From owner-freebsd-chat Sun Nov 23 04:20:56 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id EAA06004 for chat-outgoing; Sun, 23 Nov 1997 04:20:56 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-chat) Received: from sax.sax.de (sax.sax.de [193.175.26.33]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id EAA05997 for ; Sun, 23 Nov 1997 04:20:52 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from j@uriah.heep.sax.de) Received: (from uucp@localhost) by sax.sax.de (8.6.12/8.6.12-s1) with UUCP id NAA19817; Sun, 23 Nov 1997 13:20:46 +0100 Received: (from j@localhost) by uriah.heep.sax.de (8.8.8/8.8.5) id NAA00460; Sun, 23 Nov 1997 13:12:44 +0100 (MET) Message-ID: <19971123131243.SI23883@uriah.heep.sax.de> Date: Sun, 23 Nov 1997 13:12:43 +0100 From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) To: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: cmott@srv.net (Charles Mott) Subject: Re: FreeBSD Book Club References: X-Mailer: Mutt 0.60_p2-3,5,8-9 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) In-Reply-To: ; from Charles Mott on Nov 22, 1997 14:56:02 -0700 Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk As Charles Mott wrote: > Well, I went out and bought these books. My opinion is > that Gilluwe's book is solid but Shanley's is a little low > denisity (I might return it). Any other recommendations? There are few areas however where Gilluwe is completely off. I remember his lengthy discussion about the head load/unload stuff in the floppy controller, when (with a few exceptions) the last drives that actually did on-demand head-loading were the 8-inch floppies that never made it into the typical PeeCee he's talking about. (This stuff is still in proud letters there in the second edition.) In general however, and taking some of his comments with the grain of salt you need to take when reading the words of someone who's mainly working in DOS 16-bit code, his book has proven to be a valuable resource of information. Btw., does anybody know what happened to TECH Help! by Flambeaux Software? This used to be my source of information about hardware details before van Gilluwe, but my copy is rather ancient now and doesn't cover most of the things one needs these days. It's a DOS program, but runs well enough in pcemu to have it readily available even under FreeBSD. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)