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UNIX System Administrator's Bible

UNIX System Administrator's Bible

List Price: $49.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: GoodResource for the Man Who Knows Nothing
Review: "The Unix Bible" might be overstating the case a little. One tends to think about "bibles" as definitive sources of information on a given subject (but now that I think of it, that can't be true. Other wise, "The Holy Bible" would be the definitive source of all things Holy and people are still fighting over what should be included in it).

Nonetheless, this is an ideal resource for beginners who don't know one flavor of Unix from another. It's an easy read, a decent overview and will fill your head with enopugh Unix data to fake an interview.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: GoodResource for the Man Who Knows Nothing
Review: "The Unix Bible" might be overstating the case a little. One tends to think about "bibles" as definitive sources of information on a given subject (but now that I think of it, that can't be true. Other wise, "The Holy Bible" would be the definitive source of all things Holy and people are still fighting over what should be included in it).

Nonetheless, this is an ideal resource for beginners who don't know one flavor of Unix from another. It's an easy read, a decent overview and will fill your head with enopugh Unix data to fake an interview.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Long Overdue Complete Reference
Review: All the behind the scenes tasks that I didn't quite understand are cleared up in the book. I plan to use it for many InformationTechnology-years to come (which, unfortnately are shorter than calendar years)

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A very good book, slightly biased toward Solaris
Review: It's impossible to cover everything about Unix in one book. And this book should not be you the first or the only Unix sysadmin book. I think that book devoted to a particular flavor of Unix (one that you are using) should be the first one. But this is a very good general book and it does contain information that other books often miss to cover. IMHO the book is slightly biased toward Solaris. A couple of chapters would be interesting for a professional of any level and that IMHO more than justify the cost of the book.

For example I especially like Ch.5 (TCP/IP networking), Ch.7 (Administration Roles and Strategies) and Ch 19 (Setting up DNS server). Your mileage may vary.

I think the biggest success of the book is Chapter 7: Administration Roles and Strategies.That chapter is a must for a novice sysadmin and is very useful for professionals too. Another interesting part of the book is a very educating case study (a non-trivial POP client troubleshooting case) in the chapter 13.

It's one of the best general books on Unix administration.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Better titled "UNIX System Management Leisure Reading"
Review: This book is for managers, not for techies. Quite different from Aelene Frisch's or Nemeth's books, this book talks a lot about management issues and sometimes tells us real world stories. However, writing too much about these in an overly verbose manner makes me feel uneasy about the price of the book. Verbose talk on such topics is typically published in magazines which you read once and discard. Since the authors want to distinguish them from Frisch and Nemeth by these topics, I'd love them to tell us more real world stories like the three cases in Chapter 13. Or tell us more on what to watch for in vmstat, iostat etc. in the context of a real working environment. In addition, authors' and editors' fault on letting screen output inappropriately wrap, frequent typos (such as "./etc" instead of "/etc") all reduce the value of this book. Some people find some code snippets in this book valuable. Me too. Such as timedexec (I assume the authors wrote this program). But in other cases such as the buffer overflow attack, the authors should at least describe the logic of the source code instead of just listing the original code. I guess it's too difficult for them too.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Absoloutely Essential
Review: This book is the exception rather than the norm. It starts by providing you with the background to the OS's development and takes you from the basics onwards. An essential guide for anyone inheriting any unix administration duties. It is well written, clear and concise. The edition with FreeBSD 2.2.5 also allows for experimentation on a non business critical system. From novice to experienced admin this book will not just sit on the shelf

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: So-So
Review: This book was good for reviewing terms and concepts after leaving sysadm for a couple of years. It's not very good for applying to anything.


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