"How Linux Works"

[Harold Crouch <hcrouch@mchsi.com>]

I have whined and moaned the last four years about the dearth of
*usable* books for people who want to learn the guts of Linux/Unix. 
Available books seem to fall into two categories: (1) tutorials that
walk a newbie through his first installation and hold his hand as he
first explores Gnome/KDE, and (2) the MAN-like variety useful only to
CS majors who already have a clue as to what's going on.   That middle
ground, that book which gives a computer *user* The Big Picture as to
how Linux/Unix is assembled and why it is like it is, has never
appeared.

Finally, the gods have smiled!  No Starch Press has just released a
book titled "How Linux Works: What Every Superuser Should Know."  The
subtitle says it all!  The author assumed an intelligent audience of
users existed, and he aimed his discussion precisely at that audience.
Each chapter discusses a particulate Unix subsystem (printing
systems, networking, peripherals) or particular tasks (compiling from
source code, writing shell scripts).  Each chapter starts out with The
Big Picture, then goes deeper and deeper and *frequently* nudges the
user over to his own computer to try a few commands, and before I
realized it, I had learned stuff!

The author's style of writing is very much like the style used in
"Running Linux" (which I *really* like!).  In fact, I would say that a
newbie should first make a pass through Running Linux, then two or
three months later, pick up this book and continue the journey.   

My copy arrived last Friday.  I spent the weekend working through it,
and it's already filled in a number of gaps in my understanding of how
Unix works.  My opinion is that the $38 I spent on this book is one of
the best investments I've made in years.

- Harold

http://www.nostarch.com/frameset.php?startat=howlinuxworks

-
To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@silug.org with
"unsubscribe silug-discuss" in the body.