Customer Reviews

Red Hat RPM Guide

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Its been a long time since Maximum RPM was written. In the mean time the rpm package tool has grown from a command-line tool and C programming API into much more. Its become the base for many linux distributions, and companies are using it to deploy linux throughout their IT infrastructure.

The parts of redhat's new RPM book that I most appreciated have been the in-depth examination of the modern rpm .spec file, from which packages get built, and the descriptions of the perl and python API's for the rpm interface. Documentation for these areas have been lacking, and this book covers them thoroughly.

This book worked very well as a reference to aide my company's linux deployment.

Speaking only for myself,

-Peter

Having used rpms for several years I bought this book with the goal of learning to create an RPM for a specific application. This book provides very little of value in this regard.

Of 4 sections in the book, the first and largest (120 pages) is devoted to how to use the rpm command itself, but really provides no information that isn't in the man page on a standard RedHat distribution.

The second section covers how to create an RPM, and was the section that I was interested in. The section continues in the same tone as the previous section, apparently failing to realize that programmers will be using the rpmbuild command and some rudiment of basic knowledge can be assumed. Worse no explanation is given of the process that rpmbuild uses, and much of the pertinent information is skipped altogether. For instance use of the %pre %post commands is documented only in the appendix at the end of the book, and not in this section at all. (And the index has no mention of this feature at all.)

The 3rd section covers the RPM API, but I could imagine no reason why anyone other than the writers of the rpm and rpmbuild tool would want to use this, and they would certainly not want to use this book. At the least the book should have a compelling rationale for why this might be useful, and once again the level of the tone seems inappropriate for some reasonably technical information.

The 4th section is called "Extending RPM" and covers topics such as cross platform development. I never read this, but I can imagine that some might find this useful.

The appendicies do provide useful information.

it's been thirteen years since maximum rpm & seven years since this book but it's still relevant for anyone running RHEL 5 or CentOS 5. if you absolutely need a hard copy version of this book don't hesitate to buy it here. i'm not going to go into the details as to why, the other reviewers have done a great job.

if you don't feel like shelling out $60+ for a $20 book just google the book's title, it's been published on the web by the author.