A Practical Guide to Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6th Edition

This is the most useful all-in-one Linux book I've seen. I consider myself an intermediate level Linux/UNIX user. I wish I had obtained this book five or six years ago.Like a previous reviewer, I decided to wait and obtain this when I saw the sixth edition was about to be released. It was worth the wait. I became aware of this book after examining Sobell's "Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming" at a local store. I was impressed with that book's breadth and organization. That book uses generic Linux as the basis for explaining Linux. When I saw Amazon offered a Sobell book targeted to Fedora/RHEL, I knew that was the edition I wanted. I recently switched to Fedora Linux after several years of using Ubuntu.If you're in the market for a large Linux book, you'll be happy with either this Fedora book or the "Practical..Commands" edition mentioned previously. Either book will be useful regardless of the Linux flavor you use. The difference between this Fedora book and the "Practical..Commands" book: this one covers administration and server setup tasks extensively. Both books share a lot of material. The "Commands" book also covers many topics that aren't covered here (including Mac OSX). It's worth taking time and reading Amazon's preview which includes the preface. Sobell clearly spells out the differences between the books.The "Commands" book costs less and doesn't include a DVD. But, -- nowadays -- installing Linux from a USB stick is simpler than using a DVD. I suggest to buy the "Practical..Commands" book instead of this Fedora book when you're completely new to Linux. It costs less and covers more of what you don't know. Learn administrative tasks down the road as needed.Finally, a third version called "Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux" is worth considering also. I imagine a lot of effort went into choosing the content for these three different Linux references.Sobell's writing is crisp and to-the-point. It is almost completely devoid of personality -- by this I mean he eschews lame attempts at humor or grammatical/semantic oddities that mar otherwise great books. One could possibly complain that his writing style is dry or boring. I wouldn't. I don't like books which devote space to "exercises". Fortunately, these are brief. I haven't checked yet, but the answers (some) are said to be posted on the author's web site.The level of detail is perfect for this type of book. For example, you learn how UUIDs are used, but not how they're derived. This book filled gaps in my BASH shell knowledge: stuff I should've known but didn't due to laziness or having glossed over material elsewhere.The book doesn't cover a whole lot about the GNOME shell. When it does have GUI examples it depicts GNOME 3 in "fallback" mode which is similar to GNOME 2. This is a wise editorial choice. Don't expect a ton of GUI stuff anyway; this is mostly CLI. Lots of great stuff on system initialization. Material here is up-to-date and clearly explained. I'm still digesting the sections on system initialization.Would have liked to see a bit of coverage on Webmin, plus other utilities I've used. I suppose you can't have everything.

I purchased Sobell's book to help me get get going using linux as a development environment. Sobell's tome of a book has a ton of information on Redhat Linux. Which makes it a good reference when you need to look up how to do something. But what I needed was a filtered stream of information on how to use RHEL as a developer, such as basick system administrator tasks. What I got was a fire hose. Sobell's book just has too much densely packed info for my purpose. Later I discovered Linux for Developers by Rothwell, which I found to be perfect for helping me learn what I needed (essential sys admin stuff). Sometimes a pin hammer is better than a sledge hammer.

Cannot read the E-books even with a dual monitors setup and other programs running. This book really helped me out. If your trying to read the instructions in the lab e-book, copy paste the work on a PDF sheet, read the other 1/2 on another set of instructions that the teacher wants and run the virtual drive program, and then confusing. All these open in small windows, it gets confusing. (No Disc - but I think the disc is the manual - an e-book) That's why I bought the book and the manual to eliminate the extra windows. It help me a lot and got A's so far!!!

Enjoyable...Easy reading & great for basics... For understanding the mechanics of LINUX... !! "A little bit Windows & Apple" all rolled into onecomplete manageable desktop interphase w/ very little security problems...!! Want to get AWAY from "P.I.T.A." MALWARE, VIRUS..andthe like that you have to deal w/ on (Microsoft) Windows ( & occasionally w/ Mac)...?? Try any form of latest version of "Red Hat", "Ubuntu","Fedora", "OpenSUSE", "Slackware", "Debian"...just to mention a few....(w/ many, many more available...and FREE mostly...)-Good Luck & Happy Reading...-HartOtex... ;)

I'm not going to call this book terrible, but it's not great. I'm taking a Linux class (which itself is not great either) and this book isn't really that helpful - half the time when I go to look something up, it's not on the page the index says or it's really vague about the topic.I also have a silly minor complaint about the way the CD was attached in the book - I don't like taking the cardboard sleeves out since you risk damaging the book spine sometimes, but leaving it in makes it really hard to turn the pages near the index since it's position makes them all flop together. I'm always afraid I'm going to tear them because the paper is kind of thin.Really I'd have preferred a book that was a bit more clear on subjects, and that had a better index.

There's a ton of junk out there, good thing there are places like this where you can comb through techie reviews and get a better idea of what to spend your money on.A friend of mine has the older edition, and I was going to pick up my own copy when I noticed that the 6th edition was due out shortly, so I put it on my pre-order list and got it when it was released.This is both a good learning-Linux book, and a great reference. I find myself agreeing with the authors methods of system administration most of the time, and I'm starting to get the feeling that the points I disagree with are me just being stubborn, and I need to learn the "new, right" way.Great book, especially for the discounted Amazon price.

Ce livre m'a été très précieux:- très clair et pédagogique- exemples pertinents- exhaustif :Également : les différences entre ReHat et Fedora bien mises en évidenceA comparer avec ReHat Eterprise de Bartolone qui couvre sensiblement le même programmemais sans Fedora et ne donne pas la même impression d’approfondissementLe désavantage pour les non anglophones : il n'est pas en français