6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Much less number of pages than announced and serious errors, October 21, 2009
This review is from: Linux System Administration Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (Expert's Voice in Linux) (Paperback)
I have recently purchased an electronic version of this book with great expectations (mostly practical, integrated solutions). However, when I received my copy I have seen that it's about 280 pages (from cover to cover) and 70 (or more) pages are missing! It has been announced to have 350 pages on both Amazon and APress web sites.
And maybe worse part: I started reading the book and found two serious errors on the first page, in the first recipe! First part of the first recipe talks about a code (bash settings) listing but the code is obviously incomplete (line 05 is mentioned in text, but it's simply not in the code listing). In the second part of the first recipe a shell command is given to find files under /etc that are changed in the last ten minutes: "find / -fstype local -mtime -10m". But there is not such usage of find! mtime should have been mmin! This was the point I gave up.
It seems this book is not reviewed seriously and even worse the codes are just written blindly in the text without executing them on a real system. (I really cannot understand how an author can make the second error.) I have written to APress about these issues (# of pages and errata) two days ago but have not yet received any response.
Well, there are more problems.. There is no ToC (as metadata) in the PDF. What I see in the ToC is stuff like this:
Kemp000.pdf
Kemp001.pdf
Kemp002
Kemp003.pdf
Kemp004.pdf
Kemp005
...
These are just original file names of each chapter... (Even the format of this list is inconsistent. What a low quality production!)
And finally, although I have not yet completely read it the quality and coverage of the content is much below my expectations. You may take this as subjective but except this point all the problems I mentioned are enough to put this book into the list of the worst books ever produced in the history.
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
entry level / "hey, check this out!!!" - approach, October 28, 2009
This review is from: Linux System Administration Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (Expert's Voice in Linux) (Paperback)
Typically we treat Apress /No Starch press and especially O'Reilly books (with those black-white animals on cover) as the highest authority in IT. We naturally anticipate that those books are written by hard-core professional that can mentor of all. Well, that's not the case with Juliet Kemp book "Linux system administration recipes" - the whole book has the "unwritten concept" - "Hey, check this out!" . That means that it needs to be considered as a sort of article in Linux magazine that covers some Linux/sysadmin concepts that got Julie Kemp mesmerized, but not the solid reference material.
For example, page. 188
ldapsearch "(uuid=testuser)" | sed '/^#/d' | sed '/^$/d' - well , that works but any decent experienced sysadmin will tell you that it is not cool to pipe sed to sed, Instead you use '-e' command -
ldapsearch "(uuid=testuser)" | sed -e '/^#/d' -e '/^$/d' - that is much nicer. I am not splitting a hair here, but IMHO books like this need to have more elegance.
Also the whole idea of centralization using LDAP /NFS / puppet is not clearly illustrated in this book - a few Visio / Omnigraph diagrams will be a HUGE help to understand the entire concept and to see whether it can be applied to your network. I am reading between the lines that Juliet Kemp has discovered LDAP /NFS /puppet / bash completion / perl -and she is trying to tell us "See, what I am using... isn't it cool or what?"
We need less "discovery channel", but more analysis here. I am not telling you that the book is useless - it has some nice ideas, but the 2nd edition (if Juliet Kemp cares) need to be seriously revised
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