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The ACCU passes on review copies of computer books to its members for them to review. The result is a large, high quality collection of book reviews by programmers, for programmers. Currently there are 1949 reviews in the database and more every month.
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Title:
Managing Mailing Lists
Author:
Alan Schwartz
ISBN:
1 56592 259 X
Publisher:
O'Reilly
Pages:
282pp
Price:
£?
Reviewer:
Al Lines
Subject:
internet;unix
Appeared in:
12-2
Not a book dealing with programming at all, but a topic that a number of people use--mailing lists. There are very few books dealing with the actual running of a list, let alone all of the main lists, in fact Majordomo, Listserv, ListProc and SmartList. The author starts by getting the basic nuts and bolts out of the way, in terms of what a mail list is, the types of list and basics of the design, principally single message or digest. The remainder of the book is then a series of chapters on configuring a list, with chapters for each of the list. This means that almost a quarter of the book is redundant, unless (for some strange reason) you are running multiple list processors. However, for the size of target audience of such a book, this is really, I guess, of necessity. Saying all of this, I did find the information useful to ensure that I did have my own (Majordomo) lists set up correctly and with the appropriate security. Here the book is helpful in having the information printed out, but still there is little more than can be found by reading the details in the configuration files and from other sources (such as GreatCircle.com for Majordomo). As a result it is only really worth recommending for novices to list processing, especially in choosing which list processor to choose. But if you are running a list manager already, not a great buy.