I can’t remember ever reading the book, in the sense one reads a novel. I do however remember feeling a slight sense of security with a 1,000 page reference guide on my shelf overtop my workstation.

I have been a Gnu/Linux user now for 10 years, and as my career grew so did my collection of specific books on topics such as Bash, Perl, etc … but I still have that first unleashed (can’t seem to throw it away even though it is outdated). I notice as I go into other folks offices a different version of some comprehensive OS book adorning their shelf as well, be it O’Reily, Unleashed, etc … but it seems at some point everyone owned/owns one of these for al the derision we give them.

I would appreciate some reviews of more low-level books, like a kernel internals book and a side by side comparison of what ones you find most useful because face it, googling things are great for your immediate sysadmin/troubleshooting duties…but when it comes time to write modules I still don’t fully trust google for the deep understanding of what you are doing. It is a great source for commands and how-tos, but the WHY is often missing…which is where these books fill out.

1) Technology books have a store-shelf life of 6 months to 1 year. Most people buying such books do so on size of book and if they know what is in the book how much that book might help them after the OS is wiped out with FC-8/9/10.

2) A good portion of these books are sold to non-technical savy people who came home and found the home computer has some new OS on it when Billy goes abck to college. And Billy’s instructions of ‘look it up on Google’ means zip to you. You market to this crowd with size. They could go for the 100 page NO BS Guide To Fedora’s OR you could supersize it with the 1200 page Fedora BIBLE New, Old, and Apocryphal Edition. Most people will buy the bigger version because thats how the human brain works.

3) Fedora and Ubuntu do releases at extremely high rates so the authors do not have time to update/change things as much as they might like. So the publisher must make as much of the book stable so that you can basically reuse the chapters over and over again because they may only get one book sell in 3-4 releases (eg that guy who just bought Fedora Core 6 unleashed is going to not buy 7,8,9 unless something really major changed).

4) People selling books are selling them to people who do not like to read long times at computers or want to read them when ‘cogitating’. There is a reason that many of these books are printed on ‘toilet paper’ stock. I find that these times of deep thinking are usually when I want a nice big book, and I want them to have lots of stuff.

So anyway.. my take on big books.