Customer Reviews

The Linux Book

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Since buying this book i have discovered some truly excellent FREE books on linux available for download under the GNU Public License from the many linux resource sites. I would reccomend some of the online stuff in preference to this book.

The author has gone a good part of the way towards writing a decent book. When he writes longer sections of prose the style is fairly readable and informative. The chapter subjects seem to be on areas that would help a new user like me get used to the OS. However, in the end the book falls down badly, and needs the eyes and input of a second author. (I imagine it would be very hard to write a good technical book without a second writer.)

Here are the problems:

1. Bad structure within the chapters:

This book departs from the golden rule of "Explain what you are going to say, say it, and then explain what you've said." Instead it feels very easy to get lost within each chapter. Often the topics either bleed into one another or are broken up illogically. The result is that you can never be sure when you have moved on to a new concept or when you are looking at another instance on the same theme. Although the end of chapter questionnaires are helpful, they cannot compensate for these other failings.

2. Text layout is unhelpful:

It is sometimes hard to tell which comments go with which code snippets. Also, the tables did not work for me somehow.

3. Patchy treatment of user skill level:

In some places the author painstakingly explains the bleeding obvious (like how to navigate the linux GUIs' equivalent of a "start" menu) yet in other places he will string together paragraphs full of acronyms and technical terms that seem important ... but are a mystery if you don't know them. Or, the author will explain which button to click on a GUI control panel (usually obvious) but does not seem to mention how the control panel was called up by the user!

4. Logic "forks":

In some of his more brief explanations, the author uses gramatically ambiguous phrases. You end up with explanations that can have two, three or four completely different meanings, all of them perfectly sensible and gramatically valid but only one of them correct... The author is not the worst offender i have encountered by any means but nevertheless this is sloppy, unneccesary and entirely inappropirate for a book that is supposed to inform the reader.

5. Used a command term or technically meaningful term as an example string or user defined variable name, etc:

Ok, so this is just one of my pet hates with techncial writers; when they use a meaningful word or term (like "CLICK HERE to scroll to my other Amazon book reviews") in a context where its meaning is not relevant but where the reader subconscoiously expects it to be relevant. It really interrups the flow of reading.

e.g. there is a page in the book where he tells you how to find the word "data" by searching some text. You have to pay close attention when writers do things like this to you, otherwise you end up thinking that you are searching for Some Data not the word "data".

I found some chapters useful and other readers may like this book more than i did. Eventually I just had to find another book on linux.

In the end the best learning resources i have found as a linux beginner were online. (...) Until someone like Amazon starts selling printed copies of these online books under the GPL (which could still be cheaper than printing your own at home), the best bet is to download and print your own documentation until you know exactly what you want from a linux text book.

An excellent book, but it is not precisely for user advanced but for those that are begun in Linux. Contain information on the installation, what is essential on configuration and maintenance of the operative system. Has information on the X ++Window. Wimple topics of integration with other platforms as Windows and Macintosh. A good price also if is considered that brings the CD of installation Red Hat 7.0 but something bad for these since serious dates good to have 7.1. But in end for the beginners I recommend this book.

This book looked great -- and maybe a few years ago it was a great resource. But Linux has moved with leaps and bounds during the years and many Linux releases are now beyond the tekkie status of earlier releases and the typical person interested in Linux is probably leaning toward one of the major distributions such as Ubuntu or Mandriva. I purchased the book with enthusiasm (recently) and donated it to a thrift book store within a week. It is not a bad book, but just not (in my opinion) useful in today's Linux world.

Review
I just recently started diving into the Linux waters at work. While I did the Red Hat install without the benefit of this book, it would have helped a lot to have it around. There is so much that is new and unfamiliar...

The installation chapters are accurate as to what I experienced. There's more background here than what I deduced from the install screens, so that will help you make intelligent choices. The value of the book comes into play starting in chapter 4. That's where you are looking at your Red Hat desktop and thinking "what now?" There are a multitude of applications you can run under Red Hat that behave very closely to their Windows counterparts, but the power of Linux is being able to get under that UI and work with the Linux command line statements and utilities. This is where you'll have the full ability to manage access to files, write scripts to take care of tasks like moving files, viewing your logs, and other various tasks. The author has a nice blend of showing you the command along with examples of how you would use the command to execute specific tasks.

The book does not spend a lot of time covering the different applications that come packaged with the distributions. Don't look for extensive coverage of the different windowing applications, OpenOffice, or any other standard open source software that you'll end up using on a daily basis. Most of the focus is towards being able to manipulate Linux at the command line level or via the command line utilities.

If you already have a background of Unix or Linux, this book is probably going to be too simplistic for you. While it could be used as a reference book for certain commands, I think that many users would end up looking for more detail on commands than is offered here.

Conclusion
If you are looking at getting into Linux, and particularly the Red Hat distribution, this would be a good starting point. You may outgrow it quickly, but it will give you that first boost of confidence to get things running.

I would reccomend this book with the important reservation that it is best used as a reference companion.

The chapter subjects are certainly on areas that help a new user like me get used to the OS. However, the book is not structured in a way that allows you to pick it up and read it through like a training book. From that point of view, the book departs from the golden rule of "Explain what you are going to say, say it, and then explain what you've said." Also the treatment of user skill level is somewhat patchy.

The author has gone a good part of the way towards writing a decent book. When he writes longer sections of prose the style is fairly readable and informative.

In the end the best learning resources i have found as a linux beginner were online. The best bet is to download and print your own documentation until you know exactly what you want from a linux text book.

I was initially very disappointed with this book as i was hoping for a structured overview that would guide me through the learning process conceptually. However, I found this book to be pretty good when I wanted to dip in and quickly find answers on a specific topic.