Customer Reviews

The AIX Survival Guide

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Having lots of experience with NT and NetWare wasn't going to help me with my additional duties - to be sysadmin of two CRITICAL servers running AIX 4.2. I badly needed a book to help be more than a quick reference, yet less than a full set of manuals or arcane IBM tombe. This book TOTALLY is it. It's right to the point, addressing the boot process, backups, security, periodic maintenance, emergency recovery procs and more. If you're in the same boat, buy this book before any other!

This book is packed with lots of useful information. It is targeted for a UNIX sysadmin who is switching to AIX. If you are new to the UNIX this book will not be a good place to start. However the language is clear and if you do not know something you can usually figure what to look for in a general UNIX book to get a necessary background.

If you have limited experience on UNIX and end up in a job where you have to learn AIX admin, then this is the correct book. If you have indepth UNIX experience with HP-UX or NCR, etc, then you will outgrow this book in about 15 minutes. There are many tasks that need to be done that are not available in smit (smitty). This book won't cover them.

The best book available for AIX system administrators. Hopfully a newer version will be released shortly.

This book was published in 1996. It's almost ten years old. If you're working with a version of AIX newer than that, you should probably get a more up to date book. It's also way overpriced for something so ancient.

This is the only good commercial book about AIX. Is it because of IBM's Red Books being so good? Maybe, it's certainly not because of their (...) man-pages. This book will get you through everything till you hit an SP environment (PSSP), take IBM classes after that!

If there were only reference guides for Solaris and HP-UX as good as this one.... If you're a beginner, this book will likely be over your head (get O'Reilly's sysadm book instead). But if you're already familiar with SVR4, this makes learning AIX a snap.

This book has helped me adapt reasonably well from a Solaris background to an AIX environment. This book will give you most of what you need (given a reasonable Unix background) to administer any AIX box short of an SP. If get an SP, it's time to invest in some training coupons.

If you have a very basic Unix background, this book will lead you step by step into the AIX, and RS/6000 world. It is Very well structured, from the tips & tricks of the installation to the more difficult areas of AIX like: ODM, performance, etc. I am an SP/AIX sysadmin for more than four years and I still use this book as a reference. I wish the Author will write an AIX survival guide for the new AIX version 4.3.1 .

If you are a newbie to AIX, get trained first (preferably from IBM) before reading this book. Otherwise, you will feel sleepy and confused.
Overall this is not a bad book, consider it is out of date... here I am writing a review near the end of 2006.
There are still many functions that would apply to AIX 5L; if you are looking for the most current book to match with your AIX 5L, this would NOT be the book.
I would not consider this as reference book either... It's more of a casual reading on AIX....