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Fri, 29 Apr 2005

Linux Quick Fix Notebook

Peter Harrison, Linux Quick Fix Notebook, Bruce Perens Open Source Series, Prentice Hall

The idea of this book is that it's an expansion of the advanced sections in more user level books. It's also all command line which neatly skips past the different GUI's employed by distro's.

An underlying idea is that you might want to set up a Linux system for a website or similar while already running some proprietary OS. As well as that, the book suggests it might be useful for certification purposes.

As such the book could be pretty useful. There are a number of situations outlined within logical divisions: website project, RAID, kernel mods, VPN's and many more. There's an explanation of what's going on, and how to make things happen as well as examples of console output.

Random access to solutions is always a bit difficult on paper. The key is a really good index that maybe includes things under different headings according to which way different people might be heading into a problem. The index in this book is quite good, but not inspired. On paper it's hard to match a set of flat files on a computer which you grep ... and then there's the web. The advantage of a book is that a cohesive collection of information is right there in your hand.

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