I am not paranoid... honest, but we are all surrounded, surrounded by consumer appliances such as wireless network routers, media centers and even some clever fridges and microwaves. I am even sure that my elder sons Robosapien is out to get me! At least the book Linux Appliance Design: A Hands-On Guide to Building Linux Appliances by the experienced Engineers (and now writers) Bob Smith, John Hardin, Graham Philips, and Bill Piece allows us to know our hidden enemies and build better appliance mousetraps.

What are computer networks? And where does FLOSS fit in? A brief but to-the-point slim book, with loads of links, brought out by a program linked to the United Nations.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the last process I would think of when making my homepage. However, when fighting for customers or the possibility for an audience and thus advertising revenue through page clicks then understanding SEO and placing it in the center of your website’s design is vital for your personal/professional wealth. Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO by Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie and published by WORX as part of its Programmer to Programmer series details many, many valid tactics.

Linus Torvalds once wrote on linux.dev.kernel, “Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)”. While his humorous comment might not be feasible for most, the topic of backing up important files (along with recovering them) is very crucial to any person or business. One excellent book which covers this topic is Backup & Recovery by W. Curtis Preston and published by O’Reilly. The book covers not only specific solutions but methodologies as well. It is a very complete and detailed look at the whole process of data backup and recovery.

One positive example of a book that is ageless when measured against internet time is Linux Programming by Example by Arnold Robbins and published by Prentice Hall. Don’t let the 2004 publishing date fool you, the book is just as useful today as it was all those long, long three years ago. A C biased book on the subject of the fundamental core API’s such as file and memory management within GNU/Linux and based on the explanation of free software core commands, this is a powerful and valid helper for needy learners of the fundamentals.

Knowing what information is traveling across your network is what keeps you out of trouble. Are there unknown hosts chatting away with each other? Is my machine talking to strangers? You need a packet sniffer to really find the answers to these questions. Wireshark is one of the best tools to do this job and this book is one of the best ways to learn about that tool. Chris Sanders, the author of this handy book, brings you the information cleanly and clearly. His style is to show you—to walk you through exactly what to do. This method works well and the book is quite readable.

Qmail is an old, well-written, reliable security friendly email server that has proudly stood the test of time and corrosive use. Architecturally solid, with its components divided across workflow with numerous configuration files, the beginner system administrator needs a gentle push up the slopes of learning. Qmail Quickstarter: Install, Set Up, and Run your own Email Server by Kyle Wheeler and published by PACKT has been concisely written for the learning task at hand.

With so many database engine choices, it’s not easy to choose one. For those that choose SQLite, Michael Owens makes it easy to configure and operate. As the original creator of PySQLite, he knows a thing or two about this free and powerful database engine.

Setting up an enterprise mail system can be a daunting task for anyone. Curtis Smith shows you how to do it easily.

When you first open this book, you may think it’s merely a software guide. Curtis Smith shows you everything from installing Fedora Core all the way to setting up mailing lists. If you only skim through the book, you’ll think it’s just a software guide. However, if you read through the book, you will find it rich with valuable information. There is history, RFC summaries, server issues, and much more.

WordPress Complete is a guide to “set up, customize, and market your blog using WordPress”. A beginner’s guide, but much more. Interestingly, its author studied in Bangladesh, and it is published by a firm that straddles Birmingham and Mumbai!

ImageMagick, as many would know, is a software suite for image manipulation and display, supporting a wide variety of formats. But, what is less widely known is the many facets it has, and the wide array of things that can be done with it. This book gives you more than a hint of all that’s possible.

AJAX is the broadest of broad acronyms for a series of technologies that enable fashionably dynamic Web 2.0 applications. Edmond Woychowsky’s valid, technically correct and humorous book AJAX: Creating Web Pages with Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, published by Prentice Hall, plots a careful and viable path through the underlying complexity and smoke.

I picked up Beginning Ubuntu Linux, Second Edition with a sense of familiarity; I also had the pleasure of reviewing the First Edition and found the experience to be a gentle and very complete introduction to Ubuntu. It’s as though Keir Thomas wants to ensure that anyone starting out with GNU/Linux won’t feel like a worthless newb being thrown to the proverbial geeks, who will guffaw and point and weeze asthmatically and incomprehensibly. [...]

Dedicated to UNIX system managers, the book covers all there is to know about Samba (as of version 3.0.22), how it relates to Microsoft’s Active Directory networking (shares, accounts, printing) and to UNIX’s networking.

In my geek career, I have been many things: DBA, programmer, help-desk, engineer, systems administrator. I have worked with VMS, MS-DOS, various flavors of UNIX, MS-Windows of all sorts, OS/2, and MPE/iX. I have had a wide and various and satisfying career.

I can tell you without reservation, systems administration was the hardest and most demanding of all those jobs.

Subversion is a modern free software Revision Control System (RCS) that the Subversion community’s developers have designed from the bottom up to be more efficient in form than CVS. Subversion has a structured architecture and has other notable advantages such as the ability to function efficiently with binary files and the relatively low cost of tagging and branching. Yet thankfully, Subversion still manages to maintain a workflow similar to CVS, thus potentially simplifying the learning curve. [...]

If you want to build a realistic mail infrastructure with strengthened defenses against the highly selfish spammer, then Pro Open Source Mail: Building an Enterprise Mail Solution, written by Curtis Smith and published by Apress, provids a free software approach to get you there. Based on a Red Hat platform using well-known and reliable free software, this book offers a well-rounded recipe for success. If you want Webmail, Virus checking, mailing lists, content filtering and a host of other related services for your enterprise then this is most likely the book for you.

Back in my system administration days, which were pre-broadband I set up a home network with my link to the outside world being through an ISDN router. One of my co-workers came over to the house and I showed him my network, which consisted of Unix machines (Solaris, HP-UX, Linux) and Windows (NT & 98), and a Mac, to which he remarked, “You have all the cool toys, Frankie!”

The range of Java related libraries and frameworks are immense. It is a challenge for motivated Java practitioners to keep in contact with this constantly varying and exponentially increasing landscape. Challenging oneself with the new freshens one’s own ideas and helps the everyday programmer or hobbyist to adopt the right pose and attitude to constant learning. Wicked Cool Java, code bits, open-source libraries, and project ideas authored by Brian D. [...]

Maps! I grew up with a love for maps. As a young child, I could spend hours finding new routes between cities—cities I’d never been to, but could find on a map. As a teenager, a summer job depended on my ability to read maps in order to find the next job site. Now I spend hours pouring over maps to find interesting roads for my motorcycle adventures. Maps mean something different to each of us. For some they plan an escape route, for others they show the way home. Maps can also give you perspective of the world around you. Mapping Hacks can show us how to use some really interesting, freely available, data and generate maps that are unique to our own purpose. The authors, Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson and Jo Walsh, founded a company around free software GIS and mapping applications. They’re qualifications are excellent for this subject matter. As with many O’Reilly “Hack” series books, there are also a number of contributors. You will receive a wide range of instruction from people who approach the subject from different angles. This is what makes these “Hack” books so good.