[Sussex] Two books

[Geoff Teale]

Morning Slugs,

Just wanted to mention a couple of books that are out now - "Hackers
Delight" (which I have purchased a copy of) and "The business and economics
of LINUX and OpenSource" (which I was given a copy of).

Hacker's Delight
================
Author	: 	Henry S. Warren, Jr. (Forward and additional material by Guy
L Steele)
Publisher	:	Addison Wesley - hardback
ISBN		:	0-201-91465-4

This is a truely fantastic book - if you're programming at a fairly
fundemental level on a 2's compliment based architecture then this is for
you.  Ultimately this book is a cookbook of programming tips and techniques
for people who routinely think about the binary representation of their
data.  

Generally this book shows you an unconventional approach to handling binary
information (usually this means using a small number of operations (that may
seem totally unrelated) to do what would conventially be done by a large
number of operations).  In most cases this behaviour is specific to 2's
compliment machines  

The book does open with a warning that the more ingenious the solution the
hard to maintain the program is!  Most of the things here have general
function but are most likely to be appropriate if you're in the habit of
writing compilers - I assume they still make you do this at University ? ;)


Most techniques have example code in C, but obviously they can be applied in
x86 Assembly and in C++ (and the majority can even be used in Java) - this
is not a book for you PHP and Perl boys.

Even if you never use any of the tips in the book it represents an
entertaining read and at the very least it made me think about programming
in a manner that I haven't done for quite some time.  Ultimately this is a
fine companion to Knuth's "Art of computer programming", it's a lot slimmer,
less thorough and a whole lot less heavy (both on the wallet and in the
back-pack), in a way it's "Knuth for the naughty kids" :)

The Business and Economics of LINUX and Open Source.
====================================================
Author	:	Martin Fink
Publisher	:	Prentice Hall
ISBN		:	0-13-047677-3

Mmmm, this looks and sounds like a very boring book.  Realistically it is
not an exciting read - however it is a good book.  You can view this book as
an introduction to OpenSource for suits.  

Most of what is contained in this book will not be new to people on this
list, but this book does give thorough coverage to all of the issues
involved.  The book is also genuinely unbiased, it discusses the risks of
open source as well as the benefits (addressing intellectual property
concerns amongst other things).

I'd say that every IT decision maker should read a copy of this book - it
cuts through all the hype and FUD and leaves the novice reader with a clear
picture of what this stuff is all about and what it means to _your_ company.