While I've been sitting on this for a little while, chromatic has been patient. Yes, it's his review of Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained. The publisher is Addison-Wesley, and the book is for all those people out there who need to do programming but don't have time to do the engineering phase. Interesting book - click thru to read more.

chromatic has returned with yet another review. For this time around, he's taken a look at O'Reilly's Practical Internet Groupware. As you would imagine, the book focuses on using software to better enable groups to work together. Jon Udell, the author, does a great job of exploring how to use technology to better work together.

Actually entitled Cybernauts Awake!: Ethical and Spiritual Implications of Computers, Information Technology and the Internet, the book was written by the Church of England's Board for Social Responsibility. If you're interested in the social ramifications of information technology, click below to learn more.

We've got another science fiction review today, this time of Sean McMullen's Souls in the Great Machine. The book is about a post-apocalyptic future with the re-birth of technology - click below to learn more if you want this book in your stocking this year.

John Regehr sent us an excellent review of Mastering Algorithims with Perl, another O'Reilly & Associates effort. Written by Jon Orwant, Jarkko Hietaniemi, and John Macdonald, this is a book designed to take your Perl to a new level of wizardery.

Lawrence Lessig - the name may be familiar from the Microsoft trial - has written an excellent book, which I've taken my time reviewing because I felt I had to read it twice to grasp the full import. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace covers the real future of your liberties on the internet, and it is not a happy book.

Thanks to Arjen for sending a review of O'Reilly's Perl CD Bookshelf. The bookshelf is a collection of O'Reilly's well-known Perl books, complete with searchable information.

Our master reviewer of science fiction and fantasy fare, Duncan Lawie has returned. His choice of topic is a favorite book of mine, A Canticle for Leibowitz, a post-Apocalyptical book by Walter M. Miller, Jr. If you've read, join in the discussion, and if you haven't consider this a must-read.

Shortly after their IPO, Red Hat's Bob Young had a book published, written by he and Wendy Goldman Rohm (who, I should add, I had a drink with at @ ALS, and is a very nice woman) about Red Hat, and what Linux is trying to do. Click below to get the full story - and thanks to Malcolm Tredinnick for his indepth review.

SEGV has continued his tradition of excellent reviews with an examination of Jon L. Bentley's Programming Pearls (Second Edition), recently released by Addison-Welsey. One of the classics of programming, the new version continues the first edition's heritage of excellence. Click below to read more.

The first edition of this fine book, written by Neil Matthew and Richard Stones, remains one of the top-selling books that we've ever reviewed on Slashdot. At the beginning of this fall, the 2nd edition was introduced, to much fanfare, and a review by Kurt Gray. Click below to find out what's improved, or what's declined.

Quite a number of you out there are into Lego Mindstorms, as evidenced by the number of book reviews that have been sent my way. Below are a couple of reviews, one from Kurt DeMaagd and the other from Will Ware. Click below to get their take on the O'Reilly book The Unofficial Guide to Lego Mindstorms Robots.

Duncan Lawie continues his voyage through science fiction worth reading, reviewing this week James Blish's Cites in Flight. The book itself is a compilation of: They Shall Have Stars, A Life for the Stars, Earthman, Come Home and A Clash of Cymbals (aka The Triumph of Time), all stories by Blish. Click below to read more about the good, and the not-so good in this collection.

When Hemos mentioned this book, at first I didn't realize that it had actually been published in dead-tree form - or more precisely, I didn't realize it hadn't been published in dead-tree form long ago, and I was wondering why he was talking about reviewing it now. Obviously I spend too much time on the net when I can no longer distinguish between webpages and books.

Duncan Lawie, our premier reviewer of fiction has sent us his take on William Gibson's latest effort All Tomorrow's Parties. There was a lot of press surrounding the release of this book - click below to find out more about it, or dicuss your impressions of it.

chromatic, another of our fine group of book reviewers, took some time with a draft copy of the new O'Reilly and Associates book Using Samba. Written by Robert Eckstein, David Collier-Brown & Peter Kelly, this book helps you learn how to setup Samba, as well as information on the protocol itself. Click below to learn more.

cacl, who's racheting up the ranks of book reviewers, has returned with a review of the latest Neil Gaiman work Sandman: The Dream Hunters. He and Yoshitaka Amanos produced this work together, which is Gaiman's first return into the Sandman story in several years. You may remember the name recently from our review of Princess Mononoke, a recent anime film. If you've read Sandman before, you know the art of it - and if you haven't, you should.

Andrew Hunt has come through with his first review for Slashdot, of David Zindell's The Broken God. Set in the distant future, the book chronicles vast, divinely created supercomputers, a humanity spread throughout the stars, and the notion of humanity achieving divine nature. Excellent science fiction.

Being the history major that I was, I was happy when Joe Mahoney offered to review Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger's new book The Year 1000 - What life was like at the turn of the first millennium. Looks back at a year in the life of a common Englishman, circa 1000 AD, in a very entertaining and informative way.

Sebbo, lately of our review of The Big U is taking a crack at five of Daniel Pinkwater's books which have been gathered together in one. The stories are: Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars; Slaves of Spiegel; The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death; The Last Guru; and Young Adult Novel. Pinkwater is a great author - click below to learn more; or if you have read any of them, contribute to the discussion!