This book, the contents of which should be evident in the self explanatory title, makes you feel a bit revolutionary. It isn’t just the catchy headings, which are clever paraphrasings of song titles and geeky cultural refecences; it’s also the air of genuine excitment which permeates the pages, and makes you feel inspired during and after the reading process. I think many people’s continuing use of Microsoft, even when they know about the insecurities, and the bugs, and the horror, is caused by inertia. And this is just the book to get them up and off their swivel chairs!

For a lot of people, thoughts about spam are limited to a burst of bad language and perhaps a brief marvel at the sheer volume of organisations that want to help fix aspects of other people’s genitalia. However, there is more to spam than expletives. Spam doesn’t just magically appear in your mailbox, it has a history and so does the battle against it. There are some pretty interesting and innovative weapons available to combat the evil that is spam. And some of those weapons are examined in Ending Spam: Bayesian Content Filtering and the Art of Statistical Language Classification