Date: Mon, 20 Mar 95 11:05:51 MST From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) To: billlee@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca Cc: questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Tutorials--Linux versus FreeBSD for Newbies? Message-ID: <9503201805.AA02387@cs.weber.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.A32.3.91.950319085709.18546B-100000@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca> from "billlee@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca" at Mar 19, 95 09:23:52 am
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> Recently I was in our biggest local computer book store and they have > several very fat books on Linux; these books appear to be tutorials, at > least to a degree. > > I am lead to wonder if a newbie such as me wouldn't do better with Linux > than with FreeBSD, just because of the availability of these tutorial > books. I wonder if I shouldn't give up on FreeBSD and go with Linux > instead. What are your thoughts on this? > > Why are there tutorial books for Linux and apparently none for FreeBSD? Bill: A tutorial book requires either someone very, very pendantic who is willing to reinstall several times, OR it requires a new user to sit down and write a journal of everything they do. Both of these require picking several disk and network configurations in common, as well as installation sets based on what the user wants to end up doing with the machine. Technical book writing takes a minimum of 2600 hours for a book, especially where a technical inaccuracy can spell disaster. The only reasonable book would be a collaboration of 3-4 people to both ensure adequate hardware coverage and to get the book out in 3 months or less -- well, get it to the publisher, anyway -- so that the material is not dated. I own "The Linux Bible" and one Linux tutorial style book that I forget its name. Both books contain extremely dated material. The other Linux books I have seen have all been perfunctory -- not enough depth to cover anything that changes majorly from release to release. Finally, one should consider the research nature of both Linux and NetBSD/FreeBSD. This means a quickly moving target. The only chance for non-dated material for more than a 3 month period is if the interfaces are locked down and become static. In my opinion, there is sufficiently large amounts of work on basic install and administration (and new hardware being released all the time) to make the book not worth the time of a single author. I'd bet that without an agreement-based lockdown between NetBSD and FreeBSD groups, you would either have to get lock-down on both and involve 6 authors instead of 4, or you would have to forget one platform or the other. To give some idea of scale to the project: 2600 hours is 8 hours a day for 325 days -- a 1 1/4 man year full time job. Regards, Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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