FreeBSD Unleashed (With CD-ROM) [Paperback]

Michael Urban (Author), Brian Tiemann (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0672322064 | ISBN-13: 978-0672322068 | Publication Date: October 12, 2001 | Edition: Bk&CD-Rom

This book teaches the reader everything he/she needs to know in order to use FreeBSD to its full potential. It will show individuals how to use the same FreeBSD power that Yahoo!, the Internet Movie Database, and many other high profile Internet sites depend on. Whether someone needs an enterprise class server, a small business server, or a dependable workstation, this book can be a very economical and powerful solution to your needs.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Because it's very popular among Internet service providers (ISPs), FreeBSD is likely the Unix flavor you work with when you Telnet into the server that hosts a Web site. For that reason, it's worth having FreeBSD Unleashed around if you frequently need to log in to various hosted environments but don't do your day-to-day work on a FreeBSD computer. If you're running FreeBSD on your own machine--and more than a few Linux critics say you should be--you'll get even more out of this book, particularly if you prefer to have your reference materials on paper. It's a good idea to have them that way when you're having problems getting FreeBSD to connect to the Internet, after all.

This book explains, succinctly, how to do basic utilitarian stuff like moving files and creating users, and advanced utilitarian stuff like "building the world" from raw source. Further, the authors explain Unix concepts (like the shell and its relationship to the kernel) clearly and in ample detail. Michael Urban and Brian Tiemann also go beyond FreeBSD itself, explaining such concepts as wide area networks (WANs) and basic, environment-neutral Perl programming. Whether these inclusions are valuable extras or extraneous padding depends upon your perspective, but there's no doubt that the authors maintain a high quality standard throughout their documentation of FreeBSD and its allied technologies. --David Wall

Topics covered: Using and enjoying the FreeBSD flavor of Unix, with emphasis on versions 4.4 and 5.0. Instructions and explanations--all rather detailed--appear on installing the operating system, configuring groups and users, setting up daemons (including those for network services like mail), and connecting to other computers (as well as the Internet). Installable copies of FreeBSD 4.4 and 5.0 ship with this book.

From the Back Cover

This book teaches the reader everything he/she needs to know in order to use FreeBSD to its full potential. It will show individuals how to use the same FreeBSD power that Yahoo!, the Internet Movie Database, and many other high profile internet sites depend on. Whether someone needs an enterprise class server, a small business server, or a dependable workstation, this book can be a very economical and powerful solution to your needs.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 1024 pages
• Publisher: Sams; Bk&CD-Rom edition (October 12, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0672322064
• ISBN-13: 978-0672322068
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.3 x 2.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,705,050 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #47 in Books > Computers & Technology > Operating Systems > BSD

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Strong Mid-Level Reference, April 2, 2002

By 

Z. Hester (Olathe, KS, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: FreeBSD Unleashed (With CD-ROM) (Paperback)

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.)

32 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I love FreeBSD, but this book needs work, March 16, 2002

By 

Richard Bejtlich "TaoSecurity" (Metro Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: FreeBSD Unleashed (With CD-ROM) (Paperback)

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 ...

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars If you're new to FreeBSD, you will like it., September 7, 2006

By 

Henry Lenzi (Porto Alegre, RS Brazil) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: FreeBSD 6 Unleashed (Paperback)

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.