Free Book on FreeBSD System Programming

An anonymous reader writes "A new book on BSD system programming has been released. And, in the spirit of open source, the book was released using the GNU Free Documentation License. Anyone interested in system programming on the BSD's can use this."

Cool!

[Sevn]

What an awesome gift idea.

I know I'll be putting this to very good use.

Re:Cool!

[vasqzr]

Gift idea?

You can read the book online!

http://www.khmere.com/freebsd_book/index.html [khmere.com]

Re:Cool!

[Bluesman]

Which makes it a cheap gift, too. Just put the link in the card.

well edited :-)

[straycheck]

Chapter 2: Bootsrapping BSD

But isn't it nice that this can be fixed?

[jbn-o]

I fail to understand how the parent post is "interesting" (funny, perhaps). I understand the point being made -- the word "bootstrapping" was misspelled -- but that happens. It seems to me that is why the licensing on this book is significant: At least with this book this error can be corrected and reprinted by anyone so readers don't have to live with the error for long. As I read the web page, it looks like there is no error in the table of contents.

It's got to be tough to write a book and not make a

Re:The irony

[TilJ]

The FDL, as the first paragraph states.

I can understand the confusion ... one of the letters in the acronym is the same, I trip over that all the time ;-)

Re:The irony

[Webmonger]

There are arguments that the FDL ain't really Free the way the GPL is.

For instance, if you excerpted a significant portion of this book in another book (say, chapter 2), you'd have to put "Nathan Boeger and Mana Tominaga wrote this book and asks for your support through donation. Contact the authors for more information." on its back cover.

Not only would that be a false statement (because it implies that no one else contributed to the book), but it's gramatically incorrect. Plus, imagine excerpting a who

Re:The irony

[chaos_echo]

It's the old-BSD obnoxious advertising clause all over again. So maybe it is an appropriate license...

The BSD advertising clause wouldn't require a false statement, since it uses the wording "... includes software developed by ..." and even then it's only required where you advertise the features of the BSD licensed software.

All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement:

This product includes software developed by the University of Calif

Re:The irony

[Webmonger]

Right. I was comparing the way that advertising clauses can accumulate to the way back-cover texts can accumulate. And heck, I was making a joke.

Re:The irony

[darkjedi521]

I was attempting to get a +1 Funny. Live and learn.

obligatory link to . . .

[nusratt]

AC's standard screed on the death and irrelevance of *BSD [slashdot.org]

(just to spare him the effort of posting it again ;-)

Shameless self-promotion

[prostoalex]

Free programming books [moskalyuk.com] published online.

Yuck

[addaon]

Okay, I've only read the Basic and Advanced I/O chapters here, but it doesn't look like there's any material that's not straight from the man pages... certainly no discussion of best practice, or performance ramifications, or any of the other good systems stuff I had hoped to see...

Not much depth here

[dru]

This book reminds me of Marc Rockhind's "Advanced Unix Programming", but is less technical in nature.

The chapter on BSD make was interesting, a topic not usually covered because most people use GNU Make these days.

And the section on kqueue(2) was interesting, although very superficial.

Everything else would be largely familiar to anyone who's familiar with the Unix programming idiom.

As someone who cut his teeth on "The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD Operating System", I'm eagerly anticipating McKusick's book on FreeBSD 5.2, to be released in August. http://www.mckusick.com/FreeBSDbook.html [mckusick.com]

When will publishers stop doing this...

[TheTitan]

Whoever is publishing this book is going to take a bath on the project. I wish whoever did this wouldn't have been so stupid. And to whoever wrote this book, why did you push for a GFDL'ed online book? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Go ask Pearson publishing about this, they and many other publishers have first hand accounts of the failings of the GFDL. Unfortunately, this publisher will probably not write another book about BSD, even though it's the GFDL that is to blame. If Pearson Publishing Group (they o

Re:When will publishers stop doing this...

[Korpo]

While I to some degree sympathize with your ranting, I mostly feel sympathy for your (overly) ideological views. Maybe this gets a treatable disease one day, too...

Especially since you didn't have a thing to say about the book itself...