Rating: 
Summary: Great book for Sol 8 Beginners and those studying for exams
Review: I studied the first 12 chapters, took the first test and scored a 96%. I studied the 2nd have of the book and got a 89% on the part 2 exam. Very well writen. I'm new to Solaris and the book was very easy to read. The examples were plenty and the end of chapter excercises gave me something to practice. Great book and a great future reference.
Rating:
Summary: I scored
Review: I studied the first 12 chapters, took the first test and scored a 96%. I studied the 2nd have of the book and got a 89% on the part 2 exam. Very well writen. I'm new to Solaris and the book was very easy to read. The examples were plenty and the end of chapter excercises gave me something to practice. Great book and a great future reference.
Rating:
Summary: Great Training Guide- not just for certification
Review: I think where some people go wrong when they buy this book is they think it's only a cram guide for the Sun exams. These people are looking for a shortcut to become certified and there isn't one. You need to learn the material. They find a book packed with more information than they are willing to study. What they find is 1,000 pgs of training material. This book is an excellent "training guide" which presents everything you need to manage a Solaris system. In addition, it has end of chapter questions, excercises, and an exam test engine to assess your skills so you know if you're ready to go for your certification. I started out with little experience and used the book to self-teach myself about Solaris system administration. From what I see- it has everything the Sun 238 and 288 courses offer. It has saved me [money]in Sun training! The exams on CD-ROM and at the UnixEd.com website provide a great assessment tool if the reader decides to go onto take the certification exams. ( I used them and they were right on target). The forum at UnixEd answers any questions you may have as you go through the book- it offers great support for the reader. It was the best $$ I've spent.
Rating: 
Summary: Good reference book; poor certification prep book
Review: I've taken Solaris 7 and Solaris 8 certification exams and past them both using Exam Cram and New Riders as studying tools.I found that the New Riders provides greater detail, but they don't necessarily follow the exam objectives. In fact, they totally miss parts of it. For the objectives that it does cover, it is very good. There were also errors in the material itself. For this, I rate it a 4 for a reference book and a 2 for a prep book. Averaging those scores, its a 3 in my book.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book- lots of material but very thorough
Review: I've used Calkins' Solaris 7 Training guide to get my Solaris 7 Certs and now used the Solaris 8 version to get my Solaris 8 certs.
My tips for you: I practiced each example in every chapter and the excercises at the end of each chapter. If you are going for the exams, make sure you practice - it really makes the material sink in.
Another tip: The book covers alot of ground (because topics are covered thoroughly). Each chapter outlines the objectives for the exam. If you don't want to go through the entire chapter, just make sure you understand each chapter objective that the author describes. One way I assessed myself was with the exams that came on the CD-ROM. If I scored 90%, I figured I knew the material good enough and went onto the next chapter.
The chapter on RBAC was great- after digging through Sun's own documentation and other Solaris books, I finally found someone that can explain it clearly
I also have copies of the Sun Solaris 8 Training guides from courses I've taken and feel this book does a better job explaining the topics more thoroughly and completely. Lots of material here (if you need it), but it's very thorough and saved me a lot of digging.
Rating: 
Summary: One of the worst I've used (and I've used a lot!)
Review: If you're looking for a book to help you quickly pass the exams, go away. There's just too much superfluous information to wade through when your focus is on passing an exam. Gobs of details you simply don't need to know to pass the tests. If you're looking for a book to assist you with the day-to-day operations of running a Solaris environment, go away. Most of the information provided has an unrealistically Sun-centered view of the world. (I've been consulting in dozens of enterprise environments for over 7 years and have never seen a shop that seriously uses NIS or NIS+. And RBAC? Hah!) Granted, this particular problem is driven by Sun's own exam requirements. In addition, this book is one of the most poorly edited I've ever read with numerous typos of significance, conflicting information between chapters, and an index that might get you within ten pages of what you're actually looking for. I purchased the Network Administrator Guide for 310-043 from New Riders at the same time and it is an editing disaster as well. In the author's defense, his goal is admirable: Provide a good exam-prep book that can still be helpful in real life after the exam is passed. Unfortunately, it fails in both regards. Perhaps the next release (using a Sun-literate editor) could be a two volume set: A smaller, exam-focused guidebook and a larger sys-admin bible for real life. The raw material for both is certainly there.
Rating:
Summary: Not on my top ten list
Review: In fairness to this book, I did not get this book to prepare for the Solaris Admin exams. But I did want a good solaris specific administrator reference. Towards that end, this book is a failure in my opinion. Many of the items listed in the index are found many pages from that indicated in the index or when found skirt the info I was looking for. In closing, to those of you considering this book as a study guide, you should be aware that the 'highly recommended' accompanying CD can only be run on a M$ windows box. That speaks more to me about the intended audience.
Rating:
Summary: Book did exactly what it promised
Review: It covered everything needed to get top scores on the 2 tests. Using the book, I pulled a 92% on 011, and 95% on 012. Didn't use the CD. It's not a SysAdmin reference book, it's a training guide to pass the 2 tests to get Solaris SA 8 certified. I plan on using Bill's SA 9 book to ace the upgrade test.
Rating:
Summary: Good Book but contains errors
Review: It has been very informative and well laid out. I have had a little experience with UNIX but not a great deal. I have been very pleased with the main content in the book and have found it very useful. However some of the answers for the review questions are wrong and this happens too frequently. Some of them are obvious errors, like the right answer is shown but it is matched with the wrong letter, but others you have to compare with what you have read earlier in the chapter. On viewing the errata page on the new riders web page I found that the only error they published was in the index. I contacted Macmillan publishing (who own new riders) and they have told me that the information has been passed on and to refer to their web page, but nothing has been done. This is why I haven't given it a higher rating as the rest of the book is very good
Rating:
Summary: Sample questions are useful, but otherwise...
Review: Much of the book is copied almost verbatim from the Answerbooks and man pages, both of which are freely available on Sun's website. In many cases the only changes are the typos the author has introduced, or slight differences in phrasing which only serve to make what was clear ambiguous. Where the book deviates from the official documentation it is often simply wrong. I'd like to commend Calkins' attempt to make the book more than a study guide for the exams, but his recommendations will benefit only the most naive of sysadmins. Still, the chapter review questions are useful, as are the sample questions on the CD (although quite a few are hard to interpret because of the ungrammatical English). And this book is far better than the one by Cook et al. I'm certainly glad to have read the book, but I'm going to throw it away as soon as I've passed the exams.
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