The Linux Book That Could
When I was working on my Trackerbox database this week, I discovered that my book THE LINUX COMMAND LINE BEGINNER’S GUIDE has now sold over 20,000 copies.
I’m really pleased about that. I spent a long time in IT, and my main motivation for writing this book was to make something that would be helpful to people just starting out on using Linux. The book has gotten some criticism for being too basic, but that was a deliberate decision on my part. Think about it mathematically – there are far more people who know nothing about Linux and need something to help them start out than there are advanced Linux users who, say, need to set up a Postfix server or a NAS appliance or something.
I’ve gotten a lot of emails from people about that book over the last six years saying how it helped them. Here are some of my favorites:
-A high school teacher emailed to say that due to an unexpected staff absence, he had to teach a class on Linux with about a week to prepare. THE LINUX COMMAND LINE BEGINNER’S GUIDE helped him stay a few weeks ahead of his students during the semester. 🙂
-A software developer at one of the publishing platforms I used emailed to say that his company was switching to Linux for their production environment, and he was surprised to discover that the book he used was published through his company’s platform.
-I had a college professor email me to say that he didn’t particularly like THE LINUX COMMAND LINE BEGINNER’S GUIDE, but he couldn’t find anything better so he was going to keep recommending it to his students. I have to admit that some of my favorite reviews are the ones where people say things like “I DON’T LIKE THIS BUT I CAN’T STOP READING IT” with the horror of a dedicated athlete unable to stop himself from eating that second order of cheese fries.
-From the opposite side of the coin, I’ve gotten many emails from college students, usually math majors having to use LaTeX for rendering mathematical formulas, to say that the book helped them get accustomed to the Linux command line environment.
-One of my favorite emails was from a textbook publisher asking to buy the rights to the book. I turned it down (politely), of course, since the book has made far more money on its own that it would have through a traditional publisher.
Thanks everyone! I’m grateful that so many people have found the book helpful.
-JM