Customer Reviews

Linux A-Z

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Cornes begins with very basic material on commands and system administration. There are useful hints here; as a beginner, I got a lot of help from it. The sections on piping and IPC helped me in understanding how the whole system works, and in using it more effectively. There are interesting programming examples, but no discussion of how to compile and debug a program; in fact, the words "compile", "gcc" and "gdb" are not in the index. I was puzzled by the section on kernel modules and device drivers because it gives instructions on inserting your code into the kernel sources and building a new kernel, which I don't think is the best approach for beginners or for trying out little programming exercises. If I had not previously read Rubini's book on this topic, this would have given me the impression that device driver development under Linux is much more difficult than it needs to be, and that running a program with my own modules on another machine would require first rebuilding that machine's kernel.

I read the first 2/3 of this book on an airplane to learn more about Linux. If you've never worked with Linux (or unix in general) the introduction may be too terse, but was just right for me. It provided me with a good refresher of standard Unix command line commands with examples of how to use them as well as covering topics I never bothered to learn (like using VI). There are sections on installation, using peripherals, system administration, and XWindows, but they seemed a bit brief to me and are certainly not comprehensive step-by-step instructions to all the intricacies of the topics. More like overviews with specific examples to the most common tasks you might encounter (e.g. setting up a user account manually in the sys admin section). The installation section seemed a bit out of date with its references to floppies and 504mb HDs, but served its purposes. About 1/3 of the book is about programming in C in the Linux environment which I admit I didn't read.

The preface to the book says something about its intended purpose which is geared as a kind of university CS introductory textbook to Linux. If you take it as that kind of book it's pretty good, but I wouldn't recommend it to computer novices or someone with no prior experience with a unix environment.

I would recommend this book for Linux or Unix beginner because they can learn some basic commands and system programming like signal handling, sockets and etc. One drawback is you must know C language in order to read some chapters of this book.

I rated this book 3 stars mainly because I am already an experienced user in UNIX systems.

I use this book mainly because it covers some basic about Unix System Programming.

This book covers an overview of Linux including commands, shell scripts and system calls [...]

The book classes itself as a text book, which is ok for entry level classes in Unix/Linux. But being a A to Z book it lacks the depth necessary for serious study. So for anyone who wants an overview of Linux, this book will do quite nicely

While searching for books about ulcerative colitis, this title popped up on the search results list ... this is a computer book and has no relevance to ulcerative colitis!