Most of my friends would describe me as a techie. Hell, let's not mince words, they'd say I am a nerd, and they'd be right. However, as a nerd, there is one part of my nerdly education that has been sorely lacking: Linux. (Actually, there are more holes than that, but we're not concerned with them right now.)

Sure, I'm old enough that I am well-acquainted with DOS (and therefore the command-line experience) and I had to learn to use Unix in college, but I basically learned just enough commands to get by, and almost nothing about how Unix works. And I've played with Linux on and off over the years, but never gotten a handle on it because I never devoted the time required. Plus, learning to do simple things like mount an additional hard drive correctly required just enough study that it seemed easier to not learn it. I've even gone so far along the slacker route that I've put Lindows err, Linspire onto one of my PCs and have been using that. But there are still a few of those deep-rooted Linux issues that I have to address, even with that version.

So I was curious, and when How Linux Works; What every superuser should know became available, I decided to take a look. And I am very glad I did so.

I would consider this book a nice bridge between books like the "For Dummies" series and serious Linux references for experienced users. It requires that you know the basics about a PC and some OSs, but once you're that far you should do well with this book (and even if you're not, the definitions supplied and the availability of Google should help you out with most terms you don't recognize).

The book starts where you'd expect, by explaining shells and going through basic commands like ls, mv, mkdir, etc. It also goes through some commands I wasn't familiar with, like touch, head, and tail.

The real gold in this book for me was in chapters 2 and 3: "Devices, Disks, Filesystems, and the Kernel" and "How Linux Boots." Ward could have titled these two sections "Everything you wanted to know about Linux, but had no freaking clue how to ask." Which has been my main problem with Linux: knowing what questions to ask (i.e. Google) to figure out how to solve whatever little problem I'm having. This book is a big step in the right direction for those of us with that problem.