Linux Cookbook by Carla Schroder

First off, this book focuses on RPM-based and Debian-based distributions. This doesnt, by any means, make it useless for those that don't, but some of the "recipes" are specific to either of these.

I am not even sure where to begin with my praise of this book, it's got over a dozen sticky notes marking key sections that I find useful. I guess I can start by saying that the author is deeply involved with doing system administration via the command line, which is fantastic news for me! There are plenty of decent GUI tools out there, but when x dies and you're stuck at a command line, using them isn't an option. I feel that if you don't have the knowledge to fix things yourself, at least have a book by your side that offers you some tips, and that is what this book is for. And some people just prefer doing administration via the command line all the time, myself included.

The time I most often pull out this book, however, is not when I run into a problem, but when I'm setting up a new system. I don't reinstall often, but when I do there are little things that I often forget how to do, since I do them so infrequently. Things like setting up ssh keys, setting up users and groups, setting up NTP, setting up new fstab

I also found this book useful when I wanted a quick and clean explaination of different filesystems and more information about command line options for CD burning. Also I got some good ideas for backups and local file transfer methods from the chapter on Backup and Recover.

Best of all, this book contains a great chapter on kernels. So many books and online how-tos I've seen give you the steps of compiling a kernel, but don't explain what is going on. This always left me feeling like I had no clue what I was doing, and if there was an error I'd have no idea where I'd begin fixing it, since I didn't really know what "make mrproper," for instance, means (side note, she even quickly explains "according to Linux lore" the reasoning behind the name Mr. Proper, a delightful bit of trivia). Now that I've read this chapter on kernels I'm much more comfortable recompiling and customizing my own. She also talks about patching a kernel, which is something I had trouble with for a while, since so much documentation I found and people I asked said "just use patch" which meant nothing to me.

An excellent book for the linux user who wants to move away from the GUI and learn more about core, command-line administration.

Perl Core Language: Little Black Book by Steven Steven Holzner, Keith Weiskamp (Editor)

I've been using Perl for over 3 years now, but am always interested in Perl reference books that can make learning more easier. I wasn't sure how much I'd like this book, since most of my perl books are the standard blue O'Reilly ones, but I was plesantly surprised.

This is probably the most well laid out perl reference book I've ever used, and at just under 500 pages "Little" might be a bit inaccurate of a title (there is a bigger one Perl Black Book which, at 1296 pages, does make this book look small). This book is just packed with useful information. When I first got it I didn't have a lot of time to dive into it, so on evenings when I was feeling adventurous I'd just open to a random page and see what I could learn. It was always interesting!

The book starts out with some Perl basics, but I wouldn't recommend this to someone new to programming, it's aimed at intermediate to advanced Perl programmers. The section on Regular Expressions is excellent, I've learned so much from it. The book even touches upon Perl CGI, modules, and using Perl with XML.

Great all-around reference book, it's now sitting on the "most used" shelf next to my computer.