Solaris 9 Administration: A Beginner's Guide

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding! More like a text book than a trade book!
Review: I am a college student studying operating systems. This book is the best UNIX book I have come across (and I have borrowed just about all of them from our school library). The chapters are highly structured with succinct, compact and highly informative discussions of *how* and *why* you do certain things as a sysadmin. It's outstanding, really.

Rating:
Summary: Good exam/beginner's guide
Review: I bought this book last week because I am just a beginner at the whole Solaris thing, coming from a Linux background. The book covers a lot of really good timely topics - LDAP, role based access control etc. - and is written real good. It's like an exam guide which is funny - there are loads of review questions in each chapter and little projects to try out. All in all, it's a very comprehensive book for a beginner. And maybe useful for exam study too (are there certs for Solaris 9 yet?).

Rating:
Summary: Initially Impressed, Later Disappointed
Review: I got this book so that I can get help tinkering with Solaris, being a newbie to Solaris. Overall, I think there are excellent explanations, which is very helpful for novice users. So, I was initially impressed and happy with this book.

However, I found out that a lot of information is either incomplete or flat wrong. Two small examples: (1) in coverage of the korn shell environment, he exposed configurations/commands for bash, not ksh; (2) and in module 9, the author instructs you to create accounts in /home, but this is maintained by automount daemon, and accounts are more commonly created in /export. Creating accounts in /home simply will not work with the automount running.

Other sections were very well presented, but I felt were incomplete for a real practical implementation. This is includes real configuration of boot files for tcp/ip networking (dhcp, static ip, etc.) and network services like SAMBA and NFS.

I contacted the author about these items, but to this day I never received a response.

Overall, I think this book has some good concept material, and recommend it for a reduced price, e.g. used or discounted. But for the full retail price of the book, I wouldn't spend the money. Consequently BTW, I got a discounted book, so I am satisfied. :-)

Rating:
Summary: Best place to start
Review: I have purchased multiple Solaris books to prepare for my job, and I would say that this is the best place to start. It is definitely for a beginner; but coming from a background where my only role was as a non-administrative user of UNIX systems, this is an excellent book to learn the inner-workings of UNIX and specifically, Solaris 9. It is well organized; and it is possible to read the book from cover to cover, building on knowledge from previous chapters.

Rating:
Summary: A Decent Solaris Book if you have lots of time on your hands
Review: This book certainly contains a lot of information. Nobody can question that the author is informed. For me, this book fell short of the mark because the good info was often buried in needless chatter.

I've worked as a Solaris Admin for many years and I've read a LOT of Solaris books. This book isn't the worst book ever written. But it falls into a general pattern that is common for books of this type.

First off, this book is meant to be a guide for Beginning Sys. Admins. The same author already has a Solaris reference book. That's why it pains me that this book contains so much "reference-like" filler. Do we really need another book rehashing the origins of Unix? Couldn't they cram that stuff into an appendix and list some more pertinent background info? But I guess the publisher decides this book must contain X number of pages and the author just cuts and pastes from his other texts.

There was also excessive redundancy in this book. The same run-level chart that appears in the first secion reappears in the third.

The writing style is wordy and unpractical. I too got my start in Unix in a university lab, but System Administration is about doing a lot in a short amount of time. Could you please get to your point without all of the prose?

And hidden in those long paragraphs were great links and commands. But this book wasn't well structured to have those things stand out. Instead, only somebody who has a LOT of time to read every single word can truly garner all the information in this book.

A lot of people clearly like to read wordy academic style unix books. Perhaps it's only the books title that's a problem. Still I think the book could have at least been laid out a lot better. I also would have thought it better if it had shorter more clearly focused sections that actually had to do with administration.

Rating:
Summary: A Decent Solaris Book if you have lots of time on your hands
Review: This book certainly contains a lot of information. Nobody can question that the author is informed. For me, this book fell short of the mark because the good info was often buried in needless chatter.

I've worked as a Solaris Admin for many years and I've read a LOT of Solaris books. This book isn't the worst book ever written. But it falls into a general pattern that is common for books of this type.

First off, this book is meant to be a guide for Beginning Sys. Admins. The same author already has a Solaris reference book. That's why it pains me that this book contains so much "reference-like" filler. Do we really need another book rehashing the origins of Unix? Couldn't they cram that stuff into an appendix and list some more pertinent background info? But I guess the publisher decides this book must contain X number of pages and the author just cuts and pastes from his other texts.

There was also excessive redundancy in this book. The same run-level chart that appears in the first secion reappears in the third.

The writing style is wordy and unpractical. I too got my start in Unix in a university lab, but System Administration is about doing a lot in a short amount of time. Could you please get to your point without all of the prose?

And hidden in those long paragraphs were great links and commands. But this book wasn't well structured to have those things stand out. Instead, only somebody who has a LOT of time to read every single word can truly garner all the information in this book.

A lot of people clearly like to read wordy academic style unix books. Perhaps it's only the books title that's a problem. Still I think the book could have at least been laid out a lot better. I also would have thought it better if it had shorter more clearly focused sections that actually had to do with administration.

Rating:
Summary: Best place to start
Review: This book covers all the relevant topics for a beginning Solaris SA, clearly and well organized (vs. other P.Waters books).
For the more advanced topics, his Sol 9 Complete book looks good.
Unfortunately, in this job market, I don't see much need for a "beginner Unix SA", because Sr. SA's (with lots of other exp.) are already a "dime a dozen".