I have been looking around for some decent books on using Red Hat Linux at the command line level. I also searched the threads here. I have bought a few books that looked good at Amazon.com only to find that they cover mostly how to do things using GNOME or KDE. I even browsed the limited selection at my local Barnes and Noble but had no luck.

I need suggestions for books that discuss how to do things in detail at the command line level. I need help with the following topics:

· A solid explanation of the bash shell
· Shell scripting
· Cron jobs
· Commands for finding out what services might be running, what users may be logged in, what users may be doing, what hardware is installed, important things like that.

If you can think of a book that might cover one topic in detail, I’d like to hear about it.

BTW, I will be using RedHat Linux 7.2 or 7.3 but if you can think of any UNIX books that can help me, please let me know.

Any and all help is appreciated!
--Steve

Heh, that is also exactly what I need.

I'd search the web for tutorials on those specific things.

If you want good books take a look at O'Reilly - www.ora.com.

This (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067232282X/qid=1028243050/sr=1-10/ref=sr_1_10/103-9388955-6927042) (Red Hat Linux 7.2 Unleashed) is the main book I have and use very often. Although it doesn't focus just on command line and does includes X, its extremely detailed and covers every area. I'd highly recommend it :)

Linux unleased is a cool book...
There another book called networking in Linux... It's really well written.

Have a great day :)

Regards
Amar

Originally posted by smidwap
Heh, that is also exactly what I need. For the sake of anyone stumbling across this thread, I'm going to post a reply (to myself).

Like many folks, I know enough about being a server admin to get by. If there's a problem, I research it, maybe tear my hair out a little, but eventually figure it out.

Well anyway, after I composed my message about what it is that I needed to learn, I actually determined what it is that I needed to learn... Go figure!

So I went to Amazon.com and researched every potential book I could find, and looked at the front and back covers, the table of contents, and also read all the reviews.

Here's what I came up with:

ISBN: 0672321270 - Sams Teach Yourself UNIX in 24 Hours (3rd Edition) - by Dave Taylor
ISBN: 1565923472 - Learning the Bash Shell (Nutshell Handbooks) - by Cameron Newham, Bill Rosenblatt
ISBN: 0764547860 - Red Hat Linux 7 Server - by Mohammed J. Kabir
ISBN: 0072127732 - Hacking Linux Exposed - by Brian Hatch, James B. Lee, George Kurtz
ISBN: 0735710996 - Linux Firewalls (2nd Edition) - by Robert Ziegler

I forgot to mention in my orginal post that I also wanted to learn more about security so that's why you see those last two listed above. And by the way, if someone wants a book about how IPTABLES works, Linux Firewalls (2nd Edition) is the way to go. I'm really looking forward to reading that one.

--Steve