Rating: 
Summary: You will fail the exam if you rely on this book
Review: My first impression of this book is - what exam am I studying for? I mean, the material from Exam I and Exam II is just crammed in together. This approach is ignorant at best. The index is completely wrong, so how am I supposed to find anything useful?
Rating: 
Summary: Good Exam Overview
Review: Overall, this book was strong at giving an overall view of what the 310-011 and 310-012 exams would be like. The book roughly followed the layout of both exams. That being said, there are some issues with the layout. Web Start is covered on 310-011, not 012 like the book states. I found the accompanying practice tests on the CD-ROM to be fairly inaccurate. The 2nd part of the book, which focuses on 310-012 contains a chapter on Installing a Server which is totally useless for the 2nd exam. Also, the author makes a trivial lesson out of SYSLOG in the first part of the book and then never mentions it again, even going so far as to say that SYSLOG does not warrant its own chapter. This book certainly helped me pass the test, but I strongly recommend borrowing the official Sun curriculum if you know someone who has it. Also, I strongly recommend purchasing the Boson practice tests. They will fill in the gaps where this book misses stuff. And make sure you spend more time on SYSLOG than this book does, you will need it for 310-012. Overall though, this is the best study guide out there and is also very handy as a refernece book for Solaris 8. Excellent coverage of NFS, NIS, AutoFS, and CacheFS for 310-012.
Rating: 
Summary: Good but weak in a couple of areas
Review: The book is generally very good but lacks in some areas and excels in others.
There is basically no SYSLOG section although mention is made in Part I. On the other side, the section on RBAC is expressed very clearly, better than the Official Sol.8 Sys Adm. Training guide from Sun.
The NIS Step by Step was a little confusing but you learn as you fix.
Generally a good book but I would supplement it with a Training course or at least purchase the Official Sun Training manuals...
Rating: 
Summary: Good Solid Preparation Guide
Review: The sun certification tests are 25% simple questions, 50% detailed questions and 25% tricky questions. This book prepares you for about 80-85% of the questions you will see on the test with the test software having many identical questions to the real examination. I would suggest that for the main OS commands, you go directly to the man pages and put ALL the options on a flash card and memorize every option becuase the sun exam seems to pick a lot of options that are seldom used. This will get you 5-7% more hits on the exam beyoud reading Calkin's training guide.I purchased the addition questions offered on the author's web site. About 70% of the additional questions were redundant to those offered on CD with the book. My expectations were a little higher that the extra questions and money would count for more. The author presents the material in each chapter, followed by one or more exercises where the student is put through a line by line command/result loop. I found this extremely effective in learning the material. After I went through the presentation of the material, the exercises, and wrote some quick notes on the chapter's difficult points, I found that I could pass the chapter test with 90-100% scores. This carries over to the sun exam quite nicely. I found that if I could get 95% on the practice exams, I would get 85% on the sun exams.
Rating:
Summary: Try elsewhere
Review: This book contains way too many errors which is simply unforgivable for this type of text. This is even more insulting when the cover proclaims that it is "complete, innovative, accute (??!) and thorough". The software on the CD contains too few questions and getting more from the (woeful) website costs extra. You can save some money and I think that you are better off if you simply go to docs.sun.com and get all the sys admin PDF files.
Rating:
Summary: Solaris 8 System Administration
Review: This book is good with plenty of useful information but it does skip a lot of stuff. This book would not be suited to someone who is starting from scratch. You must know vi and have some knowledge of administering a Solaris box. All round a good book if you are a Solaris Administrator with previous knowledge of the operating system who is just looking to become certified. The accompanying exam questions on the CD are very good and are a great help. Overall it is a good book.
Rating:
Summary: Very poor book
Review: This book is very poorly written.
I can't believe the number of mistakes that are present.
If you want to study for the Solaris Administrator exams, this is not the book. It covers too many things that are not on the exam. Also it's obvious that very little thought went into the end of chapter questions.
Overall a very dissapointing book, I paid way too much money for this. I do recommend the Exam Cram Solaris 8 book, much more concise, and much better End of Chapter qestions
Rating:
Summary: Great book for Sol 8 Beginners and those studying for exams
Review: This book was both easy to understand and detailed enough to cover the required subject matter. I don't think I've ever used a computer book with such detailed and accurate examples of how do different tasks. Usually a computer training guide gives you a only brief writeup of how to do a task and then leaves you to figure out why the task doesn't work for you on your computer. The examples in your book generally worked the first time with very little tweaking and often it even explained why something may not work and how to workaround the problem to ensure that
it does. The book starts from the begining and works through about 90% of what's on the exams. Very good sample questions. Was able to pass both exams using this book.
Rating:
Summary: Good book, but you need more for certification
Review: This is a good reference on Solaris administration. It goes into more detail than necessary for the exam in some areas. I would recommend purchasing this book to study for the exam, but I would recommend using other books as well. I also found studying the man pages for the commands in the objective helpful, as well as the on-line cramsession.
Rating:
Summary: Not so good, not too bad
Review: Unlike many other books certification exams, this book does cover the topics in depth. It goes well beyond the scope of exam in come cases. I think that's a very good idea. Although not really necessarry for the certification exam, but it does help in building a foundation. If you have a good grasp of the topics covered, passing the exam will come automatically. Having said that, this is a book on Sun Certification, not a Solaris guide. The author should stick to the exam objectives defined by Sun. For example, the part one of the book covers Syslog and the author has a note saying Syslog is covered in Exam II. Well, maybe it's a better idea NOT to discuss Syslog when discussing Exam I topics. Another Example, Chapter 10 covers the LP Print Service. That's not even in Sun's exam objectives. I liked that chapter, but I didn't need it for the certification exam. In some cases, the the examples and explanations looked like they are staright out of the man pages. Also, some examples and review questions were wrong. Bottom line : Good book, but when in doubt check the accuracy of the information provided.
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