On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 10:05:53AM -0500, Chris Jenks wrote: > At 09:21 AM 2/20/02, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 09:16:01AM -0500, Chaz Kiser wrote: > > > I'm totally and thoroughly new to Debian, is there any books out there > > that > > > would be appropriate for a Debian newbie, or a Linux newbie in general?
I started off late last year and bought Steve Hunger's DEBIAN GNU/LINUX BIBLE. I had no linux experience whatsoever and so this, apart from this mailing list, was my only lifeline. The books covers everything but not in any great depth. I found it useful as an intoduction to what gives, an overview on the various packages that are available, the various uses to which you can put your linux box. As such it has been helpful and you have to start somewhere. However its lack of depth has been frustrating at times. There is a big gap between the man pages and the book that needs to be addressed. Debian documentation does not bridge the gap for the newbie who needs simple straightforward documentation - and likely for a standalone dialup machine which is the last thing that the documentation covers. My experience has been that to get up and running you need to: investigate the man pages read the documentation in .usr/share/doc bearing in mind that it is not all debian-specific and in any case assumes that you are a unix guru to start off with get some book aimed at the neophyte, probably any is as good as another, so search amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com and get _something_ that is not too advanced and that you can sit up in bed and read. then, the _BEST_ thing going is generally this group. lastly, there are newgroups that cover most of the packages themselves, and these can be more targeted if you cannot get help here. If you have had the benefit of 10 years of M$ self-training, the last thing you need to do is to uninstall/reinstall, this is a hard habit to break and is generally unecessary with linux. It is truly all in the configuration files and the dependancy of one package on another. Go well, it is a steep learning curve but unless you want to be a microserf slave with the latest xp then get going. Ian > > > > > > Any sites? > > > > > > Chaz Kiser > > > > > > > Try > > > > http://www.linuxnewbie.com/ > > http://www.linux.org > > > > There's absolutely loads of stuff on the web. > > > > or, for various books: > > > > http://search.oreilly.com/cgi-bin/search?term=debian&category=All&pref=all > > > > There are plenty of other publishers that print Debian books also. > > > > And this mailing list, ofcourse :-) > > > > Kar. > > Debian Planet (http://www.debianplanet.org/) had a link earlier this week to a > debian user guide. http://teleport.medri.hr/~docelic/debguide/ > > Chris > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -- Ian Balchin http://www.imaginet.co.za/fables This machine is running Debian GNU/Linux ... http://www.debian.org
