You get what you pay for - that statement has been pervasive throughout most of our lives, but is it always true? What about open source software? Not only is it often released for use at virtually no charge, but its source code is also made freely available for modification and customization. The philosophy behind open source is that deep cooperation evolves a software product at a pace that conventional development can't match. But it still begs the question - is there business value in this approach?

The mark of a craftsman is his familiarity with his tools, the speed with which he can use them to solve simple problems, and his cleverness in using them to solve more complicated challenges. The latest edition of Unix Power Tools explores the standard Unix tools in greater depth than ever, and with better coverage of Linux, FreeBSD, and even the Darwin environment of Mac OS X. It's also been improved by the addition of sections on Perl and Python, programming languages that can often solve Unix problems more adeptly than any specific utility. This detail-filled book distinguishes itself from other guides for Unix gurus with its organizational structure (it's a series of articles that can be absorbed sequentially or individually) and carefully designed and executed index. Like its esteemed predecessors, this book is one you will keep handy.

We've come a long way from the early days of the Internet, when many "mailing lists" were simply multiuser aliases maintained by the postmaster of a UNIX server. In those days, it was common for such "list" aliases to have a "-L" suffix, so sys admins and users could easily tell the difference between user accounts and multiuser lists. Subscription was a matter of emailing the sys admin and asking to be added to the alias. All mail sent to the list alias was simply resent, or "exploded," to all the users on the alias.