Just started teaching LINUX and loving it. I am teaching a LINUX/UNIX basics class at a small community college and am looking at teaching a "next level" more advanced class. I have been looking, but not found much in the way of LINUX textbooks. I have found several, but not with the content I need. Does anyone have recommendations about a good, intermediate level textbook that has good lab exercises/hands on activities and covers networking, security, SMB, NFS, cron and other more intermediate level tasks? Thanks.

'Rute' has lesson plans in the back...but it is very old.
'Running Linux' is very good, starts at the basics but gets indepth. Covers everything you mention. You will have to come up with your own exercises though.

Better idea: Get "LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell". Covers _everything_, but in a terse manner. Shouldn't be an issue when you put it together with man and info pages available on the system. Best of all, your students will be prepared to get certified at the end of your course, if they so desire.

They're not textbooks per se, but I think the LFS and BLFS (or cross versions for 64-bit systems) would make great semester exercises. They're available at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ and you can order them in bound form. You could easily work through them in a semester and there's certainly enough to fill a lecture twice a week explaining things in greater detail. The students would not only learn how GNU/Linux works, but have a pretty good grasp on what it takes to make any operating system work.

For the record, I am not affiliated with the LFS project other than as a user.

I have not checked out this book
A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming, but I've been meaning to. It does include exercises, and seems to cover the topics that would interest you. How wonderful would it be for a college student to get a textbook for under $30 that would be useful far beyond the classroom.

red hat linux ? (? as in some number )unleashed published by sams it gives a broad range of topics with just enough info to get the topics covered working with the info to understand what you are doing
no it isen't a text book it's more of a survival guide
and the info in it could fix about 70% of the problems people post here about ( my copy is way out dated as it covers red hat 6 )my copy came with the red hat 6 install disks

I don't know how it would do as a textbook, but my favorite Linux book is "Linux System Administration: A User's Guide" by Marcel Gagne, ISBN 0201719347

http://www.amazon.com/Linux-System-A.../dp/0201719347

I also like Arow's suggestion of LFS. I've never done that myself, but I've been intrigued with the idea and want to try it someday. I believe I might rate that more "advanced" than "intermediate", but that's just my first impression after reading the description. I imagine as a teacher/leader for such a project, you might be worn ragged by the end of the semester though!

Is that book advanced at all? I've always wanted to get one of his books because I really enjoy his columns in LJ, but his titles seem to imply they are for beginers...

I wouldn't call it advanced, nor would I call it beginner. I don't own it, but I've checked it out from our local library several times.

Let's put it this way, I was a Unix developer (not a sysadmin) for a good twenty years before I moved my desktop to Linux (it was Windows previously). I definitely knew my way in and out of a Unix system, and every which other way, as a developer and C programmer. There was a bunch of sysadm stuff I had picked up over the years just by being exposed to it and working closely with my sysadmins on large production systems. System V, SunOS, Solaris, HPUX ... various different flavors.

I learned quite a bit from Gagne's book. It was the first step in getting me confident in administering my own Linux system. I'd say it bridges the gap to move you from "knowledgeable and experienced user" to "basic system administrator". People who buy "... For Dummies" books would be overwhelmed by it, experienced sysadmins might not learn too much. Except that Gagne teaches command line, not GUI - for the most part. A GUI-based sysadm (if there is such a thing) would stand to learn a lot.

thanks to you all....some great titles...I will check them out..Thanks again!