[CLUE-Talk] O'Reilly Special Offer, Expires Monday

[Lynn Danielson]

Dave Anselmi wrote:
> Used to be that O'Reilly books could be counted on to be very good.
> Lately I have been disappointed by some of their books.  Can anyone
> recommend O'Reilly books that are the best in their class?  ...

I think that in the rush to market documentation for emerging and
changing technologies, publishers have been putting out a lot of 
books which are disappointing, deficient and inaccurate.  O'Reilly 
is not exempt from this, but they have a solid history of well edited
and technically accurate material.  They have published a wealth of
UNIX related documentation and have proven to be strong supporters
Linux and Open Source technologies.  For this last reason alone, I
tend to prefer O'Reilly titles over others.  When I buy from O'Reilly,
I feel like I'm contributing more to the Linux and Open Source
movement then when I purchase books from other publishers.  In more
than one respect, I like O'Reilly's style.

Ultimately the value of a book is going to depend upon its author and
how well their style of teaching matches your style of learning.  If 
you're disappointed with a particular book, let the publisher know.  
If they get negative feed back, they may examine their problems and 
try to fix them.  You'll be doing everyone a favor.  

You asked about intro to Unix books for teaching non-engineers.
I believe that O'Reilly's "Learning the UNIX Operating System" is 
a great book that I would recommend to newbies who are interested in
getting into UNIX.  Other books that I found helpful when getting 
started with UNIX: Harley Hahn's "Student Guide to UNIX" and John 
Montgomery's "The Underground Guide to Linux".  A book that came out
more recently is John Lasser's "Think UNIX", which gives a nice intro
to UNIX while explaining the UNIX way.  

I think Harley Hahn's is the lightweight in the above books.  I 
found the "Underground Guide" a fun read, but my girl friend found
its style annoying and tiresome.  Personal preference is everything.

As for best of class books.  One of my favorites is O'Reilly's "UNIX
Power Tools".  Which contains a wealth of information about how to get
things done in a shell.  If you're into Perl, you'd probably appreciate
the "Mastering Regular Expressions" book.  While the book focus is on 
Perl's implementation of regex it surveys the use of regular expressions
among common UNIX tools and languages.  I've also found Joseph Hall's
"Effective Perl Programming" to be excellent.  Another favorite I've 
acquired in the past year is the New Rider's "MySQL" book.  It succeeds
at being both a great tutorial and a reference.  It also contains the
best introduction I've found to using database API's with C, Perl and
PHP.  

My two cents,

Lynn