Content area
Full text
After many years of able service, Tom Kilpatrick has retired as the editor of this column. As his successor, I am dedicated to maintaining the high quality of coverage that characterized Tom's stewardship. I will also be adding some features to "In the Literature:' one of them being the occasional column focused exclusively on a particular aspect of the literatures with which library automation specialists are concerned. What follows is an example of this new variant.
Titles Reviewed
DiBona, Chris, Sam Ockman, and Mark Stone, eds. 1999. Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates. ISBN: I56592-582-3.
Hekman, Jessica Perry. 1997. Linux in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (Nutshell Handbook). Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates. ISBN: 1-56592-167-4.
Kiesling, Robert, ed. 1999. Doctor Linux: The Complete Linux Reference Documentation. 6th ed. Chesterfield, MI: Linux Systems Labs. ISBN: 1-885329-24-5.
Kofler, Michael. 1998. Linux: Installation, Configuration, Use. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, ISBN: 0-201-17809-5. Peterson, Richard. 1997. Linux. The Complete Reference. 2d ed. New York: McGraw-Hill/Osborne. ISBN: 0-07882461-3.
Raymond, Eric S., ed. 1998. Linux Undercover.- Linux Secrets as Revealed by the Linux Documentation Project. Research Triangle Park, NC: Redhat Books. ISBN: I888172-05-3. Sobell, Mark. 1997. A Practical Guide to Linux. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 0-201-89549-8.
Welsh, Matt, and Lars Kaufman. 1996. Running Linux. 2d ed, Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates. ISBN: I56592-151-8.
In the past ten years or so, as software pricing has become more and more competitive, vendors have contained their costs by supplying customers with less and less documentation. Startling growth in the publication and sales of thirdparty guides has been a more or less direct consequence of this cost-cutting tactic, as well as a real boon to the computer publishing industry. In no segment of the computer industry is this trend toward third-party documentation more important or more pronounced than the one that has grown up around the open source code operating system known as Linux.
Until recently, the relevance of Linux to the library software environment was limited. In the past year, however, the situation has changed dramatically. A number of major commercial developers, including IBM, Intel, and Oracle, have committed themselves to the Linux platform. As a result of such commitments, relational database management systems ported to or...