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Teach Yourself UNIX System Administration In 24 Hours
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.
I'm sure its not nearly as comprehensive as this UNIX rosetta stone.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Until then, it's not teaching you jack shit about sysadmin'ing.
Essential System administration by Aeleen Frisch. Covers Solaris, Aix, Linux, HPUX, SCO etc. Alas no OS X.
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.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Damn, I knew all those years experience were a waste of time...
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
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.
All Your Memory Are Belong To Java
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.
sig
> 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?
those "Teach Yourself ${whateverThing} in 24 Hours" books aren't worth the paper they're printed on...the 30 days ones aren't bad for just learning the nuances of a language ( like GTK+ ), but you can get more sysadmin knowledge from buying your sysadmin 8 pints, listen to him rant and rave, and then take him back to the computer room hell-bent on vengeance w/ a screwdriver in hand...actually, you might have his job if you can talk him into a little cathode ray tube repair ( those suckers pack a lot of voltage )
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
Ummm... It's called peer review. Would you rather have a pastry chef reviewing Unix books?
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
sooo.. this is the UNIX equivent of an MCSE?
Trolling is a art,
*Disclaimer* I have not read the book in question and the above is simply a joke, but the thought of teaching UNIX system administration in 24 hours seems unlikely....covering basics, maybe...most of these books seem to serve that purpose and are great as a reference in alot of cases.
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
"Yeah, sure buddy, you're hired. Here's the root password and here's some old user accounts we need cleaned up. And would you mind replacing our sendmail install with qmail, we've been getting a bunch of calls lately from wackjobs screaming about some sort of "open relay" problem. Who knows...I'm sure you'll get that all figured out."
If you ever get stuck in a text editor and you can't quit, type [ESC]:q[Enter]
After this first encounter, you'll hate that editor. But you will change... slowly...
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
If you remember when it was a different color, consider yourself the BOFH.
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
This is *the* book for someone dumped into being a sysadmin. See http://www.admin.com/ for updates.
http://www.admin.com/ for a link
dave
The job market is bad enough as it is - I, for one, don't want any extra competition out there.
The last thing I need is my developers reading this book, then thinking they don't need me around any more!!
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.
comment directly in my journal
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.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
I am not the "Kevin Spencer" you reference.
I am Kevin H. Spencer, author of one modest, now-somewhat-antiquated book on getting started with Mac OS X programming.
I am a technical editor and occasional contributing writer for a few Mac-oriented computer books from the old Dummies Press, Pearson Education, and Premier Press publishers. I make my living by supporting Macs and PCs, and have probably done so for longer than you have lived.
Aside from receiving a copy from which to make this review, I don't get a thing from this.
And, if I didn't find it more useful to explain who I am for benefit of the article, I would've used my mod points to hack your karma for making such bad presumptions. There's also a "South Park"-ish Canadian cartoon with my name in it, but I doubt he's a UNIX expert, either.
No book is a perfect reference, but this is a good one if you are getting started with system administration across various platforms. Don't knock a book due to the title. It's actually quite detailed and deeper than what the title implies.
For a relatively new system admin for Mac OS X systems, this worked for me, and it might work for others with similar skill levels.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
If a service goes down in the middle of a cluster and no client connections arrive before it comes back up, does it make any downtime?