Ellen Siever - Linux in a Nutshell

Copyright 2009 Ellen Siever, Stephen Figgins, and Robert Love

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This book is a reference to the most important commands and utilities available on Linux systems.

, explains Linux's strengths and the key aspects of working with Linux, and lays out the scope of this book.

, introduces TCP/IP networking and the Linux commands used for system administration and network management.

, is the core of the book, a reference listing of hundreds of the most important shell commands available on Linux.

, covers the commands used to control booting on Linux, particularly LILO and GRUB.

, explains the apt series of commands that manage updating and installation on Debian, and the RPM system and yum used by Red Hat/Fedora, Novell/SUSE, and several other distributions of Linux.

, documents Bash, the default command-line interpreter on Linux.

, introduces regular expressions and explains how different tools interpret these powerful tools for searching and text processing.

, provides reference information on Emacs, a text editor and full-featured development environment.

, describes the classic vi editor that is the most popular text-manipulation tool on Linux.

, describes this "stream editor" that is useful for processing files in standardized ways.

, documents another valuable tool for processing text files, the GNU version of awk that is the default on Linux systems.

, provides the background for understanding Subversion and Git, which are valuable tools for tracking changes to files and projects, and are discussed in the following two chapters.

, provides a description of a popular source code management and version-control tool.

, describes a distributed version control system with many advanced features including the ability to access project history even when not connected to a central server.

, describes virtualization on Linux, which allows multiple virtual servers to run on a single physical server. Tools covered include Xen, KVM, the libvirt API, and the VMware command-line interface.

This book doesn't tell you how to install and get up to speed on a Linux system. For that, you'll probably want O'Reilly's Running Linux , by Matthias Kalle Dahlheimer and Matt Welsh, an in-depth guide suitable for all major distributions. For networking information, check out Linux Network Administrator's Guide by Tony Bautts et al. (O'Reilly). If you're new to Linux/Unix concepts, O'Reilly's Learning the Unix Operating System , by Jerry Peek et al., provides introductory information. In addition to these and other Linux titles, O'Reilly's wide range of Unix, X, web-related, and scripting and programming language titles may also be of interest.