[CLUE-Talk] Intro to Unix book.

[Grant Johnson]

The best suggestion I can give (if they are REALLY newbies) is to get 
the dumnmies books.  The Unix for dummies covers command line stuff, 
logging in logging out, what to feed the Unix wizzards to bribe them to 
help you, etc.   It is reasonable for a starter, then I would reccomend 
Unix in a Nutshell as a 3rd book, and that covers everything in detail. 
 They dummies books for Unix only briefly even mentioned that a GUI 
existed when I got mine.

Dave Anselmi wrote:

>Can anyone recommend a good book to introduce people to Unix?  I have
>several friends and family who would like to learn, but aren't technical
>(some can handle a command line, some are just point and click).
>
>Books that have been valuable to me are "The UNIX Programming
>Environment" by Kernighan and Pike, "Essential System Administration"
>from O'Reilly, and "UNIX System Administration Handbook" by Evi Nemeth,
>et. al.
>
>The K & P book is really about shell programming but covers enough about
>the system to get by.  But it's a programmer's book, and some beginners
>just don't get that.
>
>The Nemeth book is too advanced for beginners.  I found the O'Reilly
>admin book to be a great intro to what was going on, but I haven't tried
>it on any beginners.  For them I think it's a little long, and although
>the material is very interesting and pertinent (to me), I suspect they
>will be wondering "so how does this get my email read?"
>
>Generally, I despise "for dummies" books, and the "record time" or "in
>21 days" books that turn out to be full of screen shots of pointing and
>clicking (isn't the gui supposed to make it obvious where to point and
>click?  The thing you need out of the books that they lack is details of
>how all the dialog box fields affect what actually happens.)
>
>But I don't know.  I'm an engineer, so simple books annoy me.  But I
>want to teach non-engineers, so I ask your advice.
>
>Dave
>
>
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