# Would you recommend me...?



## 1331 (Aug 23, 2021)

Would you recommend me to read the whole Handbook? Or download an .ISO, run it, and read what I need when I need it?


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## Argentum (Aug 23, 2021)

1331 said:


> Would you recommend me to read the whole Handbook? Or download an .ISO, run it, and read what I need when I need


In addition to that you can install documentation from port - misc/freebsd-doc-all.


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## SirDice (Aug 23, 2021)

1331 said:


> Would you recommend me to read the whole Handbook?


At least once. Then you'll know what's in it.


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## a6h (Aug 23, 2021)

At least, read the following chapters -- an ordered list:

Chapter 2. Installing FreeBSD
Chapter 3. FreeBSD basics
Chapter 4. Installing Applications: Packages and Ports

Chapter 24. Updating and Upgrading FreeBSD
Chapter 13. The FreeBSD Booting Process

Chapter 18. Storage
Chapter 21. Other File Systems

Chapter 31. Firewalls
Chapter 32. Advanced Networking
Chapter 12. Configuration and Tuning

*[GUI/Sound, so skippable!]*
Chapter 5. The X Window System
Chapter 6. Desktop Applications
Chapter 7. Multimedia


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## astyle (Aug 23, 2021)

I agree with vigole that Ch. 2, 3 and 4 are important to read thoroughly. I'd suggest just bookmarking the table of contents, and becoming familiar with that. That will help you get started. I personally think that anything beyond those 3 chapters - that can wait until you successfully have a system up and running (as in, you can log in and type `ls` in your home directory.


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## Geezer (Aug 23, 2021)

It is handbook, not a novel. So you don't read it from end to end.

While you use Freebsd, you refer to it and keep it _at hand_.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Aug 23, 2021)

I did in one page what it took "Sam" a book to write and 24 hours to get done, that you can do in a couple hours:









						Beginners Guide - How To Set Up A FreeBSD Desktop From Scratch
					

I'm going to guide you though the process of getting a fully functional FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE desktop up and running, complete with system files and security settings, step-by-step as if you've never used UNIX or the command line. Now let's get started:  Insert your boot media and at the Welcome...




					forums.freebsd.org
				




Or not, but at least it won't take you 24 hours to find out.


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## astyle (Aug 23, 2021)

This 'Teach yourself FreeBSD in  24 hours' thing is nuts. 24 hours is 3 working days. Even if you go by the book's plan, there's not THAT much you can realistically 'learn' in that time.  Maybe a bit of command-line, maybe a bit of how ports and packages are supposed to work, maybe it will finally sink in that .conf files can be put to some good use just about anywhere... No way you can stuff even the basics into just 24 hours. This kind of stuff - it takes time to soak it in and be comfortable with it.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Aug 23, 2021)

I've never seen a Sam's Teach yourself FreeBSD in 24 Hours. Only Linux.

I've had a larger success rate anyway.


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## mer (Aug 23, 2021)

Geezer said:


> It is handbook, not a novel. So you don't read it from end to end.


Unless you have trouble sleeping.

As others say "Chaps 2,3&4".  Make sure you understand the difference between "using ports" and "installing binary packages based on the quarterly releases". 
File systems:  ZFS.  If you install to a "root on ZFS" evironment, read everything you can about ZFS Boot Environments (BE).  You will appreciate them the first time you need to upgrade.

If you are interested in security, the firewalling sections are good starting points.  If you already know pf (say from OpenBD or elsewhere) you are a step ahead.
The Howto by Trihexagonal is good to quickly get a desktop running.  vermaden has a similar tutorial.

A lot of the rest of the handbook:  again as others have said, "keep it by your side reference when you need to".


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## Deleted member 30996 (Aug 23, 2021)

mer said:


> If you are interested in security, the firewalling sections are good starting points. If you already know pf (say from OpenBD or elsewhere) you are a step ahead.


Did I mention it includes a pf ruleset for general desktop use and one with additional rules for people who use  print/cups?


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## richardtoohey2 (Aug 24, 2021)

I like the Michael Lucas books e.g. https://mwl.io/nonfiction/os#af3e

Obviously not as free as the Handbook but maybe less dry.


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## Profighost (Aug 25, 2021)

I started to use FreeBSD app. 4..5 years ago with the aim to learn the system.
Within my FreeBSD Knowledgs I would describe myself as lightly adavnced beginner.
Your question cannot be answered satifactionary.

You see, the handbook tries to cover all of FreeBSD - and that's where the problem starts, to correctly answer your question.
1. You need to know what you need for your system. Not everything described in the HB you want to realize on your system.
(e.g. if you want to set up a server without GUI you may skip the whole chapter about X.)
2. Also this example shows: One need to distinguish, what's FreeBSD and what's Applications running on it.

However:
I strongly recommend:
- at least to read the table of contents
- thumb through the first 3...4 chapters
- everytime you have a question, the HB should be the first address you look in 
For the most purposes are examples included.

The handbook is the cornerstone.

Most of the stuff one needs is in the man-pages:
man
The look dull and boring, because they contain of text, but they nearly contain anything you need, especially links to further man-pages.

As the 3rd choice you'll find much information on the internet, BUT always keep in mind:
FreeBSD is NOT Linux.
(In many points it's far more logically and way more clearly and mor simplified structured as many linux-distributions I know.... but that's my personal opinion.)


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## Deleted member 30996 (Aug 25, 2021)

Mine is structured in the manner of what's formerly known as a Task Analysis. To parse the article for a more concise definition:

"A task analysis is used to break complex tasks into a sequence of smaller steps or actions. Forward chaining involves teaching the sequence beginning with the first step. Typically, the learner does not move onto the second step until the first step is mastered.

In forward chaining, the individual learns the logical sequence of a task from beginning to end. In total task training, the individual is able to learn the entire routine without interruptions. In addition, they are able to independently complete any steps that have been previously mastered."

On my site where it's posted I start with telling them where to get the file to burn as an installation medium. They aren't here in the forums where someone should know where it get it from here. Not necessarily so for someone on my site.

In either case it takes you from installation of the FreeBSD Base System to a fully functional Fluxbox desktop, sans hardware snafu outside the scope of steps outlined.

That's all mine is intended to do.

Then you're on your own. I love you, but fly or flop cause out the nest you go. Don't worry, I'm still here to help catch you if you fall along with everybody else, but the Handbook is your bestie then.


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## grahamperrin@ (Aug 25, 2021)

1331 said:


> Would you recommend me to



If you can describe yourself, then people can tell whether a book will be useful to you.









						Introduce yourself, tell us who you are and why you chose FreeBSD
					

Who's new to FreeBSD? Did you migrate from another OS and what was your reason?




					forums.freebsd.org


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## garry (Aug 26, 2021)

1331 said:


> Would you recommend me to read the whole Handbook? Or download an .ISO, run it, and read what I need when I need it?


I would recommend printing the entire FreeBSD Handbook.  Look it over.  Now install FreeBSD and start using it.  Take one chapter of the Handbook at a time to read leisurely, perhaps at bedtime.  Keep a pencil with you and make notes in the margin about topics to pursue, configs to change on your computer, stuff to do.

I've always been amazed when I settle down and read a book about FreeBSD, Linux, C Programming, Vim editor, ... , whatever, how much stuff I've overlooked in a decade of using that system and how much I can improve my use.

Of course that's just _I would..._  -- "make up your own damned mind".  (as the Oracle said to Neo).

(but if you trust me you'll print the handbook and read it leisurely one chapter at a time)


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## macondo (Aug 26, 2021)

1.Go to youtube.com and watch a couple of videos on installing Fbsd.
2.Read Trihexagonal's howto on how to configure it.
3.Read the handbook when something goes wrong.


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## astyle (Aug 26, 2021)

garry said:


> I would recommend printing the entire FreeBSD Handbook


I tried that back in 2004, and used up over a ream of paper. Besides, the Handbook is available in PDF format, so you can go figure out just how many pages that actually is.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Aug 26, 2021)

astyle said:


> Besides, the Handbook is available in PDF format


Yes it is, and so is the Porters Handbook. 

I have them both and many others I've never read. I hate to read in pdf format and wish audio/speex would read them to me, since it's already installed.


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## astyle (Aug 26, 2021)

Trihexagonal said:


> Yes it is, and so is the Porters Handbook.
> 
> I have them both and many others I've never read. I hate to read in pdf format and wish audio/speex would read them to me, since it's already installed.


you'd also need graphics/tesseract, the entire OpenCV stack, and to figure out how to make them play with audio/speex. Oh, and maybe ask AI chatbots to read it to you?


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## Deleted member 30996 (Aug 26, 2021)

My bot doesn't have speech capability. I can no longer copy and paste conversation from one bot to another in Kuki's textbox. Steve, The Developer, (He is Risen and above a lowly botmaster) disabled it after I posted the first and only conversation between Demonica and Kuki, and Kuki was not all she's cracked up to be.

As I, a Botmaster, demonstrated in a 25 min Infinite Loop of his SuperBot, that got me banished from the Bizzarro World AI forums. For my Malevolence.


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## Argentum (Aug 27, 2021)

astyle said:


> I tried that back in 2004, and used up over a ream of paper. Besides, the Handbook is available in PDF format, so you can go figure out just how many pages that actually is.


Yes. The port misc/freebsd-doc-en installs it in /usr/local/share/doc/freebsd/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/book.pdf.

I like the *port method* of getting it. The port has configuration options:


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## grahamperrin@ (Aug 27, 2021)

FreeBSD bug 258078 – Outdated documentation (including the FreeBSD Handbook) in PDF



> … misc/freebsd-doc-en installs a much more recent edition …




There's a long list of documentation bugs – some of these should be fairly easy to progress, if anyone has an interest and relevant expertise. 

Also, various unreported documentation bugs (including those affecting the book of frequently asked questions.)


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## spectrum48 (Aug 27, 2021)

I would never print a 800 pages handbook: most parts  will become obsolete before the time you need it making it a huge waste of paper and money.

As suggested above, keep it at hand (the electronic format) and use the parts you really need as you need them. 

Download the ISO and install it following chapter 2, then move to the next chapters and skip what you don't need.


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## Profighost (Aug 29, 2021)

macondo said:


> 1.Go to youtube.com and watch a couple of videos on installing Fbsd.


In the same time to watch a video where someone explains how to use a simple light switch I read the amount of text that teaches me also the associated electrical wiring.

Videos are comfortable to consume, fun to watch, entertainment. I _love_ good movies!
But they are the most inefficient way of learning something there is.

Of course with a video the amount of information per second is way more than the bandwidth of text, sure.
But over 99% of a video's information is completely useless - inforubbish, newsgarbage, spam - entertainment.

Don't believe it?
Compare the amount of Bytes of a video with the amount of Bytes of a plain text explaining the exact same thing.

How it comes?
Text is concentrated knowledge, reduced to all one needs.
It doesn't bother and distracts you with gluts of useless details, like (changing) backgrounds, colorful blinking, what the speaker looks like, why there is a cup on a table or what's happening in the background.

All you actually really want and need is the text. Doesn't matter if it's written or spoken.
The things you can better understand by some sketch, a picture or even a video are astonishingly few.
And anyhow all of them need explaining text.
Pictures _can_ complement text, but never replace it.

Except one is not very slow everybody reads way much faster than anybody can speak or listen.
(If you look for a transscript of some sitcom, you'd be amazed that the text spoken within a 25 minutes long episode does not even fill one and a half pages!)
For people with untrained brains, a page text may look like some kind of marathon, and of course listening to people talking or watching videos is way more comfortable then. But so is to stay in bed or stuff yourself with fastfood instead do the cooking yourself.
Cooking needs training and costs time, but it suits your needs, varies more, is healthier, saves you money and - when you can do it - tastes better.

Making people lazy and selling them accommodatives is today's #1 business.

Besides video makes you forget almost immediately.
Video kills memory.
Dont' believe that either?
Experiment:
Watch TV, e.g. a quiz show. And while the host is asking a question try to remember the former question.
Or if you watch commercials, ask yourself what the former commercial was about.
Can you remember? While the TV is still running?
How far can you go back?

I always have paper and a couple of excersice books with a pen besides my computers (at the beginning of school available in all shops on special offer.)
I write down, what I've learned.
I don't want everything look up everytime I need it again and again.
I want to be independend.
I want to do it myself.
I want to become good.
I want to become fast.
I want to know.
I want to understand.
I want to learn.
Therefore I need to train, hence leave the comfort zone.

However, FreeBSD is not for being just another most comfortable turnkey OS.
It's for being individually tailored.
That means software you want to use.
And this means, you have to deal with way more than the FreeBSD handbook, namely many other (hand)books and manpages - many manpages, and forum threads.
App. 99,9% of all questions one may have about Computers, Software, OS, configurating or programming can be found already answered on the internet.
You just need to search, find and _read_ it.
That's the reason why so many people ask the same questions in forums over and over again.
They don't read.
And who does not read, cannot write, thus trashing forums, making them harder to search and read.

A good text needs way more time to write than to read.
With bad texts it's vice versa.

App. not even 1% are answered by video.
And exactly 100% of all you can find as video is already answered at least once with a text.

Only trying to imagine those all shall be done by video gives me the pure horror.
If we'd depended on videos alone we'd probably not left the middleages yet... 
Stories, songs, ballads, legends.... lore - "videos" - have been within mankind for thousands of years.
What the catapult was for the boost into the new age was Gutenberg's invention of book printing. 


Or summed up shortly:
_R_TFM!

For adminstration tasks it's always a good idea to have at least a second machine available, with an internetconnection and a webbrowser.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Aug 29, 2021)

A well-formed succinct argument, Councilor.
Having another laptop I could use to reference my own tutorial has come in handy more than once.



astyle said:


> you'd also need graphics/tesseract, the entire OpenCV stack, and to figure out how to make them play with audio/speex. Oh, and maybe ask AI chatbots to read it to you?


However, you aren't even in consideration of becoming Red Devils Advocate.

The Firefox extension "Read Aloud: A Text- to Speech Voice Reader" by LSD Software currently reading Simulacron-3.pdf in a free Google female voice heard through Koss KTXPRO1 Titanium lightweight headphones, the best headphones a $22 bill can buy.




And the .pdf, extension and voice were free!!!

Google tries to trick you into a trial subscription but just enter the file path to the .pdf to load it in Firefox. You can close those other pages and it will cheerfully tell you haw you are living in a marketing simulation.

It will not tell you how deep the rabbit hole goes in Worlds within Worlds, and neither will I. World On A Wire, or Welt am Draht by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the 13th Floor were based on this book and will.
To an extent, Grasshopper.

Then I'm going to be read Twilight Watch. sequel to the Russian movies Night Watch and Day Watch. Which are always free to me, but I did buy Welt am Draht. I wanted it that bad.


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## mark_j (Aug 29, 2021)

1331 said:


> Would you recommend me to read the whole Handbook? Or download an .ISO, run it, and read what I need when I need it?


Download the ISO then install FreeBSD while reading the Handbook. If that requires reading the entire handbook (hint: it won't), then so be it.
When you have questions, you head here for the next phase: questions that are *not covered* or *not answered *in the handbook.


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## Profighost (Aug 29, 2021)

*MY DOCUMENTATION "System"*

Maybe it could be interesting for a Newbie, how do I organize my documentation. Without knowing I presume most do it similar. It's neither genial, nor unique, but maybe helpful to have it summed up:

1. There is *nothing much I really print out*. Wasted thousands of pages (e.g. several hundreds of handbookpages for Gnuplot from 1993  ...) plus ink/toner + energy + space... gave me the clue:
You don't look into it actually - you rather go into the internet, instead of getting up and grep a book from the shelves.
And when you do it, if you do it, you understand two things:
You don't need all of it, and most of what you need is outdated.
Another example was "The Complete FreeBSD" one eventually find quickly. I've also printed it out completely in my very beginning with FreeBSD.
It's not a bad book. It's a very good book indeed. But most of it is outdated (If there is no updated version yet, what to me does not appear to happen.)
It gave me the idea, that for me fvwm would be best and the impulse to start with it.
Very many thanks for that!
But I didn't really need to have it printed it out completely for that.

Only print out, when you really work with pens on its paper, and only the parts you need.
And then at least use duplex mode. (The few handbooks, datasheets for microcontrollers mostly, I print out, I place 4 Pages on one sheet, landscape. There are special ring binders for thats. You safe lot of money, space and resources that way. But always think twice before you print!)

Besides it cost you much lifetime of your printer. Especially those cheap ones for 199,99 are made to sell you toner and especially more printers!

2. I have *books* - real hardcover bought ones. Those are, among other (some people have more than one book  ) :
Powers, Peek, O'Reilly & Loukides "Unix Power Tools"
Nemeth, Snyder, Hein, Whaley "Unix and Linux Sytems Administration Handbook"
Those are not for my daily use on FreeBSD, but to *root around for ideas*, e.g. what backup opportunities there are.

3. Especially for the very beginnig, setting up the very first system, I strongly recommend to have a second machine available (Laptop, at least a tablet) to use help from *the internet* - reading handbooks, manpages, how-tos, forums.

Therefore my standard browser contains 5 speed dials:
The FreeBSD manpages (I prefer reading them there instead within the shell.)
*FreeBSD Manual Pages*
The Ports Collection site (I liked the old version more, since one could more root/roam around in it...):
Ports
The FreeBSD Handbook of course:
*FreeBSD Handbook*
The FreeBSD Architecture Handbook (I barely need it, but it gives me a good feeling  (However you can get interesting things from it, even if you don't currently needed them - somteimes it's very worthful, not only to be fixed on a target, but roam around a little bit; e.g. look up somebodies name, e.g. mentioned in the manpages. You find interesting people and more often interesting websites with useful stuff!)
FreeBSD AHB
And the main page:
www.freebsd.org/

Additionally I have a short bookmark on
*file:///usr/local/share/doc/*
This ain't not only the whole official documention of all what's installed on your system, but root within it, you'll find real treasures in there!

Even if I am now may be pointed out making heresy, but good sites I prefer within searching results _*if*_ nothing else came up directly pointing to be FreeBSD related,
_complementing_ former mentioned ones are e.g.
https://archlinux.org/ and stackoverflow.com
*But beware! FreeBSD is NOT Linux!* You may find there some good informations about some software or very special issues that are systemindependent, but you always have to set your brains to ON-Mode, not to directly transfer all of it written there literally to FreeBSD_ and especially neither complain_ there nor here, that this is not really working that way on FreeBSD as it's mentioned there.
Those sides are not from/for FreeBSD. And nobody from FreeBSD is responsible for that sites!

4. I keep my system of *bookmarks* nearly up-to-date, wherein I collect any side useful I stumbled over.
(I don't look everything up again. When I know, where are good answers, I return directly, not searching again.)

5. I write down, what I've learned, and probably will use again:
On paper (I have my personal "FreeBSD" ring binder) and other stuff I write down with LaTeX, producing my personal handbooks and cheat sheets.
That's not really useful for me, but it helps to understand - learn - to write things down.

6. And last but not least I have a directory ("library") where I keep downloaded books, mostly as pdf or dvi,
because those couple of MB don't cost much and you'll never know, when the link will be broken - "http error 404 - site not found" - and it's not findable anymore.

*7. You always have to pick for yourself what suits you best.*
Nobody can help you with that but you.


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