Customer Reviews

Fedora Unleashed, 2008 Edition: Covering Fedora 7 and Fedora 8 (8th Edition)

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This book, one of a series of "Unleashed" books published by SAMS is a topical work designed to instruct intermediate to advanced users of RedHat's Fedora distribution of Linux. This edition covers Fedora version 8 and includes a DVD with the software. It also states that if the book is registered in 2008, a free Fedora version 9 DVD will be sent to the owner provided the owner registers the book at the publisher's web site. My reading of the material suggests that the book should have targeted beginner to intermediate users. The authors attempt to cover a lot of ground and there is a fair bit of historical asides to keep up interest.

I have purchased "Unleashed" books before but noted that they suffered from several problems. One problem that makes the book much less useful as a reference is relatively poor indexing. To cite one example, if you look up ntfs in the index you will find minimally useful references that lead you to pages in the book that simply inform the reader that ntfs is a file system designed and released by the Microsoft corporation. Much earlier in the book in the "How to install" section the authors mention that Windows users will already have at least one ntfs partition on their computers and that the ntfs partition will need to be re-sized in order to install Fedora. Unfortunately quite a bit of vital information will either not be present or will be difficult to find due to poor indexing.

An advanced book on Fedora would likely have a detailed description of RAID technology. Although on page 277 of the book the authors state that more information will be available in chapter 35, no such information was present leading me to think that the editing of this book left a lot to be desired.

Still, despite the shortcomings the authors have written a book that most readers should find easy to absorb. They try hard to be thorough and have certainly delivered lot's of useful information. Delivering this much material would seem to be a Herculean task.

This book would be useful for someone who wants to cover Fedora's features but it is less useful as a reference book. I'm not sure how useful the "Programming Linux" part of the book would be to users since I think this is better covered in separate material.

To write a good intro book for the huge and complex distribution like Fedora is a very difficult task. The spectrum of users is too wide and selection of the topics is even wider. That means that some category of users always be dissatisfied. Authors managed to solve this dilemma in their own unique way and created a really excellent book that contain wealth of information for beginners, but some interesting tips for seasoned system admin as well.

One of the important advantages of the book is that the authors use MC (Midnight commander) as a tool for performing some tasks (including important task of undeletion of files on Ext3/Ext4 filesystems). This selection instantly made treatment of those topics superior to the same treatment in Sobey's books. The other positive feature of the book is that they introduce and explain how to use sudo -- a rare feature for an intro book. Using screen is also explained in the book. Such important topics as bootup, backup of your filesystems and adding default router are also covered well.

The authors pay due attention to scripting and provide many useful rudimentary scripts for performing various tasks. Generally Parts III, IV and V are very strong and alone are worth the price of the book. So you can view parts I and II as a bonus.

As for shortcomings I would remove information about using C/C++ and Mono from the book and increased the coverage of bash. Inclusion of too many languages unnecessarily complicated the book.

Generally this is a good book on a very difficult to cover topic. Highly recommended.

The authors have been writing this book or earlier versions for some time,
but the book is filled with stock introductory material such as shell commands. Coverage of most topics feels superficial. The editing including spelling is poor.

I expected a "what's new" chapter but it wasn't there.
But there is a history of redhat and fedora. But why.

somewhat disapointing

I got this book to set up a home web server, but I was able to find better information on the internet compared to this book. Dont buy it, just google what you need...