The FreeBSD Handbook comes with the full FreeBSD Operating System on CDROM. FreeBSD is a powerful, professional quality UNIX-compatible operating system. This book is the most comprehensive documentation set available from the FreeBSD Documentation Project. It covers installation, day-to-day use of FreeBSD, advanced system administration topics, and much more.

The following changes have been made since the first edition:
- A complete index has been added.
- All ASCII figures have been replaced by graphical diagrams.
- A standard synopsis has been added to each chapter to give a quick summary of what information the chapter contains, and what the reader is expected to know.
- The content has been logically reorganized into three parts:(1)Getting Started, (2)System Administration and (3)Appendices.
- Chapter 2 ("Installing FreeBSD") was completely rewritten with many screenshots added to make it easier for new users to grasp the text.
- Chapter 3 ("Unix Basics") has been expanded to contain additional information about processes, daemons, and signals.
- Chapter 4 ("Installing Applications") has been expanded to contain additional information about binary package management.
- Chapter 5 ("The X Window System") has been completely rewritten with an emphasis on using modern desktop technologies such as KDE and GNOME on XFree86 4.x.
- Chapter 6 ("Configuration and Tuning") is a new chapter for this edition!
- Chapter 7 ("The FreeBSD Booting Process") has been expanded.
- Chapter 12 ("Storage") has been rewritten from what used to be two separate chapters on "Disks" and "Backups". We feel that the topics are easier to comprehend when presented as a single chapter. A section on RAID (both hardware and software) has also been added.
- Chapter 14 ("Sound") is a new chapter for this edition!
- Chapter 17 ("Advanced Networking") has been expanded with many new sections about DNS, connection sharing, and more.
- Chapter 18 ("Electronic Mail") has been expanded to include more information about configuring sendmail.
- Chapter 20 ("Linux Compatibility") has been expanded to include information about installing Oracle and SAP/R3.