Book Club

Then I noticed the review on the back cover, by Linus Torvalds, the creator and maintainer of the linux kernel. Just getting him to review the book adds an incredible amount of respect.

Fortunately, Nemeth, Snyder, and Hein pulled through, fantastically. The book covers nearly every aspect of Linux system administration in great detail. Over the past month, I've read the first 650 pages straight, even the sections covering topics I was already familiar with. It is particularly useful to "brush up" on the basics, as the book covers many useful tips I was unaware of. As a network engineer, I especially appreciated the in depth coverage of serial devices (since most switches/routers use serial connections), however, I wonder how many Linux administrators really need this content anymore.

I was also surprised at the incredibly in-depth coverage of DNS and sendmail. The traditional DNS and sendmail books are easily twice as hefty as this text; however, the authors manage to cover all the essentials and still leave room for a few extras. For your average system administrator, who doesn't have to run a campus-wide DNS or sendmail server, this coverage was perfect.

The chapter on daemons (Ch. 28) is also good, as it presents a concise overview of many daemons. I would have appreciated slightly more in-depth coverage here, especially the ones not mentioned elsewhere in the book.

The fact that the authors covered Red Hat, Suse, and Debian is admirable. The system administrator who has the unfortunate job of running a heterogeneous environment would certainly appreciate this.

I also would have liked to see more coverage of non-standard software packages. For instance, Zebra for routing, Syslog-NG for log files, etc. These packages either complement or replace those found on standard systems, and typically greatly enhance the existing capabilities.

In conclusion, this book has been sitting at the top of my stack for a few weeks, and will remain within arms reach as a quick reference for many systems administration tasks. Excellent book, excellent coverage.

Review by: Norman Elton
January 8, 2004