Book Review: Fedora Linux

Author: Chris Tyler
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
Publication date: October 1, 2006
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/fedoralinux/index.html

Walk into any bookstore and you’re sure to find several books about Fedora, the community-oriented and totally free Linux distribution that’s completely cutting-edge without all the messy bleeding. Just in case you missed it, some of those books were reviewed here in November of ‘05. Many of these books are incredibly detailed and informative, but can make for difficult reading for beginners. O’Reilly has found a unique “sweet spot,” though, for one of its newest volumes, Fedora Linux.

The book is authored by Chris Tyler, a professor and consultant from Toronto who most recently spoke at Seneca College’s 2006 Free Software & Open Source Symposium. (You can find audio and video recordings of Chris’ talk, and the many other excellent presentations, here. Chris has produced a truly exceptional guide to all things Fedora that proves “comprehensive” doesn’t have to mean “painful” (to read or carry).

The book targets an audience ranging from complete beginners to intermediate users, by virtue of its exceptional task-oriented structure. Rather than trying to function as a “core dump” of topical areas, each chapter instead is built around teaching the reader a core skill set to achieve specific, common objectives. This is a very effective method of self-paced education and very different from the average Linux guide; experienced administrators will probably want to look elsewhere for extremely granular coverage of their pet topics, since this method does not lend itself to exhaustive explorations of minutiae. A beneficial side effect, however, is that users do not need to read every section in a chapter to understand the material in a particular section.The book includes plentiful cross-references and good indexing, making it an excellent, portable reference for accomplishing quick tasks while learning the operating system.

The book covers Fedora Core 6, and although the publishing schedule required use of a test release stand-in, the accuracy of the book is quite commendable. There are screenshots throughout–a relative rarity for O’Reilly publications–used tastefully and where appropriate. Users will be happy to know this book gives very even-handed coverage of both GNOME and KDE (the two most popular graphical desktop environments) as well as other environments including, of course, the command line. This book does not demand that the user drop to a terminal for every task, but does explain when and why to use one, so it is less intimidating than some of the oversize comprehensive references that focus almost exclusively on traditional UNIX methodologies.

The quantity of material covered is still considerable, despite the book’s smaller size, and includes everything from setup and installation guidance to practical coverage of such esoterica as LVM, network services, and SELinux. Each section is formatted with simple headings describing a task objective and how to accomplish it (”How Do I Do That?”), and explaining how the technology works so the reader has a deeper understanding of the methodology (”How Does It Work?”). Finally, there is an addendum of related, common questions (”What About…”) along with succinct answers. Each segment is also followed by a list of additional resources for discovering more about a topic of interest.

My absolute favorite chapter of the book, though, was the one dedicated to community participation. The lifeblood of Fedora, and indeed of all Linux, is the active involvement of interested people of many walks of life from around the globe. Because Fedora Linux gives an ambitious newcomer a place to start, and gentle guidance on how to meet with and get productive in the Fedora community, it has vaulted to the top of my list of Fedora books. Other books include this information, but I have seen none which speak to the newcomer in such an instructive and welcoming manner.

There are many excellent books about Linux and Fedora, but it is rare to find one that is written elegantly. As far as technical books go, the ease and fluidity of the writing style put this book head and shoulders above almost any I’ve seen in terms of sheer reading enjoyment. There is an almost indefinable grace in Fedora Linux, obviously born of the author’s zeal for good documentation.

This book would make an excellent companion volume for a Linux beginners class in which Fedora is the platform of choice. For a solid understanding of core skills for use on Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and guidance on becoming part of the next century of computing, Chris Tyler’s Fedora Linux is a fantastic value and highly recommended.

This entry was posted by Paul Frields on Thursday, February 15th, 2007 at 12:58 pm and is filed under review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.