What we have here is a big ol' collection of toys for any Linux guru: some of the toys are more fun to play with than others, and you probably have some of them already. Most of them you can find free of charge on the Internet, somewhere. Still, the Macmillan Linux Utilities makes sense if you want to quickly acquire a bunch of utilities and evaluate them on your own, rather than spend time reading Linux publications and downloading programs one at a time, based on their recommendations. Some of the most useful utilities in this collection include php, which interprets the PHP server-side scripting language for Web publishers; pilot-link, which allows you to hot-sync your Palm device with your Linux machine; gRun, which works much like the Windows Run dialog box; and the FileRunner file management utility with FTP capability. Developers will appreciate Alien, a program that allows you to convert Red Hat packages into Debian, Slackware, and Stampede packages (and vice versa); and GNU Octave, a high-level language for doing linear and nonlinear algebra problems. And after you've finished making your system more efficient with all the utilities, you can listen to MP3 tunes with X11amp or kJukeBox.
A worthy purchase? Sure, if you don't have the software already and look forward to exploring tons of irregularly documented Linux ware. --David Wall
