The good news is that our fast developing Operating System now does fully
and safely support NTFS. I think that became true about 2 years ago, so even
slightly older books will caution you not to use NTFS. If a book wasn't
published within the last 12 months don't take it as authoritative any more!

One can format to NTFS using Gparted, available in the Ubuntu repositories.
For more information see http://gparted.sourceforge.net/features.php

I mainly use ext3 by preference because I'm convinced it is better designed,
but I have used NTFS and it worked fine for both reading and writing. It's
good to be cautious, but it's even better to be up to date...