The Internet in Ireland, Barry McMullin, Best Selling Books, 100pp, £4.99
Beginners' guides are among the most difficult books to get right. The balance between confusing and patronising the reader is a very fine one.
By and large Barry McMullin, a lecturer in electronic engineering at DCU, gets the balance right. Intended to be read, rather than as a reference, this short book introduces the hardware and software required to access the Net and outlines the services it provides and how to use them. The descriptions are generally clear, and provide more than the absolute basics, so the reader should gain some idea of the wider context. Telecom Internet (along with Information Society Ireland) sponsored its publication and Tinet is used for the examples throughout the book.
It is attractively and expensively produced, on glossy paper. Part of the budget, however, went on a "techno-blob" illustration, which that underlies the type on each page. It does not aid legibility or understanding and the money would have been better spent on more explanatory graphics and a proper index. The latter omission is a serious shortcoming in any technical book.
Programming Web Graphics with Perl and GNU software, Shawn P. Wallace, O'Reilly & Associates, 456pp, £23.50
If Perl is text-manipulation magic, then harnessing it to automatically create or manipulate graphics piles magic upon magic. The uses for this wizardry include hit-counters, providing live graphs of usage or other statistics in web pages, generating animations on the fly or turning information from a database into clickable image maps.
The book begins with a detailed description of the main formats for online graphics: .gif, .jpg and portable network graphic (PNG) format. It moves on to the graphic-handling extensions to Perl (GD, ImageMagick, PerlMagick and GIFgraph) with descriptions of their facilities and examples of code.
Most of these techniques are relevant to Windows NT/2000 and Macintosh computers as well as Unix/Linux. One chapter is devoted to the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), which offers many of the features of an image-manipulation program like Photoshop at a much lower cost (nothing) and with the ability to extend and automate its functions. The GIMP is properly useful only on Linux/Unix, although there is also a limited Windows port. The book's own blurb - that it is for "intermediate to advanced" web programmers - is about right.
Learning Perl/Tk, Nancy Walsh, O'Reilly & Associates, 358pp, £29
This volume, on the other hand, aims itself at novices and experts alike. In relation to the former, it falls short of the (admittedly outstanding) standard of Learning Perl as a beginners' book.
The Perl/Tk extension allows Perl programs to have WIMP (window, icon, mouse, pointer) graphical interfaces, instead of being started by typing commands and options at the command-line prompt. This means that scripts can be given out to end-users who might balk at typing perl-w superscript.pl oldfile > newfile or somesuch to run a program.
Building a pretty window and buttons is less than half the battle. The programs themselves must become event-driven, ever-watchful for user actions, instead of running through in a linear fashion from the command line.
These processes are covered in depth in the book. This material, however, could be made much more beginner-friendly by having more sample programs, including ones that built up from chapter to chapter, and by doing more to distinguish itself from the dry recitation of features that is typical of the documentation supplied with Perl/Tk itself.
Zero Administration for Windows, Craig Zacker, O'Reilly & Associates, 546pp, £29
"When Microsoft first began using the phrase `zero administration' in the context of the Windows NT and 9x operating systems, snickers were plainly audible throughout the computing industry. Even the thought of a Windows-based PC that was stable enough to require no professional attention at all was - and is - laughable." With this blunt introduction the author faces up to the limitations of his subject.
He goes on to show that even if "zero administration" is not available at least the toolkit provided by Microsoft under this heading can make life much easier for someone charged with administering a network of Windows NT (now Windows 2000) computers. This is done by centralising as much administration as possible in an information technology department, where expertise is available and costs can be minimised and quantified.
Automatic distribution and installation of software, centralising security policies and (above all) locking the end users out of areas where they can do damage are among the key techniques. It is a complex area, but could well repay the learning effort for those with medium to large Windows networks to manage.
fomarcaigh@irish-times.ie