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Unix-Haters Handbook Available Online

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the don't-keep-that-bottled-up-inside-you dept.

prostoalex writes "The Unix-Haters Handbook, publication year 1994, is now available online for free as a single PDF file. Apparently some suburban Seattle company has agreed to host this 3.5MB file on its servers. The anti-foreword is written by no other but Dennis Ritchie, who proclaims: 'Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy.'" This is what should happen to more out-of-print books.

5 of 634 comments (clear)

  1. Nothing to do with Microsoft... by cperciva · · Score: 4, Informative

    This might be on Microsoft's servers, but it's in Daniel Weise's private webspace (he being one of the three authors). No, this is not an unsubtle attempt at pro-windows propaganda.

    --
    Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
  2. Announced on ``The Online Books Page'' a while ago by WillAdams · · Score: 5, Informative

    (I know, 'cause I sent in the note which it listed there ;)

    That's, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/ for those who aren't familiar with this wonderful site.

    It lists a number of other out-of-print books which're of interest to geeks (and some which are in print such as the .tex source (which one may not process save under specific circumstances) for _The TeXBook_ and _The METAFONT Book_ by Dr. Donald E. Knuth). Books of interest include:

    _Unix Text Processing_
    Norman Walsh's _Making TeX Work_ (which is on Sourceforge)
    Eckel's book on programming Java
    and for those with kids, _The Great Logo Adventure_

    William

    --
    Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
  3. Go Figure by cscx · · Score: 5, Informative

    Dennis Ritchie himself uses Windows NT...

    1. Re:Go Figure by dAzED1 · · Score: 3, Informative
      "My own environment (on PC hardware) actually runs Windows NT, but it is used mainly as a graphics terminal connected to a Plan 9 server, in a way approximately analogous to an X windows client."

      Eh? so what. SOme of us don't think of unix as a place to do gui, but instead as a place to do work ;)

  4. Mirror by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    In case it does get slashdotted, there is a mirror at www.cyruslabs.com/unix-haters/

    It even has an HTML converted version for all of us that hate PDF's.