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Rating: 
Summary: for the uninitiated
Review: If you are new linux or are thinking of building out a linux box then this is a decent place to start. The basics of unix style administration are explained about as plainly and simply as possible. One short coming of the book is the lengthy discussion of installation which admittedly used to be a harrowing experience 5 or so years ago (seemingly the main argument against the adoption of linux by microserfs), but in the hands of Red Hat has become nearly as painless a process as any windows install and therefore is not that necessary. The only other problem with this book is that the version of Red Hat is 8.0 (3rd edition) i believe and only has some middle variant of the 2.4 kernel (2.4.17 i think), this is not necessarily bad but the 2.6 kernel is out and Red Hat has a new approach to the desktop with its Fedora build. Only buy this if you are completely new to linux and want to learn the basics.
Rating: 
Summary: Maybe for Newbies but still confusing
Review: So far I've found the book only "somewhat" useful and like most Installing Linux books, it starts off with some terrible (contradictory) advice when it comes to partitioning. For example, the author states in Chapter 2: "... use FIPS to split the FAT32 partition. Once you've run FIPS, you can use FDISK to delete the new empty partition, creating free space for Linux" Makes sense until you read the next section which tells you how to use FIPS to create the new empty partition and follows up with this advice: "Now you're ready to install Linux to the new empty partition." Hello? You told me earlier that I was supposed to delete the new empty partition to make space for Linux, now you're telling me to install Linux to the new empty partition, which is it?!?! I now have three "Installing Linux" books (O'Reilly, SAMS, and Teach Yourself Visually) they all leave out a little something, making this "newbie" a little hesitant to go any further. I would say that contrary to what people are saying these books are not written for beginners, rather for people who probably wouldn't need a book to install Linux in the first place
Rating:
Summary: Looking for a shallow spot to wade into Linux?
Review: This book is an excellent primer book for beginners jumping into Linux. More specifically, Red Hat Linux version 7.2 though they are currently working on 7.4 beta. The author presents the chapters logically beginning with step-by-step installation and leading into familiarizing you with the more useful applications available. I would have wished for a more thorough look into Samba and Apache but that may have been out of the target audience they were aiming for. There is information dealing with setting up networking, DHCP service and modem configuration. By the way, you might as well toss out your winmodem and obtain a hardware modem (external is the best) as the author does not mention the difficulty when trying to get one to work. You also get one full chapter dealing with shell commands which should wet anyone's appetite to learn more. Overall, not a bad book to begin with. Seasoned Linux professionals need not apply.
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