BEWARE: Many of these customer reviews are dated. For example, the best and worst cited by Amazon are from 1999 and 2001, respectively. This is the 5th edition, published in late 2005/early 2006. FYI...

I gave it four stars simply because what I did read was very helpful, but I have much more to go. I may give it five later.

I love this book; I recommend it to people at least twice a day when I visit [...]. This book covers every aspect of installing and booting a GNU/Linux operating system, from choosing a distribution, to running specific pieces of software. It includes tangible and detailed, though introductory, material on hardware, networking, software installation, using Emacs and Vi, desktop environments, security, and package management. Many of the topics, such as Samba and networking, focus on making your GNU/Linux installation part of a wider network with a variety of operating systems. Some of it, for example the chapter on TCP/IP is not even GNU/Linux-specific, but is highly educational.

The best quality of this book that makes it my goto book is that it is a good introduction to thinking about things in the Unix tradition, and firmly keeps encouraging the reader to use the command-line instead of steering him or her to GUI tools. That's why I suggest reading the entire book (not necessarily comprehending, but reading) before trying to install a GNU/Linux distribution.

The back of the book says "widely recognized in the linux community as the ultimate getting started and problem-solving book", "will provide expert advice when you need it" and "one of the ultimate linux manuals". I haven't yet had a problem that this book helped me solve. I understand that it can't and isn't meant to cover everything. But I was annoyed that it's "in case of an emergency" section basically said that users should have a rescue cd with enough tools to recover -- but not much on how to recover. Now, whenever I break something, my recovery is 1) check Running Linux and find nothing helpful, then 2) throw the book into a corner and search the web for people with similar problems.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is new to Linux and attempting to figure their way around. It's not a great book for those who just want the how-do-I-do-this-without-having-to-understand-anything-under-the-covers approach. If you want that I would recommend going with a book like Spring Into Linux (Valade), which is much more of a get you up to speed as fast as possible without teaching you much.

I like so far how much detail this book gives you, though the reason I haven't given it 5 out of 5 is simply because I feel like it's lacking detail in some key areas (most notably so far for me would be its sparse offerings in the NFS section). However, the book itself does not claim to be exhaustive. In fact, it claims to be just the opposite and admits early on that its goal is only to give you enough information to be dangerous and then point you towards better maps if you so choose. That in itself is one of the reasons I like the book. They really do, for the most part, give you tremendous little intros to topics that help you understand not only how to do something, but also why you're doing it that way, why linux may have been designed in that way, etc. etc.

So, in short, great book for an in-depth intro to linux. However, if you're looking to spend your money for a book that treats any topic very in depth, I would recommend going with any of the other books in this series from O'Reilly, because this book was not designed for that. Good luck with Linux!

I was in a urgent need of some fairly serious Linux bootcamp. This book worked, and this is how:

I hadn't had any significant Linux experience prior to buying this book. Sure, I knew a few basic UNIX commands, who doesn't?

After installing Ubuntu it became clear that I simply will have to spend too much time googling solutions for every problem. I went ahead and bought this book, read it cover to cover in about two days, and my fluentness in Linux administration/programming has increased dramatically. I still have to google some specifics (like Postfix/MySQL integration issues), but most of what I needed for my work, was in this fairly thin book.

Note that it is not focused on any particular distribution, and most of the tasks are explained with several major distros in mind. I kind of appreciated that also, since it only reassured my decision to go with a Debian-based Ubuntu.