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Humble Book Bundle: Unix
- crimsonalucard 10y ago"Pay what you want" is a false statement. When I wanted to pay 1 cent they demanded a minimum of one dollar. 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.
- misframer 10y agoThey say "name your price of $1 or more."
- codewritinfool 10y agoYes, they do, but they also say, "Pay what you want"
- rhizome 10y agoI don't mean to be glib, but this is a pretty Sheldon-esque line of reasoning.
- crimsonalucard 10y agoNo it's not. "Pay what you want" is the most prominent statement on the whole page. The one dollar minimum for content is obscure. edit: why do people vote me down when what I say is true? I'm sorry but I'm not willing to pay for tutorials on open source applications that I can otherwise legally get for free. Humble Bundle isn't even a non-profit corporation. They are a private for-profit corporation where profit is the bottom line and donations to charity are more of a marketing gimmick used to reach that bottom line. Humble Bundle is a highly, highly profitable middle man operation that banks on the altruism of people.
- Jtsummers 10y agoThe $1 minimum is above the particular tier. Along with the marking for the $8 and $15 tiers. And when you enter in the amount you want to pay, they tell you exactly what you will (or will not) get.
- khedoros1 10y agoEven less prominent is the "free" tier. You'll get one book for it.
- __jal 10y agoI didn't down vote you, but was tempted, so I'll explain. Yes, you are stating a true fact. However, I'm pretty sure that the vast number of people who see these things do not consider the distinction you draw vastly more deceptive than, well, any other advertising out there, and much less so than most. Compare with, say, Comcast, and this is a model of clarity. An additional reason is that it is somewhat derailing to rant about what many would think to be trivial quibbles about advertising copy in the middle of what is otherwise a discussion about the usefulness of the books, ORA, etc.
- crimsonalucard 10y agoNothing was derailed, I think my comment was the first. Additionally, I believe it is more deceptive then your traditional advertisement. How much "Pay what you want" deals are out there? It is a very unique marketing strategy.
- ehec 10y agoThere is a german word for your behaviour. i-Tüpferl-Reiter http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/i_Tuepferl_Reiter http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/i_Tuepferl_Reiter Which roughly translates to: The need to make something better even if it is already as good as it gets
- crimsonalucard 10y agoI never mentioned such a need. What I mentioned was deception conducted by the company. Perhaps it is just misguided perception. People can't take a statement at face value, they must always make an assumption.
- Lio 10y agoI guess you can pay nothing but it does seem a little mean considering how cheap the suggested minimum prices are for the bundles and that it's all for charity. I say thanks O'Reilly, promotions like this are why you're still so great after all these years.
- oneeyedpigeon 10y agoI think it is reasonably obvious that "pay what you want" can never be 100% literal. Can I pay π dollars? Obviously not. Can I pay negative one trillion? Of course I can't. Can I pay 'what I want' for all reasonable values of 'what'? Yes.
- crimsonalucard 10y agoI have encountered pay what you want deals that included zero dollars, just never at Humble Bundle.
- TheGrumpyBrit 10y agoWhen HB was new, they did exactly this. The minimum $1 has presumably come about because the people who buy at $0.01 are only there fore free stuff - they don't actually want the content, so why make a loss for them? Edit: In fact, they still do this, and you can get the Mobile or Games bundles for $0.01.
- palunon 10y agoThey used to have a 1$ minimum for Steam keys when all their games bundle where also DRM-free. Now that most of the games in the bundles require Steam, I guess 1$ is the de facto minimum.
- wlesieutre 10y ago1 cent wouldn't cover a credit transaction fee, they'd be losing money if they let you do that.
- freehunter 10y agoYou can actually pay $0.01, you just don't get anything for it. So "pay what you want" is true, you can pay $0.01. But if you want to get the books, you have to pay at least $1.
- khedoros1 10y agoI just got "10 Steps to Unix Survival" by paying $0.00. 1. Click "Pay what you want" 2. Choose the "Free Stuff" tier 3. Go through the rest of the wizard ("I'm not a robot" and such)
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoWhile it is true, they have minimum pricing, if you want the items without compensating the publisher for them, you CAN stiff them. For instance, you can change the sliders so 100% of your money goes to charity, and then you didn't pay them for the books at all. Sure, not what you want, but worth noting. Particularly useful if you want something on offer, but don't like the company selling them and don't want to support them. For instance, I can imagine a lot of people stiff EA when EA has a bundle available, and go 100% charity. :)
- oneeyedpigeon 10y agoThis model blows my mind - I just cannot quite work it out. Have the companies involved - O'Reilly and Humble Bundle Inc - just decided that they're OK with potentially making nothing at all from this, so long as lots of money goes to charity? I mean, it's wonderfully altruistic, and I suppose it could be a lot more complicated than I'm giving credit for (does the goodwill gained by them outweigh the financial hit?) but it's certainly fascinating. How do people decide how they allocate the money? Is it wrong if I feel bad if I don't give all the money to charity?
- extropic-engine 10y agoIt's because they are selling digital items that have no intrinsic value. The likelihood that everyone will do this is low. Most people will just leave the sliders at their default values. And it's good marketing.
- jsjohnst 10y agoDepends on the author agreement. With the age of these books, possibly not, but there could easily be a royalty payment involved. Either way, let's assume they sell 100,000 copies, that's still not that much money and would be in line with their typical CSR giving (very likely, these authors might have waived royalty for charity too).
- crimsonalucard 10y agoHumble Bundle is an extremely profitable operation that preys on the altruism of people. They secured roughly 5 million in venture capital funding from sequoia capital. 15% of whatever money you pay doesn't go to a charity, it goes to them. This is not explicitly stated. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Bundle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Bundle (search for 15%)
- Confusion 10y agoLet's assume you are right. So what? Why did you feel compelled to share this here? To me it signals I should avoid hiring you or working with you, because you get hung up on pedantic, irrelevant, details.
- talideon 10y agoThere are many reasons why they do this, not least of which is that they handle Steam keys, and by imposing a minimum cost, it means bad actors can't as easily get tonnes of Steam keys for resale or using their purchases to game Steam and other services in other ways. They now apply this policy across the board. Read more here: http://www.gamesradar.com/humble-indie-bundle-responds-steam-key-exploiters-1-minimum/ http://www.gamesradar.com/humble-indie-bundle-responds-steam...
- bathory 10y agoMy 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.
- freehunter 10y agoIt'd be hard to get even one physical book online for $1, let alone several of them. As long as I have two screens, I've learned to like digital textbooks. It's hard to ctrl+f on a piece of paper.
- Jtsummers 10y agoIn the past, they've offered bundles with print copies if you pay at least $xx (40-50, IIRC). Not all the books though, usually some subset of the books available. Just a third (or fourth) tier in the scheme they already use.
- af16090 10y agoThis bundle includes the books in .mobi format which might be supported better on your kindle than pdfs.
- kev009 10y agoIt's a humble bundle so it would have been unusual for print books. The manufacturing cost is quite high for print on demand vs essentially free for digital download. But I am with you on the print books. I've spend many thousands of dollars building up my home CS library. Nothing helps me learn better than stepping away from the screens and reading paper in a comfortable chair!
- pfranz 10y agoI've gone back and forth. I wanted digital books, but frankly they're terrible on Kindle--especially languages like Python because of word-wrapping. Kindles are also awful at skimming or thumbing through. But physical books I don't always have with me at work/home and it's hard to dig them out when you need them. I've found that I really like buying digital books, but using my iPad or Kindle computer app to read coding books because the formatting is better. Even if you don't copy/paste, it's easier to type in code if it's in the window next to you instead of looking down (yeah, I can type without looking at the keyboard, but I have more trouble in an IDE when I have to match parens and quotes, deal with autocomplete and other syntax things like semicolons).
- freehunter 10y agoThe $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. Good sale!
- mkesper 10y agoI'm asking myself how relevant they are today? Tcp/Ip 3rd is from 2002, as well as Essential Sysadmin 3rd.
- johnmarcus 10y agowith possibly some sadness, probably still very relevant. The best book I have ever owned on TCP/IP was published ~1982....and when I read it last year, not much has changed.
- freehunter 10y agoOne of the nicer things about Unix is that it tends not to change. There's a lot of inertia to overcome in Unix, which is why Ubuntu made (and continues to make) such a big splash, for being willing to change things quickly (and not always for the better).
- SwellJoe 10y agoI disagree. Of all of these DNS & BIND is the one I've recommended the most over the years. So many people have no idea how DNS works, and so many of the online references are wrong or incomplete. I've worked in three major fields of IT over the past 20 years, and in all of them, DNS has been the cause of more problems than any other single category. And, in this case, DNS & BIND is one of the great O'Reilly books from the era when it meant something for a book to be from O'Reilly.
- macintux 10y agoThat'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. 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. (I still remember the first time I ever saw a Linux book on a shelf at a bookstore. I feel old.)
- liveoneggs 10y agoPower Tools is a really great book though
- marklawrutgers 10y agoDoes 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.
- Jtsummers 10y agohttp://support.oreilly.com/oreilly/topics/if_i_buy_pdf_version_of_a_book_can_i_share_it_to_my_friends http://support.oreilly.com/oreilly/topics/if_i_buy_pdf_versi... This is O'Reilly's take on it. You can lend it, but you can't have access to it while it's lent out. Really, really hard to enforce. But I believe PDFs are watermarked (don't know how they'll do it with this bundle), so if you lend it out and the copy gets into the wild, so to speak, they can trace it back to your account.
- r3bl 10y ago> But I believe PDFs are watermarked (don't know how they'll do it with this bundle), so if you lend it out and the copy gets into the wild, so to speak, they can trace it back to your account. The thing that distinguishes Humble Bundle from the rest of the "book sellers" for me (I know you can't really call them "book sellers") is that they offer no DRM what so ever, and, by purchasing a pack for a ridiculously low price, you're contributing to a usually pretty good NGO/foundation in the process. I usually share the hell out of a current bundle that looks interesting to me to everyone that I think might be interested in it while the offer lasts. Me personally, I could never provide a copy of the bundle in public (however, I would share a book or two with someone I personally trust in case they missed the offer) because Humble Bundle is doing something that I don't see anyone else doing: providing awesome things for cheap and supporting some awesome organization in the process.
- mrbill 10y agoI'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).
- SwellJoe 10y agoI 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: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html and http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ ). I guess UNIX in a Nutshell was good in its day, but is quite old now, even in its 4th edition. DNS & BIND 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). And Essential System Administration 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). 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.
- simondedalus 10y agoTotally agree, DNS and Bind and Essential System Administration alone are completely worth it if you're at all interested in (using) Unix-like systems. As for being dated, I think simply reading (and understanding) Essential System Administration and then spending an afternoon looking at grub and systemd could get you pretty far in the RHEL certification cycle.
- contras1970 10y agoI have to mention DJB whenever there's a mention of DNS. Thank you PRJ, JdeBP, smarden, skarnet. You have done a shitload for me and my close (and distant) ones. https://cr.yp.to/donations.html https://cr.yp.to/donations.html PS In case you've been wondering, djbdns+curvedns is a very capable implementation of DNS servers and client-side utilities. Both authoritative server and recursive cache; each independent of the other. Plus wonderful commandline utilities for various kinds of DNS queries.
- _kst_ 10y agoI 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.
- hrnnnnnn 10y agoFor what it's worth, if you use a Kindle, you can have them all emailed to your device at once
- Arkaad 10y agoThe problem is that if you email them to your device, the books in your library lose their cover picture. I always have to copy them manually with Calibre to keep the cover.
- nithinbekal 10y agoIf you prefer downloading the files the good old fashioned way. ;) In the browser console: $('.js-start-download > a').each(function(a, b) { console.log($(b).attr('href')) }) Paste the URLs in list.txt and run wget on the list: wget --content-disposition --trust-server-names -i list.txt
- partycoder 10y agoMy favourite is "The Linux Programming Interface". It's a fantastic book... very thick too.
- didsomeonesay 10y agoThis is not part of the bundle - or did I miss something?
- kingosticks 10y agoInternal server error after the payment appeared to be accepted. I wonder if I was actually charged or not...
- orbitingpluto 10y agoI upload Humbles to Google Play Books, not for primary reading but easy accessibility. I just wish that downloading a 2MB pdf from Google Books wouldn't take 450MB of local storage. 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.
- arikrak 10y agoHow does it take up so much space? What if you just download the epubs to your Google Drive?
- orbitingpluto 10y agoNo idea. It's always the first couple files that seem to grow the data used by the app to it's monstrous size. After four or five PDFs it levels out. Another 2MB will only take a couple MB.
- xchaotic 10y ago$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.
- jbmorgado 10y agoWhat 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. 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.
- newscracker 10y agoUNIX Power Tools would be relevant and a great resource even today. When I read the paperback version long ago I was impressed by the book and by what's possible.
- sunnyps 10y agoIt's missing the Unix Haters Handbook. http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
- strzalek 10y agoI 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: https://gist.github.com/lukaszx0/0044aeb9ce86a7859a235093986ef885 https://gist.github.com/lukaszx0/0044aeb9ce86a7859a235093986...
- davidchua 10y agoThanks! you just made my life so much easier.
- squarefoot 10y agoI 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. 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.
- combatentropy 10y agoJust 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. --- $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