Best General GNU/Linux Book

Question

What is the best general GNU/Linux book? I've been occasionally using Linux for a few years, but I could still benefit from a good complete manual that isn't tied too closely to a specific distribution. Is there one that stands above the rest? I am fine with online books too. Topics I'm interested in include file systems, security, directory structure, tools / utilities, servers, OS architecture, etc.

Answer 1

You may want to give a try to Linux From Scratch:

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

It's a step-by-step tutorial on how to build your own linux system from source packages. I found it much more enlightening than reading any other Linux book; you actually use linux tools to build your own system, and create and configure every single file.

Answer 2

The classic book on the subject was/is O'Reilly's Running Linux. I'm not sure that this is still up to date, but it might be worth looking into.

However, I would caution you in limiting yourself to one book. There's many layers to Linux, what are you looking for? Scripting? Getting around the shell? Programming against glibc? Window managers? Unix editors? Networking? Device drivers?

There's many great books about these topics and more--the specific distribution books (Fedora Unleased-type titles) will cover the beginnings of many of these topics. There's more specific books for kernel hacking.

And of course, the world of Linux moves quickly--many books on latest stuff might well be out of date. But you're probably familiar with that already.

Some books I will recommend related to Linux:

• Fedora/Ubuntu Unleased - thick tomes with a lot of entry-level information for navigating around a distribution and doing various tasks (text editing with vi and emacs, network bring-up, file sharing)
• Unix PowerTools - over 1000 pages of all kinds of stuff
• bash Cookbook - All the /etc/rc.d stuff, many tools are written in bash. If you're doing any kind of scripting or tying into cron, you may well be working in bash.
• Exploring Expect - for the stuff you can't do in bash. Expect is strange but it's very powerful.
• The late W. Richard Stevens' books: Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, Unix Network Programming, TCP/IP Illustrated - fantastic books, and the first two have been updated in the last few years to cover Linux and Mac OS X.
• Network Administrator's Guide - possible it's out of date, but this used to be a great resource for how to build a network. It used to be free on the web and also available from O'Rielly in print.
• For more on the kernel internals, check out Linux Device Drivers (O'Reilly). It's a fantastic and easy read, though the current edition is fairly out of date with current kernels. For more general OS architecture, check out Andrew Tanenbaum's recently updated Modern Operating Systems textbook (expensive, but fantastic).

This is a lot of books; you might check and see if your local library has access to Safari bookshelf online if you're on a budget (Boston Public Library does, for example).

Answer 3

Every now and then I like to wander through my books from the O'Reilly cookbook series:

• Bash Cookbook by Albing et al.
• Linux Cookbook by Carla Schroder
• Linux Networking Cookbook by Carla Schroder

Answer 4

I used to like the selflinux project. Sadly, it is all german texts, but i presume you look for english ones. While looking for a translation, i stumbled upon the Rute Tutorial. It seems to cover quite a few things. I hope you like it. I also read that you can install it in debian using

apt-get install rutebook

And have it available locally in /usr/share/docs. The Linux Cookbook is also available that way using linuxcookbook as the package name.