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Linux in a Nutshell (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly))
 
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Linux in a Nutshell (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)) (Paperback)

by Jessica Hekman (Author), Ellen Siever (Author, Editor), Stephen Spainhour (Author, Editor), Stephen Figgins (Author, Editor)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 797 pages
  • Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc, USA; 3rd Revised edition edition (4 Sep 2000)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0596000251
  • ISBN-13: 978-0596000257
  • Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 15.2 x 5.3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 568,152 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
  • See Complete Table of Contents

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

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Customer Reviews

2 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A First-rate First-line reference, 19 Jun 1997
By A Customer
This review is from: Linux in a Nutshell (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.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars $ lp man *, 2 April 2003
By Ms. J. Anne Lees "voracio" (Scotland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)      
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.

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