Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Inadequate and inaccurate, February 17, 2001
I teach UNIX at a college in the Phoenix area. I was given this book as the school's choice for the class literature. I have since told my students to stop bringing this book and, instead, bring a different one I have chosen. This book fails to address far too much of the UNIX operating system to be of much use as a learning tool.Missing from this book are discussions on important topics such as links/symlinks, su, detailed discussions of mode/permission settings, suig/sgid program execution, terminal settings, and much more. Large type-face and excessive (unnecessary) illustrations are more the cause for its 568 pages, than is an abundance of content. Additionally, the author spends far too much time teaching the X-Windows GUI than the actual command line which is the fundamental heart of the UNIX system. My students and I have also noticed various inaccuracies with the text content. I have removed this book from the book list for my course, and wouldn't recommend it to anyone wanting to learn UNIX. What I found most disturbing was the author's own comments that he was more concerned about Amazon initially getting the credits right than he seems to be with accurately and completely presenting information regarding the UNIX operating system.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
More of an Extended Checklist than a Book, September 13, 2005
It seemed to me that the author collected a checklist of things to cover, added some details on each item, and sat back satisfied that the list was covered.
No topic is covered really well, in my opinion. I do not mean by this that each topic should have been covered exhaustively, as this is an introductory book. Rather, I mean that many topics are covered to such a low extent that there is nothing much to do with them. The reader is basically only made aware that such a topic exists, and then needs to find an alternative source for this topic.
I think the most striking example of this (one out of many), is a 10-page chapter explaining C++ from scratch. I don't see the point for this. A reader familiar with the language would be interested in linux-specific aspects of C++ (for example, linux programming environments), which are not covered. A reader unfamiliar with the language would find a 10-page chapter useless.
Curiously, the book, even when considered as an extended checklist, is not very good. I could not find any material on archiving and compressing, and had to search the Internet for this.
I Heartily recommend this book for people who enjoy spending time on Google.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Far short of value, price, March 10, 2005
From what I can tell by reading these reviews, it seems like Instructors love this book and Students hate it. I guess I'm a lucky breed who had an instructor that hates the book too. The chapters are all over the place and dont really cover anything all that well. This book is more of a roadmap of Linux, it shows you all the places you can go and kind of an example of what to do when you get there, but for the most part unless you've been in town before or have a guide, you're going to be SOL.
The most frustrating aspects come from the questions at the end of the chapter. The book loves to throw in things that either don't make sense or weren't covered in the chapter. Their little way of having you look ahead to anticipate what's coming. Ultimately, it sucks when trying to do the assignment and you have no clue where to look for the answer.
Making matters worse, the book ships with some light-weight publisher's version of the Linux distro Fedora Core. Which is ALREADY OUT OF DATE. If you buy this book, go get yourself at least the latest version of Fedora, but I'd reccomend SuSE. The book fails to give you any comparison between distros and just assumes you'll be using Red Hat. Big mistake there, no NOT use the CDs that come with the book.
There's also lots of things that the book leaves out. For example, KDE. While it says that it covers "Both KDE and Gnome", basically it's coverage of KDE is like the coverage of Apple in a Windows book. They essentially tell you to be on the lookout because you might see it one day. Other than that, nothing.
Lastly, the killer on this book is the Price. $70 is far too much to pay for something like this. I love how Course Technology feels they can take the bare minimum out of a good Linux How-to book, stick in a bunch of questions and exercises and call it a text book. Then include a CDROM to seal the deal. While the book looks worthwhile at a hefty 641 pages, you'll be somewhat surprised to see that the chapters are pretty short, and I'd be willing to bet that about 40% of the book is just the Hands-On Projects, Discovery Exercises, and Review/definitions. Considering there's maybe 400 pages of actual content. When you consider the price of the book, you're paying about 25 cents for each page of actual learning material. All for stuff you can find in other books for cheaper or find yourself online.
So why give this book 2 stars instead of 1? The book has its aspects. It's done great layout wise and it does have a lot of commands in here that can be used as refrence. Somethings are covered extensively, so the book isn't a total waste.
That being said, don't get this book unless you have to.
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