There aren't many FreeBSD books on the market -- compared to the number of Linux books, anyway -- so it's important that the few extant titles be superbly written and technically accurate. I was really looking forward to reading Absolute FreeBSD 2nd Edition because I'd heard such great things about the aged first edition. Unfortunately, I found this book to be a spectacular disappointment.

Writing analysis

This is a big, thick book, which makes it a little intimidating, but also offers the promise of in-depth technical information. Most of that space is occupied not by great technical writing, though -- it's consumed by colloquial garbage. The author offers long-winded, meandering, and pointless filler discussion on nearly every imaginable unimportant topic, and retreats into general statements about technical points that border on the inaccurate.

Absolute FreeBSD 2nd Edition is a traditional No Starch book, heavy on "I'm your best pal" conversational speech with little technical substance. Trying to rapidly achieve a high level of understanding about the FreeBSD operating system by reading this book is as frustrating and annoying as trying to get driving directions from someone who wants to describe every road and landmark between here and your destination. You might get there, but you're going to get lost a lot.

Not only is the material badly focused, it's also badly organized. The first chapter goes into meaningless depth on where to go for help, suggesting to readers that FreeBSD is a difficult, confusing, and problematic operating system that immediately requires more help than the book offers. This chapter should have been shorter and later (last) in the book.

Putting the book to the test

Absolute FreeBSD 2nd Edition is a substantial update to the first edition. This one covers FreeBSD 7.0, which is light years ahead of the FreeBSD 4.X series covered in the original text. As is frustratingly typical for the FreeBSD release cycle, the actual release has been delayed well past its original schedule, which means that the book covers a release that was not yet complete at the time of publication. The good news is, the material should be valid for quite a while. Time will tell if the FreeBSD 7 series lives up to expectations, but as far as guessing at a good release to choose to write a book about, the author did well.

As mentioned above, it's difficult to put this book to use. The language makes Absolute FreeBSD 2nd Edition hard to sit through. If you're hungry for FreeBSD information, you're going to have to suffer through pages and pages of unimportant filler and unfunny asides, extracting little bits of useful information as you go.

The majority of the information in Absolute FreeBSD 2nd Edition is so general and non-specific that it is nearly useless. Every fact I saw in this book had a big gaping hole through it. For example, in chapter 2 the author describes what each platform designation means:

"i386: The good old-fashioned Intel-compatible personal computer."

"powerpc: The PowerPC processor found in older Apple computers and many embedded devices."

"pc98: Similar to i386, but popular in Japan."

"sparc64: Used in high-end servers from Sun Microsystems."

These descriptions, when taken at face value, are inaccurate. i386 covers a much wider range than the 80386 and its derivatives (and the i386 port will not work on any machines prior to the 80486 era); some year-old Apple machines have PPC processors ("older Apple computers" used Motorola 68k processors as far as I am concerned); pc98 is not i386; and a large percentage of Sun's high-end machines use AMD64 processors, not to mention the fact that Fujitsu has sparc64 machines as well, and not all UltraSPARC-based systems will work with FreeBSD. These are just hints at the kind of technical depth that should have been in this book, but was appallingly absent. This was either a result of the author's laziness or his zeal for writing in simple, technically anemic language aimed at readers of below-average intelligence.

In all likelihood, you will abandon this book long before you finish reading it from cover to cover.

Summary and conclusions

The litmus test for all FreeBSD books and guides is whether or not they offer substantially more information than can be found for free online through The FreeBSD Handbook. In general, Absolute FreeBSD 2nd Edition does offer more information, but the author really makes you work to find it -- so much so that you'd be better off figuring most of it out on your own -- and the bits that are there are obscured by over-generalized, non-specific language that leaves you feeling like you don't really understand the boundaries of the covered topics.

The only people whom I could reasonably recommend Absolute FreeBSD 2nd Edition to are those who struggle with basic technical concepts, do not want a great deal of technical detail, and enjoy a long-winded colloquial writing style.

I'm obligated to mention that I wrote and maintain a FreeBSD guide called The FreeBSD Crash Course (I'm working on an update now). It's a short, concise guide to installing and configuring FreeBSD, aimed solely at technical people. Since it is focused differently and distributed electronically as a PDF, I do not consider it a competing title to Absolute FreeBSD. If you feel that I'm the sort of character who would do a hatchet job on a book like this to glorify my own guide, then you can safely disregard my review.

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Copyright 2008 JEM Electronic Media, Inc. No reprints without written permission.