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OpenBSD Book Suggestions

Posted by michael on from the hefty-books-make-good-doorstops dept.

An anonymous reader writes "An OpenBSD book is being written and the author is looking for content suggestions to include in the book. It would be nice if the slashdot community suggested a bit or two. ;)"

2 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. COMPLETE setup instructions for specific purposes by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 5, Informative


    I'd like sections of the book that have COMPLETE setup instructions for specific purposes such as hardware firewall, web server, and mail server. Make all the right decisions so that I don't have make them myself. Provide a CD in the back of the book that gives me everything I need. Update the book yearly, and I will buy a copy every year. You could even assume I would buy specific hardware, if that makes things easier. The cost of hardware is small compared with the cost of discovering all the quirks myself.

    The biggest problem with technical books is incompleteness. An author will give about 40% of the information necessary to accomplish a task, and call that enough. The reader must read man pages and sources all over the internet to make something actually work. I'd like a book that assumes that I don't want to make particular software a lifestyle, but just want to accomplish something. Once I have something working, I can decide later how much time I want to spend becoming more knowledgeable.

    The city in which I live, Portland, Oregon, USA, has what is said to be the biggest bookstore in the world, Powell's. I went to Powell's technical bookstore and looked at about 20 books on Samba. ALL of them were very incomplete, as was easily proven by comparing them with each other. ALL of them were poorly written. Most assumed that you already knew something about Samba. Samba is an important subject; file serving Microsoft OS clients using Linux is a first step toward reducing dependence on closed source software.

  2. Re:Theo manual by mirabilos · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's not even right:
    - for all DJB software, you can distribute patches
    - for djbdns and qmail, you can distribute distfiles

    You must not, however, distribute (patched) binaries.

    It's not as worse as Java(R)(tm).

    --
    My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And /. still does not get UTF-8 right in 2012. Wow.)