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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.
By the time this appears, Windows 98 will be available, and the publishers have been getting ready for the users: as of the end of May, I had received notices of 66 books on Win98. No, you needn't worry. I don't use it. And I tell the publishers not to send them to me. Anyway, as far as I can tell, all one needs if one's employer insists on Win98 or NT is the books from O'Reilly (or a different job). Alternatively, you could get Samba, John Blair's book on a program that allows integration of real systems (e.g., UNIX) into a Windows network. Blair's book is a combination of tutorial, reference, and CD-ROM. It will be extremely useful for all of you involved with heterogeneous systems. Wireless Charles Perkins was on the program committee for the first USENIX Symposium on Mobile and Location-Independent Computing (August 1993). He has also, both while at IBM and now at Sun, been very active in the IETF's activities. (Among other things, he's one of the authors of the IAB draft "The Case for IPv6.") His Mobile IP explains everything I ever wanted to know about the protocols (including both IPv6 and DHCP [=Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol; RFC 2131]). It has both a glossary and a first-rate list of references. Perkins even manages to get in a paragraph on the home address option (draft-degermark-ipv6-hc-03.txt). The section on route optimization is also very fine. If you are at all interested in computing away from your desktop, you need this book. Perl There are three disparate Perl products on my desk as I write: Ellie Quigley's TheComplete Perl Training Course, Hall and Schwartz's Effective Perl Programming, and Brown and Nandor's MacPerl. Except for the compulsive reviewer, I can't imagine these being read by the same audience. MacPerl is a neat and elegant version of Perl5 for the Macintosh. The book and CD make an excellent package for those who will be supporting AppleScripts or AppleTalk (or other Macintosh applications) and want to use Perl. The book is terse, in the UNIX manual tradition, but not difficult. I liked it a lot. (This is the same group that brought us MkLinux last year they're really on a roll!) Effective Perl Programming is subtitled "Writing Better Programs with Perl," and I think the authors' point is made: with an understanding of this small volume, Perl programs will be clearer, more efficient, and, with luck, more elegant. Quigley's "Training Course" is comprised of a Perl training course on CD-ROM, Perl by Example (2nd Ed.), and a second CD-ROM containing Perl distributions for Win95/WinNT/UNIX. It may be a great thing for the poor guy who's just been told that the company is using Perl starting next Monday. Queries If you use a database, you use SQL. If you have new staff that must understand what's happened when they query for a phone number or whether an invoice was paid or . . . , SQL Clearly Explained will be worth the investment. Jan Harrington really does explain things clearly, and her book should enable the beginner to comprehend things like "joins" and why using "difference" is equivalent to a negative. Linux Two really fine books have appeared on Linux. Komarinski and Collett have written a volume, Linux System Administration Handbook, that is the equivalent of Evi Nemeth et al. and Frisch's: a reliable sysadmin volume for Linux. It has a chapter on networking and a brief one on Samba. If you really need Samba, you're better off with Blair. Johnson and Troan have produced Linux Application Development, which makes no concessions to the unwashed: it is designed for programmers and developers who are developing or porting Linux applications. Both authors are with RedHat, and their development experience makes this a superb piece of work. Ethernet and Tcl Stringing T1 lines around neighborhoods, or ISDN, or fiber is really neat. But what about "internal" bandwidth? Kadambi and his colleagues have the answer in Gigabit Ethernet. In brief, this is a clause-by-clause guide to much of IEEE 802.3z. And quite a good one. A year ago, Brian Kernighan said that Tcl/Tk was the "best-kept secret" in computing. Well, I think that in the past 10 months, the secret has begun to get out: John Ousterhout has founded Scriptics, devoted to scripting languages; several books have come out; and a Tcl/Tk Consortium has been formed <http://www.tclconsortium.org>. Most significantly, however, there is a Tcl for Dummies. Schroeder and Doyle's Interactive Web Applications with Tcl/Tk is a better place for the self-styled "dummy" to start. It is designed for the beginner and does a fine job of explaining applets, widgets, and server-based applications. The accompanying CD-ROM contains Tcl/Tk and the Spynergy Toolkit. Zeltserman and Puoplo have turned out a useful book on net management tools, Building Network Management Tools with Tcl/Tk. As this is the sort of thing that Tcl is ideal for, a reasonable amount of popularization of the language and its toolkit may ensue. I hope so. Nests, Puffins, and Woodpeckers Three O'Reilly books with "Net" concerns are on my desk. They all present the competent face all of us have come to expect from ORA. I found Charlie Scott et al.'s Virtual Private Networks a fascinating read. Alan Schwartz's Managing Mailing Lists covers Majordomo, LISTSERV, ListProc, and SmartList. It should become a "must read" for any sysadmin or site manager. Scott Oaks's Java Security is the best of the books on this topic that I've seen. Dialing for Micropayments Designing Systems for Internet Commerce is a welcome relief after over a dozen books discussing the question but lacking any real content. Treese and Stewart have written a readable volume that serves as both a technical and a business guide to constructing systems that are maintainable, functioning, and secure. I liked their walk-through of a real system. It's interesting that the best books in this area have been written by real participants, not by professional writers. (Both Treese and Stewart are with OpenMarket; Dan Lynch is with Cybercash.) Revivals Graham's Sourcebook is for HTML 4.0 and its extensions. In the past three years this useful book has gained a lot of weight and now tips the scales at 600 pages. Lippman's C++ Primer has gained a co-author, Josee Lajoie, and many features in this third edition. It is also double the size of the 1991 edition. This is an extraordinary piece of work, reflecting the ANSI/ISO "final draft standard." Finally, I've received the second edition of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, but had no time to read it. I hope to devote a decent amount of space to the three volumes in a future column. A Blatant Plug Over the past two years I have been working on a four-volume Handbook of Programming Languages. By the time you read this, it should be available. Get your academic or corporate libraries to buy them.
Books Reviewed in This ColumnJohn D. BlairSamba Seattle, WA: SSC, 1998. ISBN 1-57831-006-7. Pp. 298+CD-ROM.
Charles E. Perkins
Vicki Brown & Chris Nandor
Joseph N. Hall & Randal L. Schwartz
Ellie Quigley
Jan L. Harrington
Mark F. Komarinski & Cary Collett
Michael K. Johnson & Erik W. Troan
Jayant Kadambi, et al.
Hattie Schroeder & Mike Doyle
Dave Zeltserman & Gerard Puoplo
Charlie Scott, et al.
Alan Schwartz
Scott Oaks
G. Winfield Treese & Lawrence C. Stewart
Ian S. Graham
Stanley B. Lippman & Josee Lajoie
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First posted: 17th September 1998 efc Last changed: 17th September 1998 efc |
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by Peter H. Salus
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