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My thoughts on "Running Linux"

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edwardsen35:
I'm a newbie to Linux and I wanted to learn more about it.  My local LUG recommended reading "Running Linux".  I went to amazon.com to buy the book.  I saw that a new edition was going to be released in 2 weeks so I decided to wait for the new edition.  2 weeks went by and I got an e-mail from Amazon saying that they were pushing the release date to December.  I decided to wait for the new edition because I was busy with school and I knew that I wouldn't have a lot of time to read it.  
     Now that the first semester is over I have been able to read the first 7 chapters.  I have been very disappointed with the book.  I have found numerous spelling and grammatical mistakes.  I am beginning to wonder if anybody even edited this book.  What is even more damaging to the book's creditability is that I have found information in the book that is incorrect.  For example here is a passage from the book:

When you want to use tar in conjunction with bzip2, you need to tell tar about your compression program preferences, like this:
     tar cvf tarfile.tar.bz2 --use-compress-              program=bzip2 files...
or, shorter
     tar cvf tarfile.tar.bz2 --use-compress-              program=bzip2 files...
or, shorter still:
     tar cvjf tarfile.tar.bz2 files

The first two comands are exactly the same!!!!  

     I know that the book is 600 pages long but I can’t believe the amount of mistakes that I have found so far.  I have learned a lot but I wonder if I would have been better off to buy the third edition.

-A Frustrated Newbie
     edwardsen35

choasforages:
learn from its mistakes, and read all the howtos from back to back at the linux howto place/*don't remember it from memory*/

Chooco:
you mean this book?



my friend bought this book a year ago, hasn't found a problem in it yet. great book  ;)

if you are serious about Linux, get the book called Linux In A Nutshell which looks like this



it has every command you could think of, i love it    it's just a shame i no longer have Linux  :(

edwardsen35:
yes I mean that book.  Your friend must have bought a previous edition because the 4th edition just came out in december.

dishawjp:
I've gotten a few of the O'Reilly books for Linux and they're all been good.  But I have noticed a lot of bad editing in just about everything recently, from newspapers (which always had frequent errors) to books (which generally were well edited).  Maybe with so much of the written word being passed around via e-mail, publishers are less worried about editing, or less willing to spend the money necessary for good editing, than they once were.

I don't know.  Just a thought.

Jim

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