Customer Reviews

Solaris System Administrator's Guide

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

 

 

The author has commented that "I am the author of this book and would like to point out that the reviews shown on this page are NOT for the Solaris System Administrator's Guide, Third Edition, which was released in December 2000."

Sadly, my review IS for the 3rd Edition, which I have open on my desk. After reading 30 pages (heavily marked up in red pen representing copious errors I noticed on first glance), I deliberately looked the book up on Amazon to see if it was going to get any better. Judging from the other reviews, I assume that it probably won't.

I was startled to read on page 3 that it makes no attempt to cover Solaris installation, network administration, mail administration, hardware installation, security administration, or performance monitoring -- pretty basic tasks for ANY system administrator!

Nonetheless, it remains a basically useful guide to Solaris 8. I come from a FreeBSD background, and the book has been handy already in pointing out fundamental differences between the Unices and directing my study.

I'll probably buy additional Solaris 8 references to supplement this book, but will try different authors/publishers in the future. I don't regret buying this book because of its low price, but I guess I got what I paid for.

I'd refrained from buying this author's books because of the bad reviews many of her other books had gotten, but due to the lack of materials on Solaris 8, I was almost forced to buy this one (I must admit that I was also influenced by the author's own review, which was a big mistake). It's amazing how she leaves so many things unexplained (or just refers the reader to the man pages). On Page 59, you see this passage:

"Use the following command to raise the priority of a command by lowering the nice number by ten units.

/usr/bin/nice -10 command-name

Use the following command to raise the priority of a command by lowering the nice number by ten units. The first minus sign is the option sign, and the second minus sign indicates a negative number.

/usr/bin/nice - -10 command-name"

Guess what comes right after this? Nothing. She just moves on to renice. Why would anyone use the option sign? Or why is it there in the first place? No explanation.

She uses lots of copy & paste, as you can see from the example above. Let me give you another one. She devotes a big chunk of space from Page 43 to 44 to a table listing process tools. No sooner than 6 pages later, we are greeted by the same table, taking up another good half page. The difference? The latter has asterisks indicating the ones that need to be executed by superuser. OK. What do we use these tools for? What do they do? When do they come in handy? Instead of telling the reader those things, she devotes the following 3 pages to a screen shot of these commands, which means very little to us. All we are left with are the one-line descriptions of the tools in the table, repeated twice. The author claims that the third edition has been reorganized; now I'm curious how the second edition was organized.

About the only thing this book made me understand is the reason why so many other people gave bad reviews to her books. I still don't understand why Sun keeps hiring her, though.

Every system administrator who knows one Unix or Linux operating
system knows about 85% of every other Unix and Linux operating
system, simply because they are designed to be compatible. As a
system administrator you can muck around the admin guides and man
pages for a new operating system and maybe, if you're lucky, figure
out another 10%. That last 5% is the toughie. For example, you may
know that SAM, SMIT, and Admintool do roughly the same things on
HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris, respectively, but you don't know about the
little undocumented files they keep in addition to the standard Unix
configuration files they are intended to maintain. To get at that
last 5% of your new operating system, which you may not even suspect
exists, you're going to need a book that covers it specifically.
Janice Winsor covers the Solaris methods and software in the official
Solaris way, and shows you what those 8,000 engineers were paid to
design that will make your life as a system administrator easier.
You're just not going to find this material in any other book.

Topics that might interest you include a description of the
configuration files for every stock Solaris shell, how to administer
NIS+, what's new in AdminSuite and RBAC, IPv6, and detailed printer
control. It's weird. It's Solaris, not Unix.

People who buy this book thinking they're going to get an
introduction to system administration are going to be disappointed.
General system administration is only covered in the most elementary
and sketchy fashion, and there are other books that cover it much
better. If you're interested in getting the fullest benefit from
Solaris, however, this book is worth keeping on your desk. When
you're in a hurry and on unfamiliar territory, you will be glad that
Janice keeps it simple!

This book is poorly written, it contains too much unnecessary info and very little coverage of concepts. No depth in the chapters.Even the commands are not properly covered. I regret buying this book and I am looking for other books

Looking at the newsgroups and amazon reviews on this book and previous editions, I don't think the low ratings are well deserved. For the most part, I think everyone is bent on passing their certification scams, uh exams. This book isn't meant for that. I have used mainly the first edition to learn how to use Solaris for the first time and I felt it did a pretty good job. At the same time, Solaris is too massive to put in one book anyway, if you want more detail, buy more books.

I am the author of this book and would like to point out that the reviews shown on this page are NOT for the Solaris System Administrator's Guide, Third Edition, which was released in December 2000. The book has been reorganized, revised, and carefully edited to remove the unfortunate numbers of typos and production problems that plagued the Second Edition of this book. Please take a look at the new edition and form your own opinions. Thanks.

I've been a UNIX admin for over seven years and I've even taught Solaris to major corporations. If I designed my training manuals the way that this book was written and with its contents, I'd be a laughing stock.

This book says clearly in its Preface that it is "for beginning system administrators, system administrators new to the Solaris Operating Environment, or any user who wants a task-oriented quick-reference guide to basic administrative commands." That's utter rubbish. This book is so unbelievably difficult to follow and discusses topics that NO new user should ever know at their level that I was insulted that this book is trying to be passed off as a guide for Solaris newbies.

You would think that a book that is dedicated to newbies would attempt to build a strong foundation by explaining principles and fundamentals that are necessary to Solaris -- things like understanding the file systems and how to navigate, execute programs, display file contents, list contents of directories, and so forth. Instead, the first ten pages deal with sending broadcast messages to users and creating a message of the day.

I particularly enjoy the instruction on page 8 that says to create a text file; however, the command to create text files (the vi command) isn't even covered until page 92!

Continue on and the book discusses the various run levels and system files that I as a very experienced system administrator have NEVER needed to modify. The user can't even list a directories contents or display a file at this point, yet they're being taught startup scripts, run levels, crash dumps, and hardware commands that are not even a part of Solaris!

Basic Solaris commands aren't even covered until around page 60!

Do you want to learn how to install Solaris from CD? Don't look here. But the book DOES explain how to make disk images and how to upgrade the operating system without having to shut the system down. Forget that such information is practically useless if you don't even know how to build an operating system from scratch.

The book also assumes that all new users will have access to a graphical environment. As such, administrative tasks are explained graphically. In the real world, most Sun systems are managed remotely through a TELNET or SSH session and NOT with a monitor attached to the system. Some Sun systems are even INCAPABLE of having a video card, and not everyone knows what an X server is. (A utility to display images from the Sun system on a PC or another Sun system.)

I made sure to read this book from the premise that I am new user since the preface clearly states that this book can be used by those who are new to Solaris. I could not help but become infuriated with the layout and content of this book, and that was within the first 30 pages. Some of the topics that were covered didn't belong anywhere near the beginning of this book as they had absolutely nothing to do with building a proper foundation for new Solaris users, yet the most common and basic commands that a new user would need don't even show up until page 67.

That being said, when the book finally gets to being consistent with basic Solaris commands, they're normally done rather well with lots of examples and various command-line arguments that admins will use. I can't complain too much about that; however, there is absolutely NO excuse for teaching a Solaris newbie how to reboot a system, perform crash dumps, understand startup scripts, and send messages to users before even explaining how to change to another directory!!

Shame on you, Ms. Winsor! Shame indeed!

If you want a reference manual, I cannot recommend strongly enough O'Reilly's UNIX In A Nutshell, and if you're new to Solaris I recommend Teach Yourself UNIX in 24 Hours from Sams Publishing.

(And by the way ... this review *IS* for the Fourth - and hopefully last - Edition.)

Like the author said, this book might be revised. Lack of detail, only focus on "how-to-do" something without sufficient explanation on "why" or "what". For example: the book explains how to boot with the Kernel Debugger, but do not explain why or when it is needed, or what the Kernel Debugger is. My exact rating for this book is 2.8. Also, lack of conceptual explanation on Solaris architecture and components.

The majority of the information in this book is pretty basic and is already covered in any basic UNIX text. Anyone who doesn't know most of what is in the first half of the book has no business having root access to begin with. Seriously, if you don't know how to use cp, ls or man commands (all discussed in the book) you aren't ready to be a UNIX sysadmin. The bottom line is that if you have been a sysadmin for more than two months this book isn't much use. I guess all the good stuff is discussed in the *advanced* system administrators guide but I was so disappointed in this book that I won't bother getting it.

There was absolutely nothing in this book that I did not already know by heart and little that couldn't be discovered by reading a few man pages.