I cannot thank and commend the authors enough (John "Maddog" Hall and Paul G. Sery) for their outstanding job in writing Red Hat Linux 9 for Dummies (RHL9D). I have been looking for a quick and comprehensive book for Linux beginners like this one for a long time. This book may say it's for dummies, but after you are done with this, you will feel like a genius. Trust me, you NEED this book like Osama bin Laden needs a good shower and a fat missile to the arse!
I bought the boxed set (personal ed.) of Red Hat 9, and was able to get by with the manual included there for installing Red Hat (since it is pretty easy), but using the Red Hat desktop features is another story because the boxed set does not give you a user's guide (well, you do get a CD ROM that has the user's documentation, but who wants to wade through that??)! RHL9D will expertly guide you through the install and then show you how to "use" Red Hat 9. After all, if you are like me, the very first thing you want to do after installing an OS is to use music CDs (including burning CD's and watching DVD's), MP3's, games, e-mail, and surfing the Internet. RHL9D does it all and fast too!
Coming from the crash-prone, pay-for-everything MS Windows world, I was very skeptical in thinking RHL9D could quickly replace Windows. Red Hat spanked Windows plus a whole lot more (except crash)! Besides including a myriad of "free" utilities and games, you also get OpenOffice that is the equivalent of MS Office, and it can open your MS documents!! I have been waiting for the day when I could lose Windows for Linux. That day is here and I cannot be happier!
Don't worry, you can still use MS Windows because Linux partitions a section of your hard drive for it's own use, thus giving you a dual-boot system (Windows+Linux). I recommend buying a second hard drive and installing Red Hat there, but you don't have to.
In short, Red Hat Linux is all it's cranked up to be and much more-thanks to this book! This book is worth 3x the asking price for saving me the headaches and frustration of wading through nerdy tomes of Unix/Linux jargon offered in other books just to do a simple Linux task via the dreaded command line! It beats the hell of wading through the Linux CD-ROM documentation or "man" pages too!
I cannot praise this book enough. By the way, before you go out and buy Red Hat Linux 9-DON'T! The authors have also included the personal edition here for free (minus the source code CD's which you don't need anyway unless you are a Linux guru, and if that were the case, why would you be interested in this book??). You cannot ask for more than that! Author's, if you're reading this, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!
