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Humble Book Bundle: Unix

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Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#91

Post by derekp7 »

jsjohnst wrote: post #75
derekp7 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just bought this bundle, which is all O'reilly, so I'm assuming the ePub's are from them. Was looking at the Emacs one, and so far not too bad. But there are still issues, such as I came across a table that had the headers line at the bottom of one page, and the rest of the table on the next page. Things like this, you can probably put hits / rules in the ePub file for, but it still benefits more from having a human do the layout.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#92

Post by noir_lord »

runeb wrote: post #50
noir_lord wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is the backlight affecting your eyes? I ended up buying a Kindle because reading on an iPad was straining my eyes too much, specially at bedtime.

In daylight its fine and at night I just turn down brightness.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#93

Post by SwellJoe »

groovy2shoes wrote: post #71
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`…

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 sometime several years ago I stopped experiencing those moments of info rage, and man pages actually started working correctly.

And, you're right. The bash docs are really good. bash, in general, is such a well-managed Free software project; I have such warm fuzzy feelings about it. bash just quietly gets better every couple of years without me ever thinking about it or realizing that it's gotten better. bash-completion is lovely, and when it's not present I feel ragey (not info level of rage, but still it sucks not having completion). It's just such a solid workhorse. And, it even works well on Windows (both the WSL version and the standalone git or Cygwin versions). It's one of those projects that I never think about because it always Just Works. I can't remember the last time I ran into a bash bug; it has to have been over a decade ago (and I do quite a bit of shell scripting, though I mostly have to code to POSIX rather than bash, because of Ubuntu).

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#94

Post by SwellJoe »

blfr wrote: post #86
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…

a bit dated the last time I looked at it I was going to ask about that. A lot of these books are a little old, published a decade ago. How well did they age?

Many of the topics haven't changed much in a decade. BIND is the same as it ever was. Sure, there's relatively new stuff, like DNSSEC, but I suspect it's actually covered in the latest edition of DNS & BIND; for whatever reason, DNSSEC adoption has been very, very slow, so the spec was formalized like a decade ago. BIND is the reference implementation for new DNS features, so it was probably in there and probably in the book ten years ago. But, I dunno. The last edition I had was probably one or two revisions before this one.

Essential System Administration is kinda out of date on several fronts. I looked at the most recent edition a year or so ago when I was thinking about writing a book on sysadmin topics, just to see what the current state of the market is. I'd probably toss about half of it, if I were charged with producing a new edition, and add several new chapters about containers (across all of the various unices), systemd, more modern interop topics (LDAP and AD, in particular), and just general updates to standard practices. But, still, it's probably in the top five books about UNIX/Linux system administration, since it is well-written and does cover a lot of ground. You could just skip what you don't need, and double check with the google for whether the material is up to date for the stuff you do.

Most of the other stuff will be accurate but missing a few things. bash and vim and emacs have improved a lot in the past decade, but core competency with any of them looks about the same as it did a decade ago. New things will take some additional research, but you won't waste your time learning from an old book, because a bash script written 10 years ago is 95% of the time going to run unmodified today. Likewise, a vim user who time-traveled from ten years ago to today won't, at all, be confused by modern vim.

So...they're cheap because they're old. And, you probably don't get tremendously more than you're paying for. But, they were good books ten years ago, and they're still pretty good books today.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#95

Post by orbitingpluto »

arikrak wrote: post #89
orbitingpluto wrote: post #73

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.

How does it take up so much space? What if you just download the epubs to your Google Drive?

No idea. It's always the first couple files that seem to grow the data used by the app to it's monstrous size. After four or five PDFs it levels out. Another 2MB will only take a couple MB.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#96

Post by jsjohnst »

derekp7 wrote: post #91
jsjohnst wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just bought this bundle, which is all O'reilly, so I'm assuming the ePub's are from them. Was looking at the Emacs one, and so far not too bad. But there are still issues, such as I came across a table that had the headers line at the bottom of one page, and the rest of the table on the next page. Things like this, you can probably put hits / rules in the ePub file for, but it still benefits more from having a huma…

I already own that ePub so I'll check it on my end to see if it's specific to the Humble Bumble version. Which table should I check? Also, which reader are you using out of curiosity?

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#97

Post by RyJones »

bathory wrote: post #3

My 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 would have liked a way to register them with my existing O'Reilly account so they showed up there, but PDF is OK.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#98

Post by themoat »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #83
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…

In a buffet common sense reigns because everybody knows what a buffet is: an all you can eat deal in a single meal. Everyone knows this because buffets are numerous and have existed long before you or I have existed. A humble bundle is not common sense. There is only one company currently doing this and therefore there is no intrinsic knowledge of the nature of what I am purchasing, in fact the humble bundle was inve…

I must admit. I am stumped. I feel like I'm engaged in a debate to which I do not understand the rules.

I simply do not understand the motivation behind your arguments. I recognize that you are arguing, but I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why. You are talking about something that is clearly on the screen. There are 3 distinct blocks of books. They have a dollar value shown above them.

I would say that requires a bit of common sense, or perhaps hovering over the text "Pay what you want" and reading for a second. In fact, in order to get to the custom amount input box at the bottom of the screen, I count no less than 3 times you had to ignore the stipulation that the price was $1 for that tier of books.

Pay what you want is not a lie. It has a stipulation.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#99

Post by morganvachon »

bathory wrote: post #3

My 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…

These are all offered in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats. The MOBI should work fine on your older Kindle, and EPUB works great on third-party ebook apps. PDF should look good on a modern tablet.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#100

Post by crimsonalucard »

rhizome wrote: post #88
crimsonalucard wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So let's cut to the chase: is that what they're doing here?

They are being imprecise by your own admission. Yes.
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