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Red Hat Linux 8 Bible
This book is a great example of that. It comes complete with three CDs containing Red Hat Linux (which, I assume, are the same as or very similar to the three that come with Red Hat's own shrink-wrapped product) and it therefore starts with installing Red Hat Linux. However, some thousand or so pages later, the same book is talking about some really quite advanced systems administration tasks. I'm really not sure that the same audience will need both of those ends of the spectrum.
Let's take a look at the contents in more detail:
Chapter 1 gives a useful review of Red Hat Linux. It pretty much assumes that the reader knows nothing about Linux and goes into some detail about what Linux is and where it comes from. It even takes time out at one point to explain what an operating system is. The book does score a few early points for knowing the difference between "hackers" and "crackers" and using the terms correctly. This chapter ends with a more detailed look at Red Hat Linux and some of the changes that were introduced with version 8.0. Chapter 2 covers the installation of Red Hat Linux. It does a good job of explaining this in a way that would be clear to someone with no previous knowledge of how to do this.
Chapter 3 is the start of the second major section of the book which introduces the day-to-day use of Red Hat Linux. In chapter 3 we look at logging into the system and get an introduction to using Unix from the command line. Chapter 4 goes into a similar level of detail on using the two dominant GUI environments -- Gnome and KDE. For a beginner, it may have made more sense to have these chapters the other way round as most Red Hat installations will boot straight into a GUI environment and one of Red Hat's changes for version 8.0 was to make it far harder to work out how to get a shell window open.
Chapter 5 starts to look at at Linux applications. It begins with a table of common Windows applications and their Linux counterparts. It then goes on to discuss finding, downloading and installing new applications where, to my mind, it would have been more sensible to first look at using some of the pre-installed applications. The chapter also includes details on using the Red Hat Packager Manager (rpm) and running Windows applications using WINE.
Chapters 6 to 9 each look at a separate application area and present a very brief overview of the applications available in that area. Chapter 6 is about producing documents, chapter 7 about games, chapter 8 about multimedia and chapter 9 about the Internet. In all of these chapters the overviews are necessarily very short and it's hard to see how anyone could get much useful work done after reading them. It would be better if the chapters contained references to further reading, but they don't even mention the man pages.
Chapter 10 starts the next section of the book, which is about system administration. It contains a useful overview of a number of the most common administrative tasks like mounting disk drives, monitoring system usage or setting the date and time. Chapter 11 is about administering users. Chapter 12 looks at automating system tasks. It includes an introduction to shell scripting and a useful description of the start-up and shutdown cycle. Chapter 13 covers backing up and restoring files. Chapter 14 is possibly the most useful chapter in the book for the complete Linux beginner as it contains an overview of security issues. This is particularly important with the increase in the number of people who leave their computers permanently attached to their broadband connections.
The forth and final section looks at networking, with chapters on setting up a LAN, a print server, a file server, a mail server and many other shared resources. This section also includes a chapter on getting your network connected to the internet. As with much of the rest of the book, space constraints prevent these chapters from going into great depth, and there are very few references to other material.
So what did I think overall? Well, as I said, it's too big. But on the other hand it's too small. It's too big in that it covers such a wide range of topics that very few people are likely to be interested in all of it. It's too small in that it just doesn't have the space to go into great depth about most of the topics is covers. I think that it would be far more useful if was three books: Red Hat 8 Linux Users Bible, Red Hat 8 Linux Admin Bible and Red Hat 8 Networking Bible. Each of them could be smaller than this volume, but still cover the material in more detail.
Having said that, the material all seems accurate. The few times I noticed something that I thought was wrong, on checking I found that I was mistaken. So if want you really want is a broad (but in places shallow) overview of Red Hat Linux then this could well be the book for you.
And it's also cheaper than the "official" Red Hat Linux products.
You can purchase Red Hat Linux 8 Bible from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Also, It's a book that you read time and time again for various reasons. So this books title might be fitting based on the reviewers opinion.
That being said, I don't think any book written within the past 50 years should have "bible" in the title.
Earlier RedHats used to have nice README files in many places. Today, RH 8.0 usually has only a reference to the paper manual. This is really annoying. I hate paper and wish I could obtain the information directly on cd. To me it is obvious that RH is protecting their business (not for the benefit of the customer) by trying to sell the full set with the manual rather than having people to just copy their cd. This behavior is creating market for other unnecessary books, too.
-- Imperial units must die --
My thorax aches, but I must say it: Theres needs to be a "Learn Linux"
:-)
Sorry about your thorax. You might like to try any of the study manuals for LPI (linux professional institute certification). I have not gone for the certification but I found that these manuals actually do the best job of any out there in this regards. (I can not remember the publisher but mine is from the company that makes the big yellow books if that helps
Whenever I jump into something completely new -- like Linux several years ago -- I tend to go out and buy several books on the subject. Contrary to two perennial /. comments about books of this nature, their readers are not idiots, nor do they find that the web offers a convenient, coherent and error-free substitute.
/. book reviews would be more useful if they'd concentrate on the book itself, rather than trying to prove their assertion that the book doesn't need to exist. Leave that for the self-inflated /. posters who castigate the "idiots" who might actually buy the book.
So-called "bible" volumes are intended to package enough information to allow a completely new user to move from installation and configuration to moderately sophisticated use. One of their most useful attributes is that they help the neophyte begin to understand all the capabilities available in Linux (and how to exploit them via the inevitable distribution-specific foibles).
On a second note,
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Articulation, clarity, and elegance, mean little to publishers when physically large books sell faster than skinny ones.
Publishing companies push hard for writers to expand all points to the maximum number of pages. Even if the expansion made points incoherent. I couldn't do it. Was always a source of friction between me and various project managers.
...Even after reading this review.
I'm getting it for Christmas (My Mom ordered it for me from Amaz[ingly slow to deliver]on.com) and this review assures me that it's just what I want.
I've been using Red Hat exclusively since 7.1 and have learned plenty of tidbits here and there, but I still lack a full understanding of certain topics. It appears that those topics are the ones covered toward the back of this book.
The other thing that I'm excited about is that this book sounds like something my wife can read and get something out of. She is mildly technical and might like to know more about the OS she uses (Yes, she prefers Linux to Windows, but still has to reboot once a week to run some proprietary business software).
Hey, I think I'll even ask Chris to autograph it! He's a member of my LUG and a really nice guy. ;-P
I'm happy to support him with my Mom's money.
This user account is inactive account replaced by the PDA
With Man and HowTo pages all over these books are not that necessary. While I have always felt HowTo and Man pages sometimes being too thorough and making me search for info these "bibles" seem to be too brief, they touch on a topic and move on with the reader wanting more, ironically it also points to websites for more info that are not created by the author of the book, but developers or people that have done a good job creating a How To page.
I will admit I used to own a Mac bible during the OS 7 days and it was fun just because it didnt teach you anything but listed easter eggs and tidbits of trivia on Apple. But when the internet hit with specialized sites it turned those books into a monitor stand.
First background: I have been using linux since the mid 90's, but would not call myself an expert. I have found the bibles to be a good "manual" akin to the good old days when every software package came with 3 ring bound 1000+ page manuals.
The "bible" does a good job introducing new features of RH distro, (like the alternates system) that are not "standard" or in wide use yet. They also have a nice charty of all the applications and where the config files live. While a lot of them are obvisous, it helps when setting up something for the first time, or trying to tracking down security settings etc in unfamiliar apps.
They have helped me immensely while getting started with current information. The one area where a book has an advantage over the Internet for me is the specific target. It is frustrating to wade through newsgroups, and websites, when there is so many variations and versions of software in use. I like the book as a starting point because it is a references how to complete a task w/ RH and you can use that to start, then if you do need to advance beyond what the book offers, you have a lot better background to refine your google search to save a lot of time.
While the review says its too big and simultaneously too small, I disagree. If you take the book more as a manual, it is a good size (considering the monstrocity that RH is growing into). It touches on virtually everything that RH includes in the distro, and explains what it does. This makes it a lot easier to tune and trim your RH system.
Overall, for $50 bucks, these books have saved me a lot of time, and are worth the price to me even if they only serve as a starting point for further investigation. The book is like any other tool, it is only as useful as the person using it makes it.
-MS2k
If you are planning on picking up a boxed linux
distribution anyway, you can do a lot worse than
picking up a big, gereral purpose linux reference
that includes the CDs. Chris Negus does a great
job with every incarnation of this book... as
good as can be expected with such a broad subject
matter. It is not a book to sit down and read
from cover to cover and expect to learn Linux,
but it does make a wonderful reference.
DISCLAIMER: I might be a little biased; I was a
contributing author for the initial version of
the Redhat Linux Bible.
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
People run Linux on their crap PCs because they use their better machine to play games on. Games are almost always more system intensive than what you'd be doing with a Linux box. I use my Linux box (PIII-500, 512MB of ram) for file serving via NFS and Samba, occassional web browsing with Mozilla, internal BIND server, etc. Nothing major. The Windows box on the other hand is a 1.4GHz Athlon with 512MB of ram and it barely runs acceptably in my opinion for newer games. I guess dropping in a GeForce4 to replace the GeForce2 would solve some of the problems, but the point is still, the Windows box is always more powerful for gamers. Besides, for general web browsing and Quicken and such I've got my iBook.
I'm a newbie to Linux in general, and Red Hat specifically.
So far I have found that the book has got me up and running quickly, with good explanations and examples.
I'm coming from the windows arena, and it gives great comparisons for people like me (read: people Linux supporters seem to want to switch over).
I consider myself quite computer literate (in Windows/DOS) - and this sort of book is perfect. It starts out with the basics, but then also gets into the tougher stuff like configuring sendmail and squid.
As someone who is very interested in moving from Windows to Linux, I am finding the Bible to be a great resource.