Customer Reviews

AIX Version 4: System and Administration Guide

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

As an AIX admin that has have been doing everything from the "old" MCA boxes to SP frames, including being a systems engineer/admin independant contractor to IBM, this is the worst book I have ever seen. I picked most of knowledge up in about 3 years and bought this book thinking it might give some help after my upgrade to 4.2.1 from 3.2.5. NOPE! This is totally useless and doesn't even go into CDE or most of the intricate differences of 3.2.5. Smitty isn't everything people. Move along...

This book is just plain bad. I haven't been able to find any redeeming item inside. I hope somebody reads these reviews and decides not to buy this book. Maybe that would be the redeeming effort I'm looking for. Usually I can mine a few nuggets out of a bad or marginal book but this one takes the cake. Please save your money, and send a message to the publisher they will listen to. This book should've been caught somewhere in quality control and never made it to the printing presses.

I bought this as a reference for AIX, as I'm coming over from Solaris and HP/UX. Big mistake. It's nearly impossible to look up anything in this book. It has literally the worst index I've ever seen. I just ordered "The AIX Survival Guide" by Siegert, which I'm told is more what I need. Do yourself a favor and don't buy this book.

I made the mistake of purchasing this book at a local book store as I needed an AIX book that day and they only had 2 books.

This book looked to be more useful than the other book but as soon as I started reading it I found out how bad it was.

Much of this book is woefully antiquated and unfortunately much of it has AIX version 3 information instead of 4.

I read the book from cover to cover as I needed to get as much AIX knowledge as I could that day and I can tell you that I learned about 4 things from the book that would be useful. The rest of the book had information that has little to no bearing on administering a system or applies to a version 3 system and not AIX 4.X.

Please DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK AS YOU WILL BE VERY DISAPPOINTED IN IT!

This book falls short in index. You can never reach a command by searchingin the index. No command summary is also there. It does not list many procedures step-by-step which would have been really useful(eg. doing an NFS or configuringan NIS). Could improve a lot.

I bought this book a couple of years ago, needing to get up to speed on AIX. I've never touched it since, it's mostly filled with screenshots of smit screens - and very little info.

If you really want to learn AIX, get general unix admin with AIX specific's from O'Reily's SysAdmin book, and fill in the rest with the free and excellent pdf's from IBM. (redbooks.ibm.com)

Do NOT buy this book

Luckily I inherited this book from sombody that got fired. I would have been furious if I had paid for it. I administer serveral hundred AIX boxes from SP2's to workstations. Nothing in this book has ever been helpful to me. It is poorly organized and trying to find what you are looking for is impossible. Very disapointing. It makes me wonder why so many people have this on their bookshelf. Maybe because it's thick and cumbersome they think it's packed with goodies. It' NOT!

Try something that is thinner and infinitely more helpful for AIX administrators: The AIX Survival Guide by Siegert. It has led me to all of my AIX answers.

This is a great book for those that want to learn how to do System Administration for AIX. It is not a good book for those that want to learn how to use other flavors of UNIX. This book is intended to be read from cover to cover so that the reader can get a good introduction to what AIX System Administration is all about. References can be easily accessed on-line or through IBM's Redbooks (I'm sure there is a trademark here). Deroest has done well with this book, I know I would have struggled a lot more without it!

I know that SMIT is 'the thing', but in my opinion, this, as well as other books on AIX should concentrate first on making sure that people can do without SMIT if they have to. You never know when it will assemble a command erroneously, or it might be down.

I bought this book in hopes that it would provide a detailed reference for doing most any type of system admin. I also hoped that it too showed a comparison between AIX and other flavors like BSD and SVR4. It did at some levels, but fell short. It presented some history on AIX and also covered some hardware changes over the years. Since I am already very familiar with other UNIX's, I had hoped this would be a reference/command guide, but it was not. It has you depend heavily on the info and man pages for usage. I felt the book did not cover enough detail overall and was very weak in covering kernel config/tuning. There must be better out there...