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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.
These are generally the most-rushed, least useful books published on any topic.
The web rendered these books obselete circa 1995.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Running Linux?
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That's a good point about a book with too much breadth. Have a beginner's book and advanced book (probably multiple of the latter).
It seems they're trying to make a book where you can "grow into". By the time you grow into some of the advanced concepts, you'll probably need a new book anyway..
"Truth is not decided by majority vote" consensus gentium -- Norman Geisler
There _is_ such a book. It's called Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition:
http://www.icon.co.za/~psheer/book/rute.html.gz
Full text online, but the book is the best general linux book I've read. Buy one!
1) It has apache 2.0 ... threads are great for large apps ... keeps server load down on RH 8.0 web servers
... which is good
:)
:)
2) Wine w/ OpenGL allows you to play WarCraft III on RH 8.0 work stations
3) Still has journal file system
4) Grub still sucks
Buy a discounted book on RH 7.x for the rest (not much else is worth reading on IMHO) and send me an email thanking me for saving you some $$$$, especially if ou live in Soviet Russia where $$$$ owns you
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
These large books often seem a little confused about their target audience. They often cover everything from very basic concepts to very complex ones, and I don't really believe that anyone really needs that breadth of coverage.
Well, not all of the book may be useful to you in your application of RH8. But, if they wrote this book specifically to your needs, then this book would not have broad appeal. Its all about the audience. You use a small portion of the book, other people use other portions. But in its entirety, it should appeal to a broad range of RH8 users.
Even if you don't use a lot of what is covered in the book, its still beneficial to read up on the more complex topics. At least be informed -- then less will be mysterious to you in the future should you need to apply more diverse skills.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Be kind to the"Tech yourself XXX in 24 Hours" books. They are not presented as authoritative or deep textbooks, just as a quick introduction for people new to a subject. I find that one of the best ways to learn about a topic is to read the related "24 Hours" book, and use the basic knowledge presented there as a foundation for deeper knowledge.
Another nice feature of the "24 Hours" books is the authors. Sams has brought in some really great authors over the last few years, and most of the new books are written by accepted experts, not just some guy with a certification.
I still check these books out in my search for the Holy Grail of Linux books, a good, well written book that I can recommend to people who are familar with computers but, unfamiliar with Linux.
This book sadly, is not it. The reviewer is actually quite generous in his review. I found the book to be convoluted in its arrangement with repeated early referrence to commands that were not explained until after the tenth chapter. It did not flow well which made it all the more difficult to read its copious 1000 pages.
As the reviewer stated it tries to cover the full breadth of a subject from very basic to very advanced but in both cases it simply touches on each topic without any real depth. For instance, after adequately explaining the installation steps, it describes recompiling the kernel in less than two pages with no real explanation or what or why. Hardly something necessary for new users or people who may never have compiled a program before, and really no information on the ins and outs of the kernel for advanced users.
Basically, the book is adequate for a referrence if someone needs to get a new service up and running quickly. If you've never setup MySQL or Sendmail the book will walk you through installation and basic configuration, beyond that, you're on your own. Read the Man page and check the news groups, as the book says repeatedly.
I'd rate this book as a 5 out of 10.
I'm surprised this post was marked as a troll since "don't use x.0" releases is a pretty good rule of thumb for redhat.
Unfortunately, it's only a rule of thumb and not some absolute law. You really need to look at each distribution and make your own decision. I've run every version of red hat since 6.0 or so and I currently admin boxes that run 7.2, 7.3, and 8.0 and I have to say, redhat 8.0 is the best desktop linux I've ever seen. It really is leaps and bounds above 7.3
Of course, my servers are all running 7.2 :)