Interesting Book?

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I just came across this book and thought that it would make good reading.



Find it Here

 

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Indeed. Given that I am eager to try out Linux [Ubuntu] and have a copy on order it would be interesting to find out more about the background on Linux and how to use it. It is a shame that no-one has reviewed the book at Amazon as a neutral view might provide useful insight. Has anyone else read this, maybe Phoenix or ffreeloader?

P.S. I just smurfed over to the US Amazon site and found these reviews ... HERE.

 

Nope. Never read that one. It was on my wish list at Amazon for quite a while but I eventually deleted it and replaced it with books more devoted to pure Linux. Bascially I deleted it just because I feel I'm past that "lost" stage in my Linux knowledge now. I'm beginning to develop a good enough framework of knowledge so that if I don't know something I at least know where to go looking, or know enough about similar things so that I can "just figure it out".

It takes a while to get to this point though. It definitely doesn't come overnight, at least it didn't for me.

 

I was going to post a link to my wish list of books at Amazon, but I'm getting an error everytime I try to reach it.

 

I always check out the US Amazon website for book reviews as the American's seem to review books more than the UK Amazon site.

 

There are a couple of things to bear in mind when reading the technical book reviews on Amazon.com. What follows is what I have learned over the past 3 or 4 years of reading technical book reviews there.

Don't assume that all the reviews of books on Amazon.com are nuetral reviews by readers who have no financial incentive for writing a glowing review of a book. Some people who write do have incentives for they work for the companies that publish the books or they are friends with the author. Some people write glowig reviews in exchange for positive responses to their own books.

Also, don't assume that even if someone who is neutral writes a review that the review will be relevant for you. By this I mean that we all learn differently and a book written for one type of learner will be almost completely useless for someone who learns another way. I have purchased books from Amazon.com that some people couldn't write enough negative things about, and yet I found the book to be very good, and I have purchased some books from Amazon.com that people wrote glowing reviews of and I found the book almost worthless to me.

Also, you can find books that some people will review as worthless are very good for a beginner. The reviewer will have experience in the subject that the book covers and will say they didn't learn anything from the book so don't buy this worthless piece of junk. The same will go for a beginner who buys a book written for someone who has previous knowledge. The beginner will very likely trash the book he doesn't have the prerequisite previous knowledge.

Don't get me wrong, having reviews is better than not having reviews, but you have to be able to sort through reviews to recognize which good or bad reviews are meaningful for you in your situation.

 

I think ffreeloader has hit the nail on the head. I never take any review as 100% but I feel that if you have three or four reviews then you can usually get a pretty good idea of what the book is like. If the book is expensive I usually go down to the local Waterstones or another big book shop nearby (which I can't remember what it's called) and look at the book and have a quick scan through it first to see if it meets my needs. I like Ffreeloader have seen a few reviews of books from people linked to the book so watch out for things like that.