[Cialug] New Linux User orientation?

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 3:30 PM, Matt Breitbach
<matthewb at flash.shanje.com> wrote:
> Anyone know of a good book or site that covers this information without
> going into extra crap that I don't need?
>

They always have extra crap. A friend of mine was a co-author of the
Official Ubuntu Handbook. It covers a lot of topics so you can ignore
the chapters that aren't relevant to you. It is easily applicable to
both Ubuntu and Debian and generally applicable to other versions of
Linux.

RedHat has historically had great books. I've read the online versions
of a couple books back when they published them to their website at
the same time they hit the book stores. There were two books, one was
a gentle hand-holding, "here's Linux" type of book, the other was more
of a technical manual w/ one chapter for each thing someone might want
to do. Now they've expanded their catalog so I'm not sure which to
recommend.

Fortunately, here in the Des Moines and Ames areas our book stores are
well stocked with a variety of Linux books. You can go thumb through
them to find which suits your needs the best.

Also note that there are three or four predominant flavours of Linux
distributions. You may want to look for a book that speaks
specifically about your flavour. I'd summarize them as:

 * Redhat/Mandriva/CentOS
 * Debian/Ubuntu/Knopix
 * Novel/Suse
 * Gentoo and source linuxes (these all vary quite a bit though so one
category is too broad)

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
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