APUE

Last updated: Sun, 10 Jul 2005 12:01:00 GMT

Now APUE2.

The release of Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment was sneakily timed to coincide with payday, and when I saw that it had been revised to include FreeBSD 5 and Darwin, I thought I'd buy me a copy.

The discount I got from ADC and the fact that it wasn't yet shipping in the UK convinced me to buy direct from Addison Wesley in the US. My copy arrived four days after order. Unfortunately, it looks like one page (488) has fallen foul of a pointy bit in the binding machinery and a small strip has been scraped off the surface of the page, obscuring a diagram. The torn surface is still there, in a little curl half way down the page. It unrolls into its original position, I can fix it with a bit of invisible tape.

I thought I'd drop AW a line and tell them nicely that my book's a little bit worse for wear, see if I could get them to send me a bookmark. Hell, they might even spring to a discount off my next purchase, or a free copy of The UNIX System to replace the copy I lent out five years ago.

I got an email on Saturday morning telling me that they'd shipped me another copy of the book. That's a 960 page, $75 hardback book, plus 3-5 day shipping from the US. That's, well, pretty generous, given that I hardly even complained. In fact I complimented them on their rapid service. Maybe they felt sorry for me, grief-stricken as I am about events in London.

So I've got to take my hat off to Addison Wesley, for a fast response and a generous settlement.

But what I really wanted was a bookmark.