Humble Book Bundle: Unix
humblebundle.com
humblebundle.com
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.
As for being dated, I think simply reading (and understanding) Essential System Administration and then spending an afternoon looking at grub and systemd could get you pretty far in the RHEL certification cycle.
https://cr.yp.to/donations.html
PS In case you've been wondering, djbdns+curvedns is a very capable implementation of DNS servers and client-side utilities. Both authoritative server and recursive cache; each independent of the other. Plus wonderful commandline utilities for various kinds of DNS queries.
All of the docs you're going to find on the web are about BIND. BIND gets new standards first, because that's the implementation that the standards authors use and work on. BIND gets more real world testing than all other DNS servers combined. In short: It's fast enough, secure enough, and has more features than anything else. The only downside may be that it is somewhat intimidating, but BIND configuration maps more closely to the standards docs than anything else...so, if you understand BIND you understand DNS and vice versa, which is not as true of some of the others that try to be simpler to configure. BIND is DNS in more ways than any other server so clearly is the service it provides.
DJB software is/was great, but there's rarely a reason to go that route for most users most of the time, today.
You may very well be right, most people at any period of time are in way above their level of knowledge and consequently have no sense of quality. Let me just say that I never met a BIND person who would have an idea about the distinctions between the delegation tree, the on-the-wire protocol, and the BIND zone file format. (Not that i can blame them.)
Yes, thanks for supporting my argument in such a forceful way. As you say, BIND has needed multiple major overhauls over the same period that has seen djbdns simple be there, finished.
How about a syntax for defining a TXT record that doesn't involve octal?
+jdebp.info:2001_41d0_2_aa92_0_ff_fe23_8e7a
S_sip._udp.jdebp.info::sip.jdebp.info:5060:10:20
IPv6 records require a patch. Any records defined for IPv4 are supported out-of-the-box (your last question gives away you know this and the encoding used in the tinydns database).
What was your point?
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.
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).
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?
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.
It is true that code examples look broken at times, but most of the times turning the kindle to landscape orientation does the trick.
You should avoid feeding PDFs to your Kindle, since they only look good on a PC or on a 4:3 tablet (ex. iPad or Galaxy Tab S2), although, after reading a chapter on your Kindle, it is positive to skim through the PDF to get a grasp of the details you might have missed.
As a Kindle owner, the format you really want is .MOBI (or .EPUB converted with kindlegen[1] and trimmed down with kindlestrip[2]).
Most .MOBIs you'll encounter are actually conversions from .EPUB with kindlegen, so you should trim them down with kindlestrip too.
Finally, if you're a Kindle power user, then you should give Calibre[3] a try to convert other formats to .MOBI, but be warned that the conversion is a hit-or-miss.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000765211
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).
PDF spec actually supports different page sizes (crop box, trim box, bleed box, media box, etc) for different pages. But it seems like what you what is essentially two separate PDFs with different page sizes combined together, and the reader picks one based on the viewport. I'm not sure PDF spec natively supports that, but PDF does support JavaScript and I can imagine JavaScript querying the viewport and then hiding/showing pages.
A useful feature of a PDF reader on these devices could be to display only this area with a smaller, perhaps user defined, margin.
This at least would fix the 'huge margin' problem.
As long as I have two screens, I've learned to like digital textbooks. It's hard to ctrl+f on a piece of paper.
Just a third (or fourth) tier in the scheme they already use.
The typesetting and layout of textbooks is also very important. It's not just free flowing text. This means they are simple not compatible with the screen sizes of computers or ebook readers.
The ability to flip through a book is surely one of the best features of the format. When I'm familiar with a textbook I can find the page I want in seconds based on some vague intuition about where it will be (for some textbooks I can do this with my eyes closed). I'm not aware of any electronic formats that offers such fast random access.
You could also pay a relatively small amount to get the PDFs printed and spiral-bound at a print shop. That solves your problem of free-flowing text, plus they lay flat, which is a godsend.
I've found that I really like buying digital books, but using my iPad or Kindle computer app to read coding books because the formatting is better. Even if you don't copy/paste, it's easier to type in code if it's in the window next to you instead of looking down (yeah, I can type without looking at the keyboard, but I have more trouble in an IDE when I have to match parens and quotes, deal with autocomplete and other syntax things like semicolons).
But I am with you on the print books. I've spend many thousands of dollars building up my home CS library. Nothing helps me learn better than stepping away from the screens and reading paper in a comfortable chair!
Screen is adequately large and the DPI is so high that they look great, it turned out to be a useful device.
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 bookstore. I feel old.)
In the browser console:
$('.js-start-download > a').each(function(a, b) {
console.log($(b).attr('href'))
})
wget --content-disposition --trust-server-names -i list.txtLast time I attempted to read The Art Of Electronics on a eink reader it required like 10 seconds for each page, so I gave the reader to a relative of mine who reads text only novels and stuck with the paper version of TAoE. Wake me up when technology is there.
Good sale!
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.
That's something I always struggle when it comes to IT/programming. There are just so many written materials about a particular subject that it becomes very difficult to find which ones are those that I should actually read.
---
$1:
Unix in a Nutshell (4th ed.)
sed & awk (2nd ed.)
lex and yacc (2nd ed.)
Learning the bash Shell (3rd ed.)
Linux Pocket Guide (3rd ed.)
$8: (all of the above, plus)
bash Cookbook
Classic Shell Scripting
Learning GNU Emacs (3rd ed.)
Unix Power Tools
Learning the vi and Vim Editors (7th ed.)
Bash Pocket Reference (2nd ed.)
Learning Unix for OS X (2nd ed.)
$15: (all of the above, plus)
Essential System Administration (3rd ed.)
TCP/IP Network Administration (3rd ed.)
DNS and BIND (5th ed.)
Network Troubleshooting ToolsI 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.
I may be a cheap ass for wanting these things for a cent but that doesn't change the fact that "Pay what you want" is a total and utter lie.
1. Click "Pay what you want"
2. Choose the "Free Stuff" tier
3. Go through the rest of the wizard ("I'm not a robot" and such)
Sure, not what you want, but worth noting. Particularly useful if you want something on offer, but don't like the company selling them and don't want to support them. For instance, I can imagine a lot of people stiff EA when EA has a bundle available, and go 100% charity. :)
15% of whatever money you pay doesn't go to a charity, it goes to them. This is not explicitly stated. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Bundle (search for 15%)
When you make a purchase on Humble Bundle, it by default has a divide between the developer or publisher, the charity being supported, and Humble Bundle. You can modify this percentage at purchase time, for instance, by sending 100% of your proceeds to charity, or stiffing the developers if you despise them.
Arguably, Humble Bundle bears a large chunk of the operating cost here, since they have to provide download bandwidth for things like the eBooks and non-Steam-based games. But only asks for 20% by default, from what I can tell. Of course, I'm sure Humble Bundle has done the math on how many people pay the default cuts, and how much they need to stay profitable as a business.
So, no, it's not that Humble Bundle is a charity, but yes, you can get games and books really cheap while supporting a charity.
Edit: In fact, they still do this, and you can get the Mobile or Games bundles for $0.01.
I say thanks O'Reilly, promotions like this are why you're still so great after all these years.
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 the bottom line and donations to charity are more of a marketing gimmick used to reach that bottom line. Humble Bundle is a highly, highly profitable middle man operation that banks on the altruism of people.
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.
Additionally, I believe it is more deceptive then your traditional advertisement. How much "Pay what you want" deals are out there? It is a very unique marketing strategy.
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 only all I can eat in one visit, but nobody would be so petty as to complain about that. Would they?
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 invented within the last decade meaning most of you existed before humble bundle existed. There is nothing "obvious" about this.
You cannot equate this to a buffet. It's a ludicrous analogy similar to equating linux books to atomic bombs because both involve software of some sort. Honestly how many of you knew there was a one dollar minimum without reading about it? Or did you even know about the "free tier" without reading about it? Nothing on that page is obvious.
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.
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
The books don't have a $0.01 tier. When you look at the page, the first line of content that isn't a headline makes it clear that it's a $1 minimum. When you hover over the "Pay what you want" text, it clarifies that, on this page, it's "Name your price of $1 or more." When you attempt to pay less than $1, it displays a warning that you won't get any content if you pay less than $1. The fact that you're here moaning about it makes it clear that you understand that it's a $1 minimum. So where's the deception?
The question is whether this imprecision qualifies as deception.
edit: hey buddy, thanks for voting me down. Why the hell should I answer you when it's all I get. I have nothing left to say to you other than you are unable to respect differing opinions.
And when you enter in the amount you want to pay, they tell you exactly what you will (or will not) get.
Read more here: http://www.gamesradar.com/humble-indie-bundle-responds-steam...
This is O'Reilly's take on it. You can lend it, but you can't have access to it while it's lent out. Really, really hard to enforce. But I believe PDFs are watermarked (don't know how they'll do it with this bundle), so if you lend it out and the copy gets into the wild, so to speak, they can trace it back to your account.
The thing that distinguishes Humble Bundle from the rest of the "book sellers" for me (I know you can't really call them "book sellers") is that they offer no DRM what so ever, and, by purchasing a pack for a ridiculously low price, you're contributing to a usually pretty good NGO/foundation in the process.
I usually share the hell out of a current bundle that looks interesting to me to everyone that I think might be interested in it while the offer lasts.
Me personally, I could never provide a copy of the bundle in public (however, I would share a book or two with someone I personally trust in case they missed the offer) because Humble Bundle is doing something that I don't see anyone else doing: providing awesome things for cheap and supporting some awesome organization in the process.
And frankly, I think a more than cursory study is overkill.