Book review: Fedora 7 Unleashed
Submitted by srlinuxx on Thu, 11/01/2007 - 18:21.
Have you ever had deja vu? I re-read books on occasion, because I like them, and every once in a while I’ll re-read a book that I think I’m reading for the first time. Then I’ll sit there with this twisted-up look on my face, wondering why all the words seem so familiar. Then I remember when and where I saw them last.
I’ve been reading the new Fedora™ 7 Unleashed book by Andrew and Paul Hudson, and I’ve had that feeling several times. So I’ve made my face and wracked my brain, trying to figure out how I’ve read this before. The answer? I read Fedora Core 6 Unleashed and Fedora Core 5 Unleashed before that.
Its unfortunate. I think these ‘distro tomes,’ so to speak, provide a valuable service to the Linux uninitiated, and can be useful to more seasoned sysadmins interested in the latest technology a new release of a given distribution has to offer. The unfortunate part is that both of these groups have to suffer through repetitive rehashing of methods, processes, and utilities that have been throughly documented in a multitude of locations and media.
To be fair, this book does some things quite well,
"Ubuntu Unleashed" is also quite similar to it
These same two guys wrote Ubuntu Unleashed, 2nd Ed., and it seems to contain a large amount of content straight out of their Fedora Unleashed series. (It was startling to see them refer to Yum as a package manager in a book about Ubuntu. And many of their shell scripting examples are very familiar.)
That's the problem with buying a book over the Internet — you don't get to look at it first. At least it came with a discount! With any luck, Powell's will buy it back.