From: Chip Bennett
To: ask_tim@oreilly.com
Subject: UNIX Side Appears to be Dwindling
Tim,
I've noticed a trend in your book line towards more Windows 95/NT and less UNIX. I realize there has been a big shift in the industry, but there us still a tremendous need for current UNIX information.
As evidence, let's take a look at the current list of new and upcoming books. There are 11 titles dealing with MS Windows or MS Windows related products, and there are no new UNIX titles. There have been many new UNIX titles introduced in the last couple of years, and I appreciate them, but there are not enough of them. Also, many titles, that I consider the bibles of the industry, are getting sorely out of date.
My area is UNIX System Administration, and there are several books that I have put off ordering because they are getting so out of date. I keep expecting another edition to be around the corner. For example, the following books, dealing with rapidly changing topics in UNIX, are still on their first edition:
-
X Window System Administrator's Guide (1992)
System Performance Tuning (1990)
Managing NFS and NIS (1991)
Although, I do understand that Mr. Stern has something in the works for his book.
Is this a trend that we can expect for the future? Will there be updates soon to some of these out of date titles?
-Chip
Chip,
Well, there are two issues here: new topics, and updates.
Frankly, many of the new topics for UNIX actually go under the guise of other subject areas. For example, Perl has become a category unto itself. Ditto network admin. So many things that used to appear as "UNIX" books now fall into other categories. This is a sign of the success of UNIX, not of its decline.
Perl, Java, the Web--these are all children of UNIX.
And while there is some change in the core UNIX topics, once we've worked through an area, we don't do new books just for the heck of it. Apart from the free variants (Linux and FreeBSD), there isn't as much innovation in UNIX as there used to be. That's part of why we've been banging the drum about "open source software." We've seen a lot less innovation in UNIX since AT&T "took it commercial," and Sun, OSF and AT&T started fighting over its future direction. The focus for innovation has moved on to new areas that are still driven by open source, such as the Internet.
The reason that there are still books for us to do on proprietary areas like Microsoft or Oracle products isn't because there's been a lot of innovation there, but just because we haven't done books in that area in the past.
I'd also like to note that even in our Windows publishing program, we're still spreading the same religion. For example, our NT administration books show how you can automate tasks with Perl rather than being stuck with the limitations of the Microsoft GUI.
What's more, our books focus on cross-platform administration. We try not to get caught in religious battles about what software people *should* be using. We try to solve the problems they have with the software they *are* using. And cross platform issues with UNIX and NT are high on the list of problems our users face.
As to updates: we're often limited by the availability of the authors! We've been trying to get Hal to update NFS and NIS for about 4 years!
System Performance Tuning is being updated right now. You'll also see updates coming soon for DNS and Bind, Learning Vi, and TCP/IP Network Administration.
You're right about X Window System Administration. We should perhaps take a look at that.
If you look at our latest catalog, you'll notice that we're also coming out with a whole lot of "pocket references" on UNIX-related topics, including GNU emacs, Perl/Tk, Tcl/Tk, Vi, and Python. (These join the existing pocket refs on Perl and Sendmail.)
--Tim
