Linux newbie books and software.

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Can anybody offer advice on a good book for “novice” Linux newbies?



Is there an easy distro to learn on? (Don’t have broadband so will need to purchase a cheap copy.... anybody have any suggestions?



Thanks for your help in advance.

 

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Holy cats! What a question. There are about as many opinions on what is the "perfect newbie distro" as there are Linux distros. I've heard that Mandrake, Red Hat, and SuSe are all good distros to start with but other Linux gurus swear by dozens of others. As far as what a good book to start with is...that one always gets me, too.

Currently, I am slowly working my way through Sams Teach Yourself Red Hat Linux 9 in 24 hours just because I'm already somewhat familiar with Red Hat and the Sams books are usually a pretty good starter. Of course the book comes with the install disks and the instructions to install so I didn't have to buy the software separately.

As far as buying distros on disk, they can be had very cheaply. On place is OS Heaven but it's in the US so it may not be ideal for your purposes. You can search on Amazon for distros...I picked up SuSe 9.1 Pro very inexpensively but of course, no instructions or support. I can go to SuSe's site and pick up whatever info I need as far as installing it when I get around to it, though it's supposed to be pretty easy.

Most books on Linux have the same "beginners" material as far as the file system, basic shell commands, info on Gnome and KDE and the open source application packages it comes with such as OpenOffice. It's a brave, new world.

Hope some of this helped.

 

Found a link to some reviews of Linux books that I thought might help. Click Here!

 

I have a couple of blank CDs and i can mail you a copy of some 'newbie' distros if you dont have the bandwidth

are you looking for admin learning books or just user learning books?

 

Mandrake has a good repution for being one of the easier distro's to start on. With Linux it really is a case of user preference but for a newbie to Linux (Like myself) I would stick to the more popular distros like SUSE, Redhat and Mandrake but they are more commercialised and have a good userbase so you will find it easier to find help with these distros then some of the lesser known distros.

A good place to start is www.linuxiso.org not sure if you can buy CD's from from them but they have info on all the major distros to download.

 

Sorry for the delay in responding and thanks everybody for the input.

Will mull over all the advice and will more than likely come back for some more.

Thanks again.