Customer Reviews

Linux in a Nutshell

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Linux in a Nutshell - Anyone who is studying to become a Linux system administrator should have it.
Super fast delivery! I ordered the book on Wednesday and I received it the next day.

This is a good up-do-date (published in 2005) reference on the Linux operating system. Approximately 500 of the book's 900 pages is an alphabetical listing of Linux commands. A chapter is devoted to boot loaders such as LILO and GRUB. Dual booting on a Windows system was also considered. Other chapters deal with: (i) version control management software such as CVS and Subversion, (ii) Emacs, vi, and vim text editors, (iii) administration and networking, (iv) shells, along with other topics such as regular expressions. Thus, the book goes beyond being merely a reference book of Linux commands

This book should contain all the commands a person will ever have to refer to and makes for a good reference book. It won't teach you Linux on its own, but that isn't its objective. Overall, it's well worth the money.

This is a good overall reference on Linux. The bulk of the book summarizes the Linux commands (over several hundred pages). The remaining sections deal with system and network administration issues, various shells and editors, version control, and GUI interfaces. I found the book to be quite readable and the index complete. It is a very good complement to many "Learning Linux" type books by filling in details. Heartily recommend it.

I had the 3rd edition of this book, and the 2nd, and was really hesitant about getting this latest edition. After all, linux is pretty mature these days, isn't it?

Then I read the other reviews, and decided to get it. Glad I did so! Linux is still rapidly expanding, and it really helps to get the latest authoritative scoop, thanks to OReilly.

How many times have you been trying to find a particular command but just can't remember what it was called. How many times have you been typing in a command and forgot the options available?

Through this book, the author has taken many of the substaintial commands for users, admins, networking and programming and rolled them into a dictionary of sort for Linux users.

Sure, you can find out a lot about any command through the online man pages, but the author has taken the somewhat cryptic man pages and broken them down into simple, to the point, references laid out much like you would expect to find in a dictionary.

In addition, you'll find handy reference manuals for common utilities, such as emacs, vi, CVS, sed and awk. While each of these could fill a book in themselves, the author has broken them down to the bare basics to help you get up and running and understand basic operation of each.

All in all, a wonderful reference manual that will compliment more in-depth manuals on actual use and administration of a Linux system.

I have to say that I agree with one of the reviewer here in that most of the book is very much like the manual, but I don't completely agree with his rating; after all the man pages are a great Linux reference, but if you are looking for a reference "Book" for Linux then this is it. Personally it has been really useful for me being a Computer Engineering Major, first exposed to Linux/Unix now in college [Cornell ECE/CS 314 :-) ]

This is a book that you should keep handy while working with Linux. Every time I had a doubt in commands, this book always had an answer.

If you are looking for a tutorial on Linux, or detailed installation or other step by step tasks, this is not for you.

This is an excellent book for you to have buy your side when you're busy working on the terminal.

400 pages of the 900 pages are a reprint of the man pages. Other parts of the book can be found online. For example the chapters on shell programming, you can find similar stuff online.

I would like to know how to change task priorities. I heard about the nice command. I look it up in the book and it is just a reprint of the man pages. The man documentation isn't very helpful.

If you don't like to read online, then this is book for you. If I purchased this book from a local book store, I would return it. Anyone know of a better book for experienced people coming from the MS Windows world?

Daniel

I have used Linux (nearly every major and some minor distributions) and I cannot tell you how many times this book has saved me. It is also great because a huge percentage of the commands covered also work just fine in UNIX (though I recommend UNIX in a nutshell too. I also have never bought a book from O'Rielly that was less than top notch. If you are a newbie or want to learn Linux in general BUY THIS BOOK WITH ANOTHER BOOK. Like all of the ....in a nutshell books it's reference book not a read cover-to-cover book....