100 Best Linux Books of All Time
We've researched and ranked the best linux books in the world, based on recommendations from world experts, sales data, and millions of reader ratings. Learn more
The Linux Command Line takes you from your very first terminal keystrokes to writing full programs in Bash, the most popular Linux shell (or command line). Along the way you'll learn the timeless skills handed down by generations of experienced, mouse-shunning gurus: file navigation, environment configuration, command chaining, pattern matching with regular expressions, and more.
In addition to that... more
In this authoritative work, Linux programming expert Michael Kerrisk provides detailed descriptions of the system calls and library functions that you need in order to master the craft of system programming, and accompanies his explanations with clear, complete example programs.
You'll find descriptions of over 500 system calls and library functions, and more than 200 example... more
Julia Evanshanging out with my favourite Linux book this morning. I love that the chapters are so short (usually less than 20 pages) and I always learn something interesting by picking a chapter and reading it. https://t.co/fZBNu8rfU8 (Source)
Linux Pocket Guide provides an organized learning path to help you gain mastery of the most useful and important... more
The third edition of Understanding the Linux... more
This updated edition offers a tighter focus on Linux system essentials, as well as more coverage of new capabilities such as virtualization, wireless network management, and revision control with git. It also... more
If you're getting started along the exciting path of hacking, cybersecurity, and pentesting, Linux Basics for Hackers is an excellent first step. Using Kali Linux, an advanced penetration testing distribution of Linux, you'll learn the basics of using the Linux operating system and acquire the... more
Don't have time to read the top Linux books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
Tim O'ReillyThe Unix Programming Environment, by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike. In addition to its articulation of the Unix tools philosophy that is so dear to my heart, the writing is a model of clarity and elegance. As a technical writer, I aspired to be as transparent as Kernighan. (Source)
Now, in a narrative that zips along with the speed of e-mail, Torvalds gives a history of his renegade software while candidly revealing the quirky mind of a genius. The result is an engrossing... more
Love clearly distinguishes between POSIX standard functions and special services offered only by Linux. With a new chapter on multithreading, this updated and expanded edition provides an in-depth look at Linux from both a theoretical and applied perspective over... more
Knowing where to start when learning a new skill can be a challenge, especially when the topic seems so vast. There can be so much information available that you can't even decide where to start. Or worse, you start down the path of learning and quickly discover too many concepts, commands, and nuances that aren't explained. This kind of experience is frustrating and leaves you with more questions than answers.
"
Linux for Beginners" doesn't make any assumptions about your background or knowledge of... more
The Cathedral & the Bazaar is a must for anyone who cares about the future... more
You'll find this guide valuable whether you're interested in bash as a user interface or for its powerful programming capabilities. This book will teach you how to use bash's advanced command-line features, such as command history, command-line editing, and command completion.
This book also... more
Device drivers literally drive everything you're interested in--disks, monitors, keyboards, modems--everything outside the computer chip and memory. And writing device drivers is one of the few areas of programming for the Linux operating system that calls for unique, Linux-specific knowledge. For years now, programmers have relied on the classic "Linux Device Drivers" from O'Reilly to master this critical subject. Now in its third edition, this bestselling guide provides all the information you'll need to write drivers for a wide range of devices.
Over the years the book has...
moreWriting... more
Don't have time to read the top Linux books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
Like the popular O'Reilly book, Understanding the Linux Kernel, this book clearly explains the underlying concepts and teaches you how to follow the actual C code that implements it. Although some background in the TCP/IP protocols is helpful, you can learn a great deal from this text about the protocols themselves and their uses.... more
We are living in the computer age, in a world increasingly designed and engineered by computer programmers and software designers, by people who call themselves hackers. Who are these people, what motivates them, and why should you care?
Consider these facts: Everything around us is turning into computers. Your typewriter is... more
Evan WilliamsI want everybody I know to read "How to Make Wealth" and "Mind the Gap" (chapters 6 and 7), which brilliantly articulate the most commonly, and frustratingly, misunderstood core economic principles of everyday life. (Source)
Yukihiro MatsumotoSince programmers create programs out of nothing, imagination is our only limitation. Thus, in the world of programming, the hero is the one who has great vision. Paul Graham is one of our contemporary heroes. He has the ability to embrace the vision, and to express it plainly. His works are my favorites, especially the ones describing language design. He explains secrets of programming,... (Source)
Chris AndersonA delightful ping-pong around the brain of a really smart guy. The chapter that answers the key question of our age-- why are nerds unpopular?-- is worth the price of admission alone. (Source)
A book by Git experts to turn you into a Git expert. Introduces the world of distributed version control Shows how to build a Git development workflow. less
Approach Linux with the inquisitiveness and creativity that has always marked the open source community: read Running Linux, 5th Edition.
You won t find more experienced authors. Matt Welsh wrote the original Linux Installation and Getting Started guide; Matthias Dalheimer now leads the KDE Foundation. Their knowledge shows, whether they re talking about system administration, multimedia, or programming.
You ll start by getting comfortable and productive: navigating command lines and GUIs; using browsers and...
Vim, like its classic ancestor vi, is a serious tool for programmers, web developers, and sysadmins. No other text editor comes close to Vim for speed and efficiency; it runs on almost every system imaginable and... more
This book saves you from sifting a decade of obsolete online tutorials and quickly gets you running:SSH with the OpenSSH server and the PuTTY and OpenSSH clients. You will:
Eliminate passwords.
Manage access to your SSH server by users, groups, addresses, and more
Securely move files around your network
Forward graphic displays from one host to another
Forward... more
Don't have time to read the top Linux books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
sed & awk describes two text processing programs that are mainstays of the UNIX programmer's toolbox.
sed is a "stream editor" for editing streams of text that might be too large to edit as a single file, or that might be generated on the fly as part of a larger data processing step. The most common operation done with sed is substitution, replacing one block of text with another.
awk is a complete programming language. Unlike many conventional languages, awk is "data driven" -- you specify what kind of data you are...
Written by a leading developer and maintainer of the Linux kernel, Linux Kernel in a Nutshell is a comprehensive overview of kernel configuration and building, a critical task for Linux users and administrators.
No distribution can provide a Linux kernel that meets all users' needs. Computers big and small have special requirements that require reconfiguring and rebuilding the kernel. Whether you are trying to get sound, wireless support, and power management working on a laptop or incorporating enterprise features such as logical volume management on a large...
With this essential guide, you'll learn everything you need to know to customize your system,... more
Hello. My name is Jason Cannon and I'm the author of Linux for Beginners, Python Programming for Beginners, and an instructor to thousands of satisfied students. I started my IT career in the late 1990's as a Unix and Linux System Engineer and I'll be sharing my real-world shell scripting and bash programming experience with you throughout this book.
By the end of this book you will be able to... more
This bestselling on-the-job reference and test preparation guide has been fully revised for the new 2019 CompTIA Core 1 and Core 2 CompTIA A+ exam objectives
This fully revised and updated resource offers complete coverage of the latest release of CompTIA A+ exams 220-1001 & 220-1002. You'll find learning objectives at the beginning of each chapter, exam... more
You’ll learn how to manage multiple terminal sessions within tmux using only your keyboard. You’ll see how to manage and run programs side-by-side in panes, and you’ll learn how to create the perfect development environment with custom scripts so that when you’re... more
Don't have time to read the top Linux books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
In "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python," you'll learn how to use Python to write programs that do in minutes what would take you hours to do by hand no prior programming experience required. Once you've mastered the basics of programming, you'll create Python programs that effortlessly perform useful and impressive feats of automation to: Search for text in a file or across multiple... more
But as the follow-up to a classic, the third edition of the Linux Network Administrator's Guide does more than just spruce up the basics. It also provides the... more
Large-scale enterprise, cloud, and virtualized computing systems have introduced serious performance challenges. Now, internationally renowned performance expert Brendan Gregg has brought together proven methodologies, tools, and metrics for analyzing and tuning even the most complex environments. Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud focuses on Linux(R) and Unix(R) performance, while illuminating... more
If you don't use regular expressions yet, you will discover in this book a whole new world of mastery over your data. If you already use them, you'll appreciate this book's unprecedented detail and breadth of coverage. If you think you know all you need to know about regularexpressions, this book is a stunning... more
Ideal for new and experienced users alike--including proficient Windows users and sysadmins--this updated second edition helps you solve a wide range of problems. You'll learn ways to handle... more
The book's four major sections... more
The Linux Cookbook covers everything you'd expect: backups, new users, and the like. But it also covers the non-obvious information that is often ignored in other books the time-sinks and headaches that are a real part of an administrator's job, such as:... more
Don't have time to read the top Linux books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
Running a network doesn't mean you have all the answers. Networking is a complex subject with reams of reference material that's difficult to keep straight, much less remember. If you want a book that lays out the steps for specific tasks, that clearly explains... more
The latest edition of this bestselling reference brings Unix into the 21st century. It's been reworked to keep current with the broader state of Unix in today's world and highlight the strengths of this... more
Kelsey Hightower, Brendan Burns, and Joe Beda--who've worked on Kubernetes at Google and beyond--explain how this system fits into the lifecycle of a... more
Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, the new edition of this bestselling study guide covers the updated Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) and Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) exams. RHCSA/RHCE Red Hat Linux Certification Study Guide, 7th Edition is fully revised to cover the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and the corresponding RHCSA and RHCE certification exams. This... more
Beginning with introductory concepts and moving toward the advanced, The Art of Memory Forensics: Detecting Malware and Threats in Windows,... more
Don't have time to read the top Linux books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
Which is why we created Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two, a second collection of incredibly useful tips and tricks for finding and using dozens of... more
The new edition of this indispensable reference has been fully updated for all the latest operating systems. Even more importantly, it has been extensively revised and... more
As malware increasingly obfuscates itself and applies anti-analysis techniques to thwart our analysis, we need more sophisticated methods that allow us to raise that dark curtain designed to keep us out--binary analysis can help. The goal of all binary analysis is to determine (and possibly modify) the true properties of binary programs... more
Don't have time to read the top Linux books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
Autotools Autotools is the first book to offer programmers a tutorial-based guide to the GNU build system. Author John Calcote begins with an overview of high-level concepts and a quick hands-on tour of the philosophy and design of the... more
Absolute FreeBSD is your complete guide to FreeBSD, the powerful UNIX-like operating system that's supported modern servers, desktops, and platforms for years. In this completely revised third edition, FreeBSD committer Michael W. Lucas will teach you how to install, configure, and manage FreeBSD-based systems.... more
This book provides developers, enterprise architects, and site reliability engineers with a sound introduction to bleeding-edge Linux-based tools and technologies for both development and production environments. If you already know Linux administration basics, author Sam Alapati will... more
In this collection of essays and articles, key members of Google's Site Reliability Team explain how and why their commitment to the entire lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world. You'll learn the principles and practices that enable... more
Don't have time to read the top Linux books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
There are plenty of Linux administration books. Several things make this one stand out. Here's the most important: Linux Administration Handbook is designed for administrators working in industrial-strength production environments.
It never glosses over the "subtleties" that can get you in big trouble. It doesn't stint on technical detail. It's never satisfied with restating the man pages. And it's full of war stories from folks who've been there. Evi Nemeth and her coauthors: Boy, have they ever been there. (Just ask any... more
Once you've built your foundation for penetration testing, you'll learn the... more
This book, now in its third edition, has been widely recognized for years in the Linux community as the getting-started book people need.... more
vi has been the standard editor for close to 30 years. Popular on Unix and Linux, it has a growing following on Windows systems, too. Most experienced system administrators cite vi as their tool of choice. And since 1986, this book has been the guide for vi.
However, Unix systems are not... more
The LPIC-1 Linux Professional Institute Certification Study Guide, 4th Edition is your one-stop resource for complete coverage of Exams 101-400 and 102- 400. This Sybex Study Guide covers 100% of all exam 101-400 and 102-400 objectives. You'll prepare for the exams smarter and faster with Sybex thanks to superior content including, assessment tests that check exam readiness, objective map, real-world scenarios, hands-on exercises, key topic exam... more
Don't have time to read the top Linux books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
Learn methods for filtering large files for specific content Acquire information not included in the current grep documentation Get several tricks for using variants such as... more
"-- Eric Hartwell, Chair, School of Information Technology, ITT Technical Institute"Master All the Techniques You Need to Succeed with Fedora(TM) or Red Hat(R) Enterprise Linux(R)
The #1 Fedora and RHEL resource--a tutorial AND on-the-job reference
Master Linux... more
"Where has this book been all my professional life? It is about time someone wrote this book. The author covers many basic, practical issues that other authors omit in a format that makes for a great troubleshooting reference and for casual perusing. There are a lot of books available that give a broad overview of system and network administration, and there are a lot of detailed books on each specific topic covered in this book, but I don't know of any other place where I can get so much useful, practical information on such a wide range of topics in such a concise and readable form. I...
moreIn Black Hat Python, the latest from Justin Seitz (author of the best-selling Gray Hat Python), you'll explore the darker side of Python's capabilities writing network sniffers, manipulating packets, infecting virtual machines, creating stealthy trojans, and more. You'll learn how to:
Create a trojan command-and-control using GitHub
Detect sandboxing and automate common malware tasks,... more
Don't have time to read the top Linux books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.