When I received the "Learning Red Hat Linux, 2nd Edition" book from O'Reilly, I thought that this would be an in-depth guide, a way to hack around the Red Hat Linux operating system. It was a bit of let down for me to see that the book was for beginners. But, reading through it, I realized that the beauty of the book is in teaching new users lessons that are solid and well constructed throughout its 350 pages.
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>When I received the "Learning Red Hat Linux, 2nd Edition" >book from O'Reilly, I thought that this would be an in-depth >guide, a way to hack around the Red Hat Linux operating >system. It was a bit of let down for me to see that the book >was for beginners
Yeah, it's a damn shame that something regarding Linux should actually be useable to end users for once.
I'm looking for a book like this, but compiling is something elementary to using linux and should be at least discussed.
That Scot Hacker doesn't write a book on Linux. He's one of the few computer writers who can actually WRITE.
Yep, I already have all the Linux books I need, but I would definitely hand out the nickels for a Linux book written by Scot. Then it would be lightweight and fun, and in-depth at the same time. You could choose the depth and detail that suits you, and the book would never "talk over your head".
My gripe with all these Linux books around is that even those "Linux unleashed" and "Big book of Linux" type of books are not really that advanced. I mean, they all contain the same ol' shite, more or less useless for a Unix poweruser. A Hacker book would probably contain at least some new and interesting things that I didn't know, and it would be overall more fun to read than anything out there at the moment.
I though all that UNIX power users needed was man pages! They are so quick to tell the rest of us to go there.
That's not my style: if someone asks me for help I never tell them to go read the man pages, because I hated it when I was told the same.
Furthermore, man pages give you only a small piece of the picture, but sometimes you need to know what is this all about, how -can- it all tie together, sometimes you need to get out the power of Unix. For example: say you want to put your HP-UX system in trusted mode and to enforce certain policies different from the default ones. How do you do that? There is no man page that will explain you all you need to do, and if you go about collecting piece by piece the informations you need, well, you'll spend a lot of time. That's where a good book -could- be useful, if such book existed. More and more, unfortunately, I come to the conclusion that most self-appointed Unix gurus are just half-educated amateurs with time to write books.
OK, I'm done with my rant.
DrP, if you need any Unix help, I personally would be happy to help, just drop me a mail in marioyaddayadda@myrealbox.com (remove yaddayadda)
(Interestingly, in Linux the man pages are usually quite badly written, and expecially, without any examples.)
I totally agree to what mario has said. I had to do a lot in tru64 lately, mostly BIND 9.x stuff and the included manpages where mostly useless. I finally found some good howto's that helped a lot.
OT: is there a good indepth freebsd handbook covering more than the official manual over at freebsd.org ?
quickie
>OT: is there a good indepth freebsd handbook covering more than the official manual over at freebsd.org ?
Yes, please read our review here:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=579&page=all
