Customer Reviews

Linux: The Complete Reference, Fifth Edition (Red Hat 7.3 DVD Included)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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This book is decent, but there doesn't seem to be a target audience that allows the book to be more cohesive. I generally found that the author went far into depth about things that I (a personal linux user as opposed to a network admin) did not care about, and only skimmed the surface of items that I found truely interesting and relevant. Moreover, the audience seems to range from someone who has never touched a keyboard (I read an explination of what he backspace key does, last night), to budding admins.

So in this edition they decided to take out all the helpful info that was in the fourth and replace it with advertisements for linux features. I think most people who have a book like this want detailed descriptions of underlying components in linux. Not ads for applications that will be outdated in a few months.

It is not the best first book of Linux or UNIX but it may be very useful if know what are you looking for. If you need quick initial training see Linux and UNIX for a beginner training suite, 4DVDs + 2CDs includes 4 Unix Academy Certifications ed.2008.

I have just read 2 or 3 chapter of this book. Its text is quite easy to understand and clear. At least I learnt from it how to set user/password in Samba. I have read 4 or 5 Linux books about setting Samba but nearly all of them just can confuse me or just can teach me how to set Samba in share level but not user level security.
And it used 2 pages to tell us how to use emacs which gave me the basic step on how to use this famous text editor.