Linux Unleashed

by Kamran Husain and Tim Parker

Book Overview

For users, programmers or system administrators, this text guides the reader through installation and configuration, to advanced programming and administering/networking the system. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0672313723
• ISBN13: 9780672313721
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Sams
• Length: 1114 Pages
• Weight: 4.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 2.3" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

One-stop reference and guide

I really enjoyed reading Dr. Parker's book. I had Linux up in a day, and learned a lot about many different subjects. Many of the chapters are designed to whet your appetite, leading to more complete books if you are interested (such as C, Perl, etc). Without these overview chapters, though, I think the book would have been much weaker. I enjoyed the whole thing!

Superb book to start into Linux

I read Dr. Parker's TCP/IP Unleashed book and liked his writing style so bought this one to leanr about Linux. I had my old 486 running X in a couple of hours and i'm learning UNIX commands. System Admin chapters great for me. Really like the style and overview. When I find something I want to know more about I can get a book on that subject. For those I don't care about there's only a few pages I have to ignore. I recomend it.

Love it or hate it...the former for me

I guess from the reviews here that people either love or hate this book. I like it a lot. There's some info that's left from earlier versions (Wine, etc) and the book doesn't talk about the RedHat release included on the CD (last minute, I bet), but the book gives a very wide overview of Linux and all you can do with it. There are many more technical books out there but I got lost reading them. I could read and understand every chapter in this book without being a technoweenie. I recommend it for those who are not Linux experts. Linux experts don't need a book, anyway.

I guess you can't please everyone...but I'm happy!

I read the poor reviews by other readers here and wondered why they hated this book so much. It's not possible to cover everything about linux in one book so an overview of many subjects was obviously chosen. Heck, if you're a techie than it's going be hard to please you no matter what. This book had lots to get me going and working with Linux and I recommend it for those unsure about this great OS. If you're a techie, write your own book instead of complaining. The CDs are RedHat when the book talks mainly about Slackware but that only affects a few places. Redhat was obviously chosen at the last minute because it's a more recent release (5.2) than Slackware (and a good choice, in my opinion). This is the third version of this book, so it's got to be doing something right. Obviously there's a lot of older material in it from earlier versions that hasn't needed updating, but I found it on the whole up-to-date and very readable.

The worst technical book I've read in my life...

Don't waist your money on this book. If you do, make sure you don't open the CD ROMs. This would prevent you from doing what I wanted to do so bad--return the darn thing and get a refund.It is incoherent. It gives facts about a topic (within a paragraph for example), but does not link the ideas in a way that drives to conclude a point, offer a suggestion, or explain a procedure. Poor use of headings and sub-headings, or lack there-of. It seems that the author (although I believe he is reputable in his field) threw the contents of the book together with little consideration for making it flow in a smooth and truly explanitory manner. It defines terms and ideas for the sake of defining them, but not with the aim of applying them to solve or provide answers to practical situations. It is also sorely out of date. Although the copywrite is 1998, it makes no mention at all of Windows NT, (much less dual-booting with this O.S., or Windows 95 for that matter) and instead spends complete chapters discussing Gopher and WAIS, and considerable portions discussing DOS.Admittingly, the introduction was very good, though. I was foolish for buying it based on this.