The Cathedral & the Bazaar, by Eric S. Raymond

When it comes down to it, this book is a classic, and how does one review a classic? Well, I'm going to try.

Eric S. Raymond is described as "An Accidental Revolutionary," as he took a leading role in analyzing and documenting the changes and growth of the Open Source (or "Free Software") movement that he, as a programmer, is part of. He's one of the "famous" people in hacker culture.

This collection of essays by ESR gives the reader a glimpse into the world of Hackers (good programmers, not to be confused with people who break into computers, those are "crackers"). He goes into how and why it works, what the pros and cons of open source vs. closed source software is, and predicts where things will go in the future.

Because this book is separated into individual essays that he has written, it's easy just to go through and read what you want. But to any person who is playing a part, or who wants to play a part in the hacker world, the whole thing is a must read. It gives you a lot to think about when it comes to the open source world, and builds up a great respect and understanding of the people pioneering it.

Linux For Non-Geeks, by Rickford Grant

I was interested in this book because I know a lot of people who are scared of Linux, and thought a book like this would be great for them. It didn't disappoint!

But before I go any futher with this review, you have to understand that the Linux world is full of different distrubutions, window managers, applications, and other options, of which no book could completely cover. So this book chose to focus in on a small, user-friendly portion of the linux world. This is a book that leads the user through the steps of installing and using Fedora Linux (sponsored by Red Hat) and using Gnome.

To put this book through a decent review, I decided to install Fedora Core 2 on my laptop. The book comes with 2 Fedora Core 1 cds, but I wanted to be more up to date, and I wanted the kernel source (I am a geek afterall), my decision to use FC2 isntead doesn't matter much.

I was very pleased with how the author went through they basic non-technical side of linux, then every single step of the Fedora install (even dual booting with Windows!). He takes the user through the basic applications in Gnome, described several different methods of installing software. He introduces the user to the command line in a very non-scary way, and shows them that it's not as difficult as it might seem. He gets into installing fonts, burning cds, using your digital camera, image editing, listening to streaming media, printing, and all sorts of things that even impressed me about linux. The author also leads the reader through "projects" which commonly involve actually downloading a program and installing it, so the reader can get used to the process.

Looking at this from a Non-Geek standpoint, I think I'd be happy with this. The only trouble is that it's quite specific to Fedora and Gnome, but to someone who has never used a computer, or only used basic tools in Windows, I don't think this would be a problem, especially since no book could possibly cover everything, and big books scare people off.

Looking at this from a Geek standpoint, wow, Linux has come so far! I've been using Linux for a few years, each year brings new advances, I was excited when I could finally use my digital camera in Linux. A book like this puts all these great acheivements into one place, and really furthers my belief that it's ready for " J. Random End-User Aunt Tillie."

Succeeding with Open Source, by Bernard Golden

I'd heard people talk about "maturity" of Open Source projects, but I was completely unaware that someone had written a formal method of assigning this maturity (OSMM, Open Source Maturity Model) until I picked up this book.

The author aims this book at the company or technical administrator who wants to be able to evaluate the Open Source software that's out there, and compare it to the commercial options. The first 60 pages or so pages go through the typical "who, what, when, where, why, how?" questions involving open source. It dispells many myths about open source software. Then it goes through implementing the OSMM on a real project (they used JBoss as their example), and through this evaluation the reader was shown steps taken in each segment of the evaluation process, a very good way of teaching to people like myself who learn by example!

There were two things about this book that made it especially appealing to me:

1. Real world examples of open source being used in successful companies. I believe the blurbs about real world successes are hugely important, and it was interesting for me to read, since I never really looked into companies who had made the leap to open source.

2. Notes. Beside many of the paragraphs there would be a short note about what the paragraph is about. So say you don't have time to read the whole chapter, but you want to get the jist of it, you can just quickly read down the page's notes, if something particularly interests you, you can read that whole paragraph. In a book such as this, I think this option for reading the book is a great asset.

The book is only a little over 200 pages, but it's quite thorough. I'd definately recommend it to people thinking of taking their company down the open source track.

Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law, by Lawrence Rosen

First of all, I'm not a lawyer, and my open source licensing is not something I'm intimately versed in, so with this review I take for granted that the information in this book is correct. As the book has been used in a reference in other books, and the author is well known, I don't think this is a bad assumption.

When I recieved this book I was excited, finally I could read a book which would help my brain really understand all the licenses! I sat down to read it, and was impressed with how the author took the popular licenses and broke them down into more easily understandable. I mean, they *are* fairly straight forward, but the author gets into what they actually mean in legal terms, and that's interesting.

Unfortunately it turns out that reading about specifics of Open Source law is not terribly interesting to me (I guess I'll never be a lawer) After the few introduction chapters I had to stop reading straight through it and skip around and skim the parts that interested me.

In my case this is not such a good book for snuggling up with in front of the fire (some computer books are), but it is a fabulous reference book, written for us mere mortals.