Official Fedora Companion: Your Guide to the Fedora Project [With 2 CDs]

As mentionned, this book is not very technical. It will not teach you many bash commands. It makes you rely more on Linux's graphical interface which is OK I guess. I got myself Linux pocket guide by Daniel Barrett which is a far more technical book that really exposes the true nature of Linux : commands on a terminal, shell scripting. But I can say that Official Fedora Companion will appeal to the common people who only use Windows and are just curious about trying Linux. I regret buying this book because I didn't find the information I wanted in it.

I've played with several Linux distros in my quest for an operating system that works and might replace Windows. Fedora installed quickly and effortlessly, booted right up and has been enormously fun to play with. It has a good look and feel, it's loaded with features and seems to be rock stable. I like it much better than Mandrake, which I'd previously been using. I've never surfed the web so quickly either. It is a full featured OS and applications suite for under $20 and an incredible deal. That said, it never did recognize the two wireless cards I tried to use so I had to move my whole machine to someplace I could plug into my cable modem. Wireless networking seems to be a big issue. Also there is the larger question of when Linux is going to be ready for the average computer user. I'm willing to put up with Linux oddness and complexity because I like to play with it. Most users aren't and they don't want to deal with root passwords and the like. For all of their faults, and they are legion, Microsoft's products are geared to the consumer who just wants to turn on the machine and go. Fedora approaches that better than any other Linux distro I've seen but the OS still has a very long way to go before it's anything other than a sideshow in the consumer market. The book also leaves a lot of areas untouched although it does refer you to other sources of information. Despite these reservations, it's a great package for someone who wants to explore open source and I highly recommend it. Again, it's a complete desktop system and a manual for a very, very reasonable price.

I have been using Fedora for a couple of months and this book was a little less on the technical side than I was looking for, but it is the perfect starter book for someone looking to replace a Windows OS. I am going to buy a copy for my parents and install it (CDs come with the book) on their PC.