:santagrin: This book was suggested by Wily Yuen

Books excerpts:

FreeBSD is a high performance operating system derived from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), the version of UNIX developed at the University of California at Berkeley between 1975 and 1993. Yet, it is not a UNIX clone. Historically and technically, it has greater rights than UNIX System V to be called UNIX. Legally, it may not be called UNIX, since UNIX is now a registered trade mark of The Open Group.

This book is intended to help the reader to get FreeBSD up and running on his system and to familiarize him with it. It won't cover everything since plenty of UNIX books and online documentation are available, and a large proportion of them are directly applicable to FreeBSD. In the course of the text, the reader will be repeatedly pointed to other documentation.

A lot of thing has happened since the first edition of this book released in 1996. Then, after receiving many complaints on the inclusion of so many pages taken from FreeBSD's man, the fourth paper edition comes in 2003 with 718 pages and zero man pages.

Noticing the difference in time scale between software releases and book publication, in which much of the text of the previous editions becomes obsolete very quickly, this edition now contains less time sensitive material than previous editions. For example, the chapter on building kernels no longer contains an in depth discussion of the kernel build parameters. They change too frequently, and the descriptions, though correct at the time of printing, would just be confusing. Instead, the chapter now explains where to find the up to date information.

Intended Audience:

The reader is at least expected to understand the basics of using UNIX. For those who've come from a Microsoft background, the author has promised to make the transition a "little less rocky".