Serious price for a serious book, presumably. It's not at all uncommon to pay this sort of price (and sometimes more) for high-quality software development books. Most of the books in my software development library are in this price range (if not significantly more).
Only $59.99 with the coupon on the same page. Less than 6 cents a page.
In the universe of books that will be used among other things as college textbooks, this book is at the low end of the scale, not the high end.
It's over 1,000 pages.
How much of that is fluff?
No Starch Press books tends to be all meat no bone. I don’t think I’ve picked up a NSP book and regretted it… unlike other publishers who just phone it in
It's a professional reference book. Get your workplace to buy it.