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
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.
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.
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. :-)