My review of /The Cathedral and the Bazaar/ should follow shortly.
-- Andrew Jorgensen
Title: Smileys Summary: <em>Smileys</em> is David Sanderson's compilation of over 650 emoticons, with explanations, examples, and even a few games.
Collected from emails and newsgroups over several years <em>Smileys</em> is a compilation of over 650 emoticons. The book is divided into several sections: Style & Usage, Smiley Caricatures, Smiley Animals, Specialized Smileys, Fun with Smileys, and Reference. Syle & Usage give more detailed descriptions of the most common smileys, including :-), ;-) and a few others. Examples of how these smileys have been used are included. Smiley Caricatures, Smiley Animals, and Specialized Smileys contain entries like "=:o] Bill Clinton," "8) frog," and "!-) proud of black eye." Some are really easy to guess what they mean, like "=|:-) Abe Lincoln." Some take a second, like "pq`#' bull." And some, I'm sorry, just make no sense to me at all, like "\|=// George Bush." There's also a very cool ">-^);> fish," which is probably font dependant. There are subsections on christmas smileys, smiley profiles, and even "smiley town." Fun with Smileys has a few games in it, like "Where's Smiley?" Reference takes up the last half of this little book. It's a sort of dictionary sorted in ASCII order of all the smileys the author knew about at the time. This is where "650" comes in. There are really a lot of smileys here of varying likelihood. Frequently Asked Questions are spread throughout the book in no particular order. The first section, Style & Usage, is by far the most useful part of this book. I was surprised to find that there were nuances about smileys that I didn't know about, and learned a few common smileys that will probably prove useful to me some day. Some of the FAQs were worth reading, including "Why use smileys?" It was a fairly entertaining read, except for the few smileys that made little or no sense to me, some are even marginally offensive. The book also felt, to me, a bit outdated (it was published in 1993, so that's probably true). It seems to me that :-) has been almost entirely replaced in common usage by :) which he defines as "salamander" amongst other things. There is no Table of Contents, but the most glaring omission is that of an index. I'd really like to be able to pick up this book and look for how to say "bored" in a smiley, but I can't. That would have made this book truly useful.
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