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by Peter H. Salus
Peter H. Salus is a member of ACM, the Early English Text Society, the
Trollope Society, and is a life member of the American Oriental
Society. He has held no regular job in the past lustrum. He owns
neither a dog nor a cat.
One of the (funny) problems that arises is what to do with the "losers." I left one in a plane in August, only to have a flight attendant run after me with it. You can toss magazines and newspapers, but not hard-bound computer books, I guess. My "top ten" list is at the end of this column; this year it contains several notes concerning items not on the list. Stringing Along John Vacca's Cabling Handbook is an outstanding piece of work. This is a really comprehensive guide to telecomms and LAN cabling, from Category 5 twisted pair to fiber. Standards, planning, cost-justification, and installation/implementation are all handled in an exemplary fashion. Only one quibble: Vacca does not discuss jacks. The RJ-11 [phone plug], RJ-14 [2-phone modular plug], RJ-22 [handset plug], RJ-45 [8-pin data transmission], RJ-48X [smart jack], etc., are not here. You can't connect those cables without jacks. AIX I admit that the last time I used AIX was nearly a decade ago. But Miller has produced a small volume that reads well and appears to combine a tutorial with reference material for those working on RS/6000s. Miller's discussions of migration problems are quite illuminating. C++ Vandevoorde has produced the perfect adjunct to Stroustrup's third edition of The C++ Programming Language: a full explanation and discussion of Stroustrup's exercises, with appropriate cross-references to Stroustrup. Fine work. Perl Perl books seem to multiply nearly as fast as Java books did last year. The Perl Cookbook tricked me, because it has a bighorn sheep on its cover: after camelidae on the other covers, I didn't expect this. The organization of the Cookbook is quite fascinating. It is divided into chapters ("Strings," "Arrays," "File Contents," "Directories," etc.) and each of these contains entries of the form: Problem, Solution, Discussion, and See Also. Really sharp. I found a lot of information that I hadn't been aware of; the organization is solid; the explanations are very fine. Christiansen and Torkington have performed a great service. Now, about that sheep . . . Reappearances The camelidae are still on the cover of the Perl 5 Pocket Reference. This second edition is revised for Perl 5.005 and is still the perfect carry-around or desktop item. Vromans has kept up the excellent job he began two years ago. The second edition of HTML brought us up to HTML 3.2; the new third edition takes us to HTML 4.0. Musciano and Kennedy's work has also gained over 50 pages in the past year. Their exposition and explanations are excellent. There is a tearout reference card that's really useful (I replaced my grimy and tattered one from 3.2 two weeks ago). If you use Perl 5, Vromans is a must; if you use HTML, go to Musciano and Kennedy. I'm not sure what to write about Rich Stevens's revision of UNIX Network Programming. It's really excellent, but I'm certain to say this about his next work, too. Like so many things, it has waxed since its first appearance in 1990. Then it was in one volume of under 800 pages. Volume 2 alone is now 560 pages. And it is concerned with the single topic of interprocess communication. As nearly all programs involve IPCs, this is by no means inappropriate. Moreover, Stevens really covers the map in terms of different UNIXes. A great example of this is on pp. 460-461, where there are graphs for bandwidth of various types of message passing for Solaris and for Digital UNIX on facing pages. I wonder what Stevens will turn to next. Perhaps a revision of the TCP/IP volumes for IPv6? Each year the publishers make it harder for me to put together a list of "best books." They do this by publishing more and more: but they don't expand my reading speed, nor the constraints of the clock and calendar. In 1995 I received 720 books for review; the next year it just topped 1000; last year it was nearly 1300. I'm certain that 1998 will have brought yet more. I read about 100 of these a year. I actually write something about two-thirds of them. The ones below are good books on a variety of topics (one publisher sent me the nth edition of a calculus textbook; I resisted reading it). The Bookworm's Top Ten for 1998 (not ranked in order) 1. Donald A. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Vols. 1, 2, 3. (Addison Wesley Longman) 2. P. Ferguson & G. Huston, Quality of Service (Wiley) 3. Berry Kercheval, TCP/IP over ATM (Prentice-Hall) 4. Richard Stevens, UNIX Network Programming, vol. 2 (Prentice-Hall) 5. Ralph Griswold, et al., Graphics Programming in Icon (Peer-to-Peer) 6. B. Schneier & D. Banisar, eds., Electronic Privacy Papers (Wiley) 7. Bassam Halabi, Internet Routing Architectures (New Riders) 8. Charles Perkins, Mobile IP (Addison Wesley Longman) 9. V. Brown & C. Nandor, McPerl (Prime Time Freeware) 10. John Blair, Samba (SSC) And two further notes: for real programmers, I think that Harrison & McLennan, Effective Tcl/Tk Programming (Addison Wesley Longman) and Johnson & Troan, Linux Application Development (Addison Wesley Longman) are truly outstanding; and (in self-interest) you might want to look at the four volumes of P.H. Salus, ed., Handbook of Programming Languages (Macmillan). The ASCII Corporation has published a Japanese translation of Lions' Commentary and Code. I am told that Shinichi Iwamoto has done a superb, painstaking job in the translation. Happy Holidays! Books reviewed in this column:
John Vacca
Bonnie Miller
David Vandevoorde
Tom Christiansen & Nathan Torkington
Johan Vromans
Chuck Musciano & Bill Kennedy
W. Richard Stevens
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First posted: 1st February 1999 jr Last changed: 1st February 1999 jr |
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