Book Review: Learning Red Hat Linux, 2nd Edition
Linked by Eugenia Loli on Mon 6th May 2002 15:30 UTC
Features, Office 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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Re: more or less useless for a Unix poweruser
by mario on Tue 7th May 2002 22:26 UTC

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.)