Craig Maloney writes with the review below of the latest release from User Friendly, laughware which finally hit 1.0 earlier this year. Read on for Craig's impressions of the book, which is loaded with more than just reprints of the UF comics you've seen on the web.

David Kennedy contributes the review below of Richard Hightower's new book Python Programming with the Java Class Libraries, subtitled A Tutorial for Building Web and Enterprise Applications with Jython, writing "This book tries to be suitable for both new and experienced programmers, and suffers from this decision. However, it presents all the central programming concepts clearly and is a decent primer on Jython. It is illustrated with copious code, and covers plenty of advanced topics. Worth reading if you're interesting in the Jython language. Oh, and ignore the sub-title."

No One You Know writes "I just finished reading an excellent book by Matt Ridley called Genome. The book is divided into 23 chapters, one for each chromosome. The author picks a significant gene from each chromosome to focus on, and explores a myriad of topics such as why we age, how life forms assemble themselves into full-grown adults starting from a blob of cells, how we form and store new memories, and how gene therapy works. I found the book very well-written, highly interesting, and quite accessible. Anyone that is interested in knowing more about themselves and all life on Earth would do themselves a service to read it." Read on below for the remainder of NOYK's review.

davorg writes "In the dim and distant past when I first started doing web development, there was a book that everybody had a copy of. It was called 'How to Set Up and Maintain a Web Site' and it was by Lincoln Stein. The reason why everyone owned (and, more importantly, read) it was that it contained a complete high-level snapshot of everything you needed to know in order to run a web site at that time. Unfortunately, after a second edition in 1997 the book hasn't been updated. I suppose that the subject area has grown so much that no-one thought that a complete overview would be too high-level to be useful. They were probably right." davorg's review continues below.

Anton Chuvakin submitted this review of Lance Spitzner's Honeypots: Tracking Hackers. Spitzner has previously contributed to a book and many online documents about the Honeynet Project. Chuvakin starts off, "If you liked "Know Your Enemy" by the Honeynet Project, you will undoubtedly like Lance Spitzner's (the Honeynet Project founder) new book "Tracking Hackers" much more. In fact, even if you did not quite like "Know Your Enemy", you will likely be deeply impressed with the new book on honeypots and their use for tracking hackers."

Andrew Marlatt, the mind behind the insidious, sarcastic SatireWire, has finally gone Onion. Fans of that fine news source, in fact, are probably the first ones who should check out this new compendium -- 183 magazine-size pages -- of SatireWire stories. SatireWire is a deadpan Fortune/Forbes/CIO Magazine (with a touch of Adbusters) to the Onion's USAToday/Newsweek/Times. The book is called Economy of Errors, and puts a virtual bathroom library of stories from BusinessMonth Weekly (published semiannually every day) into one volume. (Read on for the rest of my review.)

briandonovan writes "A new edition? Given all of the changes in the web programming landscape since the 1998 publication of the previous edition, David Flanagan's JavaScript : The Definitive Guide (JS:TDG4), 4th Edition was overdue. Flanagan delivers a book that more than measures up to its predecessor - JS:TDG4 includes a substantial amount of new material and, as a whole, has been extensively updated. The crushing gain in browser market share by Microsoft's Internet Explorer offering, the maturation of the Netscape 6.x,7.x / Mozilla browser suite and its entry into the fray along with a slew of other Gecko-based browsers, promulgation of newer versions of the ECMAScript specification (accompanied by new implementations in JavaScript and JScript), and the publication of successive W3C DOM Recommendations are all reflected in this edition."

MattE writes: "Alton Brown, for those who aren't familiar, has a cooking show on the Food Network called Good Eats. His new book isn't so much a cookbook, in the current sense of a book that contains a heck of a lot of recipes. (It does, in fact, contain recipes, but it really isn't what the book is about.) See the Perl cookbook, for a translation of this idea to programming. It is a book about cooking that covers science and technique first; Recipes are only example code. He says he is a 'culinary cartographer.'" This sounds like a fun book -- for the rest of Matt's review, read on below.

PerlDiver writes: "Perl for Web Site Management by John Callender is for web professionals -- designers, editors, HTML jockeys -- who have never programmed before, but who now find themselves with the need to create their own site-management tools, automated web clients, and web-based applications. The title is an understatement; the book covers not just Perl programming but the bulk of what a novice needs to learn to function in a UNIX environment, from pwd and man to installing software packages from source tarballs. If you or anyone you know wants to cross the chasm from 'content' to 'code,' get this book." Read on for the rest of his review.

Brooks Peck writes: "The Chronoliths, by the underappreciated* Robert Charles Wilson, is a finalist for the 2001 Hugo Award and Campbell Award. The tale begins in 2021 with the abrupt arrival of the first Chronolith, a 200-foot-high monument of unknown composition that memorializes a military victory. It's dated twenty years in the future. More Chronoliths follow, blinking into existence with explosive force--usually in the centers of cities. Each is grander than the last, and each lauds another victory by a leader who does not currently exist."

dooling writes: "Perl & XML is a well-written book that accomplishes what it sets out to do. It states in the preface that it is written for Perl programmers who want to learn about XML and what is available in Perl for XML processing. It achieves this goal, but little else. When you are done reading this book you will have been given an overview of Perl and XML, know where to begin to attack an XML document, and know where to look to find more information." For dooling's more complete review, read on below.

Remember Pong, Raid on Bungeling Bay, or Earthworm Jim? E-games are now both historic and significant, representations of the birth of a culture. They embody a value system, mind-boggling inspiration, common language and experience. And they are finally getting their due. It is unbelievable how far video games have come in the past 30 years, from pinball systems to the console wars raging between Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft, or how important they are culturally. In these games are the stories of the transition from one age to another. Electronic games have spread the psychology of interactivity, re-defined narrative, and are a huge and growing swath of pop culture. They are a gazillion-dollar business, already surpassing films in revenues. They have altered the consciousness and cognitive traits of at least one generation, perhaps two. High Score: the illustrated history of electronic games, by Rusel Demaria and Johnny L. Wilson, is a beautifully organized history of this astounding and little-chronicled phenomenon, from primitive pinballs to the powerful new 3-D entertainment consoles.

David Mazzotta writes: "The jacket copy of these novels declares the writer, Haruki Murakami, to be 'a Japanese Philip K. Dick with a sense of humor.' That's pretty accurate. But while Murakami shares Dick's inventive imagination and plots that containing fantastic, near-mystical overtones, these novels are populated with deeper, more identifiable characters." If that's an intriguing idea for you, read on for the rest of David's review.

WrinkledShirt writes: "There's a whole lot of posturing going on in the world on Internet programming right now, and with all of Microsoft's slick marketing for .NET there's never been a better time to remind the industry which platform got it right first. Enter XML and Java, Developing Web Applications (2nd Ed.) , a book that promises to show just how much of a heavy-hitter Java still is in the enterprise world. Because of the variety of technologies available for Java, Addison Wesley took the approach of bringing in a bunch of experts in the field to cover the different ways that Java and XML can work together. Considering the effort that went into coordinating this collaborative work, it couldn't possibly miss, right?" Read on to see how true that is, in Wrinkled's estimation.

Geekboy(Wizard) writes: "MySQL has been used as a database for many sites and products. The U.S. Census Bureau, Slashdot, Yahoo Finance, and many other high-traffic web sites use MySQL for their database needs. It is a popular choice for databases, as it is GPL'd and thus free from costly licenses. If you need to use it in a proprietary application, you can purchase a non-GPL'd version from MySQL AB." Read on for Geekboy's review of Managing and Using MySQL: Second Edition, which he describes as "the only thing you /need/ to make a usable database."

cpfeifer writes with the review below of O'Reilly's 802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide; he warns that this is not a book for everyone setting up a casual home wireless network, but says it's excellent for its intended audience. Read on for his complete review.

Teresa Esser writes "Karen Donoghue's new book, Built for Use: Driving Profitability Through the User Experience was clearly written for marketing professionals and upper level managers. Slashdot readers may find that some of the material in this book is intuitively obvious. But it's great to have a book like this on your shelf when you're trying to have a discussion with a co-worker who doesn't understand why corporate Web sites need to be user-friendly." Read on for the rest of her below.

Hettinga writes: "Through many popular books and articles in the New York Times, Peter Wayner has done more to promote the field of applied financial cryptography, and in particular open source financial cryptography, than any other author writing today. His new book, Translucent Databases, from Flyzone Press, is no exception." Read on for the rest of the review.

prostoalex writes: "Teaching developers to program for wireless platforms is probably not an easy task, since there are just so many focus groups in your audience. This book assumes that reader is already familiar with J2EE concepts, has programmed Java and knows the basic APIs for string manipulation and mathematical operations. Learning Wireless Java was a part of my first-month Safari subscription, and since learning to program for Java-enabled phones was a specific task I set for myself, there were some other books on the list that taught you the details of J2ME."

wackybrit writes: "The concept of the virtual machine is one of the most important concepts in computer science today. Emulators use virtual machines, operating systems use virtual machines (Microsoft's .NET), and programming languages use virtual machines (Perl, Java)". Read on for his review of Virtual Machine Design and Implementation in C/C++, an attempt to examine and explain virtual machines and the concepts which allow them to exist.