Customer Reviews

Practical Linux

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

 

 

This book is one of the rare guides which is organize not by what the author knows but what are the typical problems you (the reader) have to solve. I would call it "How to.." book. Almost every time when I need to mount the disk, add the device I found exact instructions how to do it and it worked.

I am not very experienced Linux user (< 2 years) and I found this book just right for me.

This book has repeatedly saved me when I needed information that the man pages are too arcane to provide. I used the book for practical suggestions on how to use the grep utility to search for multiple terms. And, it was the only UNIX book I could find that gave practical and meaningful suggestions about how to configure the modem via the command line.

Get this book, it will save you a lot of time!

685 pages divided by 31 chapters and 6 big parts. The big parts are: Linux basics (entering commands, using text editors, etc, everything on the command line), Configuring your system (from the command line), The X window system (with an overview of multimedia tools), Connecting to the ISP (and using email, FTP, browsers, telnet and IRC), system administration (basic programming and shell programming, boot managers, users, network connections, daemons, FS, kernel,...) and appendices.

This book pretends to teach how to do things not why you need to do this or that. So this is a practical book and, because linux is evolving fast, it is outdated.

Another problem of the book is that there are many authors, each responsable for a chapter or so, and there is no good coordination between them. This brings some repeated things and a feeling of no constant evolution in complexity or evolution on the presentation himself.