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To read all the buzz on the Internet, there are a lot of people who are annoyed with Windows Vista just now. My son is a Marine serving in Iraq and the last day he was home, we bought him a laptop with Windows Vista installed so he could have a means of communication once he was deployed. Since then, he's been calling periodically asking what he can do to "fix" it. His latest outcry was to ask for a copy of Windows XP so he could "repair" his problems. I thought about that this morning as I picked up my review copy of Karp's book and wondered if the answer to these sorts of problems, (and my son isn't the only one complaining) could be found between the covers of Windows Vista Annoyances. Let's find out.

The beginning of the text on the back cover of this book says, "How secure is your network? The best way to find out is to attack it." How many people test how secure their home or car is by trying to break into them? Would you try to break into your aunt's place to test her security and when (hopefully) caught, say you were just trying to make sure she was safe? Ok, it doesn't seem to make sense when considered at that level, but in terms of the security of your network environment, people pay good money to companies so they'll take their best shot at breaking in.

This book has just come out in its fourth edition so it must be doing something right. It's huge, so at first glance, you'd assume that it's the mother of all Perl tomes. It includes a CD with all of the code examples contained in the book so you don't have to struggle with fat fingering your Perl scripts by trying to copy them from the book's pages. Now that the obvious is out of the way, what is this book's goal and does it achieve its mission?

The chapter on installing Blender was somewhat descriptive. It told me where the archive files were stored on the CD, but no actual installation instructions. I looked in vain for further hints and tips but none were to be found. As an old Debian hand now running Ubuntu on the desktop, I opened a terminal and a quick sudo apt-cache search blender later, I found that I could get the software directly installed from the apt system (yafray was also recommended and I installed it as well). No muss, no fuss. (Note to author: please include this fact in the 2nd edition. Thanks). The process for installing on Windows and MAC is different but you Windows and MAC users will have to discover it from the book since I'm only evaluating the text from a Linux point of view.

The first edition of this book got very good reviews and usually that means that unless something is drastically different about the second edition or it didn't keep up with the technology, it'll be a success, too. It's been seven years since the first edition came out which is reason enough to publish this updated title. This book comes off as cool in a couple of ways right off the bat. First of all, it's vendor-neutral...

Missing Manual guru David Pogue himself wrote this sleek, informative book on Apple's latest technology for the masses, making me wonder if he's an avid iPhone user and fan rather than just writing this "manual" to satisfy the demands of the public. Actually, despite the fact that only Pogue is given cover credit as the author, I discovered in the "Missing Credits" that J.D. Biersdorfer (I thought the days of female author's needing to disguise their gender by using initials for their first and middle names were long gone) wrote the iTunes, syncing, and accessories chapters. I've said in the past that no one person writes a book and in fact, it takes a talented and dedicated team to see a book from conception to book store shelf (or Amazon.com) and this credits section supports that statement completely.

I suppose you could call this a "specialty" book. I mean, most people "add" Ajax to their web applications when they initially develop their web applications. On the other hand, most people who have pre-existing web applications without Ajax and who think Ajax would add something, either re-develop the entire application or figure it's not worth the effort. Wouldn't it be great to be able to add Ajax to a pre-existing site and make it more interactive without having to take the whole thing apart and reconstruct it? According to author Shelley Powers, now you can.

The key to Kalbach's expertise in writing this book is his current role as a Human Factors Engineer at LexisNexis. For those of you who don't know, Human Factors or Usability is the study of how well web users with varying degrees of experience and skill are able to maneuver through your website. While you may think you've designed and launched a really cool website or the average home user, if my Mother can't figure out how to get from the home page to the product page she wants to look at or can't find her way from the product page to where she needs to go to either download a demo or get to the shopping cart, you're website turns out not looking so cool.

One of the "holy grails" of software development is the ability to write a program that will operate across platforms without you (the coder) having to rewrite for each platform. Enter Qt 4, a toolkit used largely for developing GUI applications for Linux, UNIX, Mac, and Windows. Qt 4 seems to fit the bill and be the answer to this "crusade", but can the same be said about "The Book of QT 4"?

Cisco's MARS (Monitoring, Analysis, and Response System) is a hot topic just now. This book's back cover touts it as the "next-generation Security Threat Migration system (STM)" and further states, "easy-to-use family of threat mitigation appliances enables you to centralize, detect, mitigate, and report on priority threats by leveraging the network and security devices already deployed in the network, even if the devices are from multiple vendors". That's a tall order, but Cisco Press would have to be out of its collective mind to publish something and not be able to deliver...wouldn't it?

This book comes to me in an unusual way. I received an email from the publisher and editor asking if I'd be willing to review BIND 9 DNS Administration Reference Book. Ok, that's not unusual. In fact, it happens to me all the time. What is unusual is that I'd never heard of Reed Media Services before. One reason is that they seem to be a smaller publishing house that was originally started to "print newsletter publishing, online publishing (including related software design), and providing related internet hosting services". The other reason is that they've only produced two books thus far (The OpenBSD PF Packet Filter Book is the other one).

I've played around with GIMP for awhile now but it was basically just playing around. I didn't really have a lot of time to try and "trial-and-error" my way through actually learning it so I stuck with what I already knew and did the best I could. Then Michael Hammel's book was delivered to my door. Wow! Move over PhotoShop. The GIMP has entered the building.

To quote from the "Who Should Read This Book" section: "This book is intended for anyone who is interested in learning about the foundational components of application acceleration and WAN optimization, including IT directors, network managers, application infrastructure engineers...". Ok, I get the idea and hopefully so do you. In other words, please have an admin level background and skills if you want to understand what's going on here. The real goals of this book are to instruct network engineers as to the ins and outs of this technology and to illustrate why implementing this solution is value added in the corporate environment.

That this is a second edition of a highly successful book means that it was probably updated for Web 2.0 and advances in JavaScript and Dynamic HTML. Of course, as a "cookbook" what this means wasn't that the theory and overall concepts were updated but the actual practice of developing web content was given a makeover. This doesn't mean that Goodman has produced just a dry list of "recipes" but rather has also added the "why this works" to the mix, so you aren't just stuck with a list of what temperature water boils at what altitude.

There's no doubt that women coders, developers, designers, and programmers are a powerful force in the modern tech industry, despite their smaller numbers compared to men. At the same time many of the major impacts and innovations of women at every level of the development and evolution of technology--from the first female coders to today's Web 2.0 pioneers--aren't all that well known.

I guess I was a tad surprised that O'Reilly's "Mastering Perl" is a first edition. After all, Learning Perl is in it's fourth edition and was published over 2 years ago. I was also surprised (I guess I don't keep up) that O'Reilly had published the first edition of Intermediate Perl over a year ago. Usually for a particular programming language, O'Reilly publishes a "Learning" and a "Mastering" book. I know Perl is no cake walk, but does it really need this much attention? Also, why wait four editions into "Learning Perl" before publishing more advanced texts on this language?

In some sense this book is the third in a trilogy published by Sitepoint on web design with The Art & Science of CSS and The Principles of Beautiful Web Design being the first two in the series. Since I wrote the reviews for the first two books for MCSEWorld.com, I thought I'd publish the review for The CSS Anthology here, too.

There are very few who will disagree that the best way to learn something is to do it. The concept behind the Street Smarts series is simply that if you perform a task related to a certification exam objective, you will be far more capable and knowledgeable than if you simply read about it.

The miracle of near-native virtualization technologies has saved professionals countless hours of OS thrashing. Excluding 3D graphics, systems administrators can accomplish nearly any task requiring a multitude of platforms within the comfort of the Linux workstation.

This book by Adams, et al (sorry, too many names) is a puzzling mix of the elementary and the advanced. On the one hand, it starts the reader out with very basic style sheet formatting but tosses in flash replacement which the newbie wouldn't necessarily be aware of. I'm not complaining. It's just that "The Art & Science of CSS" doesn't quite present like so many other books on the subject.