Unix Systems Books

I am coming from a VBA background learning about this new software. This book is a great resource tool for making such a transition. Mr. McAmis stepped me through the learning process in a clear and concise manner. The information was learned in progressive manner, in that, the further through the book I read, the more complex issues were handled. At the end each chapter the author challenged me with key questions to help me remember the most important issues.

It is a beginners book as the title says, but there is a pittfal, the author should consider for future books.
Not every chapter has a step-by-step tutrial. The user have to download the samples and use them to be able to follow the author, which defeats the purpose of learning by doing.
Chapters 4 & 5 make are mutually exlusive, since chp 5 requires reports from chp 4, that was not a step-by-step tutorial.
Either make it a step-by-step or don't. Just be consistent.

Crystal Reports: A Beginner's Guide covers everything and more that I wanted to learn about Crystal Reports. The information is easy to digest and there are regular 1-Minute checks along the way. Hands-on experience, in the form of Projects, are dispersed through each chapter (the completed projects can be downloaded from the web). Answers to the Mastery Checks, at the end of every chapter, are given in the Appendix.

My only complaint about the book is that, I feel, there is not enough hands-on experience because the projects are too simple. There are plenty of projects, but most of them are simply a number of steps and very little critical thinking. After reading Crystal Reports: A Beginner's Guide, my knowledge of Crystal Reports has vastly increased though I still have little experience with actually creating reports.

I'm afraid I have to agree with the review from "A reader from Cupertino, CA" - I, too, am on Chapter 4 and am frustrated beyond belief because my reports look very little like the examples in the book so far. In the case of the second tutorial in chapter 4, again the other reviewer is correct - it's not even the same report!

I bought "A Beginner's Guide to JavaScript" by the same company and was thrilled with it. It was clear, concise and had a "mini-project" at the end of each chapter for the reader to complete to ensure mastery of the concept being taught. I was expecting the same thing with this book, and am sorely disappointed. The explaination of each topic is general at best, incorrect at worst, the tutorials are simplistic and don't include half the information being covered in each chapter, if indeed a tutorial exists at all.

I need to get up to speed on Crystal Reports in a fairly short period of time, and be able to generate some fairly sophisticated reports. This book is becoming a hindrance to that goal.

This book needs some serious editing
Right now I'm on Chapter 4 and so far this book is terrible in regards to the Projects. The project instructions don't correspond with the results intended and shown. For example, the instructions say open the Customer by Country report, but then it says 'your report should look like this' and shows you an entirely different report! And sometimes the report you worked on doesn't even work for the task you're trying to learn. The author must have had his friends write the other customer reviews. Don't buy this book! It's just unfortunate though that there aren't many choices.

The value of the information presented in the book is just not worth the price. The title "Building Strategic Applications for Business" is somewhat misleading. Read again the comments of the reviewers who gave this book one star and BELIEVE THEM.

The author did an excellent job in profiling Linux for business applications. Throughout the book, the tone was serious, yet relaxing, very conversational, with lots of tips and URL for those seeking additional information on a particular subject. This book is not for technical people, but does a great job explaining to management what Linux brings to the table.

If you want to have a book to read just before going to bed, then get this book. Although it is amusing to read, you get no real benefit out of it. My recommondation is you could do better.

If you want to program or administer Linux, this book is nor for you. However, if you want concise information about Linux, its applicability and business strategies, as well as an OS comparison, a very, I mean very extensive list of Linux resources, then you need to read this book!

This is pretty low-grade stuff. While I applaud the credentials and spirit of the writer, I was saddened by the tone of the book. It read like a summary of how Linux will instill peace,love, and happiness the world over.

A little less worship of Linux, a little more Strategy would've helped immensely. 100+ pages of resources and consultants ? An entire chapter on "Care and feeding of a sysadmin" ...good lord.

As an IS manager, if you took this book to me to prove Linux a viable solution, I'd laugh you out the door. This book feels like it was written to jump on the Linux bandwagon. More thought was necessary in the development.

This book does a nice job for describing the pthread API. When I have read this book, my multithread programming experience was mainly with Win32 threads and reading this book was my first exposure to the condition synchronization objects. With the help of this book, it has been a breeze to learn how to use conditions. What is missing from this book written 10 years ago, which is also missing in all multithread books that I have read of that era, is coverage on issues with parallel processing. If all you have to do with threads is to launch a background job while keeping UI responsive or asynchronous I/O on a single core processor, you will be fine with this book.

However, if you try to crunch an array of data with multiple threads each processing their own chunk of the array, you could fall into cache line alignment problems even if your threads does not access the same memory locations. Those problems are platform dependant. I have written such a program that was working wonderfully well with a Sparc station and a PowerPC based station but once ported to a x86 architecture, the program was actually becoming slower than the single thread version. It is very hard to get it right. You have to be careful about the array alignment in memory and where the boundaries of the chunks of data that you assign to threads are. What will happen if 2 threads located on 2 different processors access to the same cache line is that one processor will have to flush that cache line back to the main memory and the other processor will have to fetch the values back from the main memory to its cache. The overhead of this is so huge that processing the array from a single thread could be faster.

I still have to find a book that addresses these problems. I expect it to come soon with dual and quad core processors becoming mainstream but this is not this book.

This is the best Pthreads book. The writing style is conversational, very easy to read and interlaced with code examples. The reader will progressively learn the subject, building on the accumulated knowledge. Coverage of multi-theading concepts is very complete. There are some excellent diagrams.

Despite the publication date, this book is still very much relevant, because the Pthreads standard has not undergone any substantive change since then.

There are the usual O'Reilly book problems: a few typos and some errors in the example source code. The source code errors will cause problems for inexperienced programmers (they may think they, not the bad code, are the cause of the problems). There are a few places where a more complete explanation would have been nice. Despite these problems, overall the book is excellent. Don't take my word for it, compare it to other Pthreads books and you'll immediately see the difference.

Enjoy!

Adrien Lamothe

The book along with the code examples provided in O'reilly's web site provide an excelent starting point to the Pthreads programmer.

It's not a reference book, and don't ask me why I rated it 5 stars,

It also presents Pthreads and multithreading in a passionate way as if to convince the reader that multithreading is the way to go.

And it is!

I read the book a number of years ago to learn pthreads.
I found numerous errors in the examples -- speaking
at work to a colleague I recall we laughed at this book --
It was such a disaster.

I may read the book again (over the last few years I learned a lot about
pthreads) and give a careful analysis of it.

I had a first printing -- there were gobs of errata on
Oreilly's site -- maybe they put in enough corrections so
the examples run -- but I'm amazed how shoddy the first printing was.

Stay away from it...

I found it too be an excellent overview. Its treatment of the issues associated with threads and signals I think was especially useful. My only complaint is with the Quick Reference in Appendix C. The reference provides no description of possible function call errors. While I admit the errors are dependant on the particular Pthreads implementation, however there are a core number of errors that would be common throughout all, or at least most, implementations. The point is if you are to do any actual programming, which I presume is the reason for a reference of function calls, you need to know what return values to expect. Providing no reference would have been better then providing a useless one.

I recommend this book if you want to waste your time!

I'm wondering why I had to play around myself only to draw a line of text! Maybe because the book emphasizes to glorify the enourmous capapilities of The GIMP. Sadly, the authors forget that the intention of the book is to teach!
And to continue the story - on day two - after opening my 'hello-world-text' picture: how can i edit/modify the text?

I don't agree to use two pages of a chapter to repeat 'what you have learned in the last lesson'. But possible the contents could then be shrinked to 10 hours which might not amuse the sales agency.

To be fair, I'm using a windows version of The GIMP - the book deals with the linux version.

To give a background - i worked for years with corel, etc.

I think i will download the GIMP help documentation and help myself.

Sorry guys, but this is the worst book I've read in the last few years!

While this was not what I was hoping for, it is an excellent introduction to the GIMP. Basic concepts are covered in some detail, and more advanced topics are commented on (mostly, it seems, to give an idea of just how powerful this program really is). The author also frequently advises experimentation, which is really the only way to learn a program like this.

Especially useful (to me, anyway) was the admittedly brief coverage on how the GIMP differs from other equivalent programs, especially those from the Mac and Windows worlds.

If you want in-depth coverage of the GIMP's capabilities, this book isn't it. If you're just starting out with the GIMP, and enjoy tinkering with the available tools, check it out.

In fact, the only real flaw in this book is that it is written for release 1.0.0 of the GIMP; fortunately, most of the specific examples given can easily be adapted to current releases (I use the 1.1.8 developer's release and had no problems following the examples in the book).

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Maybe I have a much later version than described in the book, but I found that most of the examples didn't work very well. Some were clearly broken; others did something but I couldn't quite tell what or apply the lesson to anything else.

I did learn a bit, but I still can't really apply much of what I learned. Some of the things seem useful, but but until I can figure out how to get gimp to actually do them, they'll just remain a dream.

I'll try something else ...

"I've heard it said many times that experience is the best teacher, and I believe that wise old saying is the absolute truth." If you can stomach prose like this, not to mention 500 repetitions of cliches like "cool," you can find some useful tutorial information in this book. As a reference, it's only so-so. Look elsewhere.

I indeed taught myself Gimp in less than 24 hours using this book -- I had to quickly create a digital drawing as a school assignment, and there just wasn't any time to digest the cryptic official online Gimp manual.

The photos from the book's cd-rom were also very helpful, since I didn't have any scanned photos to practise certain Gimp functions with.

Best of all, the book has made a Gimp fan out of me!

* I need tow books from(A+:Exam 220-201,Exam220-202) ISBN:1576106993.
receiving : Dammam in Saudia Arabia or Cairo in Egypt.
* Payment : Visa cart by internet.
* Can i find This book in any agent or bookstor in the Golf countries or Egypt ?
*Send the profoma invoice to: Numan Cabbani P.O.Box:6535Dammam31452 Saudia Arabia , Fax : 00966 3 8572493.

I purchased this book with the thought in mind that it would be the only study guide needed to pass the A+ exam. On the core hardware side, it was adequate. I passed the Core Hardware part of the exam with no problem. However, the OS Technologies study information is outdated and insufficient. I spent a great deal of time on DOS and Win 3.1, and the exam didn't really focus on that aspect of it at all. Most of the questions on the exam were for Windows 2000, which the book does not do a good job of preparing the student for. After studying the OS section, I took the exam from the CD ROM and scored a 98%. In addition, I answered all the questions at the end of the book with no difficulty. I failed OS Technologies exam with a score of 576 (needed 600 to pass)...I do not recommend this book.

this is a good book that is must read for the comptia a+ exam, i just pass that exam. also this is a good reference book that is good to keep in your bookcase.

you won't good wrong to buy this book.

This book has everything needed to pass the test. It has a lot of details that are not stated in some of the other books. The CD does not have many questions and they are always repeated. This book is worth looking at.

I have read about 2/3 of this book and I have to vent. Let me say this first. The book seems fairly solid in its curriculum. It covers a lot in a bit of depth. Until I take the exam I won't really know, but I feel like I'm getting a good background. Through experience I already know a lot of what's covered, and so far I haven't found any information that I know to be wrong. Usually it's stuff I already know, plus some more depth. Okay, that's good.

Now let me say this. Stylistically this is the worst pile of humus I have ever read. It is written so sloppily that every third sentence I have to stop and figure out what it means because the way it is written leaves the meaning ambiguous. It can mean any of three things. Often the only way I can figure out what they're trying to say is because I already know the subject. I know that they must mean this or that. When I get to parts I don't know about I find myself continually referencing all over the place to make sure that they're trying to say what I've guessed they are. Heaven help me if I didn't already have some background in PC hardware and operating systems.

The thing is, this isn't advanced mathematics or physics. There's nothing particularly subtle or difficult to understand. But these folks have written it as though they were on a strict deadline that left no time to go back and make things more clear so long as the facts were straight. It's making it quite a bit more trouble for me than it needs to be.

It is what is it is; It's a pocket guide. It's not exceptionally informative, but it provides baseline guidance for some of Emacs' many features.
If you're already a user of emacs, chances are you'll get a little something out of this book that you didn't know existed before (I'm using Emacs diary and calendar now...) but it's mostly good to throw at subusers while yelling at them to RTFM because they're always complaining to you that they don't know how to use Emacs...

This books is totally useless for a serious C programmer used to an editor like vi and switching to emacs. It just doesn't cover enough "progamming" type features. You'll need a full length book.

This is not a book to teach you how to use Emacs as some other reviewers think. This book is a reference and a reference only. It gives you a listing of common emacs commands. If you won't be going into the nitty gritty details of Emacs, use this. Otherwise, do yourself a favor and get Learning Emacs. This books is good at accomplishing its purpose...a secondary reference for Learning Emacs.

Yes, emacs is the most powerful editor and this book is only a little pocket reference! The book is unnecessary after 2 days (if you did not know emacs before). It is good only for a short introduction in the commands of emacs. After two days you must buy Learning Gnu Emacs, which is really a book to learn emacs!

Do not expect to much from a litte reference!

Virgilio Krumbacher

I've tried to used this to look stuff up while learning Emacs, and it is not useful to me. I have two main objections: 1. It is not organized in a way that makes it easy to look things up. There have been times when I knew the information was in the book (since I had seen it before), but had to just flip through every page to actually find it. 2. It's very incomplete. I cannot find a command in this book that takes me to a given line in a file. I suspect the book fails because he tries to cover everything. I do not expect a pocket reference to cover some nonstandard HTML mode, or how to use Emacs as my mail reader. I want a reference on how to use it to edit text and code. I probably won't open this book again; I'll just bookmark the online manual.

This book dose not teach you any think, everything is a reference to some other sources.
I will agree with a comments about Java and Linux going hand to hand but this book will not
show you how to program java on linux. I have seen many other books in that price range
and by far they where much better.

Java development on Linux has lagged behind until now. The news of the day is Java Rocks on Linux. This book goes into detail how to get set up, what tools are available and where to get them. There is a CDROM that comes with the book and a website (CDROMS tend to get stale fast) for crucial updates, news and other vital information. IMHO programming Java on Linux has been one of the best kept secrets of the late 90s. This book is a step toward disclosure. Linux and Java go together like milk and cookies.

I honestly believe Microsoft has intentionally and unintentionally helped keep a very powerful crossplatform tool combination. Programming Java and Linux go together like cookies and milk. Since it's inception in the early 90's, Linux has always been a superior platform for Internet development and Java is and will be one of several paramount tools for the web. This book is written for people who know what they want, not for Windows weenies.

I don't know if the other reviewers have read the books carefully or not because the books have been over-rated. First of all, the book is filled with reference stuff for both linux and java which do not help people to understand either of them. The useful stuffs are to help people WHERE to get java softwares, HOW to install them and how to CONFIGURE them both as SYSTEM wide and USER limited usage and HOW to RUN THE SOFTWARES. In these aspects, the book did not do a very good job. The one website the book referred to is BLACKDOWN which is a good site but the java softwares there are not updated often( it still carries jdk1.2 beta ! ).

In conclusion, the book should be trimmed down in half and emphasizes more in those aforementioned stuffs and cut the price. To be fair, the book does contain some good stuffs but these are rare.

This book is outdated and provides very little real information on programming in Java. As other reviewers have stated, it is primarily a list of (outdated) Java programming resources. The author also makes the mistake of assuming throughout the book that the book will be read from cover to cover. As I tried, however much in vain, to use the book as a reference, as I thinks most readers do, I constantly ran into unexplained references to "phenomena" and had to go back through the book looking for the initial explanation of said phenomena. Of course, we should always expect that a book nearly three years old would be somewhat outdated, but it would be nice, for a change, to find a publisher driven by more than mere greed who would recognize the diminishing utility of a book like this and adjust the price accordingly. After reading quite a bit of the book, in retrospect I would not even pay half of the [price] when I bought this book, but at least a 50% price-reduction would have meant a little less of my hard-earned dinero wasted and thus available to buy a truly useful book on Java Programming on Linux, if one truly exists...This book should be pulled from the eShelves and replaced with something useful. SAVE YOUR MONEY!!!

The book is a good one, and it possesses the mother-load of information to be expected from a Slackware Book. Unfortunately, the book spends much to much time on advanced topics that noobs have very little information on. It talks about Advanced Perl scripting, when the user only wants to know how to use different fonts.

Not for noobs.

Then again, slackware never was. :D

Actually ... this one had a bit of disappointment going into all the gui / motif programming; but that's partially due to the year it was printed ...
but also ... it was written by someone who's proud to be affiliated with SCO ... but times were different when this was written so I won't judge it on that ... but i've also put this one on the back-burner just to due to the way SCO has treated the development community in whole ... so its hard to give any opinion of this

Slackware Linux Release is a very comprehensive book covering much of the topic. I thought it was an exceptional book! I successfully installed in an older X386 33MHz machine. Initial install isn't exactly automatic but is manageable for one with reasonable computer skills. Book not only covers basics but is also good for intermediate use and as a general UNIX reference. Browsing through other books on the topic, I would strongly recommend this book as well as the Slackware distribution of Linux that comes with it.

The book's best point was the copy of Linux that came with it. There wasn't too much there as far as teaching you how to use Linux unless you already had a bit of knowlege of Unix/Linux Commands. On a positve side, the last few chapters about network programming in C were quite helpful to a beginner in that area...

Slackware is a great os and this book shows you how you will make Slackware run at peak preformance and show to you that the worlds highest price and most baught virus win 9* is such a piece of crap. Buy this book now you will not be sorry you did. Power to the Penguin The_Phreaker

This review is a collaborative writing project completed by the students in a "Technology and Ethics" class at DeVry University in beautiful Colorado Springs, Colorado. It is based on a quick look at the book under consideration.

This book has several virtues. It provides a simple step-by-step process to keep hackers out. It also provides supportive links where you can download software to protect your hardware as well as business information. The simple wording allows you to concentrate on your work while helping you protect what you are working on.

Although this book is outdated, it would still be helpful in setting up a security policy. The illustrations in this book would not be suitable for some business environments; however they would be useful for the individual computer user.

I would recommend this book to beginners in the computer technology field. This book comes with a useful CD-ROM that contains software and added resources.

This new expanded edition of Halting the Hacker came out in 2002 and is nearly double the size of the original edition. It takes the insight of how hackers attack systems from Pipkin's first edition and delves into the details of how to protect your Unix and Linux systems.

Real-life stories about hackers and companies who were hacked are sprinkled throughout the book making it an easy read for anyone, not just techies. The tools discussed (and which come with it on the included CD-ROM) makes it a valuable resource for everyone who deals with Unix/Linux systems.

Highly recommended!

I got this book to become more familiar with network security. It goes over some good topics and really helps you to understand the "secure your system" concept. However, this book is a basic overview for the network manager and I would suggest that you find some other book to go with if you wanna buy it..

This isn't a heavily technical book. Unlike many of the other security books I've reviewed, this isn't full of tcpdump traces and the like. It is, however, a really excellent overview of security that can introduce a system administrator or a general manager to the subject.

There are actually a very few pages that deal with things like disabling unused services, but that's just 14 pages from a 337 page work, and those are really more illustrative than specific. Instead, this covers the who, the how and the why of hackers, the legal climate, and includes examples of actual incidents.

Perhaps a good indication of the target audience is the Glossary, which includes definitions for "back door", "client/server", "Kerberos", "newsgroup" and "Trojan horse".

If you are looking for programmer level information, this isn't what you want. On the other hand, this is much more technical and focused than something you might read in Newsweek or your Sunday newspaper.

Recommended for business owners and managers who need to understand computer security even though others may actually implement it, or as a base introduction for technical people with no previous exposure.

It is ironic that the advent of the computer promised to dramatically reduce paper usage; today's 1,000-page-plus computer-security tomes have probably single-handedly deforested whole regions of the earth. A happy exception to this trend of titanic texts is Halting the Hacker. Which is relatively concise yet highly informative.

It provides a good overview of core information security issues and concepts. It takes a big-picture approach to information systems security, not bogging down the reader in arcane minutiae.

Halting the Hacker delves into more intricate details and includes a CD-ROM with many security tools.

Overall, it is valuable for anyone needing to know about information systems security without sacrificing a forest in the process.

Linux system administrators who want to solve problems quickly may already have many Linux references at hand for in-depth treatment, but the advantage of LINUX SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION is it's a quicker reference than most - and thus more valuable to Linux programming libraries and programmer collections than weightier coverages. Its at-a-glance pages offer up plenty of real-world case history scenarios, question/answer formats, and tips which advance the training of existing Linux administrators who want to enhance and expand on their skills. From installing Apache and MySQL on a web server to using Linux visualization with VMW are to run multiple kernels on one piece of hardware, this is an item of choice for any Linux programmer.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Pretty good book, unfortunately it has no information on setting up NIS or LDAP. Other than that a solid read.

I found this book very disapointing. My main concern was with the authors decision to base the examples solely on Debian distros of Linux. This is not mentioned in the the books description.

The book also advises that there is a website to accompany the book with examples, tips and new procedures. This turns out to be a one page website with 5 links that refer back to the same homepage with no content.

'Linux System Administration' by Tom Adelstein is a wonderful little book for doing exactly what the title says. For anyone that uses Linux on a daily basis in their jobs or is new to said role, this is a great book/tool for learning and configuring Linux. The only negative that I really have is I usually applaud brevity but in this case I will have to say that this book is a wee bit short. Covering 250+ pages, I felt like for a book to have 'system administration' in the title for such a big topic more content should have been put within the confines of this binding. What is covered is as follows:

01. Requirements for a Linux System Administrator
02. Setting Up a Linux Multifunction Server
03. The Domain Name System
04. An Initial Internet-Ready Environment
05. Mail
06. Administering Apache
07. Load-Balanced Clusters
08. Local Network Services
09. Virtualization in the Modern Enterprise
10. Scripting
11. Backing Up Data

Solid writing, nice layout and good content make this an easy recommendation but limited size also limits how high of a recommendation I can make. Hopefully in the 2nd Edition there is more content covered.

**** RECOMMENDED

I shelled out the full price for this at a local bookstore with the hopes that it could help me setup a new Debian LINUX server. Normally, O'Reilly books have a very high level of accuracy and detail, this one deviates from that standard quite a bit. I used to admin BSD boxes many moons ago and thought this would be the perfect refresher course for me to get back up to speed with the current technology. From the beginning of the book, I started running into problems and was getting confusing errors that were not at all mentioned in the book. For starters, this book is based on older software packages that aren't included in the current distribution, so you have to use your favorite search engine to find out what the current version and installation package names are. Next, the configuration files the authors tell you to modify are in many cases wrong or non-existent. They have you comment out lots of lines in various config files only to discover later on in the book that you have to uncomment them so things like PHP will actually work. On top of that, the ISPCONFIG setup fails, as there is some sort of problem with the PHP installation. AARGH! I think I spent more time playing Sherlock Holmes on the web than I did reading the book. Which, I actually recommend that YOU do if you are in a similar position as me... To add to my frustration with the authors, their website is basically vacant. My opinion is they cashed the check from O'Reilly and forgot about the rest of their commitments to the readers who are spending from $29 to $44.99 USD on a copy of this outdated and confusing waste of paper. There might be a few useful tidbits here and there, but the web is your best resource for this information. I gave it 2 stars because it does point you in a general direction of how you might want to set things up, but the explanation of it all is generally wrong.