Book review: Red Hat Fedora 5 Unleashed

Your editor recently received a review copy of Red Hat Fedora 5 Unleashed by Paul Hudson and Andrew Hudson, published by Sams. This book comes with a Fedora Core 5 DVD.

The Fedora Project is a fast-paced distribution, and with Fedora Core 6 due out soon, why bother with a book about Fedora Core 5? While it is based on FC5, this book has much useful information that will be applicable to future versions of Fedora, and to other versions of Linux as well. I expect this to be a good reference book long after the included DVD becomes nothing more than drink coaster.

The book strives to be friendly toward new Linux users while presenting information of interest to seasoned users. It contains over a thousand pages divided into seven parts, including the appendix. Part I: Installation and Configuration includes sections on Introducing Fedora, Preparing to Install Fedora, Installing Fedora, Post-Installation Configuration, and First Steps with Fedora. Each section is broken down into sub-sections and contains a reference. Part II covers Desktop Fedora, with a look at the X Window System, window managers and desktops.

Part II also covers RPM, with a nice section covering the rpm command line options, and other methods of installing and removing packages. Once you know how to install packages this section leads you through various applications: email clients, web browsers, IRC and other Internet applications, followed by productivity applications, multimedia applications, graphics, printing and games.

System administration is covered in Part III, with chapters on Managing Users, Automating Tasks, System Resources, Backup and Recovery, Network Connectivity, Remote Access with SSH and Telnet, and a chapter on Xen.

Your editor did not delve deeply into the section on Fedora as a Server, but there is much information there about installing and configuring Apache, with sub-sections for numerous Apache modules. There a brief look at some other web server options as well. There are also chapters on database servers, print and file servers, FTP servers, mail servers, proxy servers, DNS servers, LDAP servers and news servers.

The Programming section looks at Perl, Python, PHP and C/C++ with information about development tools and more. That is followed by a section on housekeeping tasks to keep your Fedora box secure and running at peak efficiency. This section includes a look at many command line tools for examining and managing your system.

So should you buy this book? If you are already running Fedora Core 6, this is not the book for you. If you have a friend that wants to get started on Linux this is a good reference book. Even if you've been running Linux for a while, but want to know more, this is good reference book that will be useful for (at least a few) years to come.

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