Re: Best environment for a newbie

From           wew@yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au (William Edward Webber)
Organization   Comp Sci, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.
Date           30 Jul 1997 23:38:02 GMT
Newsgroups     comp.os.linux.setup,aus.computers.linux,alt.os.linux
Message-ID     <5roj8q$8r$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>
References     1

On 24 Jul 1997 15:25:16 GMT, Nathan D (nathand@avon.net.au_remove_anti-spam) wrote:
: I have recently installed RH v4.2 successfully, configured X and can even
: maintain a PPP connection to my isp.  Now that I am ready to learn more I
: would like to now of the best environment.  Most 'professionals' swear by
: the command line and the 'newer generation' favour X.  I wish to learn
: about the *nix OS etc.
: 
Learn both, they're both useful tools to have.

By the way, if you have a running Linux system but are otherwise fairly new
to Linux/UNIX, then there is a superb new book out (well, it's new in
Australia) by Mark Sobell called 'A Practical Guide to Linux' (Addison
Wesley, sorry, don't know ISBN).  Linus Torvalds has written a foreword for
it, so it's a bit redundant for me to also recommend it!  It assumes very
little prior knowledge to begin with (it starts with how to log in at the
login prompt and the kind of error messages you might get there), but
continues through to cover shell programming, systems administration,
programming utilities, and networking.  I have always been reticent about
recommending Linux to naive users, but now if I can also persuade them to
buy a copy of this book I will do so with confidence.  (I bought a copy for
my wife; with luck I'll finally be able to zap that Windows partition in a
few months' time :-)

William Webber
-- 
William Webber        Multimedia Database Systems, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
wew@yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au                  Food.  Shelter.  Source code.
  "'This tree is certainly good for nothing,' said Tzu Chi. 'This is why it
  has grown so large.  Ah-ha!  This is the sort of uselessness that sages
  live by.'" --- _The_Book_of_Chuang_Tzu_
William Webber        Multimedia Database Systems, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
wew@yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au                  Food.  Shelter.  Source code.
  "'This tree is certainly good for nothing,' said Tzu Chi. 'This is why it
  has grown so large.  Ah-ha!  This is the sort of uselessness that sages
  live by.'" --- _The_Book_of_Chuang_Tzu_