This first year, the Readers' Choice awards have only three broad catagories. One of the most common requests was for us to expand our catagories significantly, which we will consider for next year's awards.

Tied for first place were Running Linux, by Matt Welsh and Lar Kaufman, and Sendmail: Theory and Practice, by Frederick M. Avolio and Paul A. Vixie. A close second was Tcl and the Tk Toolkit, by John Ousterhout.

Running Linux has sold out of several printings, and O'Reilly has announced that they will be selling it with a companion CDROM package containing Red Hat Commercial Linux.

First place in the hardware catagory was the Cyclades family of multiport serial boards, and second place was the Comtrol family of multiport serial boards.

Both of these vendors fully support the Linux drivers for their products, and the Cyclades driver is part of the mainline Linux source tree. In addition, when Cyclades released their first PCI-based multiport serial board, they prepared the Linux driver before drivers for any other operating system.

First place goes to Ishmail, a powerful mail-reading application for Linux. Tied for second were BB Tool, a stock charting application, and BRU, the Backup and Restore Utility. Many readers wanted to vote for more than one subcatagory of software; they considered choosing between an application and a tool (for instance) impossible and insane. (We would like to thank them for doing the impossible and becoming temporarily insane for us...)

While there were obviously many readers who like Ishmail, we suspect that one of them posted to an Ishmail mailing list about the survey, since the majority of the votes for Ishmail came in over a period of only a few hours. Even without those votes, Ishmail would still have won, as well as we can tell.