Is this Fedora book good?

pamount · #1 17th June 2004, 08:26 PM

Hello

I've noticed this book being advertised. It is:

"Official Fedora Companion: Your Guide to the Fedora Project" isbn 0764558366, Author Nicholas Petreley, published by John Willey & Sons. Does anybody know if it's any good?

The place I know that's selling it is also packaging it with Fedora 2 on CD ROM (without source code). It just seems like a cheap enough book ($24.20 Australian) and I'm a newbie with Linux.

Thanks
pamount

Ug · #2 18th June 2004, 01:17 AM

It's not supposed to be that good. I've got "Red Hat Fedora Linux Unleashed" which is OK. I heard the best one was the Fedora Bible...

Varkk · #3 18th June 2004, 05:33 PM

Probably for the money it will be ok, also it comes with all the disks by the sound of it which is alway handy, especially if you do't have a superfast net connection. But as Ug says traditionally the Unleashed and Bible series of books are the better one but they usually cost several times more than that one does.

sailor · #4 4th July 2004, 04:47 PM

I just got the RedHat Linux BIble (Fedora and Enterprise Edition)...it was a bit pricey at $50...but it looks like it is a pretty thorough guide...It seems to cover everything plus some stuff that I was interested in learning like laptop installation, samba, iptables and networks....it includes 3 cds with FC1...

kingcwriter · #5 4th July 2004, 07:39 PM

I had the Redhat 9.0 bible and that book is good. I got it from barnes and nobles for only 35.
I want to purchase Redhat and Fedora bible. I love the redhat 9.0 book.

carbo18 · #6 4th July 2004, 07:46 PM

I would suggest

Learning Red Hat Enterprise Linux & Fedora, 4th Edition
By Bill McCarty
Publisher : O'Reilly
Pub Date : April 2004
ISBN : 0-596-00589-X
Pages : 352

And / Or

Red Hat: The Complete Reference Enterprise Linux & Fedora Edition: The Complete Reference
by Richard L. Petersen
ISBN:0072230754
McGraw-Hill 2004 (797 pages)

Personally I dislike the Bible Books...

rkl · #7 11th July 2004, 12:08 AM

With a new Fedora Core distro every 6 months, is it even worth buying a book based on Fedora Core, since you'll probably get no more than a year's worth of use out of it before it's completely obsolete? For example, a lot changed between FC1 and FC2, so I would say that a good chunk of FC1 book content is now worthless. It won't be so bad between FC2 and FC3 though, since a major kernel/desktop change is probably not due until somethng like FC5.

I've been using Linux for many years now and have never bought a book (or even seen an OS manual for it, since I've always downloaded the free ISO images), but I also have experience with commercial UNIX (HP-UX - which seems to get a bad rep out there, but is perfectly usable as a server OS...not so great as a desktop though). The Internet plus the speed of FC development has made paper books less than useful for our favourite distro, IMHO.

carbo18 · #8 12th July 2004, 05:24 AM

Yeah rkl is right, Fedora does change very rapidly and the books that I mentionned previously cover Fedora Core 1. There have been some pretty big configuration changes since the FC2 release such as moving to the 2.6 kernel and changing from XFree86 to xorg... to name a few.

I don't pay for my books though, the company does, so from that perspective... Hell, why not get the book and support some authors

But I wouldn't purchase any myself.

cathal · #9 12th July 2004, 07:09 AM

I have the redhat linux unleashed book which is a number of years old but its a good reference book and thats really all you'll use it for.

Oh and I read a review on that book its supposed to be ok

theurge · #10 14th July 2004, 09:02 AM

I have two Red Hat books, an older edition of McCarty's Learning Red Hat Linux (O'Reilly) and Red Hat Linux 7.2 (Sybex).

The tools described and screenshots provided are outdated, but they get me by.

All purchased for about $5 a book in the clearance section. Perhaps one day I'll actually buy a current edition.

jak8charm · #11 14th July 2004, 01:45 PM

I got Linux For Non-Geeks, I really like it, it's fun and easy to read/understand. I got it from the public library, and it comes with Fedora Core 1 (although the install of that distro didn't work right for me..). You know, free and stuff.
If I hadn't read about it on slashdot literally the day before and seen it in the library, I may not have made the semi-impulsive decision to ditch windows, I sure am glad I did. Real helpful book.