CoryFoy writes "As someone who has been closely involved in both the 'agile software' movement as well as the 'Software Craftsmanship' movement, I have been following the work of Robert Martin for some time. So I was quite interested when I got my copy of his latest book Clean Coder where he 'introduces the disciplines, techniques, tools and practices of true software craftsmanship.' Would his book live up to being a guide for the next generation of developers, or would it go on my shelf as another interesting book that I had read, once?" Read below for the rest of Cory's review.

Michael J. Ross writes"Experienced Web designers and developers will readily admit that the most challenging aspect of their professions is not the technical work itself, nor learning the tools of the trade, but rather dealing with clients. Within that area, the most frustrating type of work — aside from the ever-joyless chore of collecting on invoices — is getting (non-technical) clients to understand the possibilities and limitations of Web technologies, design decisions, and all the other factors that can make or break a website project, as well as the site itself. Yet this process can be just as unhappy, and far more confusing, to prospective site owners, who typically are quite knowledgeable of their own fields, but have little to no understanding of how best to ensure the success of any website project they sponsor. Aiming to bridge this gap, is the appropriately-titled Website Owner's Manual." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.

Michael J. Ross writes "The shopping cart systems that power online stores have evolved from simple homebrew solutions in the CGI era to far more powerful open source packages, such as osCommerce. But even the later systems are frequently criticized as suffering from poorly-written code and inadequate documentation — as well as for being difficult to install and administer, and nearly impossible to enhance with new functionality and improved site styling, at least without hiring outside help. These problems alone would explain the rapidly growing interest in the latest generation of shopping cart systems, such as Magento, purported to be outpacing all others in adoption. In turn, technical publishers are making available books to help developers and site owners get started with this e-commerce alternative, such as Magento: Beginner's Guide, written by William Rice." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.

Since shortly after its release in late 2004, World of Warcraft has held the position of the most popular MMO, quickly outstripping predecessors such as Everquest and Ultima Online, and continuing to hold the lead despite competition from contemporaries and newer offerings, like Warhammer Online. When World of Warcraft's first expansion, The Burning Crusade, was released, it built on an already rich world by using feedback from players and two extra years of design experience to work on condensing the game to focus more on the best parts. Now, with the release of Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard seems to have gotten themselves ahead of the curve; in addition to the many changes intended to remove the "grind" aspect that is so prevalent in this genre, they've gone on to effectively put themselves in the player's shoes and ask, "What would make this more fun? Wouldn't it be cool if..?" Read on for the rest of my thoughts.

This year's Blizzcon saw 15,000 gamers descend from 27 different countries to take part in two days of discussions, tournaments, and sneak peaks at upcoming releases. Several big announcements were scattered among a raft of new details about Diablo 3, Starcraft 2 and Wrath of the Lich King. The new information went a long way toward drumming up interest for what already appear to be worthy successors to old favorites. Read on for more.

The hype leading up to Spore was excessive. But then, so is the scope of the game; following the growth of a species from the cellular level to galactic domination was an ambitious goal, to say the least. Bringing evolution into the realm of entertainment was something Will Wright hoped and gambled he could do after the success of the Sim franchise. But rather than evolution, Spore became more about creation — creation that allows a single-player game to include the community, as well. It ties the various parts of the game together to make Spore very entertaining as a whole. Read on for my thoughts.

On August 18 and 19, you submitted questions for NewsTrust founder Fabrice Florin about his (non-profit) site's ability to live up to its claim, "Your guide to good journalism." We sent selected questions to Fabrice on August 19. Here are his answers.

Frequent Slashdot Contributor Bennett Haselton writes with his latest which starts "If I were writing laws such that I wanted everybody to agree on how to interpret them, I would use the software development life cycle: First, have lawmakers (analogous to "developers") write drafts of the laws. Then a second group (the "test case writers") would try to come up with situations that would be interpreted ambiguously under the law. Then a third group, the "testers", would read the proposed law, read the test case situations, and try to determine how the law should be applied to those cases, without communicating with the law writers, the test case writers, or each other. If there's too much disagreement in the third group on how the law should be applied, then it's too vague to be a proper law. The only laws which made it through this process would be ones such that when they were finally passed, most citizens (the "users") could agree on how to interpret them, in cases sufficiently similar to the ones the test case writers could come up with."

The fundamentals of game design for Massively Multiplayer Online Games are beginning to become fairly well known in game development. Just the same, there is still a lot of argument about what is and is not a 'good call' when it comes to adding features to a massive service. The way to go about making those choices, and a good deal of attention to the concept of a game as a service, was laid out by Damion Schubert in his talk at GDC Austin on Thursday entitled 'The Zen of Online Game Design'.

WSJdpatton writes "Intel is mounting a long-term campaign to turn personal computers into more reliable tools for calling and conferencing. Intel business-client architecture director Steve Grobman argues that instead of exploiting the Internet to lower communications costs, the next phase is about adding new features. Among the benefits for business: broader access to online meetings with advanced features such as TiVo-style playback, instant captioning of conversations — or even translation into multiple languages. 'That technology could be a foundation for companies to add improvements such as the ability to identify the current speaker during a conference call ... He eventually expects advanced features -- such as automatic transcription or translation of conferences. Intel has used deals to advance its plans. A February 2006 partnership with Skype included joint development to tailor the service for Intel's dual-core chips, and free PC-based conferencing for as many as 10 participants.'"

Wired is running an interesting article on the realization of past predictions with regards to online gaming and where we are headed for the future. The author predicts that the separation between online worlds like Ultima Online and World of Warcraft may be headed out of style, making your in-game persona as pervasive as an email address. From the article: "Because the current metaverse evolved largely out of videogames, it makes sense that it should be composed of fiefdoms - after all, you wouldn't expect a Grand Theft Auto crack dealer to drop in for a barbecue with the Sims. But there is reason to believe that the divided metaverse is merely a transitional phase, and that its component worlds will coalesce."

meryl (Meryl K. Evans) writes "Having been in process management in a software organization for over ten years, I've seen too many articles and books on the topic that worked better than Valium for putting me to sleep especially since they have no side effects. You know that Joel Spolsky is one of the best writers on the topic of software. However, in this book he stands aside and lets others demonstrate that he isn't the only one who can write about software in English and captivate you." Read on for Evans' review.

norburym (Mary Norbury-Glaser) writes " Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional by Cristian Darie and Mihai Bucica is a valuable resource for the web developer/intermediate programmer who is preparing to create a database-driven e-commerce site and who is most comfortable learning by example. The authors have prepared a book with real-world application in a tutorial format; they give detailed instruction on how to create a fully developed e-commerce web site from design phase to deployment. This book is not for the raw beginner; some knowledge of PHP and MySQL is assumed and truthfully, this book will most benefit a professional web designer who has some experience building dynamic elements into web sites." If that fits you, or if you want it to, read on for the rest of Norbury-Glaser's review.

norburym writes "PHP 5 Power Programming is the latest in the Bruce Perens Open Source series of technical books focusing on Linux and Open Source technologies. Prentice Hall PTR publishes each book under an Open Source book license and provides free electronic versions several months after each book's publication. This particular book also includes a link to a 90-day version of Zend Studio, an IDE for PHP which also includes a PHP debugger, code analyzer and code profiler. PHP 5 Power Programming was written by Andy Gutmans (co-creator of PHP versions 3 through 5), Stig Bakken (creator of PEAR -- the PHP Extension and Application Repository -- a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components) and Derick Rethans (leader of the PHP QA team). The move to PHP 5 has begun and this volume will prepare power users with the necessary knowledge and tools to make the transition from v.4 easy. Gutman et al. provide PHP engineers and experienced web programmers a proficient introduction to the enhancements and improvements in PHP 5." Read on for the rest of Norbury-Glaser's review.

prostoalex writes "John Heilemann writes the untold story of Google IPO in GQ magazine (out of all tech publications out there). It's a story about Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google CEO Eric Scmidt and Silicon Valley venture capitalists that guided Google in the startup phase to take it public later. The article answers many questions that readers perhaps had about Google. Why go IPO when your earnings are just fine? How much power do Sergey and Larry have inside the company? What's the reason for so much secrecy? One interesting episode describes an engineer squatting CEO's office seeking solutide from the noise surrounding him in the cube area."

Wikipedia is an excellent project, and Slashdot readers' questions for Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales were just as excellent -- as are Jimmy Wales' answers to 12 of the highest-moderated questions you submitted.

sue wilcox, who reviewed Steve Grand's Life, and How to Make It in 2001, has now followed up with a review of his new book, Growing up with Lucy, about Grand's quest to design a humanoid robot. Read on below for her thoughts on the book.

A few weeks ago, reviewer honestpuck looked at Head First Java , comparing it to O'Reilly's Learning Java, 2nd Edition. Now wcbrown writes with a review that starts on the other foot; he reviews Beginning Java Objects: From Concepts to Code in comparison with Head First Java. Read on for his review.

Bruha writes "It appears that Charter Communications cable division is in the first phase of rolling out a new home media center-style cable box. The article on CNN describes the box with a 80 Gig hard drive, dual tuners (With HDTV), DVD, and WiFi networking capability to allow music to be transferred to the unit along with pictures from your PC. Copyright protection prevents recordings from being copied to the PC, and Charter has ordered 100,000 of these boxes." We covered a preliminary announcement of this box, which uses the Linux-based Moxi software, last year.

cpfeifer writes "Performance has been the albatross around Java's neck for a long time. It's a popular subject when developers get together "Don't use Vector, use ArrayList, it's more efficient." "Don't concatenate Strings, use a StringBuffer, it's more efficient." It's a chance for the experienced developers to sit around the design campfire and tell ghost stories of previous projects where they implemented their own basic data structures {String, Linked List...} that was anywhere from 10-50% faster than the JDK implementation (and in the grand oral tradition of tall tales, it gets a little more efficient every time they tell it)." Want to kill the albatross? Read on for the rest of cpfeifer's review of O'Reilly's Java Performance Tuning, now in its 2nd edition.