Books I've been reading

Working for yourself brings the added pleasure of being able to dive into technical books that you otherwise wouldn't have time to explore. Of course the whole "I don't have time for that" argument is almost always a fallacy.

Anyways, I've been reading a few technical books lately and here are some quick reviews (presented in order of intrinsic goodness)

Enterprise Linux Clusters by Karl Kopper

Wow! To say this is a good book is an understatement. One of the best technical books I've ever read. It was so engaging and interesting I actually read through it in one sitting. Rarely is presentation so clearly thought out and rarer still is the book which covers such relevant topics. Highly highly recommended, even if you aren't building a cluster using LVS.

Jakarta Commons Cookbook by Tim O' Brien

Another excellent book. This does a good job of covering a variety of different Jakarta Commons packages and really driving home how vast the selection is. A few points docked for having a 'recipe' for each package and how to download it, but otherwise a very high content / fluff ratio. Fantastic book to buy that engineer you know who's always reinventing the wheel.

Postfix by Ralf Hilderbrandt and Patrick Koetter

A good overview of Postfix. I was hoping for a bit more from this book. Yes, the postfix config files are incredibly well documented, but I was a bit disappointed to see "RTFM" comments in a book written by the authors. (I thought this was the FM!) But it still does a good job of covering the basics of MTA's and why Postfix is the way it is. I've always been a qmail fan, but this book pushes me over the edge to Postfix.

Maven, A Developers Notebook

Ugh. This is a bad book. See my Maven post for more, but with a product so lacking in good documentation this only continues the trend. It covers only the common case, doesn't describe or explore the larger Maven architecture and doesn't help equip you to solve your own problems. I'll be putting this one up for sale on AMZN in short order.