People don't seem to want to help newbies in here!

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Martin Gregorie said something like:

The only bad O'Reilly book I've seen, and I've bought several, is the
"Sendmail" one - and that's a real clunker.

the Sendmail book is bad mainly because of Sendmail. Sendmail is a
"rite of passage"-sort of thing. young men become hackers once
they've written a Sendmail config entirely from scratch. then they
become proper professionals the day they discover that Sendmail
represents unnecessary complexity and exorcise it from their systems.

This is, of course, true.

However, the book is additionally bad because its badly organised, fails
to talk about the forest while describing trees in detail and then
compounds the problem by referring to several trees it never describes.

Good O'Reilly books I've used are:

- Unix Systems Programming
- Programming Perl (the camel book)
- Using Samba
- DNS and Bind
- sed & awk
- lex & yacc

I'm less impressed by the Nutshell series, but IMO they are intended as
references, not as beginners books.

Looking at authors, I think some of the best computing books I've read
have all involved Brian Kernighan. "The C programming language" together
with the 2nd edition for ANSI C are brilliant and are excellent examples
for anybody aspiring to write technical computing books.

I'd give TCPL a B grade at absolute best. It, in my humble opinion, is not
all that fantastic.

"The Practice
of Programming" by Kernighan and Pike should be on the desk of anybody
who is learning to program in C, C++ or Java.

To get back on topic, I like Ivor Horton's style in "Beginning Java 2"
and found it considerably superior to Sun's 1 week Java course as a way
into the language. There may be better authors and Java books, but this
worked for me.

I haven't had that pleasure, but Bjarne Stroustroup's original C++ book
belongs somewhere in the black list.

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