But as with nearly anything associated with race relations in the U.S., there is a flip side to this record, and Ward offers ample evidence that suggests R&B also served to reinforce white stereotypes of blacks and promoted continued segregation. As he points out, many of the same white fans who packed venues to see Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin never supported the notion of equal rights or integration. In other words, entertainment was fine as long as it didn't challenge the status quo. It is precisely this lack of acceptance--combined with the snail's pace of civil rights legislation--that led to the emergence of the Black Power movement and the concurrent rise of funk and soul, the self-consciously inclusive offspring of R&B originally geared specifically for black audiences. Of course, the fact that James Brown's "Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud" or Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready" carried undeniably political messages for blacks didn't mean the average white music fan couldn't "get up, get into it and get involved." Ward's insistence on this point clearly suggests, despite his attempt at objectivity, that he believes the music made a difference.

Ward's coverage of R&B stretches from the release of the Chords' single "Sh-Boom" in 1954 through the mid-1970s, so it is far from a complete history of the genre, but his work is to be applauded for both its ambition and enthusiasm. Though his theorizing may wear thin at times, Just My Soul Responding is exhaustively researched (the notes and sources stretch nearly 100 pages) and packed with the kind of anecdotes that music lovers will savor. Particularly adept coverage of Chuck Berry, James Brown, Parliament-Funkadelic, Motown founder Berry Gordy, and the roles of many other prominent artists who either supported and avoided the civil rights cause stand out as some of the book's highlights. In all, a rousing hybrid of history, social commentary, and the literate liner notes of an ardent fan. --Shawn Carkonen

Wicked Cool PHP contains a wide variety of scripts to process credit cards, check the validity of email addresses, template HTML, and serve dynamic images and text. The 76 easily implemented scripts will also teach you how to:

<li>Send and receive email notifications <li>Track your visitors' behavior with cookies and sessions <li>Override PHP's default settings <li>Manipulate dates, images, and text on the fly <li>Harness SOAP and other web services <li>Create an online poll, ecard delivery system, and blog

But it's not all fun and games: Security is a big concern when programming any web application. So you'll learn how to encrypt your confidential data, safeguard your passwords, and prevent common cross-site-scripting attacks. And you'll learn how to customize all of the scripts to fit your own needs.

Dynamic Web content doesn't have to be difficult. Learn the secrets of the craft from two experienced PHP developers with Wicked Cool PHP.

The Making of Martin Luther King and The Civil Rights Movement incorporates the changing focus of civil rights movement studies to focus on communities and leaders heretofore ignored or under-represented, and thereby challenges many of the agendas established by civil rights scholarship of the past twenty-five years. We learn from essays on communities in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Montgomery that key centers of black life, such as unions, schools, teachers, businessmen, and masonic lodges played important roles in the movement. We learn of the importance of influential local leaders such as W. H. Flowers in Arkansas and Edgar Daniel Nixon in Montgomery, who were tremendously effective at organizing on the local level.The volume also confronts paradigms of history such as the notion that the Civil Rights Movement can be traced from the reformist integration of King, to the revolutionary black nationalism of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and the Black Panther Party. Clayborne Carson argues in a pathbreaking essay that there were radical undercurrents in mass black movements of the 1950s and early 60s, and that these undercurrents contained the seeds of the most significant mass movements of subsequent decades. In contrast, black power militancy of the late 1960's, according to Carson, was either readily suppressed or transformed into forms that did not threaten the dominant political and economic elites.

In a lot of ways, this book is an example of traditional Linux documentation, with discussions of what various commands do and when you should use them. However, Ward has added problem-and-solution boxes amid the documentation paragraphs. The boxes describe a symptom (rdist is too slow), state the likely problem (-ocompare is slow), and suggest a solution (think twice about using -ocompare). You're kind of out of luck if the analysis of the problem doesn't pan out on your machine, but, for easy reference, there's a handy list of problems in an appendix. Pay special attention to the chapter on printing, which does a great job of explaining how this universally required service works (and can fail to work) under Linux. --David Wall

Topics covered: The Linux operating system for power users and system administrators who have a fair bit of experience in modifying and using Linux. How to install, configure, reconfigure, and repair services that have to do with networking, printing, user environments, and Internet services. How to do administration work, such as backup operations, kernel modifications, and installations from source.

Brian Ward's prose style is pretty dry; you won't read this one from front to back, and it's unlikely you'll even read a chapter straight through unless you're encountering a problem and want to know everything potentially related to it. More likely, you'll use the index to locate Ward's coverage of FreeBSD disk-lettering schemes (or whatever) and read the several pages of text and illustrations he devotes to the matter. This is a specialized reference book, and a very good one. --David Wall

Topics covered: All aspects of VMware 3.0 Workstation (from VMware Corporation) for both the Windows and Linux versions of the software. Coverage of the two variants is approximately equal. In addition to explaining how to install both kinds of VMware, the author shows how guest systems behave--in terms of disk usage, driver compatibility, device sharing, networking, and all other major systems--in both environments. There's great coverage of FreeBSD as a guest system.