I admit, I was excited to read this.  While I had some concerns about the concept of “Wikinomics”, this factored greatly into my interest in reading. Not at all surprisingly, two things were immediately unsettling early in the book.

First, the language frequently lapses into nebulous hype, the likes of which I’m accustomed hearing on late night infomercials. It sounded like the authors were trying to sell me rather than tell me about a concept, or that their own knowledge of the subject was speculative, not authoritative.

Second, in my opinion, they seem to have a seriously misguided interpretation of the nature of open collaboration in the Web X.x sphere. Specifically, they freely associate projects that operate on the basis of extrinsic motivation with those harnessing intrinsic motivation. The tactics used by Goldcorp and Proctor and Gamble to attract prospectors and mercenaries are nothing akin to the lures that propelled Linux and Wikipedia from laudable but naive ideas (at the time of inception) to fully-realized icons of mass collaboration.

Distributing formerly closed data to the public and allowing individuals to offer competing solutions in return for money is still the capitalist model of old, even if wikis and other Web X.x technologies are used in the process. The company and participant motives are different. Work among participants is adversarial, not cooperative; and for individual gain, not the common good.  And the work is ultimately owned by the company.  It profits by selling the solution back to the public.  In “Web 2.0″ parlance, this is called crowdsourcing:

The text’s airy language — powerfully positive but often non-specific — seems to be the adhesive tape the authors used to hold these two dichotomous motivational halves together into a unified whole, but they are not two approaches to mass “collaboration”.

While I have some fundamental disagreements with their premise, overall I found the book a worthwhile read.  It’s preferable, if not absolutely essential, to be regularly exposed to ideas that challenge your own, and this book was provocative at times.  In other chapters it provided good conceptual summaries and a number of interesting histories, not all of which I was previously aware.

While few of us call ourselves chefs, we are all able to open a cookbook, locate a recipe, follow simple instructions, and get acceptable results – unless we’re trying to cook lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce served in a Provençal manner with shallots and aubergines, garnished with truffle pâté, brandy, with a fried egg on top and SPAM ™ right off the bat. Master sugar cookies first. Start with a simple recipe, then try something else. The process of incremental building will make you a more competent and confident user with each step.

This is the premise for O’Reilly’s Cookbook Series. As the author Carla Schroder, writes: the book is “light on theory and heavy on how-to-make-this-go.” Early recipe groups are the simplest – how to find and use documentation or how to use package management software. In later chapters, you’ll learn how to run Apache, share files and printers with Samba, manage a Domain Name Sever, print, configure network time, compile from source code, detect hardware, manage users and groups, record CD/DVDs, customize kernels, do system rescue and recovery, and more…

For me, the greatest benefit of this book is that it isn’t necessary to read this book from cover to cover to benefit from it (though some recipes do depend on knowledge gained in prior recipes). Simply flip to the chapter that contains a topic that concerns you, and look for the problem you are having – chances are, it’s there (and there may be additional projects that you thought were out of your grasp, but look simple once the steps are laid out for you). Within each chapter, typical tasks are covered using a standard format: Problem, Solution, Discussion, and See Also (references to other related recipes). For example, Recipe 23.23 — “Sharing Windows Printers with Linux” details commands to enter and files to edit on each box in order to print from your Linux computer to the printer on a Windows computer. Recipe 19.2 “Building A Local Time Server” describes how to synchronize one of your computers with a public time server, while recipe 19.3 explains how to synchronize other local machines on a LAN with the local time server.

This is indeed a useful, practical guide for tweaking your Linux box, and an excellent tool for those wishing to become more technically savvy without having to wade through technical language.

Linux Cookbook @ oreilly.com

When I decided to get serious about actually learning Linux (and it’s an ongoing process), I read a stack of books (literally) of varying levels of difficulty. Linux for Dummies (Dee-Ann LeBlanc), Tuning and Customizing a Linux System (Daniel L. Morrill), and Peter Norton’s Complete Guide to Linux, to name a few. They were all useful to some degree, but all were ultimately returned to the library. Except one, anyway.

Linux in a Nutshell (by Ellen Siever, Stephen Figgins, & Aaron Weber; published by O’Reilly) is on perpetual loan from my local library. Whenever it’s due for return, I renew it, and if someone else has the audacity to request it from me, I request to have it next after them. Given enough time, I’m optimistic that the library will eventually see the futility of listing this book as ‘available’ in their catalog and either order additional copies, or just give me this one.

The primary appeal of this book for me is as a command reference. Over half the book is dedicated to an alphabetical listing of commands, along with descriptions of usage, options available, and descriptions of the options as well. Not being a fan of manpages, I find it enormously handy to have a hard copy of commands I am unfamiliar with, or have forgotten the options for. Some of the more important commands even rate dedicated chapters, including apt and rpm (package mangers), bash and tcsh (shells), and sed, vi, and emacs (editors; although emacs is much, much more). With these added sections, the command portion of the book swells to over 80%, making it as much the “Encyclopedia of Linux Commands” as “Linux in a Nutshell”.

The rest of the book, while still useful, may not elicit the reading and re-reading that the command sections do, and for some average users the remainder of the book may be beyond their scope. For example, non-programmers may see fit to skip the chapters on gawk, RCS and CVS completely. Newbies may find the chapters on KDE, Gnome and fvwm2 interesting, but everyday users of a GUI may find them extraneous, given the intuitive operation of current versions of the software. I will say that the inclusion of LILO and GRUB are essential, though you may be more inclined to read up on them during an emergency, rather than in preparation of one. Read them before.

While the publication of this review runs the risk of creating additional competition over my beloved book, it certainly deserves a positive review, as has earned the competition to read it. It’s 944 pages that you will certainly dog-ear over years of use and enjoyment. Save yourself (and me) the trouble and just buy your own copy.

Buy ‘Linux in a Nutshell’ (O’Reilly)