UNIX Bible (With CD-ROMs)

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I bought this book with the impression that it would be a good book for system administration of a generalized UNIX system. I knew that it would not cover every scenario for every flavor of UNIX, but it should at least be a great foundation.

The title is quite misleading. "Bible" implies that this is an authoritative and complete tome on UNIX issues. It is definitely neither of these. The cover even says it is 100% accurate and "what you need". Perhaps if one was looking for general guidelines, this would be true, but then the book's title would still be misleading.

This book is by no means an exhaustive work on even the generalized issues. One case in point is the section on system security. It goes into great depth on describing one scenario where a hacker broke into a system and mucked around. It gives log listings, printouts, and descriptions of what was going on - in this specific scenario. This is all well and good, but it only goes far enough to show one single possibility.

The authors are adept at making sweeping generalizations without too much elaboration. They pull in one or two very specific examples on certain topics, and then move on. This is just enough to make the reader hungry for more, but never delivering.

The CDs that come with this book have an old, light copy of Slackware. Sure, it's a system that will work, but an update would be of much more use.

What the book tends to avoid, and this is in my opinion the biggest problem I've encountered, is elaboration as to the differences between the different flavors of UNIX -- Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Linux, BDS, IRIX, etc. It's all generalizations. Perhaps this makes the book more helpful to some people, by giving the bare necessities. But, that does not make it "what you need" as the cover says.

Granted, this book is not a complete waste. There are some interesting sections that give nice discussion, such as organization of file systems and so forth. But these pockets of usefulness do not make up for the rest of the problems.

There are better UNIX tomes out there, even available for download. Check those out before you seriously consider buying this book.

Rating:
Summary: Basic system administration introduction
Review: The book does a good job of introducing the main UNIX concepts such as filesystems, shells, processes, inodes, etc. It also covers TCP/IP basics, network security, a little bit of everything. The book's focus is mainly on system administration (although an introduction to shell script programming is given), so if you are looking for programming information, you won't find much here. And if you are looking for advanced topics, you would likely be better off getting a specialized book on whatever subject you are looking for: on many subjects the coverage in this book ends just "when it gets interesting".

Rating:
Summary: Not too Great
Review: This book starts off with an advanced discussion of the basics of a Unix filesystem. It moves on to breifly cover shell scripts, networking, PPP, and administration. The ONLY subject this book covers in any extent is system administration, and if that's your topic of choice, you'd be best to look in more specific books.

The main problem with this book is its not specific enough or easy enough for a new reader, and its too simplistic and, again, not specific enough for an advanced reader. The only type of reader who might get good information out of it is a broad-spectrum intermediate reader.

In general, I would reccomend that anyone looking for a good *nix book look elsewhere.