Linux Book Recommendations, for 2004?

An anonymous reader asks: "LinuxDevices.com editor Henry Kingman has reviewed O'Reilly's new Pocket Linux Guide, a 191-page guide to Linux, asking whether a book that short can tell you what you need to know to get started working on a Linux system. Apparently this book cannot, to believe Kingman, who also dismisses O'Reilly's Linux in a Nutshell as 'dry.' Can anyone recommend a good book for smart but inexperienced Linux users, something that conveys a little of the magic of Linux without being too chatty, or too esoteric, or just too overwhelming?"

Comments

The best newbie book (and a good reference)

[kallisti777]

I think the best introduction to Linux (or any *nix for that matter) is Think Unix by Jon Lasser. It is written for competent Windows (or pre-OS X) Mac users who don't need words like "disk" explained to them, but aren't exactly comfortable at a command line and have trouble conceptualizing linking together several different programs to produce a result. Chapter one is about nothing but man pages, and X doesn't appear until the end.

My favorite reference book is O'Reilly's LPI Certification in a Nutshell; it covers the same material as Running Linux, and is just as dry, but I prefer the layout and organization.

So how does our newbie get from point A to point B? The same way most of us did: with the distro manual, man pages, HOW-TOs, online support, and so on. I love computer books, but there's definitely something to be said for figuring stuff out for yourself.