the bookworm BOOKS REVIEWED IN THIS COLUMN by Peter H. Salus The fictitious news group periodically quoted at tedious length reads like no THE EFFECTIVE INCIDENT RESPONSE Peter H. Salus is a TEAM member of the ACM, news group I’ve ever seen. the Early English Text JULIE LUCAS AND BRIAN MOELLER Society, and the Trol- I look forward to reading Papadimitriou’s Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2004. Pp. 303. lope Society, and is a ISBN 0-201-76175-0. life member of the next theoretical work. American Oriental TURING Society. He owns nei- ther a dog nor a cat. Scheme CHRISTOS H. PAPADIMITRIOU Nearly everyone who knows me knows Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Pp. 284. that I like Scheme. It’s the best of the ISBN 0-262-16218-0. [email protected] descendants of Lisp. But it’s over 25 years since Guy Steele and Gerry Suss- THE SCHEME PROGRAMMING I’ve only a few books I want to talk man wrote their MIT AI memo (#452, LANGUAGE, 3RD ED. about this month: it’s not that the pub- January 1978), and many pages have R. KENT DYBVIG lishers have ceased production, but I just Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Pp. 295. been written about Scheme. Dybvig’s can’t get very interested in CSS or in M$. ISBN 0-262-54148-3. third edition is both an introduction Incident Response and a reference book. It’s really very THE BEST OF THE JOY OF TECH good and deserves a place on your book- NITROZAC AND SNAGGY Incident response teams are the thing shelf – but only after you read it. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2003. Pp. 192. today. There’s Lucas and Moeller, as well ISBN 0-596-00578-4. as Mandia and Prosise (reviewed in this Eric Raymond said that learning Lisp issue of ;login: by Anton Chuvakin). makes you a better programmer. Scheme is the right dialect to learn; and Dybvig’s Lucas and Moeller have turned out a book is the way to learn it. small, first-rate book, easy to read yet full of solid information. They set out a Lots o’ Laughs number of the pieces needed for an inci- OK. So it’s the New Year and you’ve read dent response team and then proceed to the latest User Friendly. Luckily, O’Reilly assemble them in a clear fashion. They has come up with The Best of the Joy of describe the kinds of incidents that Tech, so you won’t have any trouble con- require responses: internal and external, tinuing to laugh at Nitrozac and worms, viruses, intrusions, etc., in a Snaggy’s view of the geek world. They lucid fashion. Even SYN floods are men- manage to poke fun at nearly every tioned. The 50 pages of appendixes are trend. exceptional: a sample incident report, the federal cybercrime laws, an FAQ, a Oh. You didn’t know? The Joy of Tech is table of domain name extensions, and a an online comic. Now they’re in book list of well-known port numbers are form. included. The bibliography is somewhat Buy an extra as a Valentine gift for your disappointing, but adequate. favorite geek. Turing Papadimitriou is an outstanding thinker where computational theory is con- cerned. I have several of his books. In Turing he has written a romance novel combined with a history of computa- tional theory in the form of a series of lectures by Alan Turing and a dystopic image of the Internet. It’s a failure on every front, I’m afraid.

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