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hn_user82179 | 11 months ago

Interesting, this might be perfect for me depending on how the book is written/who the target audience is. $60 for an ebook or $80 for the hard copy is extremely hard to swallow though. I absolutely think a book of that purported length means an author probably put a lot of effort and time into it, and should get compensated. But I'm not familiar with the author at all so you're really buying sight unseen. Has he written anything else? I couldn't find anything with a quick google search.

Tangentially related, I was hoping to skim at least the first chapter via the Safari Books Online subscription which afaik had all of the No-Starch books on there (including early access I thought?). But no luck, maybe it'll be added there closer to publication date.

discuss

order

justin66|11 months ago

Regarding the cost, just a quick note, when you buy the hard copy directly from No Starch Press you get perpetual access to the ebook as well. That's maybe cooler than it sounds: at any given time you've got access to the newest (or close to it) printing of the book via ebook, and it's nice to get the little updates and errata that accumulate over the years in a big book like for example, The Linux Programming Interface.

(at least that's the way they used to do business - I'm pretty sure they still do)

kaycey2022|11 months ago

I found a pdf of his Unix lecture notes on the "high seas". These were pretty good. I'm looking forward to his book and I will buy it.

d3Xt3r|11 months ago

I concur. At least a sample/preview of a couple of chapters would be nice. Bit of a hard sell to dump $60+ on a completely unknown piece of work.

LMMojo|11 months ago

I found only this: "A Time-independent Definition of Software Reliability"

https://a.co/d/0q7gkTo

hn_user82179|11 months ago

oh good find! I went from that title to the Internet Archive version (pdf alert: https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/timeindependentd00we...) (legal because as stated in that Amazon description, the paper is in the public domain).

I am both convinced the author is quite smart and hope that the topic/audience of the book is very different from the paper because I would not survive 1000 pages of that.

Cebul1234|11 months ago

Now it's $80 and $100. We should buy it quick, because the price is rising fast.