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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.
Now that so many trees have been sacrificed to print books about Red Hat 9, I am wondering where is the next RHL 10 (Severn) beta release? More information about the new world order of RHL development was supposed to appear at rhl.redhat.com today, but not much seems to be happening.
Red Hat seems to have realized something about shrink-wrap + dead trees releases that the book publishers have not: a 6-month release cycle is too short for physical media. It may be more convenient to read about RH configuration in a book rather than on a screen, but parts of these books will be obsolete in a few months (if not weeks) and everything that is contained in them can be learned from online documentation now. The computer books that remain useful for years tend to be thin (think K&R).
However, you want to use some external firewire drives? Do some video capture? Write to a DVD? Neither book addresses these issues to any depth. And some of the things they do put in there to make their "heavy enough to justify the price" length verge on silly. I really don't expect to see a page on Xine if I can get a URL to the home site and be more up to date.
In both cases, the book seems like a way to sell RH CDs at a decent price and with a "Help" manual. For that they are adequate. But I'm still looking for the RH (or Mandrake) book that can get into the challenges my team faces.
And thus is pointed out the real downfall in any book on Computer Software that has a Version Number in the title.
I prefer 'Running Linux' (first edition) by Matt Welsh & Lar Kaufman. But then, better than that, my 7-volume BSD 4.3 printed manual set, and Volumes 3 & 8 of O'Reilly's X Window System Guides. Though, if I was only allowed to have one book for UNIX, it would probably be 'Introducting the UNIX System' by McGilton & Morgan, Byte Books, 1983. No other book does as comprehensive a job of covering the important stuff, i.e. ed, ex, vi, sed, roff, and so on.
Any book that is thick with GUI screenshots is bound to be obsolete by the time it hits the bookstores.
A Good Intro to NetBS
Has anyone noticed the huge proliferation of "RedHat as Linux" over the linux literary and driver (closed-source drivers, generally) community? The amount of articles that go on about teaching linux, and then teach "Red Hat" are huge. In addition, if you notice hardware that "Supports Linux" you will often find that it supports "Red Hat" (IMHO, the only way to support "Linux" properly is to have an Open-Source driver).
If you search for linux on chapters you will find a lot of literary material. 8 of 20 results are specially about redhat on the first page...
Searching for "Red Hat" Linux shows that at least 106 books specifically contain the words "Red Hat" in addition to linux.
While I'm all for use-your-own-distro, and I'm sure that RedHat is a good OS for newbies... I get this tingling feeling that there is a whole mentality that "Red Hat" IS linux. I understand that distros like Debian Linux might be more daunting with text-based installs, etc, but I hate to see future admins being taught that the "Red Hat" way is the only way.
Of course, it may be because many of those in the Debian-oriented mentality simply hate to document or make book-like material, whereas many more RedHat newbies have gone on to share their experience with the masses?
Give it a few months, and I'm sure we'll see a few more "Using RedHat 10" books to add to the pile. Version-chasing AHOY!
The very first lesson that every Linux newbie learns is:
Documentation sucks.
It's getting better by the day, but it still sucks.
Fortunately there's an alternative. UNIX books. Don't bother spending money on these. Go to your library, browse around, pick a couple that "speak" to you. After a few nights of poking at these all of a sudden the Linux books will start to make sense to you and you can return to them.
The thing you absolutely must understand is that you are joining the Unix community and its culture. These are not merely empty buzzwords. They have real meaning and import. Unix/Linux are not merely "Windows alternatives" in the sense that they simply replace Windows with a free version. Unix is fundamentally different. It's foreign. Like when you go to Japan and can't even guess where the restrooms are.
Windows is the end result of a series of commercial accidents and commercial rapacity.
Unix was designed by a handful of people outside of the commercial sphere (AT&T was actually forbiden by law to enter such a sphere at the time) according to their ideas of what an OS should be and how it should work. A growing community who agreed with that philosophy took hold of it and has pushed its development to where you see it today.
That original philosophy and community are still the core values of Unix. Learn them and you'll get along. Insist on doing things the way you grew accustomed to under MS "products" and you will always be unhappy.
Always.
You can't just learn a few new commands, just as in Japan you can't just learn a few equivilent words to English words you know. The very culture that words are built upon are different.
Read the UNIX books, or UNIX may forever remain "inscrutable" to you.
Spend your actual money on two O'Reilly books. Running Linux and Linux in a Nutshell. These might not be what you consider the best books in the long run, but they'll put you on the right track. On the other hand you might just find they're the only pure Linux books you'll ever need.
KFG