What is the most detailed Ubuntu book?

[Tommy Trussell]

On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 10:28 AM,  <mdovell at comcast.net> wrote:
> I know that there are short guides sometimes but I was thinking of something
> mostly complete and current. Or it would it be a bit better to wait for 10.0
> since it's a LTR? I think I'm learning more as to how to use Ubuntu but more
> is always better.

I see that Odd posted what looks like a good list of three books.

I suggest that waiting until the next LTS release doesn't make sense,
because it takes months to develop a good book, and you might ALWAYS
be waiting for the next one. (Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" was the
previous LTS release and Ubuntu 10.4 "Lucid Lynx" will be the one
coming out next April.)

If you bought a book based upon Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy," then you STILL
have the advantage of knowing that there will be another year of
complete support for that release, and security updates for another
couple of years beyond that, I believe. If you are trying to be
completely systematic, if you are running a LTS release you don't have
to worry about the OS or software changing substantially while you are
still learning it. SO the only way a book will be "mostly complete and
current" (as you put it) would be if the book was written for a
release that has been out for awhile AND you don't upgrade to the next
one.

In practice, the entire OS or included software doesn't radically
change with every release. There WILL always be major changes to small
parts, some of which may or may not be important to what you are
learning. A very old book about Ubuntu (or an older general linux
book) would not cover "upstart" for example, because sysvinit was used
in Ubuntu before Hardy. But upstart is backward-compatible with
sysvinit. And the next LTS release will use the new grub, so you will
have to toss out some of what you learned about the old grub when you
upgrade. But many of the basic concepts of "grub2" are similar to the
"legacy" grub.

SO jump in already, prepare to always be behind the curve on something!