Recommend a newbie friendly book for linux networking

October 27, 2011 4:16 PM

I am learning in college about setting up and configuring Slackware Linux and I am looking for a newbie friendly book. Areas covered includes FTP, telnet, Samba, NFS, Email, port mappers/scanners. While there are certainly many books out there, Slackware appears to be a fair bit different from most other debian and redhat based distros so I am not sure about a) what would be a good book and b) a book that is relevant for Slackware Linux. Could anyone suggest an excellent book suitable for Slackware and covering these networking areas in newbie friendly terms. Many thanks!
posted by conrad101 to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

The information here will be an important starting point if you're unfamiliar with Linux and using the terminal in general. I think it's a great, friendly introduction.
posted by jsturgill at 4:31 PM on October 27, 2011

Slackware Essentials is the official guide, though it assumes a certain amount of knowledge of the core concepts. As the oldest currently-maintained Linux distribution, Slackware hews closer to its UNIXy roots in terms of how processes are initiated and configured, so any kind of general O'Reilly UNIX/Linux Nutshell guide is likely to help you out there.

I'm going to assume that part of the course is going to have you configuring Sendmail. Good luck with that.
posted by holgate at 4:38 PM on October 27, 2011

This is kind of awesome - I just today decided to ditch my Archlinux install on Linode for Slackware 13.37, just to play around with it.

In addition to the Slackware Essentials book holgate mentions, the 'official unofficial' forum for Slack is found here: Linux Questions - Slackware subforum. The whole site is highly recommended for all Linux users.

You might also want to take a look at the Linode Library. It's got a lot of great tutorials, although not really Slackware-specific.

Have fun!
posted by Bourbonesque at 5:09 PM on October 27, 2011

The most important thing to learn is bash. Or some other shell, but the one you want is bash.

And emacs or vi, so you can navigate bash efficiently.

and grep and find.

set -o vi
posted by tylerkaraszewski at 7:27 PM on October 27, 2011

And man is your friend.
posted by holgate at 8:59 PM on October 27, 2011

While not slackware specific I'd recommend O'Reilly's Essential Systems Administration. It covers pretty much everythig you could need to know.
posted by cmdnc0 at 1:50 PM on October 28, 2011