- Paperback: 816 pages
- Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 3 edition (8 Aug 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0596000251
- ISBN-13: 978-0596000257
- Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 15.2 x 5.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 265,257 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
| ||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
|
There is a newer edition of this item:
|
Product details |
More About the Authors
Discover books, learn about writers, and more.
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Linux has command line utilities, boy does it have them. Linux In A Nutshell lists around 200 basic utilities beginners should find immediately useful in the first few pages. This is a little odd as it really isn't a book aimed at beginners. Rather, it is for the competent or even expert Linux user. The sad truth is no one has a brain large enough to keep all these commands and utilities instantly available, hence the need for quick references.
Around half the book is devoted to command line utilities: what they do, how to invoke them and the various options they take. Naturally, it is the options causing problems. While -c says to send stuff to the standard output in some utilities, in others it doesn't. For example it tells mke2fs to scan a device for bad blocks. It also covers boot issues, various shells, emacs, vi, sed, gawk and pattern matching. CVS and RCS for version control get good coverage. Gnome and KDE get a short chapter each and oddly, so does fvwm2. Some of these choices seem arbitrary. For Perl you are referred elsewhere, PHP isn't mentioned and neither is python.
In practice, the Linux man pages usually provide more information. Many of the book entries provide no more information than you would get from the usage instructions provided by the -h (or --help) option or by entering a nonsense option. The other complaint is inconsistency. Some of the commands have a usage example but most don't.
The problem with Linux In A Nutshell is that if you are actually at your desk using Linux, it is quicker to reference the system itself for the information but the book is rather too large to carry around to reference when you might need it (though why do you need it if you aren't using Linux at the time? Pub quizzes perhaps?).
Given that Linux commands comes with usage instructions, man pages and info pages as well as often having extra documentation, how-tos and source code--all for the versions you're using--it is hard to see quite what purpose its authors intended this book to serve. --Steve Patient
Review
'O'Reilly have a reputation for producing first-rate computing books, and they've reaffirmed it with Linux in a Nutshell. Each page is clean, accessible and full of detailed and well-written text, while the overall structure and choice of content is equally accomplished.' Rating 8/10. Linux Format, December 2000
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is the best comprehensive first-line reference I've seen for Linux to date. It's most emphatically not a tutorial or a book on system administration, but when I want to know how _that_ command works, or what _this_ flag does, it's the book I pick up first. Its examples are quite good, and it's well organized.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I'm currently trying to get to know the Linux console a little more after shying away from it by using various GUIs for a couple of months, so I guess I'm a beginner when it comes to Linux. I purchased this book as a general reference, based on the solid reputation of O'Reilly, and wasn't disappointed...
It is basically a printed manual for all those commands you use but can't quite remember the syntax for. While endlessly typing "man" would get you a fair bit of the same information for free, the usability of a book is considerably greater :-) It's great as a desktop reference, and as you can imagine my copy has multiple bookmarks in it...
It covers the "important" bits in quite a lot of detail, such as sed, awk, routing... I also bought a Perl book and together these have provided all the information I need to get acquainted with Linux. Now I just need to do it!
Caveat: This is not an introductory book. If you don't have a clue what command you're looking for, this book will not always be of help (the best advice I can give there is to use Google and an expert friend - if you don't have an expert friend, there are many many mailing lists out there that tolerate such silly questions as "How do I reset the date on my computer?") -- however, Linux's logical command-naming system often means you can guess, look it up in this book, and find out what a command does *without* it damaging your system. Also, for a beginner the endless possibilities of command-line options can get really overwhelming, but they also provide the power behind Linux and so it's a great thing that this book lists them in intense detail. Not a cover-to-cover read, but definitely indispensible.
Format:Paperback
New to Linux, and needing a general guide and introduction while extending the capabilities of my Arm based NAS unit I selected this as a good place to start.
Like any guide to an operating system this is not a gripping read, but it's well structured and 'does what it says on the tin'.
Like any guide to an operating system this is not a gripping read, but it's well structured and 'does what it says on the tin'.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
