Book review: O’Reilly’s Pocket Guide to Linux
Mar 22, 2004 — by LinuxDevices Staff — from the LinuxDevices Archive — views
O'Reilly's “Pocket Guide” series of books are among the most-used books on my book shelf. These slim volumes are a refreshing departure from the “bigger is better” norm among computer book publishers, most of whom use large fonts, out-of-date excerpts from the Linux Documentation Project How-Tos,… and of course a CD or two in the back to amass reference tomes more impressive in bulk than in content or organization. As an editor myself, I understand the value of organizing and condensing information. Mark Twain certainly said it well when he ended a long letter with an apology about not having had the time to write at shorter length.
The first Pocket Guide I read was Rasmus Lehrdorf's guide to PHP. That book succeeded because 1) It was written by no less an authority on PHP than its originator 2) It contains the 20 percent of PHP commands that you use 80 percent of the time 3) It is readable not only as a reference but as a how-to, or guide.
I have also enjoyed the Apache, Perl, and Gimp guides, for much the same reasons. Thus, when I heard O'Reilly was publishing a Pocket Guide to Linux itself, I was eager to get my hands on a copy. If it lived up to the high standard set by the rest of the series, here would be the perfect book to give to friends new to Linux, I thought.
The first thing I noticed about the Linux Pocket Guide is its length: at 192 pages, it's about three times bigger than most of its series siblings. Uh-oh!
I put myself in the place of a new user, and started reading from the beginning. I was immediately put off by the choice to make the book specific to Fedora Linux. All great Linux books in my opinion should apply to any Linux, just as all great Unix books address sh, csh, and ksh.
I was puzzled that the author chose to explain “scope” and “category” in relation to the Linux filesystem. Such academic terms have little interest for normal Linux users. This was the first indication that the author and editor did not select and condense material with beginners in mind.
A second warning came during discussion of the ls command for listing files. While the highly obscure -i option for listing inode numbers was deemed worthy of mention, the much more commonly used -c and -t options for ordering by creation time and modification time were not.
Things worsened in the section about reading files. The highly useful strings command is omitted, while two obscure binary listing programs, od and xxd are discussed at length.
Also missing in action: the apropos command, every newbie's best friend, along with locate (aparently Fedora uses slocate instead, but how hard would it have been to cross-reference this to locate in the index?).
I could list other examples where the author discusses fairly obscure commands at length, while leaving out or giving short shrift to frequently used commands (how useful is it to tell us about the mget ftp command, and say nothing about prompt, for example?). This is disappointing.
And, I can't help thinking that with quick edits by people experienced with other distributions, the text could easily have been made distribution-agnostic. Doesn't O'Reilly have any editors who use Debian, or SuSE, or Slackware?
Linux suffers from the same over-complexity and steep learning curve that kept Unix in a backseat role compared to Windows and MacOS for so long. “Unix isn't hard, it's just a lot,” one of its original authors once said. How true!
The challenge for any Linux book author, it seems to me, is in selecting which programs the user really needs to know about, and then presenting everything the user needs to know about those programs.
The author of the Linux Pocket Guide has punted editorial selection. He probably did a stock Fedora Linux install, and essentially digested the man pages for each of the programs he found there, before grouping them into sections such as “The Filesystem,” “The Shell,” etc. Or, perhaps he started with O'Reilly's dry reference tome Linux in a Nutshell and just pared things down. The book has that kind of bottom-up feel.
It's a stretch to consider this guide a member of the O'Reilly “Pocket Guide” series, for it isn't a guide so much as an abreviated reference book, a kind of heavily abridged dictionary. As such, it's less appealing and useful than it could be.
For experienced Linux users — especially those moving from another distribution to Fedora — Pocket Linux Guide is perfect. It can be read in a day or so, during which it will remind you of many useful tools that everyone can stand to be reminded of once in a while. It will also give you an idea about the idiosyncracies of a stock Fedora system.
But for newbies, it detours too often into trivia, and glosses too quickly over the really salient stuff. It will probably frustrate and overwhelm most newbies unless used in conjunction with a more complete and gentle introductory text.
Having said all of that, this is the first edition of a book with an extremely ambitious scope: condensing Linux into 200 paperback-sized pages is no task for the faint of heart. I hope to find subsequent editions more distilled and refined, to better serve beginners. If so, O'Reilly and author Daniel J. Barrett will really have done something amazing!
O'Reilly's Linux Pocket Guide has a cover price of $9.95 ($14.95 Canadian) and is available now. Click the image below to purchase.
About the author: Henry Kingman is editor of LinuxDevices.com and a former editor of California Bicyclist, Texas Bicyclist, Florida Bicyclist, and Computer Select. He also authored Short Bike Rides in and around San Francisco. His favorite Linux book so far is Unix made Easy by John Muster.
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.