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Not quite four months ago, I wrote a review for SitePoint's "The Ultimate CSS Reference" for The Linux Tutorial website. I wrote the review based on the online version (which has since been made accessible to everyone) and overall, found the book to be very, very good (if not 100% "ultimate"...I'm kind of hard to convince that any one source of information is all I'll ever need). I since have gotten my hands on the hardcopy of this text and am very proud to own it. When it's "mate", "The Ultimate HTML Reference" arrived in the mail, naturally, I was interested to see how it compared.

So many books like this get 'dinged' in the reviews for not being very accessible by beginners. What people seem to forget is that not every book (on JavaScript or any other technical subject) is written for the beginner. The authors (or probably the editors) make it very clear in the Preface of this text, that this book was written for the intermediate JavaScript coder. 'Intermediate' isn't spelled out as such, but it seems to mean that you're either a person who is well versed in the lessons taught by a beginner's manual, or you know just a little JavaScript, but are quite comfortable in other programming languages (and thus general programming practices). If you haven't written a line of JavaScript in your life and are eager to learn, do not buy this book. You're not ready. If you try to learn JavaScript from jump street using this book, you'll just end up frustrated and unjustly criticize the authors. With that said, if you are familiar with the basics of JavaScript or are otherwise qualified as described above, please continue reading this review and see if this text is right for you (I think it will be).

This book came just in time...for my daughter, that is. She's a Graphic Arts major at a university in the Northwest and for some time, I've been trying to convince her to try working on a Mac. Please keep in mind, I'm not a Mac person. I do very well on my Ubuntu PCs, both at home and on the job, but I know that Macs are more or less the standard platform for the graphic design world. Fortunately for Jamie (my daughter), one of her uncles was willing to be generous and "donate" his MacBook to the cause (he was upgrading).

I know the book states CS2, and since the only version of Photoshop that I own is CS3, I was a little leery of buying a book that was written specifically for another version of this software. Was I going to end up with a book that made no sense to me? After all, I am a newbie to Photoshop and everything he is talking about may have been changed in the newer version. Well, I 'm here to tell you â??noâ??, that is not the case at all. This book isnâ??t just for CS2 users. It goes great with CS3, too.

Finally, a JavaScript book not for beginners and one that says so upfront! How refreshing. I was a little doubtful when I first read the back cover, but then reassured when part of the Preface said, "This is not a book for beginners...This is not a book for dummies...This book is small, but it is dense". Actually, I was wondering how a book less than 200 pages was going to present JavaScript, if it was indeed written for beginners. To nail down the target audience a little more, I'll continue to quote, "It is intended for programmers who...are venturing into JavaScript for the first time. It is also intended for programmers who have been working with JavaScript at a novice level and are now ready for a more sophisticated relationship..."

You have no idea what it takes to get an advanced copy of a book...particularly a book on a popular subject. I hope you'll all still be interested in my review of 'The Official Ubuntu Book, Third Edition'. Let me explain. A few months ago, I could hardly swing a cat (no, not literally) without hitting someone talking about Ubuntu 8.04, the Hardy Heron. All of the Linux news sites were just 'abuzz' with Hardy Heron this and Hardy Heron that. It was as if the entire Linux world (and sometimes beyond) really couldn't get enough of this long-awaited, latest version of Ubuntu. I figured that any book published about Hardy Heron within a month or so if its official release would be able to name its own price.

This isn't the sort of book I usually review. I don't know if you can say it has much to do with the computing industry, but it is on a topic that we all have in common (hopefully). I don't always consider myself the brightest bulb in the ceiling, so when I saw this book was available and read the subtitle, "How to get the most from your mind", I couldn't resist and asked for a review copy. Here's how it goes. One of the first things I do when I get a book for review, is to take a look at the back cover. The material there usually offers a nice summary of the content contained therein. I didn't find this back cover blurb to be particularly helpful. It seemed too "general", saying in part, "One part science guide, one part self-help concierge...grounded in...neuroscience, psychology, and nutritional wisdom..." I have a bachelor's degree in Psychology and a master's in Counseling, so I have something of the necessary background to review the material, but a neuroscientist, I'm not. What's the average reader going to make of it?

You may be wondering why I'm reviewing a book on Ubuntu 7.10 ("Gutsy Gibbon") on the advent of the release of Ubuntu 8.04 ("Hardy Heron"). If I've waited all this time to review the Hudson and Hudson book (released last January), why not wait until 8.04 is released, and the 4th edition of this book is written and published (as I write this, there are 18 days to go until the 8.04 release date)? Good question. Originally, I had given serious thought to just that course of action. Then something changed.

Not only is this a good book to have if you want to learn JavaScript from the ground up, but it's a good book to have if you want to learn the basic principles of programming. Chapter 2, Programming with JavaScript alone is worth the price of admission. So many books seem to throw the reader directly into the JavaScript (or some other programming language), without describing how to do the basic steps of programming in that language. Chapter 2 is truly written for the beginner and takes the reader by the hand, showing them how to build a simple program from the ground up.

According to the Book Description blurb: "Stop wasting time doing Internet searches only to find inaccurate, out-of-date, or incomplete information. CSS: The Ultimate Reference includes all the ins-and-outs you need to know including compatibility information for all major browsers, lists of useful hacks, known bugs in CSS, and much more - all presented in a beautiful, full color layout that will have you coming back over and over again". Ok. I know plenty of folks who want to learn more about CSS and are indeed frustrated by online resources. The Olsson and O'Brien book promises what a many CSS books promise...to the the "end-all-and-be-all" of CSS resources. Let's have a look and see if it can live up to this claim.

Think of Qt (pronounced "cute") as a toolkit. In fact, according to Wikipedia, Qt is "a cross-platform application development framework, widely used for the development of GUI programs (in which case it is known as a Widget toolkit), and also used for developing non-GUI programs such as console tools and servers. Qt is most notably used in KDE, the web browser Opera, Google Earth, Skype, Qtopia, Photoshop Elements and OPIE". I suppose if you needed that definition to tell you what Qt is, then maybe this book isn't for you.

I didn't think of Wikipedia as having a manual, missing or otherwise, but it makes sense that it does. For much of the world, Wikipedia is a resource to help people access different types of information, but it's much more than that. As the back of Broughton's book puts it, "Wikipedia may be the biggest group writing project ever...". That being the case, the "group" will need to know how to work together to contribute related information in a common framework. Does this book tell you how to do this? Let's find out.

I've been studying Apache security lately and ran across a very good book on it written by Ryan Barnett called "Preventing Web Attacks with Apache". I am really impressed with this book that was published in 2006. Barnett covers things that I didn't even know existed in Apache before I started reading this. I have the O'Rielly book "Apache Security" and have to say that this book so far outstrips the O'Rielly book that it isn't even funny. To be fair "Apache Security" doesn't cover much to do with web application security, and the Barnett book covers it in depth.

On an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge tries to get the Enterprise out of an energy-draining booby trap by creating a simulation of the original Galaxy class starship propulsion design from the Utopia Planitia shipyard on Mars on the holodeck. Ultimately, he is successful with the help of a holodeck simulation of one of the original warp engine designers and thus, the ship is saved. Oddly enough, this is the kind of approach author John Day has taken to describe network architecture fundamentals to the audience of this book.

This book has almost as many authors as it does pages. This tells me that O'Reilly tapped into a rather large pool of talent in order to get this book written and out to the public. Something re-enforced by the blurb at the back of the book, "What if you could sit down with some of the most talented security engineers in the world and ask any network security question you wanted?" This book is supposed to be the print equivalent of doing just that (not that the book talks back, as such). 23 cross-referenced chapters produced by an impressive group of authors, editors, and technical reviewers with very interesting bios is a lot to absorb and it should be. I expect this book to include everything security-related, kitchen sink and all.

Skip the table of contents unless you want to go blind. Sorry, it's just the formatting of the TOC seems to run all the chapters and topics together and at least in my case, makes me work extra hard to get my visual markers and make sense of the content. I had a much better time in the "How is this Book Organized" section, though it didn't let me take in the different topics in the book at a glance. This is how I first approach a book to try and understand in brief, what's inside and if I'm interested. So far, if I'd come across this book in a bookstore or library, I might have passed it by. That would have been a mistake on my part.

I suppose I have more than a casual interest in reviewing this book. The software development team I work with operates using agile development. Reviewing this book is for me, a way of becoming more familiar with the people I work with and how they work. I'm not a developer...not in the software sense anyway. They call me a developer of content and that's what I do...provide help files, white papers, and any other documentation to describe the products developed by the folks I work with. While I have had agile development explained to me and have seen it in action every workday of the week for the past two-and-a-half months, it will be interesting to see the "official" version presented by Shore and Warden.

According to Microsoft, Windows PowerShell is a "command line shell and scripting language helps IT professionals achieve greater control and productivity". I provided a link to the Windows Powershell page at Microsoft in this review for reference but if you are at all interested in this book, you probably already know the basics of PowerShell, what is it and, to some degree, what it can do. The question is then, does Lee Holmes provide the right "recipes" in his "cookbook" to help you get baking (or is it only half-baked)?

This highly streamlined text doesn't have a "Who Should Read this Book" section but I guess it should be obvious that anyone who designs websites for a living needs to read it. "High Performance Web Sites" is literally a list of 14 steps (one chapter per step) on techniques you can use to get your web pages to load more quickly and generally improve the performance of your sites on the web. The author has the qualifications to write such a book with authority. He's responsible for performance management at Yahoo! You'd have to assume he knows what he's talking about.

The blurb on the back cover starts out, 'Want to tap the power behind search rankings, product recommendations, social bookmarking, and online matchmaking? This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build Web 2.0 applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by participatory Internet applications'. That's fine and dandy, but what's the inside story? If you happen across this book at your local bookstore, do you wonder just what 'Collective Intelligence' is in this context? Let's find out a little about the concept, the practice, and this book.