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Getting Started In Linux
In previous posts, I've asked for the Slashdot community to help me identify good books and websites for developers and I thought the response was really useful. This time, I'd like to ask you all for your recommendations for great Linux beginner books and also what you think is the best way of showing off Linux on TV. Read on for more info ...
I do this thing twice on month on TechTV's "The Screen Savers" where I try to show off something neat about Linux and Open Source software. At the end of each segment, I give out my email address for people to send questions. The question I get most is "What book should I get to help me learn Linux?" I have a couple of books that I do recommend, but I want to hear what you guys think so I can link to this conversation and have it be available for everyone to refer to.
Additionally, any tips on what you guys would think would make good open-source oriented TV and make people really want to try out Linux would be appreciated.
I found Slackware unleashed an excellent Slack book for beginners.
O'Reilly of course! :)
Linux in a Nutshell, concise, to the point, reference manual for just getting stuff done.
Guess what? I got a fever! And the only prescription.. is more cowbell!
The fourth edition of Running Linux came out this month. Great for beginners.
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
Mark Sobell's A Practical Guide to Linux is the best beginner's book on Linux I've ever found. After reading this book, all the man pages and HowTos finally started making sense.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
Here are some sites you will find useful which are going beyond newbie level.
/ rtfm.mit.edu/pub/faqs/unix-faqm /autobook/ (automake autoconf book)n elnewbies.org (kernel info)a t/booksIndex.html
www.linuxdoc.org (Linux documentation project)
www.xml.com/ldd/chapter/book (linux device drivers 2nd edition)
www.advancedlinuxprogramming.com
ftp:/
sources.redhat.co
www.scyld.com/network (network device drivers)
linuxassembly.org
linuxsocket.org
ker
freebooks.boom.ru
www.maththinking.com/bo
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
This was the book I read before even touching a Linux terminal. It was an invaluable lesson in the ways of Linux and provides a nice gentle intro for new users (and by new, I mean new to Linux, not computing. A good deal of technical understanding is required to appreciate this book. Not for Grandma is what I'm trying to say...). The 4th Edition just came out so it's all up to date again, and I would reccomened it to anyone interested in, well, Running Linux. This book is much more useful to a new user than Linux in a Nutshell since it is a narrative guide to learning Linux, and not a reference book like Nutshell.
Um, VMware makes a Windows version
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
Here's my first two books I bought, and why I like them. First of all, for any distro: Running Linux, latest edition you can get. Why? It is a book you can read cover to cover. It has some scary stories of the old days of installation in the beginning. You realize how easy it has gotten. Then you will learn the many different ways to do the same thing. You don't have to be on a computer to learn from this book. If you are using Red Hat, then grab Red Hat Linux Unleashed. Why? This has MUCH more specific information. It's not something you can read cover to cover, you read the different sections as you need to learn them. In general though, I've never found a bad O'Reilly book...
Some of the books I have on my shelf are:
-O'Reilly:Linux in a Nutshell (good reference, somewhat bad as you need to know command)
-Sam's: Slackware Unleashed
-Coriolis open Press: Linux System Administration Black Book
-Sam's: Linux Complete Command Reference
Finally:
- Sam's: Maximum Linux Security
Go to http://sunsite.dk/linux-newbie/ and get the Linux Newbie Administrator's Guide.
:)
I've bought different linux books in the past to try and get me started, and none were as good as the LNAG. Best of all - it's free! Read it online, or download it and print it off at work to piss off your co-workers.
- Dave
There are two seasons in my world - Hockey and Construction
Graham Glass is a skilled writer who is capable of introducing complex topics and commands easily to the reader, regardless of their skill level. His book benefited me greatly, and even allowed my father to gain a good footing in unix commands and philosophy.
I have recommended this book to numerous people over the years, to people who just wanted some familiarity with unix commands, to people who were interested in learning Linux, to students looking for interesting things to delve into, and to many others. The book has benefited them all. Although it is not directly a Linux book, it is exceptional at providing the tools necessary to use any unix-like system. This makes this book a wonderful reference or a great starting out point if you're just beginning.
In other words, I highly recommend it.
---
"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
Aside from whatever Linux-specific books get recommended here, one of the best investments you can make in the transition out of rank UNIX-beginner status is "UNIX Power Tools" published by O'Reilly. Its title is really a misnomer as it's actually an excellent book that teaches you all the finer points (which are not really all that "fine" if you really want to make UNIX work for you) about using UNIX. You don't at all have to be an "advanced"/"power" user and in fact, I'd argue that the greatest benefit from reading can be derived by those less experienced with UNIX. If you want to *understand* what you're doing in a UNIX system, with information that most certainly applies to Linux, get/read a copy of this book.
man info
I've always found man pages to be somewhat lacking in depth. They're great for looking up a limited set of information about a command or topic and, don't get me wrong, a resource that can't be done without. Something else to point new users to are texinfo documents. The standards info textutils, info fileutils and info bash are something every newbie should be made aware of.
I just noticed your comment was geared towards AIX, so I guess this doesn't apply (not sure there), but texinfo for Linux I highly recommend.
http://www.linuxnewbie.org
Don't think anyone posted that yet.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
They are good suggestions, but the links are part of Amazon's affiliate program. If someone clicks them and then buys the books, the poster is going to get a cut of it.
live(free) || die;
The best beginners guide is definitely a trusted tutor. If you have a knowledgeable friend to help you get started, thats usually better than any book. Just make sure they don't have you run an obfuscated rm -rf /...
Linux Format magazine a British mag it is expensive, but is a great magazine for beginers, it has great tutorials, a great question and answer section. The mag even comes with a CD or DVD full of apps to try out, the DVD version even has a few iso's each month with full distros, its about $15 for DVD edition and I think $12 or $13 for CD version. I use to just read it at the book store, and buy it if there was really something I wanted like a disto, but the last few months they have been putting it in a clear sealed type (porno) bag. I am not sure if both version are sealed like this. It probably to keep people from snaking the CD's, but I figure if you can't look throgh the mag to decide if you want to buy it, that makes it kinda hard to justify spending $15 on a magazine.
Linux journal is a good magazine but not quite for beginers. Linux magazine definetly not for beginers.
Chris, I've seen you on The Screen Savers several times, and I think you do a very good job talking about Linux. The one thing that sticks out in my memory about your appearances is that the fonts you are using on that laptop are just terrible! They're blocky, aliased, and just plain ugly.
Now, I am well aware that the fonts have no bearing on the quality of the operating system, but newbies will be put off by the less than attractive fonts. It's so easy to set this stuff up that you should never show Linux in anything less than a first-rate configuration.
If you can't upgrade your installation to use AA fonts, then either reinstall with RH 8.0, or get someone to loan you another laptop you can keep in TV-ready condition.
I've used a bunch and this and O'Reilly are the best. Sobell has more examples and, while it's an older book, it covers quite a bit of the important stuff. He's also coming out with a new version for RedHat 8.0 too...look for it about _now_ on the shelves. I floundered through the Sam's book and 2 of the various "bible" versions before finding Sobell. This is a great book and I'm sure the new one will be just as good. The only down side to the old one is that it's mainly command line, rather than GUI. The difference is that I was using it when I was still a newbie---and it made sense. If users can't do _some_ things at the command line why are they using Linux anyway? ;-)
Agreed -- but he was also asking for good examples of Open Source goodness for TV. That's what I had in mind.
Carousel is a lie!
A lot of people are recommending "Running Linux", but I never found that one I wanted to refer to most of the people who ask me.
Sobell's "Practical Linux" is good, as someone noted. Lasser's "Think Unix" is also excellent, and the only text I know of that does such a good job of explaining why Unix is *different*, not just in command names but in philosophy and structure. It's the grammer to Unix, where most other texts are only the vocabulary.
I also used to recommend the install and reference guides for Mandrake's distro, as I found it one of the better newbie guides around. I haven't read it over in a few major versions, though, so I don't know if this is still true.
I don't think that people who don't want to learn to use the CLI will ever be happy with Linux in its present state. These types of users should just stick with Windows or MacOSX if they aren't willing to try to learn the CLI.
You have to learn the CLI if you want to use Linux in any sort of reasonable fashion. How could you possibly deal with, for instance, securing Linux without the CLI?
GUIs in general are pretty clunky for quite a few tasks (Linux GUIs especially), and the CLI is not. We should be teaching newbies to use each when it's appropriate, not to rely on clicking some magic boxes.
Red Hat is THE de facto best newbie Linux distro now as far as I'm concerned, and you can't go wrong with the Red Hat Linux 8 Bible. This, in combination with O'Reilly's Linux in a Nutshell is all you need to get started with Linux. You've got the RH book for your GUI, distro-specific stuff and you've got Nutshell for all the command line stuff. Any gaps in this combination can be filled in with man pages/websites/IRC/bulletin boards/usenet/etc.
Chris
I'd hardly call Mozilla an odd-ball product considering many, many sites have already made changes to accomodate it and the very similar Netscape 6.x 7.x series. My bank, Bank of America, somehow found it useful to make its online banking site Mozilla compatible. Maybe said parent post should consider a different bank if Online Banking is so important to him.
Make sure you do a trial first. I've tried the service twice and found it slow and sometimes buggy. The selection of books is okay. I have access to a books24x7 corporate account through my employer, and it is a slightly more polished service with about the same selection of tech books. Neither of these services is something I'd pay for yet.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
That's interesting. I've rarely found the texinfo pages to be of any real use to me when a manpage fails.
/usr/share/doc/packagename. If the manpage fails me at all, this is where I go first. The documentation that came with a program is often the most useful documentation you're going to find, especially because the Readme's and the like often have a lot of quick notes in them. The changelogs have tons of good info too. Of course, to be able to use these docs requires knowing what program you're looking for in the first place, which requires some experience, but it's by far the most useful documentation that's physically on my system.
I don't know how it is for other distros, but every debian package puts its documentation in
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
i'm just waiting for become a billionaire like bill gates for dummies . . . . .
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
Oh yes, and find a Linux user you can ask for help when you get stuck!
When mentioning computer books, I freak at the thought. Just like when I was in college, the prices of college texts, and computer texts are too rich for my blood.
Until I discovered Computer Book Works. Too good to be true. They have new titles at decent discounts. But once a new edition comes out, or if the title is at all old, out comes the price hatchet!
This most awesome bookstore has good Gnu/Linux books, certification books, programming books, any kind of computer books, and most of them are 50% off or more!
The Coriolis Exam Prep General Linux I book is 75% off cover price. The orange book (LPIC Prep Kit, forgot the rest of the title and author, also known as the orange book), another Linux LPI exam book which is used by one of the nearby LUGS for their Gnu/Linux intro course is 75% off.
The Programming Perl 2nd edition is 50% off or more (I think I got my copy at 75% off), and the Perl 1 class I took is still teaching out of the second edition, but you can use the third edition for the class if you like wasting money.
I've purchased Samba books, dns and bind books, other certification books, IBM red books, html, unix, and so many other titles, all 50% to 75% off the cover price, and all still useful.
Last time I checked, they didn't have a web site. Their info is:
Computer Book Works 78 Reade St., NYC NY (near city hall)
call them for zip code
212-385-dont-use-555-the-fives-1616
and their email is: bookmanJV@mindspring.com
tip: take out the two caps (JV)from the above email address, and replace the two capital letters with a single number, 3, and you have the correct you know what.
They don't have a web site, but they do ship UPS. So you can call and order by phone (which is more secure than internet). And they are a good bunch of people there. Not a huge publicly traded company. Email them for what you are looking for, and ask the price. You'll be pleased with the response. It's the cheapest I've found for "used" or older edition books. Cheaper than other online sources.
This is one great store. Very highly recommended.
My first Linux book was Linux Unleashed, 1st edition, published by Sams Publishing. This book included Slackware with it. I'm afraid to think what verion, as this book is (c) 1995. It was good for a start. It's been read, borrowed, and stolen over the years. Hopefully it has a good home now.
:) Borders and Barnes & Noble frequently have sales on previous edition books. If you flip through both, sometimes you'll see there were only very subtle changes, or chapters which aren't important to you. For a $40 price difference, it's worth getting the older one. :)
:)
I still highly recommend Slackware for a distribution. It's what we use on all our servers, and my workstations (Home, Work, and Laptop)
I bought a co-worker Linux System Administration: A User's Guide by Marcel Gagne. Published by Addison Wesley. Flipping through it, this seems like a very good book. It seems to be working out. He's coming to me with very intelligent questions after reading chapters, rather than "What do I do at the prompt".
After the Unleashed book, I personally got into the O'Reilly books. If you do this, go to the store with the company credit card, it'll be expensive. Oddly enough, most bosses are ok with paying for books, even when they're being tight with equipment. You can't get a new $5 CPU fan, but you can spend $500 on books. Hmmmm.. Well, buy more books.
O'Reilly Essential Systems Administration
Learning
the Unix Operating System (got it for my girlfriend, so she'd understand what I was doing all night)
vi Pocket Reference. It seems none of my coworkers could use vi before I got to this office. Now they're all using it. [esc][esc]:wq!
Programming Perl. If you're going to play with Unix, you should learn Perl.
Then you should read up on what you're working with. If you're networking or on the Internet, TCP/IP is good to know.
TCP/IP Network Administration
DNS and BIND very definately, unless you want to be clueless about what happens between typing in "yahoo.com" and it coming up in your browser. Having a good understanding there definately helps you debug problems.
Sendmail This is the perfect book to spin your head, and leave you with a headache for months. But it's the topic, not the book, that's so complicated. If it didn't do absolutely everything, I'm sure it would be simpler to use.
O'Reilly has a lot of great books.
"Learning" books are for beginners.
"Nutshell" books are usually to help you figure out something if you don't really know it.
The rest of the books have various degrees of learning to them. On my desk at work, for O'Reilly books, I have 3 different PERL books, the JavaScript book, and a few others that I reference on a regular basis.
I recommend going to book stores, and flipping through everything they have (restock it to the proper places). See what your comprehension level is. If you have no clue what they're talking about, you need an easier book. If you almost understand, buy it, read it, and then share it with a friend (especially on the company expense account! hehe).
When you're ready to get out of the books, and into the real world, the most valuable reference you'll ever have is dejanews.com. If you don't know an answer, search it there. Probably someone in the last 20 years has already asked it. It's the quickest way to look smart and impress your friends, even if you're stupid.
Having the stack of O'Reilly books is always good though. I recently changed offices (same company), and while riding in the elevator, I was offered a job because I looked educated and had a big stack of O'Reilly books in my arms.. Little did she know that was only 1/3 of them. The rest were still in my car..
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I picked up Linux in 1996 and after six years of using it constantly instead of windows I can say I feel like just this year I've begun to become proficient with it and with modifying its kernel and modules.
How do you show off Linux on TV? How the heck do you show off any computer on TV? You need to show off end-user benifits. Try showing off how customizable Linux is, show off GUI's since it's TV. Show off CrossOver and other apps that help people to "CrossOver" to Linux.
Things you can talk about but can't show: Linux is free as in speech... saving companies from being tied to a single vendor. One vendor dies and all its customers die with it.
Linux can't be killed. If you are a small company, you can have custom software that you never have to worry about a big company pulling the plug on or wrecking support for. Linux spells security and security for long-term investments. Other OSes are at the mercy of the vendor. You could end up like all the SGI Irix users too... Linux and GNU won't die.
If you have to you could maintain your own distro of Linux. That's appealing if you are a big company. If you are small, you can take solice in all the other small companies out there and the community of Linux users.
However, Linux requires a gigantic investment in people. You need good solid System Admins and you need them to be knowledgeable. Nothing will substitute for an experienced SysA. You can get by with novice programmers but you can't get by with novice System Administrators.
You can't really give somebody new to unix or linux any idea of what it's all about without giving them a real hands-on experience. The best safe way to do that is with a Live CD. Knoppix is one which actually works. Demonstrate it on your show.
Redhat 8.0 retail box set comes with Excellent Documentation, and is quite specific without being overly technical. As an added bonus, it also comes with a CD full of documentation.
Chris, I watch the ScreenSavers on TechTV quite often, and saw the Quake server demo. Qudos to TechTV to give it a try. For a good topic for a show, most folks want to see what Linux can DO! Show them Ximian Evolution and Mozilla, OpenOffice, and TuxRacer. If you have time, do a demo of the Redhat setup agent, and show off Redhat Network (sorta like Windows Update). The new GUI RPM Package Manager and other GUI config tools are nice looking and will display well.
A dual boot setup would be nice to show off also.{I set up a dual boot Win98/RH8 for a newbie laptop user and they have been very happy to boot into Linux, and don't really bother with Windows anymore.}
Anyhow, love the TechTV, please say Happy Holidays to Patrick and Leo and Megan and Morgan and Yoshi and Martin and Sumi and Adam and Jennifer and Michaela and Chris and Erica and Alex and Becky and . .did I forget anyone?
I may be bad with names, but I'll never forget your IP address
How could you possibly deal with, for instance, securing Linux without the CLI?
Bastille Linux. I'm not saying that it's a complete solution to every security issue a Linux user may come across, but it's a very newbie friendly way of locking down a box in the first place.
"Are you being weird, or sarcastic?" said Emma. I said I didn't know because I get the two feelings mixed up.
0. The manual of your distribution
;-)
...
...
Skip through it, check what you need to get your system up and running. Don't try to get too much out of it. Most CLI tasks are better described in the following books.
1. Learning the UNIX operating system (O'Reilly)
This one is very basic and covers the things you have to know before you can actually do anything.
There are surely free manuals which provide the same information, but this book is IMHO easier to read and contains all necessary information for this level.
2. Learning the vi Editor (O'Reilly)
While some people dislike vi very much, it still has two big advantages compared to other editors.
First, it is available (almost) everywhere everytime. Second, it allows very fast and comfortable editing when you get used to it.
There is no need to read the whole book at once, just grab the basics and practice a lot.
3. UNIX Power Tools (O'Reilly)
This is the book I wish I had have after I had mastered the basics. It gives you some really neat tricks to actually get some work done in a clever way.
There is again no need to read the whole thing at once, just skip through it and pick out the interesting parts.
My tip is chapter 4, Organizing Your Home Directory.
And don't use the CD too much. Almost everything on it is already available on your Linux system.
-
Here you should feel pretty comfortable with your Linux system (at least on the command line).
The next thing is to decide which way(s) to go.
I think there are four big directions:
1. Free software
Learn what free software and open source are about, where they come from and what their goals are. More political are software patents and things like the DMCA and similar laws.
Don't forget to build your own opinion
2. Applications
LaTeX, Emacs, Gnome,
whatever you want or need. Almost everything can be accomplished with Linux but you should not try to do it the way it is done on other systems.
Do it the UNIX way and you will have an easy time.
3. Developing
Shell, sed and awk, Perl, C, Assembler,
This is a huge area in which free software is really strong and gives you a wide variety of possibilities.
4. Administration
First learn to configure your own system.
If like it you can try other UNIX systems which will help you in understanding your own system better (and any other computer system FWIW).
When you are interested in how your browser or your email client works, you can try to set up your own server. This will perhaps lead you to network administration, which is again a huge area for itself.
Take your time and have fun.
-
About my history with Linux
I learned Linux the hard way. I started with SuSE 6.1 and its manual. I didn't know anything about UNIX or the Internet and there was no local guru.
Most people in my region only knew rumours about this whole "strange" UNIX stuff and associated it only with mainframes, i.e. things that are far out of reach for normal people.
So, as I had nobody to ask and just learned to use the Internet (I didn't even know that mailing lists exist), I had to depend on the SuSE manual which was very helpful when configuring something but didn't give much information on how to actually use this "cool" new system productively.
Now, some years later, I can administer several different UNIX systems, applications and whole networks (at least I hope so, as this was my education and is my job).
And now, I am the one whom others ask questions about Linux (actually it feels like they ask me about anything that somehow works digitally).
I think if somebody had told me to use these books, I would have needed half the time and it surely would have been much more fun.
-
PS.
The O'Reilly books mentioned (and some others) are available as the UNIX CD Bookshelf.
I started out trying to learn Linux and was doing well from the odd book and looking through the man pages. As soon as I found the website http://linuxfromscratch.org I learned more in a month then I had done in a year.
Depends how deep you want to get into linux but its well worth a look.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
I've been unimpressed with all the Linux books for newbies. The expert books are great but if your new to Linux they are also useless.
I've not looked at Linux for Dumbies and I have over all been impressed with the dumbies books.
The best by far was a booklet made by SCO for Xenix. This is obveously out of print but it was a mini refence.
Probably the best thing is time in the trenches. For exsisting Mac Os X and Linux users thats call up the shell and experement.
For Windows users however that's not so easy. But it can be done...
Msys is a Unix environment targeted at Windows software develupment.
Software dev is easyer from the Unix shell what can I say?
It's very Unix but still running under Windows. Just an app. Not a scary install like Linux as it dosen't threaton to destroy everything in favor of the new os...
(Think of an Os install as the Genisis torpedo from Star Trek II.)
Spock "It would destroy such life in favor of it's new matrix"
In otherwords Installing Linux means never being able to go back to Windows (the old matrix).
All your data is gone.. everything...
Your not just trying Linux your commiting to it.
New users need some asurence that Linux is the way to go.
If they can learn Linux from the safe confines of having never installed it so much the better.
Cygwin is annother Unix environment again for software develupment.
Add a good Linux or Unix newbie book and the trasnsition should be smoth.
I used Danix to move from Dos to Unix.
Unlike the rest Danix is a dos port of Unix commands so as to give Dos that "Unix" feal.
The other files in the linked archive are also good for the job.
Also I was going to frivlously suggest using a "hot geek chick" the way beer ads use super modles to sell beer.
"Drink beer and date a super modle"
"Use Linux and date a hot geek chick"
But being realistic people aren't going to switch to Linux in order to date hot chicks. I honnestly could not think of a dumber reason.
Still ammusing to think of Cat teaching Linux... Yummm.
I don't actually exist.