Around 2000 or so, I used to work in tech support for a software company who had like 5000 Windows-based customers and 5 running Solaris. My boss chose me to learn Solaris when the previous "expert" left. I bought this book and started hacking. Good times!
In polish we have an idiom for rare books that directly translates to 'white crow'. Incidentally French say 'merle blanc' - 'white blackbird'. French influenced polish a lot during late modernity. Anyway where was I.
Ah, yeah likely not very rare, they must have messed a whole print run and decided to sell it off anyway, maybe at a discount, since it's not a limited hardback illuminated Shakespeare's works in 5 tomes.
Then again... Weirder things have collection value.
I had a couple of paperbacks back in the day, but they are still lying around where I used to live. The only book that I would still read now is about the Linux kernel, but it's not O'Reilly and it's about a deprecated kernel anyway XD
How did you get a Sun Sparc 5 and Ultra 60 as a high school student? You were able to get them used from a college that had recently upgraded or something?
In the late 90s they were a couple hundred bucks on eBay. Passed their usefulness as workstations. I still have the ultra 60 but couldn’t find a scsi three hard drive to replace the original when it died
Solaris is actually kinda cool now. It was based on a great OS and actually has been improved since.
We can't do much about who owns it, but I'm glad to see someone's looking after it -- unlike when IBM found the loophole and reverted AT&T Unix ownership back to novell to just rot. Good job.
About 260 if you don't count the function reference at the back. There sure wasn't much to it back then. Compared to the monster that is C++. I can maybe see why Linus doesn't like it and prefers C. There's a hundred different ways to do one thing, and it could get out of hand, and there's a lot of complex stuff in the libraries that you're dependent on. For low-level programming it's basically like "trust me, bro".
It's great for me though that can't program worth a shit and have all the algorithms ready to go.
I have/had a bunch of these books. Some got lost but I have the electronic versions of them.
This is one other book I fondly remember. UNIX For Application Developers. From 1991 I think.
I vaguely remember a statement in the intro along the lines of Windows being user friendly but UNiX being expert friendly. :-)