Product: UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook

It is a rare pleasure to hold this wonderfully produced book in your hands and study the 1000+ pages packed with just the right balance of facts and a judicious peppering of opinion. After all, if you didn’t want opinion, for example on which scripting tool/language to use or what sort of hard disk to install, you could very well just read the manuals. That’s not to say that the book doesn’t omit stuff. For example, you won’t find a ton of information on AWK, tar, NTP, inetd, or obscure Linux distributions (also, some of the sidebar references are off, e.g. the inetd reference to page 1188 on page 681, for which I blame technology/publishing not authorship). That’s because the authors had to make a choice on what to include and to what degree. I applaud the result, which is an encyclopedic treatment of the key flavors of Linux and Unix, especially as they are relevant to production environments. But it doesn’t stop there. This wonderful tome goes into great detail to explain all of the related infrastructure technologies including storage, networking hardware, printers, data centers and working smoothly with Microsoft Windows (yeah, no sulking). Finally, this book is extremely relevant to developers because developers must understand (actually master) the environment in which their programs will run. Failing to do so will cause their programs (and their careers) to crash and burn, well before they can finish reciting the multiplication table of 2. I love this book.
Rating: 5
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Count: 29