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Title: Linux in Plain English (In Plain English) by Patrick Volkerding, Kevin Reichard ISBN: 1-55828-542-3 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Inc Pub. Date: 01 June, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (4 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: Good book to learn major commands
Comment: This book is an excellent book for the Linux beginner. It has a cross reference so that if you know DOS well you can look up a DOS command and get the proper Linux command, which is very handy. It also explains Linux commands and how they are used. There is only one thing this book lacks, however. This book does not cover TAR in great detail, which is essential, especially if you use Linux to download software items off the internet. It does however cover gzip and gunzip.

Rating: 4
Summary: Good Command reference manual
Comment: Very good for the new Linux user - especially one with DOS experience. There is a crossreference of DOS to Linux commands that is a helpful starter. The book contains a page (or so) for each command, that contains a simple explanation and a listing of all the options for the command.

These pages are organized into several categories based upon function. If you know the command that you want you must first check an a-z reference showing what section of the book the command is in. I would have done it the other way. Organized the detailed pages of commands in alphabetical order and provided a crossreference by function. That crossreference could then be used to target possible commands when you did not know exactly what you need. As the book is currently organized, it is just more difficult to look up a command that you already know (possibly to review options) - first you have to determine what section of the book it is in.

This book has been right beside my Linux machine since the day it was purchased!

Rating: 4
Summary: Good for beginners, but needs more detail.
Comment: I bought this book looking for a detailed reference of the commands vital for survival in Linux (you know, dd, mke2fs, tar, fortune :), but instead got a very good quick reference book that will help those that are converting from Windows/DOS to Linux a bit, not as much as it should though as the DOS to Linux translation guide is a bit bare. I came into this book with a bit of knowledge of Linux behind me, gained the good old fasioned way of "Hm.. What does mke2fs /dev/hda1 do? Oh.. It does THAT.. Where's my boot disk?" and this book appealed to me in that it didn't tell me the right way to do something, but rather how to do it if I want to do it that way (an example is maybe I DO want to use cat instead of vi to make a text file. It didn't say "You don't want to do this" but rather told me how). This book doesn't really tell you how to DO anything such as configure X, but it'll give you the commands to do it. Unfortunatley this book too often sends ! the reader to the Linux man pages instead of printing a few pages of text about a command (such as Mount.. How am I gonna read man pages if I can't mount my drive with the man pages on it?). Overall a great book, would have been 5 stars except it sends the user to their computer too often, making this book more of a perminant referance than learning material.