Comments about oreilly SUSE Linux:

I have recently downloaded SUSE 11.1 and opened this website to buy a book that would help me with this distro. I have read two books by longterm users of other distros. This book is a set of labs that beginners may use to master the basics. It is written in clear unambiguous language. It succeeds in its intended purpose. I hope Chris Brown chooses to extend and revise this book for those of us who wish to use SUSE 11.1

Too often newbies are faced with volumes of conflicting wordy and detailed information written by programmers who should know better. This book covers the general case and where necessary cites these tomes.

Comments about oreilly SUSE Linux:

I have been a Unix guy for several years and now I find myself working with SuSE on a daily basis. This is my first experience working with SuSE and there are some things that are a little different than other OSs.

I don't usually sit down and read a "computer" book from cover to cover although with some of the O'Reilly books ("Mastering Regular Expressions" and "Programming Perl") I have been tempted to. For the most part I use the books that I purchase as refrence material. When I run into a problem or something I have never attempted to do in a specific OS, I will reach for a book or hit google. Over the past week I have grabbed the SuSE Linux book four times and it has helped me once. Two of the other times google had the answer and the other time I found the answer in a RedHat book. Overall I am not very happy with it.

Comments about oreilly SUSE Linux:

I purchased this book as someone that is very familiar with Red Hat/Fedora based operating systems that wanted to get acquainted with how Suse Linux differs and is similar. For the most part the book does a decent job of this. For someone that has been doing linux for quite some time the book may seem very basic at times. It has the sections on using vi and doing a chmod and such. The sections are very well done and explained.

I enjoyed the author's humor for the most part. It keeps things light and moving along so that was good to have in there.

What this book really does is point you where to go in YAST for the most part and how to make full use of it. If you are looking on detailed descriptions on how to administer a Suse Linux server this is not your book. It gives you means to apply your knowledge to Suse Linux but does not necessarily give you said knowledge. I was a little disappointed in the coverage of AppArmor and Xen as those were big reasons I got the book. Each only gets about five or six pages a piece. What was there was good. There just needs to be more.

So I think this book's sweetspot is for people that are quite new to Linux and to Suse as well. If you are in this category then I think this book will be an awesome resource for you. If you are a seasoned vet then you probably get most of what you need online or from within the documentation included in the Suse distro. Overall, pretty well done. More depth is very needed in future versions.