CERN Accelerating science

Book News from the UCO

  Roger Woolnough IT/User Support

Since the last NewsLetter the UCO Book Store has received many new titles, and has been completely re-stocked to adapt to Office 97 in line with the NICE team. Agreements have been made with Red Hat for the distribution of Linux software and documentation, and with IDG books to stock the "Excel Bible", that has been recommended by the people looking after Excel training at CERN.

For Office 97, we were encouraged to stock French books for this new software. The series from Simon Schuster (Prentice Hall) called ``Comment Faire'' has books on WORD, Excel, Access and Office 97. Contrary to our past experience of poor sales in French language, except for a French written UNIX book which is still in stock, it clearly satisfied this time a real need as we sold more than 250 in the space of a fortnight and had problems to keep up with the supply from our Swiss distributors. This problem is now solved. For the English books related to desktop computing we have selected:

• the "Step by Step" books from Microsoft, which are excellent tutorials (with titles on Excel, WORD, Powerpoint, FrontPage and Visual Basic),
• the Microsoft "Running" series (coming with CD-Roms), for more accomplished users (WORD, Excel, Powerpoint, Access),
• the the popular "Using" series (WORD, Excel, Access), which is full of examples and easy to follow for beginners and accomplished users alike.
• Also from Microsoft comes the Office 97 Visual Basic Language Reference in 5 volumes.

For Linux users we obtained several books and the software for Red Hat 4.1. We now have a direct agreement with Red Hat for the distribution of all their software: we have in stock Linux 4.2, Applixware 4.3, Motif and the book "Dr Linux". To complete the available range we have the book from Sobell (author of "The Practical Guides to UNIX"): "The Practical Guide to Linux".

Java books are going through a complete rewrite in many cases to comply with version 1.1. New editions in stock for 1.1 are "Java in 21 days" and "Java in a Nutshell" (Gold edition). A new book in the Addison Wesley "Java source series" is "Java FAQ".

Concerning software programming we now have 2nd editions of "Practical Tk Tcl Programming" and "Learning Perl".The long awaited arrival of the popular "C++ Programming Language" by Stroustrup has proved worth the wait with a complete rewrite. Other new titles that are in stock for programmers are "UNIX System Programming using C++", "Software Reuse",and "Software Reuse Techniques".

For Web and text processing we can mention a new title on "Cascading Style Sheets (WEB)" and a book called "Learning Adobe Framemaker 5" which was recommended by the team responsible for Framemaker at CERN: it is the official Adobe learning guide.

To end up this review, coming soon are second editions of "UNIX Power Tools" and "More effective C++". Due out in the next month is O'Reilly's new book entitled "Advanced Perl": all this will be announced as usual in the cern.computing newsgroup when the new books are in stock.

As usual these books are available via TID, EDH or cash at the UCO Help Desk (building 513). A full list of titles, prices and stock available can be found at

We encourage users to consult this list and check specially if it is in "Stock" before coming to the UCO "Help Desk".