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by Peter H. Salus
Peter H. Salus is a member of ACM, the Early English Text
Society, and 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.
A few years ago, there was a run of "introductory" UNIX books: Harley Hahn's, Graham Glass's, the new edition of the Nutshell book. Then there were the two "Dummies" books by John Levine and Margy Young (better than one might expect). McMullen's UNIX User's Interactive Handbook puts these in the shade. It both permits the learner to access a training Web site, and also contains written exercises and on-screen lessons throughout. Chapter 8 on Regular Expressions and Chapter 9 on vi are very good indeed; if there's any weakness, it's the lack of discussion of shells. But perhaps that's something we don't want learners to know. McMullen has written a splendid work that takes the user from logging in and changing a password to customizing X. It's a keeper. Spam Schwartz and Garfinkel (Stopping Spam) have produced a superb introduction to the problem of spam and the possible solutions. In nearly every form, spam is pervasive. My email today was just over 180 messages; 42 of them were spam. I received 11 pieces of US mail today; eight were unsolicited non-first class. Spam is intrusive and offensive. But while catalogs, solicitations for donations, letters telling me that I "may already have won!", and supermarket fliers may stuff my mailbox and burden my letter carrier, they do not cause service halts. In a period when ISPs have become more and more conscious of Quality of Service, the unwanted burdens of spam are truly onerous. Schwartz and Garfinkel have produced a well-written, entertaining book that contains a lot of information, including a solid chapter on blocking spam. (The section on sendmail 8.9 and the one on the getspam Perl script are particularly good.) Unfortunately, here and there Schwartz and Garfinkel wax excessively pious. Thus, on page 159 they credit a UDP (=Usenet Death Penalty) with causing a policy change at UUNET. Careful inquiry reveals that there was no change in UUNET's policy, but that there was publication of what the policy was, and that this wasn't in response to the UDP, anyway. The assertions concerning both CompuServe (now part of AOL) and Netcom are suspect, too. The detailing of the "Green Card" (Canter and Siegel) scam and of the Spam King (Jeff Slayton) and his transgressions are extremely well done. I wish that the authors had discussed the Zilker suit (Austin, TX), which is not even mentioned. However, the chapter on legal and legislative action is very good. All the URLs I tested worked. This is remarkable, as I frequently hit sites that have moved, vanished, or never were. Tcl/Tk Clif Flynt has produced a different sort of Tcl/Tk book (Tcl/Tk for Real Programmers), and I hope it sells a lot of copies. Unlike a book on TCP/IP I have left unreviewed, which came with a CD-ROM for "Windows 3.1 and higher" and "16MB RAM and 2MB" memory, as well as PowerPoint, Flynt's CD-ROM requires a 386 or better, "Windows 95 or NT, Mac OS7 or 8, or UNIX" and "4MB RAM or greater." Let's try to guess who's aiming at a wider audience. Flynt writes lucidly and manages to soar above the level of Tcl for Dummies, while shying from the depth found in the O'Reilly or Addison-Wesley books. This really is for programmers and assumes at least some familiarity with C. I especially liked the sections on regular expressions and on exec. If you do scripting and/or gluing, this book will be a treat. C++ C++ supports classes, over-loaded functions, templates, modules, procedural programs, and more. Before I read Coplien's lucid and succinct essay (Multi-Paradigm Design for C++), I had never thought about multi-paradigm design. Programmers reading this book will see just how they can combine multiple paradigms into their application development. Read together with Coplien's other books on advanced C++ and on pattern languages, one can imagine the shape of C/C++ programming in the future. Y2K After nearly a decade of jaw-jaw-jaw, there appears to have been a general awakening to the problems of two-digit years over the past 18 months. Shakespeare's Year 2000 in a Nutshell is a welcome addition to the verbiage. Like so many of the O'Reilly books, it is narrowly focussed and thorough. Nearly a third of the book is composed of a COBOL quick reference. For those of you involved in the nitty gritty (as opposed to the politics), this book will be a necessity. The first chapter should be valuable to those of you whose companies are unwilling to spend the money to rectify the problem.
QoS Quality of Service (QoS) has become increasingly important. I reviewed Ferguson and Huston's slim book last June; I mentioned QoS with regard to spam, above. But it's necessary to understand that Internet efficiency is but the most obvious domain of QoS. In 1995, the Better Business Bureau received more complaints about computers than about car dealers. In terms of placement, computers (including software) has climbed from 20th place in 1994, to eighth in 1995, to seventh in 1996 (the last year for which I have data). This is clearly a function of the size of the potential usership as well as of the reckless distribution of insufficiently tested software. Kaner and Pels have written a book (Bad Software) designed for the irate and frustrated software purchaser. I enjoyed the book and hope that it will empower folks to put a lot of pressure on the shoddy suppliers. Giroux and Ganti have turned out a very different sort of book (Quality of Service in ATM Networks). Where Kercheval's book barely mentions QoS and Ferguson and Huston devoted a chapter to it, Giroux and Ganti have lavished over 200 pages on the topic. They've done a good job, too. As more and more commerce is transacted via the Internet, traffic management in general will become vital; these two authors from Newbridge Networks provide a good example of what must be done. The only shortcomings I noted were the lack of discussion of dropped packets and of latency, which certainly influence QoS. Sys Admin For years, Nemeth et al. and Frisch have dominated the sys admin library. A new book by Lepage and Iarrera (UNIX System Administrator's Bible) has come to (in some way) challenge this dominance. The best thing about Lepage and Iarrera's work is that it is simply presented. It also comes with a CD-ROM of FreeBSD 2.2.5. I admit that I wrote two of the chapters here (21 and 23) as well as part of the Introduction, so I'm not lavishing the space on the book it would otherwise deserve, but this is an entremely useful book. Well over a decade ago, I remarked to Lou Katz that I didn't want to be a system administrator. He remarked that if you ran UNIX, you'd be forced to be. This is still true, both for UNIX and for Linux. Cyberlife Books like David Bennahum's Extra Life: Coming of Age in Cyberspace make me feel very old: I took FORTRAN a decade before he was born! But this brief biography of growing up in the period of Pong and Space Invaders really made me think about the history I have written about, as well as those born into it. Bennahum writes lightly and well, and I enjoyed the book tremendously. At times funny, at others touching, Bennahum has produced a nontechnical, yet highly worthwhile, memoir. Books reviewed in this column:
John McMullen
Alan Schwartz and Simson Garfinkel
Clif Flynt
James O. Coplien
Norman Shakespeare
Cem Kaner and David Pels
Natalie Giroux and Sudhakar Ganti
Yves Lepage and Paul Iarrera
David S. Bennahum
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First posted: 22 Mar. 1999 jr Last changed: 22 Mar. 1999 jr |
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