Rating: 
Summary: Good solid Solaris reference
Review: As an experienced Solaris and NT administrator, I have been waiting a long time for a book which covered all of the core Solaris material which I learned through experience. This book covers all of the material which makes Solaris distinct from other flavors of UNIX (like HP/UX and Linux). I like the way that the author has given examples of how to get things right (like a whole chapter each on SAMBA and NFS), and how to fix things that go wrong (like filesystem corruption - there are some great examples for using fsck). But I think there should have been more coverage of IPv6 and server clustering.
Rating: 
Summary: Solaris 8 - reviewed by the editor of Inside Solaris
Review: As the editor of Inside Solaris journal for a long time, I've been exposed to a lot of material covering Solaris. This book covers almost everything I've seen with depth and accuracy. I also wrote the foreward for this book, which is shown below:It's been an incredible journey for Sun Microsystems and it's flagship operating system, Solaris. Sun released the first version of Solaris, based on a port of System V, release 4, in the early '90s and has built it into a truly world class application platform, scaling from PC's to clusters of 64-way E10000's. Solaris has been the first true assault on the "glass-house" mainframe world of proprietary architectures and astronomical prices. And every version has offered incremental improvements that keep Sun one step ahead of the competition. Things like 64-bit processing, the journaling file system, great Java support and network integration that is built-in from the ground up. And this is were this book comes in. "Solaris 8: The Complete Reference" guides you through the rich functionality of Solaris with real world examples and techniques for getting the most out of your Solaris machines. There's enough here to satisfy everyone, from the Solaris expert who needs a reference to beginners looking for a guide to tackle a powerful, yet complex operating system. Spanning all of the core areas of Solaris makes "Solaris 8: The Complete Reference" an indispensable tool for both administrators and users.
Rating: 
Summary: Solaris 8 for beginners
Review: Caution, this is a book for beginners without any serious experience with Unix-like operating systems. Instead of focusing on the differences between Solaris and other Unix variants, it attempts to cover all that is Unix. Necessarily, this can not be done in any great detail in a single volume, even if it is nearly seven hundred pages long. In addition, you get wide margins, large print and pages and pages of listings --- not only of configuration files, but also of command output. Do you really need a two-page listing of directory sizes to explain du? I think not. If Watters and Veeraraghavan were paid by the page, they surely optimized their revenue. If not, I fail to understand why they neglected one of the basic tenets of Unix: brevity.
Rating:
Summary: very poor
Review: coming from a linux background, I'm used to high quality documentation. This book appears to have virtually no useful information in it all about how solaris actually works. e.g: I want to know which device in the /dev directory corresponds to my cdrom. This is not immediatly obvious from /etc/mnttab. This 'complete reference' makes no mention of where it might be or what it might be called. want to know how to configure CDE? Don't buy this book. Its not in here.
Rating:
Summary: This book is great!
Review: I bought this book after returning Janice Winsor's not so great Solaris 8 book. This book has concise examples. I think it's intermediate level. I might agree, it's not a complete reference, but it does do a superb job of thoroughly explaining by example a lot of very useful and sometimes complicated tasks (e.g. nfs, nis, etc.). I like the Osborne 'Complete Reference' series in general. The authors and editors there generally produce useful books.
Rating: 
Summary: Not a Complete Reference, but nice to have !
Review: I bought this book because I wanted to supplement my preparation for the Solaris 8 certification exams. I already had sysadmin experience with versions 2.5, 2.6 and 7. Solaris 8 - The Complete Reference is extremely readable and a good start for anyone who needs to look at the new Solaris version. Pros
Good emphasis for PC based admins coming from an NT background, who need a grounding in Solaris and UNIX.
Very, very readable. Cons
Not very much real information on the boot process Not very much information on the security aspects of Solaris, just a few pages only.
Way too much detail on on subjects like FTP (16 pages), which everyone should know anyway.
Practically nothing on the use and setup of Jumpstart or diskless clients.
Not enough detail on the real Solaris features such as volume management, and set/getfacl and the Openboot process. But overall.... I solidly recommend it to be on every small or big- time Solaris admins bookshelf.
Rating:
Summary: Lots of worked examples made it easy to read
Review: I bought this book because Mark Sobell's book didn't take me as far as I wanted to go with UNIX. This book caters for gurus and beginners. I also like to read many examples in books, not just man page printouts, and this book really delivers in the examples area (unlike some other reference books around).
Rating: 
Summary: Waste of time and money
Review: I come from Windows NT and read some other Solaris materials but this book didn't help me in understanding the OS as I expected it too. It generalize major topics and lacks good examples. I find it a waste of time reading this book.
Rating:
Summary: The above people are on crack.
Review: I have been using various flavours of linux and BSD for 8 years now. Without a whole lot of practical experience in Solaris I spent the money and bought this book. It is an excellent resource and overview covering a wide range of topics. One could practically not even have used a computer or the internet and sit down and read the book and be fully able to install Solaris, set up web, ftp, mail and whatever other servers they may wish. I would be forced to suggest that those that did not find this book of value either didn't have the focus and patience to wade through the close to 700 pages (my hand hurt supporting this volume for several hours -- how many pages do you want it to be?!) and/or are dissatisfied with the OS itself and taking it out on this book. It's not Windows guys, it does require a little bit of hard work and some skill.
Rating:
Summary: As complete as I need...
Review: I like this book. I use it daily with Sun's own AnswerBook program and man pages to get all of the Solaris information I need. This book covers extras - like Samba - that Sun doesn't cover because they are third party tools. It does the job for me!
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