Greg, a DDJ contributing editor, is the author of Practical Parallel Programming (MIT Press, 1995), and currently works on access control software for Baltimore Technologies in Toronto. Greg can be reached at [email protected].
Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems
David J. Agans
American Management Assoc., 2002
175 pp., $21.95
ISBN 0814471684
Translucent Databases
Peter Wayner
Flyzone Press, 2002
185 pp., $29.95
ISBN 0967584418
The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine
Tom Standage
Walker & Company, 2002
272 pp., $24.00
ISBN 0802713912
Network Security with OpenSSL
John Viega, Matt Messier, and Pravir Chandra
O'Reilly & Associates, 2002
384 pp., $39.95
ISBN 059600270X
Web Metrics: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success
Jim Sterne
Wiley, 2002
430 pp., $30.00
ISBN 0471220728
Do you ever get the feeling that some publishers believe people buy books by the pound? I do, every time a five-inch thick slab of dead trees thuds onto my desk. I think it's an odd belief: In this wired age, when all the reference material you could ever want is instantly accessible online, a book's value lies in how well it condenses, not in how long it drags things out.
Take David Agans's Debugging, for example (which I read in preprint). Its first sentence says, "This book tells you how to find out what's wrong with stuff, quick," and that's exactly what it does. In 15 short chapters, Agans presents nine simple rules to help you track down and fix problems in software, hardware, or anything else. His war stories are entertaining (although I think one or two are urban myths), and his advice is eminently practical. On the down side, his jokes are often very strained (only the one about the car's transmission bears rereading), and his editor should have pointed out to him that not all engineers are male. Still, I have printed out his rules, and expect I'll lend this book out frequently.
Peter Wayner's Translucent Databases is just as thin—and just as useful. A translucent database is one that uses one-way encryption functions to its contents, so that even if attackers have full access to the database itself, they cannot read all of the data. For example, an online retailer might scramble customers' names using passwords provided by the customers themselves. This ensures that customers can get at their own records (and prove that those records are theirs), while preventing insiders from discovering who has been buying all those books on cryptography. While it's possible to question how widely these techniques can be applied in the real world, Wayner's exposition is very clear, and the ideas themselves are very timely.
Third up this month is a nontechnical book by Tom Standage, the computer editor for The Economist magazine. His first book, The Victorian Internet, explored the parallels between the telegraphy revolution of the 19th century, and the growth of the World Wide Web late in the 20th. His new book, The Turk, recounts the story of a chess-playing automaton built by a Hungarian named Wolfgang von Kempelen in the 1760s. The Turk was supposedly a clockwork figure, although in reality a human operator hid inside it and made its moves. Over the course of almost 80 years, it sparked continuing debate over whether a mere machine could do something as human as play chess.
The Turk is an entertaining book, very much in the mold of Sobel's award-winning Longitude. However, I was disappointed that the author didn't use the Turk's story to explore the origins of artificial intelligence (and the debate over whether intelligence can be artificial) to a greater extent. While the last chapter does touch on the famous Kasparov-Deep Blue match, I wanted to know more about when and how people began wondering whether machines could think.
Network Security with OpenSSL, by John Viega, Matt Messier, and Pravir Chandra, is as technical as The Turk is entertaining. OpenSSL is an open-source implementation of the SSL and TLS protocols, which are widely used to secure network communication on top of TCP/IP. It is also a general-purpose C Library, offering well-tested implementations of RSA, SHA1, S/MIME, and many other standards. This new book from O'Reilly & Associates describes the library, the command-line tools that can be used to drive it, and how to integrate OpenSSL into applications. The style is matter-of-fact, and the examples are well chosen, although the pace is not for novices. While much of the material describing the nuts and bolts of OpenSSL is available online, this book is a good introduction, and a useful reference guide.
The last book on this month's list is Jim Sterne's Web Metrics. The blurb on the back says, "In this innovative book, leading Internet marketing expert Jim Sterne uncovers the latest tools and techniques that will help you determine if and how your Web site is adding value to your company." That pretty much sets the tone for the book itself: Sterne has clearly been infected with whatever virus it is that makes people in sales and marketing put three flavor-of-the-moment adjectives in front of every buzzword they drop into a conversation to show how plugged-in they are. Which is a shame, because the author does have a lot of interesting, practical things to say about how to figure out whether a corporate web site is paying for itself. At least the book isn't too thick...
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