Harry Putnam wrote:
Emmanuel De Paepe
<[email protected]> writes:
Idem over here.
I paid it only 28.5 Euro, which is an excellent price if you see the '50 US
dollar' on the back of the cover.
The only issue is the quality of the book. I was surprised that Wiley uses such
low quality phone book paper. This is a big contrast compared to all my other
Wiley (semiconductor) technical books.
I too see poor quality in paper... and apparently the printing too.
It appears the printer was low on ink. Nothing is really crisp.
I have to agree with that point. I had one of our dogs lick a page and
it wrinkled right up. I have a feeling that raising the quality of the
printing would probably have a pretty significant impact on the cost of
the book though and for a book like this which is aimed at entry level
folks, I think it's acceptable.
Regarding the contents, I certainly can recommend this book. It's easy to read
and I was surprised to see the number of commands I have never heard of.
Commands which are otherwise well hidden in the man pages.
I am beginning to disagree about contents too. I'm way low on the
skill level in unix or Solaris but have run unix or unix like OS for
over 10 yrs, mostly linux but with several months experience with 2 of
the BSDs (open and free) and at least 2 mnths with early offerings
from solaris... somwhere around 200[03]. As I recall you paid
something like $40 for a DVD with a x86 Solaris OS, the OS was free
but the processing cost (It may have been less, but $40 sticks in my
mind).
I actually think the authors hit the mark pretty well. I apparently
disagree with you on the depth of the coverage expected from a bible
sort of book. I do not expect a Bible book to really be comprehensive. I
choose Bible sorts of books when I need to get a good high level
understanding and then use my time to dig into the areas most important
to me. There are thousands and thousands of pages of documentation that
cover the information in the OpenSolaris bible in greater detail
already. There are thousands upon thousands of posts that dig into
specific cases. What I do expect it to give me is a very broad coverage
of the core concepts and the great majority of what I will have to know
on a day to day basis. There are a number of topics covered in the book
I spent a lot of time reading posts and pages of documentation when I
didn't need that level of detail. For a new user that sort of time
expenditure is a killer and very off putting. I want something that
gives me enough detail that I only have to worry about researching part
of the day to day stuff and can spend my time doing productive work
instead. As an example I just installed Fedora on a drive that was
larger than the BIOS supported for GRUB booting. I quickly grabbed the
installGrub command line from the book, modified it and I had Solaris
back. Took about 15 minutes to debug and fix. I would have had to spend
a lot more time digging through the docs and forums to get that answer.
That's where the book pays for itself from my point of view.
Regards,
Greg
_______________________________________________
opensolaris-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
