O'Reilly back in the Linux book business
Aside from the regularly scheduled releases of the fine "Ubuntu for Non-Geeks" by Rickford Grant on its No Starch imprint, my favorite tech-book publisher O'Reilly has been pretty scarce with the Linux titles over the last couple of years.
You'd think the explosion of Ubuntu would mean a whole lot more Linux books. Except that publishers like O'Reilly (which is most definitely not alone in this seeming neglect of Linux and BSD) have been publishing fewer and fewer Linux titles — with or without the word "Ubuntu" in the title — with each passing year.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm a Ubuntu user, too. But I also want to know more about other Linux distributions, and the Linux kernel, GNU userland and other free, open-source applications that all come together to make a working system.
So it's nice to see O'Reilly put a sixth edition of "Linux in a Nutshell" on the schedule for September 2009 publication. The book by Ellen Siever, Stephen Figgins, Robert Love and Arnold Robbins is a pretty good reference that, unlike all those Ubuntu books, cuts across distros to give a whole lot of useful Linux information applicable to any number of systems you might want to run.
I've been limping along with the Fourth Edition of "Linux in a Nutshell" for some time, and it's beyond time to replace it with something new. I'm glad to have that opportunity.
Now how about more Linux and BSD books, O'Reilly? (And thanks to No Starch for its excellent second edition of "Absolute FreeBSD" from my tech-writing hero Michael Lucas; now if only he'd update his OpenBSD book ...)
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
I wouldn't have gotten anywhere on the command line if it wasn't for the "Linux Pocket Guide". Ubuntu How-tos are useful, but sometimes I need to know just how to use simple commands rather than a complicated script. I'm still pretty useless on the command line, but at least now I can edit .conf files and the like in nano or use grep to get useful info out of dmesg. That and "The Linux Cookbook" are essential reading for getting your money's worth out of free software! Hopefully my local library will get the 2009 "Nutshell", they have the 2005(?) edition and a pretty respectable selection of linux reference books, although I don't know if the 1999 classic "The Joy of Linux" is very useful...
Both "Linux Cookbooks," by Carla Schroder and Michael Stutz, are excellent books. Both are also in need of an update.
I don't think "Linux in a Nutshell" is the most useful book out there, but it's certainly useful. The two "Cookbooks" are certainly at the top of my all-time list.
Books aimed as sysadmins are also good. Mark Sobell's books, including his huge ones on Ubuntu, Fedora/RHEL, and Linux in general are all pretty good, if not aimed at the desktop user.
"Linux Administration Handbook" by Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder and Trent R. Hein is another really good one that also could use an update.
And whether or not you use Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS, there tends to be really good books on how to administer such systems written out of Red Hat and by others. There's such a critical mass of people who are running RHEL or something close to it on the server that there exists a pretty good market for pricey books.
I Google as many things as the average person, but I still feel better having a good book at my disposal when doing this kind of work.