2004.07_Books-Teach Yourself Linux, the Perl Cd Bookshelf and Exploiting Software-How to Break Code.pdf

REVIEWS

Books

Book Reviews

Teach Yourself Linux

You know a subject has reached the

mainstream, when it has a Teach Your-

self guide written for

it. Teach Yourself

Linux fits in the Teach

Yourself series and

covers Linux in a clear

and concise fashion.

Teach Yourself Linux

is probably the best

basic introduction to

Linux that I have seen.

It covers all the nec-

essary areas without

getting bogged down

in unnecessary detail,

such as the history.

The aim of the book is

to get the reader to

load and run a version

of Linux, and it does just exactly that,

with no waffle.

It picks Red Hat 9.0 as its basic distrib-

ution and the worked examples all

follow this, but Suse commands are also

shown as alternatives. Knoppix is also

briefly covered, in case you want to try

out Linux without

affecting your hard

disk.

Some sections are

marked as optional,

these include areas

such as the com-

mand line, for the

benefit of people

who just want to get

a system up and run-

ning without having

to do anything tech-

nical. Later sections

cover Open Office,

the Internet and net-

working with Micro-

soft systems as well

as many other useful topics. There is

even a short chapter on certification and

career development.

My favorite chapter was probably the

one on embedded Linux, as it is seldom

that a basic introduction does more than

just mention embedded software.

Whereas this book gives ideas for pro-

gramming and exercises to do as well as

links to the sites for relevant distribu-

tions.

The book concluded with a short but

clear glossary, but as it is written with so

little jargon there is little need to refer to

it most of the time.

I have always been a great fan of the

Teach Yourself format, having run

through various topics from economics

to the guitar, and I was pleased to find

that this latest edition is as straightfor-

ward and easy to use as normal, and I

hope that it will encourage the accep-

tance of Linux by the general public and

encourage more people to give it a go.

■

Robert Billing

226 pages

Hodder & Stoughton Educational, 0-340-

81204-4

£8.99, US$ 11.95, EUR 14.04

The Perl CD Bookshelf v4.0

This is the latest addition to O’Reilly’s

CD bookshelf series and contains six

titles: Perl in a Nutshell (2nd edition),

Learning Perl (3rd edition), Program-

ming Perl (3rd edition), Perl cookbook

(2nd edition), Learning Perl Objects –

References and Modules, and Mastering

Regular Expressions (2nd edition). The

last of these titles is included in PDF for-

mat while the rest are HTML files.

The CD is designed to be accessed by

any Java enabled web browser and

includes a master index to the whole of

the library as well as individual indexes

for each title. The package includes a

“bonus book” – a printed hard copy of

the Perl in a Nutshell – presumably so

that the CD bookshelf does not get lost

on the shelving in a bookstore.

The CD also contains some pages from

the O’Reilly Network that are related to

the books. In total just under 70MBytes

are used on the disk of

which around 20MBytes

are for Java search

engine. If you took out

the double versions of

the PDF files this could

be reduced a little fur-

ther. As much as I like

reading paper books, the

HTML files become use-

ful because of the

searchable nature. Rather

than reinventing the

wheel for each problem,

you can now run a quick

search and get on with life.

Most of the book titles had been

updates to Perl 5.8. Previous versions of

the bookshelf contained Advanced Perl

Programming and Learning Perl on

Win32, rather than the Mastering and

Objects titles.

Overall, I think

that having refer-

ence works avail-

able on CD in a

searchable format

is very useful and

if you are likely to

be buying four or

more of the fea-

tured books it is

quite good value

for the money.

However, it can

seem expensive if

you have already

gone out and bought some of them – as

many users probably have.

■

Various

737 pages plus 1 CD

O’Reilly, 0-596-00622-5

£76.88, US$ 99.95, EUR,95.00

July 2004

www.linux-magazine.com

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