Linux Cookbook

Rating:
Summary: A solid Linux reference book
Review: Linux Cookbook, written by Carla Schroder and published by O'Reilly Media, covers a lot of Linux-related topics, but offers several invaluable recepies for maintaining your Linux system. It includes recepies for several common open source applications, including Apache, postfix, CVS, GRUB and LILO, CUPS, XFree86, Mondo, NTP, SpamAssassin, Samba, and BIND.

In addition to addressing applications, the book includes recepies for reading documentation via info or manpages, file permissions, managing users and groups, discovering hardware, and also installing software from RPMs, DEBs or from source. This book has the type of practical insight and useful tidbits that you might find on a Linux mailing list, but they're all included in a nice format for you desk, rather than searching down the information.

There were several typos in the text that started to detract from my reading experience. There were directories that were not referenced properly. This is an important detail when teaching someone the remove (rm) command. Another slightly misleading statement came when discussing a password in GRUB's menu.lst file. The author discussed putting a hashed password in the file, then putting a clear text password, and then mentioning that a file with a clear text password should be readable only by root. While this is true, it is equally true that any password contained in a text file (hashed or clear text). If a non-root user can read the file, they can use a password cracking program and learn what the password is. A new user might not understand the security risks involved. I'm sure the second edition will mention this.

There were a few instances in the text where I felt that more information could have been included on a given topic or application. In a discussion of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS), the author makes no mention of FHS versions, or the newer directories like /srv or /media. I understand that documentation lags behind newer technology, but there was no FHS version number to give the reader an indication of what they should expect. With no version number, I assumed the version was the latest, rather than the latest at the time of the author's writing. I'm sure this new version will be mentioned in the second edition.

I did learn several things from this book, including the differences between the ext3, reiserfs, jffs, and xfs filesystems. The author gave a lot of great background information, but kept true to the bookbook-style, "how-do-I-do-this?" type of book. It is a book you should keep close to your keyboard for those quick "how-do-I?" moments.

Rating:
Summary: Numerous tips on direct command line usage
Review: Perhaps the most surprising thing about this book is that it wasn't published prior to December 2004. Linux has been popular enough in recent years that the book would have been useful earlier. But given that it has just appeared, Schroder has a very up to date coverage of linux tips.

Take for example the chapter on CD and DVD recording or copying. All sorts of guidance on using DVDs for data or audio. Linux has powerful but obscure commands for these tasks. But they are run at the command line. Often with many input arguments. Not the easiest of things for someone to remember. Linux lacks a nice UI to take some of this burden off you.

Some of you should check out the chapter on Knoppix. There is an allure about making a bootable version of linux on a CD or DVD that you can then run on an arbitrary Intel or AMD machine.

The chapter on managing spam has a very limited discussion on using a blacklist. It talks about how it's used to block incoming messages from addresses on the list. No mention about using the list against domains from hyperlinks in the message body.