Customer Reviews

The Definitive Guide to CentOS (Books for Professionals by Professionals)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I bought this book because I am an advanced Linux user considering switching to CentOS. I expected this book to explain to me the philosophy behind Yum, RPM, upstart, configuring services, and everything else that's specific to RedHat and CentOS.

Instead, the book explained to me in detail how to install CentOS using the GUI (as if it's rocket science), then spent the remainder explaining how to set up common services that are configured the same way between all distributions. For me, who is already familiar with other distributions, there was nothing CentOS-specific or even insightful.

The only informative and CentOS-specific information in this book can be boiled down to two pages: where the authors discuss the five or six repositories available to CentOS users, and where the authors list a few 'yum' commands. Everything else is either trivial or unrelated to CentOS.

Basically, the use of CentOS in this book is a means, not an end. If you want to learn about how CentOS differs from other distros, look elsewhere.

A better name for this book might be "An introduction to running a Linux server".

This book covers the main reasons why anyone would want to run a Linux server: Apache, mail, DNS, Samba. CentOS is a good, userfriendly choice, and this guide goes well with it.

For the more advanced, enterprise user, this book also covers topics such as high-availability and clustering.

Written by experienced Linux users, it also contains tips and tricks they learned while working with Linux, such as frequently forgotten things, frequently reasons for getting stuck somewhere, etc. As an experienced user myself, I recognize those little things no-one would ever care about. This book also tells about them, which is a good thing in my opinion.

When you start to explore the huge possibilities af an OS like Centos this book is a good starting point. I recommend it to all the newbies like me. I found it very useful with a lot of nice advices and helpful how-to-procedures.

The title of this book, "The Definitive Guide to CentOS (Books for Professionals by Professionals)," is misleading.

This guide is NOT "definitive," but it will help you get started using Linux. Also, I wouldn't call it a guide to "CentOS," specifically, more like a guide to getting started with Linux that just so happens to use the CentOS distribution in its examples. Finally, while the guide was probably written by a professional, it clearly wasn't written FOR professionals. This guide is ideal for hobbyists. It spends time explaining reasons to operate your own email server followed by a quick ethics lesson in user data privacy. No "professional" worthy of the designation would need an operating system guide to explain that reading your users' personal emails is unacceptable.

Who should buy this book? Any beginning hobbyist looking to get started running a linux server from home.

Who should consider purchasing a different book? Any professional sysadmin or moderately experienced hobbyist who is looking for specifics on CentOS webserver configuration. If you already feel comfortable using the command prompt, this probably isn't the guide for you.

I already own Wale Soyinka's book "Linux Administration: A Beginner's Guide" and bought this assuming that there would be more CentOS-specific information in it that could help with things like NIS, LDAP, sendmail configuration, etc. While it covers some of its subjects reasonably well, it stops well short of the goal of being the definitive guide to CentOS. Beginner's guide, maybe, but there is very little that makes it definitive.

The first third of the book is dedicated to installation, yum, and Apache configuration. This information is not even as good as the existing information on the CentOS How-To pages on their web site.

The section that I found useful was on setting up virtual private networks. The book does a reasonable job of explaining this, but I find it hard to understand what sets this apart from any other Linux installation.

Don't get me wrong, the book does have value, but if you are looking for the definitive guide to setting up and configuring your CentOS-specific installation, this is definitely not the book for you.

The Definitive Guide to CentOS is an excellent reference guide. As an advanced Linux user, I referred to sections that I had either forgotten, or need priming on. These topics ranged from File System configuration, Network configuration, Security and tools such as Samba. The book is easy to read and concise, but is not the end-all reference manual. I would say this book is a good selection for Linux beginners to average users, not advanced users. But it did help me in the areas mentioned.

I appreciate the detail in which this book explains concepts and why things work they way they do in Linux. Although I have been working with CentOS for nearly two years now professionally, this book gave my weak foundation of knowledge a lot of improvement. I now understand why things are, I don't have to accept the line, "Well, that's just the way Linux works." The step-by-step instructions on how to get commonly used services up and running are right on target and very useful.

I highly recommend this book for individuals who want to learn an enterprise Linux OS, and those who already use CentOS but don't have a solid foundation of knowledge. This book is not for advanced users of Linux, you'll only be bored. But for someone like me, a beginner/intermediate, this book was very useful and a pleasure to read.

Also, this is one of the very few books this year that I didn't find any incorrect spellings or bad grammar. Thank you!

From a beginner stand point of view is very good, simple an practical. If you are looking to go deep on any topic. This is not the one.

Way too much of this book is devoted to explaining the most elementary concepts of Unix operating systems. Chances are, if you're installing or using CentOS -- a sever class version of Linux and clone of RedHat, you learned this stuff a LONG time ago. Thus, this book is pretty much useless to anyone using CentOS.

The whole point of CentOS is to be compatible and 99.9% identical with RedHat Linux; so assuming you already know your way around Linux / Unix, I'd suggest you seek out a text specific to RedHat, and not waste your money on this.

This Book is a Great Book if you Need to Manage and administrate your Own Home Based Centos Linux Server , like Web server, Mail Server, DNS Server.
this book with Help you a lot .