Practical Guide: Fedora & Red Hat Linux

I already have a 2008 version of this book and have been using that version of Linux since then, and previous versions of Red Hat linux going back to at least 2003. The main reason I got this newer version is because my older version does not support the newer huge capacity disk drives.
This new version does support the larger drives just fine but other changes I would not consider as improvements. The multi-desktop handling is
changed and not for the better. Nautilus behaves weird from what I am used to in my 2008 version, when I move a window on the desktop, it jumps
to full screen but I did not want that, there is too much wasted screen space between the icons. When I zoom in on a folder of photo thumbnails, by
the time I get them big enough to be useful, (about 1 inch wide x about 3/4 inch tall,) they are so far apart (1 3/8 inch space between,) that it does
not fit very many on the screen. My 2008 version fits them tighter with just under 1/4 inch gap between, about twice as may icons in the same space.
Probably more changes that I don’t like but can’t think of all of them now.

This is the best computer book I have ever read. When the 8th edition comes out I’ll buy one.

Full disclosure: I am a UNIX/Linux system admin by profession, and we generally don’t use the GUIs much. I will say I was slightly disappointed. What’s weak? Coverage of systemd and pam and lvm. What’s missing entirely? Network bonding, clustering and the Red Hat Satellite server. What else could it use? A whole section on command line account creation and administration. What’s very good? The coverage of CUPS is one of the best. There is a lot of good information on scripting. The in-depth explanations are good. There’s more, but the book is not in front of me now.

The subject of Linux is too large for a single book, and individuals have their own learning styles, but I’d say the Ghori book is the one I look at for day-to-day doing, the Jang book is a better tutorial, and this a better reference. No matter how many books you have, you will still find yourself searching the web for how-to take an lvm snapshot or shrink an ext3 filesystem or update hplip outside of the Red Hat channels. That said, if I ever take the RHCE, I will be reading this book from cover to cover first. I like the book.

Save yourself some trouble and skip the Fedora 19 iso included with the book. Download fedora 20 from the web. The installer for Fedora 19 was pretty shaky when it first came out. The F20 one worked better, and as of today, Fedora 20 is current.

I had to manage a steep learning curve as a linux sysadmin. I used two leading RHCSA exam prep guides and found them really informative. However, at times I found that they were focused strictly on completing some RHCSA exam activities: they told you what to do, but did not tell you why. ‘A Practical Guide to Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, 7/e’ by Mark G. Sobell filled in those gaps. The book patiently takes you through individual facets of Linux mechanics, explaining how things work so that you understand how things are interconnected. As a result, you no longer need to memorize steps to accomplish certain tasks. Since you understand the mechanics of Linux, you know exactly what to do.

I ordered this book for my husband. He’s a student of software engineering. He likes this book.

Firstly, I am a software engineer (C, C++, Python, Bash), not a system administrator, so my perspective may differ from that of the target audience. That being said, this book is mind-blowingly good.

Judging the book by its cover (how often have we heard that’s a bad idea?), this book looks and sounds ordinary. However, a quick look inside and you’ll see it is anything but. This book covers the basics, starting from a level your grandmother could understand, and works its way all the way to an advanced level where the user will understand how to configure and manage the system, writing Bash scripts to automate the tasks at hand. I can see exactly why this is used as a text book in many college classrooms. If you read this book from cover to cover, you’d go from newbie Linux user to power user.

Most importantly to me, this book does not waste your time with crap you don’t care about. It is well organized to be used as either a tutorial or reference. Between the table of contents and the index, you can jump right to whatever you need. To avoid redundancy, the author provides “links” (page numbers) to additional material that is either prerequisite knowledge or supplemental reading for the topic.

Does this tome (weighing in at about 1,200 pages) cover in full depth every single topic you’ll ever encounter? Of course not; that would take 12,000 or more pages. What it does do however, is give you a very, very well rounded knowledge base from which you can probably figure out how to solve your own problems, or at least have a launching base from which to hit Google. That being said, in almost every case (a dozen or more) where I’ve needed to lookup something, this book exceeds what you’ll find on Google.

If you will ever have the fortune (and I sincerely mean fortune) of encountering Linux, BUY THIS BOOK.