Francis White writes "Hacker's Challenge 2 is the second volume in a series of books that present a series of real-world security scenarios and their solutions. For each scenario, information is given, clues are presented and questions are asked of the reader. Turning to the back of the book reveals what really happened along with suggestions and tips for how to respond to and possibly even prevent each presented attack." Read on for the rest of his review.

bADlOGIN writes "Anyone and everyone on Slashdot probably knows that business-driven software development efforts all too often end up as a mess. After a number of years of observation, research, and fine tuning, Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle have released a book that makes a subtle but vital revelation about the nature of software projects and how to better run them. Learning what Scrum is and how to practice it is not all that profound. However, sitting back and realizing why Scrum works and how it addresses the fundamental flaws of the last 20 years of software engineering is. This book could be viewed as the "why" component to all of Extreme Programming's "how."

Kerberos99 writes "Mission Critical Security Planner is a timely and important book from Eric Greenberg, author of Network Application Frameworks (reviewed on Slashdot and used as a text in many CS courses). In Mission Critical Security Planner (MCSP),Greenberg advocates an actionable, meaningful security approach that doesn't get hung up on methodology or reliance on abstract standards, like DoD and other common standards." Read on for the rest of Kerberos99's review.

chrisd has taken time off from polls and posting to both read and review Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Read on for his impressions of the book, which he says is "not really a story about the men so much as the science they pursued."

PinglePongle writes with this review of Addison Wesley's Extreme Programming for Web Projects, writing "The authors work for a web shop, building websites for customers, and try to use their experience to make life easier for their readers. Their main point concerns how traditional web projects are structured to leave at least one of the parties taking a big risk on the project: if the project is 'fixed price, fixed scope' the developers take all the risk, if it's 'time & materials' the customer takes a risk -- they can not be sure their money will lead to whatever it is they want." Read on to see whether the authors have successfully outlined a fairer, more successful system in the rest of PinglePongle's review, below.

rjnagle writes "The availability of HOW-TOs and newsgroups is supposed to make the sysadmin's job easier, right? Much as I am a proponent of the 'distributed learning model' for Linux, the endless searching for answers on the Web for setting up Linux RAID was getting to be a royal pain. Sure, there was a RAID how-to and an excellent newgroup, but some of the information is out of date, and the tricks suggested by people a year ago may be no longer needed today. Robert reviews the O'Reilly title Managing RAID on Linux below to see how it stacks up to HOWTOs, guesswork and anecdotal evidence.

nanojath writes "The title of William Gibson's latest release, Pattern Recognition, seems particularly appropriate. While widely noted for its 'departure' from Gibson's usual genre in that it is set in the more-or-less present day, the themes, characters, and plot devices of Pattern Recognition are fully in line with the Gibson canon. Whether this is a good thing will depend greatly on the individual reader, Neil Gaiman's assertion that it's Gibson's best effort since Neuromancer notwithstanding. The short version: readers who enjoy Gibson's later work will probably find this typically fast-paced mystery to be a satisfying read, if not their favorite example among his post-Eighties efforts. Those who feel that Gibson's fire has been progressively dwindling as he navigates middle age will probably feel that Pattern Recognition is more of the same, the fast-forward technology of Neuromancer an increasingly muted backdrop to the main attraction of psychological and sociological themes." Read on for the rest of nanojath's review.

benjiboo writes "This is one of the many books designed to help the average technical manager or developer get a feel for what the .NET framework means for them. Primarily geared towards developers and technical managers, this book aims to cut through the marketing hype. But, does it succeed? Read on for Benjiboo's answer to that question.

Reader yamla writes with the following review of Mike and Phani's Essential C++ Techniques from APress. Yamla finds a few bright spots in this book, but also several weaknesses. Read on to see whether you fit into the group he says would find this book useful.

doom writes "There seems to be some interest just now in technical books based on freely licensed content, so I thought I would discuss the Dossier series from Rich Morin's Prime Time Freeware project." Doom has provided an overview of this series; read on below to find out for yourself why he says man pages and other free documentation are worth paying for in dead-tree format.

gse writes "I first heard about Po Bronson's What Should I Do With My Life? here on Slashdot a few weeks ago, then read more about it on NPR. I found these articles and excerpts compelling and inspiring, so I picked up the book. Before I get into the review, some quick background on me so it's clear where I'm coming from: I'm a geek. I've been programming since I was a little kid, I have a computer science degree, I contribute to open source projects, I've been coding professionally for ten years. I am "successful" in my career. But I've found my day job unfulfilling for years, and as a musician I often wonder if I should follow my heart elsewhere. I imagine I'm not the only Slashdot reader who fits this description." Read on for Scott's take on this book.

It's not as racy as F'd Companies , but it is another website that's made the leap to print; this one you could let small children read, and even be happy about it. jenb writes with the review below, only slightly offbeat for Slashdot, of A Word A Day. You may appreciate this link to dictionary.com, too.

davorg writes "One of Perl's great strengths is in processing text files. That is, after all, why it became so popular for generating dynamic web pages -- web pages are just text (albeit text that is supposed to follow particular rules). As XML is just another text format, it follows that Perl will be just as good at processing XML documents. It's therefore surprising that using Perl for XML processing hasn't received much attention until recently. That's not saying that there hasn't been work going on in that area -- many of the Perl XML processing modules have long and honourable histories -- it's just that the world outside of the Perl community doesn't seem to have taken much notice of this work. This is all set to change with the publication of this book and O'Reilly's Perl and XML." Read on to see how well Davorg thinks this book introduces XML text processing with Perl to the wider world.

PinglePongle writes "Kent Beck is well known as one of the main drivers behind eXtreme Programming -- a style of development which favours a very disciplined but low-formality approach to coding. Writing applications 'test-first' is one of the practices of XP, and this book explores the subject of test-driven development in detail." Read on for the complete review.

PHPee writes ""Learn the concepts and build the applications..." - PHP and MySQL Web Development is a well-written web developer's guide to using these open source products to create dynamic websites quickly and easily. This book covers everything you need to design, build and debug your own website from the ground up. Special attention is paid real-world issues, like database normalization and site security. Overall, a great reference for beginner and more advanced programmers alike." Read on for the rest of his review.

Steve Mushero writes "Alfred Loomis - Lawyer, Wall St. Tycoon, Scientist, Inventor, Catalyst. This biography follows the life and times of Alfred Loomis of Tuxedo Park, NY, a man I'd never heard of. Imagine my surprise to read the book jacket, which described him as one of the most powerful men on Wall Street in the 1920's, a brilliant physicist, inventor of RADAR, LORAN, and the man who kicked off the race to build the atom bomb. While far from a historian, I follow economic and military history with some interest and have never even heard this man's name; which, it turns out, was the way he wanted it." Read more about this obscure but important scientist and entrepreneur in the rest of Steve's review, below.

kurtkilgor writes "One of the most frustrating things about many areas of science and engineering today is that we know the basics but don't know how to put them together. We know a great deal about how atoms interact, but we aren't so sure about how to combine them to make a 'big picture' of matter. We understand how an individual computer works, but how to build large informational networks with computers is another thing entirely. We know how people act individually, and yet we can't extrapolate the behavior of entire societies from this. I've long been interested in these types of complexity problems, but not a whole lot of material has been available. In particular, Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point left me searching for an explanation for the many curiosities that he presents. Is there a mathematical description of tipping points? Is there a way to find out when and why things tip? How does information spread through society?" Kurtkilgor reviews below Albert-László Barabási's Linked: The New Science of Networking, which attempts to answer these questions.

Alex Moskalyuk writes "Philip J. Kaplan's F'd Companies is a compilation of famous and not so well-publicized dot-com flameouts. Most of the companies that are described in the book do not exist today, for some others the domain names are being used for similar businesses, but the original management and business plans are gone. Even though F'd Companies presents several chapters in the table of contents, it's better viewed just as compilation of dot-com mishaps, with about one or two pages dedicated to each company." Read on for more Schadenfreude.

jnazario writes "In Dealers of Lightning, Michael Hiltzik illustrates a remarkable setting where research was leading to commercial products. Not all of it, though -- he is telling the story of Xerox PARC and discusses both technologies that made it to commercial shelves and too many that didn't. This is the central story of the book, told with great joy and creativity as well as skill. I got this book originally because I wanted a good read on the origin of network-based worms. What I got was one of the better books on the subject of the history of the computer industry I have yet found." Read on for more on Dealers of Lightning.

Doug Dante writes "Albert Morris is a detective, but he rarely places his real body in danger. Instead, each day he rises and imprints specialized dittos to do his legwork, review the evidence, meet others, and run errands while he stays home, tends his garden, and keeps his real body in good physical condition." Read more about dittos (and other manifestations of future technology) as portrayed in David Brin's Kiln People; Doug's review of the book continues below.