The Linux Cookbook, Second Edition

Rating:
Summary: Thorough Coverage
Review: When this book fell out of its shipping envelope, it made quite a thunk as it hit my desk. No wonder: at almost 800 pages, this is quite a chunk of reading material.

I had been impressed by the first edition. The only real complaint I had about that was its exclusive focus on Debian Linux; that's been corrected here. The first edition was available on-line in its entirety; this is not, although you can see a sample chapter and the table of contents at (...).

Unlike the first edition, this covers a lot more basic material. Don't let that turn you off if you have outgrown the beginner books - unless you are expert at everything, you'll find helpful material here. There are pointers to esoteric utilities you probably have never heard of mixed in with the "getting started" stuff.

I was interested that Amazon reviews were luke-warm. I think it deserves better. I would have liked to see less attention to the real basics, but that does make this useful to the beginner also. One Amazon review didn't like it because it was too geeky, a complaint I can't sympathise with. Another didn't like the concentration on command line tools - I hope that isn't a sign of things to come where Linux users join their Windows brethren in disdain of character based interfaces.