2004.10_Books-Learning Red Hat, Wardriving, and a Practical Guide to Red Hat.pdf

REVIEWS

Books

Book Reviews

A Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux: Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (2nd Edition)

Mark Sobell is one of my favorite

authors. His “A Practical Guide to Linux”

has remained on my bookshelf for many

years and is still finding plenty of use.

His latest book is along the same themes,

but much more

current. “A Practi-

cal Guide to Red

Hat Linux” natu-

rally focuses on

both Fedora (Core

2) and Red Hat

Enterprise Linux

(version 3), but like

previous guide to

the Unix System,

nearly all of the

information can be

carried over to

other distributions.

This is not a book for late night read-

ing. At 1200 pages this paperback is

definitely a heavy tome. The weight

alone should give an indication of the

broad range of topics covered. Beginners

are catered for, as the opening chapters

describe some of the history including

the GNU ideals, before going on to instal-

lation. The detail is as I have come to

expect from Sobell, amazing.

Along the way he gives refer-

ences to where you can find

more about each topic and

subject.

Any intermediate reader

will be delighted as he

describes just about every

tool and utility available on

the accompanying 4 CDs,

which include Fedora. Where

differences do occur between

Red Hat Enterprise and

Fedora, the book shows both

options so you can easily follow it as a

tutorial.

The style and tone of the book keep it

from being a dry dusty technical manual,

and turn it into something readable. If

you are unsure on an admin matter, then

this will be the first book you reach for

with all the topics you find yourself hav-

ing to deal with on a regular basis such

as: Samba, NIS, NFS, Apache, Firewalls

with IPtables, DHCP, Scripting and

updating.

Admins will be left with the question

“Is it worth buying, or should I stick

with the previous Sobell reference

book?” The answer is simple. Buy this

book. It is not just a rewrite of previous

works. Sobell has been very busy and it

is crammed with enough extra informa-

tion to make this a good investment.

As usual the appendices and index do

the book justice and help to explain any

jargon that you may come across. Or do

you know how much a sextillion is?

■

Mark G Sobell

1,136 pages

Prentice Hall Ptr, 0-13147-024-8

£39.99, US$ 49.99, EUR 45.90

Learning Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora, 4th Edition

I like O’Reilly books. They are the stan-

dard that other publishers should aim

for. Unfortunately, they are not all per-

fect. Maybe it is because this book was

read at the same time as the Sobell book.

Maybe it was because it costs $39.99 and

is less than 350 pages, or that (because it

is a few months old) it is already show-

ing its age as it only has Core 1 coverage,

although just about any text suffers from

this problem of constant releases.

Either way, it is not in the same league

in the information it gives, or value for

money, compared to Sobell.

The book is, as to be expected, a good

guide to Red Hat’s distribution. It

explains in enough detail for any novice

to be able to set up and configure a Red

Hat box and install packages with the

RPM tools.

The subtitle of the book is “Deploying

office productivity applications & soft-

ware development environments”. For

this we can read – installing OpenOf-

fice.org and Evolution for office tasks

and using bash and nano for software

development.

The book is clear and not patronizing

as so often is the case for introduction

and installation manuals. Little if any

mention is made of RH Enterprise as the

book focuses on Fedora. This is not too

worrying for most

admins who know

that the two have

only just split with

little, if any diver-

gence, but does

seem a little harsh

on those looking

for RH Enterprise

help who chance

upon the book.

On the plus

side, the book is

easy to under-

stand, with many screenshots, and will

show any novice that Linux is straight-

forward and easy to use if you are

methodical. No prior knowledge of

Linux is assumed, but the reader is

expected to have some usage of modern

graphical computer systems. The chapter

on Bash is useful in showing how simple

commands can be scripted together to

generate powerful functions,

but all in all it is only a small

taster of what is available.

Ideal for those who want to

try Linux, but in such a satu-

rated sector of publishing it is

hard to see how O’Reilly can

really make a mark with this

book.

■

Bill McCarty

352 pages

O’Reilly, 0-596-00589-X

£28.50, US$ 39.99, EUR 37.50

October 2003

www.linux-magazine.com

Books

REVIEWS

WarDriving – Drive, Detect, Defend: A Guide to Wireless Security

WarDriving is not a crime. This is one of

the main messages that the principle

author of this book, Chris Hurley, is keen

to put across. He should know, because

he was there. Chris (aka Roamer) was

behind the first DefCon WarDriving Con-

test in 2002 and was one of the guys

behind the first World Wide WarDrive.

Is this a book for Linux users? Yes, and

no. It provides a solid introduction to the

subject of WarDriving, explaining the

basic hardware requirements and going

into detail on choosing and configuring

wireless LAN cards, the various types of

antenna, and the parts needed to con-

nect the whole thing up to provide a

workable WarDriving toolkit. It explains

the need to avoid associating with other

people’s networks, or – heaven forbid –

gatecrashing and exploiting other peo-

ple’s resources. It even tells you to keep

to the speed limit while WarDriving.

Although this may come as a shock to

some people, Linux is not the only major

than compensate by going into detail on

basic and advanced wireless security.

To m y mind, the

book really takes off

when “Roamer” revis-

its his old haunts,

explaining how every-

thing started at

DefCon 10, providing

humorous insights for

those who may not

have heard of

WarDriving. And in

the end, it was those

descriptions of the

early days that con-

vinced me that this

was a good buy.

■

Chris Hurley, Frank Thornton,

Michael Puchol

495 pages

Syngress Media, 1-931836-03-5

£33.95, US$ 49.95, EUR 46.90

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operating system on today’s markets.

The authors dabble with the arcane art

of “Installing Wireless

Cards and Programs on

Windows”; definitely not

the kind of thing that

your average Linux geek

will appreciate. Things

heat up when they install

wireless cards on Red

Hat and Fedora, putting

cards into monitor mode,

and installing Kismet.

No book is perfect. I

was left wondering who

would type in the pages

of Perl code when you

can download similar off the Web. But

the authors do have a homepage with

updates that keep the book in line with

constantly changing software releases.

Although the authors risk the wrath of

the White Hats by devoting a chapter to

attacking wireless networks, they more

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