Gleefully Malicious Books
You might have glimpsed this elsewhere, especially if you’re a Patronizer, but here’s the cover of DNSSEC Mastery, Second Edition.
The original is Baraldi’s “Romans Engaged in Learning,” as reimagined by Eddie Sharam. Of course, Unix history being what it is, this is clearly “Tux Engaged in Learning.” Beastie is doing the teaching, thank you very much.
The book is still open for sponsorship, but I hope to finish the first draft this month.
My wife works with Soroptimist International of Grosse Pointe to support their anti-human-trafficking efforts. They usually hold a variety of fundraisers, including a 5K race in September.
2020 and 2021 have been less than optimal fundraising years. Running a 5K on your own is much less interesting than trying to outrace a whole bunch of folks.
This year SIGP is raising money for the Joseph Project, a non-for-profit organization who connect human trafficking survivors with skilled pro bono legal counsel. One of the worst parts of human trafficking is that people must break the law to survive, let alone escape. Survival usually means a criminal record. I’ve written about human trafficking before, and completely support the efforts to give these folks a new chance.
Meanwhile, here I am with a variety of stuff that’s explicitly designed to raise money in the most daft way possible, and a whole mass of readers who couldn’t be unemployed if they tried. To try to cover the gap, I’m auctioning off something that was never before available online, and never will be again.
The Bail Bond Denied edition of FreeBSD Mastery: Jails.
Only five copies of this edition exist. One is in my archives. One was auctioned off at BSDCan 2019, the other at Penguicon 2019. The fourth will be reserved for the next charity auction I attend in person.
The fifth is being auctioned off right here. The members of the Grosse Pointe Soroptimists Club are signing it to express their gratitude for your generosity. I’ll sign it myself, thereby destroying their added value.
This is your only opportunity to get this book without being present at an event I’m at. Yes, I’m opening this up to seven billion people.
The auction rules are simple:
Comment on this post to bid. I advise bidders to click the “notify me of new comments by email” button, so they can see when they’re outbid.
The auction runs from now until 5 PM EDT 25 September. Most of the bidding happens on the first and last days, but I want to leave time for the Internet’s slow publicity machine to catch on. If bidding is frenzied in those last moments, I’ll leave the auction running to squeeze the most cash out of you get the best result for the Soroptimists.
Once the auction closes, send your donation to SIGP Paypal, by following the link on grossepointesoroptimist.net and send me your receipt. I will mail you the book at my expense.
Note that you don’t need to win a silly book to donate. You can donate out of your own generosity. I promise they’ll appreciate it. If you need someone to blame to keep your hard-boiled reputation, tell them I made you do it.
The hardcovers are in stores now, so I think it’s official. $ git sync murder is out everywhere except my print bookstore. You can get it at all of the usual stores. I have the ebook in my store.
Every time I release a new book, or dare to show my face in public, folks ask me how many books I’ve written. My answer is, “define written and book.” That’s not as snarky an answer as you might think.
First, they’re asking the wrong question. I’ve written many books that were not published and that you will never read. Immortal Clay didn’t pick up a bunch of 4-star and 5-star reviews by being the first novel I ever wrote. It got those by being my fifteenth finished novel in a series of deliberate practice that continues to this day, and my first published novel. So, let’s change the question to “how many books have you published?”
Here’s the current output of the SNMP object where I keep my publications catalog. (Accessing this object is an easter egg in the Networknomicon or, if you’re still attached to your sanity, SNMP Mastery.)
SNMP table: TWP-MIB::mwlBooksTable
titleIndex title year genre length
1 Gatecrasher 1992 fiction full-length
2 Believe it or Else! 1993 fiction full-length
3 Gatecrasher 2nd edition 1995 fiction full-length
4 Women who Run with the Werewolves 1995 fiction anthology
5 Absolute BSD 2002 nonfiction full-length
6 Absolute OpenBSD 2003 nonfiction full-length
7 Cisco Routers for the Desperate 2004 nonfiction full-length
8 PGP & GPG 2006 nonfiction full-length
9 Absolute FreeBSD, 2nd edition 2007 nonfiction full-length
10 Cisco Routers for the Desperate, 2nd edition 2009 nonfiction full-length
11 Network Flow Analysis 2010 nonfiction full-length
12 Horror Library volume 2 2010 fiction anthology
13 Opening the Eye 2011 fiction story
14 Breaking the Circle 2011 fiction story
15 SSH Mastery 2012 nonfiction full-length
16 Vicious Redemption: Five Dark Fantasies 2012 fiction full-length
17 DNSSEC Mastery 2013 nonfiction full-length
18 Sudo Mastery 2013 nonfiction full-length
19 Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd ed 2013 nonfiction full-length
20 No More Lonesome Blue Rings 2013 fiction story
21 Sticky Supersaturation 2013 fiction story
22 Lavender 2013 fiction story
23 Pax Canina 2013 fiction story
24 Wednesday's Seagulls 2013 fiction story
25 FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials 2014 nonfiction full-length
26 Immortal Clay 2014 fiction full-length
27 Waking Up Yesterday 2014 fiction story
28 Calling Control 2014 fiction story
29 Moonlight's Apples 2014 fiction story
30 Networking for Systems Administrators 2015 nonfiction full-length
31 Tarsnap Mastery 2015 nonfiction full-length
32 FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS 2015 nonfiction full-length
33 Forever Falls 2015 fiction novella
34 Spilled Mirovar (Prohibition Orcs 1) 2015 fiction story
35 Whisker Line 2015 fiction story
36 Wifi and Romex 2015 fiction story
37 PAM Mastery 2016 nonfiction full-length
38 FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS 2016 nonfiction full-length
39 FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZedFS 2016 nonfiction full-length
40 Kipuka Blues (Immortal Clay #2) 2016 fiction full-length
41 Hydrogen Sleets 2016 fiction full-length
42 Drowned Mirovar (Prohibition Orcs #2) 2016 fiction novella
43 Butterfly Stomp Waltz (Beaks #1) 2016 fiction full-length
44 Earthquake Kitten Kiss (Beaks spin-off) 2016 fiction novella
45 Butterfly Stomp (Beaks #0) 2016 fiction full-length
46 Forced to Talk, Like, With Your Mouth 2016 fiction story
47 FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems 2016 nonfiction full-length
48 git commit murder 2017 fiction full-length
49 savaged by systemd 2017 fiction story
50 Httpd and Relayd Mastery 2017 nonfiction full-length
51 Ed Mastery 2018 nonfiction novella
52 Ed Mastery, Manly McManface Edition 2018 nonfiction novella
53 SSH Mastery, 2nd edition 2018 nonfiction full-length
54 Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd edition 2018 nonfiction full-length
55 Bedazzled by Blockchain 2018 fiction story
56 Face Less 2018 fiction story
57 Boundary Shock: Tuesday After Next 2018 fiction anthology
58 Boundary Shock: Robots, Androids, Cyborgs, Oh My! 2018 fiction anthology
59 Sudo Mastery, 2nd edition 2019 nonfiction full-length
60 FreeBSD Mastery: Jails 2019 nonfiction full-length
61 Terrapin Sky Tango (Beaks #2) 2019 fiction full-length
62 Winner Breaks All 2019 fiction story
63 Boundary Shock: Apocalypse Descending 2019 fiction anthology
64 Fiction River: Superstitious 2019 fiction anthology
65 Snot-Nosed Aliens 2019 fiction anthology
66 An Interpretation of Moles 2019 fiction anthology
67 SNMP Mastery 2020 nonfiction full-length
68 Boundary Shock: Alien Dreams 2020 fiction anthology
69 The Networknomicon 2020 nonfiction full-length
70 Cash Flow for Creators 2020 nonfiction full-length
71 Boundary Shock: What Might Have Been 2020 fiction anthology
72 Face The Strange 2020 fiction anthology
73 Bloody Christmas 2020 fiction anthology
74 Drinking Heavy Water 2020 fiction full-length
75 Final Gift 2020 fiction story
76 Woolen Torment 2020 fiction story
77 Drums with Delusions of Godhood 2020 fiction story
78 Uncollected Anthology: Deities 2020 fiction anthology
79 Woolen Torment 2021 fiction story
80 Aidan Redding Against the Universes 2021 fiction full-length
81 Fiction River: Chances 2021 fiction anthology
82 Fiction River: Dark and Deadly Passions 2021 fiction anthology
83 TLS Mastery 2021 nonfiction full-length
84 Only Footnotes 2021 nonfiction novella
85 git sync murder 2021 fiction full-length
86 The Holiday Spectacular #2 2021 fiction anthology
That’s 86 things with my name on the cover, excluding articles in periodicals and web sites. (I don’t have the energy to go through all that stuff.) So, I’ve published 86 books.
Except some of these are stories in anthologies. Anthologies are written by multiple authors. They’re only partially “by me.” Excluding those, the catalog has 70 entries. I have published 70 books.
Except some of those are basically chapbooks: single stories, put out on their own in print. I have many more stories than these, by the way, but they’re electronic-only. I ran out of energy before I collected all that information.
47 things with my name on them that are classified as either “full-length” or “novella.” This categorization is incorrect, however. The word “novella” means “a short novel.” The definition on “novel” has bloated over the last one hundred fifty years, driven by manufacturing concerns. Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, is about 43,000 words. Publishers would laugh at Doyle today and tell him to try a chapbook publisher based on the length alone. In the 1920s, a 20,000-word tale was considered a novel and might be published as such. I have a great big stack of Rex Stout mystery novels, and many of them contain fewer than 40,000 words.
Let’s take a nonfiction “novella.” Ed Mastery. It is a short book, but it’s unquestionably “a book.”
Alternately, consider Drowned Mirovar the second Prohibition Orcs tale. It’s over 30,000 words. In the era it was set, it would be a full novel that would appear first in a magazine, then as a standalone book. Today, it’s a prologue. As it’s packaged, it’s “a book.” It would look just fine on the shelf next to any of my 1950s novels.
Then there are collections. Vicious Redepmtion is a collection of my short stories. Aidan Redding Against the Universes collects short stories and novels. They’re listed here as “full-length,” which they certainly are. Should I could those as books?
Surely there’s a culturally-accepted standard or industry standard on how to count the number of books you’ve written?
Er… no.
Isaac Asimov established a standard that “if I appear in it, it counts.” He counted anthologies. He counted chapbooks. By that standard, I’ve published 86 books. I am uncomfortable with this definition.
I know authors who won’t count anything shorter than 60,000 words. By that standard, I’ve published 22 books. It excludes all of the Mastery titles except SNMP Mastery. That’s clearly not right for me, either.
For me, the original question is about milestones. It’s about accomplishments. I want to be able to say “I made this thing” and stand by it.
My preferred definition is, if I whack you with it, will it leave a mark? Bystanders would object, however. And I have created some titles that, while they’d leave a mark, I don’t consider them independent books. An example would be the Bail Bond Denied edition of FreeBSD Mastery: Jails. It is literally the exact same text as the regular FreeBSD Mastery: Jails, but with a cover drawn in crayon by yours truly. It is a thing. It gets offered up for charity auctions. I have a small amount of pride in it. It’s not really a discrete book.
So I’m trying this definition.
a) 15,000 words or longer
b) requiring distinct and discrete effort to create
c) something I’m not embarrassed to call “a book.”
This definition lets me exclude titles like the ZedFS version of FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS, the Beck and Provost editions of Terrapin Sky Tango, and the Manly McManface version of Ed Mastery. Only Footnotes might have brand new footnotes in it, but it wasn’t hard to make. It’s excluded. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of these, but only because they polish my reputation as the good sort of troll. I knocked them all off in a morning. (They’re still in the pic of me with one copy of every edition of everything I’ve written, because that picture is only for fun.)
It lets me include works like Ed Mastery and Cash Flow for Creators. I spent three weeks writing the cash flow book, and thirty years learning how to write the cash flow book. It include volumes like the Networknomicon, because producing that required a whole bunch of work. It was a different sort of labor for me, but that unspeakable tome fine educational work is clearly a discrete, unique book.
I’m also counting collections. Again, the “how many books have you published” question is about milestones. Writing enough of A Thing to create a collection is a milestone. Aidan Redding Against the Universes is the closest thing to a Brandon Sanderson doorstop I’ve produced on the fiction side. (Also, that hardcover has two different covers, one on the dust jacket and one on the laminate, and they’re both lovely.)
Applying this definition leaves me with these titles.
1 Gatecrasher 1992 fiction full-length
2 Believe it or Else! 1993 fiction full-length
3 Gatecrasher 2nd edition 1995 fiction full-length
5 Absolute BSD 2002 nonfiction full-length
6 Absolute OpenBSD 2003 nonfiction full-length
7 Cisco Routers for the Desperate 2004 nonfiction full-length
8 PGP & GPG 2006 nonfiction full-length
9 Absolute FreeBSD, 2nd edition 2007 nonfiction full-length
10 Cisco Routers for the Desperate, 2nd edition 2009 nonfiction full-length
11 Network Flow Analysis 2010 nonfiction full-length
15 SSH Mastery 2012 nonfiction full-length
16 Vicious Redemption: Five Dark Fantasies 2012 fiction full-length
17 DNSSEC Mastery 2013 nonfiction full-length
18 Sudo Mastery 2013 nonfiction full-length
19 Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd ed 2013 nonfiction full-length
25 FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials 2014 nonfiction full-length
26 Immortal Clay 2014 fiction full-length
30 Networking for Systems Administrators 2015 nonfiction full-length
31 Tarsnap Mastery 2015 nonfiction full-length
32 FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS 2015 nonfiction full-length
33 Forever Falls 2015 fiction novella
37 PAM Mastery 2016 nonfiction full-length
38 FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS 2016 nonfiction full-length
40 Kipuka Blues (Immortal Clay #2) 2016 fiction full-length
41 Hydrogen Sleets 2016 fiction full-length
42 Drowned Mirovar (Prohibition Orcs #2) 2016 fiction novella
43 Butterfly Stomp Waltz (Beaks #1) 2016 fiction full-length
44 Earthquake Kitten Kiss (Beaks spin-off) 2016 fiction novella
47 FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems 2016 nonfiction full-length
48 git commit murder 2017 fiction full-length
50 Httpd and Relayd Mastery 2017 nonfiction full-length
51 Ed Mastery 2018 nonfiction novella
52 Ed Mastery, Manly McManface Edition 2018 nonfiction novella
53 SSH Mastery, 2nd edition 2018 nonfiction full-length
54 Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd edition 2018 nonfiction full-length
59 Sudo Mastery, 2nd edition 2019 nonfiction full-length
60 FreeBSD Mastery: Jails 2019 nonfiction full-length
61 Terrapin Sky Tango (Beaks #2) 2019 fiction full-length
67 SNMP Mastery 2020 nonfiction full-length
69 The Networknomicon 2020 nonfiction full-length
70 Cash Flow for Creators 2020 nonfiction full-length
74 Drinking Heavy Water 2020 fiction full-length
80 Aidan Redding Against the Universes 2021 fiction full-length
83 TLS Mastery 2021 nonfiction full-length
85 git sync murder 2021 fiction full-length
This makes $ git sync murder my 45th book.
Could this definition be gamed? Sure it could. But I don’t care enough to game it. I stopped counting my releases somewhere around 17 or 18 books. I counted titles on my brag shelf at one point a few years ago, using my gut as a definition, and got a number like 31 or 33 or something like that. I haven’t cared enough to count until today, when I’m putting off doing real work. Now that I’ve counted, I suspect I’ll maintain a silent count until I break 50 and then lose count again. 50 is a milestone, after all.
If you want to argue about my definitions, please find someone else to argue with.
I woke up this morning planning to plunge into the text of the new edition DNSSEC Mastery. Before I made it to my writing desk, however, UPS dropped a heap of paper on my doorstep. The “$ git sync murder” sponsor and Patronizer gifts.
So I spent today transforming a bunch of this:
into a heap of this:
Sponsors and Patronizers are also receiving an extra gift this time around. (Remember, these are gifts. I make no promise what my backers will receive, only that they will receive something.) This gift involves four thousand degree flames, rods of raw glass stock, and several small explosions. It also involves cow, although fake cow, because both cows and BBQ fans object to four thousand degree flames.
Tomorrow, I’ll be posting on the official release of $ git sync murder and answer the question “how many books have you written?” Hint: it’s a meaningless question, you’ll have to be more specific…
Hypothesis are the key to understanding and the fundamental root of science. A hypothesis must be falsifiable. Here’s an example.
Nobody will buy a bundle containing all the IT Mastery ebooks. Long-time readers already have some, and only want select volumes. New readers will want to try one or two first.
Folks at my mug.org talk last night assure me this is not true, and that if such a bundle existed people would buy it.
I’m testing this hypothesis via the Total Mastery ebook bundle. All my IT Mastery ebooks, 10% off.
Note that it’s dated. When I release a new book, I’ll create a new bundle.
Or stop bothering with it, when I fail to falsify my hypothesis.
I’ll be talking about TLS at mug.org on 13 July 2021. I get more than an hour, so there’ll be time for an energetic discussion afterwards. Their web site is not yet updated, because I just now sent them the talk abstract.
This is an online meeting. All are welcome.
Online meetings are getting more common, and I’m getting more requests to present. While online talks don’t have travel time, they do take a kind of energy I call “people juice.” People juice is scarce and not easily renewed. Video calls are even more exhausting than regular ones. I haven’t made this an official policy yet, but I’ve pretty much set a limit of “not more than one presentation a month, and maybe zero depending on what else is going on.”
I’ve started making words on a new edition of DNSSEC Mastery.
After weeks of folks repeatedly asking when they can sponsor it, I have an answer other than “later.” Sponsorships are open now. Eddie Sharam will be doing the cover, as usual.
If you’ve just come across my sponsorships, here’s the deal. You give me money before I’ve produced anything suitable for human consumption. In return, I put your name in the book. $25 or more gets your name in the epub and mobi ebook versions, while $100 or more gets your name in the print and electronic versions. (The PDF version is straight from the print, so while it’s technically an ebook you need to have print-level sponsorship to appear in there.)
For the record: yes, I consider sponsorships something of an open scam. There’s no way you get enough benefit from a sponsorship to merit the cause. They’re a throwback to the medieval patronage system, where folks with money supported artists they considered worthwhile. Or, if you prefer: you give me money your excess cash, and write it off as a business expense.
On the other hand, I got bills. So here it is.
If you want to trickle money to me, rather than big lumps, I offer monthly patronage opportunities at both Patreon and my e-bookstore.
Or, just go to your favorite bookstore and buy my books. That’s all the support I need.
My book Cash Flow for Creators lays out exactly how I make a living in this deranged business. You can get your own copy for a paltry $6.99.
Right now, you can get it for $5 as part of the 2021 Write Stuff Bundle at Storybundle. Plus three other books and classes on building a career from your craft. That’s even cheaper than my usual cheap. Or you can spend $20, and get ten excellent business books from people who know what they’re doing, who make a living with their craft, and who are cheerfully sharing how to do the same.
I’m delighted to be in this bundle, and not just because bundle curator Kris Rusch called Cash Flow for Creators “one of the most important books you’ll read all year.” (Mind you, I’m gonna keep that quote in a safe place so that when the world catches on to what a complete doofus I am, I can take it out and cuddle it.) But there’s some top-notch writers and business people in this bundle.
Johanna Rothman is best known as a business and technology consultant. She also writes charming heart-warming stories that remind me of fairy tales for some reason, because they’re totally not fairy tales. Except when they are. I’ve met Johanna at several conferences, and for a quiet and unassuming itty-bitty lady she knows how to put herself out there. I’d absolutely listen to her on getting speaking slots at a conference. Or, in this case, read her Writing a Conference Proposal the Conference Wants and Accepts.
Joanna Penn writes top-notch fiction and hosts the Creative Penn podcast. I was lucky enough to have lunch with her at a conference on the Oregon coast a few years ago and frankly, I have no idea how she gets the energy to do half of her stuff. She’s a smart people, and has built one heck of a creative business doing this weird… what’s that word? Oh, yes. “Planning.” Something I constantly and consistently fail to do. I really ought to perform the exercises in Your Author Business Plan. I should also take her advice that I need to weasel my way onto more podcasts, because the whole “wait patiently for invitations” thing doesn’t work well.
Stefon Mears once worked in computing, but he got better. I’ve known him for years, and the interesting thing about Stefon? It’s not his obsessive Blue Öyster Cult fandom, though that is one of his better traits. It’s not even that I once made him laugh so hard that bystanders asked if he was having a seizure and if they should call an ambulance. It’s that he’s just this guy, and he keeps writing book after book after book in the grand pulp tradition. One after another, he churns them out like Rex Stout or Zane Grey or Lester Dent or any number of others. We’ve talked about how to write a novel every month, and I overwhelmingly agree with the advice he gives in The 30-Day Novel and Beyond!
All this for five bucks. But the bonus books, for those who pay $20 or more?
Award-winning writers and editors Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch have survived several economic crashes in this trade. They were the first professional authors I ever met who understood that writers don’t write books; they create and license intellectual property. I don’t always totally agree with them, but they back up their arguments and make me think about why I’m doing the things I do. You can’t buy that. Except you can. In several ways. In this bundle.
Mark Leslie LeFebvre was a bookseller. He’s worked for Kobo and Draft2Digital. He’s a fantastic writer and editor. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s worked at a printer. He knows this business like I know that weird growth on the back of my left hand. (Don’t worry about me, they always drop off before they hatch.) I respect this man’s mad skillz enough that when I finish the Current Giant Epic Fiction Thing I’m working on, I’m going to buy an hour of his time to talk through how to optimally release it. If you want your work in bookstores and libraries, he’s the man to tell you how. Oh, hey–An Author’s Guide to Working With Libraries and Bookstores. What a coincidence!
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Tonya D Price at more than one conference. Her excellent writing survived MBA school, a feat not many people manage. A Writer’s Introduction to Social Media Marketing is exclusive to this bundle, so I haven’t read it. Yet.
Writer, editor, and game publisher Loren L Coleman might be best known for his work in Battletech, but I mostly know him for his phenomenal Kickstarter chops and his devoted Prohibition Orcs fandom. Anyone who can raise multiple millions in a Kickstarter has my attention. He recently Kickstarted Crowdfunding Your Ficton: a Best Practices Guide. Kickstarter is on my Things To Play With list, so I backed it. You can get his book after those of us wise enough to back him, but before the great unwashed masses.
A cut of the purchase price goes to each author. Another cut can go to Able Gamers, if you check the box. You should totally check the box.
Also, the price is completely “pay what you want.” None of us would mind if those of you with real jobs realized that this bundle is dang near theft and chose to pay a bit more for it. If you read these and act on their advice, you’ll turn a profit easily.
Here’s the heap of TLS Mastery sponsorship gifts, awaiting my poor postman.
I get asked about how sponsorships work, so I’m going to record a few notes here.
37 print sponsors at $100 each, plus 55 ebook sponsors at $25 each? In traditional publishing, we would call that an “advance.”
Except that I have to pay to purchase and mail the rewards. When I first tried sponsorships back in 2016, I calculated I’d have to pay about $10 for shipping for each print sponsor. Surely most of my sponsors would be in the US, not overseas.
I was so. Very. Wrong.
Over half of my sponsors are outside the US. Average shipping is $19. The print sponsorship is profitable, but I spend just under 40% of the sponsorship on fulfillment. I’m pondering if I want to go to the trouble of adding shipping costs to print sponsorships. The most expensive places to ship are Australia (for obvious reasons) and Israel (for inexplicable reasons, it’s right next to Europe, what the heck). Plus, there are occasional predictable failures.
I could raise the price. Going over $100 feels like it would be excessive, though.
I could integrate a shipping API, get an estimated cost, and charge $90 plus shipping. I’m not sure how such APIs react to “get a quote now and fulfill six months later,” however. I suspect Woocommerce would throw a wobbler. One reason I do sponsorships is because they’re pretty easy. This makes sponsorships more fragile. Also, my readers were voted “Most Likely To Habitually Evade Geolocation And Not Even Think About It” four years running.
I could add a note to the checkout that says “If you’re from outside the US, I’d appreciate a few extra bucks for shipping.” But I’m already asking for money for no good reason.
So, for now, things stay the same. If Australia develops Mad Lucas Disease and starts sponsoring like fiends, that might well change.
About 10% of sponsorships require a second contact. I have to drop the sponsor a note saying “Hey, USPS says your address doesn’t exist and Google Earth shows it’s an empty field in Wyoming, can you confirm?” Most often the answer is “yes, I live in a giant empty field, use my PO Box instead.” Clearly, anyone who sponsors me is probably unusual in more than one way.
I occasionally get someone who sponsored a book twice and I didn’t catch it, so I have to find out how to satisfy them. It might be a refund, perhaps another book stuffed in the envelope, whatever.
Each book gets more sponsors than the one before. I attribute this to the sponsors mailing list.
If you’re thinking of doing this: set up a real shipping operation. Buy waterproof bubble mailers. Get a tape gun. Get an online postage account (I use Shippo). Set aside a bunch of time. When I hit 50 print sponsors, I’m hiring a neighbor kid to package stuff as I sign and investigating a mailing label printer.
Sponsorships on DNSSEC Mastery, 2nd Edition will probably open in June.
As if 2020 wasn’t sufficiently rough, I spent it writing about TLS.
Now, I’m done.
TLS Mastery has escaped.
Transport Layer Security, or TLS, makes ecommerce and online banking possible. It protects your passwords and your privacy. Let’s Encrypt transformed TLS from an expensive tool to a free one. TLS understanding and debugging is an essential sysadmin skill you must have.
TLS Mastery takes you through:
Stop wandering blindly around TLS. Master the protocol with TLS Mastery!
Available in the Beastie Edition and the Tux Edition. The only difference is the cover. Hardcover has both covers.
Get the two-cover hardcover at any of the print bookstores below, or direct from my bookstore.
Get the combined editions at:
Get the Beastie edition at:
Get the Tux edition at:
If you’re a sponsor: your gifts are on order. I have enough on hand for my Patronizers, so I’ll be shipping those first. As soon as yours arrive, I’ll get them to you.
This was a rough book to write, so I want to share the acknowledgements.
TLS is perhaps the most complicated topic I’ve ever written about. Writing this book would have been impossible without outside help.
This book would not exist if the Internet Security Research Group hadn’t deployed ACME and organized Let’s Encrypt. TLS certificates are not only free for most people, their maintenance and renewal is highly automatable. They’ve changed the whole Internet, and deserve our thanks for that.
It doesn’t matter how many RFCs I study and how many technical mailing list archives I read: I lack the expertise and context to best illuminate an arcane topic like TLS. The folks who read this manuscript’s early stages and pointed out my innumerable errors deserve special thanks. James Allen, Xavier Belanger, Trix Farrar, Loganaden Velvindron, Jan-Piet Mens, Mike O’Connor, Fred Schlechter, Grant Taylor, Gordon Tetlow, and Fraser Tweedale, here’s to you.
Lilith Saintcrow convinced me that The Princess Bride could be a useful motif for a serious technology book. This book was written during the 2020 pandemic, so I must also thank The Princess Bride for providing me a desperately needed sense of hope.
Dan Langille gracefully submitted to the pillaging of his blog for useful hints and guidance. I am grateful that JP Mens, Evan Hunt, and John-Mark Gurney provoked him into updating that blog and saving me a bunch of work.
I am unsure if I should profusely thank Bob Beck for his time and patience in revealing the innards of TLS, or profoundly curse him and his spawn unto the seventh generation. I must acknowledge the usefulness of “Happy Bob’s Test CA,” however, so I’ll raise a glass to that while waffling over whether or not the bottle of fair-to-middlin’ wine I owe him should be laced with iocane powder.
For Liz.
Again, to all the tech reviewers and Patronizers and sponsors: thank you. This book would not exist without you.