nazarijo writes "The security world has been taken by storm by intrusion prevention system (IPS) products in the past couple of years. After all, a typical intrusion detection system (IDS) only alerts you that something malicious may have happened, and an IPS reacts to it and can prevent the attack. Action in this scenario is obviously preferred to a passive bystander. Still, the IPS solution space is confusing to many." Read on for the rest of Nazario's review of a book designed to erase that confusion.

ijones writes "Brute Force, by Matt Curtin, is about an event that many Slashdotters will remember: the cracking of the Data Encryption Standard. In June of 1997, a 56-bit DES key was discovered, and its encrypted message decoded, by an ad-hoc distributed network of computers, cooperating over the Internet. Four and a half months earlier, RSA had issued a challenge to the cryptography community, offering $10,000 to the first group to crack a 56-bit DES encrypted message. In Brute Force, Matt Curtin offers his first-hand account of the DESCHALL team's winning effort." Read on for the rest of Jones' review.

stern writes "Pamela Paul’s Pornified surveys the effects of pornography in America. On the basis of the book jacket, this might seem more appropriate material for iVillage than Slashdot, except for one thing: pornography pervades the Internet and drives the adoption of new technologies. You can’t fairly tell the story of one without the other." Read on for the rest of Stern's review.

Martin Ecker writes "The Red Book, also known as the OpenGL Programming Guide, is back in its fifth edition. It received the name Red Book because of the nice red book cover, and possibly also because it has remained the standard introductory text on the OpenGL graphics API for years, and always referring to it as "OpenGL Programming Guide" is too long. This fifth edition now also covers new features introduced with versions 1.5 and 2.0 of the OpenGL standard. So let me take you on a tour through the pages of this book to see what it has to offer." Ecker's review continues below.

Jim Holmes writes "Mary and Tom Poppendieck's Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit is a great read for anyone interested in agile software development. That includes developers, leads, and managers interested in speeding up development cycles, improving quality, and getting their customers the best value. This book's been out since May, 2003, but it's well worth picking up. The concepts within are absolutely applicable now, and will continue to be for quite a few years." Read on for the rest of Holmes' review.

nazarijo writes "The field of investigative forensics has seen a huge surge in interest lately, with many looking to study it because of shows like CSI or the increasing coverage of computer-related crimes. Some people see a career opportunity there, and are moving toward computer forensics, marrying both law enforcement and investigations with their interest in things digital. Central to this field is the study of data storage and recovery, which requires a deep knowledge of how filesystems work. Brian Carrier's new book File System Forensic Analysis covers this topic with clarity and an uncommon skill." Read on for the rest of Nazario's review.

Pankaj Kumar writes "Controversies aside, JBoss has emerged as a credible alternative to commercial J2EE App Servers for developing and deploying Java based server applications. Besides the usual advantages of open source and GPL licensing, what sets it apart is its JMX based microkernel, a light-weight framework to run independently developed Java programs within a single JVM. Together, these make it possible for one to pick and choose components and assemble a custom server anywhere between the two extremes (and beyond!) of a simple Servlet Container and a full-fledged J2EE Server. JBoss - A Developer's Notebook by Norman Richards, a JBoss developer at JBoss, Inc., and Sam Griffith, Jr., a software consultant and trainer, is a no-fluff How-To guide on doing stuff with JBoss in O'Reilly's new Developer Notebook format." Read on for Kumar's review of the book.

Aeonite writes "Cybernetics (that is to say, the sort associated with Cyberpunk) has long been an interest of mine, and so I was eager to dive into Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids , which is about exactly what it proclaims to be about. Sort of. The book does indeed cover everything from Bionic Humans to Androids, but the continuum of artificial beings is heavily weighted towards one end of the spectrum. Overall, the book is quite comprehensive in dealing with physical aspects of artificial intelligences, but when it comes to the nature of intelligence itself, the book barely dips its toe in the water. As the author himself says, the question here is not "Can machines think?", like Turing, but rather 'Can machines live?'" Read on for the rest of Aeonite's review.

Simon P. Chappell writes "I don't know about you, but I hardly bother with browser bookmarks any more. I used to have so many bookmarks, back in the early days of Netscape's 4 series, that I would have to regularly trim and edit my bookmark file to prevent my browser from crashing on startup -- that's a lot of bookmarks, folks! Now, I go to my favourite web search engine, enter a couple of appropriate search terms and voila, there's my page! Search engines are so ubiquitous that we rarely give much thought to the technology that powers them. Lucene in Action by Otis Gospodnetic and Erik Hatcher , both committers on the Lucene project, goes behind the HTML and takes you on a guided tour of Lucene, one of a generation of powerful Free and Open-Source search engines now available." Read on for the rest of Chappell's review.

evanak (Evan Koblentz) writes "Last year, at the PhillyClassic videogame event, I noticed a teenager wearing an ironic t-shirt. His shirt showed an original Nintendo controller and said 'Know your roots.' Sadly, it's not just modern youngsters who are unaware of their technological roots -- sometimes even we self-proclaimed adult über nerds are equally unaware. Regarding videogames, this is especially true, and now industry pioneer Ralph Baer is trying to rectify the situation. His attempt takes the form of a sincere autobiography, although with mixed results. The book is titled Videogames: In the Beginning." Read on for the rest of Koblentz's review.

nazarijo (Jose Nazario) writes "When you arrive to work one morning, you find that your coworker's workstation is acting funny. A quick forensic examination reveals it's been compromised and used to scan the network for more vulnerabilities. When did this happen, and where else is this going on in you domain? With a host integrity monitoring solution, you'll be a lot further along at answering those questions than piecing it all together after the fact. And you can accomplish this with two freeware tools, as described in Host Integrity Monitoring Using Osiris and Samhain, a new book from Syngress Publishing." Read on for the rest of Nazario's review.

Ben Rothke writes "If you review the thousands of Internet RFCs, you'd be hard pressed to find a protocol that lends itself to philosophical overtones, save for one -- the Network Time Protocol (NTP). The nature of time is abstract, difficult to measure and highly subjective. Yet time is a critical element in everyone's life, and in the effective operations of corporate networks." Read on for the rest of Rothke's review.

Daniel Holmes writes "In addition to using PHP to 'just get the job done' for years now, I've been running a humble user group here in the Midwest. As such, I have read numerous books on and around the subject, always looking for something great to inspire my colleagues, group members and myself alike. There are a metric ton of books out there that will walk you through PHP syntax -- this is not one of them. If you are looking for a book on rapidly developing prototype sites, or writing lots of HTML-embedded PHP, just keep looking. But if you have read even one of those books, or just felt like your programming style itself could use a little upgrade, then go get yourself a copy of PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice by Matt Zandstra." Read on for the rest of Holmes's review.

Joseph Brenner writes "Every now and then, a beginning programmer asks if there's any point in learning to program in Perl 5, when Perl 6 is going to change everything soon. There are a number of answers to that: one is to point out that Perl 6 is still years away, another is to point out that it is promised that Perl 5 code will run under Perl 6 without modification (a module that begins with the traditional "package" statement is Perl 5 code; if it begins with the new "class," then it's Perl 6)." Read on for the rest of Brenner's review of Scott Walters' Programming in Perl 6 style using Perl 5, a book which answers that question a whole different way.

Shalendra Chhabra writes "Jonathan Zdziarski has been fighting spam since before the first MIT spam conference in 2003, and has now released a full-on technical book, Ending Spam, on spam filtering. Ending Spam covers how the current and near-future crop of heuristic and statistical filters actually work under the hood, and how you can most effectively use such filters to protect your inbox." Read on for the rest of Chhabra's review.

SFEley (Stephen Eley) writes "Todd Cochrane's Podcasting: The Do-It-Yourself Guide has been heavily pushed in the podcasting community as the first of a wave of podcasting books to be released in the next several months. All of these books will surely cover the same themes, more or less: what podcasts are, how to listen to them, and how to produce your own. The popularity of podcasting is exploding right now, with coverage in every press outlet and Apple hyping it as The Next Big Thing. It's easy to see that there will be a huge demand for these books, even if they don't do much more than state the obvious. So what about this one? Other than being the first, does it offer any compelling virtues for the would-be podcaster or listener?" Read on for Eley's answer to that question.

Michael J. Ross writes "A professional programmer could at any time be tasked with developing a nontrivial application using a language or Web technology with which he or she is unfamiliar. A common response is to quickly scan code snippets in Internet newsgroups and online tutorials, copy and paste code that looks applicable to the task at hand, and then lose valuable time trying to make it all work and control what was created -- not unlike Dr. Frankenstein's experience. A smarter approach is to learn the language basics in sequence as rapidly as possible, not getting bogged down in excessive sample code. For developers seeking to learn PHP using the latter approach, Steven Holzner's Spring Into PHP 5, published by Addison-Wesley, would be an excellent choice." Read on for the rest of Ross's review.

Craig Maloney writes "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a very hot topic today in computer circles because of the interest in modeling behaviors on machines that we find in nature. Many books have been dedicated to studying and expanding the field of AI, but generally fall into two categories: those that concentrate on AI as a research topic, and those that concentrate on AI in the field of game development. Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games (AI for Computer Games) is unique in how it takes classical AI and merges that knowledge into AI for game development. It's an approach that will be fascinating to those currently studying AI, but the approach limits the usefulness of this book to a select audience of AI researchers interested in game development." Read on for the rest of Maloney's review.

swsuehr writes "Performance Tuning for Linux Servers provides information and resources for Linux administrators looking for a guide to the background, options, and commands available for enhancing the performance of a Linux server." Clear enough -- but read on for Suering's review of the book to see if it might help you at that task.

nazarijo writes "Plenty of people are curious as to how to become an information security professional. It's a profession that has a bit of an establishment atmosphere to it where entry to various levels is granted in secret. And it's often hard to understand where to start. Infosec Career Hacking attempts to demystify this process and show you not only generic strategies for employment, but ones specific to the information security field." Read on for the rest of Nazario's review.