Linux All-In-One Desk Reference for Dummies [With DVD]

Very good book and easy to read, everything you wanted to know about Linux (and more), a very good reference volume, and a very good buy in my estimation.

I had tried Linux previously and found the online assistance that I could find to be limited and like "finding a needle in a haystack". There are so many distributions of Linux available! Having a handy reference that is comprehensive in nature and specifically addresses the questions I had, made upgrading and tossing my Microsoft monster easy. Now that I have been using my copy for a while, I even found the courage to upgrade my system from the core model available with this text to a newer version of Fedora. The transition was smooth and easy. Many of the questions I had about the basic operation of Fedora (provided with the book) were still applicable. If you want to upgrade to Linux and are afraid to jump into it wholeheartedly, this Dummies guide makes it very easy to get your feet wet before committing to the swim!

Clear and well-organised dissection of Linux in its various flavours. Although it leans to GUI usage more than many Linux books, it does not shy away from the command-line approach, which it does in an entirely unintimidating way - in fact, it made it quite enjoyabe. Included is a CD with several Linux 'distros' and tools, which is all you need to get up-and-running with Linux. A true time-saver for the uninitiated wishing to evaluate the remarkable potential of Linux.

I really only have one complaint about this book. Other than that, it's excellect. The book is intended for the almost newbie. That is someone who knows how to turn the machine on, knows that a mouse is a plastic thing with buttons instead of a furry thing in the pantry, and so forth. The book is divided into eight major subsections, or as the book says, 8 mini books. These are intended to be self standing so that if you want to set up an internet server you really only to read that particular book (but you may want to read a couple of others like the ones on administration and security). Like a lot of Linux books, this one comes with a DVD disk, filled with lots of software (the DVD can hold a lot more data than a conventional CD). Or for $11 you can order a set of CD's that contain the Fedorea 3 Core distribution. One point about the book I liked, he tells you how to make a partition to dual boot Windows and Linux. But he also comments that you might want to set up your experimental Linux system on a separate freestanding machine. This is clearly the way to go. I bought a computer at a thrift shop recently - 1 GHZ AMD Athlon - certainly not the hottest iron on the market, but it was only $75, including a 17" monitor. I've seen too many people screw up an installation and wipe out a hard drive to suggest that the newbie do a dual boot. The problem I have with the book. He includes five flavors of Linux on the disk. In the first part of the book he goes a bit into the various distributions, but he never makes a solid recommendation. (There is a hint that this was the editors recommendation to get one book that would please the fans of any distribution.) If the newbie knows enough to say that he wants Debian or SUSE or Fedora, he probably doesn't need a For Dummies book. And the author does not say the advantages of the particular distributions, merely that they are here and here's how you install them. By default the DVD loads Fedora, and that's fine. But in the installation section the author has to jump around a lot talking about the way the other distributions do things and it gets confusing. When you read the installation chapter, feel free to ignore what you aren't using.