Resources
Reviews
This section provides short commentary on books and software products in our areas of interest that we've had the opportunity to review. Please contact us if you have an item you would like included. (Expect mostly positive reviews: if an item isn't worthy, we may not consider it worth wasting the space and the bandwidth here!)
3 Books on Firefox
Read the review as it appeared in the CPCUG Monitor, November 2005; requires Acrobat Reader.
PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide
Read
the review as it
appeared in the CPCUG Monitor, May 2005; requires Acrobat Reader.
Buy from Amazon.com
Linux Cookbook
Linux Cookbook. Carla Schroder. O'Reilly, 2005, ISBN 0-596-00640-3.
[Read the in-depth review, along with Linux for Non-Geeks, as it appeared in the CPCUG Monitor, September 2005; requires AcrobatReader.]
"Cookbook" is an apt description. The chapters cover such
system administration areas as installing and managing software,
editing text files, managing users and groups, system rescue and
recovery, system recovery, printing, etc. Each chapter then
has many "recipes" covering specific tasks, each of which typically
runs 2-3 pages. If you don't already know how to do
these, following these recipes is much, much easier than using the
on-line Linux man pages, which requires first trying to figure out just
which commands are the ones to look at. Reviewed
18 January 2005
Buy from Amazon.com
Burn, Baby, Burn!: Recording Audio CDs from any Source, LPs to MP3s
Read the review as it appeared in
the CPCUG Monitor, January 2005; requires Acrobat Reader.
Buy from Amazon.com
Robin Williams’ Web Design Workshop
Read the review as it appeared in
the CPCUG Monitor, December 2004; requires Acrobat Reader.
Buy from Amazon.com
Google: The Missing Manual
Google: The Missing Manual. Sarah Milstein and Rael Dornfest. O'Reilly, 2004, ISBN 0-596-00613-6.
Who would have thought that somebody could write
nearly 300 pages on something so ubiquitous, so seemingly simple, as
the Google search engine. If you've never clicked on Google's
Advanced Search or Preferences options, or limited your search to
images or news or froogle, you'll find this book
enlightening.
And it has good advice for webmasters too -- how to make money with
Google's AdWords and AdSense. Once you've read this, you'll
never again consider Google to be mundane. Reviewed 5 July 2004
Buy from Amazon.com
Network Security Hacks
Network Security Hacks: 100 Industrial Strength Tips & Tools. Andrew Lockhart. O'Reilly, 2004, ISBN 0-596-00643-8.
With some books in the O'Reilly "Hacks" series, one gets the feeling
that the author was really stretching to come up with the hundred tips.
But this book is all meat, no fluff. The first chapter covers
hardening Unix and Linux, while the second covers hardening Windows.
Chapter 3 covers network security -- a grab-bag covering
easy-to-implement firewalls (meaning, no expensive software to purchase!),
securing BIND and MySQL, even scanning for vulnerabilities with
nessus and creating your own Certificate Authority.
Chapter 4 covers logging, while chapter 5 covers monitoring and trending.
Chapter 6 covers secure tunnels, through the use of open source
software; chapter 7 covers intrusion detection and snort.
If you're losing sleep over security issues but you don't have the
budget for security software, this book will get you started in
developing your own arsenal of tools. Reviewed 22 June 2004
Buy from Amazon.com
Linux for Non-Geeks
Linux for Non-Geeks: A Hands-On, Project-Based, Take-It-Slow Guidebook. Rickford Grant. No Starch Press, 2004. ISBN 1-59327-034-8.
[Read the in-depth review, along with Linux Cookbook, as it appeared in the CPCUG Monitor, September 2005; requires Acrobat Reader.]
The title really says it all! For anybody
wanting to learn how to use Linux, especially somebody not too
technical, this is an excellent introduction. It provides
step-by-step instructions for loading Fedora Core (included on two
CDs); lots of short "projects" make it easy to get up
and running with a good alternative to the Windows
environment. Reviewed
1 June 2004
Buy from Amazon.com