that it earns forgiveness for its inevitable moments of contrariness.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek, and you may want to check out Thomas M. Disch's website as well. Me:

Continuing with his campaign to rid the world of lousy software, chromatic is back with this review of Extreme Programming Installed. It sounds like what the authors are advocating is a truly programmer-centric environment; does anyone have experience in a workplace even close to this?

Extreme Programming Installed author Ron Jeffries, Ann Anderson, Chet Hendrickson pages 244 publisher Addison-Wesley rating 8.75 reviewer chromatic ISBN 0-201-70842-6 summary How to implement Extreme Programming, with strategies,examples, and practical advice. More interesting than it sounds.

The Scoop Last year's Extreme Programming Explained was a manifesto of sorts. Wouldn't it be nice if customers, management, and programmers could work together to produce good software on schedule and under budget? If planning, peer review, testing, and design are good, why not do them all the time? It even put forth the radical notion that customers should set business value while programmers create -- and revise -- technical schedules.

Yet another 'silver bullet' Fred Brooks debunked years ago? The authors of Extreme Programming Installed disagree. The book breaks XP into workable chunks, hanging flesh on the bones of Kent Beck's manifesto. It explains each element of XP in turn, based on the authors' personal and collective experiences.

For example, the Iteration Planning chapter describes planning meetings. The customer presents stories, the developers break the stories into tasks, and individual programmers estimate and sign up for tasks. Each element has further detail on best practices and potential traps. Finally, the chapter describes an average meeting.

What's to Like? As with other titles in the series, the text is clear and easy to read. The short chapters have no fluff, saying only what's needed. Concise explanations and a gentle, conversational tone add up to a book that can be finished in an afternoon.

This book is the most practical of the series so far. Drawing on personal experiences and data gleaned from early adopters, the authors distill XP practices into their purest and most essential forms. Anecdotes from programmers in the trenches line the pages. Though everyone practices the processes slightly differently, a clear picture begins to emerge.

Though listed in the table of contents as "bonus tracks," the last 11 chapters may prove the most valuable. Each track addresses a common concern or criticism of XP, from "Who do you blame when something goes wrong?" to "How do you write unit tests for a GUI?" and "You can't possibly make accurate estimates." This won't satisfy all the nay-sayers, but it adds a healthy dose of reality.

What's to Consider? The testing and refactoring sections, needing the most explanation, have a strong Smalltalk bias. While these chapters have strong supporting text, a decent programmer unfamiliar with the language will have to invest extra time to understand the examples fully. This is the most detailed portion of the book, and may be the hardest to read.

While some readers may like the open-ended nature of the presented techniques, others, familiar with more formal development processes, will want authoritative proclamations. XP actually installed, argue the authors, depends on the nature of the task and the team. The controversial axiom of embracing change by continually performing a certain few practices while discarding the rest, will raise some blood pressures. Clearly, this is not for the faint of heart.

Developers and managers interested in the whys of XP would do well to read Extreme Programming Explained instead. Though the authors present a brief business case for the process, most of the text assumes the reader has already decided to install it. Customers receive more text (a few chapters), though there's clearly room for an expanded treatment of their roles and responsibilities.

The Summary Extreme Programming Installed will not silence the critics, but it makes great progress in showing how XP can work, in the right places. Beyond that, it demonstrates the flexibility of the approach, with numerous real-world examples. This book deserves a place next to Beck's manifesto, showing off XP as it's actually practiced. Table of Contents

1. Extreme Programming
2. The Circle of Life
3. On-Site Customer
4. User Stories
5. Acceptance Tests
6. Story Estimation
7. Small Releases
8. Customer Defines Release
9. Iteration Planning
10. Quick Design Session
11. Programming
12. Pair Programming
13. Unit Tests
14. Test First, by Intention
15. Releasing Changes
16. Do or Do Not
17. Experience Improves Estimates
18. Resources, Scope, Quality, Time
19. Steering
20. Steering the Iteration
21. Steering the Release
22. Handling Defects
23. Conclusion

Bonus Tracks

1. We'll Try
2. How to Estimate Anything
3. Infrastructure
4. It's Chet's Fault
5. Balancing Hopes and Fears
6. Testing Improves Code
7. XPer Tries Java
8. A Java Perspective
9. A True Story
10. Estimates and Promises
11. Everything That Could Possibly Break

You can Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Continuing with his campaign to rid the world of lousy software, chromatic is back with this review of Extreme Programming Installed. It sounds like what the authors are advocating is a truly programmer-centric environment; does anyone have experience in a workplace even close to this?

Extreme Programming Installed author Ron Jeffries, Ann Anderson, Chet Hendrickson pages 244 publisher Addison-Wesley rating 8.75 reviewer chromatic ISBN 0-201-70842-6 summary How to implement Extreme Programming, with strategies,examples, and practical advice. More interesting than it sounds.

The Scoop Last year's Extreme Programming Explained was a manifesto of sorts. Wouldn't it be nice if customers, management, and programmers could work together to produce good software on schedule and under budget? If planning, peer review, testing, and design are good, why not do them all the time? It even put forth the radical notion that customers should set business value while programmers create -- and revise -- technical schedules.

Yet another 'silver bullet' Fred Brooks debunked years ago? The authors of Extreme Programming Installed disagree. The book breaks XP into workable chunks, hanging flesh on the bones of Kent Beck's manifesto. It explains each element of XP in turn, based on the authors' personal and collective experiences.

For example, the Iteration Planning chapter describes planning meetings. The customer presents stories, the developers break the stories into tasks, and individual programmers estimate and sign up for tasks. Each element has further detail on best practices and potential traps. Finally, the chapter describes an average meeting.

What's to Like? As with other titles in the series, the text is clear and easy to read. The short chapters have no fluff, saying only what's needed. Concise explanations and a gentle, conversational tone add up to a book that can be finished in an afternoon.

This book is the most practical of the series so far. Drawing on personal experiences and data gleaned from early adopters, the authors distill XP practices into their purest and most essential forms. Anecdotes from programmers in the trenches line the pages. Though everyone practices the processes slightly differently, a clear picture begins to emerge.

Though listed in the table of contents as "bonus tracks," the last 11 chapters may prove the most valuable. Each track addresses a common concern or criticism of XP, from "Who do you blame when something goes wrong?" to "How do you write unit tests for a GUI?" and "You can't possibly make accurate estimates." This won't satisfy all the nay-sayers, but it adds a healthy dose of reality.

What's to Consider? The testing and refactoring sections, needing the most explanation, have a strong Smalltalk bias. While these chapters have strong supporting text, a decent programmer unfamiliar with the language will have to invest extra time to understand the examples fully. This is the most detailed portion of the book, and may be the hardest to read.

While some readers may like the open-ended nature of the presented techniques, others, familiar with more formal development processes, will want authoritative proclamations. XP actually installed, argue the authors, depends on the nature of the task and the team. The controversial axiom of embracing change by continually performing a certain few practices while discarding the rest, will raise some blood pressures. Clearly, this is not for the faint of heart.

Developers and managers interested in the whys of XP would do well to read Extreme Programming Explained instead. Though the authors present a brief business case for the process, most of the text assumes the reader has already decided to install it. Customers receive more text (a few chapters), though there's clearly room for an expanded treatment of their roles and responsibilities.

The Summary Extreme Programming Installed will not silence the critics, but it makes great progress in showing how XP can work, in the right places. Beyond that, it demonstrates the flexibility of the approach, with numerous real-world examples. This book deserves a place next to Beck's manifesto, showing off XP as it's actually practiced. Table of Contents

1. Extreme Programming
2. The Circle of Life
3. On-Site Customer
4. User Stories
5. Acceptance Tests
6. Story Estimation
7. Small Releases
8. Customer Defines Release
9. Iteration Planning
10. Quick Design Session
11. Programming
12. Pair Programming
13. Unit Tests
14. Test First, by Intention
15. Releasing Changes
16. Do or Do Not
17. Experience Improves Estimates
18. Resources, Scope, Quality, Time
19. Steering
20. Steering the Iteration
21. Steering the Release
22. Handling Defects
23. Conclusion

Bonus Tracks

1. We'll Try
2. How to Estimate Anything
3. Infrastructure
4. It's Chet's Fault
5. Balancing Hopes and Fears
6. Testing Improves Code
7. XPer Tries Java
8. A Java Perspective
9. A True Story
10. Estimates and Promises
11. Everything That Could Possibly Break

You can Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Reader Aaron Gifford contributed this review of Shadow of the Hegemon, by the prolific Orson Scott Card. (What? An author with the "ability to make smart characters actually act and behave intelligently"? The sky is falling!) Given the movie plans in the works from Card, it's great to see the bookshelf expand with possible sequel material, too.

Shadow of the Hegemon author Orson Scott Card pages 365 publisher TOR rating 8 reviewer Aaron Gifford ISBN 0-312-87651 summary Betrayal and murder litter the path to power as the child geniuses who helped Ender defend Earth return home to be kidnapped as a new struggle begins.

It's out, the new Orson Scott Card book, Shadow of the Hegemon. I don't want to give away any more of the plot than is already apparent in the summary above, so let me tell you about the book indirectly, about my own reactions, what I liked about it.

First of all, I must admit it. I'm a Card fan. I was introduced to his work like many other Slashdot readers as a teenager when I read Ender's Game. The intensity of that story and the believable brilliance of the main characters hooked me from the start. The sequels, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind continue Ender's story, but are substantially different in style and tone from the first. Card's more recent bold experiment, Ender's Shadow returns to the events in Ender's Game and retells them in parallel through the eyes of a different character, Bean. That book recaptures some of the essence and style of Ender's Game while making the story into something completely new and original.

Shadow of the Hegemon charts new territory as a sequel to Ender's Shadow telling the stories of the aftermath of the Formics War. This is not a parallel book like its predecessor. It takes place during those years mentioned only briefly in Ender's Game as Ender travels through space on the colony ship. Ender plays no part in this book.

The book definitely has action, and I love it! While Card often writes so much about the inner thought processes of his characters that sometimes his stories can slow down, there's enough action and adventure and a fast enough pace to make this book a really fun read. I might characterize it as a cross between the slower moving intellectual style in the later Ender series books and the fast paced intensity in Ender's Game. It's a blend that works.

Among the many things I enjoyed in this book is Card's excellent development of Bean's human emotional self. While Bean is intellectually brilliant, as the book opens, he seems to go through the motions of human emotional interaction without truly having felt the emotion. Card seems to have captured the shortcoming that children who suffer deprivation of human contact early in life sometimes exhibit, and included it in the character of Bean. As the story progresses, Bean slowly develops genuine emotional ties with other human beings and the emotional side of his character matures considerably.

Like any work of fiction, there must be a suspension of disbelief. The character Achilles, Bean's enemy from his earlier years growing up in Rotterdam and again at Battle School, returns as a highly connected villain worthy of any James Bond movie. In Ender's Shadow Bean exposes him as the psychopathic murderer he is. Achilles, also a genius, has escaped from an institute for the criminally insane to wreak havoc on the world in general, and on Bean and his personal enemies in particular, as he ensconces himself in positions of power. In several places, Achilles seems to have a nearly omniscient ability to monitor the actions and whereabouts of his personal enemies, stretching my suspension of disbelief a bit thin as I read.

I truly enjoyed Card's character work in this book. I appreciate his willingness to create characters with backgrounds from many different cultures and locations. Card conscientiously takes the time to study and learn enough about other cultures and peoples. As a result, his characters have a depth and background beyond those in many novels.

Card creates characters with religious beliefs that are real to those characters who hold them. Even those characters who are atheist or agnostic in their own beliefs hold tightly to those beliefs every bit as tenaciously and religiously as do those characters who espouse a particular recognizable. Card always seems to treat religion with the respect others often neglect. His characters in this book, in particular Sister Carlotta, Ender's mother, and several characters from India and Pakistan, through their words and interactions, show how their own profound religious beliefs make up their core and affect their choices.

Another Card talent exhibited in this book, if not as strongly as it did in Ender's Game, is Card's ability to make smart characters actually act and behave intelligently. So many authors resort to devices that seem to say, "This character is smart because I'm telling you so," without any supporting evidence other than the author's word, or perhaps on the word of the author's supporting characters who may say in agreement, "Yes, that character is smart."

Card does sometimes tell the reader that his characters are smart, but he always backs it up with intelligent decisions, thought processes, and actions that make it believable. He's not perfect, but he is definitely among the top talents.

I was delighted and amused whenever I noticed one of the characters speaking or thinking and idea that I recognized as one of Card's own opinions or ideas. If you have read much of Card's work and are familiar with his own opinions as often expressed his non fiction and on his various Web sites (you can see some examples Card's political commentary at www.ornery.com) you too will catch his characters presenting some of those same ideas.

With so many intellectually gifted characters playing on the stage, sometimes they begin to sound a bit like each other. It's almost unavoidable for any author who writes as prolifically as Card to keep each character unique, fresh, and new. Card is one of the best at avoiding this problem, but it does crop up here and there.

When you finish the story, read the Afterword. Card's inclusion of a few words of commentary about the story writing process, how the book came to be, and about the decisions he had to make as he wrote it is fascinating. If you like Card, you will like this book. If you like action and international power plays, you will like this book. If you appreciate good writing and character development, you will like this book.

If you haven't yet read Ender's Shadow, I suggest you read it before you read this book. Like most of Card's work, this book can stand on its own, but it works better as a sequel since the book expects you to be familiar with the several main characters and their backgrounds.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Reader Aaron Gifford contributed this review of Shadow of the Hegemon, by the prolific Orson Scott Card. (What? An author with the "ability to make smart characters actually act and behave intelligently"? The sky is falling!) Given the movie plans in the works from Card, it's great to see the bookshelf expand with possible sequel material, too.

Shadow of the Hegemon author Orson Scott Card pages 365 publisher TOR rating 8 reviewer Aaron Gifford ISBN 0-312-87651 summary Betrayal and murder litter the path to power as the child geniuses who helped Ender defend Earth return home to be kidnapped as a new struggle begins.

It's out, the new Orson Scott Card book, Shadow of the Hegemon. I don't want to give away any more of the plot than is already apparent in the summary above, so let me tell you about the book indirectly, about my own reactions, what I liked about it.

First of all, I must admit it. I'm a Card fan. I was introduced to his work like many other Slashdot readers as a teenager when I read Ender's Game. The intensity of that story and the believable brilliance of the main characters hooked me from the start. The sequels, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind continue Ender's story, but are substantially different in style and tone from the first. Card's more recent bold experiment, Ender's Shadow returns to the events in Ender's Game and retells them in parallel through the eyes of a different character, Bean. That book recaptures some of the essence and style of Ender's Game while making the story into something completely new and original.

Shadow of the Hegemon charts new territory as a sequel to Ender's Shadow telling the stories of the aftermath of the Formics War. This is not a parallel book like its predecessor. It takes place during those years mentioned only briefly in Ender's Game as Ender travels through space on the colony ship. Ender plays no part in this book.

The book definitely has action, and I love it! While Card often writes so much about the inner thought processes of his characters that sometimes his stories can slow down, there's enough action and adventure and a fast enough pace to make this book a really fun read. I might characterize it as a cross between the slower moving intellectual style in the later Ender series books and the fast paced intensity in Ender's Game. It's a blend that works.

Among the many things I enjoyed in this book is Card's excellent development of Bean's human emotional self. While Bean is intellectually brilliant, as the book opens, he seems to go through the motions of human emotional interaction without truly having felt the emotion. Card seems to have captured the shortcoming that children who suffer deprivation of human contact early in life sometimes exhibit, and included it in the character of Bean. As the story progresses, Bean slowly develops genuine emotional ties with other human beings and the emotional side of his character matures considerably.

Like any work of fiction, there must be a suspension of disbelief. The character Achilles, Bean's enemy from his earlier years growing up in Rotterdam and again at Battle School, returns as a highly connected villain worthy of any James Bond movie. In Ender's Shadow Bean exposes him as the psychopathic murderer he is. Achilles, also a genius, has escaped from an institute for the criminally insane to wreak havoc on the world in general, and on Bean and his personal enemies in particular, as he ensconces himself in positions of power. In several places, Achilles seems to have a nearly omniscient ability to monitor the actions and whereabouts of his personal enemies, stretching my suspension of disbelief a bit thin as I read.

I truly enjoyed Card's character work in this book. I appreciate his willingness to create characters with backgrounds from many different cultures and locations. Card conscientiously takes the time to study and learn enough about other cultures and peoples. As a result, his characters have a depth and background beyond those in many novels.

Card creates characters with religious beliefs that are real to those characters who hold them. Even those characters who are atheist or agnostic in their own beliefs hold tightly to those beliefs every bit as tenaciously and religiously as do those characters who espouse a particular recognizable. Card always seems to treat religion with the respect others often neglect. His characters in this book, in particular Sister Carlotta, Ender's mother, and several characters from India and Pakistan, through their words and interactions, show how their own profound religious beliefs make up their core and affect their choices.

Another Card talent exhibited in this book, if not as strongly as it did in Ender's Game, is Card's ability to make smart characters actually act and behave intelligently. So many authors resort to devices that seem to say, "This character is smart because I'm telling you so," without any supporting evidence other than the author's word, or perhaps on the word of the author's supporting characters who may say in agreement, "Yes, that character is smart."

Card does sometimes tell the reader that his characters are smart, but he always backs it up with intelligent decisions, thought processes, and actions that make it believable. He's not perfect, but he is definitely among the top talents.

I was delighted and amused whenever I noticed one of the characters speaking or thinking and idea that I recognized as one of Card's own opinions or ideas. If you have read much of Card's work and are familiar with his own opinions as often expressed his non fiction and on his various Web sites (you can see some examples Card's political commentary at www.ornery.com) you too will catch his characters presenting some of those same ideas.

With so many intellectually gifted characters playing on the stage, sometimes they begin to sound a bit like each other. It's almost unavoidable for any author who writes as prolifically as Card to keep each character unique, fresh, and new. Card is one of the best at avoiding this problem, but it does crop up here and there.

When you finish the story, read the Afterword. Card's inclusion of a few words of commentary about the story writing process, how the book came to be, and about the decisions he had to make as he wrote it is fascinating. If you like Card, you will like this book. If you like action and international power plays, you will like this book. If you appreciate good writing and character development, you will like this book.

If you haven't yet read Ender's Shadow, I suggest you read it before you read this book. Like most of Card's work, this book can stand on its own, but it works better as a sequel since the book expects you to be familiar with the several main characters and their backgrounds.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Do you feel like you belong in many -- any -- Web communities? Lots of people and companies try and host successful Websites, but few pull it off. Cliff Figallo has helped do it three different times, and has written a workmanlike, useful book about what it takes -- good design, time, patience, great software, trust and the right people. He never loses sight of what the user wants and needs. Here is a review of Hosting Web Communities, on how to build enduring and yes, profitable communities online. (Read more below.)

Hosting Web Communities: Increasing Customer Loyalty and Mainta author Cliff Figallo pages 448 publisher Wiley rating 7/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-471-28293-6 summary It takes people and trust to build a community site

Creating Web communities on the Net is one of the more important social and business challenges of our time, but few people or companies seem to know how to do it with skill.

Into the fray comes Cliff Figallo, author of the useful no-nonsense Hosting Web Communities: Building Relationships, Increasing Customer Loyalty, and Maintaining a Competitive Edge, from Wiley.

Like many books about the Net these days, this one is cast in part as a business tool, probably for marketing reasons. And no doubt it will help individuals and companies -- especially small ones -- who want to establish viable Web communities.

But despite the practical packaging, the book takes aim at anybody who wants to join or run one.

Figallo knows whereof he speaks. Director of Community Development for Salon and its Table Talk discussion site, he spent six years as director of the The WELL, arguably the world's most influential and enduring virtual community. Figallo also helped develop AOL's first chat interface, "Virtual Places." That would put him in three especially coherent, community-minded Web enterprises.

Hosting a successful, bona fide Web community is rough.

As Figallo notes in his introduction, three themes recur: "The first is that community is a social constant looking to take hold in an environment of unrelenting change. The second is that trust is essential for community to happen. And the third is that meaningful relationships, far more than size, determine the success of online communities." Figallo's gift is that he sees the web community clearly from every perspective: host, user, designer, businessperson. He understands that at some point, community has to pay the bills in order to survive.

What is an online community? The word gets tossed around so much that, Figallo points out, the very term "virtual community" has been reduced to meaningless jargon. "A sense of belonging," is his answer. "Unless that feeling is there, no manager, advertiser, or promoter can claim the presence of community, no matter how much commonality exists in the users' interests and demographics."

"Community" is not synonymous with "harmony." Virtual communities don't have to be cheerful and sweet. But users must feel included. If you feel like you're part of a Web community, Figallo argues, you probably are.

Authoritative and common sensical, Figallo draws heavily on his own experience and scores of examples to make his case about flow, interface and atmosphere, helpfully backing up every point with illustrative URL's and examples.

He also offers counsel on how to preserve free speech and other online values while curbing the endemic flaming and erratic communications styles that have done in too many Web communities.

Hosts are essential to the building of relationships, he insists. They not only openly maintain the meeeting place -- arranging chat room schedules, starting and naming new discussion topics, keeping order and serving as librarian for online resources -- but they also act as "social adhesives" between the people who meet there. They help create certain essentials, including an interwoven web of relationships that last through time.

"Where these attributes exist," writes Figallo,"they solidify loyalty to the group and, therefore, to the Web site that support its activities. Members return regularly and in doing so, affirm the feeling that they belong, and maintain the relationship identified with the site. They come back because they are rewarded for doing so with valued facts, feelings, advice and opinions. As time passes, they help construct a history that is shared with others, adding to the feeling that they are part of some greater entity."

Figallo has come closer than most people in recent memory to defining the social structure that has to occur -- in conjunction with the design, interface and configurations he also outlines -- before the term "community" has any real meaning in connection with cyberspace.

One interesting chapter focuses on gathering business clientele into communities. Small business sites selling specialty items have become the mom-and-pop stores on the Internet, Figallo writes, selling to customers who can now be found anywhere there's a dial-up connection. Although companies like Amazon get most of the attention, the Net has spawned thousands of electronic shops, and it's reasonable, even necessary for these entrepeneurs to see their customers as members of "communities," because they want them to keep on returning.

In the past decade, countless "communities" have cluttered the Net, but only a handful are memorable, effective, or enduring. Figallo's publisher undoubtedly thought it could snare an audience by presenting the book so distinctly in business terms, but don't be put off by that.

This is a strong, convincing look at what it really takes to build enduring and yes, profitable communities online: the deployment of software and architecture and, above all, people, that permits humans to get to know one another and to keep coming back.

You can purchase this book from ThinkGeek.

Do you feel like you belong in many -- any -- Web communities? Lots of people and companies try and host successful Websites, but few pull it off. Cliff Figallo has helped do it three different times, and has written a workmanlike, useful book about what it takes -- good design, time, patience, great software, trust and the right people. He never loses sight of what the user wants and needs. Here is a review of Hosting Web Communities, on how to build enduring and yes, profitable communities online. (Read more below.)

Hosting Web Communities: Increasing Customer Loyalty and Mainta author Cliff Figallo pages 448 publisher Wiley rating 7/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-471-28293-6 summary It takes people and trust to build a community site

Creating Web communities on the Net is one of the more important social and business challenges of our time, but few people or companies seem to know how to do it with skill.

Into the fray comes Cliff Figallo, author of the useful no-nonsense Hosting Web Communities: Building Relationships, Increasing Customer Loyalty, and Maintaining a Competitive Edge, from Wiley.

Like many books about the Net these days, this one is cast in part as a business tool, probably for marketing reasons. And no doubt it will help individuals and companies -- especially small ones -- who want to establish viable Web communities.

But despite the practical packaging, the book takes aim at anybody who wants to join or run one.

Figallo knows whereof he speaks. Director of Community Development for Salon and its Table Talk discussion site, he spent six years as director of the The WELL, arguably the world's most influential and enduring virtual community. Figallo also helped develop AOL's first chat interface, "Virtual Places." That would put him in three especially coherent, community-minded Web enterprises.

Hosting a successful, bona fide Web community is rough.

As Figallo notes in his introduction, three themes recur: "The first is that community is a social constant looking to take hold in an environment of unrelenting change. The second is that trust is essential for community to happen. And the third is that meaningful relationships, far more than size, determine the success of online communities." Figallo's gift is that he sees the web community clearly from every perspective: host, user, designer, businessperson. He understands that at some point, community has to pay the bills in order to survive.

What is an online community? The word gets tossed around so much that, Figallo points out, the very term "virtual community" has been reduced to meaningless jargon. "A sense of belonging," is his answer. "Unless that feeling is there, no manager, advertiser, or promoter can claim the presence of community, no matter how much commonality exists in the users' interests and demographics."

"Community" is not synonymous with "harmony." Virtual communities don't have to be cheerful and sweet. But users must feel included. If you feel like you're part of a Web community, Figallo argues, you probably are.

Authoritative and common sensical, Figallo draws heavily on his own experience and scores of examples to make his case about flow, interface and atmosphere, helpfully backing up every point with illustrative URL's and examples.

He also offers counsel on how to preserve free speech and other online values while curbing the endemic flaming and erratic communications styles that have done in too many Web communities.

Hosts are essential to the building of relationships, he insists. They not only openly maintain the meeeting place -- arranging chat room schedules, starting and naming new discussion topics, keeping order and serving as librarian for online resources -- but they also act as "social adhesives" between the people who meet there. They help create certain essentials, including an interwoven web of relationships that last through time.

"Where these attributes exist," writes Figallo,"they solidify loyalty to the group and, therefore, to the Web site that support its activities. Members return regularly and in doing so, affirm the feeling that they belong, and maintain the relationship identified with the site. They come back because they are rewarded for doing so with valued facts, feelings, advice and opinions. As time passes, they help construct a history that is shared with others, adding to the feeling that they are part of some greater entity."

Figallo has come closer than most people in recent memory to defining the social structure that has to occur -- in conjunction with the design, interface and configurations he also outlines -- before the term "community" has any real meaning in connection with cyberspace.

One interesting chapter focuses on gathering business clientele into communities. Small business sites selling specialty items have become the mom-and-pop stores on the Internet, Figallo writes, selling to customers who can now be found anywhere there's a dial-up connection. Although companies like Amazon get most of the attention, the Net has spawned thousands of electronic shops, and it's reasonable, even necessary for these entrepeneurs to see their customers as members of "communities," because they want them to keep on returning.

In the past decade, countless "communities" have cluttered the Net, but only a handful are memorable, effective, or enduring. Figallo's publisher undoubtedly thought it could snare an audience by presenting the book so distinctly in business terms, but don't be put off by that.

This is a strong, convincing look at what it really takes to build enduring and yes, profitable communities online: the deployment of software and architecture and, above all, people, that permits humans to get to know one another and to keep coming back.

You can purchase this book from ThinkGeek.

Don Foster was asked to track down Ted Kaczynski by studying the Unabomber's own words (and uncovering fresh information about his choice of victims). Foster, a Vassar prof who solved a centuries old mystery involving a Shakespearean sonnet and unmasked the anonymous author of a sensational Clinton campaign book, has written a book about science, words and identity. You can run and hide, he says, but your words will always give you away. Author Unknown is relevant to life online, where responsibility for words and anonymous authorship is an everyday issue.

Author Unknown author Don Foster pages 282 publisher Henry Holt rating 8/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-8050-6357-9 summary uncovering-the-authors-of-anonymous texts

With unattributed text, says word sleuth Don Foster -- an e-mail from a Hotmail address, the rantings of the Unabomber, or an anonymous letter to the editor -- it is increasingly possible to connect the voice with the creator of the document.

Most anonymous texts, from Elizabethan playscripts to libel on the Net, offer stylistic evidence that reveal a lot more than many scholars and detectives have previously realized. Words are our own intellectual DNA, writes Foster, a professor of English Lit at Vassar and perhaps the world's foremost word sleuth. Analyzed in the right way, they invariably will give us away.

Foster, the author of Author Unknown, has some solid credentials in this field. He solved a puzzle involving one of Shakespeare's sonnets that had stumped sleuths for centuries, identified the anonymous author of presidential tell-all Primary Colors (unmasking the journalist Joe Klein as the author), was enlisted by federal authorities in the hunt for the Unabomber, and was also asked to uncover the author of the celebrated Monica Lewinsky-Linda Tripp "talking points."

This is highly readable book, an intellectual who-dunnit of particular interest to people online who are continuously confronted with anonymous texts. And if you're hiding behind electronic anonymity, you don't want Don Foster on your case. The book tells juicy stories about some of the most sensational crimes and scandals of our time, but it's really about the human mind: the language, identity and the clues that individuals leave behind when they create text, digital or otherwise.

Criminals can ride or hide, Foster writes, but they can't disguise their words and language patterns. We are prisoners of our own language, writing from within a repertoire of certain thoughts and words and spellings.

Some words, Foster writes, are content specific. "Two documents about making salad from "dandelion greens" may have been written by the same person (in this example, Ted Kaczynski) or one writer may have borrowed from another; but if two documents about gardening mention the words "dandelion," "hoe", and "trellis," that may indicate not common authorship or indebtedness but only a shared topic."

Some of the most riveting parts of this book are the insights into Kaczysnki's character and intellect that Foster was able to piece together from a meticulous study of his letters and manifestos. Foster makes Kaczynski more comprehensible than anyone has managed to do, mostly by tracking down the influences, stories, books and writers that pop up again and again in his writings, beliefs and help explain an enduring mystery about his awful work: his choice of victims. We see how Kaczynski, holed up in various libraries, came across biographic references, academic writings or writings that triggered passions and interests (like the story of the Titanic, which obsessed him as a metaphor for failed technology and technological hubris, an obsession that cost lives).

Foster writes about how advanced Geographic Profiling used by police to track down serial criminals didn't work in the Unabomber case, since the offender's primary residence (Montana) and place of employment (none) couldn't have been pinpointed even with the help of advanced computer tracking software. But by locating Kaczynski's words and ideas, pseudonyms, even mailing addresses; by locating his books and magazines, reference works and principal intellectual influences, something could have been learned about the Unabomber's physical whereabouts, even down to the particular buildings in Utah and Northern California where Kaczynski was conducting his primary research, (including the probable dates of his most recent visits).

Foster writes that it was the famous Unabomber Manifesto, "Industrial Society and Its Future," completed and mailed in June 1995 that ultimately led the Unabomber Task Force to Kaczynski's Montana cabin. "I believe," he writes, "that the same wonderfully verbose document, partly written in California libraries, could have led agents to Ted Kaczynski even without David Kaczynski's invaluable assistance."

Foster was repeatedly led to archived stories from "Saturday Review" which Kaczynski read. The Unabomber borrowed heavily, says Foster, especially from the writings of Jacques Ellul. It was in February 1965 that American readers were first introduced to Ellul's "Technological Society" in that magazine. Kaczynski wrote his brother David that he was deeply impressed by Ellul's writings which closely mirrored his own beliefs. These ideas pop up all over Kaczynski's writings, letters and manifesto.

Author Unknown is a great read, timely and riveting, and with special relevance for cyberspace. "In a culture that encourages anonymous communication and the right to speak without responsibility for the content of the utterance, the spoken message and, eventually, language itself are depleted."

There may be a flip-side to Foster's new science. In the wrong hands, it could mean that the kind of free speech and safety sometimes associated with anonymity -- Anonymous Cowards on this site can be obnoxious, but they also pass on valuable information -- could be lost.

But thanks in part to Foster's ground-breaking research, speaking without responsibility may one day be tougher to do.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Don Foster was asked to track down Ted Kaczynski by studying the Unabomber's own words (and uncovering fresh information about his choice of victims). Foster, a Vassar prof who solved a centuries old mystery involving a Shakespearean sonnet and unmasked the anonymous author of a sensational Clinton campaign book, has written a book about science, words and identity. You can run and hide, he says, but your words will always give you away. Author Unknown is relevant to life online, where responsibility for words and anonymous authorship is an everyday issue.

Author Unknown author Don Foster pages 282 publisher Henry Holt rating 8/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-8050-6357-9 summary uncovering-the-authors-of-anonymous texts

With unattributed text, says word sleuth Don Foster -- an e-mail from a Hotmail address, the rantings of the Unabomber, or an anonymous letter to the editor -- it is increasingly possible to connect the voice with the creator of the document.

Most anonymous texts, from Elizabethan playscripts to libel on the Net, offer stylistic evidence that reveal a lot more than many scholars and detectives have previously realized. Words are our own intellectual DNA, writes Foster, a professor of English Lit at Vassar and perhaps the world's foremost word sleuth. Analyzed in the right way, they invariably will give us away.

Foster, the author of Author Unknown, has some solid credentials in this field. He solved a puzzle involving one of Shakespeare's sonnets that had stumped sleuths for centuries, identified the anonymous author of presidential tell-all Primary Colors (unmasking the journalist Joe Klein as the author), was enlisted by federal authorities in the hunt for the Unabomber, and was also asked to uncover the author of the celebrated Monica Lewinsky-Linda Tripp "talking points."

This is highly readable book, an intellectual who-dunnit of particular interest to people online who are continuously confronted with anonymous texts. And if you're hiding behind electronic anonymity, you don't want Don Foster on your case. The book tells juicy stories about some of the most sensational crimes and scandals of our time, but it's really about the human mind: the language, identity and the clues that individuals leave behind when they create text, digital or otherwise.

Criminals can ride or hide, Foster writes, but they can't disguise their words and language patterns. We are prisoners of our own language, writing from within a repertoire of certain thoughts and words and spellings.

Some words, Foster writes, are content specific. "Two documents about making salad from "dandelion greens" may have been written by the same person (in this example, Ted Kaczynski) or one writer may have borrowed from another; but if two documents about gardening mention the words "dandelion," "hoe", and "trellis," that may indicate not common authorship or indebtedness but only a shared topic."

Some of the most riveting parts of this book are the insights into Kaczysnki's character and intellect that Foster was able to piece together from a meticulous study of his letters and manifestos. Foster makes Kaczynski more comprehensible than anyone has managed to do, mostly by tracking down the influences, stories, books and writers that pop up again and again in his writings, beliefs and help explain an enduring mystery about his awful work: his choice of victims. We see how Kaczynski, holed up in various libraries, came across biographic references, academic writings or writings that triggered passions and interests (like the story of the Titanic, which obsessed him as a metaphor for failed technology and technological hubris, an obsession that cost lives).

Foster writes about how advanced Geographic Profiling used by police to track down serial criminals didn't work in the Unabomber case, since the offender's primary residence (Montana) and place of employment (none) couldn't have been pinpointed even with the help of advanced computer tracking software. But by locating Kaczynski's words and ideas, pseudonyms, even mailing addresses; by locating his books and magazines, reference works and principal intellectual influences, something could have been learned about the Unabomber's physical whereabouts, even down to the particular buildings in Utah and Northern California where Kaczynski was conducting his primary research, (including the probable dates of his most recent visits).

Foster writes that it was the famous Unabomber Manifesto, "Industrial Society and Its Future," completed and mailed in June 1995 that ultimately led the Unabomber Task Force to Kaczynski's Montana cabin. "I believe," he writes, "that the same wonderfully verbose document, partly written in California libraries, could have led agents to Ted Kaczynski even without David Kaczynski's invaluable assistance."

Foster was repeatedly led to archived stories from "Saturday Review" which Kaczynski read. The Unabomber borrowed heavily, says Foster, especially from the writings of Jacques Ellul. It was in February 1965 that American readers were first introduced to Ellul's "Technological Society" in that magazine. Kaczynski wrote his brother David that he was deeply impressed by Ellul's writings which closely mirrored his own beliefs. These ideas pop up all over Kaczynski's writings, letters and manifesto.

Author Unknown is a great read, timely and riveting, and with special relevance for cyberspace. "In a culture that encourages anonymous communication and the right to speak without responsibility for the content of the utterance, the spoken message and, eventually, language itself are depleted."

There may be a flip-side to Foster's new science. In the wrong hands, it could mean that the kind of free speech and safety sometimes associated with anonymity -- Anonymous Cowards on this site can be obnoxious, but they also pass on valuable information -- could be lost.

But thanks in part to Foster's ground-breaking research, speaking without responsibility may one day be tougher to do.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

A reknowned computer scientist punctures some of the arrogance and hype surrounding computing and details some of the many computational and other problems computers can't solve. After years of rising expectations, the public expects computers to reverse aging, solve the most complex problems, and restore the ozone layer. So do many computer scientists, says the author of "Computers LTD., what they really can't do." It's a good question. What can't computers do? Jump in. Computers Ltd., What They Really Can't Do author David Harel pages 221 publisher Oxford University Press rating 7/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-19-850555-8 summary the limits of computing

What can't computers do? Why don't we hear more about their limitations, along with the mushroom clouds of hype about their limitless capabilities? By now, the public might well expect computing to restore the environment, cure cancer, prolong life and reason through the world's most complex and intractable problems.

Not so fast.

The good news, writes author David Harel in his new book, "Computers LTD: What They Really Can't Do," from Oxford University Press, is that computers are indeed incredible, capable of amazing feats.

The bad news is that they also face major problems, serious limitations on what they can ever be expected to accomplish, and that few people, even with advance computer science degrees, really grasp that there are fundamental barries no amount of hardware, software, brainpower or money can ever overcome.

Harel explores the boundaries of computable and noncomputable problems, and find's a lot to be pessimistic about. "..our hopes for computer omnipotence are shattered. We now know that not all algorithmic problems are solvable by computers, even with unlimited access to resources like time and memory space." In fact, he adds, problems relating to computer programs, particularly running time and memory space -- he calls these difficulties computational complexity -- severely limit just how much computers will ever be able to do.

Harel, who's a mathematics and computer science dean at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science, may have written one of the first books in recent memory that focuses on the limits of computers. For a community grown understandably arrogant by years of hubris and hype, this is probably a much needed dose of reality. Why focus on the negative?, the author asks. His answer:

l. To satisfy intellectual curiousity. Computer scientists need to know what can be computed and what can't.

2. To discourage futility. Computer experts who tackle problems that are simply insoluble need to stop wasting their time.

3. To encourage the development of new paradigms. Many of the most exciting areas of computer science research -- including parallelism, randomization and quantum and molecular computing would not be advancing at their current speeds if it weren't for increased understanding about what computers can't accomplish.

4. To make possible the otherwise impossible. (The author saves much of the answer to what might be possible a surprise in the book, so I can't give it away here).

Harel acknowledges that our society could barely function without them. But he warns against the widespread mythology that computers will be able to do almost anything we can think up.

Typically, Harel writes, when people have problems making computers do what they want them to do, their excuses that fall into three categories: more money would buy larger, more sophisticated computers; being younger would permit us to wait longer for time-consuming programs to be terminated; being smarter could lead us to solutions we don't currently seem able to find.

But the truth is that computers are simply not equal to solve many complex problems. Harel raises, then mostly sidesteps, the debate over whether computers can be endowed with human-like intelligence. "In its wake," he writes, "a host of questions arise concerning the limits of computation, such as whether computers can run companies, carry out medical diagnoses, compose music or fall in love."

For non-techs, this book is on a pretty high plane. Even with Harel's impeccable credentials and engaging writing style, plenty of concepts are rough for someone who's not a programmer or computer scientist to grasp, especially when he gets to tiling and algorithms.

But the question is significant. The limitless potential power of computing has all kinds of implications for technology, education, culture and politics. We do need to know more about what's realistic. This splash of cold water is welcome, and more than a little shocking.

Purchase this at ThinkGeek.

In the wrong hands, scientific discovery can be scary stuff. This first-rate book by a British biophycist describes some of the most infamous tales in scientific history and how they happened. The Undergrowth of Science author Walter Gratzer pages 328 publisher Oxford University Press rating 8/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-19-850707-0 summary how science can go outrageously awry

A scientist once wrote that all truth passes through three stages: first it is ridiculed, then violently opposed and eventually, accepted as self-evident. Charles Kettering, the legendary former head of General Motors, once lamented: 'First they tell you you're wrong and they can prove it; then they tell you you're right but it isn't important; then they tell you it's important but they knew it all along.'

Both of these notions are quoted in Walter Gratzer's excellent new book, "The Undergrowth of Science: Delusion, Self-Deception and Human Frailty." Gratzer writes exceptionally well. He teaches at the Randall Institute, King's College London. His books include the "Longman Literary Companion to Science" and "The Bedside Nature."

Gratzer examines the underbelly of scientific theory, namely how some of the most delusional and outrageous scientific theories -- Russian water that could congeal oceans, Monkey testis implants that restore declining sexual powers, "truths" about genetics and the discovery of matter -- occur and are widely accepted in the scientific community. This book is equal parts science and history, a collection of gripping tales that remind us to take even the most high-minded and supposedly scientific discoveries with some caution.

Science makes much of its rules and legendary peer review procedures, but personal vanity, contemporary politics, greed, stupidity, and incompetence all pop up in these shocking episodes. Gratzer details how intelligence and reason don't necessarily exclude irrationality. One chapter takes us to eighteenth-century France, where Franz-Anton Messmer persuaded a gullible public of the existence of animal magnetism and harnessed it to cure diseases. (Messmer didn't actually invent the theory of animal magnetism, he learned it from a notorious Austrian priest known as Father Hell.)

One powerful chapter details the tragedy of Soviet genetics, the history of Russian biology in the period between the Revolution and the death of Stalin in l953, a time the author calls "a woeful chronicle of wanton destruction of both a scholarly discipline and the lives of many of its most respected practioners." Gratzer also explores the misuse of science in the Third Reich, and the rise and fall of Eugenics.

This isn't just ancient history, though. Misguided scientific theory is all too contemporary.

"Most remarkable," writes Gatzer, "is the way that false theories and imagined phenomena sometimes spread through the scientific community. A kind of mass hysteria, which parallels in the world at large, such as UFO sightings alien abductions, 'recovered memory' and probably chronic fatigue syndrome, takes possession of a hitherto rational population, like a virus of the intellect. On such occasions scientists in some area of research throw aside, to the amazement of their colleagues, the intellectual constraints that had until then guided their working lives. They become selectively uncritical and intolerant of any unsought evidence. Sometimes such a perversion of the scientific method results from external, especially political, pressures, but at other times it is a spontaneous eruption."

In the media age, these scientific stumbles are particularly dangerous, as they become powerful memes that are rapidly and virally transmitted to the general population by information technologies like TV and the Net.

In this era, science and technology are central to contemporary political, social, economic and cultural lives. How science can sometimes go awry is thus an important story. Despite the fact that Gatzer tells it entertainingly and with enormous authority, this is a disturbing book. Science in the wrong hands, used for the wrong reasons, is scary stuff.

Purchase this at ThinkGeek.

Virtual communities that only offer information, data and text-based messaging are sometimes fragmented, brittle and cold. They don't allow the kind of sequential communications and storytelling vital to any community, work or personal. Those that emphasize human contact are too limited. The Virtual Community of tomorrow may have to incorporate both. (This is the third in a series.)

So where does that leave the Virtual Community, alive or dead or in between?

The idea remains as powerful as ever, flamers, spammers, vandals, dotcoms or no. Lots of people, from medical patients and programmers to gay teenagers to gamers and quilters are seeking and finding small communities to attach themselves to. But the virtual community clearly needs some serious re-thinking, both in technological and human terms.

Many people online are nostalgic about the idea.

E-mailed chauf:

"I look back to the days of BBS's and the one I frequented the most was like its own neighborhood. You usually knew the various folks... of course some were more visible than others, much like real life. I use the analogy of a local bar.. a la 'Cheers'. That's what many of the local BBSes were like...

" Even though there was this computerized place there was still an emphasis on meeting in person at various GT's or Get Togethers. When I was in high school it was one of the local roller rinks. Often we'd have a weekend barbeque at a park where everyone could attend. We also had more deviant activities like Electric Jello parties. Electric Jello is Jello made normally but you'd take out a 1/4 of the water in the recipe and put in Everclear...

" So here you'd have these hammered, underage computer folks! It was a riot ... One of my favorite people I met during these years was a gentleman named Al ... Al was a old biker. He had to be in his mid-thirties when I met him. He was extremely articulate and intelligent and it came across in his postings. He was also an avid game player ... with a bend towards computer war games/simulations. None of us know what he looked like in person so it was QUITE a shock when we met in person. Here was this large, tattooed, long haired biker. It sent my perception of how people are on its ear. I learned to never really truly judge folks by what they look like, rather by their actions ... Virtual communites are possible. They will never replace face to face meeting but they can open the doors to such meetings and communication."

Chauf's experience is typical of many people's feelings about virtual communities. They may work best as a cross between the WELL model and the later information-swapping exchange. The new virtual community has several primary obstacles to overcome:

First, as predicted by almost every sci-fi writer, the megacorporations are moving to dominate the virtual community. the corporate world sees the Net as its primary communications medium, and the key to participating and prospering in the global economy. They have the money, political clout and legal acumen to dominate the network, as is already becoming clear. The Net is not viewed by the outside as being healthy or weak in terms of the strength of its virtual communities, but the rise or fall of NASDAQ on any given day. The idea of a tech boom or, more recently, a tech decline is entirely related to corporate earnings in tech industries and elements online.

The function of the corporate virtual community has tended to emphasize sales, period, and corporations seek to control access, content, intellectual property and usage. But the original notion of the virtual community was very different. Businesses may not actively try to eliminate other kinds of virtual communties, but they end up supplanting or marginalizing them anyway, in much the same way Microsoft or Wal-Mart eliminates its competitiion. In any contest between corporatism and community, the former seems to win hands down every time, which puts the idea of the virtual community in particular danger.

Despite the pressures of the blessedly waning dotcom era, there are things the virtual community can take from business communications. In The Social Life of Information (Harvard University Press), John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid talk about the importance of office communications, especially face to face stories. These kind of human-to-human narrative involves constant story-telling; about problems and solutions, disasters and triumphs and, say the authors, serves a number overlapping purposes. Workers "tell stories about unsolved problems in an attempt to generate a coherent account of what the problem is and how to solve it. They may do this individually, putting their own story together. Or they can do it collectively, as they drawn on the collective wisdom of the group."

F2F stories, Brown and Duguid remind us, are good at presenting things sequentially (this happened, then that). They are also good for presenting them casually (this happened because of that). "Thus stories are a powerful means to understand what happened (the sequence of events) and why (the causes of those events)." This kind of storytelling is indispensable for workers for whom these are critical issues of concern.

The virtual community is just beginning to experiment with the online equivalent of the real-life office environment, mostly in live chat and messaging forms. But the kind of sequential, coherent narrative describe by Brown and Duguid is still difficult online, especially in the text-based, asynchronious communications forms most people use.

In addition, adolescent flamers -- almost invariably young males -- continue to disrupt and distort efforts to create online communities. Rarely as numerous as they seem to be, they cause others to lurk rather than participate, and create the sort of mistrust and tension that make community nearly impossible. They almost demand some form of censorship and moderation, which makes noxious restrictions on speech easier to justify. Successful new weblogs (camworld.com is one of the best weblogs online) are created with an eye towards limiting membership, controlling submissions and the nature of disagreement -- the sort of change that's both sensible and tragic.

The dilemma is that younger Net users are among the smartest, most technologically-sophisticated people online. If they bring hostility, they also bring creativity and energy. Losing them would be an enormous loss. Still, there needs to be a heightened sense of responsibility for the words people post. If the posters don't acquire one themselves, then the operators and members of virtual communities have to start doing it themselves, challenging hostile communicators more directly.

There's also a possible silver lining. Since technology is the most powerful social and cultural force in the contemporary world, ascendant virtual communities have tended to focus on it.But if the tech world really is in a slump, if the explosive growth and pace of technological change slows and dwindling venture capital winnows the dotcoms, advocates for virtual community might once more find some breathing room.

The new online community may have to draw from some of the most traditional, non-tech elements of society: the water cooler, the backyard fence, the tavern, the neighborhood park, even the office itself. All of these gathering spots tend to cement community, forge relationships, provide the human and contextual cues that help people resolve disputes, receive information,communicate in a civil way, learn new ideas. It is precisely these kinds of one-on-one communications forums that are missing in so many VC's (though increasingly, applets for live chats are popping up on places like AOL and everything2).

Maybe online communities of the future could work this way: Napster or a site like this one would exist as an information exchange, but would also build into its architecture a face-to-face component -- perhaps video-conferencing, chat and messaging rooms, local or state chapters that actually meet.

Members would encounter other members when they joined and when they participated in online discussions. Sites could also organize face to face gatherings and activities so that the two major goals of the new virtual community -- community and information -- would both be available. As with any successful community, members would be asked to participate in the functioning of the site -- moderating, writing, reviewing, suggesting topics, relaying information, working on software design, trouble-shooting and problem-solving. Membership committees could consider and respond to complaints and suggestions, which might reduce the instinct for flaming.

The virtual community of the future seems likely to be some version of a weblog that uses the Net's distributed architecture to provode access to information. But communities are more likely to succeed, grow and endure when human elements are also incorporated into their structure. Chat rooms, IRC's, video-meetings and human contact are ultimately as essential to a virtual community as data. Notice that Chauf recalls his friend the biker more than the topics on his BBS. People connect with humans in a way they don't yet connect with data, an idea overlooked in Web design and architecture.

In part, Rheingold's dream of the virtual community -- as embodied by the WELL -- seemed posible because there wasn't all that much to do online. Today, people get overwhelmed with e-mail, chat forums, entertainment and hopping online. The virtual community seems almost an afterthought.

For all its problems and failed expectations, the Virtual Community, one of the most compelling ideas to emerge from cyberspace, still seems a fantasy. The VC needs to be rethought rather than abandoned, redesigned rather than nostalgically recalled.

Next: Your thoughts on how to reconceive the Virtual Community.

While it might be nice to have a blindingly fast, universally available language shared by every computer on the planet, for now, there's Java. Jayakrishnan contributed this review of Core Servlets and Java Server Pages, in which he finds that "the basics are covered" well along with some reservations. Read on to discover whether it might fit your needs.

Core Servlets and Java Server Pages author Marty Hall pages 575 publisher Prentice Hall rating 5 reviewer jayakrishnan ISBN 0130893404 summary The basics are well covered and there is lots of practical information, but the coverage is not comprehensive.

The book is made up of three parts: Servlets; Java Server Pages; and the supporting technologies.

The nine chapters in the first part are about Servlets, if you read through all nine, you will learn how to handle form data, access the request headers, generate the response, handle cookies and track sessions. The Java way of separating presentation and content, called Java Server Pages (also called "put everything in a single file!"), is discussed in the next section. This section includes using JavaBeans with JSP, creating custom tag libraries and a chapter on integrating servlets and JSP. The third part has three chapters on the supporting technologies -- HTML forms, using Applets as servlet front-ends, and JDBC and Database connection pooling. The appendix provides a short summary of information from each chapter and the book does has a Web site from which you can download the source code for the examples.

The structure of most of the chapters is the same: Introduce a concept, explain the basics and then develop an example that illustrates the concept. In the chapter on "Generating the Server Response: HTTP Status Codes," the various status codes and their purpose are explained followed by an example which is developing a single interface to various search engines on the Web. The other examples developed in this book are a resume-posting service, using cookies to provide customization, the mandatory shopping cart example, and an online travel agent.

Also, scattered along the book are specially marked techniques, notes and warnings called the "Core Approach." For example if there is an error in the dynamic portion of your JSP, it may not be properly translated to a servlet and the server will present a page describing the problem. But if your browser is Internet Explorer 5, then you will see a standard error page instead of the one with the error message. This "user-friendly" feature has to be turned off while debugging JSP pages and this is one of the Core Warnings.

Even though the Servlet API provides a standard for writing portable code their deployment is not standard, at least until Servlet 2.2. While Sun's Java Web Server provides a graphical applet, Apache Tomcat uses an XML file for configuration. This book talks about three servers in specific and provides instructions on how to get your code running with Tomcat 3.1, Java Web Server 2.0 and JavaServer Web Development Kit. There is a section in the first chapter that talks about the installation of each of these servers and specific information on where your classes and jar files should go. Then as we go along the text, the specifics are discussed like how to specify the initialization parameters for servlets or how to configure the server to make the servlets generated from JSPs persistent.

Though the basics are covered well, some serious topics are left out, and the discussion is inadequate on others. The book's coverage of security is very limited, for instance. There is an example of protecting a page using the basic authentication provided by HTTP, but we need more than that for any site that takes a credit card number. There is very limited discussion on SSL and on what it takes to build a secure Web site.

Servlets can (very usefully) provide internationalization using either HTML character entities or Unicode escape sequences. This involves setting the Content-Language in the header and setting the char set in the content type while sending the response. By reading the preferences set by the user in the browser for his language and char set, it is possible to send content in the user's preferred language. The topics of internationalization and customized content generation, though, are totally left out in the book.

For the deployment of Java-based Web applications, the servlet and JSP specifications support a single Web archive file similar to the jar file. The war file will also contain HTML files, images, and applets along with an XML based configuration file, which can then be placed in the directory on the Web server. Though it is mentioned in the introduction that the book covers servlet 2.2 specifications, the Web application archive is not discussed. Also missing is discussion about the new methods in HttpServletRequest that support role-based authorization.

With the knowledge of Servlets and JSP gained from this book do you get enough wisdom to architect a project? No. I wish there was a chapter which stepped back away from all the code and talked about design at a higher level. All the information is there in the book, but only scattered about.

Finally, I have one major gripe against the publisher---Prentice Hall. The margins used are too wide compared to all other publishers, making this book much more thick than required. This, along with the very large font used for section and sub-section titles makes the book look very ugly and the appendix can be used as an example on how not to format text.

To summarize, if you are a Java programmer who wants to start server side programming then this book is for you. The introduction is gentle and the book is illustrated with numerous code samples that you can extend and adapt. But the coverage is not comprehensive, as the discussion on security is limited and internationalization and some topics of the Servlet 2.2 specification are left out.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

While it might be nice to have a blindingly fast, universally available language shared by every computer on the planet, for now, there's Java. Jayakrishnan contributed this review of Core Servlets and Java Server Pages, in which he finds that "the basics are covered" well along with some reservations. Read on to discover whether it might fit your needs.

Core Servlets and Java Server Pages author Marty Hall pages 575 publisher Prentice Hall rating 5 reviewer jayakrishnan ISBN 0130893404 summary The basics are well covered and there is lots of practical information, but the coverage is not comprehensive.

The book is made up of three parts: Servlets; Java Server Pages; and the supporting technologies.

The nine chapters in the first part are about Servlets, if you read through all nine, you will learn how to handle form data, access the request headers, generate the response, handle cookies and track sessions. The Java way of separating presentation and content, called Java Server Pages (also called "put everything in a single file!"), is discussed in the next section. This section includes using JavaBeans with JSP, creating custom tag libraries and a chapter on integrating servlets and JSP. The third part has three chapters on the supporting technologies -- HTML forms, using Applets as servlet front-ends, and JDBC and Database connection pooling. The appendix provides a short summary of information from each chapter and the book does has a Web site from which you can download the source code for the examples.

The structure of most of the chapters is the same: Introduce a concept, explain the basics and then develop an example that illustrates the concept. In the chapter on "Generating the Server Response: HTTP Status Codes," the various status codes and their purpose are explained followed by an example which is developing a single interface to various search engines on the Web. The other examples developed in this book are a resume-posting service, using cookies to provide customization, the mandatory shopping cart example, and an online travel agent.

Also, scattered along the book are specially marked techniques, notes and warnings called the "Core Approach." For example if there is an error in the dynamic portion of your JSP, it may not be properly translated to a servlet and the server will present a page describing the problem. But if your browser is Internet Explorer 5, then you will see a standard error page instead of the one with the error message. This "user-friendly" feature has to be turned off while debugging JSP pages and this is one of the Core Warnings.

Even though the Servlet API provides a standard for writing portable code their deployment is not standard, at least until Servlet 2.2. While Sun's Java Web Server provides a graphical applet, Apache Tomcat uses an XML file for configuration. This book talks about three servers in specific and provides instructions on how to get your code running with Tomcat 3.1, Java Web Server 2.0 and JavaServer Web Development Kit. There is a section in the first chapter that talks about the installation of each of these servers and specific information on where your classes and jar files should go. Then as we go along the text, the specifics are discussed like how to specify the initialization parameters for servlets or how to configure the server to make the servlets generated from JSPs persistent.

Though the basics are covered well, some serious topics are left out, and the discussion is inadequate on others. The book's coverage of security is very limited, for instance. There is an example of protecting a page using the basic authentication provided by HTTP, but we need more than that for any site that takes a credit card number. There is very limited discussion on SSL and on what it takes to build a secure Web site.

Servlets can (very usefully) provide internationalization using either HTML character entities or Unicode escape sequences. This involves setting the Content-Language in the header and setting the char set in the content type while sending the response. By reading the preferences set by the user in the browser for his language and char set, it is possible to send content in the user's preferred language. The topics of internationalization and customized content generation, though, are totally left out in the book.

For the deployment of Java-based Web applications, the servlet and JSP specifications support a single Web archive file similar to the jar file. The war file will also contain HTML files, images, and applets along with an XML based configuration file, which can then be placed in the directory on the Web server. Though it is mentioned in the introduction that the book covers servlet 2.2 specifications, the Web application archive is not discussed. Also missing is discussion about the new methods in HttpServletRequest that support role-based authorization.

With the knowledge of Servlets and JSP gained from this book do you get enough wisdom to architect a project? No. I wish there was a chapter which stepped back away from all the code and talked about design at a higher level. All the information is there in the book, but only scattered about.

Finally, I have one major gripe against the publisher---Prentice Hall. The margins used are too wide compared to all other publishers, making this book much more thick than required. This, along with the very large font used for section and sub-section titles makes the book look very ugly and the appendix can be used as an example on how not to format text.

To summarize, if you are a Java programmer who wants to start server side programming then this book is for you. The introduction is gentle and the book is illustrated with numerous code samples that you can extend and adapt. But the coverage is not comprehensive, as the discussion on security is limited and internationalization and some topics of the Servlet 2.2 specification are left out.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Less than a decade ago, the Virtual Community was one of the most powerful ideas emanating from the Net, and BBS's and the nascent Internet were already providing glimpses of a better world to come. Proponents are a lot wiser -- and sadder -- now. Can the Virtual Community survive adolescent flamers and the dotcom era? Yes, but it will have to be dramatically reconceived. (First of a series).

Of all the odd and idiosyncratic groups that built the Net -- the hackers, academics, Defense Department strategists, scientists and engineers -- one of the most compelling and poignant was a cluster of community idealists, digital pioneers who founded early virtual communities like The WELL.

The virtual community is the long-sought but almost-never-found New Jerusalem that's touched the hearts and minds of some of the nicest, most ethical people who've ever gone online. Freenet, mailing lists, MUD's, Usenets and IRC's and IM and (even P2P) systems have mushroomed over the years, but the Virtual Community was supposed to be a different kind of space, a way to use the Network to connect people, to help them know and sustain one another in previously inconceivable ways.

Although almost everyone who has spent much time online has occasionally experienced this sense of community, it's generally proven impossible to maintain in an ongoing or large-scale way, for either individuals or sites. An ideal sought in part by 60s refugees trying to keep their societal dreams alive was done in by the Internet's unexpected success, by the changing economics of cyberspace and by vocal bands of articulate and aggressive adolescents.

One of the articulate prophets for that new kind of place was Howard Rheingold, a WELL mainstay and author of The Virtual Community, the book that laid out the yearning for a humanistic virtual community, rather than one purely technological or informational. The WELL, more than any other virtual space, has evoked the possibilities of a wired community whose loyal citizens meet, argue with, support and befriend one another in their work lives, their personal struggles, even in their deaths. From the first -- perhaps by dint of the particular geographic, political and cultural cast of the people who launched and inhabited it -- the WELL was unique. It still is. Despite the stunning growth of the Net and the Web, there has never been an online place like it. Increasingly, it seems there never may be.

More recent virtual communities are much more "virtual" than "community." Clusters of people collect around networks devoted to certain issues: workplace, sex, gaming, gender, finances, health, parenting. But most are transitional. The seminal idea of the WELL -- using the new network to connect personally with other humans -- feels outdated today, almost naive. Apart from sites like Senior Net, or certain mailing lists and messaging sites devoted to shared problems like cancer, the modern virtual community trades in information at the expense of intimacy. Even the most sophisticated Weblogs exist to trade ideas and commentary; participants may know next to nothing about the people behind the posts.

The idea of community itself is often mythologized, especially in America, where Disneyfied representations of an old-time Main Street have become a standard almost no one achieves in the real world. To suggest the Net has eroded community is foolish: ancient ideas of community have been eroding for generations, thanks to such innovations as the phone, TV, autos and interstate highways. The Net is just another evolution of that pattern, and it's not surprising that the virtual community has been mythologized as well.

Creating online communities is brutal work, requiring a particular kind of energy and commitment. In "Cyberville, Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town," published by Warner Books, New York City's ECHO founder Stacy Horn writes about her response to the suggestion that she ought to start some online communities in Boston, LA or New Orleans: "I put the idea aside...I'd have to find people locally to host, build, relationships with local organizations and businesses -- it's an incredibly delicate and gut-wrenching process -- I simply couldn't go through it again and again unless some big huge company paid me a lot of money to oversee the local people they would also pay a lot of money to do the actual work of building a local virtual community from within a physical one."

If everyone online were like Horn or were Rheingoldian -- smart, warm, ethical, community-minded -- then the Net might actually have become the connective environment that Rheingold and others articulated so powerfully. But most people are not, of course. Flamers and corporations and lawyers have thundered online, along with e-traders, role-players, spammers, governments -- everyone! -- with a long list of other agendas, from improved market share to con games.

As Rheingold, one of the founders of Wired Magazine's late Web site Hotwired, points out, it was briefly different, at least in some places. In the intro to Virtual Community, first published in l993 and revised and reissued this year by MIT Press, Rheingold describes how ever since the summer of l985 he has plugged his PC into his phone and logged onto the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) to carry on public conversations and exchange e-mail.

It was, initally, a revelation. "...Finding the WELL was like discovering a cozy little world that had been flourishing without me, hidden within the walls of my house; an entire cast of characters welcomed me to the troupe with great merriment as soon as I found the secret door. Like others who fell into the WELL, I soon discovered that I was audience, performer and scriptwriter, along with my companions, in an ongoing improvisation."

There is something touching about those words, the sense that Rheingold is describing something already from another age, something of enormous promise but, still, a dream unfulfilled. All over the network, individual grassroot community systems have been overshadowed, marginalized, or driven out of existence by the very technology they helped to grow.

Why? In new reflections added to his book, Rheingold notes the enormous damage done by hostile participants of virtual communities who seek attention through aggression and who take up an enormous, disproportionate amount of time and energy online, even when they comprise a distinct minority. In fact, this pattern has probably destroyed more virtual communities than any other single factor.

Internet researcher Elizabeth Reid of Australia, in an essay reprinted in Communities in Cyberspace (edited by Mark Smith and Peter Kollock), describes how some early BBS's -- she cites "CommuniTree" -- were intended to be free, open forums for intellectual and spiritual discussions. This community, she writes in a selection called "Hierarchy and Power," collapsed under an onslaught of messages, often obscene and hostile, posted by the first generation of adolescents with personal computers and modems. (Understandably, there is something about adolescence that doesn't care for free, intellectual and spiritual discussions.)

In Cybersociety 2.0, a collection of essays about digital communication and community (edited by Steven G. Jones), Reid and co-researcher Beth Kolko write in "Dissolution and Fragmentation: Problems in On-Line Communities" that it's the ease of individual expression -- the "singularity of on-line personae," that can be the greatest threat to online communities. "It has been all too easy for virtual communities to encourage multiplicity but not coherence," write Reid and Kolko, "with each individual persona having a limited, undiversified social range. This cultural schizophrenia makes the virtual community brittle and ill equipped to evolve with the demands of circumstance."

Other Net students and scholars have also found what many members of virtual communities know: efforts to control discussion, mediate disputes, or reach broad consensus often fail, breeding alienation, paranoia, anger and more controversy as online personae and positions harden in the abscence of moderating social forces like face-to-face, or even voice-to-voice contact.

So this more or less remained the plight of the virtual community as one after another struggles to maintain order against a culture that still, mysteriously, engenders endemic alienation, hostility and narcissism, even among intelligent and articulate people.

Besides, the world shifted into Net overdrive after the publication of The Virtual Community, the author notes ruefully in the new edition. In the 1980s, when he and a handful of journalists began writing about online society and culture, only a few technophiles, scholars and researchers grasped the point-to-point, many-to-many-possibilities of digital architecture.

At the time, the total online population numbered in the tens of thousands. Less than a decade later, "the Internet has made it possible for hundreds of millions of people to transform civilization's most powerful institutions -- commerce, politics, science, scholarship, entertainment, education, health care," Rheingold writes. "Our world has changed profoundly and swiftly, in large part because of the phenomenon this book described -- the sudden emergence of the Internet as a new communication medium."

Yet the change, he candidly acknowledges, was not the stirring revolution and reinvention of community he hoped for and expected.

Next, Part Two: What is a "Virtual Community," anyway? Note: You can purchase Virtual Communities at ThinkGeek.

Less than a decade ago, the Virtual Community was one of the most powerful ideas emanating from the Net, and BBS's and the nascent Internet were already providing glimpses of a better world to come. Proponents are a lot wiser -- and sadder -- now. Can the Virtual Community survive adolescent flamers and the dotcom era? Yes, but it will have to be dramatically reconceived. (First of a series).

Of all the odd and idiosyncratic groups that built the Net -- the hackers, academics, Defense Department strategists, scientists and engineers -- one of the most compelling and poignant was a cluster of community idealists, digital pioneers who founded early virtual communities like The WELL.

The virtual community is the long-sought but almost-never-found New Jerusalem that's touched the hearts and minds of some of the nicest, most ethical people who've ever gone online. Freenet, mailing lists, MUD's, Usenets and IRC's and IM and (even P2P) systems have mushroomed over the years, but the Virtual Community was supposed to be a different kind of space, a way to use the Network to connect people, to help them know and sustain one another in previously inconceivable ways.

Although almost everyone who has spent much time online has occasionally experienced this sense of community, it's generally proven impossible to maintain in an ongoing or large-scale way, for either individuals or sites. An ideal sought in part by 60s refugees trying to keep their societal dreams alive was done in by the Internet's unexpected success, by the changing economics of cyberspace and by vocal bands of articulate and aggressive adolescents.

One of the articulate prophets for that new kind of place was Howard Rheingold, a WELL mainstay and author of The Virtual Community, the book that laid out the yearning for a humanistic virtual community, rather than one purely technological or informational. The WELL, more than any other virtual space, has evoked the possibilities of a wired community whose loyal citizens meet, argue with, support and befriend one another in their work lives, their personal struggles, even in their deaths. From the first -- perhaps by dint of the particular geographic, political and cultural cast of the people who launched and inhabited it -- the WELL was unique. It still is. Despite the stunning growth of the Net and the Web, there has never been an online place like it. Increasingly, it seems there never may be.

More recent virtual communities are much more "virtual" than "community." Clusters of people collect around networks devoted to certain issues: workplace, sex, gaming, gender, finances, health, parenting. But most are transitional. The seminal idea of the WELL -- using the new network to connect personally with other humans -- feels outdated today, almost naive. Apart from sites like Senior Net, or certain mailing lists and messaging sites devoted to shared problems like cancer, the modern virtual community trades in information at the expense of intimacy. Even the most sophisticated Weblogs exist to trade ideas and commentary; participants may know next to nothing about the people behind the posts.

The idea of community itself is often mythologized, especially in America, where Disneyfied representations of an old-time Main Street have become a standard almost no one achieves in the real world. To suggest the Net has eroded community is foolish: ancient ideas of community have been eroding for generations, thanks to such innovations as the phone, TV, autos and interstate highways. The Net is just another evolution of that pattern, and it's not surprising that the virtual community has been mythologized as well.

Creating online communities is brutal work, requiring a particular kind of energy and commitment. In "Cyberville, Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town," published by Warner Books, New York City's ECHO founder Stacy Horn writes about her response to the suggestion that she ought to start some online communities in Boston, LA or New Orleans: "I put the idea aside...I'd have to find people locally to host, build, relationships with local organizations and businesses -- it's an incredibly delicate and gut-wrenching process -- I simply couldn't go through it again and again unless some big huge company paid me a lot of money to oversee the local people they would also pay a lot of money to do the actual work of building a local virtual community from within a physical one."

If everyone online were like Horn or were Rheingoldian -- smart, warm, ethical, community-minded -- then the Net might actually have become the connective environment that Rheingold and others articulated so powerfully. But most people are not, of course. Flamers and corporations and lawyers have thundered online, along with e-traders, role-players, spammers, governments -- everyone! -- with a long list of other agendas, from improved market share to con games.

As Rheingold, one of the founders of Wired Magazine's late Web site Hotwired, points out, it was briefly different, at least in some places. In the intro to Virtual Community, first published in l993 and revised and reissued this year by MIT Press, Rheingold describes how ever since the summer of l985 he has plugged his PC into his phone and logged onto the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) to carry on public conversations and exchange e-mail.

It was, initally, a revelation. "...Finding the WELL was like discovering a cozy little world that had been flourishing without me, hidden within the walls of my house; an entire cast of characters welcomed me to the troupe with great merriment as soon as I found the secret door. Like others who fell into the WELL, I soon discovered that I was audience, performer and scriptwriter, along with my companions, in an ongoing improvisation."

There is something touching about those words, the sense that Rheingold is describing something already from another age, something of enormous promise but, still, a dream unfulfilled. All over the network, individual grassroot community systems have been overshadowed, marginalized, or driven out of existence by the very technology they helped to grow.

Why? In new reflections added to his book, Rheingold notes the enormous damage done by hostile participants of virtual communities who seek attention through aggression and who take up an enormous, disproportionate amount of time and energy online, even when they comprise a distinct minority. In fact, this pattern has probably destroyed more virtual communities than any other single factor.

Internet researcher Elizabeth Reid of Australia, in an essay reprinted in Communities in Cyberspace (edited by Mark Smith and Peter Kollock), describes how some early BBS's -- she cites "CommuniTree" -- were intended to be free, open forums for intellectual and spiritual discussions. This community, she writes in a selection called "Hierarchy and Power," collapsed under an onslaught of messages, often obscene and hostile, posted by the first generation of adolescents with personal computers and modems. (Understandably, there is something about adolescence that doesn't care for free, intellectual and spiritual discussions.)

In Cybersociety 2.0, a collection of essays about digital communication and community (edited by Steven G. Jones), Reid and co-researcher Beth Kolko write in "Dissolution and Fragmentation: Problems in On-Line Communities" that it's the ease of individual expression -- the "singularity of on-line personae," that can be the greatest threat to online communities. "It has been all too easy for virtual communities to encourage multiplicity but not coherence," write Reid and Kolko, "with each individual persona having a limited, undiversified social range. This cultural schizophrenia makes the virtual community brittle and ill equipped to evolve with the demands of circumstance."

Other Net students and scholars have also found what many members of virtual communities know: efforts to control discussion, mediate disputes, or reach broad consensus often fail, breeding alienation, paranoia, anger and more controversy as online personae and positions harden in the abscence of moderating social forces like face-to-face, or even voice-to-voice contact.

So this more or less remained the plight of the virtual community as one after another struggles to maintain order against a culture that still, mysteriously, engenders endemic alienation, hostility and narcissism, even among intelligent and articulate people.

Besides, the world shifted into Net overdrive after the publication of The Virtual Community, the author notes ruefully in the new edition. In the 1980s, when he and a handful of journalists began writing about online society and culture, only a few technophiles, scholars and researchers grasped the point-to-point, many-to-many-possibilities of digital architecture.

At the time, the total online population numbered in the tens of thousands. Less than a decade later, "the Internet has made it possible for hundreds of millions of people to transform civilization's most powerful institutions -- commerce, politics, science, scholarship, entertainment, education, health care," Rheingold writes. "Our world has changed profoundly and swiftly, in large part because of the phenomenon this book described -- the sudden emergence of the Internet as a new communication medium."

Yet the change, he candidly acknowledges, was not the stirring revolution and reinvention of community he hoped for and expected.

Next, Part Two: What is a "Virtual Community," anyway? Note: You can purchase Virtual Communities at ThinkGeek.

Chromatic, indefatigueable, has come up with another review. This time through the door he's gathered his reactions to Perl for System Administrators, one of the growing list of titles to help bridge the gap between SysAdmin and programmer.

Perl for System Administrators author David N. Blank-Edelman pages 430 publisher O'Reilly and Associates rating 9 reviewer chromatic ISBN 1-56592-609-9 summary A royal buffet of ideas to stimulate system administrators

The Scoop Despite being what some call 'the purest distillation of Unix thought,' Perl has earned a place on many Windows and Macintosh machines for its power and flexibility. Unix administrators have developed and honed small scripts for decades, but their brethren elsewhere have had no such luck until recently. Enter ActiveState, IndigoPerl, and MacPerl, to provide the tools, this book the knowledge. Floating subtle suggestions between pragmatic tips and tricks, David N. Blank-Edelman weaves nets, strong and sophisticated, for the perpetual battle against encroaching entropy. What's to Like? Anything that saves a beleagured sysadmin time is very good. Any one chapter read in isolation will yield at least one new idiom, if not many ideas on improving efficiency and accuracy. The central theme of the book ('make things better by using a database to store all of your information') is an excellent and timely idea. It's not essential to the presented examples, but has the potential to simplify your work dramatically. Besides maintaining a central repository for usernames, accounts, network information, and passwords, it allows automated configuration file building. Imagine never hand-editing DNS records again, or having to enter user data only once.

The sample code is clean and understandable, taking full advantage of many CPAN modules. When competing modules exist, Blank-Edelman demonstrates each, with an eye to advantages and disadvantages. This pragmatic analysis governs other discussions, especially concerning cross-platform and Pure Perl versus glue-code isses. Realizing that most networks combine many different clients (Unix flavors, the Windows cousins, and Apple machines), the author provides solutions to the same problem on all applicable platforms.

Though pushing the envelope on certain technologies (at the expense of others), the Appendices provide adequate introduction. The LDAP and SNMP sections stand out in particular. The author provides enough background, whether on Active Directory, TCP packet construction, or e-mail headers, to flesh out his examples. A table at the end of each chapter lists all modules covered, authors and versions, CPAN ids, and alternate download sites. In addition, the book provides many links to further information on techniques, RFCs, references, and vendors. If you're left wondering where to go to learn more, it will be your own fault.

What's to Consider? The book assumes a working knowledge of Perl. Anyone who's made it through 'Learning Perl' or 'Elements of Programming With Perl' should have no trouble -- complex idioms and module peculiarities receive sufficient explanation. Beware, though, that the sample code does not enable warnings or run under strict mode. (Production programs need error checking, which, the author explains, could easily double the size of his examples.)

Not all sections apply to all OSs. The Macintosh, for example, has no concept of multiple users (OS X not being covered). These differences could hinder the text, but are clearly marked and can be skipped with no ill effects. Besides, few networks are homogenous, and astute readers will learn more about the system in general from the similarities and differences.

Some common administrative tasks have been left out in favor of emerging or more complex technologies. There's nothing on managing printers or backups. A sysadmin of reasonable experience who makes it through the book will have gained a proper mental framework to tackle other tasks, though.

The Summary Perl for System Administrators is packed with useful tips, making the most of Perl's ecological niche. Whether you're a junior administrator venturing out into the wild world for the first time, or a seasoned BOFH, you'll find something to digest here. You might even get some free time out of it. Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Filesystems
3. User Accounts
4. User Activity
5. TCP/IP Name Services
6. Directory Services
7. SQL Database Administration
8. Electronic Mail
9. Log Files
10. Security and Network Monitoring

1. The Five-Minute RCS Tutorial
2. The Ten-Minute LDAP Tutorial
3. The Eight-Minute XML Tutorial
4. The Fifteen-Minute SQL Tutorial
5. The Twenty-Minute SNMP Tutorial

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Chromatic, indefatigueable, has come up with another review. This time through the door he's gathered his reactions to Perl for System Administrators, one of the growing list of titles to help bridge the gap between SysAdmin and programmer.

Perl for System Administrators author David N. Blank-Edelman pages 430 publisher O'Reilly and Associates rating 9 reviewer chromatic ISBN 1-56592-609-9 summary A royal buffet of ideas to stimulate system administrators

The Scoop Despite being what some call 'the purest distillation of Unix thought,' Perl has earned a place on many Windows and Macintosh machines for its power and flexibility. Unix administrators have developed and honed small scripts for decades, but their brethren elsewhere have had no such luck until recently. Enter ActiveState, IndigoPerl, and MacPerl, to provide the tools, this book the knowledge. Floating subtle suggestions between pragmatic tips and tricks, David N. Blank-Edelman weaves nets, strong and sophisticated, for the perpetual battle against encroaching entropy. What's to Like? Anything that saves a beleagured sysadmin time is very good. Any one chapter read in isolation will yield at least one new idiom, if not many ideas on improving efficiency and accuracy. The central theme of the book ('make things better by using a database to store all of your information') is an excellent and timely idea. It's not essential to the presented examples, but has the potential to simplify your work dramatically. Besides maintaining a central repository for usernames, accounts, network information, and passwords, it allows automated configuration file building. Imagine never hand-editing DNS records again, or having to enter user data only once.

The sample code is clean and understandable, taking full advantage of many CPAN modules. When competing modules exist, Blank-Edelman demonstrates each, with an eye to advantages and disadvantages. This pragmatic analysis governs other discussions, especially concerning cross-platform and Pure Perl versus glue-code isses. Realizing that most networks combine many different clients (Unix flavors, the Windows cousins, and Apple machines), the author provides solutions to the same problem on all applicable platforms.

Though pushing the envelope on certain technologies (at the expense of others), the Appendices provide adequate introduction. The LDAP and SNMP sections stand out in particular. The author provides enough background, whether on Active Directory, TCP packet construction, or e-mail headers, to flesh out his examples. A table at the end of each chapter lists all modules covered, authors and versions, CPAN ids, and alternate download sites. In addition, the book provides many links to further information on techniques, RFCs, references, and vendors. If you're left wondering where to go to learn more, it will be your own fault.

What's to Consider? The book assumes a working knowledge of Perl. Anyone who's made it through 'Learning Perl' or 'Elements of Programming With Perl' should have no trouble -- complex idioms and module peculiarities receive sufficient explanation. Beware, though, that the sample code does not enable warnings or run under strict mode. (Production programs need error checking, which, the author explains, could easily double the size of his examples.)

Not all sections apply to all OSs. The Macintosh, for example, has no concept of multiple users (OS X not being covered). These differences could hinder the text, but are clearly marked and can be skipped with no ill effects. Besides, few networks are homogenous, and astute readers will learn more about the system in general from the similarities and differences.

Some common administrative tasks have been left out in favor of emerging or more complex technologies. There's nothing on managing printers or backups. A sysadmin of reasonable experience who makes it through the book will have gained a proper mental framework to tackle other tasks, though.

The Summary Perl for System Administrators is packed with useful tips, making the most of Perl's ecological niche. Whether you're a junior administrator venturing out into the wild world for the first time, or a seasoned BOFH, you'll find something to digest here. You might even get some free time out of it. Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Filesystems
3. User Accounts
4. User Activity
5. TCP/IP Name Services
6. Directory Services
7. SQL Database Administration
8. Electronic Mail
9. Log Files
10. Security and Network Monitoring

1. The Five-Minute RCS Tutorial
2. The Ten-Minute LDAP Tutorial
3. The Eight-Minute XML Tutorial
4. The Fifteen-Minute SQL Tutorial
5. The Twenty-Minute SNMP Tutorial

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.