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Rating: 
Summary: A good addition to any LINUX library
Review: Installing Linux and all its modularized parts is deeply confusing. This book does not help in the least, and I don't understand why Caldera would put it on the shelves with a CD in the back.For example, the most important reconfiguration item available is called LISA, and it does not appear in the index.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't bother if you'r installing
Review: Installing Linux and all its modularized parts is deeply confusing. This book does not help in the least, and I don't understand why Caldera would put it on the shelves with a CD in the back. For example, the most important reconfiguration item available is called LISA, and it does not appear in the index.
Rating:
Summary: A good addition to any LINUX library
Review: It's probably not possible to write "complete" book on Linux, because the OS is still new and rapidly evolving, both technically and as a commodity in the computing market. Sobell's book doesn't cover everything, but the topics he does cover are well presented, clearly written and often cross-referenced in the text itself, which save a lot of frantic paging around to find a forgotten detail. Sobell focuses on basic Linux programming and development, rather than installation, setup, hardware, etc., so his book makes a good companion volume to the "sysadmin" handbooks on the market, which often come up short on details about the OS language and utilities.
Rating: 
Summary: Book Title should be HANDS ON UNIX. No LINUX content.
Review: This book is well written. I rely on it, and refer to it constantly. If you are new to any form of UNIX, you will need to develop a good working knowledge of the UNIX tool set. You should learn about the shells (bash,ksh,etc), the editors (emacs, vi, joe) other common unix tools (make, awk, pine), and the X-Windows system. For learning about these things, this book is very good. What I don't like is that the book really should be called "HANDS ON UNIX". Only an occasional remark in the text reminds you that this is a LINUX book. The book seems titled by the publisher to cash in on the LINUX buzz, rather than according to it's content. Less than 1% of the content is LINUX specific. There is a 7 page appendix on the emulators available for LINUX, and about ten pages of Linux specific content int he first hundred pages. Chapter two just blithely states that "This book does not discuss hardware selection nor the installation of Linux" and then jumps right to logging into a UNIX command shell. To this day I'm still looking for decent coverage of buying a Linux compatible system, system installation, hard disk setup, network and sound card setup, dial up networking setup, and other hardware and installation manuals. There is nothing on recompiling the kernel. The only tweaking section that I found useful was the XFree86 section. The tips on window managers and setting up your X configuration is pretty good. If you are an at-home Linux user, you ARE the network administrator, and system administrator. If you're looking for a one-volume omnibus, this is not it. The content in this book will probably never become dated. It's timeless unix stuff. Warren Postma
Rating:
Summary: Excellent for intermediate and beginners
Review: This is an excellent book. It really helped me once i had Linux installed. Of course if you are still struggling with getting Linux installed then look elsewhere. Overall an Excellent buy. Yet the software bundle is a little lacking. The software bundled doesnt really demonstrate the free software capabilities of Linux considering most of it is on a 90 day evaulation period.
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