#91 posted on Thu Dec 30 00:00:00 2010

Review: Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook

I recently acquired a Kindle e-book reader as a Christmas present from my employer. I will not talk largely about the device in this post, except to say that I like it a lot and reading with it is better than I had imagined. The device has shortcomings, like the whole Amazon DRM business. But enough about the Kindle, this post is about the first book I bought for it.

Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook

Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook (4th edition)

I was really missing a proper Unix/Linux administration book and as such decided I would look for something along these lines as my first Kindle book. Since weirdly some Kindle books cost more than their paper versions and as IT literature generally isn't cheap, following reviews down at the Amazon store was crucial. This book clearly stood above the rest in being recently published (July 2010) and getting only good reviews. Plus the cover looked nice.

Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook is a well written, clearly structured and captivating journey into the magic of Unix and Linux administration. Topics are discussed from the perspective of large production systems, so it is clearly intended for the IT professional audience and not so much for the home Linux user. However, anyone interested in Unix/Linux will find its contents useful. Do you know how your Ubuntu desktop boots up? It's here.

The book is easy to read and written with humor. Like poking fun at Windows dialog boxes or stating clearly that, well, the Unix/Linux file system structure is a mess (glad to see that written out loud). Six different variants of Unix/Linux are used as examples in the book, including explaining why and how things work in each variant, and why they work differently. The flavors are Ubuntu, openSUSE and Red Hat from the Linux family, and Solaris, HP-UX and IBM-AIX from the Unix family.

The Kindle version works very nicely and is very easy to read. The only gripe I really have is that some of the tables are a little hard to make out and sometimes they are actually missing a few pixels on the left hand side making the first letters difficult to make out. This mostly isn't a problem though and generally reading the Kindle version of the book has been a pleasure.

Here is the product description from Amazon:

The twentieth anniversary edition of the world’s best-selling UNIX system administration book has been made even better by adding coverage of the leading Linux distributions: Ubuntu, openSUSE, and RHEL.

This book approaches system administration in a practical way and is an invaluable reference for both new administrators and experienced professionals. It details best practices for every facet of system administration, including storage management, network design and administration, email, web hosting, scripting, software configuration management, performance analysis, Windows interoperability, virtualization, DNS, security, management of IT service organizations, and much more. UNIX® and Linux® System Administration Handbook, Fourth Edition, reflects the current versions of these operating systems: