Customer Reviews

The Book of Webmin: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love UNIX

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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As the various unixes developed in the 1990s, vendors tried to make administration easier by writing proprietary UIs to simplify tasks. For example, IBM came up with SMIT. Of course, each UI was only for that vendor's unix. A developer, Cameron, set out to simplify this across vendors, by writing Webmin. As the book explains, it has now been ported to most unixes and linux.

The book shows that Webmin is ideal for a new sysadmin. Reduces the intimidation factor of unix. It may be increasingly relevant if linux keeps growing on servers and even on desktops. On the latter, a sysadmin (you!) may well be a former Microsoft OS user who decided to take the plunge into a free operating system, but is worried about the necessary level of expertise.

All the important admin tasks, like making new user accounts, setting up a mailer, and networking, are possible via Webmin. So if you are still trepid, this book might assuage your concerns. Cooper writes clearly and at a level accessible to many. No prerequisite knowledge of unix is assumed. Plus, he gives only the core functionality of Webmin, to avoid information overload. The book deliberately eshews explaining every module.

This is a great book that describes one of the best pieces of software for a *NIX enviroment I have ever seen. It is easy to read and understand

Webmin is a great web based interface that can handle clustering, updates across all servers handles by Webmin and many many other things

Joe does a great job getting into the details of Webmin and the basics of everyday system administration as is relates to the use of Webmin

As a experinced Linux System Admin I found many tips for the use of Webmin that have made my life as an Admin much easier

My hats off to Joe for such a great book and Jamie for a fantastic piece of Open Source Software

I have real mixed feelings about this book.

I did not check the pub date on this book before purchasing it. If I had, I probably wouldn't have bought it, because it is now several years old -- as in, out of date. For example, there is no mention of VirtualMin.

Still, there is a lot of good basic information here, so I will get some good use out of it.

When you spend this much for a technical book of this nature, you expect that you are paying for up-to-date information, rather than a "collectable" on the way things used to be.