Ripping your CDs (&DVDs)

De-Spam-ifying your email

Capturing, editing, organizing your digital photos

Chatting with your Linux-deficient IM pals

Tracking your contacts, appointments, life

Transforming Firefox into easy blogware

Finding great substitutes for your Windows apps

Diving into a veritable plethora of games

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  Step-by-step instructions for both Mandrake & Fedora Linux
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  Zero-hassle tips for managing & personalizing your PC
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  Gnoppix Linux on CD-ROM (run Linux without touching Windows)

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

About The Author


Susan Matteson is an avid Linux user, Web developer, and creative writer in Portland, Oregon. Susan has contributed to Cold Fusion Developer's Journal and designed hundreds of websites. If you ask her what she does for a living, she will tell you that she is a super secret agent spy for the government working to interpolate Linux into every element of society, but that is when we just smile and try to ignore her.

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews & Comments
The major good point of this book is that it's organized in a way that's extremely logical for its purpose. Essentially each chapter focuses on a particular type of task you might want to do (play music, browse the internet, etc) and then goes over your options for that task. This makes it a simple matter to jump to the right section for the kind of software you need, and then read the information as help to figure out which specific program you want to try. Another good point is that the author makes an effort to cover good options for both KDE and Gnome (focusing on Mandrake and Fedora as her example distributions, though anything using these desktop managers should behave in a similar way). This means the book covers the software that's likely to be available to the majority of users who might decide to try Linux. An especially pleasing point is that she makes some effort to include information about what it'll be like to switch for former users of both Windows and Mac OS X. There's more information for Windows, but it's nice that she made the extra effort to be a little more complete. On the other hand, if you want to give this book a try I'd suggest getting it as soon as possible. The author does a poor job of making the version numbers clear when she discusses particular pieces of software. As time goes by and the software evolves, it'll get more and more difficult to figure out whether the information this book gives you on a given program is still valid. The software they chose to include is... odd. Though the book focuses on Fedora and Mandrake, the included CD houses a copy of Gnoppix. This is nice in the sense that Gnoppix is a type of Linux that you can put into your CD drive and run it on your computer without actually installing it. That's good for just trying it out without disturbing any of your existing software. However, there isn't much mention of Gnoppix in the book and Gnoppix is still a beta distribution (that means that its developers don't consider it to be ready for widespread use, and it's likely to still be buggy). Since this book targets inexperienced users, it's very odd that they'd include beta software when similar distributions that are considered to be ready for wide distribution are available. In addition, if you're looking to be a serious Linux user (or serious computer user in general really) this book is likely to leave you with some unfortunate ideas that will probably get you laughed at by technical types. The author makes it clear in the introduction, for example, that she feels that a command line interface is limiting. Really, a major problem of command line interfaces is that they're not as limiting as they probably ought to be. Some command line programs include so many features to make them more flexible and powerful that no one except maybe the developers themselves understand why they're all there. The idea that this type of interface would be considered too limited is likely to be interpreted as a joke (because it's utterly ridiculous) by anyone who's seriously used one. If you just want to run Linux at home and not get at all involved in the community, having a few confused notions like this in mind isn't likely to hurt you much. Just keep in mind that this book only works well as a guide to the available software for specific tasks, and you shouldn't take it too seriously on issues of philosophy, design, serious technical matters, or ideas being the open source community. Otherwise, you'll risk looking foolish if you ever do try to carry on an in-depth conversation with a serious user. In general, this is a book with a lot of potential to be useful to inexperienced computer users who'd like to try out Linux and want an easy and amusing guide to the kind of software that's available to do the things they want to do. It'll get less useful over time, due to the natural changes in software over time and the lack of version numbers in the text, so once it's been more than a year since this book was published you'll probably be wanting to buy something else (unless, of course, they release an updated version!). I gave it 3 stars because it mostly does well at the basic task it sets out to do, it just doesn't have any success at going beyond that bare minimum. Comment | Permalink | (Report this)