This book is not for a faint-hearted reader: 1,400 pages are not easy to handle on your desk, especially since the book is printed on thin paper. The book is not really about Ubuntu; rather, it’s about Unix and Linux. You will not learn anything about the philosophy of the Ubuntu project or the life of Mark Shuttleworth. Only about ten percent of the book is about Ubuntu. Thus, it would be easy to transform it into a book about Fedora or Linux Mint with a minimum amount of work, and in fact it has already been done for Fedora.

The two-page “Brief Contents” section is useful for understanding the structure of the book, and the two-page “JumpStarts” section serves as a very short index to sections about some clients or servers: apt, CUPS, OpenSSH, FTP, Email, NFS, Samba, DNS, and Apache. The full table of contents occupies 25 pages. To complete the front matter, there is a 15-page preface, with a long list of acknowledgments. A DVD is included so readers can install or live test version 14.04 of Ubuntu (notice that the current version is 15.10).

Chapter 1, “Welcome to Linux,” stands alone and is rather original, both in form and content; however, it is a little confusing for a reader not already familiar with Linux.

Part 1, “Installing Ubuntu Linux,” is the most Ubuntu-specific part, although it also applies to the Debian distribution.

Part 2, “Using Ubuntu Linux,” is the only part where the desktop and the graphic interface are exposed. It is also rather Ubuntu-specific in its first chapter (4); the next chapters deal with the shell, the Linux file system, the Linux utilities, and networking and the Internet.

In Part 3, “System Administration,” the author enters into the core of his subject. In fact, the separation between this part and the following two is rather artificial. (Part 4 covers “Using Clients and Setting Up Servers,” and Part 5 covers “Programming Tools.”)

This enumeration should demonstrate clearly that this book is intended for administrators or teachers. The preface suggests that it can be used as a textbook for students, but I could not imagine students trying to master the full contents of the book. In fact, after having been a user of Unix and its successors for almost 40 years, teaching it for 20 years, and administering several small computer clusters during the same time, this book taught me a lot of new things, which are difficult or impossible to find elsewhere. However, I did not learn many things about Ubuntu.

The main problem when reading this book is knowing how to navigate through such a mass of information. This is made more complicated by several characteristics. First, the succession of chapters is not very easy to follow. For example, chapters 5, 9, and 28 all deal with Bash, and there are many cross-references between them. Second, many times, a concept is used before being explained. There is always a reference to where the explanation is, but this forces readers to browse this huge book frequently. Third, the book is not self-contained. Many times, when some specific tool or utility is introduced, the matter is only shallowly explained and the reader is referred to the main page. Fourth, the structure of the sections and subsections is not clearly apparent in the layout and typography, especially since this layout is complicated by several artifacts, like margin subtitles and various tags. Finally, although most of this book can be applied to any version of Linux, there is no clear distinction between what is widely usable and what is specific to Ubuntu.

The author strictly adheres to a syntactic constraint that leads to some very cumbersome constructs, at least for a non-native English-speaking person like me. He never uses a construction like “from which” or “by which.” See, for example, page 128: “open the program that runs ssh and give it the name or IP address of the system you want to log in on.”

I am surprised to find detailed descriptions of vim and nano, and nothing about emacs. The general matter of backup is not well covered, especially in the case of automatic periodic backups. On the contrary, chapter 10 is mainly a description of Upstart, although this init system is replaced by systemd from Ubuntu version 15.04 and Fedora 15. But it is difficult to be exactly up to date in such a case.

Every chapter has the same structure: a table of contents and a list of objectives on the title page, an introduction, the bulk of the chapter, and finally a chapter summary, exercises, and advanced exercises. Some sections are optional.

Some chapters are too detailed and others not enough, or at least they assume too much previous knowledge from the reader. Several times, the same content is repeated in a very short span.

I would not like to give the impression that I don’t recommend this book--quite the contrary, in fact. The author’s work in collecting and explaining such an enormous amount of information is tremendous. His book has no equivalent, and browsing it is much more practical than spending hours searching the web. It should be on the desk of any serious Linux administrator or teacher.

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