Without an occasional flash of subversive literature, corporate inertia and the superior political skills of the world's idea-squashers would have turned the world of networks and computers into a gray, authoritarian wasteland long ago.
Fortunately, we have books such as Lincoln Stein's How to Set Up and Maintain a World Wide Web Site and Running Linux by Matt Welsh and Lar Kaufman. The power of subversive books is that they let you create some useful functionality without a budget or the conventional IT politics that go with getting the budget. Put a Web site on an underused server, or a Linux install on a discarded PC.
The new great subversive computer book is here. The benefit of RESTful Web Services, by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby (O'Reilly and Associates, 2007) and the Representational State Transfer (REST) philosophy in general, is that REST lets you sneak a big idea, a Web API, into an existing Web project.
