If you are new linux or are thinking of building out a linux box then this is a decent place to start. The basics of unix style administration are explained about as plainly and simply as possible. One short coming of the book is the lengthy discussion of installation which admittedly used to be a harrowing experience 5 or so years ago (seemingly the main argument against the adoption of linux by microserfs), but in the hands of Red Hat has become nearly as painless a process as any windows install and therefore is not that necessary. The only other problem with this book is that the version of Red Hat is 8.0 (3rd edition) i believe and only has some middle variant of the 2.4 kernel (2.4.17 i think), this is not necessarily bad but the 2.6 kernel is out and Red Hat has a new approach to the desktop with its Fedora build. Only buy this if you are completely new to linux and want to learn the basics.