Thu, 01 Jun 2006
Debian System
Review: The Debian System
Review: The Debian System
The Debian System
Concepts and Techniques
Martin F. Krafft, No Starch Press
One reason I buy fewer technical books these days than I did 15
years ago is the ease of finding technical information on the
net. If googling on the program name and the error message
finds me what I need to know to solve the problem I'm having,
why should I spend $45 on a reference book, and have to locate
the book,
and use the index. And of course, often the book isn't up-to-date enough to have
the information I need, isn't indexed well enough that I can find
the solution to my problem.
There are of course technical books that explain concepts and are
readable away from the computer screen, which are worth having.
And if the reference material is well-linked to the explanation
of the concepts, the book may well be better pedagogically than the help forum
that google is going to find for me.
I do run a Debian system on my desktop, and I do occasionally have
Debian system management problems. So far, google has usually
solved them for me, but sometimes it's taken long enough, or
been incomprehensible enough when I found the solution that I
looked forward to having a reference book that might help.
So what I looked for when I got the review copy of this book was:
- Can I find solutions to some of the problems I've had?
- Does the book explain the concepts behind the solutions
better than what I've been using?
The answer to these questions is "Usually", and "Sometimes." On the
whole, it's a well-written book. There are whole sections about
the Debian programming community that make sense to read away
from the computer.
On the more specific stuff, the index seems a
bit sparse (5 pages for a 600 page book), and doesn't have some
fairly obvious entries. For instance, there's no entry for
"audio", although if your problem with audio is that your user
isn't part of the audio group, looking up "group" will give you a
list of all the special groups, including "audio". Incidentally,
the list of special groups is one of the things google hadn't ever
found for me, and is quite useful.
As far as the general discussion goes,
it's quite detailed in some ways and fairly offhand in others.
For instance, there are several pages about how and why to go
about becoming an official Debian Developer. However, Appendix
B, "When is Debian the right choice?" didn't seem to me to
really address the issue of what do I get from Debian that I
can't or won't from running Ubuntu.
So, in summary, I would say that if you're feeling the need for a
hard-copy reference book on Debian system management, this is a
good book. If you want bedtime reading about the Debian
project, it's a pretty good book. But you'll want to have google
around, as well.
Laura Conrad
Last modified: Fri Apr 7 10:17:52 EDT 2006
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pre Dec 04 reviews are here