Rating: 
Summary: Sense-making
Review: It's a technical book, but it makes sense.
Rating:
Summary: Absolute means absolute
Review: Let me start by saying that it's amazing what IS in this book for having ONLY 500 pages.I've used BSD for 3 years now and cannot find a better reference guide ANYWHERE. This book is AWESOME. The writing style is crisp and ENTERTAINING. I read the book from cover to cover (which is unusual for a tech. manual) and still use it as my main reference. If it doesn't have the answer I'm looking for (which is rare), it at least gives me enough information to find the answer. The section on IPFilter is worth the price alone and had me drooling with delight at the knowledge therein. I also personally enjoyed the networking section which describes basic network concepts (network layers, arp, ip addresses) as well as a vibrant discussion of netstat. Security is also a focus and the discussions of who/what/why/where/when/how of security is laid out in the style I've come to admire in Mr. Lucas. Basic permissions, flags are discussed as well as sockstat (I LOVE sockstat). Next I liked the section on ports and patching. This discusses the way each of these are utilized and how to handle upgrading ports and packages (in a step by step method). Mr. Lucas actually has DNS make SENSE, which all of us know can be daunting indeed. Mr. Lucas has made a gem of a book and only 500 pages. If you want a complete discussion of X-Windows, go find a Linux book, this is FreeBSD!
Rating:
Summary: ABSOLUTEly amazing.
Review: My work requires me to read alot of technical books. I am so full of praise of this book that I am actually at a loss of words right at this moment.
Never have I seen a book that can actually keep my attention throughout every single chapter.
I guess it is the way it is written. Very light-hearted, practical, and concise. I wish every technical book is written like this. If you are looking for a FreeBSD book, look no further.
Great job, Michael :)
Rating:
Summary: definately worth the purchase
Review: Out of the BSD books I've purchased .... while most are aimed at first timers .... this one jumps straight into the Kernel && buildworld -- and that's the best way / approach for me; epecially when the OS will work better when built by you & for your machine ...... Not to mention the detailed section of using ports is also satisfactory ..... even for a seasoned BSD user....
It really depends on whether or not you want to thumb through the usual 200pgs of how to cd & ls ... or "get straight to it" .,
Not to mention ... the humor of Michael Lucas is fantastic ... and that's few and far between when it comes to technical manuals / guides ....
Well worth the buy !!!!!
Rating:
Summary: The introduction says it all...
Review: The introductions explains the scope of the book and who it is for: <i>*Welcome to Absolute BSD! This book is a one-stop shop for new UNIX administrators who want to build, configure and manage dedicated FreeBSD servers.*</I> Now, if that applies to you, then you can get no better book. If you want X11 stuff, look elsewhere. Wanna play games??? Keep looking. I have been a network admin on other platforms for years and moved to BSD. I needed to set up a few secure and reliable web/mail/dns servers. This book was the perfect book for my needs. But what truly makes the book unique and great is the author. Too many people write Unix books that talk about commands but never actually talk about getting work done with the computer. To me, most Unix writers are more interested in showing off acquired knowledge than actually relaying that knowledge in a useful way. Learning Unix from a book had always been pain until I found this book. If you will allow me an analogy... If you look up "hammer" in most Unix books they tell you the vector force required to use the hammer. They tell you exact measurements of a hammer. They tell you the molecular composition of the head of the hammer. Then they tell you to subscribe to lists@hammers.org. Michael Lucas actually says that it is used to drive in a nail! (imagine that) No, this book does not cover every FreeBSD command and what it does. Nor was it meant to. The book is about providing solutions and not just a bunch or words. If you are a Unix rookie and want to become a decent admin fast, this is the right book. It is so easy to read, I read it for fun. (It is really funny) For you ultra newbies, learn a pinch of Unix first, not much but a pinch. FreeBSD is bar none, the most dependable server OS out there. Using it and this book is a killer combination.
Rating:
Summary: Incredibly helpful
Review: This book is by far the most useful and helpful book I've read for setting up a *NIX server (and as my husband and I have set up several dozen Linux boxes, a couple of SGIs, and an HP-UX machine, believe me when I say I've read several). The author uses a light, humorous and conversational tone throughout, making the book an easy read even for newbies, but that doesn't mean it's lacking in technical information-- just reading Chapter 9 (Too Much Information About /etc) is enough to make your head spin. Mr. Lucas starts from the beginning with installing FreeBSD (a chapter that I admit I skipped at first, and I ended up reinstalling because of it), and goes all the way up through such non-trivial events as system panics and how to respond to them (unfortunately, most of the best options require some proactive configuring, so the bulk of the people who need the information will be unprepared. But that is hardly the author's fault). In between, he spends several chapters discussing how to secure your system, which is probably the single most important element to setting up any computer for any use, and also the most ignored. The book is, admittedly, a little light in X11 and other desktop-machine elements (a mere 14 pages are devoted to the entire subject), and is more suited to those wishing to set up a server. It's evident, however, that the author has had a great deal of experience with setting up FreeBSD servers for a number of uses in a number of environments, as there's enough information in the book to set up your server as: * An all-purpose Internet host * A dedicated mail host
* A high performance web server * A firewall * A fileserver on a Microsoft network * A backup server * A nameserver * A network-monitoring server While it's highly unlikely that you would ever want a single server to do all of the above, the information is there for you to pick and choose what you need for your particular environment. And throughout it all, Michael Lucas keeps his irreverent yet easily understood tone.
Rating:
Summary: Absolute BSD.
Review: This book is great. I've been using FreeBSD for 4 years and it helped me brush up on some stuff i had forgot. Teaches you about system crashes and how to check core dumps. Networking/Kernel/EVERYTHING. This book is great. Good job MWLucas.
Rating: 
Summary: Not what it could be, too general.
Review: This book is too generalized. It barely covers much about FreeBSD, the OS and configurations. It covers some basic aspects, which may help someone that's never used a *nix variant--but other than that it covers a lot of basic stuff about Apache, Sendmail, etc. Personally, if I buy a book about an OS, I want it to cover a lot about it. This had a total (what I can recall, at least it seemed) of about 20 commands, basic configuration and the rest was just fluff about Apache, Sendmail, etc. I can't see this book being of much value. Condensed it would be a "decent' one chapter worth of knowledge. This book doesn't have a lot of knowledge or information to obtain. I have been using Linux and *nix variants for about 8 years, doing web server tasks. I haven't been on a FreeBSD system for a while now and got this book to brush up, see the differences, etc. The problem was, even though at this point logging into a FreeBSD server feels a little alien to me, even after all these years since I've used one much, I can refer to this book for anything and I already know it. Don't mistake that for me knowing more about it than I thought--there's a lot I don't know and this book didn't touch any of it. This is way too basic and for the size of it, you'd think it would at least cover more for someone starting in it with more information. I didn't see either value in this book. Again, this book could be condensed into one chapter and it would only be a so-so chapter. It didn't cover any of the commonly used commands, other than ps and top and netstat, etc., it didn't get into anything helpful. Very basic, and very general and too much fluff. I took it back the same day--because flipping through the entire book, there was only a few things I forgot about. It doesn't have much to offer, you can get all this information just as easily in the FreeBSD documentation at the FreeBSD site. This book may be good for beginners, or people like me, that just like to read and own books and try and soak up as much knowledge about the topic as they can, but only for someone very new to this... even then, I wonder the value.
Rating:
Summary: For new SysAdmins or those who want to build a server
Review: This is a book for people who want to use FreeBSD as a server -- for mail, web services, DNS, etc. It's not a book for those who want to use FreeBSD as a desktop machine. FreeBSD makes a perfectly good desktop OS, but Absolute BSD includes very little information about setting up X or installing and using desktop applications. If you want to try out FreeBSD as an alternative to your Linux desktop, look elsewhere. But if you want to build a server, and learn an awful lot of incredibly useful bits about basic systems administration tasks (much of which is applicable to any other *nix system, including Linux), then I haven't found a better book for this purpose. I bought this book because I liked Lucas's more recent book, Absolute OpenBSD, so much, and he covers FreeBSD at least as well, if not better. His writing style is humorous and very readable while still conveying a lot of technical information, and you not only learn what you need to type on the command line to accomplish a particular task, but also how a SysAdmin thinks. Being more familiar with Linux, only somewhat familiar with BSD in general, I have gone from chapter to chapter and this book has guided me through installing FreeBSD both from CDs and over the network, upgrading it, and recompiling a more optimized kernel (which turns out to be a fairly painless process, if you follow the instructions in this book, for those of you who believe, as I did, that recompiling kernels is a big hassle, messing with the guts of your machine and likely to kill it if you make one stupid mistake). He explains every configuration file, how to set up (or turn off!) services, how to make your machine secure, how to make it useful, how to install and upgrade new packages, and how to provide web, mail, and DNS services, and his instructions are very clear and makes it much easier to understand WHY you need to do certain things as well as what you should do. Someone who has never performed any of these tasks before should have no trouble doing so by following the instructions in this book, and afterwards you should know enough that with a little exploration you'd be able to do the same on another OS. As the author says at the beginning, this book is actually meant to be read from start to finish, rather than being flipped through as a reference guide. What you learn in each chapter builds on the one before. Thus, this book might be somewhat less useful to experienced SysAdmins who just need to know BSD-specific information -- while the information is comprehensive enough to make it a good reference guide, there is probably a lot of extra space devoted to material that experienced SysAdmins already know. However, if you're a novice SysAdmin or just want to learn how to run your own server at home or a small one at work, I think Absolute BSD does a credible job of turning absolute novices into competent junior-level SysAdmins. So this is really a book about systems administration, not just FreeBSD, though the material is all aimed at running FreeBSD systems. For its intended audience (novice or junior-level systems administrators or people who just want a web server) and scope (using FreeBSD as a server), this is an excellent book. There are other FreeBSD books out there, or more generic books about Systems Administration, with a wider scope, which might be more useful for other purposes. But I would still absolutely recommend including this book on your shelf if you are going to perform admin duties on any system (especially *nix systems), or use FreeBSD for any purpose.
Rating:
Summary: Total Agreement
Review: This is the best BSD book out there for newbies. The conversational style as well as the actual text formatting make this the easiest reading book on the subject. Others were WAY TOO technical for comprehension without repeated study. This one gets your feet wet in a comfortable manner, but still covers just about everything you need to know to make BSD into a secure, reliable SERVER. Be aware, no X-windows coverage here! If that's your issue, go to FreeBSD Unleashed. While I never read it, I know it covers X.
| 
