Product Description: Praise for Mark Sobell's Books "I keep searching for books that collect everything you want to know about a subject in one place, and keep getting disappointed. Usually the books leave out some important topic, while others go too deep in some areas and must skim lightly over the others. A Practical Guide to Red Hat(R) Linux(R) is one of those rare books that actually pulls it off. Mark G. Sobell has created a single reference for Red Hat Linux that cannot be beat! This marvelous text (with a 4-CD set of Linux Fedora Core 2 included) is well worth the price. This is as close to an 'everything you ever needed to know' book that I've seen. It's just that good and rates 5 out of 5." --Ray Lodato, Slashdot contributor"Mark Sobell has written a book as approachable as it is authoritative." --Jeffrey Bianchine, Advocate, Author, Journalist"Excellent reference book, well suited for the sysadmin of a linux cluster, or the owner of a PC contemplating installing a recent stable linux. Don't be put off by the daunting heft of the book. Sobell has striven to be as inclusive as possible, in trying to anticipate your system administration needs."--Wes Boudville, Inventor"A Practical Guide to Red Hat(R) Linux(R) is a brilliant book. Thank you Mark Sobell." --C. Pozrikidis, University of California at San Diego"This book presents the best overview of the Linux operating system that I have found...It should be very helpful and understandable no matter what the reader's background is: traditional UNIX user, new Linux devotee, or even Windows user. Each topic is presented in a clear, complete fashion and very few assumptions are made about what the reader knows...The book is extremely useful as a reference, as it contains a 70-page glossary of terms and is very well indexed. It is organized in such a way that the reader can focus on simple tasks without having to wade through more advanced topics until they are ready." --Cam Marshall, Marshall Information Service LLC, Member of Front Range UNIX Users Group FRUUG, Boulder, Colorado"Conclusively, this is THE book to get if you are a new Linux user and you just got into RH/Fedora world. There's no other book that discusses so many different topics and in such depth." --Eugenia Loli-Queru, Editor in Chief, OSNews.comThe Most Useful Linux Tutorial and Reference Ever, with Hundreds of High-Quality Examples Covering Every Linux Distribution!To be truly productive with Linux, you need to thoroughly master the shells and the command line. Until now, you had to buy two books to gain that mastery: a tutorial on fundamental Linux concepts and techniques, plus a separate reference. Worse, most Linux references offer little more than prettied-up man pages. Now, there's a far better solution. Renowned Linux expert Mark Sobell has brought together comprehensive, insightful guidance on the tools system administrators, developers, and power users need most, and an outstanding day-to-day reference, both in the same book. This book is 100 percent distribution and release agnostic: You can use it on any Linux system, now and for years to come. What's more, it's packed with hundreds of high-quality examples: better examples than you'll find in any other Linux guidebook. This is Linux from the ground up: the clearest explanations and most useful knowledge about everything from filesystems to shells, editors to utilities, and programming tools to regular expressions. And when you need instant answers, you'll constantly turn to Sobell's comprehensive command reference section--organized and tabbed for easy, fast access!Don't settle for yesterday's Linux guidebook. Get the one book that meets today's challenges--and tomorrow's! A Practical Guide to Linux(R) Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming is the most useful, most comprehensive Linux tutorial and reference you can find.It's the only book to deliver *Better, more realistic examples covering tasks you'll actually need to perform *Deeper insight, based on Sobell's immense knowledge of every Linux nook and cranny *More practical explanations of more than eighty core utilities, from aspell to xargs *Techniques for implementing secure communications using ssh and scp--plus dozens of tips for making your system more secure *A superior introduction to the Linux programming environment, including make, gcc, gdb, CVS, and much more *Expert guidance on basic and advanced shell programming using bash and tcsh *Tips and tricks for customizing the shell and using it interactively from the command line *Thorough guides to vim and emacs, designed to help you get productive fast and maximize your editing efficiency *Dozens of exercises to help you practice and gain confidence *Instructions for using Apt, yum, and BitTorrent for keeping your system up to date automatically *And much more, including coverage of gawk, sed, find, sort, bzip2, and regular expressions
A fair book; not great, not bad. I purchased this book thinking it would help me learn Linux Shell Programming. It did not. First, the material is too high level. Second, some of us are still constrained to the original Bourne shell. The book does not cover the Bourne shell. For example, why does the following script not work:
if [$# -lt "1" ] then VAR=$1 fi
Answer: There is no space after the opening square bracket. I found that out from an online tutorial that I can read for free any time I want.
Why didn't I send the book back, or sell it? Answer: I would have to pay for shipping, or receive less than I paid. At least it looks pretty on my bookshelf.
Linux Command-line Reference This is a good Linux command-line reference for those who just started in this domain. It has full description of the commands and their possible syntaxes.
However, for those who have medium to advance hands-on, you feel that this book lacks providing tricks and shortcut pathways. In another word, it would be beneficial if this book provided advanced real-life examples.
Overall, I found this book helpful and the only one of its kind.
A book that will help you become a Linux command line guru This is a book that I have been looking for for a long time. I have been looking for a book that takes me into the command line world of Linux but in a methodical way describing all the little options, tips, tricks but also the principles that make Linux shell so powerful.
Book begins with a brief history of Linux and very informative, relevant overview of the system architecture. It proceeds with the in depth, hands on walkthrogugh the environment, shells, and command line utilities. There is a very useful and every-day practical exercise at the end of the each chapter.
Book continues with in depth chapters on Linux filesystem, the shell, editors (emacs and vi) and the programming environment including (g)awk and sed.
Book concludes with excellend command reference section (300 pages) and Appendix on regular expressions (superb), getting help with Linux and keeping the system up to date (using yum and bit torrent).
I could go on at length to describe what this book is but trust me, a promotion for the book that you see on Amazon is accurate. This book is as good as it sounds. It is reviewed by 42 reviewers on Amazon and average score is 4.5 stars out of 5. I give it 5.
Lots of stuff, but oriented toward scripting The claim that this is a "practical guide to Linux commands . . ." is an overstatement. The coverage of commands is relatively minimal. This volume doesn't really get into any depth or go beyond basic commands. The Command Reference (Part V of the book) is incomplete. It definitely is not a guide to using Linux.
Several editors and a bit of programming are covered , though again the coverage is cursory.
Overall, this is probably an okay reference for experienced Linux users. For people like me who don't use Linux often or in-depth, it is frankly not of very much use.
Jerry
Comprehensive but overwhelming for a n00b I found this book to be just ok - it covers the basics of Linux and many important/frequently used commands but I am remotely satisfied with this book because the author focuses on stuff that many users probably will find less useful.
The learning curve is quite steep if you're relatively new to Linux - the author is describing very basic stuff like GNU, Linux file systems, simple shell commands and such, and then suddenly rushes into complicated shell programming and scripts.
Few examples from this book that I know I will never use but who knows, other users may find that:
-This book is great if you're into emacs and vi(m) since it dedicates over 100 pages on these two text editors but I prefer using nano so for me these chapters were more or less wasted. -This book is great if you're into shell programming.
Why spend 100+ pages on vim and emacs when at least some pages could've been dedicated to a Security Section that this book doesn't have? Perhaps emacs and vim are important because programming requires a good set of text editors..?
The Appendix is great though - there's an extensive collection of commands that can be useful for all newbies and intermediate users.
Someone will probably flame me for this review, saying I should've read the book's title before purchasing it. Yes, you are right - I should've. But then again, if this book clearly was written for intermediate users, why mention GNU, basics of Linux and its file systems and so forth to begin with?
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
