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Bookpool has an exclusive excerpt of the book that is going to stand on the shelfs of many /. reader.

Check the left column of http://www.bookpool.com/.x/SSSSSS_C473S597521D0502 011740/ct/163. You can buy parts of Vol. 1 (revised) and 4 already, in addition to the one part that's ready for free download. They also say they expect to be able to sell you the entire volume 4 in 2007. And I'll bet Knuth doesn't slip nearly as bad as Longhorn.

If you truly want to understand this, read through the first couple chapters of the Date book

For a brief answer, your XML files (and most OO databases as an extension) might work well for your application, but try using them for a totally different application that works with the same data. That's where relational model (at least in theory) shines: it is application-agnostic.

Additionally, as your application grows and so is the number of concurrent users, you might face issues that are just not trivial/too tedious to program by hand:

• Transaction support. For example, you transfer $5000 from your savings account to your checking account, and the power goes down when your savings account is debited but before your checking acount is credited. If you don't explicitly code around this problem, $5000 disappears.
• Transaction isolation. Same example as above, but instead of power outage, a program that generates your paper statement is run -- $5000 is not on the statement, even though it is in your account.
• Durability. Same example, power goes down. Try it enough times, and depending on which filesystem your XML file is on, you may well see it corrupted when you boot the machine after power is restored.
• Consistency/integrity. Same example, your checking account balance is stored in a two-byte unsigned integer and is currently at $63,000...

Try Date's book for more detailed (and likely more clear) explanation.

Look up some info. Just because YOU can't think of any other logic doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Now go back to your LEDs.

Allow me to save you 43% off the listed bn.com price (I hope /. at least gets a cut at that price).

The awesome Bookpool has it for $22.75.

As usual, Bookpool.com has it for less than Amazon, although shipping is only free with a $40 purchase. Not advertising, but I've saved cash with them before, and always liked their service.

It's currently on sale for $16.95 (plus S&H) at bookpool.com. But I think I got their last in-stock copy just yesterday. Can't wait for it to show up next week.

And yeah, ditto to everything else you said. A friend of mine was complaining that "every time he goes on the internet, my computer slows waaaayyyy down...". I told him, "Dude, you are 0wn3d", gave him a Knoppix CD and told him to unplug his DSL modem when he boots into Windows. He's happily back to full speed surfing and I didn't have to go clean up his Windows mess. Win-win, baby. Gotta love it!! :-)

$18.95 at Bookpool.com

Actually, for most of what shows up here on slashdot, Bookpool is often the best choice. Even after the membership discount I get at BooksaMillion.com, Bookpool usually comes out ahead.

Or you could actually shop around or go to bookpool, where it is $28.50 they don't show up on all book stores.

-- Sex Toys...

http://www.bookpool.com/.x/o46bbmdu1n/ss?qs=Beginn ing+PHP+5+and+MySQL&x=25&y=11

And even cheaper at bookpool - $25.95

http://www.bookpool.com/.x/6ibyg4xsc0/sm/189311551 8

There's no money in backdated books in the eyes of [brick-and-mortar] book stores and publishers (speaking as a former publishing employee). Most people don't realize how cutthroat the computer book market is; particularly when compared to "regular" publishing which has no time barrier(s). "Day and Date" describes when a book is desired to be on the shelf; i.e., a book is on the shelf the same day the software is available for purchase. Many people don't even worry about quality for day-and-date books - they buy the first ones on the shelf. (these folks are not descriminating users, but those who think they need to go through a product step-by-step in order to learn it).
Big question: "Just how long should they keep older versions and how many of each older version should they keep?" - this is not a rhetorical question - I'm interested in seeing what people think makes good sense from a business sense. And "Well, by making old versions available they're more likely to have my business for new books." That's weak. Seriously: how many for each version and how long for each?

Like many industries, the Pareto Principle [1] rules: "80% of your revenue comes from your top 20% of sales". So the remaining 20% of your revenue comes from the other (bottom) 80% of your sales. (this is providing you haven't picked products so good you don't have this type of problem.

Back to purchasing books and used books in particular. First: note that half.com is a spam supporter. If you want to test this yourself, create a spam trap. Create some hotmail account and submit that with a purchase at Half.com. Use that account for nothing else and log on periodically to keep the account active. Next: Bookstores. n.b. nearly every time books are mentioned on /. people say "It's $x on Amazon!" and|or "It's $y on BN!" These are the same jokers who will pay $2.00us/gallon for gas because it's the nearest gas station but driving two blocks further, it's available for $1.75us/gallon (and when you point this out, they claim they didn't look down the street and notice the other station. (so much for being smart enough for programming or observing details enough to find errors, eh?

Check your local brick-n-mortar stores. Borders piles their outdated books for a song (even if you are tone deaf) on a table - it's cheaper for a sale than dealing with destroying or shipping them back.

Finally, if you are lucky enough to have a CompUSA (we've got one here in Indianapolis), they've got several hundred titles on some rotating racks which are 25%-75% off the cover price for older versions of software.

Finally, go to BookPool: Search and Compare among 40+ sites, 20,000 sellers, millions of books! summary: this is an online shopping 'bot which searches 40+ online bookstores. If you supply information, it'll include custom shipping and|or taxes. You can mention coupons. It'll present information in a ascending order (cheapest first) with everything in a table, all broken down. Where do Amazon or BN rank? Near the top, but frequently not the top. You'll find other stores whose price + shipping is less than Amazon's gross price sine shipping - remember, shipping isn't always free for Amazon. So if a store has a book charge + shipping which is less than Amazon cover without shipping, you're getting a good deal.

If people are willing to limit themselves to Amazon & BN, they can email me with the information and I'll gladly order the books on a cheaper site and keep the difference.

Okay, you've got lots of help and tools. If you can't find it with anything listed here, well, you must be [xxxxxxxxxx redacted xxxxxxxxxx]


[1]Pareto Principle: this is the "80/20 Rule" everyone uses but likely doesn't understand 1) there's actually a formal name for it; and 2) it's eponymous (based upon someone's name). You have to be careful about tossing too many terms around [at once] but this is one of those which is nice to inject into a meeting or presentation.

Hrm, well. Putting aside my suspicions about
a college that teaches you acronyms rather than
fundamental theories ;), as someone working in
the industry since about '98, my advice is *be
vendor neutral*. Sure, learn cisco. But try to
get your hands on other vendor's kit too. You
never know what you'll run into out in the wild.
The more hats you can wear, the more likely a
potential employer is to need one or more of your
hat array. So get a bunch of cheap x86 hardware
and toy with every linux distro you can get your
hands on, all the *BSDs, and solaris x86. Learn
bash, learn perl, learn C, learn enough HTML to
make a decent-looking technical document. Use
sites like bookpool and safari to
read technical books until your brain explodes and
then read some more. Always be reading, always be
learning, and never stop growing. At my day
job, I could in any single day touch anything
from graphic design to middleware development
to server administration to hardware configs
to router management. This is a field where
the flexible get ahead and those that focus on
alphabet soup end up kissing a bank manager's
ass until they retire at 70.

Oh, and buy a kevlar vest. It's a rough world out
here.

Certs are OK I guess if you're way entry level,
but a degree from any sort of college will probably
trump them, and significant, relevant
experience will trump almost anything.

Why does everyone insist on considering Amazon and B&N to be the only online bookstores? I have news for you folks: it's almost always cheaper to go to AddAll or BookPool and get a book cheaper including shipping than Amazon and B&N.

In the case of this book, I've taken the liberty of making your life easier by providing you with urls which will take you directly to the price list for the book. For future reference: AddAll is a shopping 'bot, looking at thirty-six stores. AddAll Results and BookPool

Now, if you insist upon paying Amazon and B&N prices, let me know. You can PayPal the money to me and I'll order the book for you from AddAll or BookPool and have it shipped to you. (Of course, I'll keep the difference. After all, you were willing to pay the extra price!) If you're willing to waste your money, I'd rather collect the waste than Amazon or B&N.

p.s. Remember this the next time you see someone post a message saying, "it's -this price- at Amazon!"

p.p.s.
Here's the listing from Froogle (just in case you haven't used it yet)

Professor Andrew Tanenbaum is a professor who has written some great books. I'm very happy to have read read them. One of his books was Operatin g System Desgin and Implementation in which he describes operating systems with a toy, minimal, Unix-like operating system for the 8088 called Minix. It wasn't a really useful OS, but it was small enough to take a look at the code to any particular subsystem and learn how it worked. As an example of its mimilalism, it did have some hardware memory protection between processes, but did so with segment registers. That limited the size of each program to 64k.

Minix wasn't free or open source software. (ideas that were pretty much in their infancy) Tanenbaum sold it through his book publisher. Not for much, probably just enough to make it worth Prentice-Hall's time. Without the Internet as a cost effective distribution medium, someone had to take the orders and mail the disks. People loved tinkering with Minux, though. They ported it to other platforms, (Atari ST, Amiga, Sparc, 80306, etc.) They added to it and started distributing patches. Linus was using Minix-386 before he managed to get Linux to be self-hosting. In some reports, it was Linus' annoyance at having to pay for Minux that inspired him to make Linux free software.

Ken Brown, on the other hand, is someone whose name isn't very recognizable in technical circles. I'm tempted to say that he is a nobody, but maybe I just don't hang around the right circles. (Or on the other hand, maybe if I've never heard of him that means that I hang around the right circles.) I first read about the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution a couple of years ago when they published a paper questioning the security of free and open source software, and sold the paper in a through a system that allowed people to download the paper without purchasing it. Most of the links on their site are either links to articles from news sites about the institutes press releases, or links to papers that they promise will be ready soon.

But for tech books, the best deal I've found (so far) is bookpool.com. They habitually have 30% discounts on their books, new (not used or two editions old), and sometimes higher: I bought a few OReilly books last year at 43% off. Not a bad discount. I like supporting my local brick-and-mortar bookstore, but it's kind of hard to ignore that sort of savings.

I guess I'll just have to buy coffee at the bookstore and my books online. :-)

I've been using Bookpool as one of my main sources for technical books for several years.

They have great prices, ship promptly, and have free shipping for orders over $40.

They routinely have sales for specific publishers. I've bought most of my O'Reilly books there during their sales. Right now they have Apress books for 50% off retail.

If you register with them, you can get email notification of these sales. When I can I try to queue up my book 'wish list' and buy them when they are on sale at Bookpool.

Can anyone say how this book compares to Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment by W. Richard Stevens? I was pretty much ready to buy it today.

the Stevens book

Thanks!

I was amazed that O'Reilly did not even have a book on it.

That's because the definitive text, by LaTeX author Leslie Lamport, was published in 1986 by Addison-Wesley two years before O'Reilly got into the publishing business. Nobody's seen a need to improve on it I guess. Interestingly enough, Leslie Lamport works at Microsoft now, so I would assume if he published any new books on LaTeX they'd be Microsoft Press.

Once you get into more advanced usages, The LaTeX Companion is a good second book to pick up.

I was amazed that O'Reilly did not even have a book on it.

That's because the definitive text, by LaTeX author Leslie Lamport, was published in 1986 by Addison-Wesley two years before O'Reilly got into the publishing business. Nobody's seen a need to improve on it I guess. Interestingly enough, Leslie Lamport works at Microsoft now, so I would assume if he published any new books on LaTeX they'd be Microsoft Press.

Once you get into more advanced usages, The LaTeX Companion is a good second book to pick up.

And Bookpool cheaper still:
http://www.bookpool.com/.x/ierdixxv34/ss/1?qs=hard ware+hacking

Disclosure Note: I wrote part of the book, and the deal the publisher has with Bookpool sometimes results in slightly higher royalties for me. They do often have the best price, though.

You can do your own comparison shopping, of course:
http://isbn.nu/1932266836/shipover/

Your best deal usually depends on shipping.

bookpool.com

As they state, there is a simple solution: TCP MD5 Signature Option with BGP. Any ISP worth their salt will already be doing it. The rest will learn the hard way.

This has been supported in Cisco IOS way back since ~1998 in IOS 11.2 .

Read the BGP "Bible": Internet Routing Architectures or look at any best-practices guides which will state that TCP MD5 sigs should always be used with BGP.

Or search CCO:

router bgp 109
neighbor 145.2.2.2 password v61ne0qkel33&

It's just a single line that has to be added to both peer sides.

www.bookpool.com is much cheaper. O'Reilly books are usually 40% cheaper.

It is ~$42 shipped from Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0735 617678/qid=1077988436//ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl14/103 -7446930-0203823?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

~$33+ship from Bookpool:
http://www.bookpool.com/.x/agbh3ovdrn/ss/1?qs=0735 617678&Go.x=11&Go.y=11

I haven't read their book for XP certification (70-270?), but you may also consider it.

I think certification books are often great for study, whether or not you intend to take the test. They tend to hammer on important points, and then quiz you on them at the end of the chapter.

Best luck; I hope they at least give you SFU 3.5.

Disclaimer: My buddy works at bookpool (but their prices really are great!)

I've been using this book to migrate our existing sendmail gobbilygook mailsystem to a sane well documented postfix system and I've found the book to be a great help as I've had to do a one to one comparision between sendmail and postfix for configuration stuff.

Plus Dent's writing style is excellent and the book is well laid out.

Why doesn't anyone in /. ever link to BookPool?

If you don't know what your textbooks are early enough to order overseas, buy your books from an online store like BookPool or ecampus.com, both of which are generally cheaper than Amazon for Computer Science texts.

bookpool

Amazon and Bookpool.

Yes, APUE is excellent- but after reading that, take a look at Beginning Linux Programming from Wrox Press. This book give the best bite sized simple, coherent examples I have seen anywhere.

The only down side to the book is it tends to skirt around error checking- which is required to provide simple summaries.

If you've read APUE, check out Beginning Linux Programming- and don't let the word Beginning throw you-it covers advanced topics quite well.

BTW- my opinions are based on the 1st edition, for the at the time when it originally came out.

Since your price was incorrect, you could always pay $27.95 @ Bookpool.com.

Phil

For those of us who do possess principles and are boycotting Amazon, Bookpool has it for $6.51 less, even including shipping via USPS. And if your order is over $40, you get free shipping on the entire order.

Bookpool is even cheaper than Amazon, and they don't have any patents on anything, AFAIK. And they specialize in technical books, not books, movies and power tools.

bookpool

Here's what I use to shop for books:

BestBookDeal
Book Pool

...than SpAmazon. And Bookpool will never spam you like Amazon will, given half a chance.

The book is still in pre-order state from Bookpool, but they'll ship it to you when it hits. You can check the details at this link.

-B

And bookpool.com lists it for $18.50 (although it's not in stock).

Amazon.com is also attempting to patent the entire internet and will charge you 50 cents "per surf".

Get the book at a tech friendly place for $24.95

http://www.bookpool.com/.x/ia7nmm3ps8/ss/1?qs=webm in

Sunny Dubey

Bookpool has it $2 cheaper than Amazon, and you're not giving business to someone who is abusing the patent system.

http://www.bookpool.com/.x/ejmrmq9fa6/sm/189311594 1

Bookpool is always cheaper!

All Book Stores is a good place as well, although they don't list Bookpool which happens to be my preference for tech books and usually the least expensive.

YMMV- I am in no way affiliated with either of those sites.

...why does anyone look at Amazon and one other store? You'd think there are two book stores online. Try looking here: For a full readout of BestBookBuys' listing on this book (specifically)

There are three good urls for book shopping:

BookPool, AddAll, BestBookBuys. Why not let bots do your shopping? And if you like the newer bots, check out Froogle.Google

• Red Hat 9 Professional Secrets for $30.95
• Red Hat Linux 9 Unleashed for $31.50

• Red Hat 9 Professional Secrets for $30.95
• Red Hat Linux 9 Unleashed for $31.50

http://www.bookpool.com/.x/tc6nwfv10m/ss/1?qs=gene rative&Go.x=0&Go.y=0

It's quite scholarly.

Bookpool should always be your first search for prices on tech books. Serously. It's 15.95 over there. Don't work there, but I buy all my tech books from them.

If you plan on buying this book, more reviews of the book can be found here and here and you can buy it new for $24.50 here