general

I think this book is not good enough and can serve only as a very general overview of Linux. The more you know about Linux/Unix the more you hate this book. It was especially funny to read other readers reviews that it may be good for sysadmins. No way. To serious users and sysadmins I would recommend to choose a book devoted to their particular platform, e.g. "Red Hat Linux x.x Unleashed" or "Linux Network Servers" or various kinds of Administrators handbooks. At least you'll get some information in there. "Running Linux" in 90% of cases won't help you to solve your problems. It simply not practical. If you really want to learn Linux try books for sysadmins like "Linux Network servers". Even beginners will learn more about Linux/Unix from the book like "Teach yourself Unix (or Linux) in 24 hours" - they are much more to the point.

One general comment about O'Reilly. They really have quite a number of good books out there. Like "Unix Power Tools" and some exceptionally good books about Perl. But they have a number of bad ones. "Running Linux", "Managing projects with Make", "Learning Java" are exceptionally good examples of general fluff/bad editing. One of the major problems with O'Reilly that they don't know how to deal with books for beginners or just cannot decide what kind of audience this or that particular book is written for...

When we are reading books we are looking for well organized information and not general stories about history of Linux or Perl. We need helpful examples. Take a look at chapter 16 for example. The authors tried to explain how to use Netscape Navigator on 3 pages, HTML basics on several pages, how to write cgi script on 1 or 2 pages. All these attempts are nice but even a newbie needs a book about HTML, not just a few pages... Simply waste of paper... The best way to spoil a book is to try to consider 100 topics each of which deserves a separate book and try to explain each one on one or two pages... What one gets from "Running Linux" is not good enough even for newbies. Maybe good for company managers. Beware. I hope the next edition will be more focused or will contain three-four times more pages.

Caveat: this book is not intended for use by those who are afraid of the command-line and of probing deep into their OS to configure things manually, but then again, that is what Linux is all about- getting under the hood! For those with no previous knowledge of Linux but with a desire to really understand and be able to optimize your OS based on your needs, this book is for you. While this book gives a passing nod to the X-Windows GUI interface, it spends most of its time on the command line, wherein the real power lies. From installing the LILO boot loader to recompiling the kernel, this book will guide the reader step by step, taking very little for granted. While the book assumes no previous knowledge of Linux, it does have a steep learning curve, and the subsequent payoff is huge. This is in particular the best first step for newbies to take to prepare to use Linux's extensive, powerful (and free!) development tools (C, C++, Python, Lisp, Perl, Java etc.). My only complaints are the scanty coverage of PPP configuration and configuration files (such as .bashrc and .bash_profile). This book otherwise superlative.

If you already know a little bit of Unix or Linux or other Unix-variants, this book is way too "introductory" for you. It covers stuff like how to login and run ls, cp and mv. As another example, see the section on backing your computer. It talks about using find and tar, but nothing about dump and restore and backup strategies.

Overall, too much scratching the surface and not enough in depth information for real Unix users.