I am learning in college about setting up and configuring Slackware Linux in particular on the networking side, and I am looking for a newbie friendly book. Areas covered includes FTP, telnet, Samba, NFS, Email, port mappers/scanners. While there are many books out there, Slackware appears to be a fair bit different from most other debian and redhat based distros so certain material that I have encountered for other distros has not been very helpful.

I realize that Slackware appears to be aimed at more advanced users so I don't know what newbie friendly material there is, but newbie friendly would be nice if it exists.

So to sum up, I am looking for advice on what would be a good book that is suitable for Slackware and covering these networking areas in hopefully gentle terms.

Many thanks!

I learnt how to configure servers with generic guides, even those written for unix systems would work in slackware OS.

http://www.c3.hu/docs/oreilly/
http://www.c3.hu/docs/oreilly/tcpip/tcpip/index.htm

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/

You might try getting to know Slackware by first reading Slack Book (it seems there's a new version "cooking" right now). After you get to know the system, any general guide will do just fine.

The official page of the Slack Book project is:
http://www.slackbook.org
And current beta version is here:
http://www.slackbook.org/beta/

It's actually the opposite. It's Debian, Ubuntu and Redhat-based distros that have inflated the Linux world with semi-proprietary software that make it incompatible with each other. A slackware package is a simple tarball that could theoretically be extracted onto any other distro and would propbably work straight away in 99% of cases. So you're not going to find a printed book about Slackware because there's not much more to write than what you find in plain text on the Slackware CD or DVD.

If you don't want to download the DVD visit this page:
http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware-current/
and print these txt files: BOOTING.TXT, ChangeLog.txt, README.TXT , README.initrd , Slackware-HOWTO and UPGRADE.TXT. That's all you need.

Just as an aside, Slackware is actually older than Debian and Red Hat; it is the oldest named distribution.

Edit: The oldest named distro still developed and supported.

I have distro-hopped a number of distros and still prefer Slackware to the rest. It is quite straightforward once you get the hang of it.

Good places to start, in addition to the ones mentioned above, are Alien Bob's wiki:

http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/...ckware:network

and the unofficial official Slackware wiki:

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Slackware-FAQ