Linux Phrasebook

I could not have found a better compact Linux reference book. O'Reilly's "Linux in a Nutshell" is very comprehensive, but it gives very few examples and you pretty much have to know what you're looking for since it is organized alphabetically. "Linux Phrasebook" is organized by tasks such as "Finding Stuff" and gives practical examples. This book was money well spent!

I am picking up some Linux knowledge having been a database admin on Windows for many years. While concise, this book gives some explanation and context to commands/operations rather than simply acting as a copy of the built in documentation. More verbose than a "pocket guide", it is still quick enough to use as "how do I do this now" guide, rather than a chapter-by-chapter research book. This will likely be the most used book in my experimentations.

What a great little book!!! It is chock full of great information that can be used by novices and experts. I provided it to students of a class I taught and everyone thought it was great. This is the book that remains on the desk on not some corner of the room collecting dust.

Frankly, the GUIs you'll encounter in Ubuntu, SuSE, etc., are so good that you may not often have any recourse to the command line. When you do, however, this is the book that you want. Yeah, I know, you can buy some fat distro-specific tome for not much more money, but the free documentation provided by *many* linux communities is already good enough. Command line stuff is another matter, especially if you are new at it. Give Granneman's book a chance and make the command line work the way you want it to work. (By the way, I read the "Phrasebook" slowly--just a chapter every other day or so; easy to master in less than a month.)

I've found this book very helpful. It sits beside my computer at all times. It helps not only with Linux but with Mac OS X as well.