Millennium Prime, John Cosgrave, Folding Landscapes, 48pp, £15
An appropriate millennium present - how about a number? Not just any old number, but a prime, and one that has a neat 2,000 digits. The "millennium prime" discovered earlier this year by Dr John Cosgrave of St Patrick's College, Dublin, has been published in a beautifully produced booklet by Folding Landscapes, the publishing company of writer and map-maker Tim Robinson.
Apart from the number itself, the heart of the book is an essay by Dr Cosgrave, originally an email he sent to his young nephew and niece describing the discovery of the prime and the background to his mathematical research. It is a charming and very accessible introduction to number research, an area often mistakenly dismissed as being far too esoteric to be understood or enjoyed by most people.
An introduction by Tim Robinson evokes the mysterious attraction of the primes, which he characterises as being "like a line of monoliths each taller than the last, leading beyond all horizons". The royalties of this attractive, quirky little book are being donated to the Irish Cancer Society.
Info - www.iol.ie/"tandmfl
Webmaster in a Nutshell, 2nd Ed, Stephen Spainbour & Robert Eckstein, O'Reilly & Associates, 524pp, £15.95 sterling
Oh dear. "Behind every successful web page is an overworked and underappreciated webmaster." This book's blurb may be exaggerating (surely some webmasters feel loved?) but its basic aim is a worthy one, to pull together "in a single volume all the essential reference information for webmasters working on Unix-based servers".
In this second edition, this means substantial chapters on HTML 4 and server configuration, shorter ones on XML, JavaScript, Perl/CGI and the relatively new "server-side, HTML- embedded, cross-platform" scripting language PHP. The shortest sections are on cascading style sheets and the hypertext transfer protocol itself.
In each case, there is a full listing of commands, tags and elements, with a brief description of each. Nobody is going to learn one of these areas from scratch from this book, but then that isn't the purpose of a quick reference. One possible exception is the CGI.pm Perl module, which gets a clearer overall presentation here than in many documents twice as long.
Info - www.oreilly.com
Shopping on the Internet, Jim McClellan, 4th Estate, 368pp, £4.99 sterling
The internationality of the Net tends to take a hiding when it comes up against cultural differences, national customs regulations and companies that promote themselves globally but will only sell and deliver to certain countries. The latter restriction is often buried deep on a site, revealing itself infuriatingly at the stage when the shopper has gone through the whole ordering process and is almost ready to count the days until the book/sofa/sweatshirt lands on the doorstep.
That said, more and more shopping is being done online. One survey quoted in this book found US online retail revenues of $14.9 billion for 1998 and predicted $37 billion for this year. McClellan does a good job of demystifying what is still a very new concept for most people. About half the book is this explanatory background, while the remainder offers a directory of shopping sites under categories such as gifts, toys, books and health and beauty.
This book is written for British shoppers, but much of it would be relevant in Ireland. Certainly more so than in a US-produced guide. The days of paper-based guides to the Net may be largely over - the Web is too big and changes too fast - but this is useful enough to be an exception.
Info - www.4thestate.co.uk