LincolnBlogs

  Sometimes timing ius everything. At least it was fortuitous this time for me. Due to some unforeseen circumstances, I had been sitting on this review for a little while. There has been a lot of bad news going around lately so It was really a great pick me up to see they had used one of my quotes in the book. That’s always a nice thing 😉

The rest of the book came with surprisingly good timing as well. You see, it just so happens that I have been working lately at readying my work infrastructure for the additional release of RHEL 7. This book helps to take a lot of pain out of that new release by going over what I believe are the important changes / additions a person really should know.

Like Sobells other books, he takes great pains to guide you through a variety of topics that generally amount to a good basic understanding of the operating system. You learn about the desktop and the shell and how to set up and run some common services. Much of it is updated information from his previous versions of this book as you would expect. Where it strays are the things I just happened to be particularly interested in on this go around. The biggest changes to quickly get a hold of with the new RHEL 7 stuff, as far as I am concerned, is the replacement of MySQL with MariaDB, the new firewalld daemon and the service to systemctl transition. Mark not only mentions all these but does a good job at general instruction for their use. He also adds a new chapter dealing with virtualization, covering not only KVM but also VMware and Cloud Computing, which, of course are going to be good ways for you to set up those practice VMs you are going to want to play with.

Sobell is one of those authors that, as a techie guy, I am always excited to read and review, and this time is no exception. This book, A Practical Guide to Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Seventh Edition, is going to be another on my “recommend to read” list and a constant traveler with me for quite a while. For $60 US cover price ($33 right now on Amazon) you get not only this weighty volume of information, but a nice Fedora 19 DVD and 45 days free access to the online edition of the book as well (to help keep your work bag more manageable 😉 Another keeper from Mark Sobell and Prentice Hall. Get your copy today!