Rating: 
Summary: Great for the newbie
Review: Excellent content, concepts and depth of knowledge. The author explains Oracle as it pertains to AIX, HP and Solaris. There are also many ready to run scripts to help monitor and tune a system. It even shows how to extend STATSPACK.
Rating: 
Summary: Oracle DBA book, but not 9I
Review: I do read a lot of books from Don and other fellows. If we'll talk about minor mistakes and minor details, that will be waste of time. No one expected very serious book like One-on-One or similar. If you're new in Admin, that book is very good. If you don't know UNIX and want to care Oracle on it, than that book is very helphful. And if you're looking for "New Features" of 9I on UNIX - some utilities, or different outputs and results ( for example even Oracle is not tells about that export/import are working now is very different if compare from 7 to 9I, not just features only ), than this book is not for you (it is print of UNIX scripts, article about StatsPack - looks like from his other book, and UNIX lessons ).
I will recommend this book only to junior-middle level people.
Rating: 
Summary: Quite Disapointed
Review: I expected that this book would tell me how to do routine db administration on Unix, in addition to other features. However, I was quite disappointed that it even didn't touch on how to create a oracle database manually on unix.
Rating:
Summary: A favorite
Review: I have a whole shelf of Oracle books and I can tell by the fraying the ones that I actually use regularly to solve problems.The book is well organized and has become a nice way for me to remember Unix commands. I also used the scripts successfully and I'm quite happy with the book.
Rating:
Summary: Super for a Unix newbie
Review: I know Oracle on Windows, but I was very scared of all the Unix commands that I would need to learn to do Oracle on Unix. This book was a superb help to me and I was able to copy Unix commands right from the book and just look up what I wanted to do.
Rating:
Summary: Super for a Unix newbie
Review: I know Oracle on Windows, but I was very scared of all the Unix commands that I would need to learn to do Oracle on Unix. This book was a superb help to me and I was able to copy Unix commands right from the book and just look up what I wanted to do.
Rating: 
Summary: Clear text and lot's of nice Oracle shell scripts
Review: I really needed this book because I am a DBA from an NT environment and new to UNIX. This book is heavily Oracle-centric, and has a focus on managing Oracle in a UNIX environment, which is very different fron Windows NT. This is one of the few Oracle books that I found worthy of reading from end-to-end. The only shortcoming that I noted was that it did not have enough scripts for Unixware and DEC-UNIX, but the coverage of Solaris, HP-UX and AIX is suberb. The books starts at a beginner-level and moves on in a steady progression to advanced concepts, which I found really helpful.
Rating:
Summary: A "must read" for Windows DBAs moving to UNIX
Review: I support Oracle 8i and 9i on Windows, HP-UNIX, Solaris and LINUX. This book has become my only UNIX reference. It not only explains how to interact with UNIX but also details the differences between the different major UNIX dialects. The focus is not on tuning Oracle so much as establishing and monitoring the UNIX platform to support an Oracle Database. The author explains UNIX administration from a DBA's point of view and details those commands a DBA needs to understand to insure that Oracle operates optimally in the UNIX environment. The scripts allow a DBA to proactively monitor UNIX and anticipate problems. If you are looking for a book on installing UNIX this is not it. If you are a DBA supporting Oracle in a UNIX environment you should always have this book close at hand.
Rating:
Summary: A "must read" for Windows DBAs moving to UNIX
Review: I support Oracle 8i and 9i on Windows, HP-UNIX, Solaris and LINUX. This book has become my only UNIX reference. It not only explains how to interact with UNIX but also details the differences between the different major UNIX dialects. The focus is not on tuning Oracle so much as establishing and monitoring the UNIX platform to support an Oracle Database. The author explains UNIX administration from a DBA's point of view and details those commands a DBA needs to understand to insure that Oracle operates optimally in the UNIX environment. The scripts allow a DBA to proactively monitor UNIX and anticipate problems. If you are looking for a book on installing UNIX this is not it. If you are a DBA supporting Oracle in a UNIX environment you should always have this book close at hand.
Rating: 
Summary: Unfortunately, not a book that I can recommend.
Review: I'd worked with Oracle 7.x on AIX boxes before but my most recent experience has been with Oracle on Windows. Our production system (9.2.0.3) was moving to an AIX box and one of the other DBAs thought that this would make a nice Christmas gift. A nice thought. The major problem is that most of the examples are wrong. The technical editing was incomplete. In the example comparing MS-DOS and UNIX commands, half of the examples are placed in the wrong column. I kept going throught the book, hoping that the examples would clear up or that I could find a systematic error so that I would know what errors to expect. The errors are random and persistent. An erratta sheet would be basically republishing the book. It sits on the shelf unopened. I have not used it to bring our Windows DBAs up to speed on UNIX because I would first have to unteach them the flaws that they saw in the examples. The text itself is perfectly good. Excellent. If you know Oracle and you know UNIX and you can ignore the examples then it's a fine book. But for someone going from Windows to UNIX I predict that it will lead to much frustration.
| 
