Live data from Hacker News

Humble Book Bundle: Unix

humblebundle.com

131–132 of 132 posts

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bash actually has a pretty good man page, too. Not quite OpenBSD quality, but far superior to most GNU man pages ("The actual documentation is maintained as a TeXinfo manual. If the `info` command is properly installed, as it should be on any installation of the GNU operating system (of which Linux is only a very small and insignificant part), then the real documentation is available via the following command: `info`…

Oh, gods, the smug info message. That, more than anything anyone ever said or did, gave me negative feelings about GNU. I mean, I still love GNU for the good it's done in the world, but that broken-by-design man page for every GNU project is hateful and nearly undoes all of my good feelings about GNU. Thankfully, I don't see that message anymore. I'm not sure if GNU fixed it, or if downstream distros fixed it, but so…

I'm willing to bet that Debian fleshes out the man pages. At the very least, they tend to write man pages for software that doesn't have them, so I wouldn't be surprised if they did the same for GNU software.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every ebook I bought (which is over a thousand now) from O'reilly, Pragmatic Programmers, Manning, and Apress in the past ten years or so has been DRM free.

O'Reilly, NoStarch, Packt and Leanpub books are fine since they're completely clean. But books from Pragmatic Programmers, Manning, Apress, Addison Wesley, Pearson and Sams are watermarked which I consider just as bad as DRM. I never buy digital books from publishers who watermark.

It's rather easy to remove watermarks from PDFs with just UNIX tools, btw. (Of course it involves regular expressions.)
Post reply on HN