I was really tempted to rate this book two stars, but I gave it three because I'm only 117 pages into the book and I hope it will get better.



First, the book has many errors. These are not typos, but content errors that have caused me great frustration and time wasted. I am new to CentOS, so my learning curve is steep. For the beginner, this can be very frustrating. The book is written for CentOS 5.3, but teaches concepts from older versions of CentOS. I'll give some examples of errors from only one chapter - chapter 3:



P. 81 - "Using the Fast User Switch applet, you can switch between different desktop users without shutting down the current desktop." There is no fast switch applet installed or available in a package for download. I googled this and couldn't find anything.



p. 86 - Talks about the following applets for the gnome desktop: Deskbar, CPU Temperature, Moon Data, and Network Traffic. None of these applets exist in CentOS 5.3 and are not available packages (except Network Traffic i.e. gnome-applet-netspeed, which must be downloaded separately, but the book doesn't tell you this).



p. 106 - "Under the 'Link to Device' submenu..." However, the book doesn't tell you where this sub-menu is. You have to infer this from a vague reference at the top of the page. Little stuff like this just wastes the learner's time.



p. 117 - "You may need to run system-config-mouse to get the mouse working properly after this." There is no "system-config-mouse" in CentOS 5.3! Again the wasted time and frustration trying to find something that isn't there.



I hope these errors are not a preview of what is to come.