Reader amoon writes: "With the rise of XML-based RPC (e.g. SOAP, XML-RPC, APEX), the distributed computing world is starting to really unsettle from the CORBA-RMI-DCOM oligopoly of the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, XML-based RPC is not a panacea (though it is quite cool), especially for those of us involved in the legacy and client-server worlds. Now, what is fascinating: the publishing world is revving up the engines on not only the XML-based RPC stuff, but also the RMI and CORBA stuff -- while rarely applied to the tech industry, the old adage, "what was old is new again," seems to fit well here. This review describes this über-cool trend from the RMI perspective, with a focus on Java RMI (O'Reilly) by William Grosso." Read on for the rest of the review.

SilverStr writes: "With all the recent discussion on organizations rethinking their security strategies, I thought I would do a review on one of my favorite books. I have stayed pretty quiet on /. over the years, but security is something I don't think developers anywhere should be taking lightly. Hopefully some of them will get something out of my review and pick this book up." Read on for the rest of his review of Ross Anderson's Security Engineering.

Richard Miller contributed this review of New Riders' entry to the field of VPN books. No suspense, he gives the book a big thumbs up -- read on below for his reasoning, in particular a comparison to the previously available alternatives.

Two Slashdot (and Slashcode) readers -- Alex McLintock of Openweb Analysts Ltd, and Dave Aiello of CTDATA -- have graciously contributed their impressions of the new O'Reilly book Running Weblogs With Slash. Since the Slash code is now used to run sites covering a huge number of topics (fly fishing, mountain biking, "news for nerds," etc.), it's time there was at least one printed reference to it.

-cman- writes: "The issue of human impact on the global environment is one -- if not the most --important and divisive issues of our generation. There are two key questions involved; is human activity having a major impact on the climate of the Earth? What, if anything should be done to minimize that impact? It is within the lifetimes of most of Slashdot's readers that we begin to get answers to these questions. We will either begin to make policy and economic changes to protect the environment or we won't. And towards the middle and end of this century we will begin to see real-time data to validate some of the predictions being bandied about by environmental scientists. Amid all the uncertainty that the above two questions generate comes a new book, The Skeptical Environmentalist; Measuring the Real State of the World.." Read on for the rest of -cman-'s review.

danny writes: "The New Chemistry is a survey of the science behind many of Slashdot's technology stories - read on for my review. (An older title of related interest is Chemical Evolution: Origin of the Elements, Molecules, and Living Systems )." Read on for the rest of Danny's review.

markwelch writes: "Late last year, I read a truly awful book: Stephan Paternot's A Very Public Offering, a poorly-written account of the rise and fall of TheGlobe.com. The company has consistently been cited by critics as one of the worst/best examples of absurd internet-stock mania, but this book by the company's founder offered no real apologies, and provided very little insight. I don't blame Paternot, a young man who was willingly manipulated by market-makers, and who clearly is not a professional writer." Marc is less forgiving of writer John Cassidy, whose recent book Dot.Con he dissects below -- read on as he completes the thought.

Sysadmins should at least pretend to be nice to their users, but we all can think of times when some of them aren't. Craig Maloney may not endorse cruelty to users, but he contributed the following review, which should amuse at the very least the bastards among you, and anyone who's chortled at previous Plan Nine books.

Are intelligent machines transforming life as we know it? Or is A.I. yet another overhyped, self-serving fantasy by deluded scientists and technocrats talking mostly to one another, foisting their ill-conceived, poorly-engineered creations on an unsuspecting public? The discussion has rarely been better framed than in software-culture writer Sam Williams's short, readable and smartly-organized new paperback book Arguing A.I.: The Battle for Twenty-first Century Science," published by atRandom.com, the e-book division of Random House.

Stalwart reviewer Duncan Lawie contributed this review of Susan Solomon's The Coldest March, the epic tale of an early and tragic polar expedition, not long after returning from an Antarctic trip of his own. (Imagine spending New Year's en route to the southern ice.) Duncan's been cooking up some other things lately, too -- like an interview with Science Fiction writer Ken Macleod and a review of the LotR movie from a "bookist" perspective.

babbage writes:"As the banner above the title of James Tisdall's Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics indicates, this book is 'an introduction to Perl for biologists.' What the banner doesn't mention is that it's also an introduction to biology and bioinformatics for Perl programmers, and it's also an introduction to both Perl *and* biology for people that have never really been exposed to either field. The author has clearly thought a lot about making one book to please these different audiences, and he has pulled it off nicely, in a way that manages to explain basic topics to people learning about each field for the first time while not coming off as condescending or slow-paced to those that might already have some exposure to it." Read on for the rest of his review.

Stella Daily writes: "The unlikely subject of Ron Howard's film A Beautiful Mind , based on the 1998 Sylvia Nasar book of the same name, is John Forbes Nash Jr., a mathematical genius whose doctoral thesis earned him a Nobel Prize -- and a schizophrenia patient whose illness kept him out of the academic community for decades. The John Nash of the film is a brilliant young man who doesn't quite fit in, ignores his classes, is gawky with women and, above all, is consumed with a desire for an original idea. It is easy to like this Nash, with his Southern drawl and his earnest demeanor, and to sympathize with him as he fights his way back from insanity." Stella explains below why things aren't quite that simple.

David Weinberger, one of the co-authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual, is one of many celebrated practitioners of what loosely came to be known as cybertheory. The Manifesto began with the memorable phrase "People of Earth" and was "aimed squarely at the solar plexus of corporate America," one reviewer alleged. (You remember those days. Everything about the Net was aimed at the solar plexus of one thing or another). The book purported to show how the Internet was turning business upside down. But that, of course, was then, and this is now. Nobody seems to have noticed that if anything has been turned upside down, it's the Net. Weinberger has struck again in his new book Small Pieces Loosely Joined , (Perseus) a "unified theory of the Web." This time, the Web is changing life itself. Is he on the same Web? Mostly, what this book suggests is the end of CyberBS. And good riddance.

WrinkledShirt contributed this review of a Professional Linux Programming, a tome he says can "bend light" by its sheer size -- 1155 pages of multi-author, multi-language instruction and examples. Read on for his thoughts on the book's shortcomings as well as its strengths, and remember, lift with your knees, not with your back.

In the The Brave New World of Work, Ulrich Beck argues that the work society as we've known it is coming to an end. More and more people are ousted from their jobs by smart technologies. In the United States, all the but the highest-level workers are now unsure of their jobs and incomes. The idea of middle-class security is eroding, and so -- Beck believes they are related -- is worker enthusiasm for democratic practices like voting. Work here and in much of the West is increasingly resembling labor patterns in the Third World -- fluid, part-time, entrepeneurial, free-lance, self-directed. The idea of the "job for life" has disappeared, temporarily creating a political economy of insecurity. Down the road, he argues, this new kind of work society may actually be good for the world, creating a new kind of civil transnationalism, and enhancing our freedom and our civic lives.

Wrinkled Shirt writes: "If you want to be able to work either as or with a systems analyst, you're going to have to speak the same language as everyone else in your team, and in the tech industry that language is increasingly becoming the UML. The Unified Modelling Language provides ways of modelling every sort of system that you can imagine, covering everything from the relationships of your different objects to the dynamics of the system in action to the way it'll look when you physically set it up." He's reviewed below the SAMS-published Teach Yourself UML in 24 Hours; read on below for his reactions to the book, both good and bad.

Fans of Vernor Vinge know that he's a computer scientist, now retired, and science fiction writer. An interview we linked to a few months ago does a good job of discussing some of his ideas about the Singularity, the point in time when humans create a machine intelligence that is smarter than we are. Vinge's novella True Names was written in 1981, and forecast many aspects of the internet of today. True Names and The Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier is an anthology of the True Names novella and several shorter articles by other technically-inclined folk. If you haven't read the original True Names, this book is worth it for that story alone.

Steve MacLaughlin writes with proof that not everyone with a database wants to send you spam or sell your information to the highest bidder, even if only for the good reason that you'd be loathe to do business with them afterward. "Companies have access to more information about their customers than ever before, and customers aren't exactly jumping for joy. Purchasing habits, medical information, financial reports, favorite music groups, and millions of other bits of personal information are being captured by companies. In Making It Personal: How to Profit from Personalization without Invading Privacy, Bruce Kasanoff teaches businesses how to get closer to customers without violating their trust." Read on for the rest of his review.

Craig Maloney writes with this review of The Linux Cookbook, a hope-inspiring entrant in the still too-small category of generalized, readable references for non-programmers, as well as the even-smaller category of books with a complete free version online. Craig's found some flaws as well as bright spots, but it still sounds like a good book to check out for users who aren't sure which FM to R, no matter what their level of experience.

mfarah writes: "I've liked science-fiction ever since my mother introduced me to the genre with a couple of Asimov's books when I was ten years old. I read a decent amount of it in high school, but pretty much abandoned the whole thing in university (not enough time and no money; my Usenet addiction didn't help)." Now he's going to try to soak up some of your time (but not too much) with this review of another Science Fiction classic, below.