The Networking CD Bookshelf, various authors, O'Reilly & Associates, £64.95
It's a safe bet that even fewer of their respective owners have read right through Shakespeare's complete works on CD-Rom than on paper. It might make for very cheap distribution, but reading large amounts of complex text on screen simply isn't comfortable. However, once read and grasped in whatever medium, text is much easier to search and use as a reference on screen. This, as well as the cost saving, is the point of gathering six books previously published as single volumes on one disk.
The titles - DNS and BIND, TCP/IP Network Administration, Building Internet Firewalls, Practical UNIX and Internet Security, sendmail Desktop Reference and the monumental sendmail - cover a huge swathe of the programs and techniques that underlie the Internet.
The focus is squarely on Unix and its variants so, while there may be general lessons here for administrators using other operating systems, the details and examples are for Unix- like systems. Several of these books, sendmail in particular, have almost iconic status in their paper originals as the last word on their subject.
Anyone with a good working knowledge of all six is well on the way to becoming an Internet wizard. For those whose screen-reading skills are limited, the DNS book is included on paper with the disk.
The transition to CD has been handled well. As befits the subject matter, the text is in HTML format and readable on almost any computer that can run a web browser. A fast, Java-based search routine is supplied to search any book or all six at once.
Acrobat PDF Bible, Ted Padova, IDG Books, £36.99 sterling
Adobe's Acrobat format has been gaining acceptance steadily as the best way to save documents from almost any program in a form that protects the look and layout of the original and makes it accessible on all sorts of computers. Its growth has been particularly strong in electronic documents distribution and archiving and in the prepress and publishing worlds.
For many users, however, Acrobat still means only the free reader program distributed by Adobe to display files in Acrobat's portable document format (PDF). Padova spends a lot of time making the case for the Acrobat suite as the basis for a document workflow system that can improve efficiency in any organisation.
He makes quite a good case, bearing in mind the security, annotation and interactivity capabilities that have been included in the latest versions of PDF. The features and details of using the suite are covered in great detail, with some useful tips and tricks given. At times, less of the former and more of the latter might be a better mix. That, and an over-chatty style in places, are the main irritations in a useful book.
Nod don Eolach, Gasaitear Eolaiochta, An Dr Matt Hussey, An Gum, £7.30
The bit, byte and buckyball are here, along with over 600 other common scientific terms. Like the rest, the giota, beart and millin bucai get a concise description each in Irish in this gazetteer of science. A book like this has two major uses. Students taking science courses through Irish can use it as a reference without resorting to translating to and from English. For them and the rest of us, it also provides access to a wide range of terminology across all areas of science, including computing.
The descriptions are necessarily brief, but they are clear and the text is heavily illustrated. The contents are arranged alphabetically, removing the need for an index, but there are alphabetical lists of entries both in Irish and English. Each entry is heavily cross-referenced to other relevant entries. There is an emphasis on modern developments, so cibearspas (cyberspace), an chibirnitic (cybernetics) and codaigh (fractals) are in here. Perhaps because they are not areas of scientific research in themselves, the Internet and the Web are not. One might argue with the assertion "Ni usaidtear ach ASCII i riomhairi digiteacha an lae inniu", but overall this book is to be welcomed as a great resource for anyone dealing with science through Irish and a considerable achievement by the author.