4 ms·

a bit dated the last time I looked at it I was going to ask about that. A lot of these books are a little old, published a decade ago. How well did they age?

by blfr 10y ago

SwellJoe 10y ago
Many of the topics haven't changed much in a decade. BIND is the same as it ever was. Sure, there's relatively new stuff, like DNSSEC, but I suspect it's actually covered in the latest edition of DNS & BIND; for whatever reason, DNSSEC adoption has been very, very slow, so the spec was formalized like a decade ago. BIND is the reference implementation for new DNS features, so it was probably in there and probably in the book ten years ago. But, I dunno. The last edition I had was probably one or two revisions before this one. Essential System Administration is kinda out of date on several fronts. I looked at the most recent edition a year or so ago when I was thinking about writing a book on sysadmin topics, just to see what the current state of the market is. I'd probably toss about half of it, if I were charged with producing a new edition, and add several new chapters about containers (across all of the various unices), systemd, more modern interop topics (LDAP and AD, in particular), and just general updates to standard practices. But, still, it's probably in the top five books about UNIX/Linux system administration, since it is well-written and does cover a lot of ground. You could just skip what you don't need, and double check with the google for whether the material is up to date for the stuff you do. Most of the other stuff will be accurate but missing a few things. bash and vim and emacs have improved a lot in the past decade, but core competency with any of them looks about the same as it did a decade ago. New things will take some additional research, but you won't waste your time learning from an old book, because a bash script written 10 years ago is 95% of the time going to run unmodified today. Likewise, a vim user who time-traveled from ten years ago to today won't, at all, be confused by modern vim. So...they're cheap because they're old. And, you probably don't get tremendously more than you're paying for. But, they were good books ten years ago, and they're still pretty good books today.

a bit dated the last time I looked at it I was going to ask about that. A lot of these books are a little old, published a decade ago. How well did they age?

by blfr 10y ago

a bit dated the last time I looked at it I was going to ask about that. A lot of these books are a little old, published a decade ago. How well did they age?

SwellJoe 10y ago

Many of the topics haven't changed much in a decade. BIND is the same as it ever was. Sure, there's relatively new stuff, like DNSSEC, but I suspect it's actually covered in the latest edition of DNS & BIND; for whatever reason, DNSSEC adoption has been very, very slow, so the spec was formalized like a decade ago. BIND is the reference implementation for new DNS features, so it was probably in there and probably in the book ten years ago. But, I dunno. The last edition I had was probably one or two revisions before this one. Essential System Administration is kinda out of date on several fronts. I looked at the most recent edition a year or so ago when I was thinking about writing a book on sysadmin topics, just to see what the current state of the market is. I'd probably toss about half of it, if I were charged with producing a new edition, and add several new chapters about containers (across all of the various unices), systemd, more modern interop topics (LDAP and AD, in particular), and just general updates to standard practices. But, still, it's probably in the top five books about UNIX/Linux system administration, since it is well-written and does cover a lot of ground. You could just skip what you don't need, and double check with the google for whether the material is up to date for the stuff you do. Most of the other stuff will be accurate but missing a few things. bash and vim and emacs have improved a lot in the past decade, but core competency with any of them looks about the same as it did a decade ago. New things will take some additional research, but you won't waste your time learning from an old book, because a bash script written 10 years ago is 95% of the time going to run unmodified today. Likewise, a vim user who time-traveled from ten years ago to today won't, at all, be confused by modern vim. So...they're cheap because they're old. And, you probably don't get tremendously more than you're paying for. But, they were good books ten years ago, and they're still pretty good books today.