I think the best of these books (at least of the ones I've read) are in the $15 tier. Several of the books in the lower tiers are ones I'd recommend skipping and go to online resources, instead. It may not still be so, but when I last looked at the O'Reilly bash books, many years ago, the TLDP bash programming HOWTOs were more pragmatic and easy to follow (I think that's here: <a href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html" rel="nofollow">http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html</a> and <a href="http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/</a> ). I guess UNIX in a Nutshell was good in its day, but is quite old now, even in its 4th edition.<p><i>DNS & BIND</i> 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).<p>And <i>Essential System Administration</i> 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).<p>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.
My biggest gripe with this bundle is that they are all digital. I'd rather have less books but then in a printed format. I have noticed that I can't concentrate on reading books when they are presented to me on my computer screen. I do have a kindle (1st or 2nd generation) and that device doesn't support PDF well, furthermore it is rather slow. It works fine for regular books though, where I don't have to flip through chapters back and forth often.
That's some serious nostalgia value. UNIX Power Tools came out before GNU had a dedicated website (was still hanging off MIT IIRC), pretty sure I used the CD that came with it to install some software.<p>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.<p>(I still remember the first time I ever saw a Linux book on a shelf at a bookstore. I feel old.)
I bought it, got frustrated that I can't download them all at one, downloaded awk/sed one to refresh my skills, wrote script to download them all: <a href="https://gist.github.com/lukaszx0/0044aeb9ce86a7859a235093986ef885" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/lukaszx0/0044aeb9ce86a7859a235093986...</a>
$15 is almost inconsequential if you're smart enough to have a programming or 'ops' job in the Western Hemisphere. What is far more scarce is the time to read and apply the knowledge from those books. So while I dutifully purchased the package, I doubt that I will spend enough time with the material, beyond some wicked awk recipes for parsing logs, which I suspect, you can also google for.
I just bought these. My only complaint is the same one I had last time I bought one of these bundles: I had to download each of the 51 files (17 books, 3 formats each) manually, one at a time. An option to download a zip file or tarball would have been very helpful.
I have a good load of OReilly and other publishers books in dead tree format and I find them immensely more practical compared to digital ones. DRM (which would be a stopper for me anyway) is not the only problem but finding a good reader which doesn't require ages to draw a page if contains diagrams, is readable even with multi column pages with graphics (therefore 10" minimum) and doesn't cost a fortune.<p>Last 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.
The $1 tier is great for anyone just starting out with bash or Unix. The $8 is amazing value, that's beginner through intermediate Unix skills, basically as much as most anyone would need. The $15 tier, IMO, is completely optional unless you know that you need those books. And at that point, you probably already have them.<p>Good sale!
What I would appreciate from fellow HN commenters, is their opinion if these books are actually the best ones (or amongst the very best ones) in their particular areas.<p>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.
Just to be clear the prices are not per book. I don't know if anyone else here stood dangerously long in that misunderstanding, almost preventing them from pulling the trigger. It's $1 for all the books on the first tier, $8 for all the books on the first and second tiers, or $15 for all of the books on the page. At first I was like, well maybe I'll get this book, this book, and that book. But then it was a no-brainer. In fact on the recommendation of a couple of posts here for DNS & Bind, I bought the whole hog.<p>---<p><pre><code> $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 Tools</code></pre>
I've got most of these already (from owning the "CD Bookshelf" products ORA put out years ago) but $15 for everything is just too good a deal to pass up, especially since it has a copy of ESA in there (one of my well-worn dog-eared owned-multiple-copies titles).
I upload Humbles to Google Play Books, not for primary reading but easy accessibility.<p>I just wish that downloading a 2MB pdf from Google Books wouldn't take 450MB of local storage.<p>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.
"Pay what you want" is a false statement. When I wanted to pay 1 cent they demanded a minimum of one dollar.<p>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.
Does anyone know the legality of putting the DRM free pdf files into a public Dropbox folder? Not sure what copyrights or licenses still apply if I decide to buy these and share this with other people.