Misc. Books for Programmers This section reviews a cross section of books about Progrmaming. The books below didn't fit into the other sections on this site, so are grouped together into this "miscellaneous" bucket. Some other technical book reviews on this site are: Software Engineering Lotus Domino C++ Books Tcl Books Perl Books Design & Graphics Internet Unix Talk Java to Me is a book companion to a computer-based learning program that is included with the book. I had liked a previous book by this company, on C++ (Master C++ , which was useful when I was a rank beginner at C++) but I so far haven't found the time to sit through this to give it a thorough opinion. Python is an interesting programming language that has been popping up as a web application programming language (I think a lot of Yahoo's stuff is Python based, as I see a lot of .py extensions there). In 1996, I was considering using Tcl, Python or Perl as scripting languages for Lyris ListManager (www.lyris.com), a program I was writing then. At the time, Python was the only one of the three that was thread-safe, which was a requirement for me, since I was writing a multithreaded C++ application. However, delving deeper, I found that Python's thread-safety was caused by a global semaphore which prevented two programs from running at the same time, which (so I believed) would cause poor performance. So, I skipped it. Nowadays, I'm more of a convert to Tcl (I've gone through a few year's love affair with Perl, but now find the language useful but oying, and worthless for large programs [just look at the Perl library's source code, if you doubt me -- other people's Perl code is virtually unreadable). At any rate, Programming Python is the original book on Python, written by the author of Python, so it's the one to get if you're interested in exploring Python. I know a few Python programmers who also know some other languages, and they love the OOness of Python, and claim that it's the best language they've ever used. In terms of design, it does remind me of Java (a safer, and fixed version of C++) The New Hacker's Dictionary is a wonderfully funny romp through the words used in computer geek circles. I also love the cartoons about the water-powered computer, and back in 1993, wrote to and received permission from the cartoonist to reprint them inside our company's newletter. George Landow's Hypertext: The convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology is a good book if you're interested in the academic side of hypertext. Most of what he has to say applies to the World-Wide Web as well. Gene Landy's Software Developer and Marketer's Legal Companion is dull and painful, but is something most rogrammers should be aware of. It is now out of print.