Review "Fedora Unleashed 2008 Edition" ISBN-13: 978-0-672-32977-7

[Alex Hewitt]

This book, one of a series of "Unleashed" books published by SAMS is a 
topical work designed to instruct intermediate to advanced users of 
RedHat's Fedora distribution of Linux. This edition covers Fedora 
version 8 and includes a DVD with the software. It also states that if 
the book is registered in 2008, a free Fedora version 9 DVD will be sent 
to the owner provided the owner registers the book at the publisher's 
web site. My reading of the material suggests that the book should have 
targeted beginner to intermediate users. The authors attempt to cover a 
lot of ground and there is a fair bit of historical asides to keep up 
interest.

I have purchased "Unleashed" books before but noted that they suffered 
from several problems. One problem that makes the book much less useful 
as a reference is relatively poor indexing. To cite one example, if you 
look up ntfs in the index you will find minimally useful references that 
lead you to pages in the book that simply inform the reader that ntfs is 
a file system designed and released by the Microsoft corporation. Much 
earlier in the book in the "How to install" section the authors mention 
that Windows users will already have at least one ntfs partition on 
their computers and that the ntfs partition will need to be re-sized in 
order to install Fedora. Unfortunately quite a bit of vital information 
will either not be present or will be difficult to find due to poor 
indexing.

An advanced book on Fedora would likely have a detailed description of 
RAID technology. Although on page 277 of the book the authors state that 
more information will be available in chapter 35, no such information 
was present leading me to think that the editing of this book left a lot 
to be desired.

Still, despite the shortcomings the authors have written a book that 
most readers should find easy to absorb. They try hard to be thorough 
and have certainly delivered lot's of useful information. Delivering 
this much material would seem to be a Herculean task.

This book would be useful for someone who wants to cover Fedora's 
features but it is less useful as a reference book. I'm not sure how 
useful the "Programming Linux" part of the book would be to users since 
I think this is better covered in separate material.