I've got most of these already (from owning the "CD Bookshelf" products ORA put out years ago) but $15 for everything is just too good a deal to pass up, especially since it has a copy of ESA in there (one of my well-worn dog-eared owned-multiple-copies titles).
Humble Book Bundle: Unix
31–40 of 132 posts
Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't mean to be glib, but this is a pretty Sheldon-esque line of reasoning.
No it's not. "Pay what you want" is the most prominent statement on the whole page. The one dollar minimum for content is obscure. edit: why do people vote me down when what I say is true? I'm sorry but I'm not willing to pay for tutorials on open source applications that I can otherwise legally get for free. Humble Bundle isn't even a non-profit corporation. They are a private for-profit corporation where profit is…
I didn't down vote you, but was tempted, so I'll explain.
Yes, you are stating a true fact. However, I'm pretty sure that the vast number of people who see these things do not consider the distinction you draw vastly more deceptive than, well, any other advertising out there, and much less so than most. Compare with, say, Comcast, and this is a model of clarity.
An additional reason is that it is somewhat derailing to rant about what many would think to be trivial quibbles about advertising copy in the middle of what is otherwise a discussion about the usefulness of the books, ORA, etc.
Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't mean to be glib, but this is a pretty Sheldon-esque line of reasoning.
No it's not. "Pay what you want" is the most prominent statement on the whole page. The one dollar minimum for content is obscure. edit: why do people vote me down when what I say is true? I'm sorry but I'm not willing to pay for tutorials on open source applications that I can otherwise legally get for free. Humble Bundle isn't even a non-profit corporation. They are a private for-profit corporation where profit is…
There is a german word for your behaviour.
i-Tüpferl-Reiter http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/i_Tuepferl_Reiter
Which roughly translates to: The need to make something better even if it is already as good as it gets
Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
My problem with PDF technical books is that they are typically formatted for 8.5x11 or A4 paper, typically with a really huge margin. I wish that there was something in the PDF spec to allow for multiple sizes to be specified in a single file, so that the same file can be used for printing as well as viewing on a 6 inch reader.
It sounds like what you're really asking for is a proper e-book format, like EPUB. PDF is not an e-book format, it's a presentation format, for print-equivalent documents. They aren't interchangeable.
Right, but the problem with EPUB and Mobi is that I haven't really seen technical books done well with them, with various tables, diagrams, charts, etc. These are presented much better when they have a human eye lay them out on the page.
That's where a multi-format PDF would come in handy -- you could still have a human editor lay out the pages for 2 or 3 different page sizes, and then the reader would pick the appropriate one (given the constraints of the reader device and font size).
Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix
#35That's some serious nostalgia value. UNIX Power Tools came out before GNU had a dedicated website (was still hanging off MIT IIRC), pretty sure I used the CD that came with it to install some software. Think I've owned 1/3rd of these at some point in time. O'Reilly used to be head and shoulders above everyone else in open source/UNIX books. (I still remember the first time I ever saw a Linux book on a shelf at a book…
Power Tools is a really great book though
Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix
#36The $1 tier is great for anyone just starting out with bash or Unix. The $8 is amazing value, that's beginner through intermediate Unix skills, basically as much as most anyone would need. The $15 tier, IMO, is completely optional unless you know that you need those books. And at that point, you probably already have them. Good sale!
I'm asking myself how relevant they are today? Tcp/Ip 3rd is from 2002, as well as Essential Sysadmin 3rd.
with possibly some sadness, probably still very relevant. The best book I have ever owned on TCP/IP was published ~1982....and when I read it last year, not much has changed.
Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm asking myself how relevant they are today? Tcp/Ip 3rd is from 2002, as well as Essential Sysadmin 3rd.
with possibly some sadness, probably still very relevant. The best book I have ever owned on TCP/IP was published ~1982....and when I read it last year, not much has changed.
Would you mind sharing the title of the book?
Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix
#38I think the best of these books (at least of the ones I've read) are in the $15 tier. Several of the books in the lower tiers are ones I'd recommend skipping and go to online resources, instead. It may not still be so, but when I last looked at the O'Reilly bash books, many years ago, the TLDP bash programming HOWTOs were more pragmatic and easy to follow (I think that's here: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html and http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ ). I guess UNIX in a Nutshell was good in its day, but is quite old now, even in its 4th edition.
DNS & BIND is one I recommend to anyone who ever has to touch anything related to networks, because so many problems I have seen in my 20 years of troubleshooting network problems have come down to someone not understanding DNS. It's well-written, covers the how and why, and covers everything from "I have one website" to "I run a dozen data centers with thousands of zones and thousands of queries per second" (and the authors have significant experience at all of those levels).
And Essential System Administration is a classic, though a bit dated the last time I looked at it (I mean, the core services and concepts it covers are relatively timeless, but it's missing a lot of modern cloud and service-based concepts).
That said, nearly all of these were first written (their first editions) when O'Reilly was publishing incredibly high quality books; well above anyone else in the industry, particularly for OSS and Free Software topics. So, probably a good value, if you haven't already read them and don't have a good foundation of knowledge of these topics.
Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix
#39My biggest gripe with this bundle is that they are all digital. I'd rather have less books but then in a printed format. I have noticed that I can't concentrate on reading books when they are presented to me on my computer screen. I do have a kindle (1st or 2nd generation) and that device doesn't support PDF well, furthermore it is rather slow. It works fine for regular books though, where I don't have to flip throug…
I bought an ipad mini for safari testing (grrr) and it turned out to be my favourite way to read computer books.
Screen is adequately large and the DPI is so high that they look great, it turned out to be a useful device.
Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix
#40The $1 tier is great for anyone just starting out with bash or Unix. The $8 is amazing value, that's beginner through intermediate Unix skills, basically as much as most anyone would need. The $15 tier, IMO, is completely optional unless you know that you need those books. And at that point, you probably already have them. Good sale!
I disagree. Of all of these DNS & BIND is the one I've recommended the most over the years. So many people have no idea how DNS works, and so many of the online references are wrong or incomplete. I've worked in three major fields of IT over the past 20 years, and in all of them, DNS has been the cause of more problems than any other single category.
And, in this case, DNS & BIND is one of the great O'Reilly books from the era when it meant something for a book to be from O'Reilly.