SLUG_Wiki: Linux In A Nutshell

Ellen Siever, Stephen Figgins, Aaron Weber
4th edition, June 2003, 928 pages, ISBN 0596004826 (amazon.com, search)

Linux In A Nutshell, now in it's 4th edition, is perhaps the single most useful volume in your Linux library. Think of it as a distillation of the man pages and the LDP HOWTO's.

Historically, the matter of what to include and what not to has been a contentious issue, and the editors have generally tended towards greater inclusiveness. That is a very good thing.

I regard this book very highly, and I recommend it as a required item on every Linux user's bookshelf (it actually spends far more time right next to the keyboard), however, I am going to be fairly brutal on a few points:

In addition to the standard UNIX command set, commands of interest to those who might not be system administrators are also covered. CD Ripping commands cdda2wav, cdparanoia, and mpg123 are included, but lame is shockingly absent... so you have commands for ripping audio CD's, and commands for playing MP3's, but no command for encoding MP3's. Bizarre.

In a book this good, the howlers really stand out. For gods sake, why couldn't they let somebody who knew something about LILO and FVWM2 write the sections on them, instead of guessing about them based on outdated info from the LDP HOWTO's?

There is a 38 page section titled Boot Methods that deals with LILO, GRUB, and loadlin. There is a very obvious bias in favor of GRUB, apparently based on the profusion of features. The author of this section also parrots an ancient notion from an out of date HOWTO that states that the NT loader wants to be in charge. Then the author makes much of the GRUB boot menu, apparently unaware that LILO has had a boot menu for quite a long while.
The GRUB boot loader may actually be superior, but I would feel a lot better if the argument were presented by a competent authority instead of by a hack working from an old HOWTO.

FVWM2 suffers much worse. In section 19, An Alternative Window Manager:fvwm2 We are served a confused and uninformed presentation of FVWM as a sort of desktop for the iconoclast. As someone who runs Linux on a variety of machines from a P120 laptop to a 400 CPU Beowulf cluster, I can tell you that I use FVWM because it leaves the CPU cycles available for real work, not wasting them making windows spin in and out when they are opened and closed, etc. Even a very fast machine running GNOME or KDE will occasionally appear to hang while the desktop does some mysterious and unimaginable horribly CPU intensive task.
Neither GNOME nor KDE will run acceptably on a machine with a clock speed of less than 400 MHz.

There is a horrifying omission, the lsof command is not here!

There is a stub entry for Perl, but not for Tcl, Ruby, or Python. I can understand that O'Reilly have a glut of Perl books in stock that they need to dispose of, but they could have couched it in a form that was more serviceable to themselves and the community by using a single or two page appendix format... this would have provided them with more opportunity to mention available books, and to be a bit more fair and comprehensive.

Buy the book at [BookPool] for 39% off of the list price!