Praise for Mark Sobell’s Books

“I keep searching for books that collect everything you want to know about a subject in one place, and keep getting disappointed. Usually the books leave out some important topic, while others go too deep in some areas and must skim lightly over the others. A Practical Guide to Red Hat® Linux® is one of those rare books that actually pulls it off. Mark G. Sobell has created a single reference for Red Hat Linux that cannot be beat! This marvelous text (with a 4-CD set of Linux Fedora Core 2 included) is well worth the price. This is as close to an ‘everything you ever needed to know’ book that I’ve seen. It’s just that good and rates 5 out of 5.”
—Ray Lodato, Slashdot contributor

“Mark Sobell has written a book as approachable as it is authoritative.”
—Jeffrey Bianchine, Advocate, Author, Journalist

“Excellent reference book, well suited for the sysadmin of a linux cluster, or the owner of a PC contemplating installing a recent stable linux. Don’t be put off by the daunting heft of the book. Sobell has striven to be as inclusive as possible, in trying to anticipate your system administration needs.”
—Wes Boudville, Inventor

“A Practical Guide to Red Hat® Linux® is a brilliant book. Thank you Mark Sobell.”
—C. Pozrikidis, University of California at San Diego

“This book presents the best overview of the Linux operating system that I have found. . . . It should be very helpful and understandable no matter what the reader’s background is: traditional UNIX user, new Linux devotee, or even Windows user. Each topic is presented in a clear, complete fashion and very few assumptions are made about what the reader knows. . . . The book is extremely useful as a reference, as it contains a 70-page glossary of terms and is very well indexed. It is organized in such a way that the reader can focus on simple tasks without having to wade through more advanced topics until they are ready.”
—Cam Marshall, Marshall Information Service LLC, Member of Front Range UNIX Users Group FRUUG, Boulder, Colorado

“Conclusively, this is THE book to get if you are a new Linux user and you just got into RH/Fedora world. There’s no other book that discusses so many different topics and in such depth.”
—Eugenia Loli-Queru, Editor in Chief, OSNews.com

The Most Useful Linux Tutorial and Reference Ever, with Hundreds of High-Quality Examples Covering Every Linux Distribution!

To be truly productive with Linux, you need to thoroughly master the shells and the command line. Until now, you had to buy two books to gain that mastery: a tutorial on fundamental Linux concepts and techniques, plus a separate reference. Worse, most Linux references offer little more than prettied-up man pages. Now, there’s a far better solution. Renowned Linux expert Mark Sobell has brought together comprehensive, insightful guidance on the tools system administrators, developers, and power users need most, and an outstanding day-to-day reference, both in the same book.

This book is 100 percent distribution and release agnostic: You can use it on any Linux system, now and for years to come. What’s more, it’s packed with hundreds of high-quality examples: better examples than you’ll find in any other Linux guidebook. This is Linux from the ground up: the clearest explanations and most useful knowledge about everything from filesystems to shells, editors to utilities, and programming tools to regular expressions. And when you need instant answers, you’ll constantly turn to Sobell’s comprehensive command reference section—organized and tabbed for easy, fast access!

Don’t settle for yesterday’s Linux guidebook. Get the one book that meets today’s challenges—and tomorrow’s!

A Practical Guide to Linux® Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming is the most useful, most comprehensive Linux tutorial and reference you can find. It’s the only book to deliver

• Better, more realistic examples covering tasks you’ll actually need to perform

• Deeper insight, based on Sobell’s immense knowledge of every Linux nook and cranny

• More practical explanations of more than eighty core utilities, from aspell to xargs

• Techniques for implementing secure communications using ssh and scp—plus dozens of tips for making your system more secure

• A superior introduction to the Linux programming environment, including make, gcc, gdb, CVS, and much more

• Expert guidance on basic and advanced shell programming using bash and tcsh

• Tips and tricks for customizing the shell and using it interactively from the command line

• Thorough guides to vim and emacs, designed to help you get productive fast and maximize your editing efficiency

• Dozens of exercises to help you practice and gain confidence

• Instructions for using Apt, yum, and BitTorrent for keeping your system up to date automatically

• And much more, including coverage of gawk, sed, find, sort, bzip2, and regular expressions

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 54 Ratings

Beyond frustrating - 2010-05-07
Reviewer Rating:
I really wanted to like this book as I am now a regular linux desktop user and want to learn shell/perl scripting. Unfortunately this book has been a tremendous letdown. The presentation of topics and the code examples do not build on one another and the ordering too often seems haphazard.

Readability of code samples is hindered by not numbering lines of code. It's a lot easier to read when the text says "Line 24 specifies the variable...." instead of trying to find the line referenced by "The third say statement specifies the variable....".

Most damning in my mind is the repeated sin of referencing material not yet covered in examples. So when I am reading page 200 there is no reason to throw out a code sample with material that won't be covered until page 450. This book is replete with examples like this! It's as if they had a general idea of the topics they wanted to cover, they wrote the text and code samples for each topic and only then decided on the order in which to present the information. I'm sorry to report that learning from this book is far more frustrating than it should be.

If only one advanced Linux command reference were to be chosen, this is among the top contenders - 2010-04-18
Reviewer Rating:
A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors and Shell Programming appears in its second updated edition to provide a tutorial to the latest Linux commands and references. It's the only book to offer a primer on Perl for all system administrators, in-depth coverage of basic and advanced Linux shell programming, and tips and tricks for customizing the shell. If only one advanced Linux command reference were to be chosen, this is among the top contenders for the job.

Excellent book - 2010-03-18
Reviewer Rating:
Excellent book that can help both starters and professional administrators. Very detailed, with examples in everything. A book that is a must for everyone's bookshelf.

A Practical Guide to Linux(R) Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming - 2009-11-10
Reviewer Rating:
Great Book. Delivered on-time and as promised. Thank you.




A Practical Guide to Linux(R) Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming

Major Kudos - 2010-08-12
Reviewer Rating:
Mr. Sobell has written another beautiful book on Linux! I first read his "A Practial Guide to the Unix System" and loved it. "A Practical Guide to Linux(2E)" is also masterfully written. I come from a strong Windows/Sys Admin background. Recently, my company asked me to support Unix/Linux too. I found most books dificult to grasp and hard to read. Mr. Sobell's clear and deep understanding of Unix/Linux shines through in his book. It's a joy to read a Linux book and actually understand what's being said. I can't thank Mr. Sobell enough for writing it and helping me to have a deep understanding of Linux.

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