I already own Wale Soyinka's book "Linux Administration: A Beginner's Guide" and bought this assuming that there would be more CentOS-specific information in it that could help with things like NIS, LDAP, sendmail configuration, etc. While it covers some of its subjects reasonably well, it stops well short of the goal of being the definitive guide to CentOS. Beginner's guide, maybe, but there is very little that makes it definitive.



The first third of the book is dedicated to installation, yum, and Apache configuration. This information is not even as good as the existing information on the CentOS How-To pages on their web site.



The section that I found useful was on setting up virtual private networks. The book does a reasonable job of explaining this, but I find it hard to understand what sets this apart from any other Linux installation.



Don't get me wrong, the book does have value, but if you are looking for the definitive guide to setting up and configuring your CentOS-specific installation, this is definitely not the book for you.