Summer reading list for the geek crowd

Want to know how to get girls at the beach? Forget rippling muscles, glistening with suntan oil. Instead, set yourself up under an umbrella; make sure your pasty white skin is angled to really blind beachgoers with glare, and pile a few of the latest geek books around you. If possible, also have a notebook running with a WiMax connection or something.

I try this every time I’m in Hawaii. Although I have yet to tweak it enough to get a girl to come over and actually speak, I know there’s something to it because they all walk by and stare. I’m so close. Maybe I’ll bring an open bag of Cheetos.

I can’t get you the final sun-bathing-geek-stud success ingredient (yet), but I can help out with some of the best new geek tomes to have strewn about on your “Computer Geeks Have Hard Disks” beach towel. Unfortunate for this Enterprise Windows column, some of the better ones have recently come from Linux authors.

An interesting one is The Book of Postfix by Ralf Hildebrandt and Patrick Koetter (No Starch Press, March 2005, ISBN 1-59327-001-1). Sure, we all need to dig into Exchange, but learning about an easily implemented alternative is never a waste of time. The book is truly well-written, starting from the ground up, yet it doesn’t talk to you as though you were just hit in the head with a hammer. Additionally, it’s got a great beginning section that does an excellent job explaining the general mechanics of how e-mail works.

Another new e-mail-related text from No Starch is Ending Spam by Jonathan A. Zdziarski (No Starch Press, July 2005, ISBN 1-593270-52-6). This one gets a little geekier and in-depth than the Postfix volume, but if you’re looking for a primer on how the anti-spam battle is fought, you can’t do much better.

For those looking to tame their herds of Windows XP desktops, a great beach read is Microsoft Windows XP Professional Resource Kit, Third Edition by Charlie Russel, Sharon Crawford, and the Microsoft Windows Team (Microsoft Press, March 2005, ISBN: 0735621675). This bad-boy, 1,500-page behemoth (take that, Harry Potter!) is fully up to date with Service Pack 2 and can answer any question an IT professional is likely to have about XP  — except how to lug the book to and from your beach towel without scaring off the ladies or having a heart attack.

A remarkably clear table of contents means you probably won’t need to go index-surfing to find something specific, and this book is definitely IT-oriented: It doesn’t just cover operating system issues, but also touches on things such as planned deployment, network security, and network-based installations.

And all kidding aside, a new book I really found fascinating is Mapping Hacks by Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson, and Jo Walsh (O’Reilly, June 2005, ISBN: 0596007035). This is an entire volume dedicated to describing different methods for obtaining and presenting cartographic data. The book describes everything from simple map hacks, such as placing an interactive 3D map of a building on a Web site, to something as complex such as extrapolating business-oriented data from GPS systems and dedicated mapping applications such as GRASS.

You’ve got to be a bit of programmer to get the most out of the book, but if you’re willing to skip some of those parts, even nonprogrammers can get an excellent grounding in what to expect from a mapping application. The only ping is that the book missed the new Google mapping API by a few months; that’s a small complaint considering the clear writing and comprehensive nature of the rest of the book. It gets one glaringly white thumb way up in the summer sun.

Chewing through these volumes should take you the rest of the prime beach-going season, especially if you also take a few issues of InfoWorld along, as any proper sunbather should.