Friday, June 15, 2001
For years, the Book of the Month was a regular feature of the BYTE Column. I am slowly collecting all those olf reviews here. They'll be all together that way. One day I may to more annotations and web links.
Anyway here they are. There are two sections. Computer Book of the Month, and just Book of the Month. They aren't all here, alas. but I'll keep working on it.
- Placeholder
- September 1999 Column
- November 1999 column
- October 1999 column
- June 1998 Column
- November 1998 Column
- December 1998 Column
- January 99
- February 99
- March 99
- April 99
From the March, 1998 Column:
The book of the month is Chaim Herzog and Mordechai Gichon, Battles Of The Bible (Greenhill Books, ISBN 1-85367-266-1). A 1997 reissue of a 1948 book. Herzog is a former Israeli general who made use of his Biblical knowledge in the Arab/Israeli Wars: the strategic terrain hasn’t changed much in 2500 years. The book traces all the known Biblical battles including some previously thought to be legendary, shows the terrain, and examines what may have happened. It’s fascinating reading. One caution: there are some good detail maps, but there’s no good strategic map; if you get this book, you’ll want a good Old Testament atlas unless you’re more familiar with Palestinian geography than I am.
From the May 1998 Column:
The book of the month is George and Meredith Friedman, The Future of War, Crown, ISBN 0-517-70403-X. While I don’t agree with all they say, it’s a valuable contribution to the discussion of technology and warfare. Incidentally, I am doing my own two-volume set on HIGH TECH WARS, St. Martin’s Press, and I hope to turn in the first volume manuscript about the time you read this.
From the JUNE 1998 Column
The book of the month is On Infantry by John A. English and Bruce I. Gudmundsson, an analytical military history of infantry in this century. Technical but surprisingly readable if you’re interested in the subject. It’s apparently out of print but I was able to get a copy through amazon.com. If that’s not your cup of tea, there are a couple of new Terry Pratchett Discworld books available. Get one and laugh your head off.
From the November, 1998 Column:
There are two books this month. The first, ONCE A HERO (hardbound) (paper) by Elizabeth Moon, is a pretty standard space opera set in the world of the "Herris Serrano Series" (Baen Books). The title character, Esmay Suiza, is an aristocrat from a provincial planet who has joined the imperial space navy and shortly after finds herself the sole surviving officer in command of a ship in battle, which she wins, thereby saving an entire planet. That happens before the book begins: the novel is about the consequences of having been a hero. Well worked out, over detailed in spots, but still a page turner.
The second book is quite strange. Guy Gavriel Kay writes about the 5th Century Byzantine Empire, but he doesn’t call it that. SAILING TO SARANTIUM (Harper Prism) takes place in a fantasy world; one with a history so close to our own that sometimes only the names have been changed. That is, Sarantium is Constantinople, Rhodium is Rome, Varena is Ravenna, and the geography is the Mediterranean world of Europe in the 5th Century. The story opens as Valerius, Count of the Excubitors, is raised to the Imperial throne through the intrigues of his nephew Petrus. In due time Petrus becomes emperor, and experiences the "Victory Riots." All of this happened in real history, with Justin as Valerius, Justinian as Petrus, and the Nike Sedition as the famous riots which nearly brought down Justinian and Theodora, the dancer he married who became the most famous empress in Byzantine history. She’s called Aliana in this book.
Of course if you don’t know all that, it’s still a whacking good story. Kay has details on chariot racing which sure feel authentic. His major character is Crispin, a master mosaic artist, and details of that art are important to the story. When Crispin interacts with characters from history including Petrus (Justinian) and his general Leontes (Belisarius), the characters are true to what history knows of their real world counterparts. Details of the book sometimes get in the way – the author cannot resist the writer’s trick of making a scene important by saying "If Crispin had known this history would have been different" – but this is minor carping about a story good enough to have kept me reading 400 and more pages in one sitting. If you like historical fiction or heroic fantasy, you will like this book.
From the March, 1998 Column:
The computer book of the month is the "Special Edition" series of Que’s "Using" books. The particular one I have in mind is USING JAVA, but all the "special edition using" books are good. The QUE "Using" series tends to be rushed out at the same time as the product, and while they’re often quite good, I tend to find "Learn X in 21 Days" titles better organized for first looks. Later, though, when you need explanations of what’s going on and some of the professional level details, the Special Edition books pull out ahead; or so I have found. Anyway, the Special Edition USING JAVA is useful both as reference and learning guide, with plenty of examples.
From the April 1998 Column:
The first book of the month is Peter Kent’s Poor Richard's Web Site: Geek-Free, Commonsense Advice on Building a Low-Cost Web Site. See http://www.poorrichard.com for details; the title says all that’s needed. The second book of the month is Elizabeth A. Parker’s Home Page Improvement (IDG Books ISBN 0-7645-3083-6), another "Gee how did you do that?" web page book that’s written in English with lots of examples. It may or may not be significant that Ms. Parker is married to Rich Grace, another writer whose works I have admired. In any event I wish I had had either, or preferably both, of these books when I set out to build a web site.
From the May, 1998 Column:
If you’re just getting started with Photoshop, Hayden Books Photoshop 4 Complete by Kate Binder, Ted Alspach and other, ISBN 1-56830-323-8 with a CD-ROM of images and utilities is both a good start and a good reference work. The directions are explicit, the discussions don’t assume you know a lot but get well into the professional level, and it’s well written. Mac users will like Peachpit’s PHOTOSHOP 4 WOW BOOK, by Linnea Dayton and Jack Davis, ISBN 0-201-68856-5 with accompanying CD-ROM. It’s nowhere near as complete as the Hayden book, but there’s a higher WOW factor.
Credentialism has become the curse of the age. It’s no longer what you know, but what credentials you have, that determines salary and promotion. Now much of this is due to "Equal Opportunity" legislation: if you can’t prove that the person you promoted is somehow superior to the left-handed gay Spanish surname Kickapoo working in the office, you could be sued by a legal bounty hunter just waiting for the opportunity; thus the concentration on credentials like college degrees.
It has also created opportunities. One credential that’s worth a lot of money is MCSE: Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. There are a number of categories of MCSE. None of them require college degrees. They do require you to pass a thorough and difficult examination, but the exam is based on practical knowledge, not on remembering who said what. If I were a young guy who never made it to college and wanted to get ahead, I’d go for one of the MCSE credentials; it’s guaranteed employment at fairly decent wages. I’d be particularly interested if I were doing tech support work but hadn’t any credentials.
The usual way to get the MCSE credential is to enroll in a trade school, which doesn’t so much teach you about engineering Microsoft products as how to pass the MCSE examination. These are tough exams, and having some coaching in a trade school certainly does no harm; but you don’t have to enroll in classes to take and pass the MCSE examinations. You can learn on your own.
If you want to try that, the best way is to get the appropriate New Riders MCSE book and CD-ROM. These books aren’t cheap, but they contain everything you need to know in order to pass the exam, and the CD has sample tests. Understand, while it would theoretically be possible to learn enough to pass the exam from one of these books, it’s not likely anyone will do it; you need some practical knowledge and experience. The people who will find these books most useful are those who know a lot about the subject, but don’t know it in a systematic way; who have holes in their knowledge base; and who are a bit nervous about examinations anyway. The New Riders MCSE series are the computer books of the month. If you already know Windows NT, or Exchange Server, or one of the other major Microsoft product lines, but like the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz you don’t have a diploma, check out www.newriders.com and see if there’s not an MCSE category and book for you. It could change your life.
The computer book of the month is Edward and Jennifer Yourdon, Time Bomb 2000, Prentice Hall ISBN0-13-095284-2. I tend to think of the great Year 2000 Scare as hysteria; the Yourdons have another opinion, which they calmly and soberly present, along with precautions you can take in case they’re right. They frankly scared hell out of me.
I’m more impressed with Windows 98 now than I was last month. This is largely because I have Windows 98 under control now. The computer book of the month is David Karp’s WINDOWS 98 ANNOYANCES, an O’Reilly book. Believe me: if you work with Windows 98, you must have this book. It explains a number of "features" in Windows 98 that I thought were bugs. It tells you how to set things so they are or are not like Windows 95. It explains your options and how to use them. Without this book Windows 98 is a mystery. With it you have a chance to take control. As you all know, I am fond of O’Reilly books to begin with, but this one is outstandingly good. Highly recommended.
The computer book of the month is Sandra Osborne, Windows NT Registry, A Settings Reference, New Riders; one o those books that if you don't know about it and you need it, you need it a lot. With this book and Robert Bruce Thompson's WINDOWS NT SERVER 4.0 (O'Reilly) you can, in a pinch, be an NT Administrator even though you don't know as much about it as you should.
A second set of computer books worth looking at are the Microsoft Press MCSE guides; they are getting better and better, and if you fancy a career in this business and don't expect to take a full college degree in computer science, an MCSE certificate is about the best thing you can get.
The entertainment book of the month is Elizabeth Moon, RULES OF ENGAGEMENT (Baen) the sequel to Once a Hero. Quite as good as the original. Fast action, good space opera.
Chaos Manor orchids to the entire O’Reilly book series; I have yet to see a bad O’Reilly book, and I have a lot of them. Truth in advertising: Robert Bruce Thompson and I are this week signing on with O’Reilly to do a book with the working title of The Chaos Manor Guide to Good Enough; I suspect the title tells you all you need to know about it.
The book of the Month is Patrick O’Brian THE HUNDRED DAYS, the last of the Aubrey-Maturin sea stories; the Hundred Days are of course the short reign of Napoleon after his return from exile to Elba. If you ever liked sea stories you must know of the O’Brian books; there are no others like them.
The book(s) of the month are Tales of the Knights Templar and On Crusade, More Tales of the Knights Templar, both edited by Katherine Kurtz and featuring stories by various authors, but all the stories are set in the same fantasy universe. (Warner Books.) The premise is that when the Knights Templar were falsely accused in 1314 by the French king Francis the Fair, some of the order escaped the persecutions to continue the work of the Templars. That’s likely straight historical fact, but in these stories the order continues to this day, and some of the stories are set in modern times. The fantasy element involves the head of John the Baptist and the Shroud of Turin, both of which figure prominently in the fantasy history of the order. Some of the stories are better than others, but I liked the series well enough to read them all, and it’s an interesting premise.
The computer book of the month is Matt Welsh and Lar Kaufman, RUNNING LINUX (O’Reilly and Associates). This is the essential Linux bible, a book that you can’t be without if you’re working with Linux. If I’d thought to look in there I would have found that "p" displays the partition table; in fact, almost anything you need to know about Linux is in there somewhere. Get this book before you install Linux and you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble.
The first Computer Book of the Month is The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Running Your Small Office with Microsoft Office, by Laurie Ulrich with Jon San Filippo (Alpha Books QUE ISBN 0-7897-1748-4 $16.99). This one lives up to its title: it is for rank beginners, and I doubt if any BYTE readers will find a single thing in it they don’t already know. I’m not all that thrilled about some of the advice either, as for instance when Ms. Ulrich advises you to spend money on a faster processor rather than a bigger monitor. My view is the opposite, for Office applications blazing speed isn’t needed, but you can’t have too large a monitor: get the biggest one you can afford. It will last through several changes of computers, and save you no end of money in eye examinations not to mention headache powders. Still, if you have friends thinking of setting up a small office and completely at sea as to how to do it, this is no bad beginner’s book (which is what it’s intended to be, of course) and you can do a lot worse than to buy this for them just to keep them from pestering you with the obvious questions.
The Computer Book Of the Month is REAL WORLD PHOTOSHOP 5 by David Blatner and Bruce Fraser (Peachpit Press ISBN 0-201-35375-X
www.peachpit.com). If you use Photoshop or are thinking of using it, get this book: it starts simple and goes into real detail, and you’ll find yourself referring to it again and again. I often give review books to schools, but this one I’m keeping.For light reading this month I’ve been going through the Ellis Peters "Brother Cadfael" series, beginning with the origin story "A Rare Benedictine" and going right on through. There are some twenty of these, and they are wonderful, invoking the time of early 12th Century England during the Civil War after the death of Henry I, when Norman and Saxon hadn’t come together, and William the Conqueror’s grandchildren fought it out to see who would be sovereign. They’re nominally murder mysteries with a strong element of romance (Brother Cadfael is a Benedictine and not himself involved but he has a knack of helping romance along in others), and very readable. Great books to take on airplanes.
The Inmates Are Running The Asylum. That’s the title of Alan Cooper’s new book (SAMS, www.samspublishing.com ), and it’s appropriate. Cooper’s subtitle is "Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy, and How to Restore the Sanity." The first part of that is correct. See the column for more on this book: I recommend it but it has problems too. Well worth your reading, though.
The second Book of the Month is Bill Gates, Business @ The Speed of Thought (Warner Books, see
www.speed-of-thought.com ). This book rambles a bit, and it’s not as specific as I had hoped it would be, but it’s well worth reading by anyone using computers in their business, which is to say, by everyone in business. Gates gives specific examples of how he uses different computer capabilities and programs to run Microsoft. There’s a lot about how to use Information Technology including where to find things on the web. I think I expected more from the book than I found, but on reflection that may be because it was written primarily for business people not as familiar with computers as I am. Even so, I learned a lot from it, and I’m sure anyone involved in business will find it more than worth the price. Recommended.The book of the month is Wm. F. Buckley, The Redhunter: A Novel Based on the Life of Senator Joe McCarthy (Little Brown, ISBN 0316115894, June 1999). This is as much non-fiction as fiction, and indeed the fictional aspects of the book are the least believable. I lived through the McCarthy era and I have definite memories of what happened; this book takes a view I didn’t then hold, and tries to show what McCarthy was and was not, and what he did and did not do. It embeds the man in his times rather well, and I found myself fascinated. McCarthy certainly did his own cause more harm than good. This book shows how that happened, and to a lesser extent why. It’s also a whacking good read.
Speaking of whacking good reads, Nelson Demille, The General’s Daughter, Warner Books 1999 is certainly that. I haven’t seen the movie, but the novel is fascinating. It has the pull of a police procedural, only this time the police are warrant officers of the Criminal Investigating Division of the US Army. It all seems quite authentic, and the plot convolutions actually make sense after a while. There really is an explanation for what seems so nearly impossible at first.
The computer books of the month are from Peachpit Press. First there’s Jason Roberts, Phil Gross, et. al, Director 7 Demystified. This book takes the Director authoring tool, begins at the beginning, and goes through to a pretty high level of understanding. It does the same for Lingo, the scripting language for Director, and Shockwave. I won’t pretend that this book and the accompanying CDROM will make you an expert in a week. Nothing will do that. But this is as good a start as I have ever seen, and if you master what is in here you’ll have a good start at becoming an expert.
The second book is for nearly all of us: the Acrobat PDF file format is becoming increasingly important for web publishing. Ted Alspach’s PDF with ACROBAT, Peachpit ISBN 0-201-35461-6 takes a simple visual approach to teaching you about as much as most of us need to know about Acrobat and PDF: what it is, what you can do with it, and how you can do it. Anyone who’s going to spend a lot of time with the web would benefit from understanding Acrobat.
The book of the month is Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone by J. K. Rowling. Fair warning: the Harry Potter series of children’s books are real books, with real words. By that I don’t mean “adult”; there aren’t any words children shouldn’t hear (as if, in these days of the Internet, our children don’t know more about sex and violence than we do). What I mean is there are phonetic words like “Muggle” that kids will never have seen before. What’s great about these books is that kids want to read them, and they’re fun for adults too. In Harry Potter’s world, which looks more or less like modern England, wizardry and sorcery work, and there’s a Ministry of Magic whose major purpose is to keep Muggles – those who can’t use magic – from knowing that magic exists. There’s also a boarding school for young wizards that’s a cross between modern Eton and Tom Brown’s School Days. There’s no religious content to these books, but there is a strong ethical content: the good guys win, but it costs them, sometimes dearly, and the bad guys are really evil.
I’ve heard a few objections to these books, mostly from people who think children would be better off reading Swiss Family Robinson and Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure stories. I certainly don’t object to those, but I share Jacques Barzun’s view on what children should read: pretty well anything they want so long as it’s written with good grammar and isn’t actually depraved. (Barzun notes that at age 12 he got hold of a “highly naturalistic” novel by Mirabeau. “I thought the characters behaved in an odd manner, but I put it down to the author’s inexperience rather than my own.” If you haven’t seen his TEACHER IN AMERICA, let me recommend it to you.) Anyway, there’s nothing like that in these works: the 12 year old characters behave the way we did when we were 12 or so. I much enjoyed all the Harry Potter books, and if that’s what it takes to get kids reading real books as opposed to controlled vocabulary pap, I’m all for it.
The computer books of the month are from O’Reilly: Ellen Siever’s LINUX in a Nutshell, and WINDOWS NT TCP/IP Network Administration by Craig Hunt and Robert Bruce Thompson. Given the new Linux box those are appropriate. While you’re at it, get Thompson’s Windows NT Server 4.0 for Netware Administrators. While the title says “Netware” it turns out to be about as good a general NT network administration book as you’ll find. Truth in advertising: Thompson and I are doing a book together, for O’Reilly.
The movie of the month is 6th Sense, which does a good job of presenting a ghost story with a twist. It’s frightening without the gimmicks some movies use. Alas, there is surprise ending that can be spoiled by reviewers trying to show off. I won’t try to do that. See the movie. You’ll like it, and another time I’ll discuss the literary origins of the story line.
The book of the month is Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City Revisited. Banfield’s careful studies of urban problems are disturbing, but anyone concerned about the future tranquility of cities really should read this book. It won’t make anyone happy, but it is very hard to argue with his conclusions, which are that bad cultures produce bad results; all cultures are not equal; and without cultural changes, the inner cities are going to become less, not more livable.
The computer book of the Month is the enormous Windows 2000 Beta Training Kit from Microsoft Press. It isn’t light reading, but Windows 2000 is going to be important, and this will give you a good head start. Finally, for those who have to keep NT Workstation 4.0 running, there’s a Microsoft Help Desk book on the subject: this consists of over a thousand pages of reported errors and what to do about them. Many of the solutions consist of “Obtain Service Pack 4 and install it” but there are also lots of work-arounds. For example, if your control panel icons are black, find Display – Appearance – Icon, increase the icon size by one unit, click apply, decrease the size by one unit, click apply, and close. That at least will let you see what’s going on. There are hundreds of such tips in this book, and it ought to be available to Workstation users as a reference.
