Updates
Latest Tweet
What's New?
Check out for latest innovation, a computer based training video collection
Like this Page
Linux Power Tools Review by Henry E. Alubowicz
For the experienced novice who is ready for more.
"Linux Power Tools" is NOT like "Unix Power Tools" published by O'Reilly. If you were expecting the same, you'll
be disappointed. Otherwise this is a good general Linux book, which takes it up a notch. To quote the author,
Rodrick W. Smith in his intro, "This book is written for experienced Linux or Unix users who want to take their
general knowledge of Linux to the next level." The author does a good job on focusing on this target and still
keeping the book to around 600 pages.Author covers the five Linux distros; Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, Debian and Slackware on the Intel 32-bit platform.
If you are a Linux novice who wants to move up from Linux intro books and/or plan to use the five covered Linux
distros, then this is a good book for you. If you're focusing on one single specific Linux distro, you might be
better off settling on another book covering just that distribution.If you've plenty of Unix/Linux experience you may want to thumb through this book before deciding to buy it.
Don't expect any subject to be covered real deep. Author covers the defaults, the easy setups, and the common
setups. Many of the chapters (topics) are books unto themselves. The author starts many of his chapters with
this same caveat. If you need more depth on a specific subject, the author references some URIs (URLs) and
some other titles to consult.Rodrick W. Smith, has written a number of other good books ("Linux Hardware Book" & "The Multi-Boot Configuration
Handbook"). This one is also well written. I especially like the opinions he's expresses on various applications
and releases. I wish he would have included more. Examples are good. More examples would have been nice.
But I suspect it was another trade-off in keeping the number of pages down. Personally I found the info on USB,
scanners, audio and kernel hacking to be useful to me.