Chris's Book Reviews.

Books about hacking (reviews from 1996)

When I first launched my website I had a burst of energy and did some book reviews, here they are, all three of them, in all their glory. I have links from each book to my favourite bookstore, Amazon.

• The Cuckoo's Egg
• Takedown
• Hackers

• At Large : The Strange Case of the World's Biggest Internet Invasion

Coming Soon

• PalmPilot The Ultimate Guide - David Pogue Don't buy this one, see below!

• Palm Programming: The Developer's Guide With CDROM

• Exploring Java - Patrick Niemeyer et al

• Linux A-Z - Phil Cornes

• The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov But make sure you go here first! Thanks to my mystery literary sleuth for the link.

• Einstein's Bridge - John Cramer I've gone off this one. When the SSC was cancelled the novel was put on hold, and the rewrite is a bit too obvious. I don't like Sci-Fi novels where everything is finally going to be all right once the physicists/engineers/geeks/MBAs/what-have-yous finally get put in charge. It's a creepy view of the future and I have decided that on balance it outweighs the fun I had from this book in the early chapters.

• Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling

• Software - Rudy Rucker

Yet more books

Technical Books

• PalmPilot The Ultimate Guide (2nd Edition) - David Pogue The title gives you a fair idea about this book. It's not an exaggeration.

• DNS and BIND - Paul Albitz & Cricket Liu Actually I heartily recommend this book. I'm sure if you really need this book you already have it. I bought it out of interest (I don't run any nameservers myself) and only finished reading it about a month ago, and then today I found out about BIND 9. I presume O'Reilly will produce an updated version of this book to cover the newer release (which is actually a complete reimplementation if you can believe it) and hence if you are considering buying the book out of interest as I did you may want to hang on a while. Or you could probably get a second hand copy at very reasonable rates from your intrepid book reviewer (me!).

• Running Linux by Matt Welsh, Kalle Dalheimer, Lar Kaufman

  Now in it's 3d edition, this is the book I rely on when adminstering my Linux server. I have bought each edition when it comes out making this the first book that I have ever bought three copies of!

• Multithreaded Programming with Pthreads In my work I have dealt with multi-threaded applications in many different contexts. This is one of the best books on the topic, especially if you are based on C/Solaris.

  Of course some languages have concurrency built-in. Concurrency in Ada (Burns and Wellings) is a good book on multithreaded Ada programs. I haven't started reading about multithreading in Java ... yet.

• The Practice of Programming by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike This book concentrates on the durable essence of programming, and mixes in a lot of pragmatic advice. The authors demonstrate the solution to a small programming task in C, C++, Perl and Java. Each program is written in idiomatic form i.e. the C++ version uses STL containers and iterators, whereas the C version uses lower-level features (pointers, arrays and loops). The results should surprise some people and will no doubt please many others.

• Programming Pearls, Second Edition Jon Bentley I haven't read this one yet but it comes highly recommended.

• Come to think of it, and on a similar sounding topic I have read and can also recommend Programming Perl, Second Edition by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Randal L.Schwartz and Stephen Potter, but to be honest, I really need to read Learning Perl by Randal L.Schwartz, Tom Christiansen and Larry Wall first as my Perl is still not very good at all. When I make it through those I will make another attempt at reading Mastering Algorithms with Perl by Jon Orwant, Jarkko Hietaniemi & Jon Macdonald as it was a bit too hard for me with my rudimentary skills.

Slightly Technical Books

• Where Wizards Stay Up Late - The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon (Contributor). A straightforward and accurate recounting of the early history of the Internet. This book should set you straight on the difference between Arpanet, NSFnet, internet/Internet, Intranet if nothing else. Interestingly the book starts with a discussion of how the fathers of the Internet want to refute the idea that it was designed to withstand nuclear war, and yet this reader decided, whilst reading this book, that this is in fact a very valid claim. I think people should read this book for themselves and decide how much credit is due to Paul Baran, the apparent inventor of the concept of a distributed network (as distinct from a centralised or decentralised network - see pp. 59). Personally I think the claim cannot lightly be dismissed, but then if you know the real purpose of the Interstate Highway System (tank transport, that kind of thing) it's not such a surprise. Certainly it seems there has been a long history of people being heavily involved in a certain stage of the development of the Internet but disputing the worth of previous or subsequent work. Here is how Paul Baran himself put it (pp.79-80) :

  "The process of technological developmentis like building a cathedral," remarked Baran years later. "Over the course of several hundred years new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations each saying, 'I built a cathedral.' Then comes along an historian who asks, "Well, who built the cathedral?' Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful, you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else". Today's Internet is to the Arpanet as the Arpanet was to Paul Baran's thought experiments, and I salute him.

• Seek! by Rudy Rucker