This is the new guide to the design and implementation of file systems in general, and the Be File System (BFS) in particular. This book covers all topics related to file systems, going into considerable depth where traditional operating systems books often stop. Advanced topics are covered in detail such as journaling, attributes, indexing and query processing. Built from scratch as a modern 64 bit, journaled file system, BFS is the primary file system for the Be Operating System (BeOS), which was designed for high performance multimedia applications.
You do not have to be a kernel architect or file system engineer to use Practical File System Design. Neither do you have to be a BeOS developer or user. Only basic knowledge of C is required. If you have ever wondered about how file systems work, how to implement one, or want to learn more about the Be File System, this book is all you will need.

* Review of other file systems, including Linux ext2, BSD FFS, Macintosh HFS, NTFS and SGI's XFS.

* Allocation policies for placing data on disks and discussion of on-disk data structures used by BFS

* How to implement journaling

* How a disk cache works, including cache interactions with the file system journal

* File system performance tuning and benchmarks comparing BFS, NTFS, XFS, and ext2

* A file system construction kit that allows the user to experiment and create their own file systems

Has any comic been as acclaimed as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons'Watchmen? Possibly only Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, but Watchmen remains the critics' favorite. Why? Because Moore is a better writer, and Watchmena more complex and dark and literate creation than Miller's fantastic, subversive take on the Batman myth. Moore, renowned for many other of the genre's finest creations (Saga of the Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, and From Hell, with Eddie Campbell) first put out Watchmenin 12 issues for DC in 1986-87. It won a comic award at the time (the 1987 Jack Kirby Comics Industry Awards for Best Writer/Artist combination) and has continued to gather praise since.

The story concerns a group called the Crimebusters and a plot to kill and discredit them. Moore's characterization is as sophisticated as any novel's. Importantly the costumes do not get in the way of the storytelling; rather they allow Moore to investigate issues of power and control—indeed it was Watchmen, and to a lesser extent Dark Knight, that propelled the comic genre forward, making "adult" comics a reality. The artwork of Gibbons (best known for 2000AD's Rogue Trooperand DC's Green Lantern) is very fine too, echoing Moore's paranoid mood perfectly throughout. Packed with symbolism, some of the overlying themes (arms control, nuclear threat, vigilantes) have dated but the intelligent social and political commentary, the structure of the story itself, its intertextuality (chapters appended with excerpts from other "works" and "studies" on Moore's characters, or with excerpts from another comic book being read by a child within the story), the finepace of the writing and its humanity mean that Watchmenmore than stands up—it keeps its crown as the best the genre has yet produced. —Mark Thwaite

Before there was Fran Leibowitz, there was Dorothy Parker. Before there was practically anyone, there was Dorothy Parker. When it comes to expressing the pleasure and pain of being just a touch too smart to be happy, she's winner and still champion after all these years. Along with Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, and the rest of the Algonquin Round Table, she dominated American pop lit in the '20s and '30s; like Ginger Rogers, she did it all backwards. Parker's held up well—maybe the best of all of them.

This book is essential for any Parker fan, and an excellent way for new readers to make her acquaintance. It reprints her finest short stories and poems, some later articles, and all of her excellent "Constant Reader" book reviews from the Depression-era glory days of the New Yorker. The poetry, always light, has become brittle, sorry to say. But you've only to pick any story to be reminded that no middle-distance writer was better than Parker at her best.

Newbie and old-hand JavaScript programmers alike will appreciate Pure JavaScript, a comprehensive developer's resource to JavaScript that covers both the big picture and precise details. Authors Jason Gilliam, Charlton Ting, and R. Allen Wyke—developers all—have put together this well-organized title.

The bulk of this book is a top-notch JavaScript reference. Core language syntax is well-presented with excellent use of examples for practically every operator and function, and each entry includes version compatibility with Netscape and Microsoft browsers and JavaScript releases. The authors also include references for the two companies' extensions to the language.

A number of appendices round out this fine guide with attention to standard and vendor-specific syntax details. This is a fine JavaScript reference that cuts no corners. —Stephen W. Plain

Topics covered: Overview of JavaScript (origins of the language and the evolution of Microsoft and Netscape flavors), security topics (signed scripts and basic constructs of the language, including data types, type conversions, operators, and the features of server-side JavaScript), JavaScript execution environment, and browser version support.

You may have heard somewhere that Neil Gaiman's Sandman series consisted of cool, hip, edgy, smart comic books. And you may have thought, "What the hell does that mean?" Enter A Game of Youto confound the issue even more, while at the same time standing as a fine example of such a description. This is not an easy book. The characters are dense and unique, while their observations are, as always with Gaiman, refreshingly familiar. Then there's the plot, which grinds along like a coffee mill, in the process breaking down the two worlds of this series, that of the dream and that of the dreamer. Gaiman pushes these worlds to their very extremes—one is a fantasy world with talking animals, a missing princess, and a mysterious villain called the Cuckoo; the other is an urban microcosm inhabited by a drag queen, a punk lesbian couple, and a New York doll named Barbie. In almost every way this book sits at 180 degrees from the earlier four volumes of the Sandman series—although the less it seems to belong to the series, the more it shows its heart. —Jim Pascoe

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Stigmais an illuminating excursion into the situation of persons who are unable to conform to standards that society calls normal. Disqualified from full social acceptance, they are stigmatized individuals. Physically deformed people, ex-mental patients, drug addicts, prostitutes, or those ostracized for other reasons must constantly strive to adjust to their precarious social identities. Their image of themselves must daily confront and be affronted by the image which others reflect back to them.

Drawing extensively on autobiographies and case studies, sociologist Erving Goffman analyzes the stigmatized person's feelings about himself and his relationship to "normals" He explores the variety of strategies stigmatized individuals employ to deal with the rejection of others, and the complex sorts of information about themselves they project. In Stigmathe interplay of alternatives the stigmatized individual must face every day is brilliantly examined by one of America's leading social analysts.