r3lody ((Raymond Lodato) writes "Java was developed to be a cross-platform language. In other words, it shouldn't matter what processor or operating system you used, just the language itself. Write Once, Run Anywhere is the slogan, and an admirable ideal to attempt to reach. So when I first saw the title of the book Java Application Development on Linux, I expected to find descriptions of some idiosyncrasies in the Linux environment that affected the Run Anywhere part of the equation. What I got was a lot more." Read on for the rest of Lodato's review.

Eli Singer writes "The web is stripping away the layers of insulation between companies and the public by giving everyday people access to massive amounts of information. Increasingly companies are finding themselves like the emperor naked and exposed. Don Tapscott, long time tech author ( Digital Capital , Growing Up Digital and Paradigm Shift ), and co-author David Ticoll ( Digital Capital ) say in their latest book, The Naked Corporation: How The Age of Transparency will Revolutionize Business , that when a corporation is naked, it is best to be buff." Read on for the rest of Singer's review.

SDurham writes "Americans love trivia. From the bookish facts of Jeopardy! to the daily dose of ESPN Sportscenter, trivia is as much a part of our pop culture as hot rods or baseball. Few sources contain as much fact (or trivia) as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and in The Know-It-All, A. J. Jacobs chronicles his attempt to read this collection of knowledge. At 33,000 pages, Jacobs' task is not one to be taken lightly. Jacobs manages not only to complete this challenge, but to weave an engaging account of his year-long obsession in Know-It-All." Read on for Durham's review.

charliedickinson writes "Some of the most computationally-intensive tasks around are real-time valuations of derivative securities. Wall Street traders need these for executing the trade whenever anyone wants to hedge stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, credit, mortgages, power ... the list goes on. Emanuel Derman's My Life as a Quant is the engaging odyssey of a theoretical physicist turned serious programmer (by way of Bell Labs), turned "rocket scientist" or "quant" (Wall Street slang for the folks who've taken computer-aided design and valuation of financial products to new levels these last two decades)." Read on for Dickinson's review of the book.

prostoalex (Alex Moskalyuk) writes "Anywhere from 26% to 40% of U.S. employees refer to their work as stressful or very stressful. So it's not too surprising that the business motivation and self-improvement market, which includes books, courses, training seminars, etc. generates $5.7 billion a year. David Allen is the author of Getting Things Done, which on its cover promises the Holy Grail of business management -- stress-free productivity." Read on for the rest of Moskalyuk's review.

norburym (Mary Norbury-Glaser) writes "If you own the first edition of this book, then it's probably dog-eared and well thumbed-through, so now's a good time to upgrade to this extensive volume, Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux: Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, second edition. This book covers Fedora Core 2 (2.6 kernel) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 3 (2.4 fork version with 2.6 kernel features) and includes Fedora Core on four CDs, which comprises the complete release. Mark G. Sobell accomplishes what many fail at: he has successfully crammed a huge amount of information into one volume in a compact, perfectly readable manner. This second edition serves two audiences, the end user and the administrator, and consequently combines two topics that easily could have filled separate books: Fedora Core and Enterprise Linux." Read on for the rest of Norbury-Glaser's review.

Ben Rothke writes "In Outsource: Competing in the Global Productivity Race , Edward Yourdon examined the plight of displaced workers who find their jobs outsourced to cheaper workers overseas. The reality is that American technology jobs are being outsourced by the tens of thousands, with no end in sight. Workers who once envisioned a bright future now only see grim possibilities. In a fascinating book, Business Under Fire: How Israeli Companies Are Succeeding in the Face of Terror - and What We Can Learn from Them, author Dan Carrison focuses on a different sort of crisis resulting in lost jobs: terrorism." Read on for Rothke's review.

Craig Maloney writes "Growing up, I was immersed in the science fiction tales of my time. Space travel and laser guns were fascinating, but even more fascinating to me were the science fiction movies that involved robots; the complicated machines that performed great feats of impossible skill, dexterity, and amazing computation. When Tomy and Heathkit released their personal robots, I tried in vain to con my parents into believing that a personal robot might improve our quality of life in some way (mine more than theirs because I would obviously have been the skillful programmer of these robotic devices). While Robot Building for Beginners won't have you creating anything as complicated as C3PO or even a HERO Jr., it will show you how to build a simple robot from the ground up, and will help those who don't have the rudimentary electronics experience required to master these skills." Read on for the rest of Maloney's review.

prostoalex writes "No one quite knows the exact point when high-tech marketing went wrong. When instead of selling distinct products and services, the company Web sites and brochures started pitching 'the next big thing.' When even software developers don't have a slightest idea about what's being sold to them. Raj Karamchedu from Silicon Image, however, feels that certain things in high-tech marketing should be straightened out, hence this book." Read on for Moskalyuk's review of Karamchedu's It's Not About the Technology .

Jack Herrington writes "For most companies, lightning never strikes. The promised miracle product fails, and the revolutionary dreams meet evolutionary reality. But for Apple, lightning struck twice: first with the Apple computer, which can be justifiably named the first personal computer, then with the Macintosh. Introduced with the groundbreaking 1984 commercial the Mac started the GUI revolution which brought millions of new users into the once inhospitable world of computing." Read on for Herrington's review of Revolution in the Valley.

Ben Rothke writes "Outsource: Competing in the Global Productivity Race is a persuasive overview of the outsourcing phenomenon. Author Edward Yourdon's premise is that outsourcing is not going to disappear anytime soon, and -- given the success that many companies have begun enjoying during the past few years -- it is not likely to level off anytime soon. Outsourcing is now a mainstream phenomenon and is affecting more and more workers, in nearly every knowledge-based sector. In a nutshell, this is Yourdon's book of how to prepare yourself for the inevitable." Read on for the rest of Rothke's review, as well as Jason Bennett's different take on the book.

jkauzlar writes "Popular mathematics books don't come along often and when they do, they're only occasionally worth the read. John Derbyshire, a controversy-stirring political propagandist by day, and mathematician-enthusiast by night, has composed what may turn to out to be one of the classics of mathematical literature for the lay-person." Read on for the rest of jkauzlar's review.

Robert Nagle writes "Over the last year, Zope and Plone have gained mindshare as open source web application servers. In the last few months, two books have come out about how to use, extend and administer Plone. One is Andy McKay's Definitive Guide to Plone (available for free online), and the other is Julie Meloni's Plone Content Management Essentials." Read on for Nagle's review of both books.

r3lody (Ray Lodato) writes "Just because Linux is under the GPL, some people believe that it's pretty standardized. Actually, each distro has its own little additions and, consequently, quirks. Writing an application to work reliably under all variations is not a slam-dunk. The Linux Standard Base Specification seeks to provide the common ground that all Linux apps should adhere to, and therefore make reasonably sure that they will work as advertised. Building Applications with the Linux Standard Base is a reference manual for application developers to make sure their programs will work across the Linux map." Read on for the rest of Lodato's review.

The H1-B visa program allows many thousands of non-American technical workers (about half a million at the moment) to hold jobs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the U.S. -- jobs which are seemingly difficult to fill from the American labor pool for a variety of reasons, and which are eagerly filled by employers who find that qualified, talented people come from countries all over the world. N. Sivakumar's first-person account of being an Indian programmer working for companies in several U.S. states over the past decade illustrates a side of the H1-B system that doesn't get talked about much: the experience of skilled, highly educated workers taking jobs in an environment that offers, besides welcome employment, various levels of hostility and resentment. Read on for my review of his book, Debugging Indian Computer Programmers: Dude, Did I Steal Your Job?

Tangurena writes "Emergence is a field that is trying to come to grips with how new behavior emerges out of smaller units. There is no gene that determines the behavior of a hive of bees or colony of ants, but the behavior of the nest emerges from the individuals within. Some people are using cellular automata as a means of explaining higher order behavior (like Wolfram in A New Kind of Science )." Read on for Tangurena's review of Steven Johnson's 2002 book Emergence: the Connected lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software.

book_reader (Gary Cornell) writes "Wow, what an intriguing title! When I was getting my Ph.D in math, the words 'sex' and 'mathematics' were not juxtaposed all that often, and I suspect we would have been more likely to expect a book titled 'Mathematics and the (lack of) Sex.' But, hey, times change and the author, who is not only a mathematician but also someone who was voted one of Australia's 50 most beautiful people in their equivalent of People magazine -- and remember this is the land of Nicole Kidman -- has a point. As she says, echoing G.H. Hardy's famous comment in 'A Mathematician's Apology': 'Mathematics is the study of patterns: their discovery, their interconnections and their implications.' And what is sexual behavior but the most intriguing pattern of all?" Read on for the rest of Cornell's review.

Martin Ecker writes "Two-dimensional user interfaces (UIs) have been around for a long time, and people are accustomed to using them. However, 3-dimensional user interfaces have not yet received as much exposure. Only a select few applications utilize 3D UIs, some with more success than others. The book 3D User Interfaces: Theory and Practice (published by Addison-Wesley) attempts to give a broad overview of the field of 3D user interfaces. It discusses the hardware devices and the software techniques required to build successful 3D UIs and gives a number of design guidelines to follow when having to develop new 3D interaction techniques for specific applications." Read on for the rest of Ecker's review.

Motor writes with the review below of Frederik Pohl's The Boy Who Would Live Forever, a series book which he says escapes the release-early, release-often approach of some series. Read on for his take on the book.

Aeonite (Michael Fiegel) writes "Mark Jeffrey is probably best known to Slashdotters as an online media entrepreneur and one of the co-founders (along with Mike Maerz and Jim Bumgardner) of The Palace, an avatar-based chat system popular in the late 1990s. Jeffrey is not to be confused with Neal Stephenson, though both men have websites featuring clockwork imagery, goatees, and novels which contain references to Sumerian mythology -- Stephenson's Snow Crash and Jeffrey's first novel, The Pocket and the Pendant. From a distance, one might be inclined to believe that similarities to Stephenson's own work are more than cosmetic: Jeffrey thanks Stephenson on the Acknowledgments page of his novel (along with Stephen R. Donaldson and Carl Jung, among others), and one Lulu.com review (mentioned in a press release) describes The Pocket and the Pendant as being 'like Stargate, Harry Potter, Snow Crash and the old Land of the Lost rolled into one.'" Read on for the rest of Fiegel's review.