Linux Pocket Guide by Daniel J. Barrett, O'Reilly

 April 19, 2012

This is one of my favorite book about Linux. Probably is the most favorite one. In the last years I’ve been looking for a book that was like a printed man with some more explanation and a rigid order. This book does all this plus something more (that I’d rather not having).

I really liked the professional to professional user, since otherwise it would be much bigger and boring for pro users. I’ve to say that thanks to this the book is really small.

The books says to cover Fedora but the 99% of the book fits perfectly any other Linux distribution.

The only thing I dislike of this book is the GUI program part, since it seems to be there just to fill unused pages and not really useful.

I really like Mr Barrett writing style. It is full of useful tips, everything is well organized and categorized and really easy to be read. Also I think Mr Barrett have done a great job in writing a short and hand-size book. A lot of “Pocket Guide” are simply huge, while this is exactly the right dimension.

I’ve both the first and the second edition of the book and, I have to admit, it is not really clear to me what they changed. I think they changed only small things since the new edition (2012) speaks about stuff that was current when the first edition become public (2004). Example of this are xv, grip and xmms.

I think this is a really good book mainly for who is studying Linux or for who has already knowledge of it but sometimes (or usually, in my case) forgets the exact syntax or flag of the various CLI tools.

Disclaimer: I received a free electronic copy of this book as part of the O’Reilly Blogger Program