Running Xen, a Hands-On guide to the Art of Virtualization

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• Joanna N. Mattews, Eli M. Dow et al.
• Prentice Hall
• 9780132349666

I never thought I'd say this, but I'm starting to think that books like this shouldn't be written. I don't mean that this is a bad book: it's not. It's well laid out, encyclopedic in its coverage.. but it's already out of date.

I don't mean horribly, and I certainly don't mean so much as to make this useless. But this is a common problem in the fast moving field of open source: things can change radically in the time it takes to get a book out the door.

For example, the first thing I learned here was about a Xen LiveCD. Chapter 2 is devoted to playing with that, and it's a great idea: a non-threatening, very quick intro to Xen. Unfortunately, that's way out of date: the LiveCD can still be found, but it's not where the book says it is because it is several versions old now. It's 3.03, current Xen is 3.2.1 (or was as I write this). Try http://runningxen.com/chapters/chapter2/ if you want to follow along with the book.

Of course the book has advice, and much of that will remain useful for some time. But books like this just can't keep pace with developers, and that definitely makes them less useful. I'm not picking on just this book: most of my library is out of date and ready for the trash heap: when I need information today, of course I head for the web.

I like books. I don't like reading on-line, but it's easy to see that printed books really aren't able to meet our needs in areas like this.

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