The below review was contributed by reader Lozzer, and deals with a book about one of the most fascinating figures in mathematics history (and cryptograhic history in particular). Nearly half a century after his suicide, Alan Turing is still fascinating and relevant on several levels.

Like Open Source and p2p, "multimedia" is a term that gets tossed around a lot, but in this case it's hard to find a coherent theme behind it, or a commonly- accepted definition. As Randall Packer and Ken Jordan point out in Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, the surprisingly readable, history-minded and idealistic volume of essays published this week, multimedia by its very nature is "open, democratic, nonhierarchical, fluid, varied, inclusive -- a slippery domain that evades the critic's grasp just on the verge of definition." It's important, too. (Read more.)

Our veteran reviewer Cliff Lampe takes time from work on his PhD to give you the lowdown on one of the most unusual books about a science-fiction movie that you are likely to encounter. Ever.

There's a raft of books about building online communities, but Amy Jo Kim's Community Building On The Web is one of the best. From Net Noir to Ultima Online, she goes a long way towards laying out what makes successful communities work. (Read more).

Duncan Lawie wrote this review of a book (a collection, really, but in a single volume) that's been more than 50 years in the making -- A good reminder that good fiction can transcend its time of origin. Maybe it helps that time of origin plays an important role in the stories collected here.

Craig Pfeifer wrote this review of Server-Based Java Programming, and in a world of books loaded with buzzwords, and sometimes volume at the expense of clarity, he claims that this volume suffers neither fault. (Even if you're sick of the word "Enterprise.")

We all know some Net obsessives -- people into gaming, IRC-yakking, trading, shopping, auctioning, coding, IM'ing, even moderating, just a bit too much. The problem isn't that the Net is dangerous, just that's it's so damned interesting compared to work or school. Sometimes it does interfere with life. Dr. David Greenfield has written a calm, useful non-phobic book for the people he calls "Netheads, cyberfreaks, and those who love them." He cops to being a bit addicted himself. (Read more).

For those inundated with data -- numbers, names, dates, temperatures, colors, seismographic sensor output, voting records(!), or anything else -- the paltry concerns of user interface may be less important than the assurance that they can make something useful from all that stuff. Data munger extraordinaire chromatic has again delivered his insightful dissection of a programming book aimed at people with Perl knowledge and a lot of data to wade through, and No, it's not from O'Reilly. Maybe it's for you.

Robots have been around in concept for longer than the word itself has been used to describe them, and for most of this century they've had a fair hold on the public imagination as either Utopian saviors or inexorable villains. Reader mtDNA sent in the evaluation below of a book called Robo sapiens: Evolution of a new species which may be the basis for a more realistic and neutral understanding about Robots, especially well suited to non-experts in that field. (I also found the other books in the series excellent.)

Reader bughunter contributed the review below of K.W. Jeter's Noir, which sounds like a good book to not read aloud to your small children, but otherwise intriguing: Dark, twisty speculation in the same vein as William Gibson and other pioneers.

Reader Pseudonym contributed this review of the visually dense tome The Art of the Matrix. I spent an hour with this coffee-table-size book a few weeks ago, and even though I'm not a big fan of the film itself, the book made me appreciate it a lot more. If you did like the film or know someone who did, I recommend it, even for the art alone. WARNING: May contain spoilers for the film. But you wouldn't be reading this review if you hadn't seen it already, would you?

Reader Jim Driggers contributed this review of a book which reopens a topic considered embarrassingly closed for several years. The debate over cold fusion after a couple of Utah scientists made some startling announcements about their non-traditional fusion experiments showed how quickly new ideas can appear, be hailed as world-changing, then be abandoned by most of the scientific community. This book raises the excellent question of whether such a rush to judgement may do more harm than good, and specifically whether there's more to cold fusion than the scoffing allows.

You're probably familiar with the conventional wisdom that online interactions can lead to a polarization of ideas and of people, by encouraging a culture and attitude of constant reinforcement of already-held ideas. Freematt (Matthew Gaylor) presents below a critical reaction to the interventionism Cass Sunstein proposes to counteract this perceived trend in Republic.com.

However skeptical the ads make you, it's hard to deny that what used to be considered supercomputing power keeps showing up in consumer-priced boxes, and the threshold of what really is extreme has crept steadily upward. If you're planning a project of more than average size, though, the review that chromatic contributed below of Planning Extreme Programming could be a valuable read, and the ideas in the book itself could save you a lot of money and time. Even if you have no plans to desire to install a beowulf in your broomcloset, it's interesting to consider what sort of thought must go into any large-scale programming project.

On-the-fly organization may suffice for keeping track of scripts /bin on your local machine, but larger projects have more at stake when it comes to coordinating the effort of programmers, especially when they're not even in the same timezone, never mind in the same room. CVS has become the lifeblood of many such projects. Reader Craig Pfeifer suggests CVS Pocket Reference as a good way to help keep that lifeblood flowing.

Reader LetterJ preheated his brain, stirred in some acronyms, and sent in his review of The PHP Developer's Cookbook, which sounds like a more-than-usually-useful guide to solving specific programming problems. This "cookbook" approach is one I'd like to see in more books, too.

Steven Levy's Crypto is a brief history of the men involved in developing modern cryptography. If you've read Applied Cryptography or another work with a mathematical emphasis on crypto, you've heard their names -- Diffie, Hellman, Chaum, Rivest, Shamir, Adleman, Zimmermann, and so forth. But the other books on cryptography typically neglect the human side in favor of the math. Crypto aims to fill that hole.

Sue Wilcox has been writing and speaking for years about ALife (Artifical Life), virtual worlds, and other technologies that define (and question) the fringes of life. The seemingly intractable question of whether there can be artificial life doesn't seem to bother Wilcox one whit: she asserts that there can be, and is. Here she reviews a book on making life, but not as we know it. "The author's challenge to himself," she says, "was to make life within a computer, not just unchanging, low-level life, but intelligent life. In this book he describes how to do it from first principles." (Read on for more.)

The Hacker Ethic is a brilliant book.Written by young Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen, with contributions in the same volume by Linus Torvalds and Sociology Professor Manuel Castells, this little book blows away the myth that getting important things done requires stodgy and outmoded forms of organization, or a slavish devotion to work. Just the opposite -- Himanen demonstrates with modern and historical examples that there's a sea change underway in the way that work happens. (Read More.)

Fire In the Valley is not about the computer or software industry in toto -- this book is about the evolution of the PC, including well before it was called the PC. Forget being able to pick up the phone and order a speedy machine with plenty of RAM (for overnight delivery, no less!) from any of several vendors, for less than a month of the minimum wage: this was a time when the very idea of a machine for casual or home use, or even have a full-featured computer on one's work desktop was radical, even laughable. A personal computer? There was no such animal, until the people in this book invented it. (Read more below.)