This Practical Guide is really a *Beginners* Guide for linux end-users. The volume is comprehensive from the point of view of an end user that is new to linux. I was looking for something with more depth for that could assist a beginner that is setting up linux server. Most administrative tasks like setting up networks and local services are glossed over with no practical reference.

This book goes back Amazon.

I'm a reasonably technically competent computer user who a bit less than one year ago wanted to try using Ubuntu Linux as my primary operating system. To make that happen, I needed a book that could help me get oriented to Linux usage and help me learn some of Linux's "more than newbie" tricks and techniques.

Well, the good news began when A Practical Guide to Linux got me started with some excellent chapters and summary lists of many useful albeit less obvious Linux commands.

But the book didn't stop there. It also has some VERY good chapters about both the VIM and EMACS text editors. I especially found the VIM chapters (more than one!) very good at getting me up to speed on both basic and advanced VIM commands and techniques.

But wait, don't answer yet. After nearly a year of using Linux, I find The Practical Guide to Linux back beside my keyboard. This time it's helping me begin doing some shell programming and C programming.

In short, A Practical Guide to Linux is both well written and well edited. It's a book the author and publishers can be justifiably proud of having produced.

If you're technically competent enough to get Linux up and working, but still need a "friend" to help you make Linux do some useful work, I believe The Practical Guide to Linux will be a very useful addition to your technical library and a very good complement to your Linux adventure...

I am in a software support role at work. I ran into a project that was the first time we needed to use Linux.
I would recommend this book. It is a great reference.

The is, perhaps, the best single book for the individual committed to learning the Linux command line. It is clearly written, concise but thorough, and (miracle of miracles) well edited.

Sobell doesn't waste time with cutesy asides or clever ploys; he delivers the goods rapid-fire, but well illustrated and logically arranged. Make no mistake, however, this is not the book for dabblers. It demands focus, for each word counts. It requires commitment, for it makes no effort to entertain. Nevertheless, those who are ready to assume the task will be well rewarded for their efforts.

It is the best book I have ever seen that lets you master the most commonly used stuff (with the concepts behind each of them). Nice supplement for those man pages.

Totally unlike most Linux books, it avoids discussing everything via GUI and jumps right into making the power of the command line your friend.

This is the best Linux book I've come across in years. Great for beginners or those using Linux for years.

This book is bloated. I didn't find anything useful for myself. If you had worked on any unix or have mac then just look for other books.

A must for all Linux Admins. Covers all what we need to perform our job.

Very good book, very complete and well explained. And with tons of practices.
You must have.
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Muy buen libro, muy completo y bien explicado. Y con toneladas de ejemplos.
Hay que tenerlo.

This book makes Linux easy. I'm currently taking a college course using this book and it makes learning fun and interesting. Great book for beginners like myself to start off with.

Very helpful, understandable book. I have very little experience with Linux command line, but I've found this to be an excellent help.A Practical Guide to Linux(R) Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming

A must have book for everyone who aims to get the maximum of the GNU/Linux OS.

I bought the book to help improve my shell scripting skills. One quote on the book cover accurately states it all:

"A comprehensive, practical guide plus an outstanding reference with hundreds of realistic, high-quality examples!"

I'm don't think I could describe the book better. I highly recommend the book.

It is very good. Well organized and you can find the subject you want in there. I am not deep in this subject yet, but it cross references well with other books, and you have some assurence that you will wind up in the correct place. And I have. Sit down and read the introductions to the topics, and you will return when the maturity changes come.

This book is a very well elaboreted Linux guide in the sence that
its organization leads the user directly to his necessities.

I found this book to be very understandable. I have no experience with Linux but I was writing scripts without any trouble.

As a newcomer to Unix and Linux operating systems, I just needed a reference so I could be productive enough to perform tasks without relying on others. The book enabled me to do this. I read the other reviews about how the book works for both beginner and advanced users. I borrowed 2 books before buying this one. This one is the only one I use.

This is a very good book on Linux and presents the material in an easy-to-read style. The author does a nice job of organizing the content despite the complexity of the material.

Also recommended would be the Linux Bible.

This book has it all. Having to work with multiple OS's and programming languages each day, one does find that one sometimes cannot recall what to execute where or which tool/command does what - A Practical Guide to Linux to the rescue!!

Great review of what the title says, but if you're looking for other linux support, you're going to have to look elsewhere. This is purely a shell coding book, and not an intro to anything else. I like it.

This book is remarkably well written. It is wonderfully clear and precise. Topics are introduced in a logical order, with great care taken to build on previous concepts. This is a book that works well for beginners as well as for more experienced users, or as a refresher. There is enough explanation so that someone can grasp a new concept, and yet the explanation is sufficiently concise so that it doesn't slow down someone who already has some Unix/Linux skills and is simply reviewing. The book excels in every respect: chapter organization, sub-topic organization, and clear typographical conventions. But the biggest strength of the book is simply the clarity of the writing.

Very good book for the money. All commands are demistified and defined. Bash and C shells are discussed and demistified. This is a great book for anyone trying to learn LINUX.

It is great book no questions here. I was listening to another reviewer's advice and paired it with "UNIX Essentials and UNIX Core" DVD and this thing works! The book elaborates on many subjects and the DVD gives the whole variety of prospectives on Linux and UNIX. I also liked the clear organization of this book. It takes one glance in the list to figure out what do you need and how to get it. It also helps to see how many things maybe accomplished by variety of ways to avoid mishaps.

If you are a beginner/intermediate linux user in need of tutorial style treatment of commands, editors and shell programming then look no further. The author has done an excellent job presenting the chapters, from the basics to more advanced, gradually building on the concepts learned, in a simple, easy-to-read text. This book shines in explaining the commands with relevant examples and differs from the others in not being a printed man pages. The author also details the subtleties of shell (bash and tc) and shell commands where appropriate. The chapters on sed and gawk are invaluable, so are the chapters on vim and emacs. This book also doubles as an excellent command reference - Part 5 of the book is dedicated to this.

This book neither teaches you nor is intended to teach the nuances of mounting/unmounting devices, loading modules, managing disks and partitions, runlevels, boot sequences and boot loaders, networking, user administration and such. Linux administrator handbook by Evi Nemeth et al and How Linux Works by Brian Ward fills this gap nicely.

The verdict:
Reads so well cover to cover. Highly recommended for beginners.

Clear, concise, and comprehensive.

A 'must have' book relevant to any version of Linux. A 'text book' format that presents general theory along with optional exercises for review and practice (organized for basic and advanced levels).

Part V is what makes this book indispensable, providing over 200 pages of a most comprehensive catalogue of command references in alphabetical order (indicating options, notes and discussions of each with numerous examples).

An appendix with a glossary of general terms extends the usefulness of this book for non-specialists.

What I really appreciate about this book that it starts at the beginning and not in the middle. When I have started with this one, the only thing I knew about Linux that it is a word of five letters. I went through "UNIX Essentials and UNIX Core" DVD course while been reading the book and it was great and helpful. There are some books that you read and then sell on Amazon, but not this one! I bet you going to keep it for as long as Linux will be around. I would also appreciate if the same book could be squeezed into some smaller format to take live into small compartment of my notebook's bag. In two words: great book!

Just so you know the book is big but has very useful information. All major and common commands are discussed with examples along. The author also discussed two important editors (VI and EMACS). I found the book very helpful for novices as well for experienced linux users.
Overall, I recommend this book. You will not be disappointed.

This is a very nice book for novice unix users.

This book put everything in perspective/context. It starts with a short history of Linux/Unix/GNU and the relation between each other.

It is also a very complete book. It covers the main commands, editors, shell programming, et. cetera.

The nice thing (especially for novice people), is that there are a lot of examples with a description what it does. The examples are very usable. Because a lot of examples use multiple commands this book can also been seen as a cookbook how you can do certain task using e.g. the command line interface.

So this book is not one big printed man pages (a lot of other books are).

One little disadvantage is that this book need some updating. E.g. CVS is covered but the emerging Subversion not. Maybe it is a good idea to cover also subversion in the next edition.

This book is the best distro-agnostic foundational Linux reference I've ever seen, out of dozens of Linux-related books I've read. It's a constant battle to find a good Linux book that isn't wedded implicitly or explicitly to a specific distribution (usually something Red Hat related), more about KDE and GNOME applications and other specific applications the authors favor than about real Linux skills, or both. Finding this book was a real stroke of luck. If you want to really understand how to get things done at the command line, where the power and flexibility of free unixlike OSes really live, this book is among the best tools you'll find toward that end. About the only way it could be better is to be released under an open documentation license.

I recently was fortunate enough to receive a review copy of this book from Prentice Hall publishers, and am happy to submit this review. I found this very large volume (1008 pages!) to be quite interesting and a valuable source of information for both Linux beginners and veterans alike. As the title may suggest, it covers some of the most commonly used Linux commands, the two main editors (Vim and Emacs), and some shell programming techniques with the Bash and tcsh shells. I found it to be quite "distro-neutral", as the material presented should be available on virtually any Linux system, and does not reference distro-specific tools. The book seems very well organized into Parts and Chapters, and there are also some excellent appendices and additional matter at the end of the book, which I'll discuss later in this review.

Part I is entitled "The Linux Operating System", and starts out with some introductory "welcome" and "getting started" material which is good reading for newbies but can easily be skipped by others. The next chapter in this part covers how to use the more commonly used commands such as ls, cp, rm, and tar. This is followed up by a chapter on the Linux filesystem, including the hierarchical layout, directories, pathnames, permissions, and file links. There is a nice section in this chapter which describes what is found in nearly all of the standard directories such as /boot, /etc, /home, /usr, and so on. Also notable here was an excellent description of how to set (and understand!) file and directory permissions. The final chapter in this part provides an introduction to the shell and command line. It covers standard input/output, redirection, pipes, and backgrounding of commands. Most of the information in these first 5 chapters will probably be a review for more experienced Linux users, but they are outstanding reading for newcomers. One thing I did notice as a great feature of the book is that there is a "Chapter Summary" at the end of each chapter which is really excellent, and a list of "Exercises" to help you see and use the information in a more hands-on way.

Part II is called simply "The Editors", and devotes about 60 pages each to Vim and Emacs. A brief history of each is provided, and a pretty good tutorial of basic usage is walked through. Both chapters include a command referance/summary, and some customization tips. Even the well known "debate" about which editor to use is mentioned, although no preference is indicated. For the record, this writer prefers Vim... J There are more in-depth books available to explain each editor in greater detail, but these chapters provide a good introductory lesson.

Part III contains two chapters, one each on the "bash" shell and the "tcsh" shell. Some of the procedures and concepts in this part may well be more information than is desired by many Linux users, but command-line types will want to read all of this material. The differences between these two shells are discussed, and the fact that most users will only need to learn about "bash", as it is normally the default shell on most modern Linux distributions. I found some good information on customizing your shell, and using the "dot files" such as .bash_profile and .bashrc to control things like aliases and your environment variables.

Part IV covers "Programming Tools". The first chapter here discusses programming in C, including the basics of the gcc compiler, using shared libraries, debugging procedures, system calls, and source code management (CVS). It should be noted that this chapter describes the process of writing and compiling programs with C, but is not intended to teach C programming if you don't already understand most of it. The next chapter (11) is a quite extensive (about 100 pages) discussion of programming with the Bash shell. It covers control structures, parameters, variables, loops, arrays, expressions, functions, and builtin commands. Numerous examples are shown to help with understanding the concepts. I would recommend this particular chapter for those wishing to increase their ability to write effective shell scripts for system administration. The final two chapters in Part IV cover the "gawk" and "sed" utilities, which are essential for more advanced text processing and shell scripting. Again, there are numerous excellent examples given which really aid in understanding the material, followed by some suggested excercises for putting your new knowledge to work. This part should be required reading for any system administrator.

Part V is the "Command Reference" section. This is a very complete reference (240 pages) on how to use virtually all Linux utilities and shell builtins, from "at" to "xargs". The layout for each command is presented in the manner of a man page, only much more readable and including excellent notes and examples which are not found in a man page. All options are well explained, and there is extensive use of tables and summaries. This may be the most useful portion of the entire book, and serves both as a great refresher for veterans, and a nice learning process for beginners. The material here is presented in "plain English", which helps a lot.

The remainder of the book is made up of three appendixes, a glossary, and an index. Appendix A is an excellent presentation of "regular expressions", an often little-understood but important skill for system administrators to have. Spend some time reading this one. Appendix B is simply called "Help", and tells you about the wide array of help resources available to a Linux user. Helpful websites are listed, and mailing lists and newsgroups are described. The final Appendix C touches on keeping your system updated, although it is quite limited by only discussing the "yum" and "apt" utilities. This could have been done a little better by including some additional distro tools, and/or more generic ideas for updating. The final two sections of the book are a 50 page Glossary and a 50 page Index, both of which seem quite complete.

Overall I found this book to be quite excellent, and it has earned a spot on the very front of my bookshelf. It covers the real "guts" of Linux - the command line and it's utilities, and does so very well. It's strongest points are the outstanding use of examples, and the Command Reference section. Highly recommended for Linux users of all skill levels. Well done to Mark Sobell and Prentice Hall for this outstanding book!

For some people knowing how to do something through a graphical interface is akin to knowing how to drive without knowing how an engine, transmission, etc. work together to make the car run. For them knowing how to get down to the command line and get things done that either the graphical interface does not allow or does not do the way you want it done is a matter of pride and represents the dividing line between a user and a power user. If you want to become a real Linux guru and know how to work the command line to do whatever you want including commands, editing, shell programming, and scripting this is one of the better books available. Readable, straight-forward, educational, it is a one-of-kind reference that blends the educational aspect of a typical book on learning Linux with a typical book of command line references. A Practical Guide to Linux is highly recommended.

If you are parachuting into the Linux(R) plains, stuff this in your backpack.

This is one of my favorite books for Linux. It lists many commands regulary used by most users and a bunch of advanced and more rarely used commands that are interesting. It's pedagogical and has good language. I recommend this one for everyone who needs a bit more information about linux, the filesystem, some coding-utilities and much more.