Book Review – Manage Partitions with GParted How-to by Curtis Gedak

I know I know, you are probably thinking to yourselves “Hey, isn’t this a virtualization blog, why are you writing about partitions and disk management”.  Well the truth of the matter is that I’ve been using GParted to do partitioning for quite a while now and to be honest have always had great successes with it (meaning it’s saved my bacon a few times 🙂 )  Well, over the holidays I had the chance to check out a new book by Curtis Gedak titled Manage Partitions with GParted How-to and I’m glad I did!!!!  Curtis Gedak has managed the GParted project for the past 4 years so you can safely assume that he has some pretty good knowledge on the topic at hand 🙂

So, on to the actual book.  It is broken down into a few key concepts (Must know, Should Know and Become an Expert).  Honestly, when I first started reading this I thought it might be something that I would need to sit down with a copy of GParted loaded up in front of me, but in the end I just ended up reading it from cover to cover without even touching a computer.   Each chapter is broken down into a few different sections; Getting Ready, How to do it, How it works, and There’s more.  This type of writing style and organization makes it very easy to also use this as a reference book when performing GParted actions.  The book takes you through every single action that can be performed within GParted; certainly check out the TOC here.

Throughout all my experiences with GParted I’ve been just sort of “using” the application, never really knowing what it is that is happening in the background.  This book gives you the deep dive that you need in order to fully understand how partitions are laid out on a disk as well as a step by step guide in order to create, modify, resize, move, and manage your partitions in order to give you the most effective and efficient disk use possible.

Honestly, don’t take my word for it either, check it out.  You can get a free chapter here where you can see for yourself the wealth of information and sharp illustrations.  However if you do want to take my word, my word would say if you use GParted on a regular basis, or if you plan on starting to use it, this book would be great for you.