Linux Book: if you had to buy
 

As the title states:

If you had a limited budget, and had to buy a "few" Linux/*nix books in hardcopy for reference, what would they be?

I would like to have a few books on hand for reference, in our department, as parts of our environment have applications or services running on *nix.

Any helpful suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Keith

Any of the maroon books from the Craig Hunt Linux Library. These were excellent for me when I started out. Some of them are a little outdated, having been released in '99 and '00, but the principles are still the same and many of the packages discussed are pretty much the same as they were then.

I recommend getting them from half.com or some other used book source. If you buy them new, they run about 40-50 USD which is a bit pricey.

Follow this link to the LQ Book Review section, it may give you some ideas.

For linux these are the three I refer to most:

Linux Administration Handbook from Prentice Hall
Running Linux from O'Reilly
Linux Power Tools from Sybex

for fedora, i love this one:
Red Hat Linux Fedora for Dummies

most any O'Reilly book, their good.

They do generally contain a lot of stuff, but I've found that they tend to be (a) expensive and (b) bloody hard work i.e. a very "dry" read!

Go to a decent technical bookshop and have a flick through too see what you like.

I used this one most of it wasn't too bad, just a bit of a struggle where it mentioned stuff that I had little or no knowledge (javascripting etc). But I did look at it in the shop first and it seemed the best of a bad bunch!

regards

John

How Linux Works from No Starch Press is a good one. The list price is $37.95 but you can get it on Amazon.com for $25.05. It covers a little bit of just about everything from basic commands, to networking, shell scripts and even kernel maintenance, plus a lot more.
Highly recommended :)

i second that "How linux works" ...