Customer Reviews

Red Hat Fedora 4 Unleashed

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Perhaps the most popular instantiation of linux has been the Red Hat Fedora. If you are inclined to adopt it, then the book offers comprehensive support, whether you are brand new to linux, or an experienced linux sysadmin. Along related lines, the book can be used for either sysadmin purposes, or by a general user.

For the latter, don't be taken aback by the size of the book. You do not have to sequentially plumb through most of the book before applying it. Many chapters can be read in any order, depending on your needs.

For general purpose usage, Chapter 8 is worth looking at. It covers surfing, email and reading newsgroups. The first two tasks were, and remain, the killer apps of the Internet. For surfing, the book recommends Firefox, which might be described as an improved Mozilla (from which it was derived). Somewhat surprisingly, given the 1100 odd pages of the book, only a few pages are devoted to Firefox. The authors may have taken the view that Firefox is so simple to use that there was little else they could add about it.

For sysadmins, the book offers help with crucial and common tasks like running an Apache web server or a database server. For server side applications, open source solutions running on linux are a very attractive configuration to many, and the book addresses this need. The default database server that arrives with Fedora is MySQL. Which is the most popular open source database server. However, the book also includes guidelines for using PostgreSQL.

Looking for a single volume that touches on just about everything related to Red Hat Fedora? Here you go... Red Hat Fedora 4 Unleashed by Paul Hudson, Andrew Hudson, Bill Ball, and Hoyt Duff.

Contents:

Part 1 - Installation and Configuration: Introducing Fedora; Preparing to Install Fedora; Installing Fedora; Post-Installation Configuration; First Steps with Fedora

Part 2 - Fedora Desktop: The X Window System; Managing Software and System Resources; On the Internet - Surfing the Web, Writing Email, and Reading the News; Productivity Applications; Multimedia Applications; Printing with Fedora; Games

Part 3 - System Administration: Managing Users; Automating Tasks; System Resources; Backing Up, Restoring, and Recovery; Network Connectivity; Internet Connectivity

Part 4 - Fedora As a Server: Apache Web Server Management; Administering Database Services; File and Print; Remote File Serving with FTP; Handling Electronic Mail; Setting Up a Proxy Server; Remote System Access with SSH and Telnet; Managing DNS; LDAP; News Servers and Mailing Lists

Part 5 - Programming Linux: Using Perl; Working with Python; Writing PHP Scripts; C/C++ Programming Tools for Fedora

Part 6 - Fedora Housekeeping: Securing Your Machines; Performance Tuning; Command-line Masterclass; Advanced Yum; Managing the File System; Kernel and Module Management

Part 7 - Appendix: Fedora and Linux Internet Resources; Index

At over 1100 pages, this isn't the book you'd give to a typical Windows user to make the switch over to Linux... :-)

As you can see from the contents, Fedora Unleashed touches on nearly every area of Linux at some level. Using this book alone, you could easily get a Linux server and/or a Linux desktop environment up and running on your computer. Depending on your particular needs, you could then dive into server related topics like file sharing, LDAP, or running a web server. If you're just wanting to break out of the Windows monopoly and run a desktop OS not controlled by Microsoft, you would spend more time in Part 2 where the desktop Linux environment is covered. While you could definitely find more detailed books on specific areas of Linux, Unleashed allows you to get a working knowledge of a broad swath of the subject.

The book also comes with a DVD containing the Fedora 4 distribution so you can easily start to dive right into your own Linux build. This definitely beats having to find, download, and burn a number of CD .iso files before you can get started. While the downloads are free, having all the media ready to use adds to the value of the book...

Since I haven't yet upgraded to Red Hat Fedora 4, having this book around will put that task higher on my priority list... Good volume for anyone wanting to learn and understand Linux...

just wanted to say how impressed I have been with the Unleashed series of books, I worked on an old Linux unleashed book years ago and lately I have been training SuSE and RedHat courses for a Novell platinum partner training company in South Africa, I have tried other books like the SuSE bible and have not been very satisfied since they are not comprehensive enough. I bought your book on Fedora 4 unleashed the other day and am pleased to say that it is still the same quality, easy to read and very comprehensive, that is why I recommend the unleashed series of books as the first choice to all my students. When you are in a training environment and you sometimes have very little time to prep a new course, having a book like this take a lot of pressure off you.

This is a good book for the linux "newbie" or someone who is famaliar with other flavors of linux and want to brush up on this new version of Fedora. The book gets really in depth but I realized that everything I was looking for was already self explanatory on the desktop. The core linux command line stuff isn't there but you should buy a book that contains that information before tackling a server build first anyway.

Final point: If looking for basic linux command line information, buy a linux command line book.

If looking to learn the new points of Fedora Core 4 buy this book but play with the "GUI" and you'll figure it out in 10 minutes.

Fedora--being a free and non-retail distribution--now has a definitive tome to go with it. No matter the distro, a printed manual or any printed matter is of infinite benefit.

Paul Hudson takes us from a brief overview, to installation and system administration tasks. Though very comprehensive it's great for beginner and pro alike. And if you're new to Linux and Fedora, it's best to read the book through as a matter of course. But after you have mastered the basics the book becomes at once an excellent reference book. Just turn to the section that contains the answer to the problem at hand.

If you've decided to use Fedora or are simply interested in finding out what all of the comotion is about surrounding this distro, this is the book to buy.

Get it today and be on your way to Fedora mastery in no time...

This is a great book to those of you brand new to the wonderfull world of linux or those of you experienced. I originaly bought this book thinking it would be a a total linux newbie tutorial, I was slightly wrong. It will walk you through the installation, and basic setups but other than that I have noticed that it is a huge reference guide, great none the less it will teach you a lot. I have used it quite a bit just over the first 3 days of getting it. Great guide for anyone willing to try Fedora

I didn't find this book useful for finding what I'm looking for fast. Commands and Linux Topics are scattered about the book in different section. The directory and index had little use for finding what I'm looking for, a quick web search turned up faster focused results. This book touches the surface in order to get a novice going but thats about it.

It seems the authors of this book could not make up their minds if they were writing a reference book or a tutorial. This book fails as a tutorial by not spending enough time on basic subjects and is too disorganized to be an effective reference tool. There is a lot of information in there but good luck trying to find out how to do something specific.