Web navigation is, ideally, something you never have to think about as a Web site visitor or user. As a Web designer, however, it is among your primary concerns. If you need a good education on this particular subject, you'll find a great resource in O'Reilly's Designing Web Navigation. It's an outstanding guide to building effective, professional navigation for sites of all kinds.

Software in Review, the site that has hosted all of our software reviews over the past two and a half years, was sold to a private individual this past weekend. We hope the new owner continues the tradition of excellence in technology journalism that our company established on Software in Review, and wish him luck in expanding its readership.

We've received some inquiries regarding other JEM Electronic Media sites since Software in Review went up for sale. Indeed, all of our sites are for sale; we're both committed to private sector contracts and other work and are unable to give enough attention to our media sites to increase their traffic level appropriately. Contact us at staff at jemelectronicmedia.com with offers or inquiries.

My partner in JEM Electronic Media has moved on to a different career, and I am in the same transitional process as well. Most of my time is now consumed with book writing, editing, and evaluation, not with technology journalism. I've been struggling to keep the sites current in recent months. So it is time to pass at least some of them on to someone else. The first one up for sale is Software in Review, our most successful site. It is on a 10 day auction on eBay with no reserve. So if you really like the tradition of excellence we brought to the software review world through softwareinreview.com and want to pick up the torch, now's your chance. If you've always wanted your own software review site with a decent amount of traffic and the opportunity to make money from Web publishing, this is a dream come true. And if you want to buy it out because you hate the reviews you don't agree with, this is a chance to unpublish them forever.

There aren't many FreeBSD books on the market -- compared to the number of Linux books, anyway -- so it's important that the few extant titles be superbly written and technically accurate. I was really looking forward to reading Absolute FreeBSD 2nd Edition because I'd heard such great things about the aged first edition. Unfortunately, I found this book to be a spectacular disappointment.

In switching over our software and hardware review sites to a new publishing application, site design is something we put a lot of consideration into. I wish I'd had The Principles of Beautiful Web Design to read as I was going through that process. Content-wise, it is indeed that good -- it's indispensable for Web designers, professional and amateur. It's afflicted by substandard editing, but the high-color, graphic-rich, information-heavy content is superb.

Ah, yet another book about Ubuntu Linux. Is there no reprieve from the bombardment of Ubuntu and beginner Linux books (and Ubuntu for beginners books)? For Introducing Ubuntu: Desktop Linux to impress me, it had to offer something new and unique, and it had to successfully address the reality of introducing a new operating system to a computer user. I'm impressed with the scope of the book's coverage on frequently encountered Linux problems, but I don't think this book was as good as it could have been.