Book Reviews

TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac accomplishes exactly what it set out to – show you how powerful TextMate really is and how to use this power to do exactly what you want. James Gray has put something for every level of user into his book. Novice and average TextMate users will gain a breadth of knowledge about keyboard shortcuts as well as seeing how a few of the built-in bundles can help them increase efficiency. The TextMate gurus out there can even learn about building their own language grammars for TextMate to recognize.

The book is organized into three major sections with appropriate chapters in each. In the first section, Gray shows how to effectively use TextMate's project drawer for managing your work, explains TextMate's Emacs-like keyboard shortcuts, and demonstrates the power of the find and replace features with regular expressions. The second section shows TextMate's strength in automating things you would normally type, thereby saving you time and preventing typos. The final section explains how to write a language grammar yourself and provides a concrete example of such an implementation.

Despite being somewhat of a manual, the book is very readable, with pictures, simple explanations, and some jokes tossed in. Although the book isn't a quick reference or a complete guide, it is very easy to find what you are looking for and contains a large amount of information along with examples. If you are looking for a good reference book on the TextMate editor, definitely look into this one as it should contain everything you need.

This book is an excellent introduction into the world of computer security. I was a bit surprised at the contents; the book features many more offensive techniques, like reverse engineering binaries, performing successful stack/heap overflows, attacks on a variety of server/network platforms, and defeating IDS/forensic technologies. I had initially expected the book to be more focused on security defense, which is covered, but certainly not in a typical ratio. I wouldn't complain though, because as is stated in this book several times, a good offense is a good defense. For instance, upon introducing stack overflows, the authors wisely quip how a company could save a great deal of money and embarrassment if its employees found such vulnerabilities before they leak into the wild.

If I did have one bad thing to say about Security Warrior, it's that I happen to know quite a bit about its entire first section already, so I found parts quite tiresome. Having already read such texts as Chris Eagle's "The Ida Pro Book", this book's section on disassembly seemed a paltry introduction in comparison; however, it seems this amount would be about right to gently introduce someone to the subject, were they not already aware of this field of computer security knowledge.

All in all, Security Warrior is a good introductory text to a wide variety of computer security related topics, and hopefully the reader will leave interested in implementing at least a few of the defensive strategies listed, or want to become more familiar with some of the more interesting attack vectors. Further reading/knowledge will be needed other than the information found here in order to do useful security work, but, Security Warrior certainly at least gets the ball rolling and the interest piqued.

The Manga Guide to Physics presents a simple, but quite effective, introduction to the topics of mechanics, such as Newton's Laws and energy. The manga style lends itself quite well to the presentation of the various topics.

The book begins by discussing the three laws of motion: inertia, acceleration, and reaction. With the basic topics down, it moves on to more complex ideas, such as momentum and the transfer of energy. These ideas are all explained with copious examples and pictures to reinforce the concepts that are being taught. There is also a longer, more detailed explanation of each idea at the end of each chapter, to expand on what was said during the chapter.

There are few downsides to this book, as physics is best explained with lots of pictures and examples, but occasionally I found myself needing to reread sections due to the amount of information being presented.

Despite the differences from the traditional textbook, I highly recommend The Manga Guide to Physics to any beginner or veteran looking for an less complicated way to review the basics of physics. Overall, I believe Hideo Nitta and Keita Takatsu have created a very high quality guide that is successful at both teaching physics and being enjoyable to read.

Most Xen documentation on the Internet can be a tad focused on the single-computer, single-admin personal-use Xen administration case. This book, thankfully, is not. This is definitely the book to keep on your shelf if you require tips and tricks for setting up your own VPS hosting service, with its world full of malevolent users needing to be kept in their place, quotas for bandwidth, disk I/O, CPU time, and memory usage, and allowing your users to configure their own instances without you having to step in every time they blow out their /boot partitions.

There are plenty of concepts covered in here for other use-cases (besides just hosting your own VPS provider) as well, including remote-mounting disks over NFS/iSCSI/AoE, migrating live Xen instances across a cluster of servers, and backing up disk images and machine states.

The Book of Xen provides a fair and balanced view of Xen management; that is to say, while it it does talk often about the many distro-specific ways of easily bootstrapping and configuring a new virtual server (like Debian's debootstrap, Red Hat's virt-install, or even creating images in Citrix XenServer) it also covers vendor and distro-neutral ways of performing all the required installation and management tasks. The Book of Xen is also fair in that it also goes on to describe the use and configuration of Microsoft, BSD, and Solaris Xen dom0 and domUs as well, with the caveat that support for Xen is weak and upcoming on such platforms as FreeBSD, and that HVM is required for many of these more exotic operating systems like "Microsoft Windows", as there are no Xen hooks in the Windows kernel.

I particularly liked the Book of Xen's first chapter, which, unrelated to the rest of the book’s sysadmin-oriented content, was a good overview of the technical underpinnings of the Xen hypervisor platform, and how it interacts with the hardware and virtualized machines from a very low-level perspective. As it is stated later in the book, and something that I agree with, the authors believe that one must know a technology, how it works, and its more basic manual and command line tools, before ever trusting a GUI or web interface to do the same. It will also surely aid debugging later when something goes wrong, as the administrator will have a good idea as to where the problem might lie.

All in all, I liked the book and would recommend it to anyone setting up their own Xen servers, however, I wished it would have had more information about Xen on the Intel Itanium (which is touched upon in the book as being a supported platform, but not talked about further) and I wish it had talked more about some of the topics they covered, like giving users access to their own Xen management consoles, in the common situation where there are many physical machines that a user's instance could be on, a situation which completely broke their offered solutions for this situation and others.

"The Manga Guide to Databases" by No Starch Press takes on the task of teaching the fundamentals of databases and their design through the colorful and cheerful world of manga. As the story goes, Princess Ruruna is in trouble. Her parents have just run off to vacation in some far away land, and left the entire "Kingdom of God" in her hands. Ruruna has no idea how do run a kingdom, and to top it off it seems the three branches of her government keep getting their data mixed up as they have no central storage for their information. Just as it looks like all hope is lost, Ruruna's parents send a book that contains a magical fairy. This fairy is not an ordinary fairy though, this is a "database fairy" that is here to teach Ruruna about databases that will help save her kingdom.

Using this story and great looking graphics "The Manga Guide to Databases" covers almost all the fundamentals of databases. Normalization, basic SQL, and even database operational management are all topics covered, while keeping its upbeat style and humor. I was surprised to see just how well this book was able to explain some of the more complected aspects of database creation while keeping its simple style of explanation. This would be a great book for any that wants a quick overview of databases without having to deal with a mundane textbook you have to trench through. This book could even be read by young adults that are interested in learning technical topics like databases.