On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 1:07 PM, <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote: > > As I may have said, everyone I know in computers has a number of books > from this publisher - he specializes in not only finding people who > really, really know their subject, but CAN ALSO COMMUNICATE WHAT THEY KNOW > (as opposed to, say, the BAL textbook I had in college, many years ago, > that if I could have gotten the rights to, I'd put all the pharmaceutical > co's market for sleeping pills out of business....) I don't' know anything about this book or publisher, but you really need to learn in several different levels. One is the broad overview of what you are trying to do (and once you understand that, you won't want to revisit the theory every time you want to change some detail), another is the choice of OS/application programs and languages you are implementing (which may change, but relatively slowly), and another is the very version-specific details you need when you actually start changing things. I've never found a single book that could combine those levels in a way that works together at all or could avoid being out of date before it is printed. You really need a tutorial that you'll read once and throw away, plus a reference for the details you'll change. And for the reference side, the online man pages work, once you learn to read them and understand that they expect you to already know what the shell will do to command lines (wildcard/variable substitution, redirection, etc.) before the program itself runs. And the RHEL/CentOS docs are good too. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com