Open Source Books

Slash is the software that runs sites like Slashdot and use.perl. It's all written in Perl using the Template Toolkit with MySQL at the back end. Despite it being based on a number of my favourite technologies, I'd never really the time to get to know how it worked. Reviewing this book finally gave me the excuse to spend a few hours looking at it. I decided the best way to "test" the book would to be to try and set up and configure a Slash web site whilst reading the book.

The book starts by giving an overview of Slashdot - the site that the Slash code grew out of. This is followed by an overview of how a Slash site looks to the user and a brief look at the architecture of Slash. All very interesting, but it didn't get me any closer to setting up my Slash site.

That started in chapter 2, which is a guide to installing Slash. During this chapter I became aware that the book (or, at least, this part of it) wasn't really aimed at me. By this I mean that the chapter assumed that the reader knows less than I do about installing Perl modules, setting up MySQL databases and configuring Apache. I was fast coming to the conclusion the the book's target audience was people who wanted to run a weblog using Slash, but didn't really know very much about Apache, MySQL or Perl. This made reading this chapter very quick and in an hour or so I had a basic Slash site up and running.

The next five chapters look at the nuts and bolts of running a Slash site. They describes the processes of setting up authors, editing and updating stories, reviewing and approving submissions, dealing with comments and managing topics and sections. Again, I read all of this pretty quickly as the chapters were going over in some detail processes that I was finding pretty easy to work out from the layout of the Slash administration pages. One section stood out. In the middle of chapter 6 there is a discussion on how Perls's regular expressions can be used to filter comments. I found myself wondering how easily my assumed target audience would deal with this material.

Chapter 8 changes direction completely. This chapter discusses ways to manage the community that builds up around a successful Slash site. It was almost completely non-technical but, building on their ideas of what has made Slashdot so successful the authors present some interesting ideas on the nature of web communities. To me, this chapter alone justifies reading the book.

In chapter 9 we're back with customising your site, with sections on setting up Slashboxes (little areas of content that go down the side of a Slash site), exhanging headlines with other sites using XML and managing user polls. Again there's not much comlpex technical content in this chapter.

In the last two chapters we suddenly get very technical, looking at advanced site customisation and administration issues. In particular, when the advanced customisation chapter looks at plugins, it gives an example of how to write a plugin and this may well all be a bit confusing for the target audience I discussed earlier. This is aimed at someone who knows what they are doing when it comes to Perl and MySQL.

The five appendices act as a reference to the Slash codebase. They contain much in depth information about the database tables and the API exposed by the various Slash modules. Appendix C contains a useful introduction to the Template Toolkit, which Slash uses to create all of the actual HTML pages. There's a lot of information in this pages and they take up about a third of the book.

I suspect I've come across a little more negative that I intended in this review. I do think it's a very useful book and should be read by anyone running (or thinking of running) a site using Slash. My only problem is that is seems to be two half books joined together. The second half seems to be aimed at a far more technically literate audience than the first half.

But the bottom line is that I got my Slash site up and running and I know a lot more than I did about how to configure and administer it - so the book does what I wanted it to.

I would have loved a 'type these commands to install' type thing in the book. Even with the book's help it took me a while to install.

"Slashdot" is one of the busiest sites on the internet. Part newspaper, part bulletin board, part personal journal - just a casual mention on Slashdot has been enough to bring major web sites to their knees. Slashdot has lead the way in the high-traffic mass-participation web, and the software is free to download. This book is about the ideas, challenges and designs which keep Slashdot working. Although the slash software is written in Perl, you don't need to read Perl; there's hardly any source code in the book.

When I first saw this book, I thought it would be dull. Who wants to read documentation for a bunch of Perl scripts? As it turns out, the book is mostly case study and installation/configuration guide. Although obviously aimed at people considering using the open-source "slash" engine for their own sites, reading about how the Slashdot administrators evolved their software to cope with such astonishingly high traffic is quite inspirational. There is a lot of solid wisdom for anyone involved in maintaining web applications on the internet.

If you are designing or improving a public collaborative web application and want to be able to scale to massive traffic, this book is an important addition to your bookshelf. If you are curious about the growth and internals of Slashdot, it's worth a read. If you want a theoretical discussion, code listings, or product comparisons, look elsewhere.

Slashdot is, of course, the original community weblog: "a moderated list, in reverse-chronological order, of timely items, with links to further discussion on-site, or to further information off-site.".

What David, chromatic, and Brian have done here is write a manual for Slash, the open-source code that underlies Slashdot and dozens of other communities. Slash is by far the most powerful community weblog technology out there, so a how-to manual is especially important.

If you're looking into setting up a community weblog that members can use to share links and stories, Slash is the power tool of choice. With the publication of "Running Weblogs with Slash," David, chromatic, and Brian make it much more likely that your Slash installation and management will go seamlessly!

As someone who has spent a fair amount of time toying with and writing about managed code I have to say that I am in awe of the wisdom and clarity contained in this book. "SSCLI Essentials" transcends its subject matter (a research platform unlikely to be used much outside of academia) to be one of the best books I've ever read on Virtual Execution concepts. Java, the CLR, Smalltalk, and all other such environments ultimately have to solve the same problem (How to turn source code into executing machine instructions?). This book uses the SSCLI as a backdrop for exploring decades of VM research and explaining the historical forces influencing how and why this particular implementation (and by implication, Microsoft's commercial CLR) works.

The resulting volume is concise, fascinating, and thorough. Given the increasing importance of virtual environments in the computing world today I think most all working developers (including Java developers!) owe it to themselves to read this book. Even if you never plan to install or use the SSCLI codebase you'll benefit from Dave and friends' lucid explanation of the issues facing modern VM environments and how one particularly popular platform chooses to solve them.

The editorial description makes more claims that what the book deals with. Following are the excerpts from the book description at Amazon.com:

>> Microsoft's Shared Source CLI (code-named "Rotor") is the implementation of the ECMA Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) and the ECMA C# language specification.

Above implies: (Shared Source CLI) = (Rotor) = (ECMA CLI + C#)

>> [The book] is a companion guide to Rotor's code. [It] provides a road map for anyone wishing to navigate, understand, or alter the [Rotor] code.

The book declares in the introduction that it does not cover several components of Rotor. The run-time engine is covered, but the compiler (C#) part is not. That is less that half of what was claimed. I correspondingly give 3/5 to the book.

I was interested more in the C# compiler part.

This book is the best and most concentrated source of information I've found for understanding how the .NET CLR is implemented (comparable only to Chris Brumme's blog). Even if you never actually build the SSCLI, this book combined with the SSCLI source code can provide a solid understanding of what's going on behind the scenes in the commercial CLR. I have found this level of understanding to be absolutely necessary in understanding and diagnosing some types of unusual behaviour or performance characteristics of .NET.

If you're not using the SSCLI on a UNIX machine and have a solid understanding of the Win32 API, you can probably safely skip the last chapter on the PAL as it is somewhat anti-climatic. However, coming from a UNIX programming background myself, I found it to be of value in solidifying my understanding of Win32 specific functionality (eg. structured exception handling) and how its used by the SSCLI.

Obviously this book is a must-read for anyone that is actually experimenting with the SSCLI, but I also consider it essential for anyone that wants to fully understand how the commercial version of .NET works.

Well, there I was sitting on my bed with my new book. I opened the first page and didn't surface again for 9 days; it's that good i read it cover to cover, twice! I found it not only intellectually exciting, but also quite arousing; the way they talk about managed code gave me a right chubby one!

I have run Snort at previous jobs and currently run it at home. I found the book to be packed with tons of valuable information and a great reference for tweaks you may want to make to your install down the road as your needs change. The only down side is that it's already "out of date" as far as current versions go. It's not so out of date that the information is irrelevant but just keep that in mind and make sure to read up on new features and bugs compared to what is listed in the book and the version you are installing.

This book is an excellent starter into the world of IDS/IPS. Would be nice if they went thru on only 2-3 platforms instead of 10. THere should be a follow up book after this to go more in depth. Still very valuable information here though.

Syngress published "Snort 2.0" in Mar 03, and I gave it a four star review in Jul 03. Syngress followed with "Snort 2.1" in May 04, and I gave it a four star review in Jul 04. I recommend reading those reviews, since the latest edition -- "Snort IDS and IPS Toolkit" (SIAIT) -- makes many of the same mistakes as its predecessors. Worse, it includes material that was already outdated in BOTH previous editions. If you absolutely must buy a book on Snort, this edition is your only real choice. Otherwise, I would stick with the manual and online articles.

SIAIT looks impressive page-wise, but it suffers from the multiple-author, no-editing, rush-to-production problems unfortunately inherent in many Syngress titles. One would think that including many contributing authors (11, apparently) would make for a strong book. In reality, the book contributes very little beyond what appears in "Snort 2.1," despite the fact that "only" chapters 8, 10, 11, and 13 appear to be repeats or largely rehashes of older material. Comparing to "Snort 2.1," these compare to old chapters 7, 10, 12, and 11, respectively.

The absolute worst part of this book is the re-introduction of all the outdated information in chapters 8 and 10. It is 2007 and we are STILL reading on p 353 that XML output is "our favorite and relatively new logging format" and on p 367 that "Unified logs are the future of Snort reporting." (I cited both of these as being old news in Jul 04!) I should note that these chapters are not entirely duplicates; if you compare output such as that on page 335 of "Snort 2.1" with page 365 in SIAIT you'll see the author replaced the original 2003 timestamps with 2006! This is the height of lazy publishing. Chapter 10 features similar tricks, where traffic is the same except for global replacements of IP addresses and timestamps; notice the ACK numbers are still the same and the test uses Snort 1.8.

There's plenty more in this book to make you cringe. Mentions of Netbus, SubSeven, BO2k, ExploreZip, QAZ, and the like in ch 1 will make you think it's 1999 all over again. In ch 2 you can be mislead into thinking that "there will be rule upgrades released with each major version of Snort for those who do not care to register." In reality the last rule set for unregistered users arrived with Snort 2.4 in Jul 05. Ch 3 wastes time rambling about SMP, threads, operating systems, and other topics I can better learn in a non-Snort book. I also liked reading how to install Snort 2.4.3 on OpenBSD in a book about Snort 2.6.x. Ch 3 also featured such pearls of wisdom as recommendations to not run Metasploit but instead use worthless stateless tools like Snot and Sneeze (p 123).

A few more choice words could be said about these disasters. Check out the "three way handshake" diagram on p 238 that shows FIN ACK / FIN ACK / FIN, and the "graceful close" diagram on p 239 that shows FIN / FIN ACK / ACK / ACK. These sorts of train wrecks are evidence that someone is asleep at the publishing house. Returning to the old material theme for ch 9, be prepared for screenshots or output from BASE 1.0.2 from Jul 04, Sguil 0.3.1 from Apr 04, and SnortSnarf from Jan 03. Finally, ch 12: why bother?

I have a few positive comments. The best chapter in SIAIT is ch 5 (Inner Workings). I liked seeing Afterglow, Tenshi, and SEC in ch 9. I enjoyed hearing something about performance profiling in ch 6. I thought the rules chapter was ok, but (to repeat a plea from my earlier reviews) would someone please consider writing a real rule writing reference that exceeds the introductory material found in this book and elsewhere? We also need coverage of shared object rules and other advanced Snort features.

It should be clear by now that the Syngress Snort book procession needs to end. Another publisher should consider writing a real Snort book for version 3.0 once it is available.

This is the best single book on Snort I've come across, so I bought it. I used it as reference recently to customize a Snort configuration including writing a few custom rules. It has a really good index. It can be used as an in-depth tutorial or good quality reference.

Description of Chapters:
1) Intrusion Detection Systems - A nice overview of some basics
2) Introducing Snort 2.6 - Fairly comprehensive coverage of the product
3) Installing Snort 2.6 - Good coverage of the different options.
4) Configuring Snort Add-Ons (I don't recommend snort on Windows, but whatever)
5) Inner Workings - One of the best chapters on how snort really works
6) Preprocessors - Another great chapter on the inner workings.
7) Playing by the Rules - Good coverage of snort rule syntax.
8) Snort Output Plug-Ins - Another good chapter
9) Exploring IDS Event Analysis Snort Style - Some of these add-ons are a bit dated, but it's nice to have it all in one place.
10) Optimizing Snort - Principles of Snort optimization...
11) Active Response - More useful options
12) Advanced Snort - Not much of use here for most people.
13) Mucking Around with Barnyard - It's good to at least know what Barnyard is.

At 700 plus pages, this is the best collection of Snort info around.

i haven't finished all of the book(mainly part2 & part4), but base on my experience so far, it's a well-written book.
this book gives you wonderful idea about how to write perl web applications with apache. for someone like me, whom have been using perl for 2 years (mostly are on system side), it's good to get throughout idea for doing User Authentication with session,cookie etc. btw, the code examples are easy to grasp too.

i particularly like Part 4 site managerment. it describes how to run mod_perl + apache server, with fine tunneing, server side config, load banlancing.

don't forget, mod_perl website has a lot config/coding detail too. and if you are especially interested in writing mod_perl application, i would recommend "practical mod_perl".

Excellent book; few typos.

Let me explain who I am so you know where I am coming from. I am a UNIX systems administrator/Perl programmer/web developer for an insurance company. I've had more than my fair share of shizophrenic managers and project managers that would qualify as ignoramuses only on their best days. I do not suffer fools gladly, as I just don't have time to hold their hands and tell them how wonderful they are.

For Managers and Project Managers:
If you are a manager or a project manager looking at web development, and you have a decent technological base, this is an excellent book. Not sure when you started feeling like you'd lost control of the technical people under you, or even if you were aware that you had. As far as I have seen, there are two shops -- technically savvy shops with no direction, and the Microsoft-loving shops with no clue and no direction. (IMO, MS products' sole benefit is to allow managers to delude themselves that that kid they hired out of a tech school for $10 an hour actually knows his --- from a hole in the ground. There are no substitutes for experience, no matter what Redmond says.)

Petersen has a very readable style -- pleasant and professional, without sounding preachy. This is important -- while I appreciate a good flame war as well as the next geek, sometimes software has to be evaluated in terms of its economic value. He also did not put me to sleep -- a rare quality in technical books.

Theo does a great job here. There are many books that will give you extremely detailed information on a single aspect of web programming. This book is more of an overview of how it should be done to get a great site that makes money and can be developed and supported on-time and on-budget.

Petersen's book covers useful technologies, gives you an idea how they are used, gives you examples of them in action, and then talks about tuning for performance. The security explanations are built in from the start, so you don't have worry about having to secure non-securable systems.

The technologies are explained well -- trust me on this. Don't feel ashamed if you skip the coding part and just read the bits around it. That's why you have technical people working for you. You just need to know what they are doing, and be able to give them direction that does not leave them wondering if you've truly lost it this time. Part of the great thing about this book is that it makes sense even if you do not understand perl.

This book will give you the ability to think about your web projects like an architect, not a bystander.

For the poor geeks who have to deal with Managers and Project Managers:
Great book. It belongs on your bookshelf; not just so you know what's in it, but also so you can pass it on when you need to get someone educated FAST.

I liked it because it gave me an idea of other ways of doing things -- why should I reinvent the wheel, when someone else has already came up with a solution?

Get it. Read it. Get a copy to your boss. It gives a good idea of what web technologies can do, and gives some solid examples. It explains these technologies in terms that any person in a technical field ought to be able to understand. This book will save you endless hours of discussing *how* things work, and may get you out of a number of pointless meetings where you wind up spending valuable time explaining basic concepts to people
and trying to stop them from picking impossible projects out of thin air.

With a copy of this on their desk, they will know what's possible, and have a better idea of the web development process. If you're lucky, they will read it, be able to ask intelligent questions and actually understand what you are doing and asking for. If they do not read it, you can still refer them to the appropriate sections of this book and escape out of the meeting.
(it's even of a decent enough size that you can still roll it up and smack them upside of the head if they are not reading it.)

I'd like to teach a web programming course someday, and if I do, I will base it mainly on this book. With it, you will be sure to have a class of developers who actually both have a clue as to what's going on, and can actually do what is needed. After the students have read this book, they can branch out to whatever specialty they need.

In a classic example of perfect timing, this book came to me at a time when I've been approached to implement a Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl solution to replace a broken, proprietary based application at a local Ivy League University. So the obvious question on my mind was, would this book be helpful or just a waste of my valuable time?

As it turns out Web Development with Apache and Perl is a sort of "glue" book that is designed to help meld what the reader already knows using things that they might not have. For some more advanced readers, much of the information in the book is mostly review, but this volume still serves as an excellent reference to the plethora of choices available to us.

Thankfully, the book doesn't even feign to be introductory, which is a very good thing. Most Perl programmers already have a sizable enough library and the last thing we need is yet another book that is half filled with the basics of the language.

That's not to say that if you are a beginner you won't be able to garner a wealth of information because the first part of the book will ease you into web site basics by presenting you with some very useful information on configuring the Apache server and giving a walk through in CGI scripting.

Be forewarned though, Theo's obvious bias towards Open Source clouds many of the pages in the first section. To his credit, he does leave the door open to the possibility that the reader might choose (or be stuck with) a commercial OS, but unfortunately he goes on to insist that the user re-evaluate their choice, and if they went with a commercial OS in their first round of evaluations that they should consider Linux or one of the BSDs.

Don't' get me wrong, Linux or one of the BSDs is the obvious best choice for a web server, but I think that prodding the reader like this is a bit insulting. And with a title like Web Development with Apache and Perl and the sub-title "How to build powerful web sites with Open Source tools", there's a 99.99% probability that he's preaching to the converted.

In the second part of the book, popular tools used for web applications are discussed including MySQL basics, DBI, SSI and HTML::Mason. It's also where you can find an excellent chapter on better ways to script using FastCGI or mod_perl. Not to mention the all-important chapter on security that covers SSL and HTTP authentication.

For the third part of the book, Theo discusses some example sites for virtual communities, intranet applications and a web storefront. Of course, he doesn't forget to mention Slash since one of the best and easiest ways to start a virtual community is to use the code that drives the ever-popular Slashdot community website.

Oh, and speaking of Slashdot, if your site happens to become anywhere near as popular, the fourth and final part of the book will help you with content and performance management.

So, if you can forgive a little soapbox preaching, you'll find Web Development with Apache and Perl is a very useful book for your web development needs. If you're fairly new to using Apache and Perl this is a must have addition to your growing library.

In the dim and distant past when I first started doing web development, there was a book that everybody had a copy of. It was called How to Set Up and Maintain a Web Site and it was by Lincoln Stein. The reason why everyone owned (and, more importantly, read) it was that it contained a complete high-level snapshot of everything you needed to know in order to run a web site at that time. Unfortunately, after a second edition in 1997 the book hasn't been updated. I suppose that the subject area has grown so much that the publishers thought that a complete overview would be too high-level to be useful. They were probably right.

I mention Stein's book because that's what this new book reminded me of most (that, by the way, is a huge compliment). Petersen realises that an overview of the whole web development area would be difficult to write (and, ultimately, unhelpful) so he restricts himself to a subset of the available technologies - Perl and Apache - and gives a thorough review of the state of the art of web development in these areas.

But before he gets into the details of Apache and Perl, in chapter 1 Petersen takes a look at the wider world of Open Source Software and in the process presents one of the best arguments I've seen in print for why a company should choose Open Source Software. In chapters 2 and 3 he takes the same approach with web servers and scripting languages, giving compelling reasons for choosing Apache and Perl.

Having chosen his architecture, in part 2, Petersen moves on to looking at some common tools for web development. Chapter 4 looks at databases. The two main Open Source Databases (MySQL and PostgreSQL) are compared and MySQL is chosen as the basis for the rest of the examples. Chapter 5 discusses the shortcomings of the standard CGI architecture and introduces mod_perl as an alternative. This is a good introduction to a technology that some people can find hard to get to grips with. Petersen takes us through the use of Apache::Registry before moving on to the complexity and power of mod_perl handlers.

Chapter 6 looks at the importance of security in web applications and discusses in some depth the problems of user authentication and the use of SSL for secure data transmission. Chapter 7 looks at ways to separate content from presentation. First we look briefly at server-side includes, but the majority of the chapter is taken up with a review of the various templating systems that are available for Perl. The chapter finishes with a detailed look at two of the most popular templating solutions - HTML::Mason and Template Toolkit.

Part 3 of the book looks at three different types of web site in great detail. In each case Petersen uses the examples to take a brief survey of a number of the existing tools. For example chapter 9 looks at a community web site and contains information about a number of web-based forums and chat rooms. It also takes an extended look at Slashcode the software that runs Slashdot. Chapter 9 takes a similar approach for intranet sites and Chapter 10 for online stores.

In part 4 we take a longer term view of a web site. Chapter 11 looks at content management systems and chapter 12 lookat at performance tuning. Both of these chapters are full of useful advice on how to make running a web server as painless as possible.

I think this is a very useful book to have on your bookshelf. Anyone who is developing web applications using Apache and Perl will find something useful in the book. It should be obvious that in order for a single book to cover so much ground, sometimes there isn't quite as much technical detail as you might like, but there is a good bibliography that will show you where to go for more information. In my opinion the high-level approach makes the book particularly useful for a couple of groups of potential readers. Firstly I think it makes a great introduction to the subject for someone coming to Apache and Perl for the first time. Secondly (and perhaps most importantly) I can see the book (in particular the first three chapters) being very useful reading material for a manager who is making a decision between using Open Source Software or some proprietary technology.

This book lives up to its title by offering expert advice on how to use MySQL to its fullest. Expert MySQL goes deeper than just syntax and samples, offering useful information on the internals of MySQL. Even though there are a lot of titles on MySQL, this book would make a worthy addition to the library of any MySQL developer or DBA.

Expert MySQL starts with a section on the anatomy of a database system including the common types of systems. This is often missing in database books and a very important part to understand if you going to use one to its fullest potential. Other sections include one on the source code and one on extending and debugging MySQL. The author devotes a chapter to embedded MySQL including building embedded MySQL applications as well as one on adding functions and commands. The third and final part of the book covers advanced database internals and includes a good section on query optimization.

Throughout Expert MySQL the author has included notes embedded with the text, sidebars offset by a different shading, and other notes, diagrams, and illustrations as appropriate to help the reader understand the text. There are also plenty of coding examples. My book had some printing problems towards the back with pages that had a vertical black line running down the center of the page. This sort of problem is highly unusual with Apress but occurred in my copy nonetheless. Chapters 10, 11 and 12 have exercises at the end to help ensure that you understand the concepts. The answers to the questions are included in the appendix.

This is not really the best book for the person new to MySQL but is more appropriate to the person who understands MySQL and wants to extend its functionality into new areas. Expert MySQL is recommended to those people who want to learn how to modify and extend MySQL.

This is an advanced book.
You can use it to learn the internals of MySQL as well as the internals of a Database Management System (DBMS).
It will teach you how to make changes to the MySQL source code.
An alternative name for the book could have been "MySQL internals".
I really like it and I find it very useful.

PS. It contains C++ code.

I really like this book. The internals of the CIFS protocol is not a subject for the faint hearted, but Chris has really tackled it well. This is just the right book for people like me who want to understand what is going on on their network at the bits and bytes level.

In the Samba Team we have been working on implementing the protocols that Chris describes in this book for the last 12 years or so, but we've always been doing this from sniffer traces and incomplete specifications. It was quite an interesting experience to see all this information distilled into such a readable format.

This isn't the sort of book that one buys grandma for Christmas, but if you run a Windows network and have been curious about what is happening inside all those network packets, how your computers find each other and what that weird error message really means then do yourself a favor and have a read.

Andrew Tridgell
Samba Team

The information is helpful and appears to be complete. The empirical knowledge implied by frequent contrasts between the specifications and what happens "on the wire" is impressive.

One criticism is that the prose is conversational with many self-conscious references to the author and reader. This makes reading somewhat inefficient and irritating at times.

If want to know CIFS/SAMBA/NetBIOS internals, this is the book to read. It goes into detail of CIFS implementation. You will find discussion on structures, functions, and architecture of CIFS. This is a very good book for programmers who are working in this area. Although the book is useful for general users of CIFS but the real audience are the programmers and people who want to go into in-depth knowledge of CIFS implementation. You should know C programming to really benefit from this book.

To be honest, I didn't go throught the whole contents yet. However, I found the chapter on (GNU) make utility is the best I ever read. It is clear, thorough, and practical. For example, I really like the section on how to organize a project with multiple make files and subdirectories. In addition, the author also did good job explaining compilers. In all, I think it is a great book for those who already know some programming basics and want to start serious developments on Linux.

Back before the advent of Mac OS X, my favourite (and for many years, only) development environment was one variety of Unix or another. The nicest thing about Unix was that the development environment stayed pretty much the same regardless of the variety; this stayed the same with the introduction of Linux.

The Linux Development Platform might be better titled "The GNU Development Platform" since almost all of the tools discussed come from the FSF, and those that don't are nevertheless open source; as a result they will run on almost any Unix variety. You know that the 'Linux' in the title is almost just a marketing ploy, but we will forgive Prentice Hall and the authors. Certainly more people will buy this book to learn about using these tools under Linux than under any other *nix variety.

The book starts with a short chapter on software development per se before getting down to the nuts and bolts. It starts in the obvious spot, with editors, and quickly covers choosing an editor before taking a brief look at Emacs, Jed and VIM. The rest of the book is devoted to much less contentious issues.

As a whole, the text provides a good grounding in using gcc, make, CVS and GDB, with enough extra information on smaller tools and larger issues (such as cross-platform and embedded systems) that you will not need more than this book and, perhaps, the man pages to understand and use these tools. Of course others, have written entire volumes on each of these topics, but for most of us this book will provide the information we need.

The Linux Development Platform comes with a CD containing the source for a fair number of the tools discussed, so you can build any tools which happen to be missing on your platform, though some of the included apps are, of course, already a version or two behind.

The writing is mixed in quality: while never bad, it has a slightly heavy, technical feel to it, often a bit wordy or cumbersome. This rarely gets in the way of understanding, but it does slow you down. The topic coverage is good, moving from a beginner level right through to a good understanding of each tool discussed. More importantly, all the tools you will need are covered.

I imagine this would make an excellent companion text for any programming course: note that it doesn't provide details on any programming language, but covers everything else you need to know regarding the development tools. It is thinnest in the discussion of editors, really only giving a brief overview of each. I cannot really see this as a fault since detailed coverage really would take a separate book, and this quick look is better than pretending to cover the topic well and failing. The other possible weakness is that there is almost no coverage of general Linux usage, so calling the book The Linux Development Platform is a bit of a misnomer -- it is really devoted to the tools available for development, not the underlying operating system at all. Once again, I feel that this lack is not serious; most buyers should know enough about the operating system and any attempt to cover it adequately would have swelled the size and cost of the book.

Prentice Hall PTR have a site for the book with a Table of Contents or you can see the whole book in HTML format at FAQs.org.

I would recommend this book to anyone who would like a good, general introduction to developing software on a Unix platform. Though it's not a cheap book, it is a good one. It was certainly a relief for me to find a good book in Prentice Hall's 'Bruce Peren Open Source Series' after a couple of flawed ones. I've marked it three stars rather than four (and it really deserves a three and a half) for the slightly clunky writing.

To work with open source platform is not that hard thing to do
Although to get up to the speed & work on a production server
You need this reference to feel comfort
This book saved me much time, googling & waiting on answers from the mailing lists to solve my problems
I recommend to any sysadmin, Developer, learner,....

Even this book was wrote in the early times of Mono I found it a really good introduction to the Mono Development, it is not designed to the "Professional C# Programmer" but for the really beginer in Mono and the C# Language.

It covers topics from the basic of C# Programming to topics about Network Programming, Database Programming and XML Programming.

If you want to start programming in Mono, start with this book

Mono Kick Start is co-written by Hans-Juergen Schoenig and Ewald Geschwinde for intermediate to advanced users and is a fast-paced, hands-on, nicely organized guide to Mono and .NET compatible application programming with Mono. Includes subjects like threads, network programming, security, database interaction, XML, and more, plus a comprehensive practical section that shows readers how to set up Web applications with Mono, how GUIs can be programmed using GTK, and how applications written with .NET can be operated in the Mono framework.

This is a good introduction to C# and Mono, unfortunately something is lost in the translation. One paragraph seems to be missing a sentence, and I was confused on numerous occcasions by variable names that appear to be in German. It can be confusing when the "avg" variable suddenly changes to "zah1". The "Human" class is refered to as the "Mensch" class in one example, and apparently "Andreas" is German for "Andy." If these kinds of errors don't trip you up, I recommend this book.

Are you an administrator managing a computer network or a power user running a small home/office network? If you are, this book is for you! Author Christian Gross, has done an outstanding job of writing a great book on how to use Open Source on a Microsoft Windows operating system.

Gross begins by explaining how to write shell scripts using BASH and its associated text-processing tools. Next, the author explains the Python programming language to write scripts. Then, he focuses on using encryption to secure data and communications between two computers. The author continues by focusing on using tools installed on a local computer that processes information which controls the computer, manages its files, and runs administrative scripts. In addition, the author next focuses on storing data using the Light Weight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) data store and Windows-compatible File Server SAMBA. He also explains the management of a relational database. Next, the author covers how to manage a Web server. Then, he examines how to process e-mail, send, receive, and filter e-mail. Finally, he covers how to install and manage productivity applications, such as an e-mail or Office software package.

No one book can teach you everything there is to know about Open Source. But, the author of this excellent book makes an earnest effort to provide you with a set of tools that can be used to complement your current operational routine.

When you hear the term Open Source many people think only of Linux and Linux based programs. While Linux is Open Source software there is plenty of Open Source software available for Windows too. Some of the programs and tools discussed in this book include the following: Cygwin, which allows the use of the bash shell and related powerful scripting language inside Windows, Python and its use as a scripting language, WinPT, the Windows Privacy Tools, OpenPGP Public Key Server, OpenVPN, a virtual private network server and client, XYNTService which allows running console scripts as a service, OpenLDAP, a LDAP server, SAMBA file and print server that shares between Windows and Linux and can act as a Domain Controller, MySQL SQL server, Apache web server, Xmail server, and OpenOffice, an office productivity suite. For each of the packages it includes installation instructions, configuration, and basis instructions on how to use it as well as where to go for additional documentation. These are all very useful programs that can make your Windows administration easier and more efficient. Open Source for Windows Administrators is highly recommended.

I haven't seen a book like this yet.. And I should know, I'm writing a Windows / Linux Integration and co-existence book. This book's focus is taking the myriad of open source applications and making them run on Windows. The idea is a good one: save in software costs by using the free stuff out there. There are some good tidbits of information on all sorts of applications which are already common in the Linux world: OpenVPN, OpenLDAP and OpenPGP to name a few. It could be a hard road for Windows administrators (at first) to go down the Open Source path.. and this book is good guide to get going on that path if you want to explore.

This collection of essays on the open source movement could be called a second edition to the book "Open Sources: Voices from the Revolution" that was published in 1999. That book spent much space trying to argue that the open source movement was legitimate and here to stay. That argument has long since been settled, so this book takes up the current and future trends of the open source movement. The essays can be read in any order, and depending on your expertise, some may not be of any real interest to you- for example the open source biology essay might not be valuable to someone interested in network security. However, all essays are written to be accessible to a wide audience in spite of that fact. For example, I have no background in biology whatsoever, but I still found the essay on open source biology an understandable and interesting read. I particularly enjoyed the essay on the open source paradigm shift by Tim O'Reilly. His premise is that free and open source developers are in much the same position today that IBM was in 1981 when it changed the rules of the computer industry, but failed to understand the consequences of the change. This allowed others, Microsoft in particular, to reap the benefits. O'Reilly concludes that existing proprietary software vendors are no better off, playing by the old rules while the new rules are reshaping the industry around them. Another favorite of mine was on the commoditization of software in which it is explained that this process has been driven by standards, in particular by the rise of communications-oriented systems such as the Internet, which depend on shared protocols, and define the interfaces and datatypes shared between cooperating components instead of those components' internals. There are also two fascinating essays on the open source movement in China and India, neither of which was really a factor when the first edition of this book was published six years ago. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in where technology might be headed in the future, not just those who are employed in the tech industry. I notice that nothing about the contents of the book is currently shown by Amazon, so I show the table of contents here for the purpose of completeness:
The list of essays are:
1. The Mozilla Project: Past and Future by Mitchell Baker
2. Open Source and Proprietary Software Development by Chris DiBona
3. A Tale of Two Standards by Jeremy Allison
4. Open Source and Security by Ben Laurie
5. Dual Licensing by Michael Olson
6. Open Source and the Commoditization of Software by Ian Murdock
7. Open Source and the Commodity Urge: Disruptive Models for a Disruptive Development Process by Matthew N. Asay
8. Under the Hood: Open Source and Open Standards Business Models in Context by Stephen R. Walli
9. Open Source and the Small Entrepreneur by Russ Nelson
10. Why Open Source Needs Copyright Politics by Wendy Seltzer
11. Libre Software in Europe by Jesus M. Gonzalez-BarahonaGregorio Robles
12. OSS in India by Alolita Sharma and Robert Adkins
13. When China Dances with OSS by Boon-Lock Yeo, Louisa Liu, and Sunil Saxena
14. How Much Freedom Do You Want? by Bruno Souza
15. Making a New World by Doc Searls
16. The Open Source Paradigm Shift by Tim O'Reilly
17. Extending Open Source Principles Beyond Software Development
by Pamela Jones
18. Open Source Biology by Andrew Hessel
19. Everything Is Known by Eugene Kim
20. The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir by Larry Sanger
21. Open Beyond Software by Sonali K. Shah
22. Patterns of Governance in Open Source by Steven Weber
23. Communicating Many to Many by Jeff Bates and Mark Stone
Appendixes :
A. The Open Source Definition
B. Referenced Open Source Licenses
C. Columns from Slashdot

Chris DiBona, Danese Cooper and Mark Stone edit Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution, a collection of essays from today's tech leaders exploring open source's impact on the software industry. Open source is network- enabled distributed collaboration that holds the potential of changing not only online business itself, but the nature of collaboration. Articles address the future of open source in essays that cover not just the developing technology but the participation of international communities. A 'must' for any interested in open source who would understand its ongoing evolution and potential.

Open Source Software (OSS) has radically redefined the landscape of the software industry and the Information Technology field. As much a mindset as a methodology, there are many elements of OSS that draw some of the deepest thinkers of our field. You can find some of those essays in the book Open Sources 2.0 - The Continuing Evolution, edited by Chris DiBona, Danese Cooper, and Mark Stone. There's a little something here for everyone...

Contents:
Part 1 - Open Source - Competition and Evolution: The Mozilla Project - Past and Future; Open Source and Proprietary Software Development; A Tale of Two Standards; Open Source and Security; Dual Licensing; Open Source and the Commoditization of Software; Open Source and the Commodity Urge - Disruptive Models for a Disruptive Development Process; Under the Hood - Open Source and Open Standards Business Models in Context; Open Source and the Small Entrepreneur; Why Open Source Needs Copyright Policies; Libre Software in Europe; OSS in India; When China Dances with OSS; How Much Freedom Do You Want?
Part 2 - Beyond Open Source - Collaboration and Community: Making a New World; The Open Source Paradigm Shift; Extending Open Source Principles Beyond Software Development; Open Source Biology; Everything Is Known; The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia - A Memoir; Open Beyond Software; Patterns of Governance in Open Source; Communicating Many to Many
Part 3 - Appendixes: The Open Source Definition; Referenced Open Source Licenses; Columns from Slashdot; Index

As with all compilations from various writers and authors, it's not possible to have all the articles flow with the same voice and pace. And really, they shouldn't. You're looking to get a wide array of opinions and insights, not a blended mind dump from a single writer. Conversely, you'll find that some of the articles resonate with you, and others have you moving into scan mode to get to the next one. If you keep that in mind as you're working through the book, you'll get a lot more out of it.

For me, there were two areas that were enjoyable and valuable. The story of how Wikipedia went through growing pains and worked through rules and culture was interesting. Likewise, the story of Slashdot and how it got to what it is today is insightful. I still don't care for the site, but you can't argue it's effect in the technology world. The most thought-provoking essays for me revolved around the commoditization of software. Coupled with a different book I recently finished, I realize that certain software vendors are in a very precarious position, and they are following the same path that has led others to destruction as they attempt to hold on to what doesn't work any more. Those essays would have been worth the cost of the book alone to me...

If you're part of the OSS movement, or if you're trying to understand how it will affect your business, this is a good book to read and ponder...