One might recognize the author's name, David Clinton, from another well-written book from the same publisher (Manning), called "Learn Amazon Web Services in a Month of Lunches". This time, the book is called Linux in Action, and the book is project-based rather than skill-based. Clinton will guide you through some real-world tasks, such as automated system backups, web servers including PHP and MySQL to setup MediaWiki, system security and encryption, remote connectivity, system performance and networking/hardware troubleshooting, and even some DevOps deployment orchestration with Ansible. However, you will still learn the lower-level details along the way such as the command-line syntax, as Ansible is only introduced in the very last chapter of the book (on purpose). Other topics that are touched include Linux virtualization, archive management, emergency system recovery, Nextcloud file-sharing, web server securing, system hardening including auditing and an IDS, VPN and firewalls, system monitoring and network file sharing. The operating system chosen is the one that dominates the enterprise and cloud system markets, and specificly the distributions Ubuntu and CentOS, because each of them represents an entire family of distributions. Ubuntu itself derives from the Debian family, while CentOS is closely related to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Fedora.
The book begins with a page describing the books topics together with the keywords of technologies used in those chapters. The first chapter describes what makes Linux different from other operating systems, and the basic skills needed to work with Linux. The second chapter describes the difference between virtualization and containers and how to work with both of them. The third chapter mainly touches ssh. The fourth chapter helps with archive management considerations and tools. The fifth chapter touches bash, AWS S3 and cronjobs. The sixt chapter describes recovery/rescue mode, live-booting and chrooting. The seventh chapter describes the manual setup of a MediaWiki server. The eighth chapter describes the manual setup of a Nextcloud file-sharing server. The ninth chapter describes securing, hardening and encryption. The tenth chapter describes securing network connections. The eleventh chapter describes system monitoring, mostly via logfiles. The twelfth chapter describes NFS and Samba for network file sharing. Chapter thirteen, fourteen and fifteen then describe troubleshooting of system performance, networking and hardware respectively. The sixteenth and last chapter describes how a lot of this previously done manual work can be automated with the help of DevOps related tools like Ansible.
While I have previously reviewed a book by Manning on a related topic, which was titled "Learn Linux in a Month of Lunches" by Steven Ovadia, the different level of this book is clear. While the former was a quick primer to enable the user to run Linux on his desktop, this book is instead trying to help the user to step up his game in Linux and potentially would like to pursue a career in Linux System Administration, or would at least like to be able to run and use Linux for work or hobby reasons and feel comfortable doing so. Recommended!