moment of nostalgia

I recently picked up the latest release of Linux Pocket Guide by Daniel J. Barrett. It's a newer edition of my first Linux book, which I had acquired a little over nine years ago. I had given it away a few years back because I figured I didn't need it anymore.

I don't know how much I'll use it, if at all. I just wanted to have it here again.

I think that the book was originally more geared towards Red Hat/Fedora, but it looks like more of a general Linux reference guide now. However, the "Installing Software" section includes info about yum, rpm, and aptitude commands, and tar.gz and tar.bz2 files, but apt-get commands are not covered; nor are other things like pacman and other package management tools. Synaptic and Ubuntu's update manager are mentioned in one sentence about graphical package managers.

I used to take Linux Pocket Guide with me everywhere, poring over it at bus stops and on the city bus, and during my lunch breaks at work. I didn't know at the time that I'd turn out to be more of a Debian guy than anything else! It was a good intro to the Linux world, though.