Sobell focuses on basic Linux programming and development, rather than installation, setup, hardware, etc., so his book makes a good companion volume to the "sysadmin" handbooks on the market, which often come up short on details about the OS language and utilities.

For example, the most important reconfiguration item available is called LISA, and it does not appear in the index.

If you are new to any form of UNIX, you will need to develop a good working knowledge of the UNIX tool set. You should learn about the shells (bash,ksh,etc), the editors (emacs, vi, joe) other common unix tools (make, awk, pine), and the X-Windows system. For learning about these things, this book is very good.

What I don't like is that the book really should be called "HANDS ON UNIX". Only an occasional remark in the text reminds you that this is a LINUX book. The book seems titled by the publisher to cash in on the LINUX buzz, rather than according to it's content. Less than 1% of the content is LINUX specific. There is a 7 page appendix on the emulators available for LINUX, and about ten pages of Linux specific content int he first hundred pages.

Chapter two just blithely states that "This book does not discuss hardware selection nor the installation of Linux" and then jumps right to logging into a UNIX command shell.

To this day I'm still looking for decent coverage of buying a Linux compatible system, system installation, hard disk setup, network and sound card setup, dial up networking setup, and other hardware and installation manuals.

There is nothing on recompiling the kernel. The only tweaking section that I found useful was the XFree86 section. The tips on window managers and setting up your X configuration is pretty good.

If you are an at-home Linux user, you ARE the network administrator, and system administrator. If you're looking for a one-volume omnibus, this is not it.

The content in this book will probably never become dated. It's timeless unix stuff.

Warren Postma