Customer Reviews

Red Hat Linux 7 Unleashed with CDROM

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Overall this is a good reference book. It is not the type thing that you are going to sit down and read cover to cover. Some chapters you will read all of and some you will just use to find specific items. It is probably a little advanced for someone new to Linux and a little basic for the more advanced user. It is for the intermediate type, which I am and it is great so far.

This book is as good as the previous versions of Linux Unleashed. Maybe a little better since it is only concentrating on the RH versions. Gives quick introductory to a lot of configurations. I think this is helpfull because at least you can make it work without digging through sometimes Illegible README and INSTALL documentation. Sometimes I use the information from the book to try and understand what the author of the README pages is talking about. The basic configurations for Apache, Samba and Networking are there (NIS is there also but didn't try it). Once you get this setup going you can tweak it and see whether it did what you wanted or it crashed. You get a baseline working system though. One little tid-bit of warning. I tried to use the disks provided with the book to upgrade a system and it stalled 3-times in a row. I put in a RH installation disk from RH and the upgrade went fine. So there may be a few kinks on the disks which are provided with this book. I have used the book supplied disks to install individual rpm packages and they seem to work fine.

Okay, I picked up this tome and noticed that it had a lot of what I was looking for and then some. I don't know that I'll ever use the programming sections - excpet, perhaps, Perl and C, but I have good books on those already.

I have used this book in three ways. 1) After a system crash and I could not restore my filesystems, it has the commands to do the file checking and get the inodes straightened out. I have probably had to do this on four or five systems because of users must turning things off. (Yes, I have the page and the commands highlighted. 2) Initial installation is pretty easy with Red Hat, but there were times when I did not know what the things were. The book provided better explanations than I could find in many of the on-line documents that are based on the how-to. 3) After a set-up, I used the book to help me configure X-Windows for the new monitor.

Now, I have several years of Unix experience so I'm not looking for how to do an ls command. I am looking for how to make the services work, what this brand of unix calls various files, and how to keep a system managed.

Let me say this bluntly, THIS BOOK WAS NOT WRITTEN FOR BEGINNERS. But, for the person with some guts, or some experience with systems, you will probably find this as valuable a tool as I have...

I have a UNIX background and wanted to dabble in Linux at home, setting up a Linux server for a home network. I picked up this book (as well as a few others) and found that this is the one I always refer to when I need to get something done. It is a great reference for "how-to's" like how to install something, change network settings, configure mail etc. Even for very complicated subjects like Samba and Apache, this book gives you just enough to get you going. Highly recommended as a reference, but I probably wouldn't recommend it to complete newbies just struggling to learn what the OS is all about.

I bought this book because I wanted one of the latest distributions and thought it would be nice to accompany it with a good reference book. This book is well over 1000 pages , and you would think there is plenty of stuff in it right? WRONG. Just browse it a bit carefully (something I didn't do and regretted) and you 'll see they just fill pages over pages with useless listings and screenshots! They list the whole httpd.conf file in 24 pages for example(p.393-416). Sometimes it makes you mad when you realise you spent your money for stuff like "Now press Enter, and you 'll see:" and get a couple of pages with listings you could also read from your very screen.

My suggestion is : BUY RUNNING LINUX and a separate distribution instead. Those guys have written a real book and not a collection of listings and manual samples like the guys with "RH 7 Unleashed"!

I am a senior engineer for managed network security operations, and fairly new to Linux. I bought this book to gain familiarity with installing, configuring, and optimizing Red Hat Linux 7, specifically. I recommend this book as a reference, but don't rely on it too heavily if you need information on kernel 2.4 features. Since Red Hat Linux 7 installs 2.2.16-22 by default, with a pre-2.4 kernel as an option, this situation is understandable.

The book seems marketed to more advanced users, with the words "from knowledge to mastery" on the cover and the warning "user level: intermediate-advanced" on the back. However, I would place the book squarely in the beginner-intermediate bracket. There's far too much introductory material to qualify this book as an advanced guide to Red Hat Linux. For the sake of completeness, I appreciate the authors' inclusion of basic material. As a beginner, I was "introduced" and not "overwhelmed." Gurus, though, will want to look elsewhere.

Chapter 24, Linux C/C++ Programming Tools, was my favorite section. The concepts in this chapter seemed central to the Linux experience. I was surprised to see "make" and "gcc" explained so late (pages 772-3) in a book of this size. Most parts of the book recommend installing software using rpm's. When rpm's are not available, the guidance in chapter 24 can be critical. Chapter 27, Configuring and Building Kernels, was also significant for the same reasons.

Being a security professional, I was not surprised by chapter 23, System Security. To address this topic more thoroughly, I plan to read Bob Toxen's book.

The bottom line is this: Red Hat Linux 7 Unleashed is a solid work, but it's probably better titled "Red Hat Linux 7 Introduced." I'm sure the authors (who are all very Linux-savvy) could write a more advanced follow-up.

It is often hard to write a book for intermediate users. Covering so many different topics just make it harder. The book gives overviews for many operations that are possible in RedHat. However, too little is provided apart from listing commands and config files, sometime with no explanations. Too many times I have found my self reading HOW-TOS instead - what's the point of having the book?

I suggest getting 'Running Linux' (good general) and 'Linux in a nutshell' (good reference) from O'Reilly. This book is too vague for beginners, and of little value to intermediate-advanced users.

This is a great book. However, since I'm a Linux newbie, it left me a little in the dark. It coves most of the popular Linux topics (ex. whole chapters devoted to SMTP, FTP, sendmail, Apache, DNS/DHCP), yet leave a great deal out about sys admin, and the basics of USING Linux. There is a command listing in the back (Appendix B), but that doesn't help much when you're a complete newbie. (I shouldn't say complete, I've been a Win user/programmer since I was 7 years old...) I would recommend this book for people who already have a grasp on the very basics, and want more info on intermediate stuff. This book makes a great reference/how-to.

This book was my first foray into the world of Linux and I found too many errors for this to be a good start for a newbie. Case in point is Chapter 20 on ipchains. The sample firewall script is inclomplete (missing a definition of $ME in the constants section) and contains basic errors (such as showing an option as "-I" when it should be "-i"). Most galling is the publisher's website. There is no section on errata to undo some of the mistakes that made it into print. Moreover, unless your web browser supports vbscript the web site will not load. It requires dissecting the start page source to find a way into the site.

Buy the book for the disks, but expect to spend some time extricting yourself from the mistakes in it if you follow all the author's examples.

The book I received does not match the sample pages that are displayed.