UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, 4th Edition

This book is very thorough in its details for the current line of Unix/Linux systems, including Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Red Hat, Solaris, HP-UX and IBM AIX. It is well written, often entertaining and always informative. The amount of detail the authors go into for the various operating systems is impressive. If one looks at the definition for "absolute and relative paths" (page 142), they can get a pretty good idea of the approach this book takes;"The list of directories that must be traversed to locate a particular file plus that file's filename form a pathname. Pathnames can be either absolute (/tmp/foo) or relative (book4/filesystem). Relative pathnames are interpreted starting at the current directory. You might be accustomed to thinking of the current directory as a feature of the shell, but every process has one."Now the definition from "A Practical Guide to Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux" (page 193) by Mark Sobell:"Every file has a pathname. An absolute pathname always starts with a slash(/), the name of the root directory. You can then build the absolute pathname of a file by tracing a path from the root directory through all the intermediate directories to the file. A relative pathname traces a path from the working directory to a file"Of the two I felt the explanation from Sobell's book was more straightforward, but the "The Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook" integrate the philosophy of the Unix/Linux world much more into the text than others I have read.If you are a beginner, you might not be able to rely ONLY on this book, you will almost certainly need something a little more elementary; "Linux in Easy Steps" by Mike McGrath is good for those who are visually oriented. "Administration Handbook" book is good at is covering the breadth of Unix/Linux system administration duties across multiple versions. It makes it relatively clear and easy. It sticks to principles rather than a "cookbook" approach. The section on shell and bash scripting is a very good primer, but you will need to build out from there. There is also a good chapter on virtualization and particularity Amazon Web services. If you thought Amazon was just about books and music, well, that is the tip of the iceberg.Students and professionals alike will find this a valuable reference. If you are a previous owner, it is worth it to get the new edition. I would think this book will cover at least 90% of what you are likely to run into as you administer systems.Beginning Linux books only go so far. Books that focus on one area such as writing shell scripts won't be general enough. This book covers a lot and covers it well. It is the one I kept in my backpack to lug to class.

There's a reason this book receives glowing reviews, and it doesn't have much to do with what's in it. It has to do with what's not in it.I am so accustomed to really miserable, overly verbose tech writing by people who are clearly not good writers that finding this book blew me away. In an era of disposable and free blog writing, I forgot how good tech writing can be. We need more writing like this. I bought the paperback and the Kindle edition. First time, ever, that I bought a book twice. When they come out with a new edition, I'll buy that one, too. Another first.Tech book publishers, take note of why this book works:- There aren't equally-weighted discussions about every single option available.- There's not a lot of BS filler.- There's historical context which aids in memorization. Stories teach.- There's a lot of "do this, here's why" aka "best practices".- There aren't pages and pages of useless code that nobody cares about.- There are no gimmicks (free CD/DVDs and the like) attached to the book.- The writing style assumes you are busy and treats your time as valuable.In this book is practical wisdom and tested/tried techniques to get you started on most things you will do as an admin. The authors know you have Google, and they don't kill you wasting your time. They give you a description of the technology, the most appropriate way(s) to handle it (with syntax), how to think about it, and how it differs (if it differs) between versions of Linux/UNIX.

This book gives a good and comprehensive overview of the Unix systems and systems management, but if you only need to manage one or a few Linux computers e.g. for scientific computing then a lot of the material is not relevant, like networking, mail etc. The book covers several flavors of Unix, including Linux, Solaris, AIX etc so if you only need Linux there is also some material you don't need, but of course if you have several different systems that would be pretty useful. The book is well written, in a conversational style and easy to follow, and gives a good overview. It is not that good as a reference source, say if you need to do a specific task or figure our the options to the mount command, or the correct syntax for awk, for example. All in all, it is a good book, but I think I will need another Linux reference book with a little more detail in some areas.