SpinDoctor writes "Looking across the XML bookshelf today, it's easy to see many books discussing XML in a generic manner, or more commonly how to utilize XML within Java, .NET and Perl. Moreover, despite the broad based support that PHP has for XML, there has been no book that tackled the complexities and best practices, and at the same time offered a comprehensive resource to the XML-based APIs -- at least not until now. Read on for more about the best selling Professional PHP4 XML." Read on for the complete review.

chromatic writes with the review below of Writing Perl Modules for CPAN, which explains at a level "between novice and intermediate user" (and in a minimum of space) how to contribute to Perl's own Library of Alexandria.

David Mazzotta writes "Reading like an extended, Darin Morgan-penned episode of the X-files (Humbug, Bruckman, Coprophages, Chung), Christopher Buckley's Little Green Men uses alien abductions and UFO conspiracies as a backdrop for some of the surest and funniest satires in recent years." Read on for the rest of David's review; I tend to prefer books from William F. Buckley, but this one sounds fun.

David Kennedy writes "Applied Java Patterns is an adequate Design Patterns reference for those who must have a Java version of the classic Gamma et al (aka Gang of Four, or GoF) Design Patterns, but it's only adequate. If C++ or Smalltalk hold little fear for you, stick with the original sources: 'This isn't the definitive Java Design Patterns book we're looking for -- move along.'" Read on for the rest of David's review.

davorg writes "Over the last few years mod_perl has become a serious force in web development. If you're building a web site to run on an Apache server and you want to write the code in Perl, then you're going to want to install mod_perl on your server too as it's the best way to avoid many of the performance issues with traditional CGI. It's taken a while for publishers to wake up to the fact, however, and there haven't been many books in the shops. It looks like this will be the year that this changes. A number of mod_perl books are about to be published and this is the first." Read on below for Daveorg's thoughts on this one.

Bonker writes: "When I first picked up 'ChronoSpace', parts of which were published earlier in 'Asimov's Science Fiction', it initially looked like an interesting time-travel thriller-- something we've seen many of, but not a story that gets old due to its variations. Indeed, the story starts out revolving around the central premise that the small percentage of UFO's sighted that can't be explained away as airplanes, comets, or blimps, are in actuality time-travelling ships from the future sent to investigate the past." Read on for Bonker's thoughts on how the book progresses from there.

dooling writes "Continuing the tradition of well written O'Reilly 'Programming' books by those who know the language best, Programming PHP, co-written by the creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, provides a detailed overview of the popular PHP web-page scripting language. This book provides good programmers who have never used PHP enough information to do serious web development using PHP and serves as an excellent reference for web-page designers who dabble in PHP." Read on for the rest of his review.

Alexander Moskalyuk reviews below the new O'Reilly title Essential Blogging, which he points out is available not only for purchase through conventional purchase, but also with O'Reilly's Safari Online subscription, where it's available for a mere 1 point. Read on for his take on how useful Essential Blogging really is.

John F.X. Sundman is the author of Acts of the Apostles , an independently published, computer science, science fiction-attach-whatever-label-you-want-but-it's-good book, which we've reviewed on Slashdot before. Recently, he's taken his other work Cheap Complex Devices, updated, edited, and put together a package with Acts, available in PDF and dead tree version. I had the pleasure of reading both of them again -- read more to see my thoughts.Update: 09/09 16:11 GMT by T : Oops -- that should have read (as it now does) "Cheap Complex Devices" rather than "Cheap Computing Devices." That is all.

Peter Wayner writes: "If you're one of the last few who believe that the numbers on your portfolio statement are any more permanent than a spring day, a sun tan, or a wink in a bar, you may want to tune into John Motavalli's new book, Bamboozled At the Revolution: How Big Media Lost Billions in the Battle for the Internet. The book follows the stumbling attempt by the old school in the media to turn their so-called power into dominance over the new domain. Numbers fly back and forth. Executives fret over turf. Dreams of glory float skywards. Yet in the end, it's just as Ecclesiastes warned: 'All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.'" Read on below.

Robert Nagle writes: "Apache's HTTP server has been by many measures the most popular web server on the web, and perhaps the primary application that drives people to Linux and open source. Three years ago, Wrox published the definitive book on running the Apache server by Peter Wainwright. Excellent though the book was, it badly needed updating. In May 2002, Wrox published another book, Professional Apache 2.0, which covers the new generation of Apache server, as well as older 1.3x versions that are still running production servers around the world." Robert's review continues, below.

Alexander Moskalyuk writes "Most of the people I know have a love-hate relationship with Kip Irvine's Assembly Language for Intel-based Computers. Ask any student who used this textbook and you will either get a cheerful 'I've used it, it's great, I learned Assembly, and it has lots of useful examples' or resentful 'The book is horrible, hard to follow and full of code that is irrelevant to the contents of a specific chapter.'" Alexander's review of the book (below) concentrates on its role as an instructional aid, and on the differences between the third and fourth editions.

joefrench writes: "It might seem strange to review a C# book on Slashdot, especially one published by Microsoft, but I felt that there must be a lot of readers like me -- programmers who know Java, but want/need to learn something about C# and .NET. C# for Java Developers aims to teach experienced Java programmers how to write in C#." Joe outlines what he considers the book's good points (many) and weak points (few) in the rest of his review, below.

stemnitsa writes: "Michael Ruse is, somewhat unusually, a professor of both philosophy and zoology. In this book he looks at how evolutionary thought developed between 1830 and 1875. The book was originally published in 1979; the text has not been revised for the new edition but Ruse has included an Afterword in which he looks at new research that has come out in the intervening years. There has been an immense outpouring of publications about Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution since his book first appeared but it still merits an honourable place, both for its insights and for its readability, enhanced by touches of humour. To some extent it covers the same territory as Peter Bowler's "Evolution: the history of an idea", but its focus is narrower in time while providing more in-depth discussion of the philosophical and religious ideas of Darwin's contemporaries." The remainder of stemnitsa's review follows; this book sounds like a good one to pair with Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution, reviewed last week by Danny Yee.

BShive writes "Developing Applications with Java and UML focuses on building and modeling industrial-strength Java applications. The book takes you step-by-step through a product lifecycle and software process. You do not need to know UML or OO Design, as both new and experienced Java developers will benefit from reading this book. It is highly focused on process, so developers will have to put aside the 'jump in and code' attitude." Read on below for the remainder of his review.

Johnzo writes: "It seems ludicrous to imagine that a spaceship could ascend into orbit and beyond by riding the impulses produced by a series of external atomic explosions. Such an idea would perhaps be more properly confined to science fiction -- like the Niven & Pournelle classic Footfall. But Footfall drew its inspiration from a real-life project, a project that, according to George Dyson's Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship, continues to offer exciting possibilities for space exploration." This sounds like a fascinating book; read on below for johnzo's full review.

ny writes: "Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution is not popular science, but as a broad overview of the processes of evolutionary change it is reasonably accessible to non-specialists. I recommend it to anyone who has read Gould and Dawkins and Ridley and so forth and now wants something more substantial." This sounds like a book to interest anyone interested in current ideas in evolution -- read on below for Danny's complete review.

prostoalex writes: "In the world of information technology, information, as the name suggests, is as important as technology itself. Erik T. Ray's and Jason McIntosh's Perl and XML is an attempt to take a look at perhaps the most popular languages for data processing. XML is an open-standard specification for documents, while Perl's natural powers lie in the area of data processing, and, as the name suggests, practical extracting and reporting." Prostalex has reviewed Perl & XML below; read on for his take on the book.

Craig Maloney writes: "Bram Moolenaar's Vim editor has quickly become the clone of choice for users of the venerable vi editor. Unfortunately, until recently finding documentation for the features of Vim meant spending quality time with the help files that come with Vim. While the help files are very good, a manual/tutorial of the Vim editor was needed. Other vi books included scant pages about the improvements of Vim over standard vi, but Vim isn't only a slight improvement to vi. Vi IMproved -- Vim is the manual Vim users need to help them get the full benefit out of Vim." Read on for more of Craig's review of this book below.

When direct database access to the information you need isn't available, but web pages with the right data are, you might pursue "screen-scraping" -- fetching a web page and scanning its text for the appropriate pieces of text in order to do further processing. LWP (Library for WWW access in Perl) is a collection of module to help you do this. mir writes: " Perl & LWP is a solid, no-nonsense book that will teach you how to do screen-scraping using Perl. It describes how to automatically retrieve and use information from the web. An introduction to LWP and related modules from simple to advanced uses and various ways to extract information from the returned HTML."