Teach Yourself UNIX System Administration In 24 Hours

Spencerian writes "UNIX guru and writer Dave Taylor's Teach Yourself Unix System Administration in 24 Hours is a strong "rosetta stone" reference and tutorial for beginning and intermediate Mac OS X, Linux and UNIX system administrators. The book covers fundamental and specialized UNIX sysadmin tasks for three UNIX flavors: Red Hat Linux 7.2, Solaris 8, and Mac OS X, version 10.1.2. Although Mac OS X and Red Hat have advanced in versions since this book was published, it doesn't appear to affect the book's usefulness since many of the tasks involve the venerable UNIX command line." The rest of Kevin's review is below -- read on to see if this book might help you. Teach Yourself Unix System Administration in 24 Hours author Dave Taylor pages 508 publisher Sams Publishing rating 8 reviewer Kevin Spencer ISBN 0672323982 summary Teach Yourself Unix System Administration in 24 Hours makes an excellent rosetta stone for beginning or intermediate UNIX sysadmins.

The Big Picture As you might get from the title, Sams Publishing's "24 Hours" book series attempts to teach specific tasks or steps within 1 chapter per hour. UNIX can get pretty complex, so it would seem that this format would limit the effectiveness of this book. Not so.

Topics from the book include:

• Unix Installation
• Documentation
• File Ownership
• Disk Usage
• Account Management
• Package Management (including the Fink system for Darwin)
• Process and System Controls
• Network configuration
• Web Server Management and shell scripting

Almost every chapter views how a particular task is handled with Linux as its normal focus, where many commands are shared between Solaris and Mac OS X. When functionality differs, Taylor downshifts to show how matters are handled in each respective operating system. As someone very experienced with Mac OS X, I found Dave Taylor's discussions on Mac OS X idiosyncrasies in contrast to Red Hat and Solaris very useful, particularly where Darwin overrides the traditional dotfile preference configuration, substituting the convoluted NetInfo services.

What to Expect Dave provides a Q & A section after each chapter. In an early chapter, Dave answers a typical geek question, "What Unix distributions do you run on your own systems?" Dave provides a very geeky answer--his Apple PowerBook G4 is running Mac OS X (with Darwin as its core, of course), along with a PC running Windows 2000, Linux Mandrake 8.1, and a web server running Red Hat Linux 7.2--a varied assortment that shows Dave puts the author in authority. In a later chapter, Dave touches on emulators such as WINE and Virtual PC as options for additional operating system support.

What makes the book work is that Dave provides a very conversational tone throughout the book, almost as if you're sitting with him in front of a system, talking while you do your thing. Humorous moments are scattered in appropriate moments to make things less dry (this is UNIX, after all).

Questions that weren't answered for me as a beginning UNIX sysadmin in another book by Dave Taylor, Learning UNIX for Mac OS X , were available in droves in this book. Topics such as scripting with perl or from the shell, disk quotas, crontabs, rlogin, managing system logs, and the like--all answered. Ever wondered how Mac OS X handles system init states? You'll discover that its a tad different from other UNIX systems, but not too much.

The Bad and the Upshot I ran into several layout problems in the book that were somewhat annoying, such as where tables or notes were sliced between pages, making them difficult to read. It wasn't a showstopper at all, but I hope that a later reprint will pass muster.

If you're still getting your feet wet with a few basics, or have a really mixed environment of UNIX flavors, this book may be very useful to you. I'd recommend this book to any Mac OS X technician who wants to take advantage of its UNIX underpinnings. Beginning Linux users should also find this a strong general reference. The book's cost ($25) is very reasonable, even a bargain for a book of this depth. Overall, Teach Yourself Unix System Administration in 24 Hours makes for a very well rounded reference, as well as a tutorial book. Perhaps the title should be shorter--it's quite a tongue twister.

You can purchase Teach Yourself UNIX System Administration in 24 Hours from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Teach Yourself...

[ThrasherTT]

I've read a couple of the "Teach Yourself X in N [days|hours]" books. I have not read this one, but my experience with the others is that they can be best considered an "entry point" into the subject, and a reference for only the most basic questions. Anyone who thinks they will acquire even an intermediate level of skill (starting from an unskilled base) by reading these books are, IMHO, mistaken.

Linux + OSX == Authority on UNIX?

[Plutor]

> In an early chapter, Dave answers a typical geek question, "What Unix distributions do you run on your own systems?" Dave provides a very geeky answer--his Apple PowerBook G4 is running Mac OS X (with Darwin as its core, of course), along with a PC running Windows 2000, Linux Mandrake 8.1, and a web server running Red Hat Linux 7.2--a varied assortment that shows Dave puts the author in authority.

I would argue that running Linux and OS X does not (necessarily) make someone an "authority" on UNIX. Where's his Solaris, SUNOS, HPUX, IRIX, and BSD experience? Has he ever installed cross-platform software? Only using a few machines, I would doubt he's using NIS or NFS. Has he ever?

Really want to learn UNIX Admin fast?

[emptybody]

You can learn basic unix operator skills in 24 hours. You will not get real knowledge without spending considerable time in the trenches. More lessons have been learned working with real systems in real use than in the books.

Want to learn fast?

read ALL comp.sys.blah postings. Try to resolve them on your own.

get some second hand UNIX gear (HP,DEC,SGI,SUN...) or some cheap PC gear (SolarisX86,RedHat,debian,freebsd,MacOSX...),build a LAN.

make NFS/NIS/LDAP/DNS/SMTP/NNTP/etc. work on your new LAN.

Read the documentation for each of your platforms.

Compile and use all the opensource packages you can find. Start with GCC and the major gnu packages. Do not go the easy out pre-compiled route (compiler for first compiler excluded.)

Make a NFS /usr/local to install all variants into. Make them work on each of your platforms.

Add printers/scanners/disk/peripherals to each platform. Add any bit and piece that you can find.

try to find EMC/compaq/netapp storage gear. make that all interoperate.

make everything work with everything else

Get on the help desk at a LARGE company or university and answer/resolve as many questions as possible.

never stop learning.

Re:The first thing you need to know...

[macdaddy]

The only thing you need to remember:

export EDITOR=pico

or for you tcsh-challenged people

setenv EDITOR=pico

vi scares people, even old timers and especially newbies. IMHO vi should *never* be the defauly editor on any distribution. If a power user wants it, let them change it. Give the newbies (the ones that don't know how to change it) something they can use like pico or joe. If we really want to make our OS user-friendly (read: newbie-friendly) we're going to have to start making some compromises on the default settings. The default editor should be easy to use; by default the firewall shouldn't allow local services; daemons and all their friends and relatives should NOT be running by default. Until we make concessions such as these, we can not expect Linux (or any other *nix except for OS X) to be easy for newbies to grasp. We're skilled enough to be able to turn on advanced features and change the defaults to suit our needs. Newbies are usually barely competent enough to get the install right. Lets think about our next Linux generations for a while.

My experience with Sams and "Teach Yourself ..."

[Lumpish Scholar]

When it comes to technical books, I look for a good publisher first, and a good author second.

A good publisher can help a so-so author (by, for example, good editing, technical and otherwise). A really good publisher can return a rotten manuscript as unpublishable and refuse to distribute the darned thing. The publisher can only do so much, of course, but I wouldn't lightly underestimate how much.

Any author, good or bad, gets a lot of value from the publisher. No book is perfect in the early drafts. A so-so publisher may often put out a very imperfect book.

I've had a little experience (from both sides of the keyboard) with Sams at one point in its history. I don't feel they were a publisher that added a lot of value once the author's work is done. They may have gotten some good authors who put out some good books, but not as consistently as (say) O'Reilly. (I don't know how Sams is doing these days.)

A couple of replies to earlier comments:

"... In 24 Hours" doesn't mean "start at 9 a.m. Monday, be done 9 a.m. Tuesday." It means, "put in a couple of hours a day, be done in about a couple of weeks."

Some people have complained this is an introductory book that's not very deep. Fine; it's not for gurus. It might well be a good book to read before reading the "purple book"; and that's not a bad thing.