Here are some technical books in various fields I am reading at the moment:

Taylor, Dave. Macworld Creating Cool Web Pages with HTML (Foster City, CA: IDG, 1995).

This book is great for simple reference to basic HTML. I have been using it for about 8 years. I use it about once a month like now when I need to look up the code for a definitons list like this one you're reading showing titles of books and a brief comment about each book. For more serious HTML references with more depth, I use Ian Graham's, The HTML Source Book: A Complete Guide to HTML 3.0 (New York, NY: Wiley, 1996).

Schwartz Randal L. & Christiansen, Tom. Learing Perl, 2d (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 1993 & 1997).

I have tried to read this book before. I am volunteering as a recording secretary and administration secretary for two of my unions and a community group, so would like some help with report writing and quick editing of word processed documents. PERL promises this help. The problem is... I have not been able to learn much about PERL by reading about it alone. Oh well, I try again and borrowed this book today.

Schwartz, Alan. Managing Mailing Lists (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 1998).

This book I bought to read for advice on managing... actually moderating mailing lists. I have present responsiblity as a volunteer for moderating two community group's email lists. These are real life organizations that use mailings lists. I have one of my own yahoo mailing lists too for geography studies discussions but it is only used once or twice a year, so it is sort of a dead list. It also has no real life affiliation. Some people confuse email mailing lists with mass marketing postal mailing lists but if you don't know yet what an Internet email mailing list is then it is easy to see why you might not know there's a difference. In fact, one can use an email mailing list for marketing but I don't think one could use a fund raising postal mailing list or mass market postal mailing list for discussions. I haven't read much of this book but I bought it just last week.

Gulbransen, David. The Complete Idiot's Guide to XML (Indianapolis, IN: QUE, 2000).

Instead of Y2K the year 2000 brought us this book. I started reading this book in the winter of 2003. I have been slowly writing a dtd or two. I have opened about three or four editors for writing XML on all three platforms Linux, Mac and Windos. All these XML editors seem to need a dtd to already exist. I read the whole book last year and am reading it again this year to reference for writing my dtd's. I have been using xemacs on my WinXP laptop most recently to work on one of my dtd's but plan to go back to Gedit next for this work.

Spector, David H.M. Building Linux Clusters (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2000).

Again Y2K didn't happen, I recorded my first movie off TV which was Y2K the movie and this book came out that year. Actually I had a friend record it as at that point, December 31, 1999, I could not work a VCR. I can now program and work a variety of VCR's. I can even install Red Hat 6.2 as a super computer on IBM hardware and this book and its accompanying CDROM made this happen. Reading this a couple of years ago I learned basic networking and SCSI with the help of other networking books since, and the web to learn SCSI facts. I find this a great book but apparently the publisher has appologised for publishing it. I could not get the web interface working on the supercomputer software maybe it was flawed or something. Contact me if you read or used this book just to share notes. I was reading this book recently to understand networking with more than one router.

Cross, David. Data Munging with PERL (Greenwich, CT: Manning, 2001).

Computer books seem to still to be written only by people named Dave or David and this book comes out a year after Y2K. I just got it today at the library and might stay up all night so I have time to read it before having to go work somewhere.

Bhasin, Shweta & Bhatia, Vikram. Web Security Basics (Cincinnati, OH: Premier, 2003).

Finally it is 2003 and this book is for Intermediate and Advanced users and it is not written by a Dave or a David. Other than that I haven't read it yet.

Well those are the technical books directly in computer science that I am reading. I will post some books on more social computer topics later as well as some technical books I am reading in statistics, GIS, GI science, hydrology, technology and disabilities, and finally some politics and techno-culture books. I mean cyberculture but don't want to use that word really.

Another busy day working as a tutor/student/teaching assistant ends and I feel great.