Practical Unix & Internet Security, 3rd Edition is the best general security book I've ever read (and I've read a lot of them). Even Fyodor agrees with me (if that means anything ;-).

As for the CVS book, I didn't particularly like its organization and found learning CVS (even the complex parts) is better done by the docs. Lots of people disagree with me here though.

I'm curious what you thought about The Peopleware Papers: Notes on the Human Side of Software, it looks worth the read.

Peopleware's still on the 'to read' list =)

PUIS, I have an earlier edition of. I do actually want a hard copy of the new edition rather than just an electronic one, but probably won't be able to justify it for a while.

I approached the CVS book from the position of having been using CVS already for quite a few years. But I'd never bothered going beyond the basics. Sure, I could set up a pserver, I could do remote repositories, I could tag, I could even use tags. I wanted to learn about branches though and wanted to see what the book was like.

It is mostly unexciting. The word 'Essential' should be noted. It's almost a quick reference (though I do note that ORA has one of those as well). I did find the branching section useful and it did cover branching philosophies which was nice. Even if the very next day I'd started using subversion and am now importing my various projects from cvs into svn.

I think it's a good book, worthy of a read if you're new to CVS, but I'm not sure if it's worth the cover price. I think it's worth a Safari rent. If you're new to CVS.

 

Favourite recent node: 279915 - The Study of Computer Programming.

I don't know if Safari has the following books, but here goes my list:

• Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, it includes some Perl code;
• Content Management for Dynamic Web Delivery by JoAnn T. Hackos, Wiley; it describes the entire process, no code but many ideas;
• Code Complete by Steve McConnell, suggested here many times, is really interesting;

There is also a place in the Monastery where you can find a list of books suggested to vroom. Look also on gmax's homenode.

Ciao, Valerio

I don't believe Safari has any fiction books on it actually. I think this is mostly due to tech books being O'Reilly's strength. It would be nice to see an alternative site launched for that purpose though.

Tim O'Reilly for president!

Actually, there are some books on Safari that fall in to that category:

• The Art of Project Management
• Perl 6 Essentials
• Perl Best Practices

:-)

• Test-Driven Development By Example By Kent Beck
  
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture By Martin Fowler and others.
  
• Pragmatic Programmer, The: From Journeyman to Master By Andrew Hunt, David Thomas.
  
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code By Martin Fowler and others.

With the exception of the first book, I've read them all. The strange thing is, I didn't learn a single thing from them. Has anyone else had similar experiences with these, or design books in general? They seem to either confirm the blatantly obvious, or state theories that you see problems with .5 seconds after reading them.

It seems to me a good design book would be 90% code. Perhaps I'll just go read the 2.4 kernel again (-;

In many cases good design is obvious. The second part of good design is that sometimes you have to do something that isn't good design, and that is good design.

For every design rule there is an exception. The trick is to know when that exception is happening.

If you're finding you see problems with many things, perhaps you should point such things out to the author, or note them in your web journal, assuming you have one.

Having read about half the books on Safari (well, almost), I'd highly recommend the following:

1. Python in a Nutshell
2. Customer Relationship Management: Getting It Right!
3. Mastering Algorithms with C
4. Oracle in a Nutshell
5. PostgreSQL
6. MySQL, Second Edition - Paul DuBois
7. Secure Coding: Principles & Practices
8. Programming .NET Security (just started this one)
9. Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++ (just started this one)
10. Perl 6 Essentials
11. Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules
12. Practical mod_perl
13. Linux Security Cookbook
14. Practical Unix & Internet Security, 3rd Edition (very highly recommended)
15. Honeypots: Tracking Hackers
16. Building Secure Servers with Linux
17. Writing Information Security Policies
18. Chris Crawford on Game Design
19. Java™ Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition
20. Nanotechnology: A Gentle Introduction to the Next Big Idea
21. Sequence Analysis in a Nutshell
22. Running Weblogs with Slash
23. Testing Extreme Programming

Whew! Keep in mind that's just a very small sample of what's available. The only improvement I would suggest is for O'Reilly to consider adding more science and AI books. Then again, if that happened, I'd never leave my house ;-)

Really what you have to do is just look around for yourself, they have about 1600 high-quality tech & business books, it's hard to recommend ones without knowing exactly what you're interested in. Anyways, hope you find something in that list interesting :)

How come you manage to read as much books as I would take to an isolated island 4 the rest of my life (including a PC, of course)(and a power generator)(and an ISP connection:))

How come you manage to read as much books as I would take to an isolated island 4 the rest of my life

Caffeine, lots of Caffeine :). That, a few speed reading courses, and an extreme interest in everything technical and you're set.

Actually, I'm lying, I've really just created a construct program that directly interfaces with my neural net. From there it was just some LWP, HTML::Parser, quite simple really ;-).