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It's one thing for a software engineer to develop on Linux. It's quite another thing to plop Linux down chez the customer. Linux Installation, Configuration, and Use, by Michael Kofler, augments the degree of ease and confidence with which Linux can be deployed in the workaday world.
The ambiance of Linux has traditionally been the ambiance of any clique; that is, "If you have to ask, you don't need to know." The explosive growth in install base over the past couple of years has changed things; Linux Installation, Configuration, and Use makes a piquant impression regarding the extent to which the Gnu/Linux world has changed. Elements of installation, operation, and use that once presented the most difficulty are now completely routine, whereas the administration of X-cum-desktop-du-jour has become an absorbing concern.
Linux Installation, Configuration, and Use is well-written, well-edited, and well-rounded, covering adequately installation, most common elements and some uncommon elements of configuration, basic UNIX command-line operations, X and the desktop, and getting onto the Internet. The book is attractively designed and typographically precise and readable. There's some exposition of the different packagings of Linux -- the accompanying CD-ROMs contain RedHat 6.0.
Popular volumes are often way too broad and insufficiently deep. Kofler, while trimming his sails to his youngish audience, is well-informed and reliable, as well as unafraid of sudden dives into the depths. You not only learn from this book how to browse the Web from Linux, you also learn to recompile the kernel, since you never know when even an end user might still be called upon to do so.
Toward the end of the book, space that could reasonably have been devoted to a bit more administrative detail or networking hints is given over instead to document formatting in LaTeX and Lyx, and to a fairly exotic exposition of Gimp, right down to layer manipulation. My first reaction was, "Color rendering is more entertaining than inetd or running postgresql," but after consideration, I conclude Kofler's choice is the correct one. This Age of Linux is really the Age of the Linux End-User Application. Kofler has exercised good judgment in taking the opportunity to emphasize to the mass readership two of the most technically mature, excellent, and broadly useful general computing application bundlings in the canon.
Linux Installation, Configuration, and Use successfully merges the authenticity of an expert Linux exposition with the tone of a mass-market operating system power user guide. Of broad appeal, it's especially a book that should be by the elbow of the intern installing Linux on the workstations of the impatient and ill-informed.
-- Jack Woehr
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Explanation of ERCB rating scale: No stars = unacceptable, 1 Star = marginal, 2 Stars = average, 3 Stars = above average, 4 Stars = exceptional.