Customer Reviews

Pluggable Authentication Modules: The Definitive Guide to PAM for Linux SysAdmins and C Developers: A comprehensive and practical guide to PAM for Linux: how modules work and how to implement them

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

 

 

I did not gain anymore insight from this book than I already had from reading MAN pages and briefly researching on-line. The first 25 pages are basically history, file structure and an introduction with tips on how to compile from source. The other 75 pages are shallow descriptions of various modules, dumbed down examples so things don't get to complicated, and a short section that talks about development. There is absolutely no depth and very little useful information. I can't believe this is called a "definitive guide". If your work as a system administrator has brought you to considering this book chances are you probably already know more about PAM than you will gain from this book. I gave it one star because it is thin, lightweight, and it uses nice big fonts.

If you are looking for a book to help you write a PAM module, this is definitely not it. There are all of 5 pages on the subject, and they go into much less detail than anything you can find on the web; no explanations for why things are the way they are are given.

The information contained in the book was easy to understand but it did not go into as much detail as I had hoped it would about what I was purchased it for.