Another chromatic review, this time of Disappearing Cryptography. It is a fortunate circumstance that even as governments -- and others -- are becoming more interested in peering over your shoulder, or at least at your data traffic, the exchange of large files suitable for hiding messages has become commonplace. Peter Wayner is also the author of Free For All , reviewed here on Slashdot a few months back.

While it might be nice to have a blindingly fast, universally available language shared by every computer on the planet, for now, there's Java. Jayakrishnan contributed this review of Core Servlets and Java Server Pages, in which he finds that "the basics are covered" well along with some reservations. Read on to discover whether it might fit your needs.

Unstoppable reviewer Duncan Lawie is back through the gate this time with his review of a legitimate science fiction classic (though one that may be hard to find at your local MegaStore), Brian Aldiss' Non-Stop. I wonder my local oddball bookstore has a used copy in stock ...

Chromatic, indefatigueable, has come up with another review. This time through the door he's gathered his reactions to Perl for System Administrators, one of the growing list of titles to help bridge the gap between SysAdmin and programmer.

Antitechnologists, academic and other snoots, and neo-Luddites equate technology with the erosion of culture and civilization. A neat little book by Paul Johnson details how technology helped spark the Renaissance, which is an interesting perspective. One day historians may be writing similiar books about this time.

Like Gutenberg, and unlike some of the other self-taught inventive geniuses who spring to mind (like Franklin, Edison and Tesla), John Harrison was not a catholic inventor: his speciality was time. He did, though, draw from the fields of metallurgy, cabinetry and mechanics to find unconventional materials and techniques, and with what can be seen either as impossible optimism or sheer stubbornesss, Harrison managed to solve a problem which had killed thousands of his countrymen. By applying and extending the time-keeping technology of his time, he invented a means by which ships at sea could reliably determine their own longitude, and the story of how he did it ranks with any of the great dramas of science. Dava Sobel tells that story in Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.

Sure, you know that Netcraft tests have for a while provided empirical evidence of Apache's usefulness and ubiquity. But if you're called upon to use Apache in your workplace (or if you care to serve pages for fun off your home box), you might need more to go on. Chromatic took some busy time out of his life to write this review of Administering Apache, which he says takes a "calculated, strategic approach" to what has become one of the world's most important pieces of software.

Chronic reviewer chromatic writes again, this time with a review of the newest iteration of what is probably the emblematic Perl book, the O'Reilly camel book. Read on to see how it stacks up to earlier versions of that work, and whether your Perl skills would benefit from reading through it.

Reader stern contributed this review of Catch Me If You Can, Frank Abagnale's story of creative identity hacking on a level that makes Kevin Mitnick's look more like a Groucho mustache. Don't try this stuff at home ... or in the cockpit, or the operating room, please.

In addition to all the other books he has insightfully reviewed, chromatic has written this review of CGI Programming With Perl. This books sounds like a great resource for the builder of dynamic Web sites with a Perl background. And isn't it nice to see a book with "an unapologetic Unix flavor"?

Contributed by readers FooBard and Scrymarch, the pair of reviews below ought to either bring back memories or spark some curiosity. Stranger In a Strange Land may not be everyone's favorite book -- even among Heinlein fans -- but it certainly strikes a chord. If you haven't read it, these reviews should give you a good idea of whether you'd like to.

Joel Kotkin's new book (The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution is Reshaping the American Landscape) is so bad it will make you pine for all those volumes on hackers and online sexual predators. Normally, there's no point to trashing a silly book, but this one cries out for it. Written in cyber-jabberwocky, it argues that the digital revolution is creating a troubling new geography in which rich technies and companies have more choices about where to be than poor industrial workers. Oh yeah, and something should be done about it. Duh.

Sitting at your average Linux box is becoming simpler by the day, but the complexity and volume of information that that machine is likely to transmit and recieve is only getting greater. Reader Martin Barry contributed this review of Linux Routers. This book promises to unravel that complexity for the reader willing to trade some time and effort for a custom solution to their own routing requirements.

Properties of Light is a dark and beautiful novel (set in a school suspiciously like Princeton) about three physicists whose lives unravel as they struggle to reconcile quantum mechanics with relativity. Rebecca Goldstein really pulled off a hat trick, turning physics into first-rate fiction.

If your life is an acronym soup of protocols like IPX and CLNP, and you sometimes feel like you need a cot in the wiring closet, you probably ought to keep reading -- more so if finding a fount of information neither too abstruse nor too patronizing is important. For the networking professional, inveterate reader and reviewer Danny Yee here briefly takes on a book called Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking, which could be that fount.

I've taken some time to read the Kevin J. Anderson/Brian Herbert written Dune: House Harkonnen, which is the second in the prequel series. Find out what I think about the potential blasphemy of Dune prequels *grin*.

Now chromatic has stepped through another couple of books, in addition to the nine in the previous parts of this series on books for the Linux newbie-to-semi-newbie. Actually, the selections this time go on the assumption that you've taken a few weeks (or some very intense days) to absorb the information you need to accomplish some basic tasks, and they take on the challenge of going beyond the basics. Note: here are links to part one, part two, and part three of this series.

The ever illuminating Cliff Lampe returns, this time with a book and topic which continue to hover in the background. What sort of a life has information taken on in our brave new world? It sounds like a balanced account with a wide-ranging approach.

Russell Pavlicek, Linux and Open Source evangelist, has written an impassioned little book that purports to explain to the non-geek world in particular why they should care about the Open Source movement and the success of OS systems like Linux and FreeBSD. Know what? He delivers.

Fabian Pascal has written this work on issues that come up in database administration and recommendations for solving them. It's not really a practical guide, despite the title, but probably many administrators would benefit from reading the book and keeping it handy somewhere. Yes, I mean you, the one who's got a copy of Filemaker Pro at home and thinks he knows it all.