YOUR PROFILE
SIGN OUT

Netsurfer Recommendations

The Complete Walker IV
Chip Rawlins, Collin Fletcher
Knopf; ISBN: 0375703233

While this book is all about walking and hiking, we would not recommend that you actually tuck it in your backpack. Not because there is anything wrong with the content, mind you - no, it's the weight of the 860-page brick of a book that would have you chucking it out the minute you started wheezing up the next steep hill. The content, on the other hand, is absolutely sterling in its coverage of every conceivable hiking topic under the sun. As the title implies, this is the fourth major revision - more like a total rewrite, really - of this well known guide to all things pedestrian. Much of the book can be considered hiking-gear porn. Major sections are devoted to every piece of hiking equipment known to man, with the authors naming names and telling you exactly what works, what doesn't, and why. Beyond the equipment, shorter sections look at other aspects of foot travel, such as animal companions, trip planning, and the ever-popular environmental philosophy of hiking. The bottom line is that if you contemplate any sort of serious hiking or walking, even if you're a grizzled veteran of the trails, you need this on your shelf.

The Dumbest Moments in Business History: Useless Products,
Adam Horowitz, The Editors of Business 2.0
Portfolio; ISBN: 159184035X

One of the best features of Business 2.0 magazine is its annual list of the 100 dumbest moments in the past year's business history. This compilation of the last four years is a hugely entertaining list of gaffes and blunders made by organizations and people, big and small, famous and infamous. The fact that many of them did these things with complete sincerity and belief in the rightness of their cause makes these stories all the more entertaining. Advertising on headstones, fruitless apple juice, employee sperm donation to help the company debt - it's all here, interspersed with choice quotations from esteemed business leaders who really should have known better. The book is undeniably funny, but not without practical value as a guide to what not to do in business. It's a slim volume of bite-sized entertainment, perfect for reading on the go.

Frederick the Great on the Art of War
Frederick, Jay Luvaas (Editor), H R M Frederick II
DaCapo Press; ISBN: 0306809087

Other than military historians, not many people know much about Frederick the Great, and those who do mostly remember him as a successful general from the 18th century. But Frederick was actually an amazingly talented ruler who set a small provincial backwater called Prussia on the path to becoming a nation that would dominate Europe in the 19th century. He was a true benevolent despot who modernized his nation according to progressive principles such as freedom of the press, freedom of religion, popular education, an honest judiciary, and better government in general. Of course, he was also a creature of his age and thought of nothing of invading neighboring Silesia to extend his domain. His military adventures, in particular his skill at fighting off the much more powerful armies of France, Russia, and Austria, won him his most notable place in history. Frederick never produced any consolidated work detailing his thinking about the art of war in the 18th century, but he was a prolific writer and did write extensively about military matters in his letters, orders to his generals, and other works. This book is a collection of his military writing and spans his whole life. It's arcane stuff, mainly of interest to fans of military history, but it's such a rare collection of the words by a powerful man who made a lot of history, military and civilian, that we think it's eminently worth recommending.

Exploiting Software: How to Break Code
Greg Hoglund, Gary McGraw
Pearson Higher Education; ISBN: 0201786958

One of the essentials in designing secure software is knowing how the bad guys find and exploit flaws. Sadly, the average programmer has only a cursory understanding of the often creative ways in which crackers try to break his code. The goal of this book is to educate programmers about common techniques such as reverse engineering, privilege escalation, server/client exploits, crafting malicious input, the theory of rootkits, and the old favorite, buffer overflows. While the book has plenty of theory, it's also full of concrete examples that use a wide range of free and commercial tools easily available to the motivated bad guy. Creating good code is difficult, so it should not be surprising that breaking code is equally hard. This is reflected in the content of this sophisticated book about a technically complex subject, which is ideal reading for advanced programmers or those who aspire to that status.