8 ms·
Half-price Ebooks for Day Against DRM
- dabber 9y agoPacket Publishing has 50% off as well: https://www.packtpub.com/ https://www.packtpub.com/
- Scipio_Afri 9y agoThe few books I've dug into from them on python are good and recommended by the 6.00 series of MIT MOOC on python. Also, free book of theirs is offered everyday on their website. I'm not sure how long that is going to keep happening cause I can't imagine them having enough books to keep doing that with forever.
- kod 9y agoI think you misunderestimate the spam cannon that is Packt Publishing. They'll publish pretty much anything, and seek out authors that don't necessarily know anything about the topic. They've currently got enough titles to do a free book per day for something like 10 years, without taking into account new releases. Some of their books in specific topic areas are actually good, but in general, beware.
- jug5 9y ago50% off brings most books pretty much in line with other retailers of their books...
- dabber 9y agoRight but it's DRM free, multi format and all the proceeds go directly to the publisher.
- treehau5 9y agoAre any of these good? A lot of them look interesting
- pjf 9y agoPerhaps: https://www.nostarch.com/silence.htm https://www.nostarch.com/silence.htm https://www.nostarch.com/tangledweb.htm https://www.nostarch.com/tangledweb.htm
- rdl 9y agoSerious Cryptography by JP Aumasson is the one I picked up first (it is still early access but you will get the finished version when done.) https://www.nostarch.com/seriouscrypto https://www.nostarch.com/seriouscrypto
- carlosgg 9y ago"The Art of R Programming" is very good. https://www.nostarch.com/artofr.htm https://www.nostarch.com/artofr.htm
- carlosgg 9y agoThese two have a lot of good reviews on Amazon https://www.nostarch.com/tlcl https://www.nostarch.com/tlcl https://www.nostarch.com/howlinuxworks2 https://www.nostarch.com/howlinuxworks2
- carlosgg 9y agoAlso, Al Sweigart makes available many of his books for free on his website, including "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python", which also has a lot of good reviews on Amazon. http://inventwithpython.com/index.html http://inventwithpython.com/index.html
- GabrielF00 9y agoI liked Learn You A Haskell For Great Good, but it's available free from the author online.
- akoster 9y agoI just bought https://www.nostarch.com/Rust https://www.nostarch.com/Rust and https://www.nostarch.com/seriouscrypto https://www.nostarch.com/seriouscrypto Both are early-release, but look good from the sample chapters provided.
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- mercurysmessage 9y agoAnyone read PoC||GTFO? Looks like it'd be interesting.
- dchest 9y agoYou can read them online for free https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/ https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/ But the bible must be a better format :-)
- SonOfLilit 9y agoAlso, they're AMAZING And if you like them, you may like https://www.xorpd.net/pages/xchg_rax/snip_00.html https://www.xorpd.net/pages/xchg_rax/snip_00.html, a book of x64 poems (full disclosure: I was a reviewer)
- schoen 9y agoI know some assembly, but I'm having a hard time appreciating the poems. Can you give me some tips on what to notice or consider about them?
- SonOfLilit 9y agoThey're very much like koans in the sense that there's something to be learned from each one, they encode some deep gem of knowledge that a master low level programmer or reverse engineer will probably recognize. Some are very self explanatory, like 0x00, which I consider a sort of tutorial on how to read the book. Others require careful thought and a few glances at the instruction set manual to figure out. Some, like 0x04, are so hard to figure out that either you ran into the solution once in your career and you know it, or you didn't. Try asking colleagues if it rings a bell. My personal favorite is 0x13, because how rewarding it was to figure out what's going on.
- schoen 9y agoOh, thanks. Somehow I was imagining "poems" in a very different sense. The way that you've described it makes sense, and I look forward to taking a look at them with this understanding.
- ballenf 9y agoThe biggest issue I have with publisher websites is the lack of a strong review ecosystem. I've started looking at Amazon or industry blogs for reviews and recommendations, but that gets frustrating and is slow. Just wonder if the publisher could arrange to get rights to it's books' reviews across seller sites and aggregate the results. The truth is, apart from occasional sales like this, the publisher sites are rarely in price competition with any other sellers. But as far as Amazon goes, I'll buy the books in paper (or pay more for DRM-free) to avoid the Kindle DRM and being locked into one ecosystem. It almost feels like a luxury to be able to loan out or give away paper books. Kindle books just feel more like renting a book than owning it. Which is, legally, probably a closer metaphor for the transaction.
- rdl 9y agoI'm pretty sure if you buy a book from No Starch and have serious complaints, Bill would probably refund you. They are really one of the most community friendly publishers out there.
- dudul 9y ago"The truth is, apart from occasional sales like this, the publisher sites are rarely in price competition with any other sellers." Is this really true? I usually by ebook/pbook combo and I find that I get a better deal directly on the publisher's website. Amazon is a non starter for me because I don't buy into their ebook format. "ebook" to me means epub and pdf.
- Finnucane 9y agoI am involved with ebook production for an academic publisher. I sometimes joke that I am going to have "that doesn't work on the Kindle" engraved on my tombstone.
- jp_sc 9y agoA post listing some of these things (things that doesn't work on the kindle, not tomb stones) would be very interesting
- Tepix 9y agoIt's sad that O'Reilly books are no longer available without DRM or subscription.
- kajo 9y agoO'Reilly had the serious flaw that you could just claim you own a book by adding its IBAN to your account's library and thus being able to "upgrade" it and obtain the ebook version for $5. I wonder why that worked as long as it did.
- freehunter 9y agoBecause enough people would still buy them at full price, and if you were willing to scam your way into a $5 ebook, at least you're paying something for it instead of just pirating it. I always saw it as a way to turn pirates into paying customers, and the would-be pirates still felt like they were getting a good deal. It's a win-win.
- favadi 9y agoI think they discontinued the upgrade program already.
- tzs 9y agoYou can still buy O'Reilly books without DRM through Google.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoAs discussed previously, the Google ones are like converted EPUB's, they don't match the original/real formatting of an O'Reilly DRM-free PDF.
- rollover 9y agoYou can buy them on Ebooks.com http://about.ebooks.com/drm-free-oreilly-ebooks-available-ebooks-com/ http://about.ebooks.com/drm-free-oreilly-ebooks-available-eb...
- rdl 9y agoIt is weird how Amazon works - 50% off from the publisher is within a dollar or two of the regular Kindle price. No DRM and multiple formats is a huge improvement, but if you have a lot of Kindle books already, being able to manage everything through the Kindle system is also a benefit. (For fiction or single-read, I would still probably go with Amazon. For a tech book which I'd want to keep reading and potentially view on platforms which don't have Kindle and where defeating the DRM could be a challenge, publisher direct.)
- pella 9y agoPragProg: 40% off DRMFREE ebooks for #DayAgainstDRM / Valid July 9-12, 2017. https://media.pragprog.com/newsletters/2017-07-10.html https://media.pragprog.com/newsletters/2017-07-10.html
- donquichotte 9y agoRant time! Some time ago, I bought a Tolino, an e-reader by Deutsche Telekom that is sold in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands. Huge mistake! At first, I loved not having to lug around printed books. Then the screen broke, I got the device replaced. Then the updates started. It looks like the device is running Android. Instead of a sweet half hour of light reading in the evening it was a sweaty two hours of searching my two passwords (one for the device and the Thalia bookstore, and one for the Adobe DRM, which I need to enter everytime I want to read in a book I fu*king paid for, and don't get me started on the keyboard and the slow screen refresh rate) before the unskippable update finished. The update broke my account, so I had to physically go to a bookstore to have them restore my account, which is the exact opposite of what I had in mind when purchasing this piece of utter garbage. Then I started realizing that books on Amazon are like 50% cheaper than in the Tolino store, and there is no way to buy books on Amazon and read them on Tolino. Oh, and they don't have a lot of books either, especially if they're not in German! What a horrible experience, I will never again buy anything made by Tolino, Thalia or Deutsche Telekom.
- PhantomGremlin 9y agoAm I dense? When does this "day" start? Browsing with Safari 10.1.1 I see a standard website with standard pricing. I would think that if this were something being promoted there would be a very prominent statement. But I don't see anything? I tried adding a few books to my cart, but they also seem to have regular pricing. The only thing that says "half-price" is the HN title???
- william20111 9y agoNo im getting this also...might have ended not sure tbh.
- schoen 9y agoApparently you needed a coupon code, which was given elsewhere, and the promotion ended a few minutes ago.
- aboyne42 9y agoThe coupon code was buried in the comments, but it is still working: RIGHT2READ
- muloka 9y agoIn case anyone is looking the coupon is RIGHT2READ
- mattl 9y agoAnd here's why... https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
- kod 9y agoThe Linux Programming Interface by Kerrisk is probably the best book of its kind. Even better than Stevens' Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, although obviously linux specific. https://www.nostarch.com/tlpi https://www.nostarch.com/tlpi
- itamarst 9y agoYes, it's wonderful. But personally I'd recommend getting the paper version.
- kod 9y agoI have both. It's worth mentioning that, unlike a lot of technical ebooks from other publishers, the No Starch ePub version seems to be well-formatted and totally usable on a e-ink reading device (Kobo Aura One in my case).
- criddell 9y agoThe SparkFun Guide to Processing and Book of Inkscape both look very promising. The No Starch folks have assembled a really interesting catalog of books.
- kqr2 9y agoUnfortunately the deal is now over.
- jkchu 9y agoStill works for me. Use code: RIGHT2READ as mentioned elsewhere in this thread.