Customer Reviews

Hands-On Linux: Featuring Caldera Openlinux Lite, Netscape Navigator Gold, and Netscape Fasttrack Server on Two Cds

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is well written. I rely on it, and refer to it constantly.

If you are new to any form of UNIX, you will need to develop a good working knowledge of the UNIX tool set. You should learn about the shells (bash,ksh,etc), the editors (emacs, vi, joe) other common unix tools (make, awk, pine), and the X-Windows system. For learning about these things, this book is very good.

What I don't like is that the book really should be called "HANDS ON UNIX". Only an occasional remark in the text reminds you that this is a LINUX book. The book seems titled by the publisher to cash in on the LINUX buzz, rather than according to it's content. Less than 1% of the content is LINUX specific. There is a 7 page appendix on the emulators available for LINUX, and about ten pages of Linux specific content int he first hundred pages.

Chapter two just blithely states that "This book does not discuss hardware selection nor the installation of Linux" and then jumps right to logging into a UNIX command shell.

To this day I'm still looking for decent coverage of buying a Linux compatible system, system installation, hard disk setup, network and sound card setup, dial up networking setup, and other hardware and installation manuals.

There is nothing on recompiling the kernel. The only tweaking section that I found useful was the XFree86 section. The tips on window managers and setting up your X configuration is pretty good.

If you are an at-home Linux user, you ARE the network administrator, and system administrator. If you're looking for a one-volume omnibus, this is not it.

The content in this book will probably never become dated. It's timeless unix stuff.

Warren Postma

It's probably not possible to write "complete" book on Linux, because the OS is still new and rapidly evolving, both technically and as a commodity in the computing market. Sobell's book doesn't cover everything, but the topics he does cover are well presented, clearly written and often cross-referenced in the text itself, which save a lot of frantic paging around to find a forgotten detail.

Sobell focuses on basic Linux programming and development, rather than installation, setup, hardware, etc., so his book makes a good companion volume to the "sysadmin" handbooks on the market, which often come up short on details about the OS language and utilities.

This is an excellent book. It really helped me once i had Linux installed. Of course if you are still struggling with getting Linux installed then look elsewhere. Overall an Excellent buy. Yet the software bundle is a little lacking. The software bundled doesnt really demonstrate the free software capabilities of Linux considering most of it is on a 90 day evaulation period.

Installing Linux and all its modularized parts is deeply confusing. This book does not help in the least, and I don't understand why Caldera would put it on the shelves with a CD in the back.

For example, the most important reconfiguration item available is called LISA, and it does not appear in the index.

This book assumes that you have a working Linux machine, and that you are trying to become familar with LINUX and its vital organs. If you want help making a boot disk or installing, don't look here. If you do want a broad overview of Linux with a small tutorial on the each of the major LINUX constituents, this is a very nice book. Outstanding for complete newbees to UNIX. The CD-ROMS are excellent.

Hands-On Linux was written by the same author that Linus Torvalds learned Unix from. This book is very thorough, and you sure get a whole lot of pages for your money. There are exercises at the end of each section that range from beginner to expert so everyone from novice to expert operating system users can be challenged. This book lacks one very important issue: Dial-Up Networking (i.e. connecting to your ISP). Not one page is devoted to using a modem for any purpose. But if you connect to the Internet through a LAN, you're in luck. This is the book for you.