Product: 0470082933

At some point, any Debian user will either give up Linux, getting back to the cave and Windows or end up googling to find a faster, better way to accomplish all those tedious, time consuming and error prone tasks that he manually does, over and over, through the graphical interface. This book, with its learn by doing approach, is a great companion to anyone wiling to get the most out of the penguin, unleashing the true power of Linux and taking control of his machine and its services through the command line.

First things first: this book is not for people new to Linux. Its for those that have already been playing with Debian, or any of its derivatives (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, ), and want to do more, faster and better. On the other hand, this title does not give the reader details about the Linux philosophy and/or its internals. There are excellent books to learn about what happens under the hood (see the suggested books down, at the bottom).

In this title, Christopher gives the readers an accurate and comprehensive coverage of the commands to take control of the many different aspects of the operating system: memory, disks, network, . Among them, I have particularly enjoyed the chapters dedicated to the file system management, which covers everything, from mounting and unmounting up to creating virtual and encrypted file systems. And their maintenance, of course.

Its not a reference. For each command presented, the author does not show all the possible options and flavors. He does instead present the good ones, those that you want to save as an alias in your bashrc or jealously somewhere safe.

Moving through the chapters, the reader feels amazed by the quantity of commands hes shown, step by step, and by the simplicity through which the author explains the concepts.

A very good book. Certainly one of the best cookbooks out there. Definitely recommended to power users. Not to sys admins though: the book does not present/teach shell scripts to automate the daily maintenance tasks . Moreover, the topics covered are probably way too easy for any seasoned admin out there.

Suggested readings:
Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook: a similar book, which targets system administrators instead.
How Linux Works: a great title dedicated to the internals of Linux. A must have for anyone interested in understanding how the system works.

As usual, you can find more reviews on my personal blog: http://books.lostinmalloc.com Feel free to pass by and share your thoughts!
Rating: 4
0470082933
Count: 18