Date: Tue, 1 May 2012 12:46:38 -0600 From: Chad Perrin <perrin@apotheon.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: UFS Crash and directories now missing Message-ID: <20120501184638.GA4489@hemlock.hydra> In-Reply-To: <201205010558.q415wAFu091478@mail.r-bonomi.com> References: <CAF6rxgksNAC2PguE6jzPtBauNZig9VWG--UmTt_fGVB7PytonA@mail.gmail.com> <201205010558.q415wAFu091478@mail.r-bonomi.com>
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On Tue, May 01, 2012 at 12:58:10AM -0500, Robert Bonomi wrote: > > Reading _both_ of McKusick's "Design of .." books, and the 'Unix System > Admininstration Handbook', by Nemeth, et al. is a good _start_. "Both"? I'm aware of at least three (FreeBSD, 4.3BSD, and 4.4BSD) that are probably within the realm of what you're talking about (learning about the workings of a BSD Unix system), all of which seem a little redundant -- just different editions of the same book, from the look of it. What do you mean by "both" of McKusick's books? I think there's an answer book for at least one of those, too. Do you perhaps mean the main book and the answer book? Do you mean to include the general-purpose "open source" book as one of the books (Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution)? > > Having a bunch of the books from O'Reilley & Assoc. (<http://www.ora.com>), > especially for 'standard' tools that you need to get the most out of, is > also highly recommended. > > Disclaimer: I know a lot of the authors of those books, persoally. If you have a decent ebook reader, I recommend just getting on the O'Reilly mailing list for its periodic announcements of ebook discount deals and picking up an occasional good book from those deals. It's easy to get far more excellent books than you have time to read that way, for really good prices. In fact, O'Reilly has a 50% off deal for a few ebooks about C programming right now: http://shop.oreilly.com/category/deals/c-programming.do O'Reilly's ebook deals are about the only way I've found to get good technical books from a major publisher in digital formats at a reasonable price, considering most of the publishing world still thinks it's okay to charge more for ebooks than for hardcopy books for some asinine reason. O'Reilly is, in fact, pretty far ahead of competitors on its handling of ebooks. For instance, if you have a hardcopy O'Reilly book, you can register it by ISBN with O'Reilly, then get an ebook copy of it for about five bucks. By contrast, The Pragmatic Bookshelf (which produces very high quality books as well) at *best* gives you the opportunity to get a hardcopy book plus a PDF book at the same time for about 150% of the cover price of the hardcopy alone, *only* if you buy them together from the Pragmatic website itself, and if you only have the ebook or the hardcopy book you have no way to get a discount on the other; you have to pay full price. Pragmatic does offer ebooks at slightly lower price than hardcopy, which is at least better than the "standard" industry practice for science fiction, but it's a ridiculous price for a bundle of bits in a digital file. O'Reilly offers some kind of discount on hardcopies for people who have the ebooks, too, I think. I'm not sure -- I've never taken advantage of that discount, because I only started collecting ebook copies of O'Reilly books after getting an e-ink reader, which I find every bit as good for many (though not all) reading purposes as a physical dead tree format book. Your mileage may vary, I suppose. -- Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
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