Product: 013236039X

Despite it’s length, this book avoids (for the most part) degenerating into a concatenation of man pages. The text is concise and accurate, as far as I can tell, and examples are short and to the point.

I was a bit surprised that even though such a large book wouldn’t seem attractive for beginners, some of the basics (e.g. file systems) are discussed in great detail, but without much technical depth.

The book also spends a lot of space re-documenting various tools, instead of focusing more on giving a good overview of what tools are available for what purpose, and how to choose the most appropriate one.

For example, I don’t need a comprehensive discussion of Apache configuration directives (can go to the Apache documentation for that or read another, more specialized, book). But I do want to know Ubuntu-specific configuration file locations (discussed), and why I would be using Apache rather than e.g. lighthttpd (not discussed).

In summary, the main audience for this book must be people who are not too familiar with Linux yet, but have just accepted an admin position on a remote island without Internet (or just have an aversion to reading documentation online).
Rating: 3
013236039X
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