I used this book to teach a Beginners Linux Administration class, and found it to be a great book.

The only downfall, and this does not really matter at the beginners level, is -- this book is written with Red Hat 8 when we have had 3 oor 4 versions after that.

Beyond that this is a great book.

This is strictly a beginner's guide to Linux. The author goes to great lengths to explain only the rudimentry. For example, the author explains around 12 useful commands for the beginners and ignores the rest. Of course, there are far more commands to learn to be truly competent with Linux.

If you already know how to install and configure Linux, stay away from this book. On the other hand, if you just learned how to spell Linux, then this book is a good place to start. Just remember to buy an another more advanced reference to raise your understanding.

My only gripe about this book is that the author lacks strong understanding of Windows but criticizes it nonetheless. For example, the author claims that when a Windows GUI crashes, the entire OS crashes with it. This WAS true....about ten years ago.

I think this book accomplishes exactly what the title mentions, "A Beginner's Guide". I guess I thought myself as in the "beginner" category, but after reading this book, I realized that I was not and needed something with a bit more depth to help me. But in any case, it was a good read.

New users to Linux (Power Users or Windows Admins) will find this book a solid read. I'm not sure how it would be as a beginner's book with no previous experience. I suppose even a beginner could use it, since it covers all the important parts of administration, Linux or whatever. It contains lots of skill building exercises and projects, as well as reusable blueprints. It emphasizes basic areas small business system's administrators would use It covers topics like file systems, backups, printers, user management, security (SSH), various GUIs, task automation, etc. It covers stuff like Apache, sendmail and nameservers, talking to Windows with Samba, exceptionally well.

I've messed around with a bit of UNIX at work as a shell account user, but with this economy, it never hurts to know more tech and be a little less dispensable, so I wanted to set up my own system at home and get my hands dirty.

This book has been a miracle, helping me get through everything from setting up the basics on an old computer I had sitting in the garage (nice to get more use out of it) to implementing a GUI, setting up server daemons, even doing some troubleshooting.

I think I'd have had a slower start if I hadn't already had some basic UNIX experience (navigating, copying files, using a non-GUI text editor) but beyond that, I thought this book was really useful and quite helpful. It's going to be on my reference shelf for a while.