Tim Und Struppi. Tim Im Lande Der Sowjets By Hergé

The book provides a great deal of detailed information that is difficult to find other places. For that reason alone, it belongs on any Debian administrators bookshelf. However, it has some problems in the way the author orders things: He’ll often list steps out of order, a cooking parody might read like this:

1. Add ingredient A to the mixture.

2. Add ingredient B.

3. Before you add ingredient B, be sure to let the mixture sit for 10 minutes!

4. By the way, ingredient B should be added before ingredient A for best results.

Here is are two short exerps as examples:

“When init is invoked by the kernel, it reads /etc/inittab and processes the file top to bottom, according to the rules described in inittab (5). Before anything else, init calls /etc/init.d/rcS…”

“…Before iterating through the files, the /etc/default/rcS file is sourced; the file parameterizes some aspects of the boot process. The files in /etc/rcS.d are actually just symlinks to corresponding files in /etc/init.d”

This kind of writing makes it very unclear what the actual process order is, to readers not already familiar with it.

In places he also states, in a ‘by the way’ style, critical information you could have used half a chapter ago. In other places he’ll give you just enough information on a topic to get yourself into trouble only to inform you that “we’ll cover this in a later chapter.” While some of this is to be expected, it happens quite frequently.

The book packs a great deal of useful information, if you have the patience to break it down and re-construct it into a more logical order or are already familiar with the topics being covered. Due to these shortcomings, the book reads extremely slowly; Don’t expect to whip through it in a week.

Forget about debian being hard to install. Pick up a copy of this book, and be on your way to enjoying an operating system that is well built, and orders of magnitude more stable than Windows. In fact, I had zero installation issues with debian — which compared favorably even with my attempts to install Fedora, another popular and well-regarded Linux distribution.

I liked this book because, finally, an author has had the presence of mind to write a book that did not regurgitate Unix commands like ‘ls’ and ‘vi’ for the gazillionth time. The focus is on debian, and only on those parts that make debian unique — the culture of the “debian project”, the notoriety for its alleged difficulty of installation (which I have not experienced), the speed and timeliness of its releases (not!), and homage to that supreme program — apt-get and its close relatives.

Those new to Linux may do well to first read a general Unix/Linux book before delving into this one. They will also be well served by first playing around with Knoppix (…) which is a debian derivative that does not require a hard-disk install. This is especially useful if you are not (yet) prepared to wipe your hard disk clean of Windows.

If you’re not a rank beginner, buy this book, and install Debian 3.1 which is on the accompanying DVD. People wanting a more polished and up-to-date debian might want to try its close cousin, Ubuntu (…). While individual packages might vary somewhat, the concepts presented in this book are applicable across debian and its progeny (including Knoppix and Ubuntu).

In summary, raise the quality of your Linux reading a few notches by purchasing this book, and raise the quality of your personal computer usage by installing debian or its derivatives.

Outdated. I’m sure it was a great read in its day, but it needs to be rewritten and brought up to date.

As a professional system administrator who works with a variety of different linux distributions as well as a the full panopoly of different unix-like operating systems (Solaris, freebsd, linux, etc) I purchased this book to gain a greater insight into the debian specific ways and methods of linux administration. I found that the book does a very good job at describing the methods and motiviations of debianistas but it was, in my opinion, far too concerned with the intricacies of software packaging and distribution. This would be a great book for someone looking to contribute to debian’s development process or software developers looking to target debian based distros directly by ensuring inclusion in the mainstream repositories. If however you want a book with a good insight into how to run/admin debian systems this is not the one…