This book was a disappointment. It contains more pages of screenshots than text, and does not explain anything in any great detail. Most of the descriptions fall into the "push this button" category: Push This Button, then That Button, then That Button and it'll work - except for when it doesn't work.
The author spends a lot of time trying to be cute (and it fails). Even the title shows this: the subtitle "Tricks for Old Dogs, New Dogs and Hot Dogs with Open Systems" is too cute for words (besides being a little misleading). There is no discussion of the various "Open Systems" (such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Slackware, SUSE, Debian - or other non-Linux, non-UNIX systems).
Chapter 2 ("Breaking into OpenVMS and Linux") is totally out of place: it's in the wrong order, in the wrong book, et al. In chapter 6 ("Using E-mail with OpenVMS and Linux"), three pages are spent describing "the ol' days" of email - then almost 40 pages of screen shots. Chapter 7 ("SMB for OpenVMS and Linux") is two pages text, and 36 pages of screen shots. Chapter 8 ("Apache VMS and Linux Style") is 3 pages text and 26 pages of screen shots.
All of the chapters appear to share a single approach: here is product 1 (on OpenVMS) and product 2 (on Linux): here is how you set this product up on OpenVMS, and here is how you set up that product up on Red Hat Linux 7.3 (or whatever specific version). There is no mention of SUSE, or any other variant of Linux that can be found.
One interesting (and obvious!) lack is the lack of discussion of DECNET implementation on Linux. The DECNET project for Linux is never mentioned anywhere.
The index is 7 pages long - not very long at all.
The book is also somewhat aged; no mentions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora for example. The version of Red Hat used was Red Hat Linux 7.3, and the version of OpenVMS was OpenVMS 7.3-1. At least he said so; many books don't have the guts to mention it, or hide it somewhere deep in the bowels of the book (sometimes showing it by accident!).
Too bad. There is a real spot for a good detailed explanatory reference guide of the ways of getting Linux (not Red Hat Linux) to talk with OpenVMS.
