Reiji Asakura's Revolutionaries at Sony: The Making of the Sony PlayStation and the Visionaries Who Conquered the World of Video Games is an authorized account of how some renegade Sony programmers and engineers battled one another and their own corporate hierarchy to create the PlayStation. The rest is history. This book is an interesting if worshipful yarn, and one of the few book-length accounts ever published about the corporate politics inside of the video-game arena. (Read more)

Reader Mike N. contributed this review of The Mystery Of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. Hernando de Soto, for those unfamiliar, is an interesting character in his own right.

Adventurous reader Duncan Lawie, throwing himself in the way of the books being hurled at you by well-meaning bookstores, wrote this review of Mission of Gravity. If your taste in Science Fiction runs to the adventurous and thoughtful, Duncan may just turn you on to a work he says is "elegant and simple."

Some of you may find it odd to see your own experiences and memories presented as social history. But according to a meticulously reported (but somewhat dry) new book Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Open Source has changed the world and isn't done yet. If you want to read a top-to-bottom account of how it happened, author Glyn Moody offers a good one. (Read more)

Years after the virtues of XML were first extolled (and plenty of uses both front-and-center and behind-the-scenes later), XML still isn't the do-all, be-all wonder we were led to believe. Book reviewing genius chromatic here dissects a book that sounds aimed at intermediate or advanced programmers (of other languages) who want extend their grasp with a greater understanding of the flexibility inherent to XML. How well it succeeds? Well, see what he's got to say about that.

The Complete FreeBSD, The Design and Implementation of 4.4BSD, and The FreeBSD Handbook are among the most notable books available for BSD, but recently it was my pleasure to review a new book about FreeBSD, The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide by Ted Mittelstaedt.

Would you believe a book review written by someone who calls himself "bs" about a book called The Truth? Believe it. Terry Pratchet is hard to pin down -- is this humor? Unadulterated absurdity? Clever satire? More real than real? Whatever it is, it's The Truth.

Code Breaking: A History and Exploration has joined Simon Singh's The Code Book on my bookshelf, and it's hard to read either of these books without comparing it to the other. If you've read the Singh book, though, you'll certainly find that the material covered overlaps heavily. Read on to find out if you'd enjoy checking out Kippenhahn's work.

Duncan Lawie, stalwart science fiction reviewer, this time steps up to the plate with what you might call a meta-science fiction book, Thomas Disch's The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. Considering that SF has been around as such for far shorter than many other types of literature, a book like this sounds like it may be useful in explaining its disproportionate hold on the public imagination. (Personally, I'd like to read the stuff on Heinlein.)

Continuing with his campaign to rid the world of lousy software, chromatic is back with this review of Extreme Programming Installed. It sounds like what the authors are advocating is a truly programmer-centric environment; does anyone have experience in a workplace even close to this?

Reader Aaron Gifford contributed this review of Shadow of the Hegemon, by the prolific Orson Scott Card. (What? An author with the "ability to make smart characters actually act and behave intelligently"? The sky is falling!) Given the movie plans in the works from Card, it's great to see the bookshelf expand with possible sequel material, too.

Do you feel like you belong in many -- any -- Web communities? Lots of people and companies try and host successful Websites, but few pull it off. Cliff Figallo has helped do it three different times, and has written a workmanlike, useful book about what it takes -- good design, time, patience, great software, trust and the right people. He never loses sight of what the user wants and needs. Here is a review of Hosting Web Communities, on how to build enduring and yes, profitable communities online. (Read more below.)

Reader John Regehr contributed this review of O'Reilly's Understanding the Linux Kernel, which goes into greater depth than most people have ever seen of the kernel source itself. (I wonder what it costs to look at the Windows source.)

Don Foster was asked to track down Ted Kaczynski by studying the Unabomber's own words (and uncovering fresh information about his choice of victims). Foster, a Vassar prof who solved a centuries old mystery involving a Shakespearean sonnet and unmasked the anonymous author of a sensational Clinton campaign book, has written a book about science, words and identity. You can run and hide, he says, but your words will always give you away. Author Unknown is relevant to life online, where responsibility for words and anonymous authorship is an everyday issue.

Michael JasonSmith (not his evil cousin Jason MichaelSmith, or the nefarious Smith MichaelJason) contributed this review of a book which treads the line between simple and complex by concentrating on that strangely simple little equation of Einstein's -- how it came to be uncovered, its history, and its ramifications.

This "dynamic content" thing doesn't seem to be going away, does it? Web sites need to get smarter to handle the types of content that at least some people want to see on them these days, and the coders and designers behind them need the tools to make them so. Accordingly, Gavin Bong crafted this review of Web Development with JSP, which may be one of the tools you need.

A reknowned computer scientist punctures some of the arrogance and hype surrounding computing and details some of the many computational and other problems computers can't solve. After years of rising expectations, the public expects computers to reverse aging, solve the most complex problems, and restore the ozone layer. So do many computer scientists, says the author of "Computers LTD., what they really can't do." It's a good question. What can't computers do? Jump in.

In the wrong hands, scientific discovery can be scary stuff. This first-rate book by a British biophycist describes some of the most infamous tales in scientific history and how they happened.

Reader apsmith contributed this review of Gerard O'Neill's The High Frontier, a book now nearly a quarter century old. The author's dream of an upwardly mobile Earth population remains largely unrealized, though if O'Neill were alive today, he might be gladdened that there is at least one long-term orbiting home in place.

John Schwartz and Michael Osterholm's new book Living Terrors paints a bleak picture of the preparedness of the United States -- and really the entire world -- for bioterrorism. Given the recent reports on the almost total lack of security in places like Russia's facility for holding the smallpox virus, their Cold War manufacturing of thousands of tons of the stuff, and the FBI sting operation of someone in Las Vegas trying to buy anthrax, the book's subject matter hits even closer to home.