Is the author "Burns Lara" of several books on FreeBSD human or AI?

T

Thirblig

I recently looked Kindle for books on FreeBSD and found several by an "author" going by the name of "Burns Lara" (NOT ex-FBI agent Lara Burns). While searching for reviews on these books I could not find any information on either the books (outside of Amazon) or the author. Checking ISBN's told me that the books were all "Independently Published" and the author was very prolific during 2026, which is when most (if not all) of these books I looked at were published, including a number of books not related to FreeBSD. I'm almost positive that the author is a pseudonym and I feel that the content of the books is probably AI generated. Is anybody familiar with either the author or the books?.
 
I see it's marked for ages 5 years and up. Some of them say 5-18 years. Not a great sign.
In my opinion, and, I think many others with better informed opinions than myself, right now the best book is Absolute FreeBSD 3rd edition by Michael Lucas.

Absolute FreeBSD, third edition

Absolute FreeBSD, third edition Links.
mwl.io
Other signs of reasons to avoid the Burns book. I didn't see comments on any of them. I think you're right that it's AI authored--I suspect that if you bought one it would have valid information, but probably some wrong or outdated info too. Looking at samples from a few, seems like it's just very general common sense information, e.g. the security one says humans are the weakest link, etc.
 
www.amazon.co.uk

Burns Lara: books, biography, latest update

Follow Burns Lara and explore their bibliography from Amazon's Burns Lara Author Page.
www.amazon.co.uk
"He" appears to have written a bunch of other books. Burns Lara doesn't sound like a real name to me, unless it's Lara Burns backwards. They are only publsihed as kindle e-books, and none of them appear to have reviews. There sure are a lot of them. One of the books is "Mastering low power CMOS and VLSI design", another is "Mastering UART programming". Yeah, right. Looks like nonsense to me. Got to be AI slop.
I suppose it might have some useful info in it, but these should be free downloads.
 
scottro said:
I see it's marked for ages 5 years and up. Some of them say 5-18 years. Not a great sign.
In my opinion, and, I think many others with better informed opinions than myself, right now the best book is Absolute FreeBSD 3rd edition by Michael Lucas.

Absolute FreeBSD, third edition

Absolute FreeBSD, third edition Links.
mwl.io
Other signs of reasons to avoid the Burns book. I didn't see comments on any of them. I think you're right that it's AI authored--I suspect that if you bought one it would have valid information, but probably some wrong or outdated info too. Looking at samples from a few, seems like it's just very general common sense information, e.g. the security one says humans are the weakest link, etc.
Click to expand...
I do own several of Lucas' books, including Absolute FreeBSD 3rd ed. and was looking on Kindle mostly to see if there were any updated versions of books (such as "Networking for System Administrators 2nd ed." 2025 and Hansteen's "The Book of PF 4th ed." 2026, both of which are newer editions than the ones I already own) when I saw this sudden influx of FreeBSD books and got curious having never heard of the author considering it's a relatively small community
 
scottro said:
I see it's marked for ages 5 years and up. Some of them say 5-18 years. Not a great sign.
In my opinion, and, I think many others with better informed opinions than myself, right now the best book is Absolute FreeBSD 3rd edition by Michael Lucas.
Click to expand...
Age 5 is definitely pushing it as most 5 year olds can't read or write enough for it. Even when I was a kid back in olden times, I think we were like 7 or 8 before we got to go to the computer lab to use the Apple ][ computers. And even that wasn't anything very sophisticated, but it did require typing a few commands in to get programs running.

As for Absolute FreeBSD that's been my preferred book ever since Greg Lehey stopped writing new The Complete FreeBSD volumes. It's apparently now creative commons for anybody that does feel the need to update it. http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/CFBSD/
 
scottro said:
hedwards, I didn't know that the Greg Lehy was now creative commons as my version disappeared during some move or another.
Click to expand...
I didn't either, I think the last one I had was the 4th edition. It's on his official page, so I'd assume that it's legitimate. But, it is the 4th edition and it's from 20 years ago, so I'm not really sure who would be wanting to buy a new copy since FreeBSD 6.x was the most recent version at that point and there are some quite good books that have come out since then, most notably Absolute FreeBSD.
 
Does it matter if garbage is human-produced or AI-produced? It is still garbage. Before AI, some humans produced books to sell on Amazon from Wikipedia articles and whatnot.
 
tingo said:
Does it matter if garbage is human-produced or AI-produced? It is still garbage.
Click to expand...
But AI makes it easier to generate a lot of garbage quickly :)
Flood the markets with garbage, consumers/users get used to the garbage and can't recognize quality when it smacks them across the face.
 
I remember in 2021 when I started with FreeBSD searching for books, most of what I found was Lucas's ones and few very old ones, basically one hand was enough to count them all.

But now 5 years later suddenly it seems there are some experts out there in many era, and they are very prolific too:
Jola Orbis , Cassian Smith , Lora Burns , Agnes Stur.
Somehow they still don't know how to create a good cover they all look the same, very generic.

To be honest I've seen this pattern in coding books too and I would not be surprised if it exists in many subjects, that's sad.
Sounds like Amazon has a new task, hire qualified people to identify real authors and to control all of this mess ... and they will probably use AI to make that happen, even sadder.
 
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