Customer Reviews

Red Hat Linux: The Complete Reference (Book/CD-ROM package)

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

The fact that the book doesn't live up to its claim to be a 'Complete' reference is not surprising given the depth of Linux/Unix. I did however, expect more than what I got. For instance, there is very little mention of Postgres. When talking about partitioning it mentions nothing that isn't covered in the little install book that comes with Linux, and when trying to look up how to do a search and replace with Reg expressions, it didn't mention how to reuse matched elements. In short, everytime I try to look something up in this book I find little 'reference' material and end up looking in a different book. Perhaps a better name for this book would have been, "Red Hat Linux, a cursory sampling."

Well, I know quite a bit Unix, but little about Linux specifically. This is my first book on Linux which I bought when I was installing Linux on my PC. It helps a little at the beginning for simple things which you can find on many web sites and the Linux manual (I was lazy to surf around so I bought a book). But, after just two days and my experience and demands about the system grow, this book became obsolete. I totally agree with the other reviewer: whenever I want to know something, I end up somewhere else but not in this book. Its instruction on kernel update is very incomplete, for example. For beginners, its instruction is of little use. No expanation about the specific contents of the kernel files and the strange kernel names. And it explains little about update procedure. I found the missing information very annoying throughout the whole book. It's a book of two-days' value, not worth keeping as a "complete" reference at all, even for simple things.

This book is anything but complete, including the CD-ROM. The loader for RedHat 6.2 publisher edition is extremely slow and bug-loaded.

I wouldn't say that this book is totally bad, I was able to install Linux on a PC fine the first time following the instructions. Although upon further snooping, just set your cd-rom drive to bootable and pop the cd in and it goes almost automatically. Past that, other than a couple of semi-useful appendices for commands, I found the book sorely lacking. For example, I could not find how to install programs in a .tar.gz format, which just happens to be the majority that programs come in. I do not like rpms and prefer to compile my own programs. When it came time to set up some ftp and apache, the book was almost laughable. It talked about the world wide web and that you can surf it with a program like Netscape, wow! If 400 pages of fluff like this were cut out and the price slashed 75% the book would get 3 stars from me, but do yourselves a favor and get something else.

I wouldn't say that this book is totally bad, I was able to install Linux on a PC fine the first time following the instructions. Although upon further snooping, just set your cd-rom drive to bootable and pop the cd in and it goes almost automatically. Past that, other than a couple of semi-useful appendices for commands, I found the book sorely lacking. For example, I could not find how to install programs in a .tar.gz format, which just happens to be the majority that programs come in. I do not like rpms and prefer to compile my own programs. When it came time to set up some ftp and apache, the book was almost laughable. It talked about the world wide web and that you can surf it with a program like Netscape, wow! If 600 pages of fluff like this were cut out and the price slashed 75% the book would get 3 stars from me, but do yourselves a favor and get something else.