The 2 volumes of authoritative X documentation came from Digital Press. X Window System by Scheifler, Gettys and Newman. X Window System Toolkit by Asente and Swick. If you read further in the acknowledgements that you quote, you'll see them listed as primary sources. My copies take up 3.25" on the shelf.
I know we had a lot of the O'Reilly X books floating around. Nobody ever read them, but we felt weird throwing books away. You're right that they got bundled by vendors--I think HP and Sun eventually bundled stuff too. The bundling decision was probably more about trying to justify insanely high workstation prices than an indictment of the complexity of X.
I know we had a lot of the O'Reilly X books floating around. Nobody ever read them, but we felt weird throwing books away. You're right that they got bundled by vendors--I think HP and Sun eventually bundled stuff too. The bundling decision was probably more about trying to justify insanely high workstation prices than an indictment of the complexity of X.