IRC Hacks Author: Paul Mutton Pages: 432 Publisher: O'Reilly ISBN: 0-596-00687-X Summary: A useful collection of tips, tricks, and bots for IRC. Review Date: 20 May, 2005

I was first introduced to IRC back in 1997, with a co-worker who spent a lot of his time typing away at a text-based IRC client. He told me later he had some very good friends on IRC, one of which my co-worker never met in person until this friend came to my co-worker's wedding. I ventured into some IRC channels myself, but always felt a little "behind the curve" in terms of understanding what was going on beyond the basics of just participating in a discussion.

Many who are new to IRC may feel the same way, and often those accustomed to the medium are less than accomodating of newbies. Fortunately O'Reilly's IRC Hacks comes to the rescue. O'Reilly uses the term "Hacks" here in the positive sense of a clever way to use a particular technology, or an elegant way to solve a certain problem. You can get a good feel of what the book covers by perusing its table of contents.

The first couple of chapters constitute an introduction to IRC. Various IRC clients for Windows, Linux, and Max OS X are covered, along with ways to enhance these clients. That might be enough for many users of IRC, but to be true to its title, the book proceeds to describe several frameworks you can use to write your own IRC bots in Java, Perl, and Python. No less than 7 chapters follow outlining a wide variety of different bots that can be used to enhance your IRC experience.

The remaining chapters give an in-depth look at the IRC protocol, describe ways in which you can connect to IRC via "other" means (such as from a mobile phone), and also provide coverage on setting up your own IRC server.

Overall IRC Hacks is very informational, and a good introduction to IRC. Perhaps one of its greatest strengths is the large number of "starting points" it provides to allow you to do just about anything with IRC. One complaint I have about the book is that in the chapters offering samples of bots you can write, the vast majority of them are written in Java. I would like to have seen more Perl in the mix. It's there to some extent in the beginning chapters, but Java examples dominate the latter part of the book.

Overall Rating: 7/10