Rating: 
Summary: Good book, The only game in town
Review: The IT publishing industry strikes again! Yet again, a major revision of software is released to the general public, and the IT publishing industry takes six+ months to release the first book on the subject. Lotus Notes 5, and now Solaris8 fit this trend...always a day late and a dollar short. You could blame this on the market shares of LN5 or Solaris, but the same thing is ongoing with Microsoft's Active Directory Service.This book is as good as it gets (for now). Combined with the MAN pages, 90% of admins/engineers should be on the way to successfully managing Solaris8 systems. Unless you need some exotic information (installing Lotus Notes 5 on Solaris8), this book will give you what you need. Hopefully the people publishing the Solaris8 Exam Cram (Coriolis), Sun Certified Solaris8 SSA (McGraw-Hill), and Solaris 8 Network Admin Cert (New Riders) will get with the program and release their books within the next two months, instead of waiting another year....
Rating: 
Summary: My Book Also Fell apart!!!
Review: This book is a waste of money! I had the book for two days and the spine fell apart causing the pages to fall out (unfortunately they didn't blow away in the wind). The book is useless the examples in the book regarding samba and apache aren't even suited as a intro. The authors should have left both chapters out! The rest of the book gives brief descriptions of useful applications and commands.... but in no way is it a complete reference as the title states. Do yourself a favor and get Sobells Guide to Solaris (for this is truely a complete reference)! Last thing to mention the book does not mention any of the new aspects of solaris8 ... the cover could just as easily say solaris7 or linux instead of solaris8!
Rating: 
Summary: MY Book fell apart
Review: This book is full of unnessesary printouts about 20% of the book is just printouts from the results of the commands you are told to run. Although I cant blame the author for this , my book fell apart at the spine (bad glue) Im going to try and get my moey back from the bookstore. Those of you who are already familiar with solaris dont even bother with this book- its a guide not a reference.
Rating:
Summary: One of those books with a lot of fluff but not enough detail
Review: This book is too basic and is full of empty fluff. You get to learn how to interactively install Solaris, with full pages of graphics showing windows and whatnot, just like a Microsloth book. You also get to learn how to use CDE, which makes sense for an aspiring Unix admin, right? No. It also contains full printouts that are utterly useless -- like the /dev directory, which fills up about 5 pages. It's really embarrassing. Further, it uses a very large font. I'm not accusing the authors of trying to cheat the buyer, but I will say that the book is far from "Complete" and in fact contains very little actual information. Where the information provided begins to look interesting, it cuts off at the point where you'd want to know more details...
Rating:
Summary: Nothing about Solaris 8
Review: This book makes a fine general Solaris reference. It lacks though concrete concepts about Solaris 8. Like SEAM, and RBAC. It has no disucussion of ASET. Or any of the other new features that make Solaris 8 so exciting. WHat is good about it? It provides a fine general reference for Solaris. Has a good section on proc, and is one of the books which spends anytime going over Samba, and Netalk. If only VERY breifly.
Rating:
Summary: The Profoundly Incomplete Reference
Review: This is a book may be OK for very, very basic use of Solaris, but otherwise it's almost absurdly incomplete. And the index is completely useless. Too much history and concept (of UNIX, of Sun, of FTP, of DHCP) but not NEARLY enough detail about the real-world configuration and administration of the OS. I personally did not find any help with the issues/scenarios I regularly encounter... The online AnswerBook is easier and better - plus it's free!
Rating:
Summary: Okay book, better for beginners
Review: This is an okay reference. Fairly simplified and missing any mention of some of 8's newer features, such as RBAC's. Hardly complete at all.
Rating:
Summary: Okay book, better for beginners
Review: This is an okay reference. Fairly simplified and missing any mention of some of 8's newer features, such as RBAC's. Hardly complete at all.
Rating:
Summary: Solaris 8 - Incomplete Reference
Review: This may be better called "Solaris 8 - Incomplete Reference". Don't even use it alone trying to pass Sun's Certification. The index is particularly useless.
Rating: 
Summary: OK to Good
Review: This was a pretty good book for covering Solaris - in general, not Solaris 8. I bought it becuase I just got my hands on a new Ultra5. As an NT dood with just a little Linux experience, this helped a lot when dealing with sendmail (though just enough to get started) qpopper, process management, drive management, run-level management, and other goodies. It's definitely not thurough, but good enoug to keep around. If it didn't say 'The Complete Reference' I would have given it 4 stars. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty decent; it touches a lot of things pretty well, but definitely not deep and broad enough to be called "The Complete Reference.'
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