Customer Reviews

Solaris 8: The Complete Reference

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

As an experienced Solaris and NT administrator, I have been waiting a long time for a book which covered all of the core Solaris material which I learned through experience. This book covers all of the material which makes Solaris distinct from other flavors of UNIX (like HP/UX and Linux). I like the way that the author has given examples of how to get things right (like a whole chapter each on SAMBA and NFS), and how to fix things that go wrong (like filesystem corruption - there are some great examples for using fsck). But I think there should have been more coverage of IPv6 and server clustering.

I have been using various flavours of linux and BSD for 8 years now. Without a whole lot of practical experience in Solaris I spent the money and bought this book. It is an excellent resource and overview covering a wide range of topics. One could practically not even have used a computer or the internet and sit down and read the book and be fully able to install Solaris, set up web, ftp, mail and whatever other servers they may wish. I would be forced to suggest that those that did not find this book of value either didn't have the focus and patience to wade through the close to 700 pages (my hand hurt supporting this volume for several hours -- how many pages do you want it to be?!) and/or are dissatisfied with the OS itself and taking it out on this book. It's not Windows guys, it does require a little bit of hard work and some skill.

I bought this book because Mark Sobell's book didn't take me as far as I wanted to go with UNIX. This book caters for gurus and beginners.

I also like to read many examples in books, not just man page printouts, and this book really delivers in the examples area (unlike some other reference books around).

While the book provided a good overall reference of Solaris, dealing with alot of books that don't touch on subjects like IPV6, NIS+, and proc . This book did. The title is decieving . It doesn't cover much of the new specific features of Solaris 8 other then IPv6. Even then it is underwhelming.

I think this book is great. It has many good chapters covering the main areas of running a Solaris system. I like the fact that it covers alternatives to standard Solaris software (e.g., one whole chapter on Samba). There is also good coverage of NIS+ and routing. I setup my work Solaris network using this book alone!

I like this book. I use it daily with Sun's own AnswerBook program and man pages to get all of the Solaris information I need. This book covers extras - like Samba - that Sun doesn't cover because they are third party tools. It does the job for me!

I bought this book because I wanted to supplement my preparation for the Solaris 8 certification exams. I already had sysadmin experience with versions 2.5, 2.6 and 7.

Solaris 8 - The Complete Reference is extremely readable and a good start for anyone who needs to look at the new Solaris version.

Pros
Good emphasis for PC based admins coming from an NT background, who need a grounding in Solaris and UNIX.
Very, very readable.

Cons
Not very much real information on the boot process

Not very much information on the security aspects of Solaris, just a few pages only.
Way too much detail on on subjects like FTP (16 pages), which everyone should know anyway.
Practically nothing on the use and setup of Jumpstart or diskless clients.
Not enough detail on the real Solaris features such as volume management, and set/getfacl and the Openboot process.

But overall.... I solidly recommend it to be on every small or big- time Solaris admins bookshelf.

The IT publishing industry strikes again! Yet again, a major revision of software is released to the general public, and the IT publishing industry takes six+ months to release the first book on the subject. Lotus Notes 5, and now Solaris8 fit this trend...always a day late and a dollar short. You could blame this on the market shares of LN5 or Solaris, but the same thing is ongoing with Microsoft's Active Directory Service.

This book is as good as it gets (for now). Combined with the MAN pages, 90% of admins/engineers should be on the way to successfully managing Solaris8 systems. Unless you need some exotic information (installing Lotus Notes 5 on Solaris8), this book will give you what you need.

Hopefully the people publishing the Solaris8 Exam Cram (Coriolis), Sun Certified Solaris8 SSA (McGraw-Hill), and Solaris 8 Network Admin Cert (New Riders) will get with the program and release their books within the next two months, instead of waiting another year....

This was a pretty good book for covering Solaris - in general, not Solaris 8. I bought it becuase I just got my hands on a new Ultra5. As an NT dood with just a little Linux experience, this helped a lot when dealing with sendmail (though just enough to get started) qpopper, process management, drive management, run-level management, and other goodies. It's definitely not thurough, but good enoug to keep around. If it didn't say 'The Complete Reference' I would have given it 4 stars. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty decent; it touches a lot of things pretty well, but definitely not deep and broad enough to be called "The Complete Reference.'

I use Linux, but I buy this book two weeks ago when I wanted to run the Solaris program. It is really good (some commands are even the same). The English is easy to understand and there are good examples. Many problems solved in these pages. Best chapter is about devices - Solaris /dev is more difficult than Linux I think.