Title Linux for Windows NT/2000 Administrators: The Secret Decoder Ring Authors Mark Minasi, Dan York, Craig Hunt Publisher Sybex Publication Date September 22, 2000 ISBN 0-7821-2730-4 Price $39.94 (U.S) Pros Good introduction to working with Linux for experienced network admins. Cons Server setup cookbook (DHCP, DNS, etc) chapter feels rushed. The authors should have taken more time to explain these servers in depth. Verdict Good introduction to get you started with Linux. It assumes some networking background, so it can concentrate on comparing Linux and Windows without wasting time on networking basics.

Those who are familiar with the Windows NT/2000 world will have heard of the lead author for this project. Mark Minasi is a well-known speaker, columnist and author, who is probably best known for the monster books Mastering NT Server and now Mastering Windows 2000 Server. His books typically cover a large amount of material but at the same time have a very conversational tone that allows you to digest the information very quickly. The same is true with this book.

If you are familiar with Windows NT/2000, know nothing about Unix and are looking for something to get you started in the world of Linux, then I can heartily recommend this book. It does exactly what it aims to do in getting you up and running with Linux. For example, listing files with the ls command is discussed over 4 pages of text. It also has one of the most detailed explanations of file and directory permissions in Linux that I have seen, with 10 pages dedicated to this topic. I'd consider myself an intermediate-level Linux person yet in these two sections I found some useful material that I hadn't come across before.

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The book opens with some background info on Linux, the main distributions available, and some typical uses for Linux today. One thing I particularly like about the book is that it doesn't fall into the all too easy trap of calling NT rubbish and Linux great. There are some comparisons made at the conclusion of the book, but these are based on the author's experiences and are very fair in pointing out the strengths and weaknesses today of both platforms.

Next, the book details the concepts you need to know to get Linux installed. Because this is an introductory book, it recommends creating an only swap partition and a single root partition for everything else. This will get you up and running, but when you later build Linux servers for production use you will probably come across recommendations to keep the root file system small and have multiple partitions to hold the user and system files.

Once you have the operating system installed, the book covers some basic commands to get started working with Linux and also the details on working with users and files. This is followed by a discussion about X Windows and the KDE and GNOME graphical desktop environments.

The book also contains some quick cookbook guidelines in setting up Linux to run a DNS server, DHCP server, Web server (using Apache), sendmail server, FTP server, IP router, proxy server or dial-in server. The discussion here isn't to tell you everything you need to know about each topic, but to get you up and running quickly. Unfortunately, the scope of this section combined with the cookbook approach will leave most readers wishing for more details.

Once you have digested the material here you will be well placed to delve further into the world of Linux. This book delivers on its promise and I'd recommend it if you want to start using Linux after having worked with Windows NT/2000.