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Books for a newbie to Linux

grrl

grrl

Diamond Member
Can anyone recommend a good beginners book for Linux (Redhat seems to be the most common)? I'm looking for something that begins with the basics, but also gets into more advanced stuff.
 
Try Checking out "Running Linux 3rd Edition" by Mat Welsh, Matthias kalle Dalheimer and Lar Kaufman. Its a very nice introduction to linux. Highly reccomended.
 


<< Ditto Derango... "Running Linux," a little dated, but still the champion. >>



True, it is just a bit dated, but nothing that it talks about has really changed except for some of the samba stuff and the entire X windows chapter. Other than that, its just basic command line linux. Also "A Practical Guide to Linux" is pretty good, although I can't remember the author of that one. That book features more detail on the "how" aspect of doing things. Its a good companion to "Running Linux", IMHO
 
Well I will suggest Your Unix The Ultimate Guide by Sumitaha Das. It's a expensive book ( $60 new ) but a very well written book which is very much worth the purchase and effort in reading.
 
The O'Reilly can be a little daunting for newbies. (I know, I was a little overwhelmed when I first got it.)
But with a little experience, it's great.

For a complete beginner, I'd go for a distro specific book like Learn RH in xx Hours/Days or Mandrake for Dummies.
Something that can get you going. IMHO, I'd rather see someone who has a running system that can figure stuff
out than someone who can't even get anything installed. 😛

You can always move to the 'harder' distros later. 🙂
 


<< The O'Reilly can be a little daunting for newbies >>



It's not nearly as bad as the "man" pages or "Linuxdocs".
Why would anybody send a stark nekkid newbie there for info?

BTW, I ditto the O'Reilly book. I'm still digging stuff outta there 2 years later.
 


<<
It's not nearly as bad as the "man" pages or "Linuxdocs".
Why would anybody send a stark nekkid newbie there for info?

BTW, I ditto the O'Reilly book. I'm still digging stuff outta there 2 years later. >>



because that's where i was sent there by my unix guru friends. personally i think the best way to learn is to initially suffer through the migration to *nix's.
 


<< because that's where i was sent there by my unix guru friends. personally i think the best way to learn is to initially suffer through the migration to *nix's. >>



This is bad. Now Linux is like a club with an initiation ritual? No wonder most people won't deal with it...

One of Linux's major problems is the lack of a standard documentation system. It's got:

1. Man pages
2. Info pages
3. Howto's
4. KDE Help System
5. Gnome Help System

And for most programs, only ONE of these is picked; sometimes it's not obvious which. Emacs has info pages; smbd uses man pages. Wait, you wanted to print out the smbd man page? You can use "man xxx | col -b | ul -t dumb | lpr" but of course you'll have to hunt to find that pearl of wisdom 'cause it isn't in any man page or Info page that I know of.

Of course many programs are so poorly supported and documented that they use none of the above... But as with so many other problems with Linux, it's difficult to complain when you don't pay for any of it!
 


<<

<< because that's where i was sent there by my unix guru friends. personally i think the best way to learn is to initially suffer through the migration to *nix's. >>



This is bad. Now Linux is like a club with an initiation ritual? No wonder most people won't deal with it...

One of Linux's major problems is the lack of a standard documentation system. It's got:

1. Man pages
2. Info pages
3. Howto's
4. KDE Help System
5. Gnome Help System

And for most programs, only ONE of these is picked; sometimes it's not obvious which. Emacs has info pages; smbd uses man pages. Wait, you wanted to print out the smbd man page? You can use "man xxx | col -b | ul -t dumb | lpr" but of course you'll have to hunt to find that pearl of wisdom 'cause it isn't in any man page or Info page that I know of.

Of course many programs are so poorly supported and documented that they use none of the above... But as with so many other problems with Linux, it's difficult to complain when you don't pay for any of it! >>



heh. i wasn't really implying that it was a club. i'm not too sure how you even came to that conclusion either. all i meant is that most people that know a lot about linux spent countless hours doing research on their own instead of doing what a lot of people do in any situation and ask for someone to hold their hand through something. there are some people out there that actually enjoy learning. i'm sorry that i fall into this category. it shouldn't be about a quick fix, it's about understanding what (if anything) went wrong and why. armed with that knowledge you should be able to tackle any problem that you're presented with.
 


<< All i meant is that most people that know a lot about linux spent countless hours doing research on their own instead of doing what a lot of people do in any situation and ask for someone to hold their hand through something. There are some people out there that actually enjoy learning. I'm sorry that i fall into this category. It shouldn't be about a quick fix, it's about understanding what (if anything) went wrong and why. Armed with that knowledge you should be able to tackle any problem that you're presented with. >>




Nobody was making any value judgements.
IMHO until/if the Linux movement does a much better job with documentation it will always be a geek OS that happens to run some pretty good web serving software(Apache).
Does Linux want to compete for the desktop market?
From the din and roar of "M$ sux, GO Tux" you hear all over from what I will call the "rabid little pit yorky's" it would sure seem like it.
Yet what do we hear when one of those "appliance operators" were all so fond of making fun of wants to actually give the OS a try?
"RTFM!! I had to stuggle with it so should you."
I think it's ironic as hell that one of the most stable OS's ever built can't compete with MS simply because nobody will put their foot down when it comes to standardized, easy to read and use documentation. What do I mean? You sit the muckety mucks of the Linux movement down in a room and they set some universal docs standards. If a piece of software has non-conforming docs it doesn't go in the distro or Kernel. The Linux movement needs to take a lesson from MS when it comes to marketing.

If Linux is destined to be just a geeky niche OS then the rabid little pit yorky's should just sit down and STFU. It's getting tiresome.

 
When I type "rabid little pit yorky's" I meant the often too loud Linux supporters across the net.
You know the ones, "MS sucks, Linux rulz", kinda guys.
While I love their enthusiasm for Linux it seems to me it's also a disproportionate number of these people who will tell a Linux newbie RTFM.
If Linux wants to compete with MS for the desktop we need to market it like MS does Winders.
In that scenario RTFM won't cut it.
 
RTFM or STFU. 🙂

If you dont like the documentation out there, write some new documentation. Come up with a standard for documentation, start using it, draw up a draft of it and submit it. Until then, the man pages are good enough for me. The program doesnt have a man page? Ill try the program's web site. No documentation on the site? Ill try google.com/linux. Nothing relevant? Ill try info. No info? Ill try linuxdoc.org. Nothing there? Well Ill either work through it or find a better program.

Seriously Tiger and everyone else complaining about documentation, either do something about it or STFU. The coders have more important things to do than to cater to newbies who dont want to be bothered with reading the available documentation.
 


<< When I type "rabid little pit yorky's" I meant the often too loud Linux supporters across the net.
You know the ones, "MS sucks, Linux rulz", kinda guys.
While I love their enthusiasm for Linux it seems to me it's also a disproportionate number of these people who will tell a Linux newbie RTFM.
If Linux wants to compete with MS for the desktop we need to market it like MS does Winders.
In that scenario RTFM won't cut it. >>



i'm not pointing fingers or making generalizations, but don't a lot of microsoft users jump to put down anything that is not made my ms? isn't it usually because they are ignorant and have never actually used any other os besides windows? just some things to think about.
 
I have to agree with Noc on this one. The documentation is there and while it is sometimes may not be pretty and is sometimes a daunting task to read
through it is well worth the effort to look over and read through. Even though it may be written at a higher then six grade level in terms of what you might
find in when reading a newspaper or Windows manual it helps to read through it none the less. Hell even comercial distros have manauls as well but most
people tend to chuck them aside for some reason thinking that they won't need them. Maybe it's because of prior Windows manuals experince ( which plain
suck ass IMHO ) but Linux manuals are there to be read through. I definetly found that out when I first tried to setup Samba without reading the manual that
came with SuSE. Instead I thought that I could figure it out all by myself without having to read but in I was proven wrong. Anyways if you are using a commercial
distro and have a box with manual I would suggest you read through it if first to find a answer then consult with other sources in this order : Linux/Linux
Application related books, man pages, info pages, LinuxDoc.org, Google.com/linux, asking friends if you have any, and finally but last go out and ask for help in some
website OS/Linux forum or newsgroup. The fact of the matter is that Linux does not have a lack of documentation as I see but it does have a problem of having too
much documentation IMHO and some of it may or may not be well structured for noob's to be read at a lower level but it's there for those who might want to tackle
it and read through it and absorb it.


 
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