After spending a fair bit of time with FreeBSD and needing some information regarding Linux installations I thought this book would be a good way to speed things along. Wrong. It's not that this book is too expensive, or poorly put together, but it's little more than a cursory overview of the Linux operating system and a listing of the commands to get things done with a terminal. But even to find the commands to do simple things such as renaming files, is too time consuming to be bothered with. Simply doing a Google for the stuff you want to know is much quicker and more comprehensive.

Whole chapters are committed to such stuff as Emacs and KDE. But, yet again, there are specific websites with HTML help manuals for this, and more.

These Open Source books are pretty much a waste of paper, simply because, being Open Source, it's all available online, or in the manuals provided with the distros.

Worth dropping your earlier editions of this book

Rating: 5/5

I had the 3rd edition of this book, and the 2nd, and was really hesitant about getting this latest edition. After all, linux is pretty mature these days, isn't it?

Then I read the other reviews, and decided to get it. Glad I did so! Linux is still rapidly expanding, and it really helps to get the latest authoritative scoop, thanks to OReilly.

Excellent Reference Manual

Rating: 5/5

How many times have you been trying to find a particular command but just can't remember what it was called. How many times have you been typing in a command and forgot the options available?

Through this book, the author has taken many of the substaintial commands for users, admins, networking and programming and rolled them into a dictionary of sort for Linux users.

Sure, you can find out a lot about any command through the online man pages, but the author has taken the somewhat cryptic man pages and broken them down into simple, to the point, references laid out much like you would expect to find in a dictionary.

In addition, you'll find handy reference manuals for common utilities, such as emacs, vi, CVS, sed and awk. While each of these could fill a book in themselves, the author has broken them down to the bare basics to help you get up and running and understand basic operation of each.

All in all, a wonderful reference manual that will compliment more in-depth manuals on actual use and administration of a Linux system.