[ Thanks to Carlie
for this link. ]
“A certain book company made a fortune off a certain notion.
Namely that people are, at least at some point in their computing
lives, terrified of the machines and willing to be patronised and
almost insulted in terms of their intelligence, in order to have
things explained to them as simply as possible. This company later
found a second sub-set of people; those who DID know something
about computers, in fact some people who were genuinely gifted with
years of experience and skill at a certain skillset, but who, when
faced with a new technology, just wanted to be able to get a
first-grade-reading-level simple text so that they could get their
bearings and some starting point to learn a new skill. It turned
out to be a Very Good Idea.”
“Setting up a Linux Intranet Server” is a neat book, because it
takes as its premise that you wish to set up a Linux intranet
server, but have never done so before. I have seen several books
for the SoHo market on this topic, but these 232 pages of text (a
surprisingly slender volume) are extremely goal-oriented and
written to get you from point A to point B as quickly as possible.
It is written for a more advanced person in the first category, and
definitely the second category of person as described above, but it
doesn’t have a title that suggests the author is clueless, so you
can safely put this on your work bookshelf. Although geared for the
home intranet user, this could be used as a starting point or just
a “rats, I forget the command for doing this” reference for those
brain-fade days for more advanced uses. The requirement for this
book is RedHat. Sorry, this is not a generic book. They do however,
mention others, and explain why they chose RedHat – namely, that
it’s the most popular distro out there with the most support.
Sounds fair. I also have the nitpicky complaint that they make sure
you use NE2000 compatible ethernet cards rather than suggesting all
hardware be checked with the HCL, but again, these are nitpicking
details.”