Product: 0596004826

Unless you are a seasoned Linux guru who never forgets anything, then you should buy Linux in a Nutshell. This is quite possibly one of the most essential books for anyone working with Linux. If you are like me, reading documentation online can be tedious and having a handy reference volume is better than stumbling through Google search results. Linux in a Nutshell covers major user, programming, administration and networking tools for popular Linux distributions. At over 900 pages, this hefty volume can save you time and prevent you from making mistakes. Have you ever gotten regular expression wrong and deleted a bunch of files? This handy reference can help prevent future mistakes!

At first glance Linux in a Nutshell may appear to be nothing more than Linux’s manual pages in print form - but it’s much more. The whopping 400-page third chapter provides a comprehensive reference guide to almost any standard Linux command you will need. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of commands are covered in this chapter. Arranged alphabetically for quick reference, you can easily find the proper documentation for a command. For example, consider the simple shell command ‘ls’ used to list contents of directories. Often you may find yourself wanting to list items in a specific way. If you pull up the man pages on your console terminal or SSH window, you will find yourself scrolling through a myriad of pages. Or with this book next to you, you could turn to page 258 and quickly run through all of the various listing options. There are nearly 50 different command options for the seemingly simply listing command. With this reference volume, you can scan through them all in seconds.

Another excellent chapter covers package managers. It provides a solid introduction to Red Hat’s rpm format and Debian’s deb format. If you use Linux, then you probably grab packages frequently and install them. This chapter will guide you through many aspects of the package manager. Especially useful on Red Hat is rpm’s verify command. If you suspect your system has been hacked, using rpm to verify md5 checksums can be a very quick way to check on specific files.

Learning to use a text editor is essential to becoming a good system administrator. Linux in a Nutshell covers Emacs and vi. Linux text editors can be very powerful when you know the right commands. Also editors like vi tend to preserve a files format better than simpler editors like pico. Though these chapters will not replace a dedicated reference volume they are certainly handy when you need to find a quick way to change a text file.

Linux in a Nutshell is an excellent reference volume. At first, you may not think you will use it, but once it is at your side, you will find yourself referring to it often. Even if you’re a seasoned Linux user, you occasionally run across some command that you may not know well. Rather than stumbling though man pages and often-inappropriate online documentation, you could use this book and have your answer in seconds. In short, if you use Linux, buy this book.
Rating: 5
0596004826
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