Book Review: How Linux Works 2

I received a review copy of How Linux Works 2, by Brian Ward, from the lovely folks at No Starch Press (my publisher) late last year. Inexcusably, it’s taken me until now to put together a proper review; here it is, with profuse apologies for the delay!

How Linux Works 2 is a very nice technical read. I’ve been a user and administrator of Linux systems for over a decade now, and can safely say I learned a lot of new stuff from both angles. Newer users will probably get even more from it – although absolute beginners with less of a technical bent might be better off looking elsewhere.

The book fills something of a niche; it’s not a standard manual-type offering, nor is it a technical system reference. It’s more impressionistic than either of those, written as a sort of overview of the organisation and concepts that go into a generic Linux system, although with specific details scattered throughout that really get into the nuts and bolts of things. If you’re looking for “how-to”-type instructions, you’re unlikely to find everything you need here, and it isn’t a comprehensive reference guide either. But if you’re technically-minded and want to understand the essentials of how most Linux distros work in considerable (but not absolute) depth, with a bit of getting your hands dirty, then it’s a great book to have on your shelf.

Various technical concepts are covered ably and concisely, and was I left with a much better feeling for more mysterious Linux components – like the networking subsystem – than I had before. There are practical details here as well though, and you’ll find brief, high-level overviews of a number of useful commands and utilities that are sufficient to give a flavour for what they’re good for without getting too caught up in the (often idiosyncratic) specifics of their usage.

That said, the author does sometimes slip into “how-to” mode, giving more details about how to use certain tools. While this is fine in moderation, the choice of digression is sometimes unusual – for example, file sharing with Samba is awarded a whole six pages (and ten subsections) of usage-specifics, while the arguably more fundamental CUPS printing subsystem has to make do with less than 2 pages. The discussion of SSH is also quite limited, despite the importance of this tool from both the user’s and administrator’s perspective, and desktop environments probably could have done with a bit more than a brief single-chapter overview. Still, this book really isn’t intended as a manual, and the author has done well not to stray too far in this direction.

A common difficulty for Linux books is the great deal of variation between distros. Authors often struggle with where to draw the line between complete (but superficial) distro-agnostic generality and more useful, but audience-limiting, distro specifics. How Linux Works succeeds admirably in walking this tightrope, providing sufficient detail to be useful to users of more or less any Linux system without repeatedly dropping into tiresome list-like “distro by distro” discussions. This isn’t always successful – the preponderance of init systems in modern distros has necessitated a long and somewhat dull enumeration of three of the most common options, for example – but HLW2 does much better at handling this than most books I’ve seen. The upshot is that the writing is fluid and interesting for the most part, without too many of the “painful but necessary” digressions that plague technical writing.

Overall, this book is an enjoyable and informative read for anyone interested in, well, how Linux works! You’ll get an essential understanding of what’s going on under the hood without getting bogged down in minutiae – making this a very refreshing (and wholly recommended) addition to the Linux literature.

You can find a sample chapter and table of contents/index on the No Starch website.