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Comment by dhruv3006 | Hacker News Reader

Lot of admiration for no starch - your books are great !

Per Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick (as announced in one of the recent BSD conferences), No Starch Press will be publishing the third edition of the Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System book sometime later this year.

I was just wondering about this the other day. I own both previous versions.

Chapter 1, config files don’t go in /etc. Well they do, but also /var. And also here and also there. It’s like linux you get a free treasure hunt built in when you need to update something. Some services get local_ attached even though all the services are local. Somehow NetBSD is able to avoid all of this. But do you want working drivers or not? End of chapter 1.

Actually FreeBSD is great and for a modern OS better than linux in all ways but ecosystem and even there it’s fine. But also the design while it makes sense in some way kind of sucks, it’s messy.

Yeah. My favorite are books that guide you through implementing complex systems projects from scratch, like Nora Sandler's "Writing a C compiler", or Sy Brand's "Building a Debugger". I wish they produced A LOT more of them.

Those are some new and very very shallow books. There better one's from 90" and 80".

care to name a few such good oldies?

https://www.amazon.com/Compiler-Construction-Monographs-Comp...

This one is my favorite.

much like swimming, it helps to start in the shallow end before you tread into deeper waters.

The central point behind this type of books isn't so much to build an enterprise-grade production-ready thing, but rather to bridge the delta between zero and having a working thing of sufficiently large complexity, which inevitably exists for someone who had never been there before. Having that in mind, I think these books are very valuable.

I buy ebooks straight from publishers like Nostarch and Leanpub. (In fact, I have an older edition of this book). There are a few books that are sold directly by the authors too. All of them DRM-free.

I actively avoid publishers and sellers who don't respect me as a consumer/reader. People need to start demanding better deals, or else we'll end up with monopolies that won't think twice about deleting books in your custody that you purchased from them.

Yarr, that do be a problem matie.

In all seriousness, how has DRM not yet been recognized as the failure it is?

Got any notable suggestions from Leanpub?

Jeff Geerling's classic, "Ansible for DevOps", since naturally you'll be configuring PF on lots of servers.

[1] https://leanpub.com/ansible-for-devops

The Kubernetes Book, by Nigel Poulton. A very detailed and well explained book that is updated every year and you get them all for a one-time purchase.

Build Your Own Lisp, by Daniel Holden. This is an often cited classic with a lot of precious concepts explained in detail. It can be read for free online. But this is an opportunity to reward them for it. (Yes, I do own a purchased copy).

Ansible for DevOps by Jeff Geerling. Already mentioned by the sibling commenter.

There a lot more on my wishlist. All of them are competitively priced at 10 to 15$ each.

I wish I had more of them. I maintain a modest library made out of real paper and I'm so glad No Starch still has good quality paper and excellent binding. I have a few of the more recent print on demand O'Reilly books but they feel more like cheap print outs I could have done myself. Unfortunately they are just so expensive so I do have to be very selective.

No starch are the best! I’ve learned so much from them.

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