Linux Installation and Getting Started

Rating:
Summary: Now I can work with Linux/Unix
Review: I read the german translation by Redmer and Dalheimer. This book made me content. I've been working in a Unix environment for years without knowing what I was actually doing or what I could do with Unix. I work together with Unix specialists and hardly could understand what they are talking about. At home I tried to run and understand a Linux distribution for a year now which almost drove me crazy. Mainly because I was lost in the huge amounts of data, documents, resource files and directiries. This book introduced me step by step to Linux/Unix. This helped me to recognise structure in the 'jungle of data' of Linux/Unix. Unix-concepts, administration, swapping, printing, X-windows, TCP/IP, UUCP and other topics: now I have a basic understanding. I feel selfconfident with Linux/Unix now, wanting to do more with it. Of course, there still are limits ... E.g. the find-command now has become one of my favorites. Things like: find . -exec ls {} -l \; -exec echo "===========" \; cat {} \; | more no longer bothers me. This one is just a way to search all files, display their name, size etc. and display their contents in a way that I can scroll back and forth. I put some ==== between adjacent files to better see where the next one starts. Now, after reading this book, I can understand the handbook of my distributor and I can follow my colleagues. The only part I was missing is about ISDN. There seems to be a few different ways to access ISDN with Linux. A nice and concise chapter to understand the basic ideas and differences would make this book almost perfect for me. This book is not specific to any Linux distribution. At some occasions a hint is made to some specifica. I glanced through other 'Installing Linux' books as well. For me those focussed too much on the installation process itself, which is well supported by my Linux distributor, and hardly on the backgrounds of the operating system, which I needed.