Scott Abel writes "Kurt Ament has hit the nail on the head! His latest effort, Single Sourcing: Building Modular Documentation is a valuable reference for those of us who seek to save time, effort, and money by implementing a productive method of creating information once and reusing it often." It's not a big book -- just 246 pages. Read on for Abel's brief review.

rjnagle writes "When Marc Prensky asked a colleague who had just returned from a training course how it was, she replied, 'AFTRB.' (Another #$#$^&# Three Ring Binder) . In his book, Digital Game-Based Learning , Prensky, an instructional game designer and founder of games2train, argues that computer games are more effective learning tools because they sustain interest and attention in settings where people are normally bored." To follow that train of thought (or if you just liked Ender's Game), read on below for Nagle's lengthy review of the book.

peterwayner writes "If you're looking for more proof that good stories happen to those who can tell them, pick up a copy of James McManus's Positively Fifth Street, an adrenaline-charged, first person account of a reporter sent to cover the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. But why sit on the sidelines? He decides the only way to capture the true flavor is to risk his advance and enter. Along the way, he uses his journalistic license to justify trips to strip clubs, interviews with all of the female players, examinations of the ex-stripper wife of the tournament host, investigations of a murder, and winning bigger and bigger bets at the poker table." Sounds like fun. Read on for the rest of the review.

Martin Ecker writes "NVIDIA's book The Cg Tutorial: The Definitive Guide to Programmable Real-Time Graphics, published by Addison-Wesley is a book that many 3D graphics programmers have been waiting for. Finally a book is available that introduces NVIDIA's high-level shading language Cg (short for 'C for Graphics') and the concepts involved with writing shader programs for programmable graphics pipeline architectures to the interested reader." If you are such an interested reader, you'll find the rest of Ecker's review below.

adamba writes: "Why are manhole covers round?" "How many gas stations are there in the United States?" "How would you design a remote control for venetian blinds?" "What company is famous for interview questions like those?" You might not know the answer to the first three questions, but you probably know the last one. The notion of asking "Microsoft interview questions," quick logic puzzles and brainteasers, has become accepted wisdom for many technology companies. In comparison, the questions asked during traditional interviews, such as "Describe your typical day" and "What is your greatest weakness?" seem too simplistic, too easy to handle with a prepared answer, too prone to allowing weak candidates to slip through: they simply don't reveal enough about the person. While the Microsoft questions appear to be a better way to evaluate people, the issue has never really been seriously examined. Microsoft's success would seem to make the argument pointless: Can $250 billion in market capitalization be wrong?" Read on for an interesting look at the details and justifications for this kind of interview.

jpetts writes "If you have an interest in cryptography and spend even a small amount of time looking at the subject on the Internet, you will almost certainly have come across the name Bruce Schneier. His book, Applied Cryptography is widely regarded as the most accessible, and one of the most important books on cryptographic algorithms ever published. Schneier has also published other books, including the less technical Secrets and Lies, an thought-provoking book aimed at getting people to think about the whole of the security landscape, not just cryptography. Now, together with Niels Ferguson, renowned cryptographic expert, and longtime collaborator, another immensely valuable book on security has just appeared." Read on for the rest of jpetts' review.

Alex Moskalyuk writes "Ben Hammersley's Content Syndication with RSS is a step-by-step guide to implementing RSS. This standard is gaining popularity among the Web community, and some of your favorite sites might syndicate their content as RSS feeds. The new O'Reilly publication focuses on many aspects of this standard, and is of primary interest to developers, Web site designers, data architects and anyone interested in distributing their data around the Web." So if you have a steady stream of information for your customers, family, or fans, read on for the rest of Alex's review.

ginormous writes "Philip Taubman's new book, Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage is perhaps the most exciting book ever written about the Eisenhower administration. (Did you know the Eisenhower administration was exciting?) It traces the story of how aerial reconnaissance developed from conventional planes (modified bombers and such) outfitted with cameras through the high-altitude, high-speed U-2 and SR-71 planes and the Corona satellite." Read on for more on this book.

dvdweyer writes "This book deals with administration of UNIX (one wonders why the book doesn't bear the title "Essential UNIX Administration"), all major UNIX platforms are covered, most of them in their almost latest version when the book went to press (Linux: Red Hat 7.3 and SuSE 8.0, Solaris 8 and 9, FreeBSD 4.6, AIX 5, HP-UX 11/11i, Tru64 5.1), SCO and IRIX were dropped for this edition, FreeBSD was added. Other UNIXes (e.g. Debian Linux) are not mentioned, but this makes the book only a little bit less useful on those, with some imagination the information can be used, except for special topics (e.g. package management). This book is on system administration and not targeted on desktop users, as such it doesn't cover KDE, Gnome or any desktop application." Dvddwyer's section-by-section review continues below.

Ursus Maximus contributes this review of Python in a Nutshell, writing "Perhaps the best book about Python ever written, this is the perfect capstone to anyone's library of Pythonic books, and also the perfect introduction to Python for anyone well versed in other programming languages. For newbies to programming, this would still be a good second book after a good introductory book on Python, such as Learning Python by Mark Lutz." Read on for the rest of his review.

peterwayner writes "If you're a bit tired of programming books, API descriptions, tables of keywords, and arguments about which data structure is buzzword compliant, super-mega-efficient and intuitively easy to grasp, turn to Developing Online Games , a book that seems to have very little interest in many of the traditional challenges for programmers. The authors spend four lines discussing the best computer language for the job (C/C++), conclude that objects give "far more flexibility in design" and then move on to fun questions like how to make a online game compelling for achievers, socializers, killers and explorers. This book is a wonderful psychoanalysis of the gamer's mind and it should be the first and last book read by game developers about to start a quest to capture the hearts, minds and subscription fees of people on the Internet." Read on for the rest of Peter's review.

WatkinsDore writes "The Executive's Guide to Information Technology is a book focused on the 'business' pieces of managing IT, such tasks as IT organization design, vendor selection and management, communicating with business users, IT human resource management, establishing IT steering committees and managing the overall demand within the IT department." Read on below for more of WatkinsDore's review.

Alan Eibner submitted this review of Addison-Wesley's Open Source Web Development With LAMP. He writes "The number of books about Web development technologies is astounding. Some claim you can learn everything you need to know in 24 hours. Others require several complementary volumes in order to learn the subject. Why another web development book? And what sets this one apart from the rest?" Read on for the rest of Alan's chapter-by-chapter review. Update: 04/11 18:22 GMT by T : I'd called this an O'Reilly book rather than Addison-Wesley; sorry, now fixed.

Reader JonKaye contributed this review of Reviewing Practical Statecharts in C/C++. He writes "Since I am not from the embedded system world, I was a bit apprehensive about approaching this book. While I can see that author Miro Samek has a directed target for his audience, I strongly feel that this book is a 'must read' for technical developers in all areas who want to improve their program design abilities or developers who want to understand the philosophy, use, and implementation of statecharts intimately." Read on for the rest.

cpfeifer writes "Performance has been the albatross around Java's neck for a long time. It's a popular subject when developers get together "Don't use Vector, use ArrayList, it's more efficient." "Don't concatenate Strings, use a StringBuffer, it's more efficient." It's a chance for the experienced developers to sit around the design campfire and tell ghost stories of previous projects where they implemented their own basic data structures {String, Linked List...} that was anywhere from 10-50% faster than the JDK implementation (and in the grand oral tradition of tall tales, it gets a little more efficient every time they tell it)." Want to kill the albatross? Read on for the rest of cpfeifer's review of O'Reilly's Java Performance Tuning, now in its 2nd edition.

ggoebel writes "Extending and Embedding Perl is, as it boldly states on the cover, 'The definitive guide to XS, embedding, and the Perl internals.' This book is well organized and information dense. One could spend days sifting through the available perlapi, perlcall, perlembed, perlguts perlxs, perlxstut, and h2xs documentation. After which you'll probably understand very well references to nethack's 'You are in a maze of twisty little passages all alike.' Or you could get yourself a copy of this book and find your way out of the maze." Read on for the rest of ggoebel's review.

honestpuck writes "It must be difficult when writing a book for 'power users' to decide what exactly needs to be put in and what can be safely left out. This volume does the job quite well, covering the simple stuff quickly and early while devoting a great deal of its 750 pages to topics of more interest to serious users of Apple's new(ish) operating system. It also declares its audience early, the preface devotes a page to explaining the target audience and states it is 'aimed at folks with a more technical bent than the average user--the power user.'" Read on to see what Honestpuck thinks of O'Reilly's OS X in a Nutshell.

ggoebel writes "Programming Web Services with Perl is principally a book on implementing solutions using XML-RPC and SOAP in Perl. It also covers complementary and alternative standards such as WSDL, UDDI, and REST in some detail. And on the periphery, it finishes with a whirlwind tour of developing message routing, alternative data encoding within XML, security, transactions, workflow, internationalization, service discovery, extension, and management techniques and specifications." Read on for ggoebel's full review.

Chris Beasley writes "I have a PHP book that's 567 pages long. I have two SQL books: one has 377 pages; the other has 719. Yet I consider 295-page 'Build Your Own Database Driven Website using PHP & MySQL' by Kevin Yank more valuable than any of these books. Why? Because, while I may find only a quarter or, at best, half of these books useful on a regular basis, all 295 pages of Yank's new release are of value to me on a daily basis."

Duane Gran contributes this review of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, writing "The title of this book is a mouthful and the author, Martin Fowler, confronts headfirst complex topics of concern to software developers and architects. Fowler is a respected figure in software engineering circles, and his latest book is an attempt to codify best practices he learned in the trenches and through peer relationships. Many of the patterns will resonate with experienced developers, but Fowler's talent explaining abstract concepts will afford even the most grizzled reader many 'aha!' moments." Read on for the rest of Duane's review.