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Spring Into Linux(R) Review by Thomas Duff
Focused and concise book to get you up to speed quickly...
There's obviously no lack of books to help you learn Linux. One of the latest entries into the arena is Spring Into Linux by Janet Valade. If your goal is to get up and running quickly, this book will help...
Contents: Understanding Open Source Software; Choosing a Linux Distribution; Getting Ready to Install Linux; Installation; Interacting with Linux; Using Your Desktop; Using the Command Line; Linux Accounts; File Management; Applications and Programs; Word Processing; Spreadsheets; Graphics; Printing; The Internet; Multimedia; Email, Messaging, and News; Editing Text Files; Shell Scripts; Regular Expressions; Command Reference; Index
As with most successful books, this one has a particular style that helps to maintain the focus on quickly getting up to speed. Each chapter consists of "chunks", which are one to two pages of material covering a specific topic or skill. Each chunk starts at the top of the page, so it's pretty easy to find what you're looking for. Also, the chunk titles are also listed in the table of contents, so finding the topic for reference purposes is pretty easy. Due to the space constraints for each topic, there is a higher ratio of text to pictures than you'll find in a lot of other books. So if you want a lot of step-by-step pictures, you might not do too well here...
The distribution coverage, while not exhaustively complete, does hit many of the major ones... Fedora, Mandrake, and SuSE. Again, this will not give you a complete reference to absolutely every option in your distribution of choice, but that's not the purpose of this book. It's enough to get you up and running. From there you can learn more of the details over time. There's a good mix of command line to desktop GUI material here, so you should learn enough in the way of skills to allow you to switch back and forth when necessary. And in addition to the OS material, Valade also covers some of the more significant desktop applications that are needed by nearly every computer user. Applications such as OpenOffice and GIMP will allow you to be as productive on the Linux desktop as you are in a Windows environment.
For the right audience, this is a book I'd definitely recommend. It's focused, concise, and it will get you active with the software in short order...