Software Books

Very good book with some good tips. I also find it very useful to help me navigate the horrific Ribbon menuing system.

I learn something useful every time I open the book which I keep on the coffee table for leisure reading! Yeap, leisure reading, it's that interesting.

Bought it, got it, LOVE IT!!! This is really a great little book. I love this book. This was actually one of the best purchases I ever made.

Ar first I was hesitant about learning Excel 2007 - due to work, it was necessary for me to learn it (I teach Excel at a local college.) The book is great - it got me excited aobut using the new program. There are so many great features that are explained very well. This book is a definite must if you need (or want) to learn Excel 2007.

I think there are two reasons for buying a book on Excel 2007.

First, of coure, is if you are new to Excel. I suppose that there are some people out there who don't know Excel. If you're one of these, this is not the book for you.

Second, and I expect far more common comes in two versions. (1) you know and use Excel and are wondering if it is worth while to spend the money to pay for an upgrade, and if it is worth while to spend the time and effort to learn the new features. (2) you have the new Excel and are looking at the 'RIBBON' and wondering what to do with it.

In either of these cases this is the book for you. It's a small book on what's new in Excel 2007, it skipps all the beginning stuff like 'what is a spreadsheet.' It starts with the Ribbon. What else, that's the biggest change. And from there it goes on to the other major changes into what Microsoft did with Excel in this revision.

This little book could save you an awful lot of time and effort.

This book was so easy to follow. It gave easy to follow directions. It was very thorough. It gave great examples. I have all the One Step Books. Do you have one for understanding email and internet? PLEASE HELP! I am working from a book called "creating web sites" that has numerous errors. It leaves out instructions. I don't know how a publisher can put this book on the market.

Outstanding book for the beginner--and even for someone who knows a little about Excel. Very good exercises and lessons/explanations. The book walks you right through the exercises and does a super job to explain how to use them to learn Excel. I have not had much experience with or training on Excel, so was worried about just how difficult it would be to learn. My new job requires I use Excel all the time. Now I feel like I can do most anything that is required of me in Excel. This book is a must for someone, like me, who is just learning. The CD that accompnies the book is also excellent to use and definitely helps you learn in whatever format you find easiest--or combine all formats to learn and review what you have learned!!! A must to buy and make an integral part of your bookshelf collection.

The book is excellent. Read the very last page first: It tells you how to copy the exercise onto your hard drive and re-set the READ ONLY button. Once you have done that, you won't need to install the 'program' from the CD-ROM. Read the book, do all the exercises and you will be better trained than going to one of those $199 'ACCESS I / II / III' courses.

My boss sent me to an Access II course. I was not sure if I may fail so I bought this book; did all the exercise and when I was in the class room, I can do things even the teacher cannot, let alone being able to understand everything that the course offered.

The book is that good. If you know nothing about Access now, but need to know, buy the book.

This book was so easy to follow. It gave easy to follow directions. It was very thorough. It gave great examples. I have all the One Step Books. Do you have one for understanding email and internet? PLEASE HELP! I am working from a book called "creating web sites" that has numerous errors. It leaves out instructions. I don't know how a publisher can put this book on the market.

Outstanding book for the beginner--and even for someone who knows a little about Excel. Very good exercises and lessons/explanations. The book walks you right through the exercises and does a super job to explain how to use them to learn Excel. I have not had much experience with or training on Excel, so was worried about just how difficult it would be to learn. My new job requires I use Excel all the time. Now I feel like I can do most anything that is required of me in Excel. This book is a must for someone, like me, who is just learning. The CD that accompnies the book is also excellent to use and definitely helps you learn in whatever format you find easiest--or combine all formats to learn and review what you have learned!!! A must to buy and make an integral part of your bookshelf collection.

I'm always looking for more ways to use Excel - and I hoped this book would help me solve some of the glitches I've come across. But - it's better than that. It offers problems I've never even encountered - and what fun to try and duplicate them! There are so many little tricks that just aren't covered in the usual classes & seminars. Definitely worth having on the shelf - nearby, so you can grab it quickly!

At last, a computer book written, as I now think they all should be, by a professional comedian. This book is not written for the absolute beginner, but by someone who has used Excel enough to have a couple of annoying problems that they would like to have fixed.

The first Annoyance is "Kill Clippy." This was one of the most hated "innovations" in history. Even Microsoft eventually had the sense to turn him off in Excel 2002. But if you're running an older version, or if someone else using you're computer turns him on, here's how to get rid of him permanently. And for a joke he offers you a web site on "clippycide." That's what a computer book should be.

This goes on to nearly every aspect of working with Excel. Chapter 9 starts out:

Excel's basic functions haven't changed in years. Of course, Microsoft has to addd new stuff to give you a reason to upgrade to the latest version. In Excel 2003, that reason was support for XML."

XML is supposed to make it easy to transfer data from one program to another. Of course there are XML annoyances, one is that the XML that Access produces isn't necessarily readable by Excel. Oh Boy!

Excel Annoyances ...

This book is made for those who have had one or more vexing problems with Excel. If that's you, the answer can probably be found here and lots more besides.

Curtis Frye is an established author, including several books on Excel. He has the book divided into chapters that deal with several categories of problems: Entering Data, Formatting, Formulas, Manipulating Data, Charts, Exchanging Data, Printing, and Customization.

His solutions vary from basic training on how to use a feature, to how to tweak things "just so." Each Annoyance is the result of someone's problem with an aspect of Excel. Since many people do not upgrade to the latest version of Excel when it's available, the book covers solutions from Excel 97 through the current Excel 2003.

One of the most interesting things I learned was the existence of a function that translated numbers into Roman numerals! I never knew this existed. That's not to say I would ever have any use for such a function, but it was interesting playing around with it. If you want to try it out, type a number in one cell and in another, type this formula: = roman(cell), where "cell" is the location of the number you typed. You'll see the result in roman numbers, as advertised. Slick! Someone once threatened to file his income tax return using roman numbers, just to make things hard for IRS, and this is a way it could be done. IRS would probably object.

Screen shots are used liberally in the book. These may simply be a shot of a worksheet but often a related dialog box is also shown. Occasionally a text box includes extra information that may be of importance for a subject.

One extra feature include in the book is reference to some time-wasters, also known as games. Each is an Excel version and is free to download. There's Pac Man, Arkanoid, BlackJack, Rubik's Cube, Tetris and more.

There are occasional answers using Visual Basic, but for the most part, the answers simply use the settings that are already in Excel. Most users never tap the full potential of Excel, and I'm no exception. I feel I am an expert, but I certainly learned a lot by reading this book and you will too, if you use Excel at all.

Ok, Excel is the dominant spreadsheet. No question of that. But it has some surprising "features" which this book calls annoyances. It gives a multitude of them, with fixes for all. (Another O'Reilly series might call these fixes hacks.)

Logically enough, the book starts off with those difficulties that can be met when inputting data. Many of you will applaud that the leading annoyance is the Paperclip, on which much verbal ire has no doubt been expended. So Frye forthrightly shows how to terminate this pesky little bugger.

Later sections talk about formatting, formulae, charting, printing and so on. The chapters essentially follow the main functional structures of Excel. Some features might not be obvious to you; depending on your expertise. But chances are that for the average Excel user, you'll get some good advice from Frye.

This is a well organized and written set of useful hints and pointers for Excel. They range from solutions to difficult data analysis issues, to tips about graphing, pivot tables, and importing data from various formats, notably XML.

The book is organized into chapters around central Excel themes; editing, formulas, formatting, charting, etc. Each chapter has a set of annoyances with a description and a solution. These annoyances are sometimes bugs, and sometimes just difficult issues that reasonably advanced users will run into where the help is either insufficient or poorly written. The fixes are generally fairly short and contained within the bounds of Excel, though the book does point to external sites and software where appropriate.

Definitely a must have for the power Excel user.

Great book that explore a lot Excel using all the examples on calculus in the electronics area.
A lot of examples let easier the electronic enginner live, using Excel in the best way for it.

Great examples of real applications. His method of transference is one of ease, if you pay attention! Before finishing it, I was using several tidbits that had been doging me at work...

My boss sent me home early on a Friday with the instructions to take the wife out to dinner on him! Is this book worth it? What do you think?

I recommend this book highly.

The Excel spreadsheet software includes many capabilities most people do not think about when they use Excel for general business purposes. In this useful book, the author presents 16 complete examples from day-to-day electronics. Those examples include a voltage-to-current converter, a mean-time-between-failures (MTBF) calculator, a resistor color-code decoder using voice input, a voltage-regulator circuit calculator, and others. Instead of simply presenting and describing the examples, the author steps readers through the creation of the needed spreadsheets, formulas, graphs, formats, and other portions of the project.

The examples are not static. In the MTBF example, you will have an opportunity to create "scenarios" that let you try combinations of variables to determine what happens under "what if" conditions. The book comes with a CD-ROM that contains all the examples as well as an eBook version of the book. As you learn by doing, you'll gain experience using Excel so you can better apply it to your own engineering problems.

(Disclosure: I write for several magazines owned by Reed Elsevier, the parent company of the Newnes series of books. I do not work with the book-publishing group, however.)

This is a book you keep around because you forget all the tricks you pick up. I have a copy of the book and have used it a few times. Very handy in those situations where you need to use excel because everyone else is - its good that its for electrical engineers. Its good that it has those things that no one will teach you how to use.

This is book provide practical examples which are useful and helpful to me in my analogue design work, e.g. the variation of anlaogue reference voltages. Besides, this book also covers some digital applications. The book is easy to read and the spreadsheets are available in the enclosed CD ROM and we can use it as a reference, this saves me much time to regenerate the spreadsheet.

I am looking for someone that knows something about old books like the home garden handbook published in 1927

This book is amazing. It excels (no pun intended) not just in showing solutions, but even more important, it provides concepts and a way of thinking about solving Excel problems.
If there is one book about Excel that I recommend reading cover to cover, this is it. Even though it covers Excel 95, it is now, 10 years later, still actual.

One of the excellent book of Excel. However it is out of stock. I lent it from the library and can't find it from any book store. I hope the publisher will re-printed it.

This book doesn't deal the basics. It gives you everthing about advanced options and solution strategies. The cd-rom is very good, with many excersises and solutions. I wanted to have read this book earlier.

I am a heavy duty user of Excel and I support users of the application too. This is one of the best books I have seen on Excel's most powerful features. The chapters on array formulas and range names are the best I have read on the subject. This book is outstanding. I am here writing this review because I was hoping to order a copy for work.

I'm a little leery of taking the title "Missing Manual" literally. Other books in this series have discussed the Macintosh and other Apple offerings, where indeed typically Apple provided only a paucity of information in its manuals. But for Excel, Microsoft does offer comprehensive hardcopy documentation. This book is really one of a numerous set of third party offerings that try to improve on Microsoft.

The strongest argument for this book is that it appears to combine a comprehensive description of Excel with a conciseness of that explanation. In other words, it really doesn't belong in the Missing Manual series, but rather in O'Reilly's regular and long running series of texts, that share these properties. You know, the books with the purple covers.

Granted, the book is bulky. But that reflects over a decade of Excel being continually refined and added to. The conciseness of the explanations means typically some prior exposure to spreadsheets in general, and Excel in particular, would greatly aid your understanding.

This is the ideal Excel walkthrough. It's a balanced blend of basic and advanced information that has a gentle learning curve that will take you all the way from creating your first spreadsheet through the basics of macro development. The book is organized into eight parts, though the first four make up the majority of the book. Part one covers the basics of editing, files, printing, saving. Part two is all about formula creation. Part three is about templates and lists. Part four is about charting and graphics. After that it's into networking, macros, and more advanced topics.

The writing is excellent and the use of screenshots is effective and not overwhelming as with other books. A superb walkthrough of the fundamentals of Excel.

When I start to look at a book on Excel I first turn to the index and look up Pivot Tables. Pivot tables are an amazingly powerful tool that allows you to turn the data around (pivot even) and look at it from another point of view. It's also amazing that a high percentage of books on Excel simply ignore pivot tables altogether, or perhaps give them half a page. This book has an entire chapter on pivot tables. Furthermore, if you read the Microsoft help screens on pivot tables you get 113 topics to read. In this book the description of pivot tables explains what they are, shows you some examples to illustrate what can be done, and then leads you through using them. This is truly what the manual should have shown, if of course there was a manual that came with Excel.

The next thing I look for is XML. This is really the big thing that makes Excel 2003 a new edition of Excel. Sure enough, a chapter on XML as well. (Except for this section and a few very minor points, you can use the manual for earlier versions of Excel.)

But suppose you are not up to guru level and wanting to know about pivot tables and XML. Well, the book starts off with Creating a Basic Worksheet and goes on from there.

In summary, here is everything you need to know about Excel from the very basic steps to just as far as you want to go.

Becoming good using Excel is like learning how to ski/snowboard. Riding up the lift looking down on the experienced skiers/snowboarders ride down the mountain having fun and making it look so easy and graceful, and you think to yourself, if only I could do that, I would be happy. Will I ever be able to ride like that, maybe, but how long? That is what it is like learning/using Excel out of the box. After flipping through many a Excel book, I finally through the dart and picked The Missing Manual. The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald is a wonderful instructional piece. Written in a manner that does not put a person to sleep nor so techy that tears just fill your eyes trying to hold back the pain whilst reading it, because you tell yourself this is good for you. I find myself going to the Missing Manual all the time, for things that I never knew how to do, and to remind me of things I did once a long time ago and cannot recall. This book is a great resource for the newbie to intermediate.... which if you are looking for a book on this subject, I bet you most likely fit into that category.

This manual has help me to master pivot tables, macros and lookup functions, which has made me a much more productive user of Excel. I strongly recommend this book to people who want to get the most out of Excel.

This book is about Oracle JDBC programming, not generic database neutral JDBC programming but Oracle specific. There are many JDBC books available and many Oracle and Oracle programming books but this concentrates narrowly on JDBC for Oracle, and how to get the best performance out of that combination. It is aimed at an audience that already knows Java and probably already knows a little JDBC. It is written in a dry but very readable style and plenty of code examples. At just over 700 pages it is a fairly fat book, but I felt everything was justified and there was nothing that felt like "padding". The code examples are fairly short and tend to be complete programs with a main method rather than snippets that need to be incorporated into a runnable program. Each code example includes a comment about which version of Oracle it will run with, and mostly this covers at least 10.1 and 9.2.

The main emphasis is on compatibility with Oracle 10.g. There is an emphasis on performance which is clear from the title of Chapter 1 "Performance Toolkit" and graphs are used to illustrate the influence of various parameters on performance. The book makes use of UML style class charts, tables and plenty of performance/time line graphs. I particularly liked the use of a flow chart to illustrate the statement processing algorithm. Flow charts seem to be old fashioned, but they are almost perfect for illustrating this type of information. If you were being overly critical of the diagrams, you might describe them as unsophisticated. Thus in Chapter 15 the "Our example application" illustration looks like it was taken from the clip art of a DOS program from around 1987. But if you want pretty pictures you can buy any glossy "Illustrated Walking and Chewing Gum" book that takes your fancy. This book by contrast, concentrates on explaining essential technical and performance information, in the simplest clearest way possible, and they achieve it.

The coverage tends to keep to how Oracle is used in most common "real world" situations, thus the index does not even contain a reference to Grid computing and there is no coverage of distributed transactions, which are described in the introduction as a "less commonly used JDBC feature".

Although chapter 3 is entitled "Introduction to JDBC" it is a lightening tour with code examples that assume they are accessing an Oracle database. There is an emphasis on performance with chapters on statement caching and connection pooling. It not only covers the Oracle specific classes, but also covers where they do not work exactly as per the specification. For example
in chapter 4 "Transactions" there is a note

"In 10g Release 1 and 9i Release 2, the method setReadOnly() of the Connection interface internally does a set transaction read only. This is a bug, as it isn't the intended behavior of the method setReadOnly().."

There are many examples of notes such as this which could be vital when you are struggling with some unexpected quirk of behavior.

With this book you are not getting a re-writing of the documentation, but a description from someone who has actually used the classes. Although the heart of the book is JDBC it does have some excellent coverage of general Java/Oracle programming and configuration issues.

I was particularly interested in the sections on Connection Pooling/Caching and security related issues. These chapters would be of value for anyone writing JDBC for any target database, as it explains some of the implication of connection pooling in terms of authentication. Chapter 15, "Security-related issues" covers the issue of Mapping an end user to a database user. This covers the performance issues of a one to one mapping and the benefit of proxy authentication to get around this.

Performance Performance

Chapter 2 is called "Oracle Fundamentals", thought it might have been called "Oracle performance fundamentals". It covers issues such as the impact of Oracle record locking and the value of using bind variables for inserting records. This includes a performance graph typical of the book. Without bind variables, the graph curve is like an ascent of Mount Everest. By contrast where bind variables are used the increase in time taken represents a very gentle slope. This is the type of advice that could make the difference between your code being optimal or being unusable. In chapter 2 the author gives his mantra for the book as

"we should not just produce code that works; we should produce code that works well".
I interpret that as code that "runs fast" and code you can prove runs fast.

One of the few parts of the book that is probably not essential is chapter 8 which covers Oracle Objects. This can be summed up unfairly as "Oracle supports objects but you probably don't want to use them". However as most Java programmers tend to have an interest in Object Oriented concepts they will probably get some value out of it, even if they decide not to use JDBC to access Oracle Objects.

What about PL/SQL?

The author is not a Java Zelot and puts convincing arguments for when PL/SQL may be a better choice than Java/JDBC. He makes the expected performance argument, but more interesting is the argument that sometimes using PL/SQL may be more portable, in that you should use the procedural language of your target database, e.g. TSQL in SQL server, PLSQL etc. I think this is stretching the argument, and database portability can be more important for some categories of application.

Summary

This is not a book for students who want to learn JDBC from scratch. It is for people who want to write high performance JDBC for accessing Oracle. It takes the view that to build the best application you need to understand the underlying database as well as JDBC. If you are writing Oracle JDBC you need this book. If you are writing platform neutral JDBC you could still benefit from this book as it would allow you to avoid performance bottlenecks specific to Oracle.

Good Things:
Lots of excellent real life code examples
Good reading for beginners to advanced users; helpful for advanced concepts but also built up to them by explaining the basics ones.
Great code optimization recommendations.
Well written, easy to understand.

Bad Things:
No CD that comes with book containing code examples. I also did not find a website with the code examples.

The previous reviewers are absolutely right about this book. This book is definitely the best book if you are looking to exploit JDBC in combination with Oracle. Note that it covers JDBC on its own right but then suppliments it with info on Oracle. It is way better than any other JDBC book in the market (I have read through most others.) What I liked about this book is:
1. The author gives complete examples for you to work with. He also explains these examples step by step.
2. The author always provides proof for any statement of performance claims he makes in terms of code that anyone can run. This is a refreshingly different approach than some authors who simply state the claims (that are more often than not incorrect)
3. Author's approach is practical and can be used in real life projects.
4. The author goes in-depth into all topics he covers and is not afraid to delve into the details of Oracle architecture when required.
5. There is no "fluff" or "padding". There are no reams of pages just giving API information that is readily available on the web. Instead the author suppliments the JDBC API info and the Oracle documentation on JDBC freely available on the web.

In short, this book bridges the gap between J2EE developers and database developers (focusing on Oracle, of course.)

The only thing to note is that as a reader, you could get bogged down by the first two chapters since they give overview of Oracle architecture and performance tools the author uses. But as you would read the remaining chapters, you would appreciate the contents of these first two chapters.

If you are using JDBC on Oracle, then buy this book! You won't regret it!

"Expert Oracle JDBC Programming" is part of a new series called OakTable Press. This series is written by Oracle experts, making the quality very high. In fact, one of the technical reviewers of this book is "Ask Tom."

This strong relationship with Oracle results in trying to convince the reader to use stored procs/Oracle specific code. This isn't a good or a bad thing - just something to know up front. The author clearly shows what is Oracle specific and describes the tradeoffs.

The book has three sections, starting with an introduction to JDBC. While JDBC knowledge is not required, it is helpful to get full benefit from the book as advanced concepts are introduced very quickly. The book relies heavily on code with all examples clearly explained. The second section goes into Oracle specific concepts. The last section explains best practices, issues and specific performance related concepts.

This book is distinguished from others by the emphasis on good quality, high performing code. Benchmarks are provided from the beginning. Chapter 1 even covers how to time your code.

As you can tell from the title, the book is Oracle specific. So you can copy/paste the code and run it on Oracle. All code examples specifically state whether they work on 9i, 10g or both. The focus of Oracle also allows the author to demonstrate exactly what needs to be done to run/test the examples on Oracle. I recommend this book for Java developers on Oracle.

This is an excellent book with a very refreshing hands-on approach to JDBC programming for the Oracle database. The author tackles fundamental database concepts, with a strong emphasis on performance. The approach that the author uses includes the right combination of theoretical fundamentals and hands-on coding and testing. The result is a book that is ideal for both the novice user looking to understand fundamental database concepts and the advanced user looking for in-depth analyses using code examples and benchmark numbers. Best of all, the book is not just about the Oracle database in isolation. It is set within the context of JDBC programming, bringing the world of RDBMS programming to the Java community.
This book is a must have for the enterprise software developer who is even half serious about leveraging the enormous power of the Oracle database in her/his application.

This book doesn't contain a lot of jargon. It has pictures of how to do things and explains things in non-technical terms. Great for beginners but also useful as a refresher when you haven't used some aspect for awhile. Well laid out index so easy to find what your looking for. These people have done a good job. Hope they bring out another one more advanced.

I had no idea what the interface looked like or ANY idea about how to use 3DS Max; I just knew I want to learn how to do animations.

Well, I know this book isn't going to have me making 3D animation movies, but it does give a great insight into the program's basics.

Lots of hands-on exercises, just as I like. Lots of pictures too. The authors do an excellent job of spelling out the basics and telling you exactly what you need to do to complete an excerise. And, as you move further along in the book, they "neglect" to tell you how to do something they've already covered - just like a teacher would do in class. It forces you to explore, reread (if you don't understand a subject) and practice with the program - what you need to do if you're ever going to learn to use 3DS Max.

A very well written book about the basics of 3DS Max 7.

I highly recommend this book to the beginning 3ds max student. It was very helpful to me, as it explained more of the basics and gave more detail behind the steps. Also, the tutorials frequently used diffent tools to accomplish the same task. This showed how to use the graphical interface, quad-menus, toolbars, etc.

I found it the best of several books I bought to get my feet wet with 3ds max. It really helped with some of the basic lighting and material concepts. While, this book doesn't even begin to touch all the features of 3ds max, it was a great primer and I'm glad I read it.

This book is perfect for those just getting started in 3ds Max 7. There are a lot of easy to follow screen shots to accompany the text so it is possible to still follow along when you're not in front of your computer. It is written with plenty of step by step explanations of what you are doing and why as well as a great accompanying disk to help with tutorials. It even tackles some of the more difficult aspects of 3d modeling such as composition, the dreaded material editor (it even throws in a side bar about UVW unwrapping) and lighting. It is written with the beginner in mind and does a great job explaining concepts and procedures without insulting your intelligence. It may, however, be a little below intermediate users, it can be a great tool to brush up on fundamentals. I can't recommend this book enough for those looking to get their feet wet in MAX.

The book by Till & O'Connell is great for newcomers simply because it doesn't attempt to give you too much information but only what new users might need to learn the basics of max 7. I had never turned on max 7 and within a week I was amazed as to how much I had learned without having any previous experience with 3d softwares. This should be the first book you buy if you are starting from scratch with max 7.

This book is not for the faint of heart in Access 2000 coding but it is invaluable to the advanced programmer. I refer to this book almost daily in developing our in-house applications. The real strength of this book is in developing code that is more portable or reusable. I have gone from writing sloppy code that is application (or even form) specific to writing completly reusable (and of course fully documented) code. Excellent reference for the power VBA programmer!

Had everything I needed to get going, even the obscure stuff.

Only thing missing was an explanation of what Access does with it's version of Stored procedures, but then again, Microsoft isn't sure on that one itself, so that's no surprise.

Great book, I recommend it.

Love this book. This is the only book I know that does not abandon DAO. I like DAO. All other post Access 97 book abandons DAO.

It is well written and have used many of this examples for my job. I even like it better than the Getz books.

I BOUGHT NOT LESS THAN 15 MS ACCESS BOOKS WHILE LEARNING ACCESS. I FOUND THIS ONE MOST HELPFUL. I HAVE LEARNED MANY THINGS FROM THIS VALUABLE BOOK: CLASS MODULES, CUSTOM COLLECTIONS, CUSTOM PROPERTIES & METHODS, API CALLS ETC ETC... THE AUTHOR HAD PROVIDED MANY USEFUL CODES. I REALLY LIKE HIS BOOKMARK TRACKER.

This was just the book I was looking for. Scott goes into alot of the issues that most of the books on Access just do not. For instance his sections on the winAPI's as well as performance recomendations. I found this book a total reference for beginner through the intermediate programmer of Access. Thanks Scott.

i am somewhat new to linux and i am finding this book useful. It is well organized and has most of the commands I am looking for in RHEL 5. Any other books for starters folks would recommend?

This book is a fantastic way to take your tinkering to the realm of true Linux mastery. Christopher Negus has written some of the best comprehensive Linux guides on the market, but here he has slimmed down the advice into tried and true command line tips that -- once you've learned a few of them -- will have your boss singing your praises, and friends calling you for advice. [...]

Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of this slim, portable, and power-packed book. You won't regret it!

This book is a very good desk side companion. This is not your typical "power users" book that is just a raw dump of a ton of esoteric commands that go in one eye and out the other. It is actually useful commands put into an understandable context, organized by classes of activity. I've been using Linux for many many years yet I'm learning, and using, new things from this book. I would highly recommend it.

If you're looking for a gift for your beloved Fedora/Red Hat geek, this is it. You'll be thanked when the gift is opened, and you'll be thanked each time as the book is used over and over.

--
Jesse Keating
Fedora Release Engineer

This book is practically "perfect" (sorry if sounds exaggerated) for the following reasons:

1 In less than 260 pages (340 considering appendixes) quickly covers a wide and useful selection of topics
2 The text is updated to the latest improvements in EVERY subject
3 Very easy to read and follow with or without a computer at hand
4 Command line oriented

Let me explain:

1 From the Table of Contents you may see the book covers practically everything most users will need when using a Linux as Server or Desktop; that selection of subjects was really well calculated and provides with a mix that is rarelly found. Also, the "depth" for the provided information was carefully calibrated in order to show the most useful situations (by the way avoiding being boring with nerdy configurations)

The authors provide with a minimal and informal introducion to every subject, and next use a good selection of samples for illustration.

2 Surprisingly, all chapters were written taking into account a lot of "modern" improvements in distro/commands/kernel. Every old-Linux user may appreciate here the giant advances made by Linux to the point that practically every subject is now simple to manage (or at least not esoteric.)

3 As I have several years using Linux, most of the material presented was familiar (with a lot of "modern" surprises), but the organization and style did let me follow all the text without needing to test the examples or configurations in order to understand anything. At least for me, it is a big bonus.

4 99% of the recipes and examples apply to the command line (with some mentions to the graphical front-ends). This may be sad for new users, but very important for administrators or users that look for "maximum flexibility", or "task automation" or work in "server environments" where the GUI is not allowed or discouraged.

Hey folks... I've been an RHCE since 2000, training RHCEs since 2003, and "doing Linux" since 1996.

What I like:
The three big things that I like about Linux Toolbox are:
1) It concisely shows you how to use the Linux command line to solve many of the most common personal and administrative tasks.
2) It uses the proven "learn by doing" method to show the reader how to just "get stuff done" from the Linux command line.
3) What really sets this book apart from other "next level" type books is its well thought layout and how they organized the content in a quickly accessible way. Negus & Caen split the content out by Shell stuff, Working w/Files, Text Manipulation, Multimedia, Administration, Backups, Networking, etc.. . Well thought out and quickly useful as an on-hand reference.

So who should buy this book?
I see it being a "best fit" for two groups of people:
1) Technical users and admins who want to become more competent on the command line and be able to do ten times more work thought automation (scripting).
2) Windows power users who want to become more savvy on the Linux side (Linux power user wannabes). Especially those who need to get Linux CLI/shell proficient quickly (such as Windows sys-admins who have had Linux forced on them)

Old Timers Too:
The cool thing is that even if you've been using Linux for years (as I have), there are still useful "Oooo.. cool!" moments peppered throughout the book. Do you know how to properly (and quickly) get the most out of classic power tools like find, sed, awk, case, and tr? Are you armed with experience in all the newer über tools such as screen, dmidecode, growisofs? Do you know how to do software RAID from the command line (mdadm) or know how to build & control LVM via its command line tools? If you answered "no" to any of these.. you should check check out Linux Toolbox.

Negus and Caen have a winner here. Good job guys.

Tweeks