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LINUX in A Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (3rd Edition)
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by Ellen Siever, Stephen Spainhour, Jessica P. Hekman, and Stephen Figgins
Sales Rank: 446000
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List Price: $34.95
$34.95
At Amazon
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Paperback: 816 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly; 3rd edition January 15, 2000
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0596000251
ISBN-13: 978-0596000257
Product Dimensions:
9 x 6 x 2.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
Product Review
Into the already crowded Linux desk-reference market (which threatens to push my monitor off my desktop) comes O'Reilly's third edition of Linux in a Nutshell by Ellen Siever and colleagues. The ever-expanding horizon of Linuxology makes the editorial task of circumscribing it in a nutshell impossible--even from the venerable O'Reilly sources. We ask, "What didn't they cut, and do we really need it next to the coffee cup?" The success of this attempt is spotty, at best.
From agetty to znew, this Nutshell book contributes half of its contents to alphabetically arranged synopses of 400 user, programmer, and administrator commands and utilities. The online manual page for "ps"--the process status program--produces over 14 screens of command-line options, environment variables, output formatting statements, utility cross-references, and author credits. The abstracted Nutshell entry contains only three textual pages of command-line options and bare-bones output abbreviations.
We learn that "yes" is an obscure little utility that's used ostensibly for driving scripts like ./configure. When misused, "yes" can create a 5-MB file on your hard drive in one CPU second; but the entry contains neither a warning to that effect nor a description of its relationship to big brother "expect"--which is alarming in its absence from both the alphabetical parade of commands and the index altogether.
Consequently, the first half of the book is intended for the curious and possibly nonexistent subpopulation of well-trained users who want to remind themselves of command-line flags, but would rather not use the online manual pages as a reference.
The meat in this Nutshell is contained sparingly in its second half. Here, it compares favorably with online how-tos for providing technical details of Linux kernel loading and boot parameterization, package management, bash/tcsh/csh shell use, and the underused CVS version-control system. The technical specifics of the popular editors emacs and vi are of marginal use to the experienced administrator whose manual muscle memory is full. The gawk and sed tutorials are somewhat more reference-worthy, and the tome ends with introductions to the barely discussed gnome, JDE, and fvwm2 window managers. The gaping crack in this book is the absence of X11 configuration guidelines, which often takes 80 percent of system configuration time, even for experienced administrators.
If you can't spare a better patch of pine, you might consider wedging 75 percent of this desk reference under your monitor, where it might contribute more to the ergonomics of coding than to the content. The remaining 25 percent will slip into your blotter for easy access. --Peter Leopold
Product Description
Linux in a Nutshell covers the core commands available on common Linux distributions. This isn't a scaled-down quick reference of common commands, but a complete reference to all user, programming, administration, and networking commands with complete lists of options.
Contents also include:- LILO and Loadlin (boot) options
- Shell syntax and variables for the bash, csh, and tcsh shells
- Pattern matching
- Emacs and vi editing commands
- sed and gawk commands
- Common configuration tasks for the GNOME and KDE desktops and the fvwm2 window manager
New material in the third edition includes common configuration tasks for the GNOME and KDE desktops and the fvwm2 window manager, the dpkg Debian package manager, an expanded investigation of the rpm Red Hat package manager and CVS, and many new commands.
Linux in a Nutshell is a must for any Linux user; it weighs less than a stack of manual pages, but delivers everything needed for common, day-to-day use. It also covers a wide range of GNU tools for Unix users who have GNU versions of standard Unix tools.
Customer Reviews & Comments
This review is from: Linux in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly Nutshell) (Paperback)
This could have been an excellent reference manual had the author bothered to give command syntax along with a more complete list of options. The other thing that keeps me from giving this or any other computer book I own a five star rating is a poor, incomplete index. Why is it that people who write books on computers don't use their computers to amass comprehensive indexes? Baffles me. Anyway, I keep this book close by, but it has turned out to be less than I hoped for and less than it is rated as being. If it had a good index, I would give it four stars. If it provided more in the way of command syntax, I would probably give it five stars. This is a book for intermediate to advanced users willing to jot notes in the margins on command options not included and cross references not indexed.
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LINUX in A Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (3rd Edition)
List Price: $34.95
Available from Amazon
Price: $34.95
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