From: Art Williams
To: ask_tim@oreilly.com
Subject: FreeBSD books?
Tim,
I've recently started experimenting with FreeBSD and linux. I already own three O'Reilly linux books, but I've only found one book on FreeBSD, "The Complete FreeBSD" by Greg Lehey. How 'bout turning your folks loose on the free Berkeley UNIX flavors and come up with a "Running FreeBSD" book for us. Your general UNIX books and the GNU books are very useful, but something specific to FreeBSD would be a major help.
Incidentally, the approach you are taking to "infect MS users with the UNIX attitude" is exactly the right one. I come from a Microsoft background, and the bigoted (and sometimes even hateful) attitude of *some* UNIX people I have encountered did nothing to inspire me to explore their favorite OS. ( I mean to imply no criticism of Dave Walker by this statement and do not include him with those types.) No, my interest in UNIX, linux, FreeBSD and open source software in general is (if you can believe it) a result of reading "Learning Perl on Win32 Systems". I make my living as an NT systems/network administrator and here I am trying to think of ways to infiltrate FreeBSD and linux into my Company's network. See how you've corrupted me?
Anyway, I am certainly glad that you are turning your attention to MS products. I already have the octopus book and tomorrow I'm going to try to find a copy of "Essential NT System Admin" precisely because of the chapter on using Perl for network and systems administration.
Best regards,
Art Williams
Art,
We're thinking on this right now. The AT&T lawsuit chilled the popularity of the various BSD derivatives, until it was settled. I was chatting with Kirk McKusick of Berkeley fame last week, and he pointed out that once the lawsuit was settled, FreeBSD took off, and has about the same growth rate as Linux, only three years behind. He estimates that there are about 1 million FreeBSD and NetBSD users now, vs. about 7 million for Linux.
That being said, we've always tried to position our books as for all versions of UNIX, rather than focussing in on the differences. Still, it would clearly make sense to do a BSD-specific book on the order of Running Linux.
We're certainly open to proposals for books on FreeBSD. But do keep in mind that if a program is used on other Unixes as well, we'd probably rather not emphasize the fragmentation.
Any proposals should focus on the "information hole" and not just on the idea that "there ought to be a book" because BSD UNIX doesn't get enough respect or attention.
--Tim
