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Ubuntu unleashed 2016 edition : covering 15.10 and 16.04
Helmke M., Sams publishing, Indianapolis, IN, 2015. 816 pp. Type: Book (978-0-134268-11-8)
Date Reviewed: Oct 13 2016

Ubuntu is close to becoming, if not already, the most popular Linux operating system, used by millions of ordinary and power users on a daily basis. The Ubuntu unleashed 2016 book by Matthew Helmke aims to provide in-depth knowledge of the operating system itself and its most important and heavily used peripheral functionalities. More importantly, it touches upon various topics not examined by other similar technical books.

The author has done a great job segmenting the book into five intuitive parts, with each one covering a broad range of functionalities, services, and capabilities available to both newcomers and experts in the Ubuntu environment. The information provided in the book covers Ubuntu release 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) up to the most recent 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) released in April 2016.

Part 1 provides a comprehensive “Getting Started” section, with step-by-step guidance ranging from booting the LiveCD (handily a copy is provided with the book), going over the various installation configuration options (partitions, boot loader, available software packages, user profiles, network settings, and so on), up to the point of running your fresh Ubuntu-based system for the very first time. From my perspective, the pages included in this first part provide in a nutshell everything there is to know to get an Ubuntu system up and running with minimal effort, even for the Linux newbie.

Part 2 focuses on the Ubuntu Desktop environment, beginning with the foundations of the X window system and subsequently introducing the Unity graphical user interface, the principal point of user-system interaction. In addition, it provides an overview of various Internet (browsers, mail, RSS, IRC clients), productivity (LibreOffice document suite), and multimedia (sound, graphics and video manipulation tools, DVD burning) applications bundled by default with Ubuntu Desktop.

Part 3 delves deeper into the specifics of administrating an Ubuntu-based system. Here, the author provides initially a quick-start and subsequently a master class to the command line interface (CLI), an essential and powerful tool for the user who aims or claims to be a Linux system administrator. Various CLI concepts are presented (handling files/directories, editing, sorting, piping, compressing, comparing, and so on) and accompanied by in-line examples. By itself, the chapter covering the CLI material is a comprehensive reference. Next, the Linux file system and its essentials (hierarchy, navigation, permissions, and so on) are explained in an easy-to-read, understandable manner, turning an often intimidating concept for newcomers into a simple tutorial. Moreover, this part provides an extended discussion on automation through scripting, system backups, and security, as well as networking and connectivity over Ethernet and WiFi.

Part 4 explores Ubuntu from the viewpoint of a solid and well-supported server operating system. Here, the author discusses the different server functionalities available to Ubuntu through the installation and configuration of numerous software packages available from the APT repository (file sharing, web and email server, proxying, and so on). Again, each topic is well described and includes the simplest and most minimal configuration needed to have each service up and running. Special emphasis is given to the use of an Ubuntu-based system as a database server, both for traditional relational (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and the more recent tabular/NoSQL (Cassandra, Memcached, Redis, and so on) models. Importantly, chapter 32 in this part brings up two inherent capabilities of Ubuntu for the following modern hot topics: virtualization and cloud computing. For the former, traditional hypervisors are presented (KVM, VMware, XEN); however, unfortunately, there is no discussion of LXD, the next-generation container hypervisor (available as a stable release in 16.04). For the latter, Ubuntu serves as the reference operating system for Openstack, the renowned open-source cloud computing platform. This chapter provides a good description of the main Openstack service families (compute, networking, storage, identity, imaging, and juju) and how these relate and can be managed by the underlying operating system.

The final segment, Part 5, is dedicated to programming in Linux environments. Particularly, it discusses the supporting tools available in Ubuntu to sustain complete software development cycles, starting with project management tools, popular programming languages, version control systems (SVN, Mercurial, Git), online community forums, and resources.

Overall, this book flows very well and provides comprehensive and in-depth knowledge of the most recent versions of the Ubuntu operating system. If you are just entering the Linux world or you consider yourself an Ubuntu expert, you will certainly benefit from having it in your library.

More reviews about this item: Amazon

Reviewer:  Nicholas Loulloudes Review #: CR144841 (1701-0015)
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