Red Hat Linux 9 Professional Secrets

Red Hat Linux 8 Server

Linux Web

Red Hat Linux Internet Server

Format: Paperback
Author: Paul G. Sery
ReleaseDate: 29 November, 2002
Publisher: Red Hat
Rating:

this is only a walk-through, not really a content based book
I was expecting a more detailed technical explaination of the topic, but instead i was faced to extensive examples that made no sense to help with learning. This is not a detailed narrative or technical language book. The book uses examples that were not well introduced, such as the network topology of the examples, server names, etc. . . there is no reference or apendix that remembers what is the topology of each example, so if you cannot use the book as just a reference as you lose track of what the examples are about. For this type of topic a more graphic book is important. To conclude, I believe the book has some good content but it was poorly structured and written, so it vanishes among its pages. I gave up of trying to learn from this book.

Is there any page without an error?????
. The book is good, but like I said before is there any page without an error????? There is no published errata for the book too!!!.

Technical Errors Found
But, once a book as adopted this philosophy, I expect that they provide correct code, or else the value significantly is diminished. I like the book's "get right to work" attitude, providing code that implements configurations that are not academic, but actually useful.

An example of this is found in Chapter 4, "Building a Firewall" in which firewall code is provided. On p. 84 (and 89-90), one sees code such as:

iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p -s $PRIV -j ACCEPT

The problem is that the environment variable PRIV has not been defined in the book (and never is). This is a "show stopper" error in the book for us. I looked to the publisher's website, wiley. com, for errata but found no support for the book. I contacted Wiley by e-mail and they forwarded us an unpublished URL:

[website]

Unfortunately, the updates (errata) section is empty and the downloads section not only has the above error in the online version of the firewall rules collection, but has additional variables that are referenced without being defined (SWCP, SRC, SON).

These types of errors make me wonder if the code in the book was properly tested. . . and worse, increase my concern that the code in the book in other areas will prove to be unreliable.

The errors in the book, compounded by poor website support, compel me to reduce the rating of this book to only 3 stars.