Ubuntu Made Easy review Part 1.
Posted 08-27-2012 at 07:48 AM by rich_c
Well, my copy of Ubuntu Made Easy which No Starch Press kindly sent me to review arrived 2 or 3 weeks ago. The book itself is remarkably well put together making it a pleasure to hold and read as well as easy to refer to while working on the 'projects'. No Starch were also kind enough to provide me with a PDF copy which I have shared with a select few people with less (Or different.) Linux experience than myself. So, hopefully future parts of this ongoing review will provide their perspectives as a more representative sample of the book's target audience.
On to my initial thoughts, having read up to Chapter 11/roughly half way. To put it simply, I'm confident that someone with a little aptitude (In the traditional sense rather than the Debian package management sense...) would be able to pick up this book and an Ubuntu 12.04 CD and set themselves up a working and productive system in a matter of hours. The one ommission I personally feel lets the book down slightly is that there is no section relating to running Ubuntu as a virtual guest in chapter 2 which covers installing and running Ubuntu. To me, although this is a reasonably technical undertaking it's still relevant to potential readers of UME. Those being advanced users interested in migrating from other types of system. A topic that makes this book of real value to new Ubuntu users is covered in Chapter 3. This chapter provides a lot of excellent information relating to the use of Unity. I'm pretty sure that most people who initially find Unity confusing and unintuitive would quickly be able to get some real work done using this chapter as a reference.
To bring this first part to a close, the other thing I noted is that this book pretty much exactly hits it's intended objective as laid out in the opening part of the introduction. As a reference for readers who are familiar with computers and have an interest in Linux/Ubuntu it would quickly get you up to a technical level that a lot of people would consider to be 'power user'. In particular, Chapter 8 provides a great introduction into the 'arcane' world of the command line.
Watch this space for the next installment which will hopefully include comments from users/readers who would particularly want/need Ubuntu to be made easy.
On to my initial thoughts, having read up to Chapter 11/roughly half way. To put it simply, I'm confident that someone with a little aptitude (In the traditional sense rather than the Debian package management sense...) would be able to pick up this book and an Ubuntu 12.04 CD and set themselves up a working and productive system in a matter of hours. The one ommission I personally feel lets the book down slightly is that there is no section relating to running Ubuntu as a virtual guest in chapter 2 which covers installing and running Ubuntu. To me, although this is a reasonably technical undertaking it's still relevant to potential readers of UME. Those being advanced users interested in migrating from other types of system. A topic that makes this book of real value to new Ubuntu users is covered in Chapter 3. This chapter provides a lot of excellent information relating to the use of Unity. I'm pretty sure that most people who initially find Unity confusing and unintuitive would quickly be able to get some real work done using this chapter as a reference.
To bring this first part to a close, the other thing I noted is that this book pretty much exactly hits it's intended objective as laid out in the opening part of the introduction. As a reference for readers who are familiar with computers and have an interest in Linux/Ubuntu it would quickly get you up to a technical level that a lot of people would consider to be 'power user'. In particular, Chapter 8 provides a great introduction into the 'arcane' world of the command line.
Watch this space for the next installment which will hopefully include comments from users/readers who would particularly want/need Ubuntu to be made easy.
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