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The official Ubuntu book (8th ed.)
Helmke M., Joseph E., Rey J., Ballew P., Prentice Hall Press, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2014. 368 pp. Type: Book (978-0-133905-39-7)
Date Reviewed: Dec 8 2014

This is the eighth edition of a book I’ve never read before, so I’ll not try to compare it to the previous editions. Instead, I’ll consider it as a new book. Its purpose is to be “The Official Ubuntu Book,” but the definition of “official” is unclear. I don’t have any satisfactory explanation of the book’s title.

This is not a very large book at only 350 pages. Moreover, some chapters are encumbered by a lot of not-very-informative screen copies: for example, showing a terminal window with only one line used, extended to a whole screen. In the same vein, chapter 9, which presents Ubuntu flavors, does that mainly with screen copies, which only show almost empty screens.

A relatively important part of the book is devoted to philosophical explanations about the history of Ubuntu and the various institutions and people on which it relies. The body of the book begins more than 70 pages after the title page, and at that point we should know everything about the life and achievements of Mark Shuttleworth, but not so much about the difference between free software and open source.

This book is supposed to be written for beginners, and it is praised for that. But I’m sure that beginners will need more help from elsewhere, for example, when trying to understand what partitioning is. Screen copies, to which I already alluded, provide only minimal help, especially since they rely on the dark default background of Unity, and thus are generally almost impossible to read. Another remark about them is that they never show several windows at the same time, as if that were impossible. On the contrary, installation of Ubuntu from the minimal CD is almost identical to the normal install, but again described at length.

The authors did not clearly decide whether they wanted to describe Unity, or to evaluate it. They compare it only to the Windows desktop manager, not to other flavors of Ubuntu like MATE, Cinnamon, GNOME, Mint, and so on. The idea that Unity should be a unique interface, from the smartphone to the desktop, is considered obvious, but not substantiated. Admittedly, the same is anticipated for Windows 10, but is it a good example? And do you use the same interface for driving your bicycle and driving your car, or still better, your airplane?

Chapter 4 is about finding and installing Ubuntu applications. Describing them is impossible, since normal books about GIMP or Inkscape, for example, are at least twice the size of this one. This chapter only skims the matter, and one may doubt its usefulness.

Chapters 5 to 7 try to tell more about Unity, and to explain that it’s the best thing since sliced bread. The existence of so many alternatives to this desktop manager seems to show that there is not unanimous agreement on this issue. The terminology is a clear hindrance, since you must learn about Unity, Dash, Launcher, Lens, Switcher, Panel, Compiz, and Scope, and some of them are not explained at all.

Chapter 8, about the Ubuntu Server, is the best chapter of the book. However, it’s clearly not intended for beginners; for example, it does not even try to define what a server is. It is written in a pleasant and humorous way, and it provides more precise information than all of the other chapters. One reason is that no space is lost with useless screen copies. One remark, however, is that this chapter seems to have not been rewritten, or even revised, for several years. GNOME is mentioned instead of Unity. Different Ubuntu versions are used: Precise (12.04) instead of Trusty, and Lucid (10.04). Hard disks are still 10 or 20 GB integrated development environment (IDE) disks, although serial ATA (SATA) has been with us for more than ten years now, and it’s now difficult to find a disk smaller than 320 GB.

The book ends with a chapter about Ubuntu-related projects and derivatives, which only skims the surface, and another chapter about the Ubuntu community. The final index is usable, but the choice of entries is sometimes surprising. For example, GNOME is only a reference to Ubuntu GNOME, which itself does not say anything about what GNOME really is.

For the ninth edition of this book, I would like to suggest that the authors discard most screen copies; make the remaining, informative ones easier to read; and update chapter 8, using it as a model of style and contents for the other chapters, which could be much more informative without needing to add pages to the book.

More reviews about this item: Amazon

Reviewer:  O. Lecarme Review #: CR142991 (1503-0207)
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