Customer Reviews

AIX 5L Administration

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

After working with UNIX of various flavours for over ten years, I needed to learn AIX in a hurry. This is a thorough book, with plenty of examples and careful, detailed explanations. There is a good introduction to RS/6000 and pSeries hardware, and then the reader is pushed into the operating system at the deep end. You will need a good grounding in UNIX to get through this book -- it's not a beginner's introduction. My only gripe is that the index is rather sparse -- you need to be very patient if you don't know exactly what you're looking for. But for the right audience, this book is a real treasure.

This is an excellent book. It was very well written. It is very hard to find good AIX System's Administration documentation. I found this book very concise and user friendly. I recommend it to the beginner as well as the advanced AIX System's Administrator.

When I used AIX in the mid 90s, it was probably the most advanced unix operating system generally available. Its SMIT user interface for the sysadmin was quite well done. Here, you can see much of that. IBM continued to improve AIX. SMIT is shown as relieving you of the burden of knowing and typing some very long command lines.

However, this book was written in 02. When IBM was already consolidating its operating systems towards linux. Hence the heavy linux discussion in the book. Probably, much of what the book describes that is specific to AIX then is still being supported under whatever AIX you get now with your machine.

The book presents an excellent systematic presentation of AIX
administration. It is written in a refreshing style that is not found in
typical AIX documentation.

Having been a developer on various Unix platforms, I was familiar with several aspects of sys admin ... or that what I thought. But AIX is a different game and being a sysadm requires very special set of skills. This book atleast prepares one with the technical details. The book has a good mix of background and technical info.

There are sections that were very useful for me (like ODM, LVM, sysback which are new for someone coming from non AIX). And there are sections that are completely irrelevent or treated light (like Apache, TCP/IP).

But overall this is a great book on AIX.

I found this book to be both comprehensive and well written. It was recommended to me by a very experienced AIX user. I am much less experienced, but I also found the book very helpful- it has a good mix of information, and is presented in a logical, well formatted way.

I used AIX in the mid 90's. I got pretty good at installations, SNA services, peripherals and applications. Since them I switched to HP/UX and moves from version 9 to 10 to 11; so I am familiar with today's systems.

Well it is a shocker but once again the AIX technology and their thrust into Linux and more web based applications, not to mention hardware technology has once again leapfrogged past me in the AIX field.

The book itself is appropriately designed to bring you up to snuff as of its printing. The main thing about this book is that it assumes that you already know UNIX systems administration and some of the older versions of AIX as it the commands and locations shown do not have any explanation. The differences however are described in detail.

Still the one advantage of SMIT and WebSM is that they are a good starting point and with a little tweaking you can bypass them next time with greater precision.

Regardless of where you are on the AIX food chain this book is more than just a helpful reference for your library.

AIX for UNIX Professionals

I manage both Solaris and AIX servers and found this book to be a useful guide for beginning admins (not many AIX books to choose from though). I gave it to one of my Admins that came on board with no AIX experience to acquaint him with the environment. It's a decent reference. No substitute for training though.

The book is written well but I was left disappointed. I'm an experienced Solaris Admin, so I mainly wanted to see the differences between the two. I feel that the book could of basically been condensed into one sentence. "Use smit for almost everything." Most of the book is just guidance through the smit menu's or explaining technical principals like the differences between RAID levels or Power 4 vs Power 5. I feel that I've got more out of the IBM Red books and can't recommend this book to anyone but beginners who need the extra guidance through SMIT or basic concepts like RAID.

This is a great book. It is very informative and very useful.