Michael Lucas is the Best Tech Author

mvivirito

mvivirito

I have been so happy with all the books that I have purchased from him. I have Absolute Freebsd, Jails Mastery and Ed Mastery. He manages to keep the books entertaining and fun as I read through them. Do you guys feel the same way? also who are your favorite tech authors? Please share below.
 
I stopped caring for Michael Lucas's books when he started adopting sexism to help sales:

Any third-person singular pronouns that appear in the standard edition, for normal people, are female. Those who believe that women don’t belong in tech books may purchase this special “Manly McManface” edition, where all third-party singular pronouns are masculine.
To compensate for this edition’s much smaller market, though, the Manly edition is unfortunately pricier than the standard edition.
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"Ed mastery" would almost have been my first tech book in years. Now it won't. I cannot support this.
 
Cthulhux said:
I stopped caring for Michael Lucas's books when he started adopting sexism to help sales:



"Ed mastery" would almost have been my first tech book in years. Now it won't. I cannot support this.
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Developing a thick skin is important to me. To each his own. I thought that part of the book was a joke and saw that he did sell the Manly McManface edition on his website.
Are you seriously bothered by that?
 
He is an okay author. I prefer the UNIX and Linux system administration handbook over Absolute FreeBSD. I agree with Cthulhux about "adopting sexism". I don't like his humor. His book on jails was missing a lot of important information and the examples I tried simply did not work.

I've been in networking my entire life and I like Todd Lammle as an author (I've read his CCNA book). I like a few more tech authors, but only heavily on the networking side. I did not yet find any really great authors on Linux, UNIX, or BSD.
 
tommiie said:
He is an okay author. I prefer the UNIX and Linux system administration handbook over Absolute FreeBSD. I agree with Cthulhux about "adopting sexism". I don't like his humor. His book on jails was missing a lot of important information and the examples I tried simply did not work.

I've been in networking my entire life and I like Todd Lammle as an author (I've read his CCNA book). I like a few more tech authors, but only heavily on the networking side. I did not yet find any really great authors on Linux, UNIX, or BSD.
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Thank you for the recomendation. I just purchased it! Looks like a fantastic book!
 
mvivirito said:
Are you seriously bothered by that?
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Nowadays it's all the rage to be offended by everything. People get off on it as much as pornography.

I know someone who was offended when I saw a ceremony put on by the Cherokee Indian tribe a few years back because I called them Indians. I double checked and the Cherokee Nation has a web site. It's called http://www.indians.org/

Now that I think about it, I thought it was indiancountry.net or something like that but there is this http://www.navajoindian.net/ Back then, there were 10 interviews with young people about whether they wanted to be called Indian and none of them had a problem with it. Some even preferred it.

Which goes to show the difference between the internet and how real people actually think in reality and normal every day life.
 
The "Ed Mastery" prank was specifically aimed at the people who send me email telling me to not use female pronouns in tech books. Every few months, I got a coordinated flood of email telling me that mixing male and female pronouns in a tech book was wrong. Many senders claimed that women have no place in technology. Those people, in particular, are the ones I'm hitting back at.

All of which it says in the book description, clearly and distinctly. (Note: I found a couple of stray angle brackets in the web site when I went to check the link, but you can check the text at any bookstore; that hasn't changed.)

Me telling those people to bug off is not sexism.

Me telling those people to bug off is being a decent human being.

And it hasn't affected my sales one way or another.
 
There lacks a non-gender specific pronoun to mean either he or she. It's like how there's the slang y'all or yous, for a lack of a single pronoun to specify you all (you can be also plural, but it's not specified, and usually assumed as singular), and many use it in speech as if it were grammatically correct. The word "they" is often used to say one person, but is technically incorrect. To specify both she or he together is lengthy. Often, nothing is meant by using a gender specific pronoun, and sometimes it's not correct, but you know it's not meant to offend. But to insist that a gender specific pronoun be used for the purpose of singling out a gender, for something not gender related, is discriminatory, unless the purpose is fundamentally gender specific.
 
sidetone said:
There lacks a non-gender specific pronoun to mean either he or she. It's like how there's the slang y'all or yous, for a lack of a single pronoun for you all, and many use it in speech like it were grammatically correct. The word "they" is often used to say one person, but technically incorrect. To specify both she or he together is lengthy. Often, nothing is meant by using a gender specific pronoun, and sometimes it's not correct, but you know it's not meant to offend. But to insist that a gender specific pronoun be used for the purpose of singling out a gender is discriminatory, unless the purpose is fundamentally gender specific.
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I really don’t want this discussion to be about this
 
Did you read Lucas' books on ZFS? I've read the first but I don't believe I've yet finished the second one. They were a very good introduction to ZFS and one of the reasons I switched over from Linux to FreeBSD.

While looking at my library, there aren't many books on Unix/Linux that I would recommend. There are a few that I really like (e.g. the Unix and Linux system admin handbook) but most of them are too old to really recommend. I think that might be one of the problems. There just aren't enough quality authors on Linux/Unix.

I especially don't like Packt's books as it seems their (technical) editors don't really do a good job of fixing all the mistakes.

I would love to hear some good recommendations on book myself.
 
tommiie said:
Did you read Lucas' books on ZFS? I've read the first but I don't believe I've yet finished the second one. They were a very good introduction to ZFS and one of the reasons I switched over from Linux
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I did not read anything on zfs yet. This perfectly coincides with me freshly installing freebsd on my work desktop yesterday and Deciding to go with zfs so I can learn what all the fuss is about.
 
Tip: don't get The design and implementation of the FreeBSD operating system by McKusick. While it might be a superb book (I wouldn't know) I found the contents way too advanced for me, being just a FreeBSD/programming noob myself.
 
I first got hooked on Michael W Lucas' book Networking for System Administrators. I loved his style, and was impressed that the friction I had previously experienced with the network engineers where I worked at the time melted away once I was able to give them better information.

I've enjoyed the ZFS books, and have enjoyed about half the Jails book - the other half is waiting for elusive free time...

As for other recommendations...
I really got on with Learning Perl, after spending a few night shifts reading it between railway signalling tests I was really surprised how easily I could jump in a create useful Perl scripts.
Knuth's The TeXbook is a wonderfully simple read. It seems to be available here as a PDF.

tommiie said:
Tip: don't get The design and implementation of the FreeBSD operating system by McKusick. While it might be a superb book (I wouldn't know) I found the contents way too advanced for me, being just a FreeBSD/programming noob myself.
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I bought it, I've tried and failed to read it twice. My programming and systems knowledge is nowhere near where it needs to be to properly digest the content. If anyone has recommendations of how to skill up to digest it I'd be much appreciative.
 
forquare: thanks for the recommendations. I will check out the TeXbook by Knuth. I have TeX by topic but found it too low-level for me.

About the Perl book, I think I'll skip that one. I rather focus on Python (as it's extremely popular) and simple shell scripts (a good book for this one would be appreciated).
 
forquare said:
My programming and systems knowledge is nowhere near where it needs to be to properly digest the content. If anyone has recommendations of how to skill up to digest it I'd be much appreciative.
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As far as system knowledge I learn best from hands on experience. Trial and lots of error was how I learned to use FreeBSD. I would recommend the Handbook now.

I bought the Open Solaris Bible but never got past the intro before I wanted to get my hands on it.
 
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