BKNFJS6A.RVW   20060915

"No Fluff Just Stuff 2006 Anthology", Neal Ford, 2006, 0-9776166-6-5,
U$29.95/C$38.95
%E   Neal Ford
%C   Dallas, TX
%D   2006
%G   0-9776166-6-5
%I   Pragmatic Bookshelf
%O   U$29.95/C$38.95 800-699-PROG
%O  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0977616665/robsladesinterne
  http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0977616665/robsladesinte-21
%O   http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0977616665/robsladesin03-20
%O   Audience a- Tech 2 Writing 1 (see revfaq.htm for explanation)
%P   240 p.
%T   "No Fluff Just Stuff 2006 Anthology"

"No Stuff Just Fluff" is a seminar/conference series: to judge from
the contents of the book, the seminars are limited to Web development. 
One feature of the conferences is a dinner for the speakers who are
asked to present, away from the attendees.  In such circumstances you
could expect inside jokes, opaque jargon, and cryptic references that
are generally deliberately designed to keep outsiders in the dark.

The editor explains this, and notes that this book, a collection of
papers from speakers at the seminars, might be likened to one of these
dinners.  He may be right.  A number of the essays seem to be using
terminology all their own.

At the same time, while the majority of the articles present a
favourite tool or two, some appear to be rediscovering practices that
other fields of development have known for some time.  Versioning,
content management, configuration control, build control, and
dependency analysis are all described.  (Then there are a couple of
papers that might be interesting for a larger audience: one outlining
some of the "agile" development methods, and another that promotes CSS
[Cascading Style Sheets], even though it doesn't do a particularly
good job of explaining the topic.)

It is, therefore, intriguing to find that the last item in the work
states just that: Web developers are starting to discover what other
programmers have known for years.

At the same time, there is one aspect of the text that I find
incredibly depressing.  While software safety and security is starting
to become an issue for both general systems developers and security
professionals (and especially in regard to Web development), these
guys seem to be actively advocating practices that are known to be
incredibly dangerous, such as relying on the client for validation and
authentication.

Hopefully it won't be too long before they catch up on that one.

copyright Robert M. Slade, 2006   BKNFJS6A.RVW   2006091