YOUR PROFILE
SIGN OUT

Netsurfer Digest Trial Subscriptions

This is a trial subscription to Netsurfer Digest. You have three options:

1. Subscribe to obtain login for full access ($20/year) here: http://www.netsurf.com/signup.html

2. Unsubscribe your email from the trial subscription here: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/trialsub.html

3. Do nothing. Keep receiving the trial subscription and check out the content until you decide what to do.

Full text samples of Netsurfer Digest are here: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/backiss.html

Netsurfer Recommendations

The Big Bang: Nerve's Guide to the New Sexual Universe
The writers at Nerve
Plume; ISBN: 0452284260

This smart, amusing, and straightforward guide to sex is credited to the writers of Nerve, the well known sex magazine/Web site, but it's mostly the work of Emma Taylor and Lorelei Sharkey. Taylor and Sharkey write the "Em & Lo Down" column for the magazine, tackling the complexities of modern sex in witty and thoroughly honest prose. This book is exactly what you'd expect from a sex manual, covering the usual subjects - a tour of all the major orifices, sexual techniques, health, toys.... Most reasonably liberated adults should have already learned all this stuff, but if you're young and curious and find porn a bit too superficial for your educational needs, then it's a good book to get. Actually, it's not a bad lubricant for couples who can have a fun time reading it together, and maybe learn a thing or two - about sex and each other - in the process. The writing is engaging, the pictures are pleasant, and the subject is congenial. It's worth mentioning that Taylor and Sharkey, on tour to promote the book, are keeping a weblog of their travels on Nerve.

Fat White Vampire Blues
Andrew Fox
Del Rey; ISBN: 0345463331

The delicious but fat-rich food of New Orleans is not only a problem for its human citizens. Jules Duchon is a New Orleans vampire and the calorie-laden blood of his prey has turned him into a 450-pound mountain of undead flesh. Talk about a rich diet. Still, Duchon's life is not too bad on the whole, until a flashy new vampire called Malice X intrudes on his turf. All of a sudden, things take a turn for the worse as Malice X burns Duchon's house to the ground and warns the white Duchon away from preying on his black brothers and sisters. Duchon must turn for help to his ex, a large stripper-vampire who originally made him undead, and Doodlebug, his cross-dressing sidekick. The hapless and rather dim Duchon finds his situation rapidly spiraling out of control. The book is not perfect, with somewhat uneven comedy at times and a noble try at a tragicomic ending, but you can't argue with the terrific premise. It's surely a must for vampire-lovers and a nice comic antidote to Anne Rice's angst-ridden New Orleans creatures.

Singularity Sky
Charles Stross
Ace Books; ISBN: 0441010725

Charles Stross is one of the wave of writers out of England and Scotland - along with Ken MacLeod, Iain Banks, Alastair Reynolds - who are attracting a great deal of attention for their high-quality, hard science fiction. Stross's particular interest seems to be the Singularity, that moment when human and machine intelligence evolve into something greater. Stross's Singularity was triggered by a powerful intelligence called the Eschaton, a descendent of humanity with the power to travel through time. Two humans, working for different masters, are caught up in an interstellar conflict within a repressive society that has rejected most advanced technology, with the notable exception of military tech. The society is threatened by an enigmatic alien intelligence and the resulting mix of interested parties, human, transhuman, and alien, makes for a satisfying and complicated plot. Ultimately, this book is exactly what you'd expect, a satisfying mix of action and classic hard SF themes such as artificial intelligence, interstellar conflict, time travel and weird aliens. Check out a good interview with Stross or head over to his Web page.

Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++
John Viega, Matt Messier
O'Reilly & Associates; ISBN: 0596003943

This long-overdue book brings together in one volume numerous security related topics for the world's most popular programming languages. C and C++ are justly famous for the amount of control they give a programmer and justly notorious for making it easy to seriously mess up from a security standpoint. The vast majority of security problems in C and C++ stem from the ignorance of the coder. This book addresses the problem by telling coders how to avoid common programming errors such as buffer overflows, race conditions, format-string problems, and improperly validated user input. But there's much more than that here. The book also shows how to properly go about common security-related tasks such as enabling SSL in applications, creating secure communications channels, setting up public-key infrastructures, using cryptography, launching programs securely, and using file-access mechanisms. There's even a detailed chapter on protecting applications from reverse engineering. It's an indispensable reference work - you can't really call yourself a C/C++ programmer without being familiar with this material.