Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsRead this book before you read any other Linux book. Actually, any book on Operating Systems at all.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 18, 2014
This has been an amazing book. It should have been the first thing I ever read on Linux. You might think that it's a specialist book of some kind - after all, it is only about the command line. But the command line is where it's at and the author doesn't assume you know anything about Linux. It's actually a complete introduction to Linux and at each step of the way you have a new skill you can start to apply or just something to screw around with on your computer. I mean, there's nothing in Linux that can't be done on the command line. Graphical user interfaces are just a pretty presentation of what's going on underneath. Some people might grumble at "having to learn the command line" but honestly it feels very powerful once you get the handle on it (not as hard as you'd think) and I think linux actually makes doing stuff in the terminal much more fun, intersting, and powerful than in Windows or OSX.
It starts out with navigating folders and files, copying and what-not like you could do through menus and right clicking on a GUI. Then it teaches you some cool tricks you can only do in the command line (and aren't that difficult) like making a folder for each of the letters A-Z (it happens to be sudo mkdir {A..Z} so again, not as hard as you might think). Or maybe you want to find a folder on your computer whose third letter is either a p or a q - you can't quite remember. There's a chapter on permissions which allows you to, say, make a file that is only accessible to users in the group "teachers," or maybe you just want to turn a text document (say you compiled something from C) into something your computer knows can be run. It tells you how to alter the command prompt to display pretty pictures or show a clock. There's a chapter on the very cool way Linux installs programs. It will even teach you some very basic computer programming concepts, enough to start customizing your linux, and how to install a program from source code (again, it's easier than you think).
So it really runs the gamut of all the basics of how Linux works and I think by actually typing in the commands yourself, you gain a much better understanding of the system and how it works. There are other books I'm reading about operating systems and not a lot of it really stuck or made sense until I started reading this book and messing with things myself through commands and editing files (and editing config files makes you feel like a computer wizard when you're starting out). And there's something about the way it's written, the language, the pacing, the occasionally joke that is just rare enough that it catches you off guard. My only criticism would be that the "Gentle Introduction to Vim" could have been a little more gentle. Perhaps by spacing it out over a couple of chapters to let it sink in rather than trying to remember all of the keyboard shortcuts that make vim what it is all in one chapter. But it's a minor point compared to how much I feel like I've learned reading this book.
