His book reprints eight key papers that trace the evolution of these ideas over 15 years. As with the logic programming collection, some of this material will only be of interest to specialists, but the rest of it should be a fertile source of ideas for programmers developing web bots, interactive game characters, and the like. A new collection of articles published by the ACM, called Intellectual Property in the Age of Universal Access , examines many aspects of the emerging body of Internet-related law. Of particular interest to me were those articles that highlighted the inconsistencies and ambiguities that are beginning to plague online commerce and privacy, and Ned Kock's story of a case of academic plagiarism. Having been plagiarized online myself several years ago, I can sympathize with his frustration with professional organizations that encourage scientists to report their research on the Web, but do nothing more than mumble when others abuse that altruism.
Mutation is one of the forces that drives evolution, but crossover is equally important.
The book is well edited, and has enough sample code and platform-specific detail to keep it well grounded. Unfortunately, as fast as authors like Muller write good books, other authors write bad ones, such as Dennis Smith's Designing Maintainable Software . I ordered this book based on its title, and actually agree with the author's central thesis. Smith argues that comprehensibility is the key to maintainability, and that software developers have to take human cognition into account if their successors are to be able to understand and modify their creations. I think this is a fascinating subject that deserves a lot of attention, but not of this kind.