Rating: 
Summary: At last it all makes sense
Review: The most authoritative guide on Samba from an insiders perspective, and something the windows administrator will benefit from.This is scary, open source projects becomming more microsoft centric. Wow! What next?
Rating:
Summary: A Must Have...
Review: The Official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide is a "Must Have" book for anyone responsible for the running of a multi platform environment. Written for both the SAMBA beginner and pro alike, this book allow the reader to both learn the basics or go as deep as the source code of the SAMBA tools.
Rating: 
Summary: The straight dope on Samba 3, authorative and indispensible
Review: The Official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide is an ambitious work that is going to have a lot of admins slapping their foreheads and saying "Aha! So that's how it's done." Having used Samba for quite a while, but never having felt confident enough to try anything overly exotic in the office, this book helped (and inspired) me to dust off my minimal configurations and go for more complete integration with the existing Windows infrastructure. The authors are knowledgable and speak from production experience, punctuating the technical content with helpful comments and best practices for folks who depend on Samba to get their job done. The tone of the book is also realistic about explaining what's in Samba, what might be in Samba, and what's not very likely to ever be in Samba. (I think it's great that members of the Samba team can be frank, and aren't taking advantage of an opportunity to toot their own horns, promise the moon and a bunch of vaporware.) Even if you consider yourself fairly advanced with Samba configuration, this book - the distilled knowledge and experience of great number of HOWTOs and configuration examples - is likely to be useful for you. It's probably not for rank beginners, but that's part of being a good reference work for production admins. My only complaint with the book has to do with a few typos and editing problems. (LaTex can be unforgiving, eh?) Also, I found Part II, the quick start/cookbook section, to be a little repetitive, and felt that it could have used a little more editorial oversight. (Hint: Don't read it straight through - you don't need to anyway.) But Part III, which is the meat of the book, is much better done, and I'd say damn near indispensible if you're serious about bridging the gulf between Un*x and Windows technologies in your workplace.
Rating:
Summary: The straight dope on Samba 3, authorative and indispensible
Review: The Official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide is an ambitious work that is going to have a lot of admins slapping their foreheads and saying "Aha! So that's how it's done." Having used Samba for quite a while, but never having felt confident enough to try anything overly exotic in the office, this book helped (and inspired) me to dust off my minimal configurations and go for more complete integration with the existing Windows infrastructure. The authors are knowledgable and speak from production experience, punctuating the technical content with helpful comments and best practices for folks who depend on Samba to get their job done. The tone of the book is also realistic about explaining what's in Samba, what might be in Samba, and what's not very likely to ever be in Samba. (I think it's great that members of the Samba team can be frank, and aren't taking advantage of an opportunity to toot their own horns, promise the moon and a bunch of vaporware.) Even if you consider yourself fairly advanced with Samba configuration, this book - the distilled knowledge and experience of great number of HOWTOs and configuration examples - is likely to be useful for you. It's probably not for rank beginners, but that's part of being a good reference work for production admins. My only complaint with the book has to do with a few typos and editing problems. (LaTex can be unforgiving, eh?) Also, I found Part II, the quick start/cookbook section, to be a little repetitive, and felt that it could have used a little more editorial oversight. (Hint: Don't read it straight through - you don't need to anyway.) But Part III, which is the meat of the book, is much better done, and I'd say damn near indispensible if you're serious about bridging the gulf between Un*x and Windows technologies in your workplace.
Rating:
Summary: The straight dope on Samba 3, authorative and indispensible
Review: The Official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide is an ambitious work that is going to have a lot of admins slapping their foreheads and saying "Aha! So that's how it's done." Having used Samba for quite a while, but never having felt confident enough to try anything overly exotic in the office, this book helped (and inspired) me to dust off my minimal configurations and go for more complete integration with the existing Windows infrastructure. The authors are knowledgable and speak from production experience, punctuating the technical content with helpful comments and best practices for folks who depend on Samba to get their job done. The tone of the book is also realistic about explaining what's in Samba, what might be in Samba, and what's not very likely to ever be in Samba. (I think it's great that members of the Samba team can be frank, and aren't taking advantage of an opportunity to toot their own horns, promise the moon and a bunch of vaporware.) Even if you consider yourself fairly advanced with Samba configuration, this book - the distilled knowledge and experience of great number of HOWTOs and configuration examples - is likely to be useful for you. It's probably not for rank beginners, but that's part of being a good reference work for production admins. My only complaint with the book has to do with a few typos and editing problems. (LaTex can be unforgiving, eh?) Also, I found Part II, the quick start/cookbook section, to be a little repetitive, and felt that it could have used a little more editorial oversight. (Hint: Don't read it straight through - you don't need to anyway.) But Part III, which is the meat of the book, is much better done, and I'd say damn near indispensible if you're serious about bridging the gulf between Un*x and Windows technologies in your workplace.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent book for those keen on SAMBA
Review: This book is a great resource for anyone who is using Samba to connect MS-Windows machines into a Unix environment for file sharing and print serving. I cannot say that I have read the book in its entirety, but I have used it to troubleshoot some common mistakes in the configuration of my smb.conf file. Moreover it was useful in defining a simple batch file to manually re-connect my shares without having Windows re-build the connection at login. I foresee myself consulting this book as my needs expand in usage of Samba as a networking bridge between Windows and the greater world that computing has to offer.
Rating:
Summary: Become a SAMBA Guru painlessly :-)
Review: This book is a great step by step guide, reference, and learning tool. The organization allowed me to drill into those areas of interest without having to wade through unnecessary details. When I wanted to drill into the technology - the information was there! I was able to find concise, accurate instructions, as well as theory and background. I think it is especially helpful to the Windows skilled sysadmin who is looking to deploy or support UNIX interoperability. Having the help files at the end of the book was also very helpful. I would recommend this book to anyone who has both Linux/Unix and Windows systems!
Rating: 
Summary: Samba 2 and not Samba 3
Review: This book reports the Samba 2 configuration examples and seems to ignore that Samba 3 "talks" directly with LDAP without the numerous "scripts" that are reported in the examples. This ia a Samba 2 daptation to the LDAP directory service and simply sucks!
If you want to make a donation to the Samba "father" John Terpstra, then buy the book but for real stuff, simply go in Internet, you will find exactly the same obsolete documentation, not a word more nor less.
Rating:
Summary: The Official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide
Review: Very good book, would be even better if audience was unix/linux admins, but I guess even windows admins are beginning to see the light. All kidding aside this book will help any administrator using samba regardless of the operating system.
I found most of the discussions easy to understand and read even on topics that can be hard for some admins to grasp (e.g. Security). I realise this is a compliation of work by many authors and so we see several different styles of writting, but in one section that was discussing file permissions the author said if you don't know what the "sticky bit" is, go read the man page, I believe the author should go read the man page, since what was really being describe and set by the command was the SUID & SGID bits! not the "sticky bit", but this is a common misunderstanding that I see in the classroom all the time so can be forgiven! All in all a great new reference for those of use needing to understand the smb protocol.
Rating:
Summary: Everything you ever need to know about MS Domains and Samba!
Review: What a fantastic reference! Not only does this fully explain how to install and configure Samba, but this includes how to troubleshoot and "insert" Samba in to a fully functioning Microsoft environment. This book includes a fantastic overview, and detailed discussion of how the Microsoft domain model works - invaluable for using Samba effectively. The endless tidbits of information were invaluable to me when installing and configuring. For instance, just what happens when you run SWAT the first time..., How to get a sample server up quickly..., How to connect from UNIX/Linux clients... And, how to use LDAP authentication. I highly recommend this HOWTO for anyone using Samba.
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