[buug] learning shell (Shell book), etc.

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Tony Godshall (togo at of.net):
> Karen Hogoboom wrote:

>>O'Reilly is not as good as it used to be.
> 
> Really?  What other examples do you have?

Speaking just for myself, I concluded in the '80s that O'Reilly &
Associates (now O'Reilly Media) books weren't living up to reputation.
E.g., the Bat Book certainly had somewhere within it everything knowable
about Sendmail, but in such impenetrable presentation that you'd never
find what you needed to know until long after you needed it.  Cricket
Liu's _DNS and BIND_ proved to be a really awful way to learn either DNS
or BIND, and I did better when I disregarded it and learned from
friends' examples and other sources.  I think the Rubicon was a
circa-1988 book on administering Internet services that was utterly
useless.  After that, I've never, ever bought one of their books simply
on trust.