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Linux: Asennuksesta tehokäyttöön
391 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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March 15, 2014
Hello, and welcome to yet another instalment of "WWWWolf explores obsolete computer books"!
For some reason, I never really liked the books published by Suomen ATK-kustannus (SATKU) in the latter half of 1990s that much. They were certainly trying to break some new ground by covering things like Linux when the more serious publishers didn't, and they were a little bit geeky and whimsical - but the whimsicalness always came across as sloppiness rather than deliberate humour. I suppose they were yearning to be the Finnish equivalent of O'Reilly books and failing miserably - O'Reilly books are certainly whimsical but they're also of impeccable quality.
Yeah, no one would mind if this just extended to case sensitivity, but they also do just plain weird word choices ("server" has been consistently translated as "palvelija" while the established term has long been "palvelin", for example), plenty of misspellings, and as you can even see in the example above, a little bit of disorganisation and putting things is strange order. (Whatever happened to non-fiction books presenting more important information first? If I had written that paragraph, I would have put my grammar disclaimer right in first sentence and put examples afterward.) There's also a lot of repetition of same stuff (was it really necessary, for example, to specifically mention that each and every single fvwm module needs to be run from fvwm and can't be run independently, in a section specifically listing every single fvwm module in order?) Also, some of the formatting is a bit strange and probably wastes perfectly good pages.
A lot of this book also seems like it was basically a rephrasing of the existing material. For example, descriptions the X Window System and fvwm consistently refer to authors of the software and the stuff on other platforms besides Linux, which smacks to me that they're pretty much reading the documentation and rephrasing it. The original thought processes of the authors only occasionally make their appearance - for example, some of the examples they give talk about interfacing with OS/2, which sounds like something they personally had to figure out and felt like sharing. (Oh, and it also grates me that they're almost consistently referring to "X Windows". At the time, the matter was laid out in the first entry in the X documentation: It's "X" or "X11" or "X Window System", explicitly and categorically and absolutely definitely not "X Windows".)
But is it any good? I don't think the book was absolutely super-awesome back in 1996 - it covers barely any new ground that is above the electronic documentation that shipped with Linux distributions of the day. I suppose the book would have been good for people who didn't know English or basics of *nix operating systems too well, but even so, I doubt how far a befuddled newbie would have gotten with these instructions. The book explicitly talks about Slackware, and doesn't even bother talking about other distributions. Hell, it doesn't even talk about where to get Slackware. (okay, the answer at the time before broadband was "from your friendly neighbourhood Linux CD-ROM vendor", but hey, would have been nice to tell that to the newbies too...)
All in all, I have to respect the effort and the fact that this sort of books were even made at the time. It's mostly a haphazard collection of information on how to get Linux up and running and maybe do some neat tricks with it, so I suppose it serves as some sort of an encouraging testament of what kind of wealth of software you had at your disposal even way back in 1996, and what sort of awesome shit you could do. But it's not really that good as a reference book or as an in-depth introductory book, unfortunately - the flaws are really obvious.
For some reason, I never really liked the books published by Suomen ATK-kustannus (SATKU) in the latter half of 1990s that much. They were certainly trying to break some new ground by covering things like Linux when the more serious publishers didn't, and they were a little bit geeky and whimsical - but the whimsicalness always came across as sloppiness rather than deliberate humour. I suppose they were yearning to be the Finnish equivalent of O'Reilly books and failing miserably - O'Reilly books are certainly whimsical but they're also of impeccable quality.
In Linux filesystems, file names are case sensitive. This is why many sentences in this book begin with a lower-case letter. ls is a name of a program, and it won't start if you type "Ls". This is why Finnish grammar has been badly abused in this book. (p.1)
Yeah, no one would mind if this just extended to case sensitivity, but they also do just plain weird word choices ("server" has been consistently translated as "palvelija" while the established term has long been "palvelin", for example), plenty of misspellings, and as you can even see in the example above, a little bit of disorganisation and putting things is strange order. (Whatever happened to non-fiction books presenting more important information first? If I had written that paragraph, I would have put my grammar disclaimer right in first sentence and put examples afterward.) There's also a lot of repetition of same stuff (was it really necessary, for example, to specifically mention that each and every single fvwm module needs to be run from fvwm and can't be run independently, in a section specifically listing every single fvwm module in order?) Also, some of the formatting is a bit strange and probably wastes perfectly good pages.
A lot of this book also seems like it was basically a rephrasing of the existing material. For example, descriptions the X Window System and fvwm consistently refer to authors of the software and the stuff on other platforms besides Linux, which smacks to me that they're pretty much reading the documentation and rephrasing it. The original thought processes of the authors only occasionally make their appearance - for example, some of the examples they give talk about interfacing with OS/2, which sounds like something they personally had to figure out and felt like sharing. (Oh, and it also grates me that they're almost consistently referring to "X Windows". At the time, the matter was laid out in the first entry in the X documentation: It's "X" or "X11" or "X Window System", explicitly and categorically and absolutely definitely not "X Windows".)
But is it any good? I don't think the book was absolutely super-awesome back in 1996 - it covers barely any new ground that is above the electronic documentation that shipped with Linux distributions of the day. I suppose the book would have been good for people who didn't know English or basics of *nix operating systems too well, but even so, I doubt how far a befuddled newbie would have gotten with these instructions. The book explicitly talks about Slackware, and doesn't even bother talking about other distributions. Hell, it doesn't even talk about where to get Slackware. (okay, the answer at the time before broadband was "from your friendly neighbourhood Linux CD-ROM vendor", but hey, would have been nice to tell that to the newbies too...)
All in all, I have to respect the effort and the fact that this sort of books were even made at the time. It's mostly a haphazard collection of information on how to get Linux up and running and maybe do some neat tricks with it, so I suppose it serves as some sort of an encouraging testament of what kind of wealth of software you had at your disposal even way back in 1996, and what sort of awesome shit you could do. But it's not really that good as a reference book or as an in-depth introductory book, unfortunately - the flaws are really obvious.
Displaying 1 of 1 review