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Humble Book Bundle: Unix

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71–80 of 132 posts

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#71

Post by groovy2shoes »

SwellJoe wrote: post #38

I 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-HO…

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`. Otherwise, you're stuck with this sorry excuse of a man page.").

I pretty much learned bash from the man page (and OpenBSD's ksh(1), which has enough overlap with bash to be mostly applicable), enough to get by, at first, and getting more and more advanced by checking man recurrently as I encountered problems that demanded solutions beyond my skills.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#72

Post by pixelcloud »

themoat wrote: post #46
crimsonalucard wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 it seems like you're being intentionally literal to the point of being a bit obtuse. Technically you are correct, I understand that. The majority of people can look past the technicality but you, for some reason, won't. It's like complaining about an all you can eat restaurant being falsely named because technically, I can eat more at home. Technically, they made a false claim, it's really…

Otherwise known as; a lack of common sense/understanding

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#73

Post by orbitingpluto »

I upload Humbles to Google Play Books, not for primary reading but easy accessibility.

I just wish that downloading a 2MB pdf from Google Books wouldn't take 450MB of local storage.

I've also experienced issues with Humbles not uploading properly to Google. It usually takes Humble about four or five weeks to rectify the issue with the PDF.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#74

Post by Arkaad »

hrnnnnnn wrote: post #61
_kst_ wrote: post #49

I just bought these. My only complaint is the same one I had last time I bought one of these bundles: I had to download each of the 51 files (17 books, 3 formats each) manually, one at a time. An option to download a zip file or tarball would have been very helpful.

For what it's worth, if you use a Kindle, you can have them all emailed to your device at once

The problem is that if you email them to your device, the books in your library lose their cover picture. I always have to copy them manually with Calibre to keep the cover.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#75

Post by jsjohnst »

derekp7 wrote: post #34
dublinben wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appro…

Have you looked at many O'reilly, Pragmatic Programmers, or Apress books? I own a library of over a thousand titles from those publishers and generally any ePub created in the past 3-4yrs from them is top notch.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#76

Post by jsjohnst »

Ianvdl wrote: post #37
johnmarcus wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

TCP/IP Illustrated Vol 1-3 is great and still very relevant.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#77

Post by xchaotic »

$15 is almost inconsequential if you're smart enough to have a programming or 'ops' job in the Western Hemisphere. What is far more scarce is the time to read and apply the knowledge from those books. So while I dutifully purchased the package, I doubt that I will spend enough time with the material, beyond some wicked awk recipes for parsing logs, which I suspect, you can also google for.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#78

Post by crimsonalucard »

pixelcloud wrote: post #72
themoat wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't down vote you, but it seems like you're being intentionally literal to the point of being a bit obtuse. Technically you are correct, I understand that. The majority of people can look past the technicality but you, for some reason, won't. It's like complaining about an all you can eat restaurant being falsely named because technically, I can eat more at home. Technically, they made a false claim, it's really…

Otherwise known as; a lack of common sense/understanding

Woah there, did you just say I lack common sense? Is that a personal attack? We all know everyone on HN loves personal attacks.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#79

Post by crimsonalucard »

rhizome wrote: post #69
crimsonalucard wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never mentioned such a need. What I mentioned was deception conducted by the company. Perhaps it is just misguided perception. People can't take a statement at face value, they must always make an assumption.

It may be imprecise, but "deceptive" is a bit harsh.

Deceptive is a bit harsh, but is it not the truth? One can be deceptive by being imprecise.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#80

Post by jsjohnst »

extropic-engine wrote: post #68
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This model blows my mind - I just cannot quite work it out. Have the companies involved - O'Reilly and Humble Bundle Inc - just decided that they're OK with potentially making nothing at all from this, so long as lots of money goes to charity? I mean, it's wonderfully altruistic, and I suppose it could be a lot more complicated than I'm giving credit for (does the goodwill gained by them outweigh the financial hit?)…

It's because they are selling digital items that have no intrinsic value. The likelihood that everyone will do this is low. Most people will just leave the sliders at their default values. And it's good marketing.

Depends on the author agreement. With the age of these books, possibly not, but there could easily be a royalty payment involved. Either way, let's assume they sell 100,000 copies, that's still not that much money and would be in line with their typical CSR giving (very likely, these authors might have waived royalty for charity too).
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