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The Bookworm
by Peter H. Salus
<peter@pedant.com>
Peter H. Salus is a member of ACM, the Early English Text
Society, and the Trollope Society, and is a life member of the American
Oriental Society. He has held no regular job in the past lustrum. He
owns neither a dog nor a cat.
At a time of year when most folks are perusing mysteries or science fiction, here's some less-than-typical summer reading. (By the way, I trust that most of you are aware of the fact that Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and Vernor Vinge all have new novels out. Stephenson's Cryptonomicon is nearly a thousand pages, but quite fine; Sterling's Distraction is far shorter and portrays a dystopic future; Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky is a "mere" 600, and well worth the reading, continuing the universe that we met in A Fire Upon the Deep. If you don't want to read computer stuff at the beach, try these.) If you want something a bit on the light side, try Open Sources. In 14 chapters by (alphabetically) Brian Behlendorf (Apache) to Bob Young (Red Hat), by way of McKusick, Stallman, Torvalds, Vixie, and Wall—and two contributions by Eric Raymond—the field is limned quite well. Despite some strange historical howlers in several essays, this is well worth the couple of hours you'll put into reading it. The GPL is in an appendix; I wish several of the other "free" licenses were there too. A tip of my sun visor to Bruce Perens for noting, "The concept of free software is an old one." (In fact, it precedes the FSF by just under 30 years—SHARE was founded in 1955.) Staying Mobile
When I first saw a computer, over 40 years ago, it was an enormous monstros- More Networking Most of the books I look at just weigh too much. I really don't believe that most topics require 600-1000 pages. [Sic! See below—Ed.] And even more aggravating are the myriad volumes with wide margins, lots of boxes and screen shots, and about 100 pages of text. So when I received Stewart's BGP4, I was delighted: under 200 pages and devoted to a single topic! (BGP is the Border Gateway Protocol [RFC 1654, July 1994] derived from RFC 1267, October 1991. BGP is the descendant of EGP [Exterior Gateway Protocol, RFC 904, July 1994; which grew out of RFCs 827 and 888].) BGP4 is both an easy read and a solid piece of work. Before I was done with Stewart, two more small books in the series had arrived: Geoff Mulligan's Removing the Spam and Andrew F. Ward's Connecting to the Internet. Neither of these is up to the standard of Stewart. In fact, I think that I still prefer Schwartz and Garfinkel's Stopping Spam — and they cost pretty much the same. Connecting to the Internet is a good enough book, but it's hard to see the same level of sysadmin or networker wanting it and the Stewart. It's a solid presentation of well-known material. I then received Brian Tung's Kerberos. It is not merely the first book on Kerberos, it's a real keeper. Tung is the author of the online Moron's Guide to Kerberos and has done a splendid job explaining this authentication system. Kerberos is detailed and interesting. Tung and Stewart are definite stars to me; Mulligan and Ward will depend on your level and what you want to get from them. But there's one striking thing: Each of them is under 300 pages, and two of them are under 200! Great stuff! A good series beginning. Perhaps there'll be volumes on Wave Division Multiplexing and on hubs and routers, too. More Linux Goncalves has put together a neat small book. It's not clear to me that it'll be used a lot for "building strategic applications for business," but it is a useful introduction, the CD contains Red Hat 5.2, and the Appendices (which occupy nearly 40 percent of the book) are very useful. More History Over 25 years ago, there were no PCs of any kind, but then the Alto — arguably the most important result of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, was born. And the entire world has been different ever since. Hiltzik has done a wonderful job in bringing PARC and its staff to life and making the developments comprehensible. At times, he may be a bit overenthusiastic and sound gullible, but he's right on top of all the folks and their products. Long before there was an Alto, almost 40 years before, there was the Harvard Mark I (planned in 1937 and operating in 1944)—the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. The designer, fundraiser, etc., of the Mark I was Howard Aiken. I. Bernard Cohen, who knew Aiken, and is now in his mid-80s, has produced a combination of biography and technical history that is a really compelling read. I recommend it to anyone interested in the early, electro-mechanical computers. Cohen has also added a number of inaccessible documents in appendices. Among these are the remarks Aiken made at the "Dedication" of the Mark I and his memorandum of 1949 describing the "Harvard Computation Laboratory." Even more documents of Aiken's are accessible in a volume edited by Cohen and Gregory Welch. My gratitude goes to MIT Press for making them available. Books reviewed in this column:
Chris di Bona et al., eds.
Dejan Milojicic et al., eds.
John W. Stewart, III
Geoff Mulligan
Andrew F. Ward
Brian Tung
Marcus Goncalves
Michael Hiltzik
I. Bernard Cohen
I. Bernard Cohen and Gregory W. Welch, eds.
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