[ILUG] Best General Purpose Book on Linux

[Owen Brady]

On Thu, 29 Jan 2009, David Howe wrote:

> I just wanted to poll the list on which Linux manuals or instructional
> books that they have found particularly good.
> I have found "Linux Cookbook" (O'Reilly ISBN 0-596-00640-3) to be useful
> in the past but it does lack in some departments. It provide quick fixes
> but does not go into too much depth.
>
>
> -- 
> David Howe
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> Howe Systems Limited
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I bought this book called 'UNIX Power Tools' recently, and it's quite
a big book(1104 pages). I have flicked through a few articles and it seems 
to explain each topic well in a nice small chunk at a time.

Don't be put off by it's bredth, the preface actually recommends NOT to 
read the book cover to cover. The 'Hyperlink' style works quite well.
It's a very general book on all things UNIX, and a nice touch is that it 
is also *NIX platform agnostic(for the most part).

I can see myself using this book for a long time, and it's nice to have
on the bookshelf to consult when required. This book is already
filling gaps in my knowledge simply by trying things out.

I have the third edition which glosses over some sysadmin stuff like 
networking, but this really isn't the book to go for Networking stuff.
Still good for sysadmins I reckon, but this is not a sysadmin book.

There is a nice introduction to Perl, and the stuff on regular expressions
is helping me slowly but surely. The sed stream editor is also 
mentioned, along with the AWK programming langauge.

Just make sure if you get this to purchase any edition above
the first, because the first edition uses the old non POSIX complient 
tools.



As a Linux user most of the time, this book gets a huge ++ from me
Can't recommend it enough.

-Owen