This is a great installation guide for Arch Linux; I installed Arch several times with nothing but this book and the 2010-05 netinstall CD.

However, in using Arch I found that the Handbook seemed to defer important information to online sources. For example, it does not fully document the essential pacman command. It gives example command lines that tell you what you must type to do an initial install but defers documentation of the all-important "pacman" with the suggestion that you try "man pacman" or "look up the pacman wiki entries at your leisure." There is a pacman tutorial in an appendix that gives example command lines that you would use for various purposes, but no detailed explanation of all of the pacman commands and options like you would find in an O'Reilly nutshell book or handbook.

There are other examples of information that is online being deferred to when a table in this book would make this a really useful "hand" book, one that you could carry into the woods with you and learn all about Arch Linux while sitting around the campfire.

There are numerous Arch specific man pages and wiki articles that should be included in this book. I was very glad that this book was available and I've enjoyed having it while bringing up my first Arch Linux system but a couple of hours after the installation I find no reason to carry this book to bed or even to keep it beside the computer.

It will be really great if the next edition of this book contains for us to carry to the bedside or the campfire all of the man pages for each command that is unique to Arch Linux and a more thorough compilation of "what you need to know to become a competent Archer."

Arch Linux does have a great support community and documentation. I've spent at least a year with each of Debian, Gentoo, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Ubuntu and it seems to me that Arch Linux may exceed them all in its quality of implementation and may meet the best of them in online documentation. This book improves the level of documentation for Arch and is well worth the small price to get started with this distribution.

这是一本很好的Arch Linux安装指南；除了这本书和2010-05的netinstall光盘，我还安装了好几次Arch。

然而，在使用Arch的过程中，我发现这本手册似乎把重要的信息推给了网上的资料。例如，它没有完整记录重要的pacman命令。它提供了一些命令行的例子，告诉你必须输入什么来进行初始安装，但却把最重要的 "pacman "的文档推迟了，建议你试试 "man pacman "或 "在闲暇时查阅pacman wiki条目"。附录中有一个pacman教程，给出了用于各种目的的命令行示例，但没有像O'Reilly果壳书或手册中那样对所有pacman命令和选项进行详细解释。

还有一些在线信息的例子被推迟到本书的表格中，这将使本书成为一本真正有用的 "手写 "书，你可以带着它进入森林，在篝火旁学习所有关于Arch Linux的知识。

有许多Arch专用的man页和wiki文章都应该包括在这本书中。我很高兴能有这本书，而且我很喜欢在建立我的第一个Arch Linux系统时拥有它，但在安装几个小时后，我发现没有理由带着这本书去睡觉，甚至把它放在电脑旁边。

如果这本书的下一版包含了Arch Linux特有的每个命令的man页，并对 "成为一个合格的Archer需要知道的东西 "进行了更全面的汇编，那就真的太好了。

Arch Linux确实有一个伟大的支持社区和文档。我在Debian、Gentoo、FreeBSD、NetBSD和Ubuntu中各花了至少一年的时间，在我看来，Arch Linux的实现质量可能超过了它们，在在线文档方面也可能达到它们中最好的。这本书提高了Arch的文档水平，非常值得花点小钱来开始使用这个发行版。