The Official Ubuntu Book

Be warned: there is an awful lot of self-congratulation and sermon-giving in this book. Ubuntu has a community, it has a strong sense of ethics and there is a Code of Conduct. It's all very admirable, but most of us would be content to read that on a web-site.

What one wants from a book is ease-of-reference to common but tricky situations, where regular "help", "man" and online facilities may be a little difficult to follow.

The book is excellent at the very early stages of installation, though since Ubuntu is famous for its ease-of-installation this is not altogether necessary. There is a rather random chapter on typical problems but it didn't address a problem I had - I had downloaded and apparently installed a program from one of the repositories - easy enough - but it did not appear in any of the regular Ubuntu application menus and it was far from easy to work out where on the computer the package had landed and how to start it up.
My advice is: think carefully about your level of expertise before buying this book and consider which of the other available titles may suit you better.

A good introduction, but lacks depth and power user tips (99/100 people found this helpful)

I have been using Ubuntu for about a year now and when I first started using it I craved for a good book to help me sort out the teething problems. There were none available at the time (as opposed to the huge amount now being published) so I resorted to the Ubuntu forums for help. This book is written by the people who contribute to those forums and answers a lot of the questions I had and many more besides. It also contains an excellent foreword by Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, which explains lots about the philosophy of Ubuntu and has some interesting history of the project.

However, I have discovered that I have actually become quite adept at using Ubuntu without realising it, so this book has been redered almost useless to me. Despite being able to use Ubuntu quite well, I was hoping to get some power user tips such as using the Beryl display manager and configuring the apache web server and using mysql or other database programs. Some of the tips alos refer you to the forums as 'there isn't enough room to cover this in the book', which can be frustrating.

I would recommend this as an essential 'users manual' for anybody who is new to Ubuntu, but would look elsewhere if you are reasonably experienced and looking for advanced techniques.

Benjamin Mako Hill, Corey Burger, Jonathan Jesse, Jono Bacon

Reader Reviews:

Bit preachy, fine for newbies, not for the more experienced (7/8 people found this helpful)

A good introduction, but lacks depth and power user tips (99/100 people found this helpful)

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