Any good Linux books?

[engineer331]

I am new to Linux. I've played around with Knoppix and even installed Linux on my hard drive, but I'm not that knowledgeable about it. I was wondering if anyone knew of any good book (or books) that would take me from Linux newbie to power user.

Thanks in advance.

[oz]

Here's another thread with some info regarding books:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/top...tml&highlight=

Running Linux by Matt Welsh and Linux Cookbook by Carla Schroder (both published by O'Reilly) are very good.

[SwimminSasquatch]

I was looking at a really good book last night at Barnes & Noble called "Linux Desktop Hacks" I don't remeber who wrote it, but it had everything from how to adjust the desktop wallpaper to compiling the kernel.

[borromini]

O'Reilly has a complete edition dedicated to Knoppix... Otherwise, the Linux Cookbook is also great . You should check those out.

[lsatenstein]

Chapter n, standard locations for packages
chapter n+1,backup before installing new software packages
chapter n+2,troubleshooting and recovery
chapter n+3,networking
chapter n+4,wifi and currently accepted wifi cards
chapter n+5,performance optimisation

Of all the books that I read and purchased, not one addresses the above topic.

[adamdaughterson]

I like the SAIR Linux/GNU certification prep books myself. Also UNIX powertools for the broad scheme and some handy tips and trix for *UX. Linux in a nutshell is a great reference that I keep close to my keyboard. It is like having the man pages to some common commands in book form.

[davebardsley]

To become a power user get out of the GUI application 'ivory tower' and master shell programming. Use the terminal wherever possible and perform as many day-to-day tasks manually (i.e. with the shell scripts you write). The best books are the individual applications' documentation and "info" will quickly become your new friend. Become comfortable with a text editor like "vi", "emacs" (or any of a plethora of others) and familiarize yourself with the information found under <info coreutils>. If you have any programming experience at all I recommend you learn to write your own executable applications/kernel modules: through learning the UNIX system interface you'll find GNU/Linux is an intuitive and natural way of doing things.

There are many sources available on the internet that cover these very topics, however the one book in my library that covers all of them in some detail (more or less) and that stands out in-front of the rest is "Beginning Linux Programming" by Neil Matthew and Richard Stones (ISBN 0764544977). As the name implies it is heavily weighted toward programming, but does have a great chapter dedicated to shell script files. One way or another you're going to want/need to write them (shell scripts).

You don't have to be a computer scientist or professional programmer (but it helps) to become proficient. Simply pick a useful task and investigate its details fully. My first major project after getting my system installed (Debian Sarge net-install from four floppies is almost too easy) was to secure my distro by simply reading through and following the procedures presented in http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/se...n-howto.en.pdf. Although the details vary from distro to distro, the underlying concepts are universal to all.

Follow a "hands-on" approach and regiment yourself to performing your tasks from the terminal. Prepare yourself for hours reading documentation, experimenting, and fixing things you break in your wake. A word from the wise: do as much as possible with only user privileges and in user space!

Most important of all, have fun!

[borromini]

Chapter n, standard locations for packages
chapter n+1,backup before installing new software packages
chapter n+2,troubleshooting and recovery
chapter n+3,networking
chapter n+4,wifi and currently accepted wifi cards
chapter n+5,performance optimisation

Of all the books that I read and purchased, not one addresses the above topic.

Linux cookbook covers n+2, n+3, amongst others... maybe a little of your n+1 chapter. The first one: you have to do some googling, read a bit about Linux' tree structure, you'll know exactly where goes what (but still, distro's tend to differ amongst each other, especially the bigger ones like RedHat, Debian and SuSE).

Wifi is fairly new, so you'll have to take a dedicated networking book I think. For performance optimisation: one address = the gentoo wiki . With some tweaking (and researching!) it will work for your system also. Again, you'll have to do some effort. Linux knowledge cannot be concentrated in one book (or a series of books). You have to pick what you need.