Customer Reviews

Red Hat Linux 9 For Dummies

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I cannot thank and commend the authors enough (John "Maddog" Hall and Paul G. Sery) for their outstanding job in writing Red Hat Linux 9 for Dummies (RHL9D). I have been looking for a quick and comprehensive book for Linux beginners like this one for a long time. This book may say it's for dummies, but after you are done with this, you will feel like a genius. Trust me, you NEED this book like Osama bin Laden needs a good shower and a fat missile to the arse!

I bought the boxed set (personal ed.) of Red Hat 9, and was able to get by with the manual included there for installing Red Hat (since it is pretty easy), but using the Red Hat desktop features is another story because the boxed set does not give you a user's guide (well, you do get a CD ROM that has the user's documentation, but who wants to wade through that??)! RHL9D will expertly guide you through the install and then show you how to "use" Red Hat 9. After all, if you are like me, the very first thing you want to do after installing an OS is to use music CDs (including burning CD's and watching DVD's), MP3's, games, e-mail, and surfing the Internet. RHL9D does it all and fast too!

Coming from the crash-prone, pay-for-everything MS Windows world, I was very skeptical in thinking RHL9D could quickly replace Windows. Red Hat spanked Windows plus a whole lot more (except crash)! Besides including a myriad of "free" utilities and games, you also get OpenOffice that is the equivalent of MS Office, and it can open your MS documents!! I have been waiting for the day when I could lose Windows for Linux. That day is here and I cannot be happier!

Don't worry, you can still use MS Windows because Linux partitions a section of your hard drive for it's own use, thus giving you a dual-boot system (Windows+Linux). I recommend buying a second hard drive and installing Red Hat there, but you don't have to.

In short, Red Hat Linux is all it's cranked up to be and much more-thanks to this book! This book is worth 3x the asking price for saving me the headaches and frustration of wading through nerdy tomes of Unix/Linux jargon offered in other books just to do a simple Linux task via the dreaded command line! It beats the hell of wading through the Linux CD-ROM documentation or "man" pages too!

I cannot praise this book enough. By the way, before you go out and buy Red Hat Linux 9-DON'T! The authors have also included the personal edition here for free (minus the source code CD's which you don't need anyway unless you are a Linux guru, and if that were the case, why would you be interested in this book??). You cannot ask for more than that! Author's, if you're reading this, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!

This book is great for getting the newest version of Red Hat and getting step-by-step installation instructions, but the rest of the book does not get heavily into using Linux other than for connecting to the internet and using some basic programs. I was hoping for some stuff on shell programming, for example, but nothing at all like that appears in this book. Still, I would've been lost as far as partitioning and installing without this book. It just became a bit useless afterward.

This started off for the newbie but quickly assumes you have run Linux before. Not a lot of detail in the area of text commands which is like old DOS and the core of the system. It did help in setup of the included CDs which I did not have a problem installing. All of the Linux distributions are quickly being snatched up by corporations making them more controlling just like the Microsoft empire. What every happened to Free or the idea of open source?

I spent alot of time trying to get the included disks to install on various computers, but none of them would boot off the included CD. I finally went to the Dummies website, and found that the CDs are MISLABELED - Disk one is actually disk 2, and disk 2 is actually disk 1. To install, you therefore need to place the second CD in the drive first and boot off that DVD. It would be nice if Amazon would place that info near the top of the listing so customers would know when ordering.

It is a good book but too soon out of date. I had Red Hat Linux 9 and managed to get it installed and setup using the book but shortly there after an upgrade came out which made the book somewhat out-of-date. I would not recommend purchasing this book; nor would I recommend most computer books. They are too expensive for the little use you will get from them. Also; the Linux developers seem to have shot themselves in the foot. They had a good product which to compete with Microsoft Windows but they did not pursue it. Now you cannt even find Linux operating system.

This is a good guide if you are planning to install Linux. However, the version of Linux that comes on CD (RedHat 9.0) is SOOO!! easy to install this book proves to be a waste of money.

During installation RedHat 9 asks you what you would like to install and it even tell you what the packages come with. My 60 year old mother was able to install it without this book or any help at all. (And she can't even use Windows that well)

I wouldn't suggest buying this book unless you need the computer so watered down for you that it becomes a trouble just to find the "any" key (in this case you probably shouldn't be installing Linux anyway)

You could spend less time looking up the information in the book, on the internet rather than spending time and money purchasing this book.

I'm sorry, but I have to say that this book was NOT a good read overall. I was hoping for more.

The two reasons I bought this book, it is the cheapest way to buy linux from a store, so I didn't have to waste 3 days downloading, and I am a linux newbie. Like others have said, the book is good for calming any jitters you have installing linux, but once linux is setup and you establish an internet connection, the book is no longer useful.

My suggestion is simply spend a little more, you will get the same detailed instructions for installing, it will most likely come with redhat 9, and you will have something to refer to whenever you need help. I still feel it was a good buy, but there is just no reason I would ever again need to refer to it.