Mark G. Sobell wrote a lengthy book about Red Hat Linux and Fedora, A Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux, and we are taking a look at its draft copy (second edition released end of July).
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Am I the only one, or does it just seem strange to have a book be called 'A Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux : Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux' when it mostly uses these as example distro's to talk about Linux and Linux-based subjects?
Huh?
You've got the general Linux and Linux-based components of a dristibution, and the particular engineering choices made by the distributor.
Your remark seems to imply that they should limit their discussion to RPM, Bluecurve, and their installer.
Such a book might not be helpful to someone trying out their distribution for the first time, which is likely their market. Folks that don't need the general topic treatment are also likely to acquire their own ISOs and just use info/man/irc/usenet to get knowledge.
You talked about default things in Redhat's distro and I noticed that mysql is not setup by default, even if you choose database server option.
I also think that PHP is not a programming language by default in Redhat environment. They seem to support Python and Perl more.
Electronic manuals has only one advantage over books - search capabilities. Other than that, a good book written by a good teacher will do better than FAQs and manuals in the wild Internet.
Of course, having Google right under by fingers, I always use it for learning Linux, but a good book feels much much better.
However, there is a tendency for Linux books to become like Windows software books, which live only for a season, until next version is out. No one has enough money to follow that.
Where in the world are authors who write FUNDAMENTAL books that enable people to understand the OSes and cope with any new version and even new OSes?