Sarusa writes "Video games are big business. Movies are big business. I hear that people used read a lot of things called books: it seems like there would be a lot of money to be made from a successful merger of what makes books and movies compelling with what makes video games compelling, though we've been trying that for decades with little success. Interactive Storytelling: Techniques for 21st Century Fiction by Andrew Glassner takes a look at what we know about stories, what we know about games, how they work (or don't work) together now, and how they might work together in the future." Read on for the rest of Sarusa's review.

William Nichols writes "With a couple of projects coming up that are going to require complete W3C CSS and XHTML validation (with 1 client requiring just a pure CSS layout) I thought it was time to brush up on some CSS knowledge, and maybe learn a new thing or two. I have spent the past week with a newly released book (and one of the smaller CSS books out there), the Web Standards Solutions The Markup and Style Handbook. The author, Dan Cederholm, has now become my right hand man, so to speak." Read on for the rest of Nichols' review.

vertigo writes "I am reasonably proficient in C and C++ as well as the more common scripting languages, but i always felt the lack of a sweet spot between the hard and fast low-level programming languages and the loosely typed scripting languages. Lately, my interest in the Mono project has been growing. The C# language appears to offer just that sweet spot between power and productivity I've been looking for, and its class libraries like Gtk# seem to provide the programmer with a very clean and intuitive API." Read on for vertigo's review of Mono: A Developer's Handbook from O'Reilly.

Sarusa writes "Simulations and the Future of Learning chronicles the attempt by one company -- convinced that the business e-Learning establishment has squandered its potential to build a 'leadership simulator' -- to actually create such a thing, and by doing so prove that simulation is a better educational tool than straight linear regurgitation. The sheer chutzpah of trying to simulate 'Leadership' may stagger you, 'but it means there's plenty of room for interest here. While not quite comparable to The Soul of a New Machine, as a breathless blurb suggests, it is a highly interesting read." Read on for the rest of Sarusa's review.

jmweeks writes "It comes in a black edition and a white edition, and I suppose this symbolizes the two schools of thought warring within. If you've been in any chain book store this month, you've seen its emblem--the raven in flight, the big swirling ampersand. Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is something extraordinary: many adult fantasy novels are taken seriously by their readers, the nerds among us; Strange & Norrell is taken seriously by its publisher and its critics as well. It is a small complaint, then, to say that it is taken perhaps a bit too seriously by its author." Read on for the rest of Weeks' review.

Martin Ecker writes "With the advent of powerful, programmable GPUs in consumer graphics hardware, an increasing number of shading languages to program these GPUs has become available. One quite interesting language that - in many ways - has a very different approach than other mainstream shading languages (such as Cg or the OpenGL Shading Language) is Sh. The recently released book "Metaprogramming GPUs with Sh" by Michael McCool and Stefanus Du Toit, both major contributors to the Sh project, explains the basics of the Sh high-level shading language and the corresponding API and also goes into some of the details of the implementation. The book is intended for an audience that is already familiar with traditional shader development for programmable GPUs. Also, a firm background in 3D graphics programming and C++ is a must for the interested reader." Read on for the rest.

jnazario writes "As a computer security professional, one of the things I notice is that for our proposals to be effective, they often require the participation of the vast majority of computer users out there. Almost all of them are not computer security professionals, so it's imperative that our methods be usable by the non-professionals. What makes this even worse is that most computer users are not terribly savvy about what they're using. Terms like hard drives and memory don't mean anything to them, and a browser is just a window to the internet. A computer is a tool for information use, not an end in itself. So, a book like Security Alert: Stories of Real People Protecting Themselves from Identity Theft, Scams and Viruses sounded like it had real promise." Read on for Nazario's review of the book.

maximino (Shawn Stewart) writes "Due to a shipping error at Amazon.com, I received my copy of this book early. I like everything Stephenson has written, but this one, although well written, just leaves me cold. Anyone who is contemplating reading this book has either already read Quicksilver and The Confusion, or is entering a world of confusion and pain. The System of the World holds up all right under its own substantial weight, but is simply incapable of shoring up the whole trilogy. I think it reads better than the first book, but cannot stand up to the second for sheer manic joy. As far as the whole work, I find it disappointing at the last." Read on for the rest of Stewart's review.

Alex Moskalyuk writes "'Open source is great, but where do we start?' This is probably one of the most frequently asked questions in the corporate world when CIOs are faced with the need to choose between open and proprietary solutions. How do you figure out when it's feasible to implement an open source solution? Are there any support or training options if the solution does get approved, or if the project chosen was an alpha version developed by some student, who's away for the summer? Bernard Golden from NavicaSoft has probably heard the same questions too often, and then decided to write the book." Read on for prostoalex's review.

Alec Kryten writes "Here is a book that introduces and teaches a fascinating new sport for the hacking hobbyist which doesn't necessarily involve computers. Steel bolt hacking is the art of competition lock picking that is beginning to make its mark on computer people and other geeks around the world. At DefCon this year I picked up a book titled Steel Bolt Hacking, which teaches the basics of lock picking. I bought it because I watched the lock-picking contest during the DefCon Convention and thought that I might want to participate in next year's lock-picking events." Read on for Alec's review of the book.

Sarusa writes "The Shaggy Steed is an Irish folk tale about a prince whose kingdom has fallen into chaos. A druid provides him a small shaggy horse which guides the prince on his quest through great trials and tribulations to a magical realm where he can obtain the necessary powers with which to bring peace to his land. (You can find more detail here.) For David Oliver, the Shaggy Steed of Physics is the two-body problem: the motion of two bodies bound together by the inverse square law." Read on for the rest of Sarusa's review of Oliver's book The Shaggy Steed of Physics. Fair warning: the review is lengthy, because the book demands it.

ppanon writes "When Larry Niven's Ringworld's Children came out in June, I picked up a copy and it's been sitting on my shelf since. I had been hesitating to read it because I didn't want to be disappointed by it as I had been by some of his other solo novels in the last decade (Destiny's Road, The Ringworld Throne). But being home with a virus this weekend, and having run out of new Anime DVDs to watch, I thought it was time to catch up on some reading. I looked at Niven's book and thought, 'Might as well, I can't feel much worse.' As I got further into the novel, my problem wasn't that of feeling worse, it was forcing myself to put the book down when I felt I needed to rest again." Read on for the rest.

Ben Rothke writes "There is a very simple albeit unscientific two-step test to see if a book about security assessments is for the serious security practitioner or for the script kiddie. Step one: Does the book use the term bulletproof or hacker-proof? Such nebulous terms are utterly meaningless. Especially since bulletproof deals with physical objects, and nothing, not anything, can ever be made hacker-proof. The second step is to see the books discussion and placement of the nmap tool within the book. While nmap is a invaluable and important security tool; it is nonetheless but one tool in a large security toolbox. Books that place the bulk of their discussion of nmap at the beginning of a book are generally focused on the blind running of tools without insight or analysis. Those that place nmap towards the latter parts of the book generally focus on the big picture." Rothke reviews below Chris McNab's book Network Security Assessment; read on to see how it handles his assessment.

AccordionGuy writes "If you've ever spent an afternoon in the "Computers" section of a bookstore going through the programming language books, you've probably noticed that most of them seem to exist only to boost a publishing company's fortunes by capitalizing on the hot new programming language of the moment. These books -- essentially glorified bookends -- seem to follow the same format, cover the same subjects and aside from the tiny flourishes that are part of each author's particular writing style, are indistinguishable from each other. Reading them, one gets the feeling that its primary purpose is to allow the author to make some payments on a car or mortgage. I have a few of these books and they're gathering dust on the bookshelf farthest away from my desk." For deVilla's review of Dive Into Python, a book that inhabits a completely different category, read on below.

Chris Acheson writes "John Taylor Gatto is a former New York City school teacher. During his 30-year career, he has taught at 5 different public schools, has had his teaching license suspended twice for insubordination, and was once covertly terminated while on medical leave. He has also won the New York City Teacher of the Year award three times and the New York State Teacher of the Year award once during the final year of his career. The whole time he has been an outspoken critic of the school system. Nine years after leaving his career, he published The Underground History of American Education (full text available here), in which he puts forth his insider's vision of what is wrong with American schooling. His verdict is not what you'd expect: the school system cannot be fixed, Gatto asserts, because it has been designed not to educate. Skeptical? So was I." Read on for the rest of Acheson's review.

Daniel Jolley writes "I spend basically every waking hour online, and I have seen all kinds of crazy things on the Web over the years, yet I was amazed by some of the incredible things author Greg Holden describes in Internet Babylon: Secrets, Scandals, and Shocks on the Information Superhighway . This guy has gone where many fear to tread, digging up the goods on some of the Internet's most questionable, fascinating, oftentimes disturbing oddities. He has put all of this knowledge to a higher purpose, using it to describe the all-pervasive social change the Internet has wrought." Read on for the rest of Jolley's review.

Gianluca writes "If security is not a concern, installing the Apache web server is a simple task even for an inexperienced system administrator. The problem is that security should always be a concern, and in case of Apache the information about making it secure can be sparse and fragmented. This is probably the reason why many web administrators are pretty clueless when it comes to Apache security. Needless to say, this creates a worrisome situation (to say the least): many web servers are vulnerable and exposed to thousands of potential attackers." Read on for Gianluca's review of Hardening Apache, a book intended to consolidate and clarify that information.

Anton Chuvakin writes "Here is a really cool security book that made me lose half a night's sleep when I first got it. Richard Bejtlich's Tao of Network Security Monitoring (Tao of NSM) covers the process, tools and analysis techniques for monitoring your network using intrusion detection, session data, traffic statistical information and other data." Read on for Chuvakin's review of the book.

Raymond Lodato writes "Where do I begin? Oh yes! If you are a teenager who uses computers, or the parent or guardian of a teenager who does, buy Always Use Protection, by Dan Appleman! Let me take a little time to explain why." Read on for the rest of Lodato's review.

kcurtis writes "I realize this has nothing to do with technology, but I found this list of books (and related Boston Globe article) suggested by the US Chief of Staff of the Army fascinating. It is basically what General Peter Schoomaker thinks officers at different ranks should read. It includes classics like "The Art of War", and newer books like "Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest". It is also interesting for the changes made to the list. As noted in the Globe article, there is a new emphasis on the way the roles of an army may change."