Customer Reviews

Mastering Linux

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

 

 

I am a professor of Computer Science and I have been a UNIX user for a very long time. I got Wang's book, Mastering Linux, several months ago. Whether you are an experienced programmer, casual Linux user, or a beginner, you will find "Mastering Linux" user friendly yet comprehensive. Beginners will find chapters 1 through 4 very useful especially the Linux Primer chapter and the chapter on the interactive usage of the shell. These chapters provide a solid start and get users into the subject very quickly. Lunix users will benefit from the variety of useful applications, commands, and filters provided and discussed in details in the book. Programmers would love the coverage of a wide range of applications from writing shell scripts to Internet programming. Although the book covers many topics in depth, it is still written in an easy way to follow making it very useful. I strongly recommend this book.

I am a faculty member at RIT and teach courses in system administration. I am always on the lookout for texts that go beyond the usual Linux bible type topics to discuss in a very concise fashion the many sides of Linux and its use. I greatly enjoy Prof. Wang's style of writing and the fact that this text goes beyond the regular topics to give students an introduction to Linux as both an operating system and a development platform. The thing that I particularly enjoy is that rather than try to cover every detail of every topic he covers (an impossible task given the changing nature of the technology) this text introduces students to many topics, gets them up and running and then lets them figure things out on their own. As an example of this his chapter on writing shell scripts does not pretend to be the last word on shell scripts (that is for much thicker tomes) but this chapter gives students enough to get started writing shell scripts and points them in the direction of uses for shell scripts and then moves on.

For me, this is the right approach and I intend to use this text in several classes.

I'm a Windows person and this book helped me much more than any other in learning Linux! Definitely worth the money.