Customer Reviews

Sun Certified System Administrator for Solaris 9.0 Study Guide (Exams 310-014 & 310-015)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I'm a Solaris instructor and our firm reviewed this book because it was the first one out and we needed a Solaris 9 training guide for our students; I returned it. In short, here's our review: Gibbs has 3 sentences on managing disks with SMC, nothing on managing core dumps, nothing on Flash archives, nothing on fssnap, nothing on printers, one sentence on smpatch. Gibbs devotes an entire chapter to vi and another entire chapter on basic command syntax- both are not on the exam. Gibbs also includes sections on Admintool and Adminsuite when both products have been discontinued in Solaris 9. Gibbs still refers to SVM as DiskSuite and the book contains numerous typos (ie. syslogc). Gibbs tells the reader to use rlogin, rcp, rsh and does not even speak of the secure shell. I could go on and on about what this book has missed. In short, we started using the Calkins Solaris 9 Training Guide (pub. Que) and our students are getting certified and getting jobs.

I bought this book and read it for a good hour. After having just read the Solaris 8 version the week before, it's clear to me that the contents of this book were not adjusted for Solaris 9. For UNIX types, s/Solaris 8/Solaris 9/g pretty much sums it up. Even the typos from the previous edition are still there.

I'm not familiar with Mr. Gibbs' other work, but in this case it appears that they brought him in to update the excellect Solaris 8 version of this book, which was originally written by a talented group of admins. Mr. Gibbs appears to have taken their money without doing any work in return.

I returned this book and bought Ambro's Exam Cram 2 for Solaris 9, which is very condensed but accurate. For in-depth coverage, I'm still searching for a good book.

This book does not cover the necessary information needed to pass the exams. It does not even mention printing, which is a big part of the exam. Used without any other aid, you would need a lot of luck to pass the exams.

This book is for solaris 8 and not for solaris 9.....
The exam number has been mispelled throughout the book..
Its a good book for solaris 8 though.I studied the whole book to find out this at the end and i have to give the 8 exam ultimately.

This book is just terrible... Does not cover all required material, has a large number of typos, lumps together config files that should be separate... Not even worth the price of the paper it's printed on.
On the other hand, I highly recommend the book by Bill Calkins.
See my review there.

The book does cover 310-014 & 310-015. The error is in the table of contents, not in the actual book; the editor goofed and missed the number change, which is unfortunate! The book is actually very good otherwise, informative and important for passing the exams.

I echo everything that the good people have already said about this book. If you go on just the material that is published in this book, YOU WILL NOT PASS THE EXAMS. It is most certainly NOT 100% complete. It's missing key exam objective coverage on cron and at commands and more importantly, printers. Printers are a HUGE part of the exam, at least 10-15 questions out of 57.

I just took part 1 of the SCSA, and if I would not have gone through the course and had the course materials to study from, I would have been sunk for the exam. Because of this material, however, I did pass. I've read some great reviews on the Exam Cram 2 book on the SCSA, so I will pick that up and use that as a supplement to the course materials for part 2.

That said, in light of it's many failures, this book does contain info that is pertinent to the exam. Most of the information found in this book was contained in the Solaris 8 publication. Many of the concepts from Solaris 8 apply, so the book is helpful in some ways. It's just very annoying that it totally leaves out some key exam objective coverage.

I thought this version would improve on the problems that were found in the Solaris 8 version of this book, but it's worse. Maybe the publisher should get out of the Solaris market. Look elsewhere for a certification guide.

I did not like this book. It does not mention printing anywhere. It seams that the book was rushed to press to quickly. In some spots is says Solaris 8 where it should say Solaris 9.

This book is junk. The find and replace they used to change the terms used in Solaris 9 instead of 8 missed a few acronyms. The software included is an advertisement to sell you online classes. This book fails to satisfy its intended purpose.