by Peter H. Salus
<peter@pedant.com>

Kidnapped by gypsies at an early age, Peter H. Salus grew up in the mountain fastnesses of Ruritania. Escaping at age 18, he became an international swindler until ­ at 25 ­ he retreated to a lamasery. He has no qualifications whatsoever.

Boston can be very cold in the winter. The result is that I've looked at many more books than usual, and the variety of topics has gone up. Some of the books are very, very good.

Confidentiality

Diffie and Landau have produced one of the best books I've gotten to review. It concerns something of great importance: privacy. Moreover, it is tightly and well written. It pains me to have to point out that we're all enmeshed in the politics of wiretapping and encryption. This book gets to the core of the debate concerning national security and civil liberties. There is a discussion of the functions of privacy and the dangers to society in its loss. A tip of my hat.

Although Stein's book is also on security, it is nearly at the opposite scale from Diffie and Landau. It really is a "step-by-step reference guide." If you're running a Web site and you want to make it relatively safe, this is the book for you.

Fortran

Fortran was the first high-level programming language, issued by IBM towards the end of 1957. It was also the first programming language standardized by ANSI. And it was the first programming language I ever saw (in May 1958). We have travelled from Fortran 66 through

Fortran 77 to Fortran 90 and now to Fortran 95. Adams and her fellow authors have done a super job in putting together this complete resources and reference to ISO/ANSI Fortran.

System Administration

There were a lot of works of interest to sysadmins this past month or two. A few were new editions, and I've mentioned them at the end of this column. Mohr's book is far too padded to be useful. For example, I don't think that "Users and System Administrators" really need 90 pages on shells, AWK, sed, and vi. But then, I might well be wrong: this isn't a book for sysadmins at all, it's a "Dummies" book in disguise, one you can carry in an airport without being embarrassed.

Poniatowski's HP-UX sysadmin book is at the opposite pole. It really dives into the nitty-gritty of HP-UX administration. Moreover, the CDs are for Win95, WinNT, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, and MP-RAS (NCR). A useful book.

Networking

Carlson has done for PPP what Comer and Stevens have done for TCP/IP: elucidate a protocol (or suite of protocols) in such a way that the intelligent user can make sense of the material. This is a handy and useful book that made me realize just how much we all owe to the guys who participate in the IETF.

Stallings has turned out another of his lucid treatments of design principles and such complexities as congestion control in both TCP and ATM. Stallings's brief "tutorial" in graph theory is exceptionally fine.

On a "smaller" scale, there are Intranets. In December I mentioned Dasan & Odorica's book (favorably). But now I've read Gonzalez's opus, and it puts all the others in the shade. The author has succeeded in combining the technical, the financial, and the business aspects of networking into a relatively seamless narrative. Occasionally, I hit something irritating (at the end of section 1, Gonzalez seems to equate the Web and the Internet, for example); but who could remain irked when turning the page and encountering "Chapter 11: This is not Bill Gates' Playground"? This is a very fine book.

At the other end of the scale is Dodd's Essential Guide. It's not. The nine (!) pages on telephony seem to concern themselves with PBXs alone. The discussions of T1/E1, etc., are totally insufficient, not even mentioning the ways that supervision is the root of much of the difference. (It's also interesting to note that although Dodd mentions that UUNET is "owned by WorldCom," she is silent on the facts that WorldCom has been in the process of acquiring MCI and that GTE has acquired BBN.)

Second Helpings

There are several books that have come out in new versions or new editions to which attention should be directed. Stevens's Network Programming was good nearly a decade ago. It seems to have waxed so that there will now be (at least) two volumes. Volume 1, which covers sockets and xti, is really a new work, not merely an updating.

Equally good is the second edition of Arnold and Gosling. It's a hundred pages longer than the 1996 version. Among the nearly 200 Java books I've seen, this is the very best.

Foster-Johnson's new edition is one of the first to cover Tcl/Tk 8.0 in any detail. I found the book too full of screen dumps, but the CD has good stuff on it.

Winsor's book on Solaris administration has been revised. If you're running Solaris, you want to get it. However, if you're involved with administration at all, you know the second edition of Nemeth, Snyder, and Hein. It had a CD-ROM packed into it. You can now "update" your old CD by purchasing their "Tools" CD. It's got lots of really good stuff on it.

There's also a new edition of Craig Hunt's TCP/IP book. Another good 'un.

Finally, there's the volume I'm not certain how to classify. Sobell's Hands-On Linux combines his earlier Linux book with Caldera's release and with Netscape. I think it's more new packaging than new information. I looked at OpenLinux Lite and went back to RedHat.

Books reviewed in this column:

L.D. Stein
Web Security
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998. ISBN 0-201-63489-9. Pp. 436.

Jeanne C. Adams, et al.
Fortran 95 Handbook
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.

James Mohr
SCO Companion
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996. ISBN 0-13-451683-4. Pp. 792.

Marty Poniatowski
HP-UX System Administration Handbook and Toolkit
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998. ISBN 0-13-905571-1. Pp. 691 + 2 CDs.

James Carlson
PPP Design and Debugging
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998. ISBN 0-201-18539-3. Pp. 228.

William Stallings
High-Speed Networks
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998. ISBN 0-13-525965-7. Pp. 576.

Jennifer Stone Gonzalez
The 21st-Century Intranet
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998. ISBN 0-13-842337. Pp. 472 + CD-ROM.

Annabel Z. Dodd
The Essential Guide to Telecommunications
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998. ISBN 0-13-259011-5. Pp. 251.

W. Richard Stevens
UNIX Network Programming, 2nd ed., vol. 1
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998. ISBN 0-13-490012-X. Pp. 1009.

Ken Arnold & James Gosling
The Java Programming Language, 2nd ed.
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997. ISBN 0-201-31006-6. Pp. 442.

E. Foster-Johnson
Graphical Applications with Tcl & Tk, 2nd ed.
New York: M&T Books, 1997. ISBN 1-55851-569-0. Pp. 802 + CD-ROM.

Janice Winsor
Solaris System Administrator's Guide, 2nd ed.
Indianapolis, IN: Macmillan, 1997. ISBN 1-57870-040-X. Pp. 324.

Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder & Trent Hein
Tools for UNIX System Administrators
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997. ISBN 0-13-665431-2. CD-ROM.

Craig Hunt
TCP/IP Network Administration, 2nd ed.
Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 1998. ISBN 1-56592-322-7. Pp. 612.

Mark G. Sobell
Hands-On Linux
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998. ISBN 0-201-32569-1. Pp. 1013 + 2 CD-ROMs.