Linux Cookbook by Carla Schroder

First off, this book focuses on RPM-based and Debian-based distributions. This doesnt, by any means, make it useless for those that don't, but some of the "recipes" are specific to either of these.

I am not even sure where to begin with my praise of this book, it's got over a dozen sticky notes marking key sections that I find useful. I guess I can start by saying that the author is deeply involved with doing system administration via the command line, which is fantastic news for me! There are plenty of decent GUI tools out there, but when x dies and you're stuck at a command line, using them isn't an option. I feel that if you don't have the knowledge to fix things yourself, at least have a book by your side that offers you some tips, and that is what this book is for. And some people just prefer doing administration via the command line all the time, myself included.

The time I most often pull out this book, however, is not when I run into a problem, but when I'm setting up a new system. I don't reinstall often, but when I do there are little things that I often forget how to do, since I do them so infrequently. Things like setting up ssh keys, setting up users and groups, setting up NTP, setting up new fstab

I also found this book useful when I wanted a quick and clean explaination of different filesystems and more information about command line options for CD burning. Also I got some good ideas for backups and local file transfer methods from the chapter on Backup and Recover.

Best of all, this book contains a great chapter on kernels. So many books and online how-tos I've seen give you the steps of compiling a kernel, but don't explain what is going on. This always left me feeling like I had no clue what I was doing, and if there was an error I'd have no idea where I'd begin fixing it, since I didn't really know what "make mrproper," for instance, means (side note, she even quickly explains "according to Linux lore" the reasoning behind the name Mr. Proper, a delightful bit of trivia). Now that I've read this chapter on kernels I'm much more comfortable recompiling and customizing my own. She also talks about patching a kernel, which is something I had trouble with for a while, since so much documentation I found and people I asked said "just use patch" which meant nothing to me.

An excellent book for the linux user who wants to move away from the GUI and learn more about core, command-line administration.

Perl Core Language: Little Black Book by Steven Steven Holzner, Keith Weiskamp (Editor)

I've been using Perl for over 3 years now, but am always interested in Perl reference books that can make learning more easier. I wasn't sure how much I'd like this book, since most of my perl books are the standard blue O'Reilly ones, but I was plesantly surprised.

This is probably the most well laid out perl reference book I've ever used, and at just under 500 pages "Little" might be a bit inaccurate of a title (there is a bigger one Perl Black Book which, at 1296 pages, does make this book look small). This book is just packed with useful information. When I first got it I didn't have a lot of time to dive into it, so on evenings when I was feeling adventurous I'd just open to a random page and see what I could learn. It was always interesting!

The book starts out with some Perl basics, but I wouldn't recommend this to someone new to programming, it's aimed at intermediate to advanced Perl programmers. The section on Regular Expressions is excellent, I've learned so much from it. The book even touches upon Perl CGI, modules, and using Perl with XML.

Great all-around reference book, it's now sitting on the "most used" shelf next to my computer.

PHP 5: Power Programming By Andi Gutmans, Stig Saether Bakken, Derick Rethans

I first started using PHP with it was at version 3, used it through version 4 and just recently began using version 4, which is when I got this book, my first PHP reference book.

Although this book touches upon PHP basics, the explaination of methods used are not for programming beginners. A background in other programming languages if very helpful, I wouldn't recommend this book to beginners looking for a place to start.

For intermediate to advanced users, however, this book is a vital tool in secure PHP programming. Security is a serious issue with PHP, and the authors work to cover all known vulnerabilities. The section about image uploads using PHP was 5 pages long, simply to cover and provide solutions for several security problems the PHP programmer should be aware of. The section to "make scripts safe" was helpful in the same way, getting further into authenticating user input before accepting it.

I also have the sections about using PHP with XML and database interaction bookmarked, as they are both things I use PHP with. Chapter 9: Mainstreem Extensions was very good, talking about accessing files and streams, regular expressions, date handling and graphics manipulation.

A very good book for PHP developers looking for secuire development solutions. Bravo!

Programming the Perl DBI, by Alligator Descartes, Tim Bunce, Linda Mui (Editor)

I started using Perl with databases a couple years back with a small project. I was discouraged to realize that the only documentation I could find was in the perl docs themselves, which were as dry as most docs, and sometimes as hard to read as your average man page. I knew this book existed, but held off getting a copy and struggled through beginning to learn Perl DBI.

When I did aquire this book, I knew the basics. I was able to flip through the first bits of the book and was pleased with how it was laid out. It had all the wealth of information that the perl docs had, but was less confusing to me. And it was a book I could hold and scribble notes in, something I was unable to do with the perl docs (I don't have the resources to print them all out, afterall.

I would recommend that the reader has a fairly solid base in Perl before picking up this book, as they don't spend time on the Perl Basics (I suggest O'Reilly's Programming Perl and Learning Perl for this). But other than that, as far as I'm concerned it's the best Perl DBI book on the market.

The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks and Hacks, By Rachel Andrew

I've been writing websites in HTML since 1998, and using basic CSS since I discovered it's usefulness in late 1999. Until I received this book I had learned everything I knew about CSS from internet resources. As CSS grew in popularity I realized that a book that was complete and carefully laid out would be a great help to me. This book fit that need.

The first chapter answers "Why CSS?" The second reviewed the basics of CSS, which I was quite familiar with, but which would be a great help to someone who is familiar with HTML and just getting into CSS.

The rest of the book was helpful to me, as an experienced web developer. It gets into images, navigation, the proper use of tables, forms and layout using divs. When making my most recent site I had this book at my side the whole time.

Best of all, there are notes throughout the book detailing what CSS techniques work with different web browsers on different OSes (Windows, Mac and Linux), and how to get your site to work in all of them. The book even devotes an entire chapter to this.

This book also has plenty of relavent, real-world exampes that I found very helpful.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants an up to date (published in Nov/Dec of 2004) reference for CSS.

Unix Shells By Example, by Ellie Quigley

If want to learn about shells and you learn by example, like I do, this book is essential.

The first 6 chapters (nearly 200 pages) goes over the basics of all shells; what they are, what they do, what programs are most used to manipulate data in them. There are whole chapters devoted to grep, sed and awk, and the author doesn't skimp on details. You will be a virtual grep/sed/awk guru by the time you learn everything in these chapters.

Chapters 7-15 introduce and get you into scripting of each major shell: Bourne shell, C and TC Shells, Korn shell, and Bash (bash is the standard shell in most linux distributions). It then spends a chapter on general debugging shell scripting problems.

The last chapters touch upon system administrating via the shell (rather than using gui tools). Again taught by example so it's very clear to the reader.

I learned more about bash (my shell of choice) from this guide than any other that I've read, and not for lack of trying, I've read several bash guides. I was happy to see that examples given were explained line-by-line so you don't lose track of what is happening in each example. I was delighted by the useful appendices covering useful commands and giving side by side shell comparisons.

This is my favorite shell book to date.

Spam Kings By Brian McWilliams

The first thing that struck me about this book is that it takes years of emails, newsgroups, and chat sessions and turns it into a story. To a long-time internet addict such as myself, seeing such a thing is rather surreal. But it's something I should get used to, as the world of the web is interacting more and more with the "real world" as this book clearly shows.

Back to the point. I had sometimes idly wondered about spammers. Who they are, how successful they could really be. This book explores that by telling the story of a few major and minor spammers, as well as the anti-spammers that work so hard to defend normal people from their aggressive advertising tactics. I'd known about MAPS, RBL, Samhaus, and Spews, but I never knew much about the specifics of how and why they were created until I read this -- this book even explores how they operate!

Best of all, this is a story about spam. All true, not dull (often dramatic!), and very informative. I suspect this is just one person's perspective of the spam world, and the people mentioned in the book are just a portion of the spammers and spam fighters working everyday (no doubt some were miffed by not being included). But the book is effective in educating people like myself in the spam underground. It also makes me more informed when I hear new news about spammers being prosecuted or new spam laws being enacted.

The only problem with this book is an unavoidable one. Because the spam wars are ongoing, the story is never over. I can see a "Spam Kings 2" being released in 5 years to catch up on what's happened. To keep folloing the spammers and spam fighters in their battles.

The Book of IRC, by Alex Charalabidis

I am an IRC junkie, so when I saw this book I just had to pick it up.

This book was written in 1999, and it shows. There are outdated server lists and statistics. The attacks described are mostly outdated (who "nukes" "jupes" and "floods" these days? This is only interesting from a historical perspective). The IRC clients described are now of outdated versions, and some of the now popular clients (xchat, irssi) aren't mentioned. The book claims to have a companion website with updates, which I was excited to see, but the site's domain (bookofirc.com) seems to have expired and been snatched up by an unrelated website.

All that aside, IRC is a pretty basic protocol, and most things about it haven't changed a whole lot, so this book is quite useful. It can walk someone new to IRC through the basics, describing what everything in the IRC world is, as well as providing experts with some interesting tidbits. The whole chapters on DCC and CTCP were especially informative to me. Appendix B "Terminology" was great for providing some of the "language" one might encounter in channels with tech/irc-saavy occupants.

The book even touches upon "IRC Netiquette" when it comes to what is acceptable or not behavior-wise in IRC (I think a whole chapter should have been devoted to this, this seems to be a major stumbling block to new IRCers). The fun way in which the author presents this book makes it very amusing to read, not at all like normal techical books (this is something I enjoy about all No Starch Press books).

In summary, this is a very informative book, even for someone like me who has been using IRC for over 6 years, and now run my own server. But it needs a second edition and/or the companion website revived.

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.

IRC Hacks, by Paul Mutton

I am an IRC Junkie, so when I heard about this book being released I was pretty excited, I could always learn new things about IRC!

The book starts off with very simple basics of using IRC, including connecting to a server, registering with the servs. Then it goes into "raw" IRC, which was interesting to me because I really don't know enough about it, and it went into how to make a "basic" irc bot without an actual client, way cool!

Although I tend to use Perl for my IRC scripting, I was pleased to see that the author covered all sorts of IRC clients and scripting, including Perl, Java, TCL and C. The book is a valuble resource to IRC bot writers, as it gives you all sorts of ideas for new bots, and new features, like blogging from IRC, or making the chat client irssi talk aloud, I didn't think about these! It also introduces programs like Bitlbee (which has a special place in my heart because of the documentation I wrote for it) which allows you to use instant messangers in your IRC client.

This book is definately of most value to bot writers, but also for just about anyone interested in exploring the possiblities in the world of IRC. Another great O'Reilly Hacks book, I love this series!

How Linux Works, by Brian Ward

I didn't know about this book until it showed up on my doorstep courtesy of the great folks at the O'Reilly LUG program. But I was interested in it from the moment I opened the box.

It's a basic guide to general Linux. It's new, fun and the author does a nice job of covering the basics. He doesn't dwell on any one distro, but covers all sorts of commands, issues, and questions that a lot of people who are switching to linux might have. He goes over basics of Networking, Printing, and touches upon more advanced options in linux. I was especially pleased with the referencing he did, if you want to know more about a subject he recommends a book to check out! Very nice.

I sat down on a Saturday afternoon, and by Sunday night I had read my way through it. Even as an experienced Linux user I was interested and picked up a few tidbits from this book that I didn't know about. Although it's aimed at the new user, it was fun and interesting for me to read.

I'd definately recommend this book to people wanting to get into the Linux world.

Hackers & Painters, by Paul Graham

I saw this book on O'Reilly's site and was quite interested, so I ordered it. The quick review? It was a very interesting read, and at least half of it is understandable to people with all varieties of computer knowledge, as Graham is very good at explaining things simply.

It's basically a collection of essays that Graham (a Lisp programmer, an artist, and one of the parners who started Viaweb, which produced a web-based online store creator which was bought by Yahoo! and to this day runs the Yahoo Store). The essays all flow very nicely with each other, so there are few parts in the book that feel random. And definately go from easy to understand to everyone, into more complex as the book goes on.

He explains a lot of typical "Hacker" (good programmers, not people who illegally break into computers!) culture, and compares it to other art forms. He starts out by explaining nerds, and why they are so unpopular in school, a fun chapter that makes me feel a bit better about being such a nerd in High School. The book goes into internet startups, programming languages, and it's only in the last three or four chapters that he gets into specifics which may lose the ordinary reader. Still, from the chapters preceding those you get a great snapshot of the Hacker world.

I was very pleased with how he used his artist background to draw historical and artistic parallels between the art world and the computer world. And these strong associations really made this book different from others that I've read hacker culture.

This book was definately worth my time.

Darwin's Radio, by Greg Bear

The last time I read a Greg Bear book I was very pleased. I expected the same from this book, but was surprised at how different it was from the "space books" of his that I had read.

It tells of a newly awakened "virus" which begins to strike the human race, and the scientists, politicians, and companies involved with dealing with this new outbreak. I can't say much more without spoiling things, but it delves into archeology, biochemistry, and Bear tries hard to get his science straight (which can be a bit boring at times) for when he wrote this book.

Very interesting, and toward the end I had trouble putting it down each night. The ending was a bit funny, but a very amusing view of how things might be sometime. Another great Greg Bear story, very innovative.

Call to Arms (The Damned, book 1), by Alan Dean Foster

I wasn't sure what to expect when a friend of mine loaned me this coverless hard back. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book.

It's about races of aliens who are battling for the future of the universe, and in this effort they travel the universe seeking out new planets and systems containing intelligent life. And inevitably they come upon earth, full of strangely ruthless creatures who are constantly at war, and deemed only moderately civilized. But they sure make magnificent fighters.

The story primarily follows a man who first encounters these aliens, and his realizations (along with my own) about what a violent species humans are. And I was quite interested in the aliens, they were quite "approachable" in my mind, which goes against what so many alien movies tell us. I liked that.

Good book, I'll need to find the rest in the trilogy.