After walking the reader through Red Hat installation, Bob Rankin provides a quick introduction to Gnome. Mostly, this is a tour of the obvious: He introduces all the standard utilities and some of the games. There's a speedy introduction to setting up a PPP connection with an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Rankin's introduction to the file-management capabilities of the Bash shell is the most valuable aspect of this book. He lists scores of tasks, ranging from copying a file to concatenating multiple files, and provides clear statements of the syntax used for each. He explains Linux features, such as piping, which aren't widely seen in Windows and MS-DOS environments, and shows how to use utilities that improve Linux's ability to work with Windows data and software.
The No B.S. Guide to Red Hat Linux 6 ships with its eponymous operating system and a bunch of other software on CD-ROM. For that reason, it's a decent deal--but most new Linux users will soon want a richer guide. --David Wall