[CentOS] Good book on Linux Admin (Centos 5.5)

[Les Mikesell]

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.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com