Setting Up a Linux Intranet Server Visual Black Book: A Complete Visual Guide to Building a LAN Using Linux as the OS

Heavily visual books have become popular lately, but mainly for elementary subjects. In Setting Up a Linux Intranet Server Visual Black Book, a team of authors and designers brings the picture-intensive approach to Linux. It's a welcome move that simultaneously heralds Linux's improving ease of use and the willingness of the computing mainstream to investigate the operating system.

The authors have hit their subject at precisely the right angle too. By choosing to use the Visual Black Book style on Linux-based intranet servers, they nail the application that's most interesting to the small-office users who are their audience. This book will help the casual network administrator get a Linux machine working as a file, printer, Web, and electronic mail server.

The format relies on illustrating sequential steps with a combination of line drawings, screen shots, and command-line listings. The text that describes what's going on in the steps includes callouts, so there's never any question about what part of the illustration is relevant. The format isn't great for communicating conceptual information, but it will help you accomplish the basic tasks quickly and enable you to look into denser reference on a more solid footing. --David Wall

Topics covered: Building a local area network (LAN) server with Linux (Red Hat Linux 6 appears in the examples), installation, basic command-line operations, users and groups, and heterogeneous networking with information on Samba for Windows and netatalk for Mac OS. Coverage of specific services includes the Apache Web server and electronic mail with sendmail and qpopper.