Customer Reviews

Guide to UNIX Using Linux, Third Edition

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I teach UNIX at a college in the Phoenix area. I was given this book as the school's choice for the class literature. I have since told my students to stop bringing this book and, instead, bring a different one I have chosen. This book fails to address far too much of the UNIX operating system to be of much use as a learning tool.

Missing from this book are discussions on important topics such as links/symlinks, su, detailed discussions of mode/permission settings, suig/sgid program execution, terminal settings, and much more. Large type-face and excessive (unnecessary) illustrations are more the cause for its 568 pages, than is an abundance of content. Additionally, the author spends far too much time teaching the X-Windows GUI than the actual command line which is the fundamental heart of the UNIX system. My students and I have also noticed various inaccuracies with the text content. I have removed this book from the book list for my course, and wouldn't recommend it to anyone wanting to learn UNIX.

What I found most disturbing was the author's own comments that he was more concerned about Amazon initially getting the credits right than he seems to be with accurately and completely presenting information regarding the UNIX operating system.

It seemed to me that the author collected a checklist of things to cover, added some details on each item, and sat back satisfied that the list was covered.

No topic is covered really well, in my opinion. I do not mean by this that each topic should have been covered exhaustively, as this is an introductory book. Rather, I mean that many topics are covered to such a low extent that there is nothing much to do with them. The reader is basically only made aware that such a topic exists, and then needs to find an alternative source for this topic.
I think the most striking example of this (one out of many), is a 10-page chapter explaining C++ from scratch. I don't see the point for this. A reader familiar with the language would be interested in linux-specific aspects of C++ (for example, linux programming environments), which are not covered. A reader unfamiliar with the language would find a 10-page chapter useless.

Curiously, the book, even when considered as an extended checklist, is not very good. I could not find any material on archiving and compressing, and had to search the Internet for this.

I Heartily recommend this book for people who enjoy spending time on Google.

From what I can tell by reading these reviews, it seems like Instructors love this book and Students hate it. I guess I'm a lucky breed who had an instructor that hates the book too. The chapters are all over the place and dont really cover anything all that well. This book is more of a roadmap of Linux, it shows you all the places you can go and kind of an example of what to do when you get there, but for the most part unless you've been in town before or have a guide, you're going to be SOL.

The most frustrating aspects come from the questions at the end of the chapter. The book loves to throw in things that either don't make sense or weren't covered in the chapter. Their little way of having you look ahead to anticipate what's coming. Ultimately, it sucks when trying to do the assignment and you have no clue where to look for the answer.

Making matters worse, the book ships with some light-weight publisher's version of the Linux distro Fedora Core. Which is ALREADY OUT OF DATE. If you buy this book, go get yourself at least the latest version of Fedora, but I'd reccomend SuSE. The book fails to give you any comparison between distros and just assumes you'll be using Red Hat. Big mistake there, no NOT use the CDs that come with the book.

There's also lots of things that the book leaves out. For example, KDE. While it says that it covers "Both KDE and Gnome", basically it's coverage of KDE is like the coverage of Apple in a Windows book. They essentially tell you to be on the lookout because you might see it one day. Other than that, nothing.

Lastly, the killer on this book is the Price. $70 is far too much to pay for something like this. I love how Course Technology feels they can take the bare minimum out of a good Linux How-to book, stick in a bunch of questions and exercises and call it a text book. Then include a CDROM to seal the deal. While the book looks worthwhile at a hefty 641 pages, you'll be somewhat surprised to see that the chapters are pretty short, and I'd be willing to bet that about 40% of the book is just the Hands-On Projects, Discovery Exercises, and Review/definitions. Considering there's maybe 400 pages of actual content. When you consider the price of the book, you're paying about 25 cents for each page of actual learning material. All for stuff you can find in other books for cheaper or find yourself online.

So why give this book 2 stars instead of 1? The book has its aspects. It's done great layout wise and it does have a lot of commands in here that can be used as refrence. Somethings are covered extensively, so the book isn't a total waste.

That being said, don't get this book unless you have to.

I too was leery of using this textbook in a Unix workshop that I sometimes teach for a graduate program at IUPUI. After reading the negative comments I contacted Course Technology and tracked down the editor for this title. She admitted that there were some serious typos which made the exercises difficult to complete successfully. She told me that they had hired a Linux expert to re-edit the book and it would hopefully be available in time for my class the summer of 2001. It was ready in time and it worked very well for my class. BE AWARE that the ISBN number wasn't changed and the only indication that you have the revised version is the word UPDATED in a gold star in the upper right side of the text cover. Instructors can get a CD with solution files, Powerpoint slides, Test Manager, and an Electronic Instructors Manual. I would agree that perhaps less GUI content and more of the omitted topics noted in other reviews would make this a 5-star textbook.

Hi i am an I.T student from Texas and an MCSAx2 (W2K/Windows 2003) and I have the misfortune of having to use this book.

If the author is more concerned about receiving credit for this book, then for having it proof read, that might be a problem.

I don't expect perfectly proof read college books, but it appears very little effort has been made to proofread this one.

Why this book bundles Redhat with it is beyond me. The book never examines that OS in any of its pages, much to my chagrin.

Perhaps it should be retitled "Unix using Linux (and not including the attached OS CD Rom").

It is extremely hard to follow along with screen print outs printed in the books, since they are extremely fuzzy and unclear and i am not sure if they were placed in the book to enlighten the students or to frustrate them. The instructor's slides cannot be seen farther then a foot away from the board, for the same reason.

You think this is a five star book? You must be an instructor with prior knowledge of unix, because as you may have noticed all students on here complain about not being able to read large portions of the book.

A book that is mostly unreadable I cannot learn from. Look at this book BEFORE you purchase it. And if you do- as a previous reviewer suggested-make sure you have some back up Linux/Redhat books available, as a reference to explain the things the author doesn't.

I can't belive people can actually rate this book 5 stars. I'm not so sure they tried the exercises. There is so much mistake in the book, that it's rediculous. None of the exercises work, because of the fact that UNIX is case-sensitive and the author sometimes considered that and sometimes didn't. Bottom line is: THIS IS AN EXTREMELY BAD BOOK.

This book is simply written and easy to read but it has serious
problems. I felt it deserved 1.5 stars. It has many figures of
monitor screens which are about 90% blank space. The text on the
screens is hard to read since it's fine white letters on black.
There is a lot of wasted space elsewhere.
Why doesn't it show long options using -- or the --help option?
Why were the important symbolic links omitted? Why didn't it show
how to ask for help with the vi editor? The list of important
information omitted goes on and on.
Fig. 2-1 fails to show the important /sbin and /var
directories. The use of the + option for the sort command is
obsolete according to the on-line manual page. The obsolete +
option uses and index origin of 0 which the book fails to
mention. The definition in the Glossary of Telnet as being
a "terminal emulation program" is incorrect. And so on ...
So I'm disappointed with the book and can't recommend it.

I am a College Student using this book, my prof. likes it because he does not have to work at making exercise for us to do, but the whole class seems to hate the book, we only meet once a week, but during those couple hours we find about 10 mistakes. to many typo's, and the review questions at the end of the chapter don't help either, there are more than one spot where the answer could be multiple but there is only one answer ????? i would not use this book. unless you have an O'Reillys "Unix in a nutshell" handy.

The screen prints in this book are so poorly reproduced as to be completely unreadable and there are many, many typos. I am taking a class using this book as a text, and I spend more time trying to figure out what the typos are in the commands than I do learning how to use the software. I sent an email to the publisher regarding the fact that the screen prints, which are white characters of low resolution on a dark background, are nearly invisible; I received a reply that said they were sorry I was having trouble reading the graphics - nothing else - no apology - no statement that this is a recognized problem they would correct in a subsequent edition.

My advice - find a book you can read that you won't have to waste your time proofreading and leave this one on the shelf!

I am an old student of Jack Dent and I am fortunate to have been able to perfect my skills of UNIX under him. I was with him when he was writing the book and was able to see and contribute to the book as it was being developed. Now that I have read the book as a finished product I think that it should be in the home of everyone that is in the UNIX field. The book is one of only two that I would read over and over, not only as a reference, but as a teaching tool as well. Five stars all the way.