Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely a great book FreeBSD book -- for administrators
Review: This is the sort of book I've been waiting for, since reading Annelise Anderson's "FreeBSD" almost one year ago. Michael Lucas is well-known for his articles, and his knowledge and easy conversational style shine in "Absolute BSD." Of the four books I've read with "FreeBSD" in the title, this has been the most helpful -- but not necessarily the most comprehensive.
The strength of "Absolute BSD" lies in Lucas' understanding of what matters most to system administrators. Control of services via scripts, bandwidth throttling, firewalls, networking health monitoring, SCSI, RAID, upgrades -- these are what UNIX sys admins care about. You'll learn the most if you follow along with Lucas' examples. I tweaked, tuned, and typed my way through kernel builds, mergemaster, IPFilter, jails, MRTG, and other processes and tools. Along the way I appreciated Lucas' attention to detail, like pointing out the subtleties of 'top -S', and his knowledge of obscure tools, like 'sockstat' or 'vmstat'.
"Absolute BSD" does have a few flaws, and I almost gave it four stars. I was sad to see no coverage of 'portupgrade' (though Lucas wrote about it in Nov 01) or using RSA/DSA authentication with OpenSSH. While his instructions for Apache were sufficient to get a basic installation running, I didn't feel BIND was covered adequately. I would trade the talk about these applications for more FreeBSD-specific material, like the excellent and unique chapters on "Making Your System Useful" (ch 10) and "System Performance" (ch 18). Beware errors in crontab entries (pp 190-1) and probably omissions in OpenSSL (pp 313-4). Overall, the quality of the material Lucas included in his book far outweighed my concerns. If you know anything about FreeBSD, it's that the developers of the volunteer project are almost too busy to document their work. Thank goodness Lucas -- a FreeBSD committer -- took the time to share what he knows!
"Absolute BSD" addresses topics not found in other FreeBSD or UNIX system administration books. It's a must-buy. If you want wider coverage, try "FreeBSD Unleashed." For integration with Windows, check out "The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide." For comparisons with other UNIX types, see "The UNIX System Administration Handbook." Beginners will still like Annelise Anderson's "FreeBSD." I can't wait to read Lucas' upcoming OpenBSD book.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely a great book FreeBSD book -- for administrators
Review: This is the sort of book I've been waiting for, since reading Annelise Anderson's "FreeBSD" almost one year ago. Michael Lucas is well-known for his articles, and his knowledge and easy conversational style shine in "Absolute BSD." Of the four books I've read with "FreeBSD" in the title, this has been the most helpful -- but not necessarily the most comprehensive.
The strength of "Absolute BSD" lies in Lucas' understanding of what matters most to system administrators. Control of services via scripts, bandwidth throttling, firewalls, networking health monitoring, SCSI, RAID, upgrades -- these are what UNIX sys admins care about. You'll learn the most if you follow along with Lucas' examples. I tweaked, tuned, and typed my way through kernel builds, mergemaster, IPFilter, jails, MRTG, and other processes and tools. Along the way I appreciated Lucas' attention to detail, like pointing out the subtleties of 'top -S', and his knowledge of obscure tools, like 'sockstat' or 'vmstat'.
"Absolute BSD" does have a few flaws, and I almost gave it four stars. I was sad to see no coverage of 'portupgrade' (though Lucas wrote about it in Nov 01) or using RSA/DSA authentication with OpenSSH. While his instructions for Apache were sufficient to get a basic installation running, I didn't feel BIND was covered adequately. I would trade the talk about these applications for more FreeBSD-specific material, like the excellent and unique chapters on "Making Your System Useful" (ch 10) and "System Performance" (ch 18). Beware errors in crontab entries (pp 190-1) and probably omissions in OpenSSL (pp 313-4). Overall, the quality of the material Lucas included in his book far outweighed my concerns. If you know anything about FreeBSD, it's that the developers of the volunteer project are almost too busy to document their work. Thank goodness Lucas -- a FreeBSD committer -- took the time to share what he knows!
"Absolute BSD" addresses topics not found in other FreeBSD or UNIX system administration books. It's a must-buy. If you want wider coverage, try "FreeBSD Unleashed." For integration with Windows, check out "The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide." For comparisons with other UNIX types, see "The UNIX System Administration Handbook." Beginners will still like Annelise Anderson's "FreeBSD." I can't wait to read Lucas' upcoming OpenBSD book.
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