Linux Books

I would rate myself as a little above a newbie with linux. I keep reading all these posting and notice that some of you guys really know your **** about the OS. Is there any good books about the inner workings of Linux? Because most of the books i look at end up giving me tutorials on how to run its applications like Emacs and Vi and stuff like that which i'm not interesting in.
Anyone got any good suggestions?

Yes of course, the best book of knownledge is the internet and most forums on it.

Sorry I never read any book about Linux. I learned everything by reading the HOW-TOs, man pages and other tutorials. Otherwise I believe that the O'Reilly books are quit good.

sure - any of the O'reilly publications. 'Linux In A Nutshell' is quite good. They even have books on 'sed & awk', 'Learning the korn shell', 'Learning the bash shell' and they also have some books on the linux kernel and I seem to remember seeing a kernel hacker's guide on the list too.

O'Reilly tend to be the authority wrt computing reference books

riv is also right in pointing you to the HOWTOS - they usually solve any problem you might have. man pages can be a bit terse for a newbie

christo

>applications like Emacs and Vi and stuff like that which i'm not interesting in.

What are you interested in? riv suggested HOWTOs is a good one, although they are sometimes a bit out of date and can be hard to grasp.

im interested in finding out about configuration files and all that, at the moment the only way i can install a printer is to go and use the update tool with mandrake, i want to be able to know enough not to have to do that kind of thing becuase they differ from distro to distro

General online docs and HOWTOs won't help you to solve the printing problem with mandrake. You need to upgrade your drivers then follow its instructions.

>im interested in finding out about configuration files and all that

there is an ibm paper with some good references in it, you may want to have a look :

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwor...ml?dwzone=linux

Somehow, though, your only real hope of learning about Linux and it's workings is through playing with it. You could buy a book, but it's not something you can read and remember like a novel... You just need to play, play, play. Places like Devshed are a perfect place to come when you get stuck, or if you're not sure where to go with something. You also mention that using mandrake, you are just using a GUI to achieve tasks, without understanding what is going on underneath... I guess one option is to change to a less user-friendly distro, or to try and push yourself to work in the console. UNIX uses lots of flat text files for configuration, so you can usually tweak your network settings, or change your keyboard just by editing a line of text somewhere. The config files are often referred to in man pages and most distros hint at what's going on under their interfaces..

Blimey, I'm writing a theseis here! That's what happens when you're too sick to go into work and too bored to just lie in bed without dragging a laptop in with you But anyway, my advice is to buy a good book for reference, possibly to change distro and also be prepared to really break something - it's at these times of crisis that you really get to understand stuff.

christo

Although i use Mandrake, i also use WindowMaker, i dont install any KDE or Gnome GUI features, im quite comfortable with the command line as i know how to use it quite well, my big problem half the time is finding information when i get stuck.....
however, i am making my way up the learning curve and i am doing a hell of a lot better than i was when i first installed it 6 months ago, back then if something minor went wrong, i just reinstalled the entire system , not now though

Trust me, there is a HOWTO for almost any task!