cafeman writes "This was a really hard review to write. It's been a long time since I've read a book that was so fascinating on the first reading and yet raised so many questions on the second and third. Books on the history of gaming are relatively few -- Joystick Nation, High Score, Game Over, Masters of Doom and The Ultimate History of Video Games, the major works on the topic, all focus on the West. Finding out more about the history of gaming in Japan is harder. Suffice to say that if you're interested in game trivia, Japanese console gaming industry history, or the Eastern cultural drivers behind game design and communication, you owe it to yourself to get Power Up. Why was the book so frustrating? That's an interesting question, one that I've since put a lot of thought into. Much to the annoyance of my wife, I might add." Read on for the rest of cafeman's review.

Jim Holmes writes "Microsoft's Visual Studio is an elephant of an IDE. It's got tremendous power and adaptability, but it's difficult to dig through all the less-than-helpful documentation. It's also very tough to figure out which of the many available add-on tools are worthwhile to add. Visual Studio Hacks by James Avery is a terrific reference for helping get the most out of Visual Studio." Read on for the rest of Holmes' review.

Bruce Lawson submits the review below of Stuart Langridge's Excellent guide to creating dynamic web pages; scalable and sensible., writing "Don't be put off by the title: the DHTML here bears no resemblance to the stupid Web tricks of the late 90s that allowed animated unicorns to follow your cursor or silly Powerpoint-like transitions between Web pages." Read on for the rest.

Scott Pinzon writes "Writing sonnets, screenplays, or an epic poem in your third language is a breeze compared to the toughest of art forms, didactic fiction. That might explain why the various chapters of Stealing the Network: How to Own an Identity range from appalling to exciting. Whether you see the glass of STN: Identity as half empty or half full depends on whether this is your cup of poison -- but on a technical level, it rocks." Read on for the rest of Pinzon's review.

Craig Maloney writes "Just about everyone out there who has ever typed #!/usr/bin/perl has encountered Learning Perl (otherwise known as "The Llama Book") in one form or another. You may have learned some of the intricacies of the language from this tome, or you've seen someone recommend this book to potential Perl programmers on-line. Learning Perl is generally in the top three recommended books for new Perl programmers, next to Programming Perl ("The Camel Book"). Now in its fourth edition, Learning Perl returns with updates covering the stable 5.8 series of Perl. The changes are subtle, but the improvements make for a clearer and more readable book." Read on for the rest of Maloney's review.

nazarijo (Jose Nazario) writes "A couple of years ago, Johnny Long made a large splash in the press with his Google Hacking. He showed the world at large how easy it is to use Google to sift through mountains of information to discover facts about your adversary they didn't know were public (and would rather were private). Now he's written a book with a few other authors and shows you the kinds of techniques and queries you can do to mine Google for all sorts of information." Read on for the rest of Nazario's review.

pankaj_kumar writes "Apache Ant, the Java replacement for make , belongs to the rare breed of category killer software for automating Java software development tasks. It is an Apache open source project, has won numerous awards, boasts comprehensive online documentation and is used by most Java developers. So, what could a book say that is already not available online?" Read on for Kumar's review of Ant: The Definitive Guide.

Simon P. Chappell writes "There is a school of thought that if you cannot explain what you've done, then what you did was worthless. Perhaps that attitude is a little extreme, but in this highly networked world of emails, instant messages, wikis, blogs and webpages, the art of explaining oneself well is important. While there are many books that teach written skills, there have been few ostensibly aimed at technical folks. Enter Spring into Technical Writing for Engineers and Scientists by Barry J. Rosenberg, a technical writer and the author of a number of technical articles and books including the KornShell Programming Tutorial." Read on for the rest of Chappell's review.

Jim Holmes writes "Marc Holmes's Expert .NET Delivery Using NAnt and CruseControl.NET is an outstanding book for development teams wanting to build a reliable, automated delivery system. The book clearly lays out the case for having a standard delivery process, then dives into specific details of implementing such a process via NAnt and CruiseControl.NET. The book also covers several other tools, both open source/freeware and commercial, including NDoc, FxCop, NUnit, Red Gate's SQL Bundle, and Eric Smith's CodeSmith code generation tool. This book, like Steve Loughran's Java Development with Ant has crucial concepts and patterns which are useful to folks even outside its target .NET audience. This is because the author is so emphatic about the criticality of process and standards, something applicable to anyone developing and delivering software." Read on for the rest of Holmes' review.

Running a table-top roleplaying game is, to put it mildly, a challenge. A prospective Game Master (or Dungeon Master) has to utilize interpersonal communications, mathematics, creative writing, acting, and endless stores of patience in order to successfully draw a group of players into a gaming experience. With that in mind, most wise DMs use every tool they can lay their hands on to make the job easier. Wizards of the Coast's sequel to the Dungeon Master's Guide may just be the toolkit you've been looking for. Read on for my impressions of WotC's Dungeon Master's Guide II.

Stanislav Blingstein writes "Cyberpunk just got a whole lot darker. The Escapist , by James Morris, takes the genre into a gloomy alley and gives it a good kicking. The main character, Bentley Dean, is more than just an anti-hero: he seems to enjoy being bad. His cast of accomplices aren't much better, either, and some are far worse. Most are pretty cartoon-like, too. But you still can't help liking Bentley Dean. He brings a certain charm to being a hacker with a cold-blooded killing streak." Read on for Blingstein's review.

honestpuck writes "With an increasing number of people disenchanted with the flaws, bugs and security holes in the world's most popular web browser (still) switching to the current open source champion, Firefox, it would seem timely to release a volume titled Don't Click on the Blue E. The number of books on Firefox is increasing by leaps and bounds - so far I've read three, fortunately all have their place. Don't Click on the Blue E is O'Reilly's latest entry into the market. It is targeted at the absolute beginner. I found it to have the usual O'Reilly quality: well-written, well-edited and well-designed." Read on for the rest of Williams' review.

stern writes "In the not-so-distant past, engineers, scientists and mathematicians routinely consulted tables of numbers for the answers to questions that they could not solve analytically. Sin(.4)? No problem: look it up in the Sine table. These tables were prepared by teams of people called computers (no, really -- that's where the term comes from) who typically had only rudimentary math skills. The computers were overseen by more knowledgeable mathematicians, who designed the algorithms and supervised their work." Read below for Stern's review of David Alan Grier's book When Computers Were Human.

Michael J. Ross writes "When it comes to creating a dynamic Web site with data store capabilities, the site developer can choose from many technologies, including PHP and MySQL. The combination of the two is rapidly emerging as a favorite, partly because they work well together, and partly because they are both available under open-source licenses. As a result, technical book publishers are cranking out a growing number of high-priced tomes that try to cover all of the details of either technology, or both. But for the developer just getting started in either one, there is a new title that could prove more accessible: Vikram Vaswani's How to Do Everything with PHP and MySQL, published by McGraw-Hill/Osborne." Read on for the rest of Ross's review.

danny writes "Do you run a mail server using Postfix? If so, then you should check out the latest addition to my book reviews, a look at Hildebrandt and Koetter's Book of Postfix." Read on for the review.

Jim Holmes writes "I'm new to the .NET environment and have been looking for solid books in the same class as McConnell's Code Complete, 2nd ed., or Kernhigan and Pike's The Practice of Programming. Those books, to me, are must-haves on any serious developer's bookshelf, but while they're terrific books, they're general in nature. Bill Wagner's book Effective C# is a great companion to those books because it's specific to C# and hits hard the implementation details of working in that language. (Disclaimers: 1) I got this book for free from Addison-Wesley as a regular giveaway for our .NET Developers Group. 2) I attempted to get SRT Solutions, the author's consulting company, involved in a software development project several years ago. The project tanked due to customer constraints and other business issues not related in any way to Wagner or his company. End Disclaimers.)" Read on for the rest of Holmes's review.

Spencerian writes "Roz Kaveney's From Alien to the Matrix is definitely a love-to-hate book for me, and probably for most fanboys who've forgotten more than the author knows about the meanings, philosophy, and humor found in many popular SF films of the last 35 years. If you love to argue and curse when you read something that's so way off base in interpretation or appears to lack any research in even the basic meanings that most Americans found in a SF film, then this is your book. But if you hate arguing with your non-fannish significant other on why you really liked a particular movie, save your money by not buying this book. Oh, and dump your boy/girlfriend, too." Read on for the rest of Spencerian's review.

honestpuck writes "It might seem a little strange to associate Cisco Press with a book for newcomers to home networking but Cisco are now the proud owners of Linksys and have a large place in this market. Therefore a book like this may not seem so out of place." Read on for the rest of honestpuck's review.

droopus writes "Most of you have heard about the Microsoft researchers' Darknet paper a couple of years back, which shoveled dirt onto the coffin of DRM as a business model. Well, now along comes a tech journalist to marshall the arguments in that paper as the basis for a new book. I wasn't sure what to expect from a book titled Darknet (a riff on the shortcomings of digital rights management? an ode to encrypted networks?), but the subtitle was a good tipoff: 'Hollywood's war against the digital generation.'" Read on for droopus' review.

nazarijo writes "I think by now we're all familiar with viruses and worms. It may have been a term paper diskette chewed up by a virus back in college, a family member's computer infected with the latest worm, or your email inbox clogged with a mass mailer of the week. But how do AV researchers dissect such malware, especially when virus writers have devoted so much time to avoiding detection and perfecting their craft with self-decrypting viruses, polymorphic shellcode, and obfuscated loops. Haven't you wanted a peek into how that's done, and how you would analyze such a monster that landed in your computer? Well, Peter Szor's book The Art of Computer Virus Research and Defense (TAOCVRD) has been gaining lots of critical acclaim lately for filling that gap, and rightfully so. (Before we begin, however, I should make one thing perfectly clear: I was a technical reviewer of this book. I enjoyed it when I read it originally, and I'm even more pleased with the final result. And now on to your regularly scheduled review.)" Read on for the rest.