 | By: Charlie Russel Sharon Crawford Binding: Paperback Publisher: Osborne/McGraw-Hill,U.S. ISBN: 007882446X ISBN-13: 9780078824463 Released: 01 Feb 1998 RRP: Average Rating:  |
This very readable book introduces a newbie Unix user to several basic tools' use with some tips & tricks. Home directory file management & backup, printing & printer management, terminal customization, vi, XWindows & the fvwm window manager, running programs & a little job management, LAN messaging, file sharing, awk & sed are covered.
I think this book is one of a kind, but probably everyone who reads it will wish there were more. Instead of 300 pages, it should be 400-500 pages. Almost everything that is covered could be covered more. Even if the book must aim only at users, it would be approriate to add introductions to or sections on: the general Unix filesystem hierarchy, CDE & KDE window managers (replacing the section on the antiquated fvwm), StarOffice and/or WordPerfect, gzip & bzip2, & Netscape.
But, given the number of people that are installling free or somewhat free versions of Linux, Solaris, BSD & SCO Unixes on their home systems, & given that such things as the relative merits of SMB & NFS are already discussed in the book, it is beyond doubt that the audience is not primarily users but users/newbie sysadmins. So sections on common TCP/IP setup files, SAMBA & NFS setup should be added to the next revision, as well as on kernel (re)configuration, the make & rpm commands & JDK/JRE 2 setup, XFree86 setup (mention video setup & wheel-mice), library control, & various Unices' administration tools (SAM, admintool, linuxconf, SMIT, etc). This could easily be covered & bring the book to no more than 500-600 pages. It's only 300 now.
In short, I think the book is a reallly great start & is worth buying & worth completing.
Coverage on the vi editor is good.Shell programming & Regular expressions could be covered in more detail.
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