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

UNIX rosetta stone

[Plutor]

I'm sure its not nearly as comprehensive as this UNIX rosetta stone.

Re:UNIX rosetta stone

[imac.usr]

I'm sure its not nearly as comprehensive as this UNIX rosetta stone.

Well, it certainly isn't as slashdotted as that one is....

From the same series:

[Dot.Com.CEO]

Teach yourself open heart surgery in 24 hours.

Re:From the same series:

[ThrasherTT]

The problem is you might actually learn open heart surgery in 24 hours, whereas with Unix System Administration...

Re:From the same series:

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

People who liked: Teach yourself open heart surgery in 24 hours
Also liked: Teach yourself malpractice litigation in 24 hours

but..

[kin_korn_karn]

but does it teach you these things?

• how to worship your uptime?
  
• why you the machines are 'yours' (never mind the company that your work for who paid for the things, with a hundred other depts besides IT)
  
• how to be arrogant beyond belief about the abilities of users to do their own management of [files|directories|disk space|processes]
  
• how to use being on call as a blanket excuse for everything?
  
• how to revel in your asshole nature ala BOFH?
  

Until then, it's not teaching you jack shit about sysadmin'ing.

I prefer THE O'Reilly book

[pigeon]

Essential System administration by Aeleen Frisch. Covers Solaris, Aix, Linux, HPUX, SCO etc. Alas no OS X.

In 24 hours?

[Orlando]

Damn, I knew all those years experience were a waste of time...

UNIX sysadmin in 24 hours..

[grub]

sooo.. this is the UNIX equivent of an MCSE?

Just a lead-in

[curtisk]

This book is just a lead in to the rest of the series....

• Teach Yourself UNIX server restoration in 24 hours or else.
• Teach Yourself Office Diplomacy in 12 Hours or less.
• Teach Yourself Creative IT resume writing in 2 Hours.

*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.

I can see the resumes flowing in now...

[Silas]

I can see it now:

Objective: to obtain a system administration position in a large IT department.

...

Experience: started learning System Administration about this time yesterday.

"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."

The first thing you need to know...

[Mr2cents]

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...

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.

This book should be banned!

[GodOfHellfire]

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!!

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: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.

Disclaimer My Ass!

[Spencerian]

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.