Sams Teach Yourself Mandrake Linux in 24 Hours (Teach Yourself -- 24 Hours)

The book comes with a CD that contains a full LINUX/UNIX system with all the tools one needs to write high-quality documents on a computer. (1) UNIX/sh/sed/awk ... for scripting, e.g., systematically formatting a pre-LaTeX source to LaTeX. (To learn UNIX, one should buy the book by Kernighan et al., read man-pages plus some free book of mine available for download from The University of Aizu FTP-server.) (2) LaTeX for publishing. (If one wants to learn LaTeX, one should buy Lamport's book.) (3) XEmacs text editor for editing scripts and LaTeX-files. (Just play around with it.) (4) LyX typesetting system, a highest level WYSIWYG LaTeX interface, whose indexing system dwarfs any other product. (Selfexplaining). The software was easy to install and runs well on an older 233Mhz, 32MB-ram laptop. The book gives enough information in this regard. What makes it valuable is the completeness of the system: one has not to go around and download this and that ... The system has been used by myself for writing several scientific publications, and by a complete computer novice using LyX to write a M.A. thesis. The book gives enough hints that one can proceed exploring the hugh underlying LINUX/LaTeX/Emacs/LyX system. School of Computer Science & Engineering.The University of Aizu. Japan.

I was used to Windows (and it's 'blue screen of death' too!), but then I heard about Linux Mandrake and this book helped me learn Linux quickly. When i started reading, i had barely an idea of what Linux was, but this system and the book itself took me to a whole new world! I would reccomend this book for the novice to intermediate Linux user.