Rating: Summary: Fantastic Review: This is a great book for those looking for quick solutions to common real work scenarios. If you are responsible for Unix (yes including Linux) systems this is one book you have to have. For coding solutions the book usually shows both shell script and perl examples for the same problem.
Rating: Summary: Good overall book for new Sys Admins Review: This is a great book. Its pages contain plenty of useful information for the aspiring Sys Admin. Experienced Unix administrators probably should look elsewhere, since a good majority of the material is stuff that they should already know. The book starts with hands-on "Hints and Hacks" and slowly gets more and more general (i.e. Handling Irate Users, Finding a job as a Unix System Administrator, Interviewing new Sys Admins, etc). Overall, I feel this book is well worth what you pay for it.My only real complaint about the book is the sometimes annoying typos. Some of them can be easily overlooked and the authors desired meaning can be understood. But sometimes it gets a little ridiculous. The author showing some hints on the VI editor: "When you go into the command line mode, you can execute the command and write the results out to a file such as :!date > /tmp/date.tmp ...Then position the cursor where you want the results of date command to go. :r /temp/foo Execute the read (r) command on /tmp/dat.tmp and the data is read..." Errors like this can be annoying and detract from an overall great book. A couple of other similar errors, plus general typos, is why this book lost a star. Otherwise, grab this book!
Rating: Summary: Great Book Review: This is a great book. It has many tricks that are geared toward real world experenice that are not covered in any other book I have seen. I especially liked the section gearded toward getting your first job as an system admin. It is one book worth buying. For all kinds of information for less than 15 dollars how could you go wrong.
Rating: Summary: Good overall book for new Sys Admins Review: This is a great book. Its pages contain plenty of useful information for the aspiring Sys Admin. Experienced Unix administrators probably should look elsewhere, since a good majority of the material is stuff that they should already know. The book starts with hands-on "Hints and Hacks" and slowly gets more and more general (i.e. Handling Irate Users, Finding a job as a Unix System Administrator, Interviewing new Sys Admins, etc). Overall, I feel this book is well worth what you pay for it. My only real complaint about the book is the sometimes annoying typos. Some of them can be easily overlooked and the authors desired meaning can be understood. But sometimes it gets a little ridiculous. The author showing some hints on the VI editor: "When you go into the command line mode, you can execute the command and write the results out to a file such as :!date > /tmp/date.tmp ...Then position the cursor where you want the results of date command to go. :r /temp/foo Execute the read (r) command on /tmp/dat.tmp and the data is read..." Errors like this can be annoying and detract from an overall great book. A couple of other similar errors, plus general typos, is why this book lost a star. Otherwise, grab this book!
Rating: Summary: Bunches of cool tips and ideas Review: This is not a beginners book, you should have some background and practical Unix experience before picking it up. There are a multitude of handy dandy little tips that can be easily adapted to your routine system administration chores. Many of the tips are directed towards system administrators responsible for large installations of dozens or hundreds of machines and should be great time/energy/aggravation savers. This book clearly shows the power of Unix, the author has taken simply tools and combined them in ingenious ways to perform useful work. I've found many relevent hacks that I can't wait to try out.
Rating: Summary: Very basic, unproofread, and occasionally just plain wrong. Review: This is the only admin book I've ever returned to the store. If you are getting paid as a Unix sysadmin, you had better already know about 60% of this book instinctively, and know why much of the remainder is bad advice. Maybe 10-15% of this book contained useful and nontrivial information, and even that frequently contained typos. (in the actual code and/or algorithms, mind you--not just textual typos) Furthermore, many of the hints are platform specific, even when they're listed as being generic. I don't think the book was ever tested against HP-UX, despite it being one of the 'supported platforms.' The book isn't _all_ bad, but there are far better resources out there. (including, ironically, the author's website)
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