[TriLUG] sample chapters of RH courseware online for interested parties

[Robert P. J. Day]

  for those who might be interested, i've been revising a number of
my linux/red hat-related courses and, in order to get some feedback,
have posted a small number of sample chapters at

  www.kwlug.org/download.php

  there's still work to be done -- i'm still aesthetically messing
with the docbook stylesheets and agonizing over fonts, and some pages
are still to-be-written, but the flow and majority of content is there,
if people find it useful.

  right now, there are three sample chapters:

	kernel building
 	users and groups
	services (startup/shutdown and service management)

some of the thinking that went into the way these things were
written:

1) they're meant to be part of an instructor-led course, so those
   chapters necessarily don't try to present everything, leaving
   some things for exercises so students can figure it out on their
   own with some guidance.  (that means they're not really suitable
   for standalone reading some times.)

2) those chapters also don't try to cover every conceivable, cool
   feature of every topic.  my RH admin course is meant to be a 
   4-day course, and there's only so much you can do in 4 days, so
   each chapter covers what i consider *essential* first-level admin
   stuff, and leaves the really cool, neato stuff for a follow-up
   course i'm calling "advanced workshop".

   as an example of the difference between the two, consider, say,
   filesystems.  the first course will cover essentials like fdisk,
   structure of ext2/ext2 filesystems, mount/umount, /etc/fstab, 
   swap space, hard links, df, etc.  you get the idea.

   the advanced workshop will take off from there and get into reiser,
   XFS, LVM, RAID, parted, etc.  like i said, 4 days flies by a lot
   faster than you might think, so i have to be ruthless in deciding
   what stays and what goes.  it's the same with every chapter.

3) finally, those three chapters online (soon to be more) are all 
   formatted as if they're all the one and only chapter in the 
   manual -- that's just based on my commenting out all other
   chapters in the manual before running my docbook PDF generation
   program.  like i said, i'm still pondering aesthetics but you
   can still get an idea from what's there.

so feel free to check them out.  if they're useful, terrific.  if
you want to offer suggestions for improvement, i'm all ears.  more
chapters should be coming soon, but i better be careful that i don't 
end up publishing the whole thing onlike.  i'm not sure that would
be smart for business. :-)

rday