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

great book

[tps12]

As a Unix sysadmin for seven years, I'd have to agree with the reviewer that this book is a lifesaver. I find that information tends to dissipate from my head after I absorb it (sort of like Mother Nature's swapping algorithm LOL), so I spend the first day of each month rereading it, and this keeps my skills charged for the rest of the month! I've even gotten pretty good at scheduling major projects for early in the month, when things are fresher in my head.

Seriously...

[ekephart]

How many of these books can one own? I have plenty of books, but the mile-wide-but-foot-deep-overview books get old. I have Glass and Ables' "Unix for Programmers and Users" and Oreilly's "Running Linux". I reference there every so often (in fact just yesterday while installing VOCAL), but I'm not sure there is much more I could get out of a book that wasn't specifically about some library or application.

Most of the quick reference stuff anyone needs is on various websites and discussion boards.

Only half a joke

[drinkypoo]

The number of places you need to know to look for things on a Unix system and the way you troubleshoot is usually fairly simple and you do not look in a lot of places, thus a cookbook approach is reasonable. Teaching you a few major gotchas and how to use a couple utilities (like lsof, fuser, or the local equivalent) will take you VERY far.

On the other hand, a book like this can never make you a GOOD systems administrator as the secret there lies in years of experience, knowing what kind of odd, twitchy little things to look for; and also knowing how to use all these neat little utilities and chain them together in the shell (of your choice) to make them do large, complicated, magical things.

A book like this might very well be the beginning of a beautiful career. The worry is that people will read it and think they're ready to tackle the world. Of course that's why we have certifications, but they only prove one's ability to regurgitate knowledge on command. Handy, but a book like this can give you just about everything non-vendor-specific that shows up on most Unix certs, I'm guessing -- and some of that, too.

On the gripping hand, it used to be matter of course that the sexretary or similar ended up being the one to maintain the mainframe, being sent to Armonk for classes... you know what I'm talking about. Maybe someday some of Unix's quirkiness will be ironed out and that sort of thing will be feasible in Unixland. I'm not holding my breath, though.

Re:Really want to learn UNIX Admin fast?

[bogie]

That's one thing that absolutely kicks ass about the opensource nix's. Everything you need to learn about nix you can learn at home for free and run them on the oldest pc's you can find.

I mean try learning windows 2000/exchange/SQL server on a P90 with 32MB ram. Not only is the software timebombed(You don't get to keep that now useful file/print/dns/proxy/firewall/blah server up running forever)but the hardware requirements are much higher.

Plus these days even though everyone wants to talk about TCO, there is something to be said for being able to provide File/Print/DNS/Web/Proxy/Database/Directory software to your company for Free. Unless your working for the most diehard of diehard MS shops employers take note of that sort of thing.