Customer Reviews

Citrix Metaframe Access Suite for Windows Server 2003

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

 

 

Finally a book that not only addresses the technical issues a Citrix administrator needs, but also the often times forgotten business issues that justify why any technology should be implemented. These guys do a great job addressing the paradigm change a system administrator must understand in order to correctly design, implement, administer and troubleshoot a MetaFrame environment.

The book spends an excessive amount of pages talking about things OTHER than Citrix. Project Management, Network Management etc. The core problem with the book is that it simply does not contain details on getting up and running. It spends huge amounts of space talking about coneptional things like "Server Based Computing" but does not go through the technical details of setting it up.

If you are buying this for technical reference, forget it, head for the Citrix Knowledge base. There aren't very many Citrix books out there, so you don't have a choice sorry to say.

I bought this book after reading the "Author Rebuttal" as it sounded as if he was making the case for it being a technical book. It would be best to read the other reviews that complain about its lack of technical "get it working" material.

Interesting bits: the first few chapters do go through the history of the product and clear up questions I had about version names and numbers. Since this wasn't why I bought the book I can't give it a break.

I have started reading the book and find it to long winded. If I want to read PMBOK I would read it, if the book is about Citrix please get to the point.

Sometimes technical writers get paid by the word instead of getting to the point. I am at chapter 5 it is starting to scratch the surface, that is alot of reading for nothing.

-Travis

Seven expert technical reviewers from VectorESP, ECC, Osborne, and Citrix reviewed the Chapter 12 content, and we are very confident in its technical accuracy and the separation between the UNIX and Windows content. On the Datastor options, we discussed all available options (including Oracle, MSDE, and DB2) on page 359, but we chose to provide a step-by-step guide only for SQL, since Citrix claims that over 80% of the datastores in the field today are on SQL. The advantage of picking only one of the choices for a step-by-step in-depth discussion was that this allowed readers a true in-depth look, rather than just a brush by look that could have been provided if we tried to cover all the choices. Additionally, we discussed the datastor design options in depth in the design chapters of the book, which outline a very rigorous and strict approach to all aspects of the solution.
As future reviews will attest to, we are very confident that this book is unique and much more in depth than the other guides when it comes to networking, security, and disaster recovery aspects of Server-Based Computing.

The announcement of this new book caused me a lot of excitement. However, I became very disappointed when I started to read it.

Even though it has a lot of pages, it is not an in-deep guide. It talks a lot about general stuff. In my opinion it lacks some more advanced chapters and a most rigorous and strict approach.

For instance, chapter 12 is about the "server configuration". The windows and UNIX stuff have got all mixed up. So, in my opinion, it is not good enough for Windows administrators nor for UNIX administrators. In the same chapter, when talking about how to create the IMA Data Store, it mentions only SQL Server (there are also Access, MSDE, Oracle and DB2!!!)

I'm sorry to say that I would recommend, for instance, any book by Brian Madden rather than this one.