On 6/3/2011 11:54 AM, Thomas Harold wrote:
The things I always look for and almost never find are
(a) A split between tutorial (step-by-step for common uses) and reference sections (that have all the options). Once you've followed the tutorial you won't want to wade through that again to find the option to make an obscure change.
For pure reference, I've always liked my "Linux in a Nutshell" book (O'Reilly publisher), which has a huge section with all of the commands and options. It even has sections on "vi" and "emacs".
Google and man pages take care of the rest.
(Also, since CentOS is so similar to RHEL, anything taught in a RHEL book tends to carry over.)
Back in the old (pre-X) days of unix, the entire manual set was a few small books that you could easily flip through and understand how all of the tools might be used together under control of a shell command or script. And if you understood what the fork() system call did, all the rest would make sense. I'm not sure how someone starting today would find the core tool set (which is almost unchanged today except for the GNU options on some commands and the addition of perl) or where to start with man/google. Or if these even matter any more now that there are monolithic GUIs to do most common operations and computers are fast enough to run them.