Linux by No Starch Press
humblebundle.com
humblebundle.com
Originally, it was really really good.
Original software, books and co. It was adding added value, like the bundling of music or assets, the promise to have "drm free" executable, and as much as possible, games and software running on linux or at least downloadable. All of that, really for the price you wanted and valued the pack.
Now, it is mostly abusing of its previously marketing image to sell you for indecent price what are abandonware or deprecated content.
Most game are provided as single use steam or origin license keys. If you pay what you want, you can usually only get a garbage subset of the content, otherwise you kind of need to pay the "fixed" price to have the content that is advertised.
They also have occasional Manga/Graphic novel bundles which are nice as well.
[1] Way back when it was Safari Library they had a variety of plans. They wanted to switch to a single unlimited plan. Those of us on the cheaper limited plans were grandfathered in. To encourage us to voluntarily switch to the new plan they offered it to us for $200/year for as long as we kept our accounts active, which was 1/2 the current price for new subscribers. Now it is $500/year for new subscribers, but still $200/year for those of us who accepted their offer.
A sad but not uncommon tale of new ownership not keeping the old feel.
£21.67 to No Starch Press
£1.97 to Charities
£15.76 to Humble
£18.71 to No Starch Press
£5.91 to Charities
£14.77 to Humble
I have zero interest in giving money to Humble. Would much prefer to just donate straight to EFF.
Your response is either snark, in which case not useful, or a failure to read.
FWIW I have a recurring donation.
Reminding you that it's very simple to donate directly to the EFF seems like a rational response to someone who has the desire to donate to the EFF directly.
Humble Bundles are not the right way to support a charity -- they're the right way to support IGN. It used to be possible to minimize/remove the amount Humble got, but that time has long since passed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There are actually people who buy the bundles to get the ebooks. If there are more than 2 or 3 ebooks in the bundle that they would have otherwise bought from the publisher or at retail then the bundle costs them less.
That the bundle also includes a small donation to a charity and several other books is just a bonus.
How Linux Works is also very interesting, used to for interview prep as I found some places were asking questions about internals rather than how I go about doing things
If you really enjoy them, buy them or find a way to donate to the author(s).
If you want to support the charities, donate directly.
Humble Bundle doesn't make sense to books. It only makes sense for a few games where you can really get a good offer, for lets say, a game and the main DLCs, but such promotional campaigns rarely happen.
And given that the purpose of HB is to get money donated to charity, it's not an efficient way of achieving that because they get a very small fraction of what we pay.
Hence why I said you'd better off pirating, evaluate the book value, and if needed buy the book to support the authors.
And if charity is also important because they earn more money.
Suggesting you should pirate these books because you think they're outdated is just 'splaining away being too cheap/frugal to pay for things that you want.
But it's already 12 years old. Are there important innovations in Linux and its APIs from the last 12 years that would be interesting to learn, and how ?
From a kernel API/ABI point of view (which is the focus of "The Linux Programming Interface"), the most important one would probably be io_uring (https://kernel.dk/io_uring.pdf).
Off the top of my mind, systemd, released 12 years ago.
That said; IO_URING, eBPF and CGROUPS are fairly new additions to the kernel.
TL;DR: the book remains highly useful twelve years later, and I expect it will for another six to twelve.
After that, it's such a brick that it's going to be an excellent monitor base. If we still have monitors then, that is.
My bet’s on the brain chip.
A lot of the books here seem like they might miss my use case by a bit, but again, I'm not sure.
UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook is very appealing.
There are only a couple of books in this one that weren't on the 2019 one. It's a shame that they don't allow to just buy the difference if you bought a similar bundle in the past. But I guess their agreements must forbid that.
The way I see it, you're getting the Linux Programming Interface on sale (it's usually $60-$80 as an eBook), and the rest are thrown in to sweeten the deal.
That's quite expensive for a glorified PDF that can be downloaded for free.