Slashdot Mirror
Two Books On Red Hat 9
skogs' review of Red Hat Linux 9 Unleashed Red Hat Linux 9 Unleashed author Bill Ball and Hoyt Duff pages 1002 publisher Sams Publishing rating 9 reviewer Nathan Jay Skoglund ISBN 0672325888 summary A guide for intermediate to advanced users of Red Hat 9.
To begin my humble review, I think I need to explain my point of view a bit. I am very interested in Linux and the open source movement, hence the purchase of a 1000+ page Linux book. Nothing new here, just a book review, if you want some technical writing, buy the book.
The problem is that I have tried many distros (Slackware, RedHat7.2, Icepack 2.0, Mandrake 9.1, Knoppix[fun], DamnSmallLinux and now RedHat 9.0), and not really known what I was doing. I liked most of the install programs, and I liked the general office suites, but I couldn't fulfill my need to know what exactly was going on inside my machine.
I sat down inside Barnes & Noble for roughly an hour and a half and looked over the Unleashed Book and compared it to the 'Bible'. Having looked through them both extensively, and learning a few things along the way, I decided that I liked the book I am reviewing much better. The Red Hat Bible just didn't have the same smart feel to it. It did not have specific console commands written out in examples, and did not seem to give as much insight into exactly how my Linux system operated. The best way to describe it would be that it was just like the 'how-to' books for Microsoft products: they tell you how to change things, how to make such and such happen -- but more like "If I turn the wheel in my car to the right, I go right," instead of teaching the physics of the gears in the steering column and the forces being transfered to the wheels, and the wheel's friction turning the cars direction. I learned how to change things, but not how the things I changed specifically interacted.
After a short introduction, the book spends 20+ pages coaching the reader on how to prepare for his first Linux install. It also helps decide how to partition systems and drives, so that just about any foreseeable storage situation is addressed. The next chapter is dedicated to actually installing the OS on your computer(s) by any method you would like, be it CD-ROM, traditional ethernet, hard drive, or even through a parallel port or serial port. The book explains and tells you where to look up the autoinstall Kickstart system, and generally makes you feel like you could walk into any situation and feel comfortable with what you were doing. It even gives a two-page listing of exactly what things to expect during an office transition, and a great checklist for getting all hardware versions and compatibility issues checked out ahead of time. Hopefully before you put a dent in that professional image of yours.
After you are done reading about all the wonderfulness of post-install configuration, then you go through your 'first steps' with linux. Learning the directory tree a little better, shell commands to compress/decompress, directory permissions, various switches and adding users.
There follows in the 6th chapter the best explanation of X I have ever read. I must admit that I had no idea how versatile and powerful X was. This is the section of the book that started to make me feel like I was 11 years old again and playing with my first computer, and trying to understand how to program Basic. :)
Part II of the book then starts dealing with actual system administration, including all the services that run in the background, software and system resources, user management, filesystems, and backup/restore/recovery. I get kind of misty eyed when I think of all the user commands that I can now type in at a prompt. Group and user admin surely beats the competing win2k/win2k3 server editions (User manager, though wonderful, is not as powerful as these simple commands in Linux).
Part III of the book deals with System services, including Printing, Network, DNS, Apache management, MySQL, FTP, Email, and collaborative software. While I have always found network connectivity to be a strong suit of mine, I think I learned a bit in that chapter anyway. I have not had the opportunity yet to set up my own email servers or web servers, but I do anticipate doing so within the next 2 years, and with the excellent line-by-line examples in this book to lead me, I feel that I will be far less bewildered than your average Microsoft-only user.
Part IV deals with programming and productivity. I am not a programmer, so I skipped most of the sections on perl and C/C++. I did find shell scripting to be a worthwhile read, and implemented a few little tweak scripts on my own little machine. Multimedia is also covered in this section, which also describes why RedHat avoided allowing MP3 playback by default. No matter; I had long before reading this section updated xmms to allow MP3. (Gosh, I would never accomplish anything without my trusty MP3 collection.) There is also a very nice history of OpenOffice.org, and how to use it too. The book also offers help with PDAs, faxing and scanning.
This section also includes text examples of configuration and setup for emulation and cross-platform tools. While I am intrigued by the beautiful screenshot of Return to Castle Wolfenstein running perfectly in emulation mode, I cannot say that I have attempted to completely replace my gaming computer just yet -- sadly I still dual boot with win2k. However, after fully reading the chapters in the emulation section, I feel that I will have a much better chance than I did before. I know that newsgroups are great, but my general feeling after reading this book is much better than after reading bulletin board posts. :)
This book concludes with a large appendix section -- and best of all, somewhere around 20 pages of blank paper for me to write in my own notes and cheats. That way I won't lose them underneath a computer, because, damn, that is a big book.
I strongly recommend this book to just about anybody interested in starting into Linux. Assuming that you can indeed read, and don't get freaked out by an occasional command-line interface, you should be fine. I know most things have a GUI command interface available, it is nice to know exactly what that little GUI applet is doing. "It is editing this text file, that is linked to this one," and so on. I also strongly recommend it for the hardened Linux user/admin, as I believe it would be a worthwhile thing to have on the shelf. You probably will get a little bit more use out of it than you do that Windows NT4 server book you have up there. I find this book relevant, accurate, helpful, logical, and insightful. It has a few typos, grammatical mistakes and spelling errors(show me a programmer that can spell in English!), and sometimes I wish the authors had spent more time on the graphical tools rather than the text/console based tools, but on the whole, excellent.
Acemics' review of Red Hat Linux 9 Professional Secrets Red Hat Linux 9 Professional Secrets author Naba Barkakati pages 1038 publisher Wiley rating 9 reviewer Vince ISBN 0764541331 summary A great Linux guide for experienced users as well as newbies.
The task of learning Linux can be a burden that some people just do not want to take on. Trying to find the right book to learn more about Linux or to use as a reference can be a mind blowing task given all the choices that are available. Red Hat Linux 9 Professional Secrets by Naba Barkakati is an excellent option for the Linux newbie or the experienced Linux user who wants a useful reference guide.
Weighing in at over 1,000 pages, Red Hat 9 Professional Secrets provides many useful insights and behind the scenes tips on the inner workings of Red Hat Linux. I have used many different books on Linux and specifically the Red Hat distro, and over the past few weeks I found myself going back to this book as a reference and easily finding the solutions I was looking for.
Such a large book can sometimes be a "turn off" for someone looking for their first book to learn something new. The fear being that they will never be able to navigate through all the technical advanced jargon that one usually finds in a 1,000+ page book. However, I feel the author does a good job introducing Linux basics and fundamentals in Part I: Setting Up Red Hat Linux, and Part II: Exploring Red Hat Linux.
The first two parts of this book which compose chapters 1-12 are only the first 373 pages. Parts III, IV, and V discuss in detail Internetworking with Red Hat Linux, Managing Red Hat Linux and Programming Red Hat Linux. These sections of the book deal with more advanced subject matter such as setting up Red Hat Linux as a Mail Server, News Server, Web Server, FTP Server and Samba Server, and how to manage, secure and administer your Red Hat Linux system.
While some may consider the first two parts to be strictly for the Linux newbie and the second three parts for the more experienced Linux user, I believe that these areas mesh well with each other providing the experienced Linux user with install tips in the first two parts that are often overlooked and providing the newbie with the definitive Linux guide that will walk them through the simple tasks as well as provide them more in-depth detail to the more advanced concepts that are often only found in a separate Linux administration book.
I would highly recommend this book to the experienced Linux user and the Linux newbie who are looking for the ultimate guide on Red Hat 9.
You can purchase Red Hat Linux 9 Professional Secrets or Red Hat Linux 9 Unleashed from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Ref: Amazon has Red Hat Linux 9 Professional Secrets for $5 less and with free shipping.
Free shipping on Red Hat Linux 9 Unleashed (same price as bn).
The second review is dry, pretty much contentless, and really not very helpfull at all.
When You Can't Find Your UNIX System Administrator
-Dave
One of the most annoying things about Windows (the versions I have seen) is, that you cannot start reading a file before it has been completely written. I often want to start reading a file while I'm still not finished downloading it.
Are you sure about that? I can always start viewing or listening to video/audio before its done downloading in Windows. This may be more of an issue with which software you are using to download. I remember there being some apps I've used where I couldn't do this, but in those cases, I could make a copy of the file while it was downloading and then open the copy.
--Drunk as in Beer
For a normal user, linux is not too much different than any other UNIX like system. One book that I found to be very helpful when I was UNIX for the impatient. There were many things I liked about this book. It covered both emacs and vi pretty extensively. It covered programming in awk, although awk is pretty much superceeded by perl. It also covered many of the small text processing utilities like cut, grep, etc.
Another good book for users might be the Oreily Linux in a nutshell book. I'm not usually a fan of the nutshell books, but this one seems to cover many of the same topics that the impatient book covers.
The directory /etc/sysconfig holds various
short configuration files. This document unlocks
the mystery. It is very easy to do; merely edit
these very short little files per the guidelines
given in sysconfig.txt.
I'll start you out with a link to ESR's "The Art of Unix Programing," which deals with Unix history and philosophy quite nicely, right up front:
:)
.," etc.
:)
o ad .html
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/
And the Unix Koans of Master Foo:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/
Maybe it'll be all you need and save you even the trip to the library.
Since most Linux users traditionally come out of the Unix culture Linux books, even those at the "Dummies" level ( I failed to install Linux for a week using "Linux for Dummies", it didn't even make any sense to me) assume you are already aculturated.
Unix books tend to assume you're some poor, dumb slob who's being sat down at a terminal for the first time and are thinking, "What the F**k?!"
Which is exactly what those of us who came to Unix already indoctrinated in other systems are thinking when finally getting Linux successfully installed.
The hardest part of getting used to a Unix is just learning where things are and why they are there. This is a bit of a Catch-22, because you can't really understand that until you understand the Unix philosophy. Nifty, huh?
What't the first question most Linux newbies ask?
"Does it run MS Office?"
What they can't know, because they don't understand the culture, is that that's the wrong question to ask. Unix doesn't even really know about "apps." It has a fine grained modular structure.
A Unix weenie will answer that question with, "Well, duh! No," while wondering why anyone would even want that.
The correct question is, "How do I produce a document?"
Then the Unix weenie can answer, "Oh, that's easy, you type the text in with your favorite text editor, spell check it with ispell, format it with LaTex, search it with grep. .
None of these things are "apps" in the PC sense. They are all small programs that perform single functions and are inherent to the system.
Your mail program and your wordprocessor don't each maintain a spell checker. The system has spell checking capability. The system can search and modify text files.
In the MS world you buy a kit for every model you wish to build. You want a Cutty Sark? Fine, we'll sell you a Cutty Sark kit. You want a Bluenose instead? Well, we'll sell you that kit too.
In the Unix world you're given a "tool kit," a pile of materials and a book of plans.
KDE and Gnome have certainly done a good job of making Windows like enviroments and apps for Linux, and I certainly encourage you to use them ( I'm typing this in Konquerer right now), but always remember that down underneath the GUI things are happening in very Unixy ways, or you'll get bit sooner or later.
Oh, and just to be fair I'll close out by giving you a link to the Unix Hater's Handbook.
http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/uhh-downl
KFG
good points. Documentation does suck, and is at about the level of Windows 3.1
When I was a newbie I found the the O'Reilly books a bit intimidating. 'Running Linux' is good, though.
The only book that I found that 'spoke' to me was Mohammed Kabir's RedHat Server.
Another suggestion which I found helpful is to install Webmin, it makes playing with linux easy for beginners, and has a java filemanager interface which gives you a windows explorer type look and feel. When you have got some confidence using this, then you can go and play by directly editing the files.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.