The news of a software patch uploaded to the Voyager probes reminded me of a 1980 book telling precisely the story of how their journey began 46 years ago. When said book hit the publishing press, Voyager 1 had just finished its flyby of Saturn, a planet which Voyager 2 was about to survey a few months later. Assisted by gravity slingshots, the latter probe would reach Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. Both Voyagers would cross the Heliopause decades later, one in 2012, and the other in 2018. Against all odds, they are both beeping back to Earth as you read these lines.

It turns out that IBM has an internal policy forbidding employees to write books about the company while they are employed by it. This is the major common point among the three authors of this month's Library article: they were all IBMers at some point, and they all wrote their books after leaving.

As much as the NoSQL pundits would like to make us think otherwise, learning about relational database technologies is still, and hopefully will still be, a staple of computer science education in the years to come. There are quite a few authors considered as references in the field, but without any doubt, the subject of this month's Library article is by far the most prolific of them all.

None of the previous 48 entries in the Library section of this magazine have dealt with what is commonly referred to as a "coffee table book". Today we rectify such omission by showcasing a massive, recent, and by all standards, very desirable book from Taschen, the legendary German publishing house.