Red Hat Linux Fedora Unleashed

Linux books tend to fall into two categories:1. How-to books for beginners2. Reference booksI am already fairly comfortable in linux, but most of my experience is with distributions that do things differently than the "Red Hat" way. When I decided to try out Fedore Core 2, I realized I would need to either spend a lot of time online in forums, or get a book. But I didn't need a beginners book, and I wanted more than a simple reference.I looked through many, many linux books on the shelves of my local brick & motor bookstore, but they almost all fell into one of the two catefories I mentioned above. Luckily, I then found "Red Hat Linux Fedora unleashed". This book has the perfect combination of background and reference material that somebody who has a little bit of linux experience needs. In fact, I would also recommend this book to beginners as well, because if you stick with linux you move out of the "beginner" stage fairly quickly, and would then need a book like this one. Better to have spent your $$ on this book to begin with.Oh yeah - the index is also great. A good and usable index is a hard thing to produce. Most publishers seem to be letting software build the index and then never bother to have a human check it out. I don't need index references that point me to every single page that mentions the word or topic I'm trying to look up, but that's what you get with most linux books. For the index in "Red Hat Linux Fedora unleashed" the publisher either used a human being or has smarter indexing software.

This review is for Red Hat Linux and Fedora Unleashed. When I was considering purchasing this book, I had mostly come across inaccurate reviews referring to older editions that bear no relevance to this one. I am writing this review (the first one I have EVER written) in support of this particular edition of the book.Before I had purchased this book, I considered myself to be just an average user of Linux. Coming from years of experience in the "Windows" world, including knowledge of scripting and programming languages, I felt that I was ready to explore the Linux world. Sure, I managed to get along rather well, but there was still more that I wanted to know about Linux. This book provided me with the knowledge I needed to get to the next level.Red Hat Linux and Fedora Unleashed is a book that no Linux wannabe expert should be without. It covers basically everything from installing and configuring a Linux workstation to writing shell and Perl scripts. I could never have done the things that I do now in Linux without the help of this book. You can tell how useful this book is just by paging through the index!Don't get me wrong, I am still learning as I go along here. But now I have an advantage. In fact, I plan to set up a couple of Linux servers in the near future and I am looking forward to utilizing the several chapters in this book that cover server configuration.

I bought this book because it was the only book reviewing my flavor of Linux, RedHat 5.2.It is comprehensive and expansive and includes the CDs you would get from Red Hat anyway, with the addition of the thorough book and everyday reference.I found an article that said the fastest benchmark of a povray rendering is the Cray supercomputer costing $5.5 Million until some scientists got together and linked a harem of Pentium II Xeons for $150,000 and matched matched the Cray's time. Of course, running the Red Hat they bought out of the back of a RH Unleashed Book.So, with all that and the tide of change, it is a prudent choice, if you ask me!

This book is one of the very few Linux books I look through on a daily basis, to understand concepts and configuration syntax.The books covers everything from the actual installation of the product, to configuring peripherals, in an extremely organized manner.This is a MUST have book for anyone who is a newbie to an advanced user of Red Hat Linux 5.2.***** (5 Stars)