Linux in Small Business: A Practical User's Guide a review by Al Brown In a nutshell, this book is exactly what the title proclaims: a useful guide for someone not expert in Linux or software, who wants to quickly deploy Linux in a business environment. This book takes a rather straight forward approach to presenting a lot of information in relatively few pages. It is based on a Redhat installation using the Gnome desktop, neither of which is one of my personal favorites, but I considered it a smart move to concentrate on one distribution. Another noticeable trait, is the author's reoccuring reference to his website, www.linuxleap.org, which besides housing a few downloadable configuration files, is an intro to the author's business services. I would rather have seen a few extra pages with the files or preferably a mini CD included with the book, but it is not a major drawback. I was very pleased with the organization of the material. It was definitely geared toward getting results without drowning the reader in details. The subjects were addressed in a manner that provide a specific means of satisfying a given need. Once implemented, the reader is in a position to gain some insight into the workings of the particular application or tool and decide later if further adjustments are necessary. The number of topics covered was also impressive. Everything from basic installation, through file sharing, print services, and networking, to office applications was covered, not in depth, but sufficiently to get one started. The one small office scenario which was used throughout the book, seemed to be well thought out and presented a reasonable variety of situations that would be encountered in the average office environment. Subjects such as Samba, which are actually very complex, were demonstrated in such a way that would be useful but not intimidating. Even in the areas that are seeing regular change and improvement, such as office suites, the proposed solutions can suffice while one investigates the available alternatives. It was nice to see that command-line operations and system administration were addressed later in the book, rather than early on as is done in so many other books. The typical user doesn't care what processes are running, or how much free disk space there is, etc., until they have some basics in place such as a functional wordprocessor, email, and internet connenction. This book is a welcome change from all the overweight, detail laden text books that, although useful, are impractical when trying to implement all the normal features of the typical Windows machine in a very short timeframe on a new and unfamiliar platform. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is relatively new to Linux and needs to get work done immediately in a Windows-centric environment.