Sunday, January 25, 2009

Unix: Your visual blueprint to the universe of Unix

This is a good book to learn Unix. I tend to be a visual learner and this book has plenty of sceenshots so you could follow along on your workstation. There are some downsides however.

Some of the commands will work on different versions of Unix or "Unix-Like" operating systems such as the many Linux distributions, but it's meant mainly to be followed along by people with Solaris installed. All the screenshots are from the CDE gui.

I don't mind that most, if not all, of the screenshots were from the Solaris operating system but I think the book would've been more effective and been able to reach a larger audience if the book would've focused on the three major operating systems (Solaris, FreeBSD and Linux) and just note the slight differences in the commands where applicable.

This book has a lot of information for the beginner to get up and running with Unix but it's geared towards the novice who has no experience. It would be nice to have one of these visual books that go into more advanced issues such as setting up servers and getting Unix play nice with Microsoft Windows.