The Ubuntu Beginner’s Guide
Sixth Edition
Jonathan Moeller
(Azure Flame Media, LLC – Kindle)
This should not be your first book on how to use Ubuntu, particularly if you consider yourself not much of a computer geek and you are fleeing Microsoft Windows to escape the death throes of XP (or the life throes of Windows 8).
However, The Ubuntu Beginner’s Guide is an excellent how-to book that can add to your enjoyment and mastery of Ubuntu once you are comfortable with opening applications, downloading the latest updates, and doing some basic work at the command line in Linux. In other words, once you are ready to learn more about what else you can do with a PC running Ubuntu (besides typing on it and surfing the web), The Ubuntu Beginner’s Guide definitely can help. (It focuses on Ubuntu version 12.04 — not the latest, but still a good release that will be supported for a few more years.)
Jonathan Moeller spends much of his book showing how to set up an Ubuntu PC as a server platform, for example an Apache web server, a MySQL server, a DHCP server, and an FTP Client and Server, among others. His instructions are clear, and you don’t have to flip from one chapter to another to keep track of all of the steps. He repeats setup steps when necessary to help the reader stay focused on doing a task from start to finish. (I am definitely not a Linux guru, but I have used Moeller’s book thus far to assign some static IPs, set up SAMBA file sharing, set up an Apache web server, and do several other tasks that I’ve wanted to learn. Some reviewers have criticized the author for repeating certain steps for each process. But I appreciate the convenience of staying focused on just one or two pages at a time.)
Meanwhile, later chapters focus on web applications and “the eight best applications for a new Ubuntu desktop installation.” (No spoilers are given here.)
“Hosting web applications,” Moeller writes, “is where Linux really shines….Ubuntu Linux can run a variety of web applications, ranging from simple interactive sites to powerful content management systems.” In his book, he shows “how to install three of the most popular content management systems on an Ubuntu web server — WordPress, MediaWiki, and Drupal” — and explains what a LAMP server is. “LAMP is simply an acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (or Perl and Python).”
The author covers several other useful topics, including how to create a bootable USB flash drive, how to run some Windows software on Ubuntu using the Wine application, and how to manage eBooks on Ubuntu. And he describes how to enjoy some computer games on Ubuntu, even though the “gaming experience” admittedly will not measure up to Windows machines, various mobile devices, or dedicated game consoles such as an XBox or Playstation.
If you have not yet tried Ubuntu and still wonder if you will like Linux or not, start with a book such as Ubuntu Made Easy, which comes with a CD that lets you try Ubuntu 12.04 without actually installing it. (And , if you do like it, you can use the same CD to install Ubuntu on your PC). Then, after you get comfortable with the basics and want to know more, get The Ubuntu Beginner’s Guide.
— Si Dunn
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