Customer Reviews

UNIX and LINUX Answers!: Certified Tech Support

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I would actually rate this book at 3.5 out of 5.

This very readable book introduces a newbie Unix user to several basic tools' use with some tips and tricks. Home directory file management and backup, printing and printer management, terminal customization, vi, XWindows and the fvwm window manager, running programs and a little job management, LAN messaging, file sharing, awk and sed are covered.

I think this book is one of a kind, but probably everyone who reads it will wish there were more. Instead of 300 pages, it should be 400-500 pages. Almost everything that is covered could be covered more. Even if the book must aim only at users, it would be approriate to add introductions to or sections on: the general Unix filesystem hierarchy, CDE and KDE window managers (replacing the section on the antiquated fvwm), StarOffice and/or WordPerfect, gzip and bzip2, and Netscape.

But, given the number of people that are installing free or somewhat free versions of Linux, Solaris, BSD and SCO Unixes on their home systems, and given that such things as the relative merits of SMB and NFS are already discussed in the book, it is beyond doubt that the audience is not primarily users but users/newbie sysadmins. So sections on common TCP/IP setup files, SAMBA and NFS setup should be added to the next revision, as well as on kernel (re)configuration, the make and rpm commands and JDK/JRE 2 setup, XFree86 setup (mention video setup and wheel-mice), library control, and various Unices' administration tools (SAM, admintool, linuxconf, SMIT, etc). This could easily be covered and bring the book to no more than 500-600 pages. It's only 300 now.

In short, I think the book is a really great start and is worth buying and worth completing.

If you are a newbie to UNIX this book is very useful.The presentation is by question & answer,making it useful while "hands-on" with UNIX.It helps you to gain speed with the esssential commands.

Coverage on the vi editor is good.Shell programming & Regular expressions could be covered in more detail.