Review

 Just recently SOPA became a big deal.  If you haven't hear the basics Michael Geist provides a snappy overview.   The intersection of copyright and internet access issues have really come into the main stream in the past year or so.

I still remember the first hack that I witnessed with my own eyes.  My buddy we'll call him 'G',  and I were sitting in front of a computer in our High School Grade 10 programming class. Some of the specifics escape me but it was an amazing bit of computer work.  

 I guess it is fair to say that I have been struck with Drupal fever.  But I wouldn't go so far as to say I've learned the chords for the Drupal Song.  I have moved over the initial hump of learning curve and slowly I'm making my way down the smooth segment towards advanced-beginner.  There is a lot of documentation online to get going with Drupal but it is often hit or miss.  Quite often it is outdated, mostly due to how fast Drupal moves.

It's not very often I'd say this but these books do a great job introducing core Drupal ideas, far better then any single tutorial I've found online. 

The Case for Books: Past Present and Future by Robert Darnton

This book is a quaint, and nostalgic look at the physical form of the traditional book.  In the parlance of the bibliographic scholar the 'codex'.  The work itself is a collection of essays written by Darnton at various junctions in his career.  Some of it should be common knowledge for those in the Library field but others not initiated will find the discussions about the Google Book Search Settlement and the staggering raise in price of journal subscriptions enlightening.  Darnton also recounts the launch of his Gutenberg-e project, which was an initiative to create a series of ebooks for scholars of history.  For me this was the highlight of the read.

The only hitch however is that the metaphor of 'ebook' is nebulous and probably won't make much sense in 10 years.

 Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson

This book takes a look at how free, free as in beer not as in speech, is being used by businesses to make money.  What might quickly come to mind when hearing the premise of the book is that companies have been giving away free sample products all the time, what is the big deal then and why a book?

 The Logic of Failure by Dietrich Dorner

I originally first came across this book as an assigned reading in Project Management class.  That was some time ago but the book ages well.  In fact my edition was published in 1997 so it was out for a few years before it hit my reading list.

Ok.  Anyone who has been online in the past 5 years should know everything in this book.  In particular for Librarians out there this should be old hat.  However I can see how this wouldn't jive with some.  Essentially the role of the Librarian is to de-miscellaneous the world of information. The term meta-data is used heavily in the book.