[plug] re; Books

[Matt Bruce]

<ESSAY ALIGN="geek"> ;)

Jon,

I hadn't read any books on Linux until a few months back and must admit that
I find the Unleashed book quite good (I borrowed it off a friend who was in
your shoes, and I figured I should find out what all this paper-based text
stuff was all about ;)). All the reading/learning I've done with Linux has
been by trial-and-error, going through /usr/doc and man pages, and by
visiting various websites on the topic I was interested in
(http://www.linux.org, http://www.stokely.com, http://www.slashdot.org,
http://www.freshmeat.net, http://www.sendmail.org, http://www.w3.org,
http://www.debian.org, http://www.redhat.com, etc). Remember that the
majority of what you'll need to read about can be found on the Internet. 

For a raw Unix/Linux newbie, I'd suggest working through the Unleashed book
and playing around. Learning that 90% of config files are in or under /etc,
that the "man <pick-a-subject>" command approach is often the best, that
/etc/mail/sendmail.cf is often though to be the scariest thing known to man,
etc, are all things that come with familiarity. Install it on an unused
partition, drive or PC and get into it. It's really the best way to learn.

I think that's one reason why there haven't been any serious sites/companies
devoted to Linux tutorials until quite recently -- it's just one of those
things that a 2 day course can't give, IMHO. A course would provide you with
some basics, but unless you'd played with the product, I doubt if much of
what you learned would sink in.

If you want to get a good resource (and don't mind reading a screen instead
of a book), give O'Reilly's "The Networking CD Bookshelf" and "The Unix CD
Bookshelf" CD books a try. The RRP on the packing says US$79.95 and US$69.95
respectively. They are the complete books in HTML format and are fully
searchable (bundles a search program with it). The Networking CD has
O'Reilly's "DNS and BIND", "TCP/IP Network Administration, 2nd Ed",
"Building Internet Firewalls", "Practical Unix & Internet Security, 2nd Ed",
"sendmail Desktop Reference", and "sendmail, 2nd Ed" books. The Unix CD has
O'Reilly's "UNIX Power Tools", "UNIX in a Nutshell", "Learning the Korn
Shell", "sed & awk", "Learning the vi Editor", and "Learning the UNIX
Operating System" books, though bear in mind they are general Unix, not
Linux-specific. Two awesome investments, IMHO.

I have Debian Linux installed as LILO dual-boot on my work notebook (with
NT4WKS), main home PC (with Windows98), and my home dialup server. I use a
cheapo 486 to connect to Wantree, which lets me play games or turn off my
main PC without affecting the Internet connection and LAN. It also provides
me with a certain amount of insulation from all these silly Microsoftish
networking bugs and exploits, not to mention the ability to configure
Linux-based firewalling.

</ESSAY> ;)

HTH & regards,

-- 
Matt Bruce  <matt.bruce at alphawest.com.au>
Security Engineer - Security & Internet Services
AlphaWest - http://www.alphawest.com.au/
--
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things." -- Yoda and Silent
Bob


>-----Original Message-----
>From: Jon L. Miller [mailto:jlmiller at wantree.com.au]
>Sent: Thursday, 15 July 1999 10:10 pm
>
>So what book would a network engineer use to learn and 
>practice Linux.