Good for beginers and experienced users., 8 Feb 2002

The book tackles installtion, system maintenance, file systems, commands etc etc with clarity, making it both a book to read in an idle moment and a fine reference book.I'd hate to be without this book now, so I'm going to have to return the copy I have to my friend and buy my own!

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Good Book - Especially for the Newbie, 16 Jul 2000

This is an excellent general introduction to Linux covering all the basics, no matter what distribution you are using. I have specific texts on Red Hat, Caldera and Debian distributions, but if you are just starting out and don't need to know the esoteric differences between Distributions, buy this book as a general getting started guide and reference.

As I am learning Linux for work, I did find some of the information lacked detail on specific subjects, i.e. the detailed nut and bolts of FTP, Apache and Samba, but in fairness, this information is easy to come by on the WWW and where this book really excells is in getting you started.

I also suggest you consider Linux in a Nutshell by the same publishers as a command reference guide to accompany Running Linux

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A Good Reference, 4 May 2004

Now the problems:

I don't particuarly like he way it starts explaining a certain topic but doesn't really cover the possible pitalls one might face. it seems to refer the reader to the distribution vendor just a little too often for me. It does however still go into plenty of detail on the various options available for various parts of the Linux OS. Setting up X, recompiling the kernel, navigating the file system and many more are all done in a well laid out and effective manner.

It also explains things which with modern distributions (Fedora/Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake etc...) you don't need to do. Using Fdisk for instance. I think this is good as it explains the industry standard tools which get the job done, and which at some point you may well need to fall back on. It also carries on the tradition of O'Reilly books by being accessable for the new user but not treating them like an idiot. It assumes you want to go further and allows you to do so by giving a good grounding as well as introducing advanced topics.

All in all, a very good book which I would say is suited to the person who wants to learn the way things are done and really access the power of Linux. If you just want to write letters in Red Hat, get "Red Hat for Dummies" or "Red Hat in 24 hours". If, however, you want to learn how to properly reconfigure the kernel in Slackware then go for this.

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