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Comment by anonymousiam | Hacker News Reader

They aren't always great books. They're better now, but I remember over 25 years ago I bought "DNS & BIND" (Bat Book). I had to read the whole thing cover-to-cover three times before it began to make sense. It was so full of forward references that I just couldn't comprehend it, and I'm no stranger to technical content.

The later edition is better.

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I used to love O'Reilly books, many years ago, and in my experience cookbooks and pocket reference guides were always a clear skip.

But nowadays I thought they've started distancing themselves from book publishing, considering that they don't have an obvious link to books on their homepage. They've been trying to position themselves as a learning platform for some time now.

This is very interesting to me.

I also (tried) to learn BIND via the bat book many years ago. I found it very hard to follow, and I was still early in my career so I just assumed that BIND was over my head and gave up.

To this day, DNS is a very aggravating topic for me. I wonder if much of that is due to the bad experience I had when I first tried to learn about it?

They are rarely good books these days. The fact the Python for Devops has 4.6 rating on Amazon baffles me. The book is unreadable, full of anecdotes that don't add up to anything. And as always, they gotta teach me python once again in the first few dozen pages.

I keep asking myself "what is so brilliant about this book that it deservers 4.6 stars?". Maybe the average developer can't tell bad content from decent.

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