The Linux Cookbook, 2nd Edition, by Michael Stutz, is a very detailed and scholarly book aimed at people who already know a fair bit about Linux, and are quite comfortable with using the command line interface.

Do not be misled by the colourful title page, or the simple-sounding title - this book is definitely not for beginners.

This book is staying on my bookshelf until I learn a fair bit more about Linux. Indeed, some casual readers may never need to know the in-depth information contained in this book.

This would be an okay book for my wife if she got interested in the linux command line.

It does not tell you much about setting up your system - but my wife can just get me to do that.

This book is getting old, but for a lot of command line stuff, that doesn't matter much, because it doesn't change a lot. And my wife can ask me whether there is something newer and spiffier.

It does not go into any depth. Things like tunneling a vnc session over ssh - no way it is going to tell you. But my wife doesn't care. And if for some reaswon she needed to open a desktop on a remote system securely, she would ask me to do it for her.

It does not tell you much about GUI tools. My wife does like GUI tools, but she's pretty good at figuring them out.

Its strength is the nice examples. There is never any doubt how to do something that is actually covered. I suspect its coverage of things like postscript and printing would help someone who needed to deal with those at a user level. So if my wife wanted to print out a DVI file, this would be the book for her.

For people like me, who want to know how to make that new printer work right, or start up a secure desktop session on a remote machine, this is not the book. A book with the same title but a different author (Schroeder) does a better job for us.

It's a book for beginners that concentrates on the console commands and programs. It was mostly review for me, and I'm just a novice in Linux. I've been kicking around with it for 6 or 7 years just on a very casual basis (a few minutes a week, really) and I guess I was hoping for something that could advance me to the next stage of understanding, but all it did was reincforce some things I already knew and introduced a few I didn't. Might be a real eye opener for an absolute beginner. In fact I would recommend it to anyone just getting started with Linux to get their feet wet in the console. Pretty good command index to keep at arm's reach.

I AM NOT A GEEK. That said, I'd have to say that this book fell short of providing me any really useful information. I've been a Linux user for about 5 years now, and I still find some aspects of it frustrating, but this book didn't really help me much. And, it certainly doesn't live up to the O'Reilley "Cookbook" series (not that it is pretending to be, just shares the name), which I always find helpful. There are numerous Linux books out there that are better than this one. To me, the hints provided don't help much. And, when I'm stumped about what's going on with my system, this book doesn't help either.

If I were just starting out, maybe it would be OK. But I think I would probably spring for something else, "Unix Power Tools" comes to mind.

Let me start with what this book is and is not. There is nothing on how to install, troubleshoot, or administer Linux and it is not supposed to have that information. This is a cookbook and is designed to be a resource when you have a specific goal in mind and want to know how to get there. The first several chapters focus on the very basic Linux information that everyone working in the operating system should know. This includes such common items as how to determine what processes are running and how to determine who you are logged in as. Of course anyone with even a minimum of Linux experience knows this stuff. For the more experienced Linux users the later chapters deal are a real treasure. It includes things like viewing and editing images, PostScript, working with sound, and cross-platform conversions. The recipe style layout really works well. Like a list of ingredients the author lists the program to be run, package manager name for the installation package, and the home page where the package can be found. This is one of the really nice features of the book. If you are looking for how to accomplish a specific task you can look it up, see if there is a program to accomplish it, locate and install the program if necessary, and follow through the specific directions to achieve your desired result. The Linux Cookbook, 2nd Edition is very highly recommended for the new Linux user, and recommended as a desk reference to keep available for the more experienced user who may just need to know how to convert that mp3 file to another format and burn the result to a CD.