FreeBSD weakness.

[Tom McLaughlin]

On Sat, 2004-06-19 at 14:23, Lloyd Hayes wrote:
> I finally decided that I needed to get more information on FreeBSD. I 
> got it up and running, then I did something else and I start getting 
> errors again....
> 
> So I just ordered 3 books on FreeBSD from Amazon. In most of the reviews 
> posted there about the books, people were complaining about weak 
> documentation, too much information about things that they were not 
> interested in, and errors in the in the books which seems to be the most 
> common complaint. In my very short recent history with FreeBSD, I've 
> formed the opinion that documenting FreeBSD is it's greatest weakness. 
> FreeBSD needs someone who can actually type to write a good book for 
> beginners who have never seen UNIX code. A book is needed with examples 
> that actually WORK! Examples that are explained in plain English. There 
> seems to be very few books on FreeBSD around.

Of the free OSs I think the different BSDs tend to be the better
documented.  Along with the man pages (don't short them, some can be
obtuse at times but overall they give me what I need most of the time),
this has served as my primary source of documentation for FreeBSD:

http://www.freebsd.org/docs.html

Book wise, there are more on Linux.  This is starting to change though
which is great.  I think what you are looking for isn't necessarilly a
FreeBSD specific book, though having at least one is great, but a
general unix primer to help you get more familiar with unix concepts.  I
remember when I started toying around with linux and stared at the
command line not knowing what to do.  I had "Running Linux" back then
which had a great intro to such things like file permissions,
users/groups, and navigating around the system.

Since I really can't from looking at my bookshelf, can anyone recommend
a book with a few good chapters on general unix concepts to get a
completely green user familiar and comfortable with "the way things are
done"?  Comming from $OTHER_OS to unix can be daunting but once you get
the basics down, you start to complain that $OTHER_OS is too hard to do
what you want.  :)

Tom

> I have decided that it is a very good operating system which I need to 
> learn more about. And yes, I have all of the links that everyone sent 
> me. Thanks for all of the info.