In my early days (circa 1998-9) I made heavy use of the following "kilobook" library:
* Using Linux - Tackett & Gunter, Que ... Not bad in its time
* Open Linux: Complete Reference - Peteren, Osborne ... Easier to use than Tackett, but not as extensive
* Redhat Linux Unleashed - Pitts & Ball, Sams ... I was a Redhat user then and it did help
* Linux Network Toolkit - Sery, IDG ... So, so but useful for waht I needed at the time
* Using Samba - Sharpe, Que ... Intermediate. Got it at half price from Bug during their English book liquidation sale.
and of course,
*Linux Complete and Unix Complete, both Sybex and dirt cheap.
All of this stuff is completely outdated vis-a-vis desktop configuration, but for command line stuff they are still useful. Each of the above items has strengths and weaknesses (which is why I used several of them).
The Sery book was useful in setting up my little office network, but it's now way out of date. (I use the SWAT GUI to maintain Samba, and it has almost nothing useful on Apache, with which I'm pottering around at the moment.) For NFS, you don't need a book.
You can of course get NAG and SAG online (they comes with the SuSE distribution).
Over the years I added a few Riley books on specific subjects (a matter of taste and direction).
Any further comment on this matter is dependent on what your friend wants to do with his system. (My own library is heavily slanted towards user-land programming [C/C++/Java] which may not be relevant to you.)
Another thing: Get your friend to use man or info or whatever catches his fancy. Whenever I use a man page a lot, I print it out and put it in a binder. After several years of this, I have a "homemade" book which matches my own requirements.(I haven't succeded in doing that with info.) To get him started, pick out a list of commonly needed things and waste some paper. Here are some of mine:
depmod/insmod, fstab, ftp,lilo (or grub), ln, moddeprobe, module.conf, mount/umount, proc, ps, rm, swat, tar
For a real beginner, you add such things at cat, cp etc.
Regards,
Daniel
Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:
Hi, A friend of mine asked me for a recommendation for one or two comprehensive intermediate level (i.e. not for complete novices or idiots) reference books on Linux system and network administration, and though I am usually able to find the right FM for a question at hand, I found myself unable to recommend any single reference source in a form of a dead tree or parchment.Assuming responses like "Why does he need a book at all?" are redirected to /dev/null, can anyone recommend anything generic enough and comprehensive enough? Updated and correct to a reasonable degree... It's OK if it is specific to a major distro. If it isn't - so much the better. If there are none - it's a good answer as well.
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