Customer Reviews

Red Hat Linux (v 5.2) Unleashed

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(18)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

This review is for Red Hat Linux and Fedora Unleashed. When I was considering purchasing this book, I had mostly come across inaccurate reviews referring to older editions that bear no relevance to this one. I am writing this review (the first one I have EVER written) in support of this particular edition of the book.

Before I had purchased this book, I considered myself to be just an average user of Linux. Coming from years of experience in the "Windows" world, including knowledge of scripting and programming languages, I felt that I was ready to explore the Linux world. Sure, I managed to get along rather well, but there was still more that I wanted to know about Linux. This book provided me with the knowledge I needed to get to the next level.

Red Hat Linux and Fedora Unleashed is a book that no Linux wannabe expert should be without. It covers basically everything from installing and configuring a Linux workstation to writing shell and Perl scripts. I could never have done the things that I do now in Linux without the help of this book. You can tell how useful this book is just by paging through the index!

Don't get me wrong, I am still learning as I go along here. But now I have an advantage. In fact, I plan to set up a couple of Linux servers in the near future and I am looking forward to utilizing the several chapters in this book that cover server configuration.

I am up to page 190 and am extremely unimpressed with this book. So far it seems to be about 95% padding or waffling, 4% telling you to read the ReadMe's, HowTo's, Tutorials, Manpages, various websites (which any new Linux user has already found, and found wanting, hence buying a book), and maybe 1% useful information.
I wanted a book to teach me Fedora - this is not it.
I feel I have been duped by the authors and the publishers and would very much like my hard earned money back.( It goes without saying that my opinion of Amazon.com has dropped drastically also ).
I live in Africa so I have to go by the reviews I read on line. Maybe those for this book were ramped up.

Martin Williams.
Port Elizabeth.
South Africa.

I bought this book, and found in several instances it was incorrect, or just plan lacked any depth.

Example 1: Page 107 (3rd edition) talks about windows managers, and talks about CDE. Red hat has dropped CDE. Its not even on the Disk. but the book spends about 10 pages talking about it.

Example 2: the discussion of INN is very very lacking. It also, gives steps on setting it up, but doesn't go into how to implement the steps (ooppps). example: "create a new user news and add the user to the news group...." (Excuse me, but I bought this book, because I don't KNOW how do do these things).

I will be returning the book and buying a different one.

Buyer Be ware!,

Probably should have looked to WROX professional series for answers....

I was just amazed that some of the reviews were from Red Hat 5.2, and the Year 1999.

I agree with the author, you do think twice about buying a book with inaccurate reviews?

I suggest the author contact his publisher, as in most places it how much you money you have that counts. And I am sure the publisher will know who to phone to get the reviews checked.

I bought this book because it was the only book reviewing my flavor of Linux, RedHat 5.2.

It is comprehensive and expansive and includes the CDs you would get from Red Hat anyway, with the addition of the thorough book and everyday reference.

I found an article that said the fastest benchmark of a povray rendering is the Cray supercomputer costing $5.5 Million until some scientists got together and linked a harem of Pentium II Xeons for $150,000 and matched matched the Cray's time. Of course, running the Red Hat they bought out of the back of a RH Unleashed Book.

So, with all that and the tide of change, it is a prudent choice, if you ask me!

I have a cat

This is an excellent book, but only to be used for reference. Many readers will open this book and find it unorganized and unsgaped, but they do not realize that it is intended for reference. Great resources and an index that should be put to use. Don't read it cover-to-cover. Definatly a great reference book.

Linux books tend to fall into two categories:

1. How-to books for beginners
2. Reference books

I am already fairly comfortable in linux, but most of my experience is with distributions that do things differently than the "Red Hat" way. When I decided to try out Fedore Core 2, I realized I would need to either spend a lot of time online in forums, or get a book. But I didn't need a beginners book, and I wanted more than a simple reference.

I looked through many, many linux books on the shelves of my local brick & motor bookstore, but they almost all fell into one of the two catefories I mentioned above. Luckily, I then found "Red Hat Linux Fedora unleashed". This book has the perfect combination of background and reference material that somebody who has a little bit of linux experience needs. In fact, I would also recommend this book to beginners as well, because if you stick with linux you move out of the "beginner" stage fairly quickly, and would then need a book like this one. Better to have spent your $$ on this book to begin with.

Oh yeah - the index is also great. A good and usable index is a hard thing to produce. Most publishers seem to be letting software build the index and then never bother to have a human check it out. I don't need index references that point me to every single page that mentions the word or topic I'm trying to look up, but that's what you get with most linux books. For the index in "Red Hat Linux Fedora unleashed" the publisher either used a human being or has smarter indexing software.

If you're thinking of buying a Linux book, do _not_ buy this one. This book is _so_ full of errors! For example, as a part of setting up user accounts by hand, the author gives a set of instructions. Here's what's in the book (p.480):

1. cd /home/new_users_name ex. cd /home/tpowell

2. chown -R username.group ex. chown -R tpowell.user

3. chmod -R go=u, go-w

4. chmod go= .

Step 1 is correct. However, step 2 is missing something that causes it to fail and, of course, he doesn't explain what in the heck it's doing so you are totally on your own. Step 2 should read:

chown -R username.group .

That final dot is _very_ important! But he leaves it out and then leaves it up to you to figure out what is wrong! Since I'm a seasoned expert on figuring out stuff like this, I found it but I really feel sorry for a poor novice. This is the kind of thing that makes people go running back into the arms of Bill Gates!

Save your money and go to the Red Hat mirror of the Linux Documentation Project.

Aside from the installation sections, this is only a fair book. It isn't terrible, it gives snippets of information about many topics.

Unfortunately, this is all this book gives you. It offers very little detail on almost everything the book covers, leaving you in the dark at almost every section.

For example, the book describes that to disable a users account, the admin should create a tail script to do so. It then offers a few lines of text showing a tail script, and then tells you to modify the passwd file.

That's great, but what EXACTLY needs to be modified? Do I stick the tail script at the end of the user's entry? Do I have to snip out some text somewhere?

If you want some general instruction about the what Linux is capable of, this is a decent book. In terms of Linux implementation and administration however, it needs a lot of work.