Customer Reviews

FreeBSD Unleashed (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've been casually using FreeBSD for about a year now and wanted to make it my primary workstation OS. After paging through all three books on FreeBSD at my local bookstore, I bought a copy of Unleashed. The biggest reason I bought it was that it covers FreeBSD 4.5 (the RELEASE version at the time of my purchase). It also has a lot of information on 5.0 CURRENT.

The strength of the book is its breadth. It's pretty much a Swiss Army Knife book. You could literally start with only a little knowledge of UNIX (or multi-user OSs) and build a rather complete server to host all kinds of services for a web site, or a local network using this book. (I recommend you DO build a hobby server to try out some of the examples in the book.)

There are several glaring problems, though. The biggest being technical errors strewn throughout the text. If you're entirely new to UNIX, you'll probably run into a few problems if you type in the commands exactly as listed. I'm a technical editor myself, so my "edit daemons" are always running in the background and pointing out problems while I read anything. I would say that the book has no less than 20 errors (either in command statements or technical theory) that are large enough to cause you problems if you're not sure what you're doing. Be careful when you're reading and if something looks a little odd, it probably is, so look it up somewhere else.

I would also say that it would have been nice to see some of the examples on the CDs that were promised in the text. (My CD-ROMs came with FreeBSD 4.5 RELEASE and FreeBSD 5.0 CURRENT.) The "phantom references" to the section on periodical service configuration would have been nice to see.

If you use or plan on using FreeBSD, either as a production-grade server or a stand-alone workstation, this book should be on your shelf. This either means that the book is really useful in spite of its problems, or that there just isn't enough choices when it comes to up-to-date books on the coolest OS out there: FreeBSD. (Help me, O'Reilly.)

I am a senior engineer for network security operations who uses FreeBSD daily. I want to encourage other authors to write FreeBSD books, since documentation helps administrators adopt unfamiliar operating systems. Unfortunately, "FreeBSD Unleashed" suffers too many flaws to warrant more than an average to below-average rating.

The book suffers from three major weaknesses. First, my 'First Printing, August 2001' edition contained typos on pages 357, 358, 363, 364, 378, 435, 730, and others. FreeBSD newbies may not always recognize these mistakes. Second, the book makes numerous references to scripts on an accompanying CD-ROM, but the discs sold with the volume only offer FreeBSD 4.4 RELEASE and FreeBSD 5.0 CURRENT. I could not find the missing scripts at the publisher's web site, either. Third, several sections refer to missing content. For example, chapter 14 apparently should have contained guidance on automating processes using 'periodic'. It's difficult to implement later recommendations that cite this missing documentation, such as pages 426-7.

Beyond these three flaws, the book does not suit its intended 'Intermediate-Advanced' audience. The material appears to be aimed at users trying to migrate away from Windows or perhaps Linux. 'Intermediate-Advanced' users do not need lessons on fundamentals of networking like hardware and protocols. I was also frustrated by the inclusion of a chapter on 'Perl Programming' which was too vague to be helpful. If the authors couldn't do anything useful with the 23 pages allotted to the topic, the chapter should have been dropped. (In contrast, I found the shell scripting chapter more practical.)

I really hoped to give this book a glowing review. My company's FreeBSD servers routinely exceed 100-plus days of uptime, and I believe the OS is an incredible platform for servers. While I found sections of "FreeBSD Unleashed" useful, they were not sufficient to make me overlook the book's weaknesses. Strangely enough, it's probably still a good idea to buy this book if you're a FreeBSD system administrator. It's important to collect and support documentation for this robust, powerful OS. Unfortunately, I'm still waiting for the book that does it justice ...

This book isn't for me.
You would think a FreeBSD book in 2006 will tell you things like how to keep your system safe with binary updates, or walk you through a decent CUPS installation, or mention using OpenBSD's firewall tool. It's just the same-old same-old. There's little here that can't be learned from the Handbook or Greg Lehey's The Complete FreeBSD. And both are free. To be fair, there is new stuff here, like installing the official Sun JDK port for FreeBSD, or using portupgrade, but I expected a little more thoroughness and variation in choices in the areas of security, ports and printing. Also, I think a chapter about contributing to the FreeBSD ports tree would have been good to have.
However, if you're new to Unix/FreeBSD, than I think you will enjoy the chatty style instead of the rather more terse style of The Handbook.

I've looked at all the other books but this is the only one worth considering if you want to learn how to install and use FreeBSD. It is thorough, very readable, but doesn't go so deep as to confuse or frustrate you. You will have enough understanding that, if anything in the book should go out of date or change, you will be able to figure out what to do or where to get online help. Just by using this book, I went from knowing virtually nothing about FreeBSD/Unix to running an online web server with Apache and Postgresql and Gnome/X Windows.

Some ask whether The Complete FreeBSD by Lehey might be as good or better than this one. While Leheys book is good, I found it went deeper into the subject than I was prepared for at the time and I don't recommend it for beginners. I do, however, refer to Leheys book from time to time. I reviewed his book there.

As has been said by another reviewer, this is a Swiss Army knife type book. At the same time, it isn't overwhelming. I haven't encountered the errors, but then again I haven't used all of the examples or checked the publication date of my copy (so I may have a later version).
What I like about this book is that it covers enough of everything to get a system up and configured with the essentials for Internet computing.
I used to be a regular UNIX user, but haven't done much of it for over 6 years, so the general UNIX sections were good refreshers. The product and application specific areas were invaluable Overall, tremendous value.

Of all the books out there on FreeBSD, this one is probably the most authoritative. This has sections on configuring SAMBA, Print Sharing, Apache, Sendmail, and BSD administration.

The only other book out there of this quality is "Absolute BSD" by No-Starch Press. However, that one has a few misprints in the Crontab section that can be confusing.

With Linux (or MS for that matter) there are probably thousands of books, some for the neophyte, some for the expert, and some for almost every level in between. With FreeBSD, there are only a few--Ms. Anderson's book, which fills a niche for the beginner, Mr. Lehey's, which covers just about everything (it's rightfully called the Complete FreeBSD), Mr. Mittlestaedt's, designed for the Network/Sys Admin, the Handbook, also available on line and this one.

This book gives straighforward explanations of various aspects of running FreeBSD. I liked its section on firewalls, for example, more than I did the Handbook's section. It's a good reference to have around.

This book seems the perfect bridge between Ms. Anderson's and Mr. Lehey's.

Unlike Windows OS's, FreeBSD changes DAILY. Writing a book for it is not an easy task, but FreeBSD Unleased does it well. I hope they keep coming out with updated ver's as FreeBSD's version number climbs. As of Summer 2002, you shouldn't use 5.0 as your daily OS or for a server, so the book really focuses on 4.5 (4.6 came out June 2002). It covers every topic, and has good info about PORTS! (programs that are not apart of the basic OS) like pop3/imap, ssl tunnels, php for apache, what types of security hacks/attacks you need to watch out for and how to combat them.

I've only been using FreeBSD for 3 months (I'm a old hat MCSE, CCNA) and I use 4 resources for 99% of what I learn ...I've looked at all the other FBSD books, none compair to the wide array of info here.

This book does do a great job of walking you through the rather complicated process of installing freeBSD and it gives you enough of an idea of how to get a couple of basic services configured. However, it is woefully inadequate when it comes to administering the system once you've got it running. The section on configuring security and firewalls is surprisingly limited and many of the sections are so generalized that they're useless for trying configure anything but the most basic services.

As a FreeBSD enthusiast I could say that everything is on the handbook, but I'd be a liar. Everything about FreeBSD is on FreeBSD.

For all those who have heard about FreeBSD and desire to start from scratch (i.e. moving from Windows), you'll need all the help you can get: you'll have to look for the Complete FreeBSD book, the Handbook (printed or online) and will be surfing the FreeBSD man pages after the instalation... and then you'll have to use your own creativity imagination and all the internet search engines available to understand and implement this beautiful OS. But the results are excellent, the stability and security that FreeBSD offers are outstanding.

FreeBSD Unleashed is certainly a book which has many updated information and shares many common points with the books mentioned above, however, all of them complement each other. I certainly recommend this book for everyone who needs a good reference book for FreeBSD and already owns the others mentioned.

Good Luck!