Product: Linux Bible

The book is pretty much well written and does contain a lot of good info, however Ive got to drop my rating for the overly-hyped marketing. While the author is clear that the team putting this together is a fully Red Hat group the covers & write-ups claim …a focus on the latest version of Red Hat…Fedora…and Ubuntu…. Yes, Ubuntu is regularly mentioned and a few Ubuntu instructions are presented but understand that the book really is about Red Hat/Fedora and just barely scratches any Debian products. With that said it does a pretty good job of presenting command-line information. The majority of that is relevant to most distros of Linux.

Ive also got to say that the bar for a Power User must be horribly low. This is the 3rd book Ive worked through to get up to speed on Linux. My last exposure to the system was about 25 or so years back when Red Hat Linux (no Enterprise version, Intel 386 chips) was available. I also learned with a Unix look-alike named Coherent (on all 30 of its floppy disks). With that ancient and minimal background I still seemed to be well past what any book deemed entry level and was already almost what they consider Power User, yet I felt just barely functional.

The Linux Bible does a good job of presenting a new, yet somewhat familiar user with the tools necessary to use the system. It offers a look at a very wide variety of functions, capabilities, and possibilities for further study. If it meets the criteria listed on its cover to advance to enterprise and cloud computing or become a Linux system Admin or Power User then I am very disappointed in the lack of a skill-set needed to earn those titles. Personally I think its the book that misses the mark, not the Admins.

Bottom line, yes its a worthwhile read and reference book. I would recommend it to those interested in dabbling in Linux; to those end-users who need to learn the operating system for work or pleasure; and as a high-level look at the type of subject matter a future System Admin might need to learn (but definitely not a comprehensive guide to get you to that level).
Rating: 3
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