On Sun, 19 Jan 2003, Mark C Ballew wrote: > Are there any books that any of you would recommend for people new to > Linux?
I don't think there's really a "one size fits all" answer to this question, since *nux has so much depth. I would probably recommend the manuals for the distro the person is using. Red Hat, in particular, does a pretty nice job with their manuals (available for $nada.zip in PDF format), especially the Red Hat-isms that will help speed a newbie along. The Linux Documentation Project has some good manuals, too, especially the "Linux Systems Administrator's Guide." I've even got a couple of hardbound books from a few years back that basically contain a bunch of how-to guides, some of which are still pretty valid. The main problem with *any* Linux newbie book is that they cover some very generic basics once past the distro-specific installation stuff: Gnome/KDE, a whirlwind tour of the bash shell, and how to run Apache or Sendmail. They never seem to amount to anything more than a brief guide to the desktop, but if that's what's wanted, then pretty much any of them will do. The O'Reilly Linux in a Nutshell does a good job of presenting most of the common utilities and commands, which is (IMHO) a better long-term investment. Anything in there that's too confusing to be mastered right away is probably worth a dedicated book, but at least the nutshell books are a good gauge for figuring out what you *don't* know about something. -- "Of course I'm in shape! Round's a shape, isn't it?" _______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
