Customer Reviews

Windows Administration at the Command Line for Windows Vista, Windows 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000

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

 

 

I enjoyed this book. The author was comprehensive to say the least. Granted, there's no way I'll ever use all the tools mentioned, and I doubt I'll ever need to, but it's nice to have an authoritative resource. The author also seemed to speak from experience, which I appreciated.

If you script or hack at the Windows Command line this is a good book for you. I'm always looking for an extra insight and found a number of them here. I can highly recomend this book

I had to purchase this book for the first few weeks of a scripting class. I have to say that the book walked me through step by step to building batch scripts for Windows command prompt. I have found many of the commands in the examples to be useful for functions I have performed at work.

This book was great for school and now has become a very useful reference guide for my desk at work.

This book covers everything you might need to know about how to make your computer more efficient. The price I paid for it was a bargain. The resources here are among the best.

It's hard to know where to begin.

A lot of the reviews of the previous version talk about finding a new respect for Windows seeing the power of its command line. I doubt many of these people have used BSD, Mac OS X Terminal, or Linux lately. I would be staggered if any of them get such an impression by actually putting this book to use. Trying to extract useful information out of this book has only underscored every negative opinion I had about Windows, including and especially the limited, inconsistent, arcane nature of its command line. I wouldn't hold that against the author if he didn't keep putting blurbs in the middle of the text about how powerful and useful it is when he should have been devoting time, energy, and ink to helping you through the reality of the situation. He does eventually go into the actual workings of the command prompt and some of its time-saving features - starting on page 316. I do actually use the command prompt to save time every day, and use well-written batch files to save even more time. I thought this book would help me take it to the next level. I'm afraid not.

On page 9:

"For example, one command problem that people encounter is a failed audio system. You can check the event log and then view the information about the sound system using the Control Panel applets. In addition, you can use a utility such as DXDiag to perform audio checks on your system. You might even use performance monitoring to look for hidden audio problems...However, as the book progresses, you'll find that you can also access all of this information from the command prompt. A batch file might be all you need to perform a carefully executed diagnostic check..."

Read those last two sentences carefully. If the command prompt will show you all of the information described, then, ipso facto, a batch file *is* all you need. Determining where exactly the uncertainty comes in is an exercise left to the reader.

In my situation, I have a home machine with Windows XP, at work I (and the rest of the help desk) remotely support (via Remote Desktop) hundreds of sites where we connect to a Windows 2000 server machine from which we then remotely support the Windows XP clients. Terminaling into the XP machines is disruptive to business, any operation where onsite personnel must assist in system troubleshooting is *extremely disruptive* to business, their audio functionality is mission critical, and the results of instructing Remote Desktop not to affect the remote computer's audio hardware is spotty. This mythical batch file would be a godsend. If I'd flipped to page 9 in a book store I would have paid full retail for that alone, expecting to get a bonus for saving my company thousands of dollars.

So, I get on my Windows XP Home machine, and run "DRIVERQUERY" - not recognized as a command or batch file. I look it up on the Microsoft website and I see it referenced as a Windows XP Professional feature. Get in to work, and sure enough, while the command - just like it says in the text - can specify a remote computer, Windows 2000 server will not be querying any machine's drivers with that command either. And that was one of the commands the author chose to describe in relative detail. There is some discussion of Windows versions in this book beyond "Vista" and "Other" but not much, and not this time.

Get to the DXDiag Utility (had a little trouble finding it again, the index only points to the blurb I quoted and pages 259-260 where - according to the index - you will learn how to use it to convert a FAT partition to NTFS) and the author describes the graphical equivalent in slightly better detail, which is to say almost none. Will those reams of output I'm sifting through include the results of any diagnostic tests, or does that fall under the category of the "wealth of diagnostic tests and essential system information" that lead us to normally use the graphic version as he says?

How exactly the information I can find through the command line by any means on any Windows version relates in any way to what's in the Control Panel applets he doesn't mention.

As for the Performance Monitoring section - well, what he wrote might make sense if you were already an expert on using the graphical utilities. He tells you sometimes - after he tells you how useful it is know something - that you require knowledge he's not going to impart then gives you the URL to somebody else's website, but not this time. After nine pages of dense text, I might be able to craft four commands but I would not feel at all comfortable that in sifting through the dozens of switches and deciding which ones to use that the author's tiny blurbs on them was enough information to make a single good decision. To say nothing of the fact that the author's description of what exactly happens when you run the commands, and what exactly you need to make use of them, is not enough to determine if those four commands even have anything to do with each other. He might have made better use of the space where he devotes the page immediately following to a utility that will tell you if your system is suitable for Vista (wait for it) after you have installed Vista. That one I feel I could use from his description.

It would be nice if he could beef up those "Real World Scenario" boxes with Real World examples, Real World challenges, and Real World results. I suspect we're dealing with an unusually hypothetical definition of "Real World".

The little "Vista" symbol in the margin appears very frequently and might mean that what he's telling you works slightly differently in Vista, it might mean that it is no longer available in Vista, and it might mean that it is only available in Vista. He usually tells you which, but not always. Using both a "V" in a box with the caption "Vista" for "Vista-only" and the same symbol in a circle with a line through it for "Not in Vista" would be enormously more illuminating. Describing slight differences is a job for explanatory text.

All in all, the overwhelming majority of the book reads like sales text for the book you've already bought (or perhaps for when you're flipping through it in the bookstore?), followed by the screens you can see by entering "help" and "/?" into the command prompt with just enough added text to look like he's explaining something. Its layout and organization make it barely suitable for use as a reference, and even then I'd want a little more nuts and bolts.

I would have to suggest that the author read "A Practical Guide to Linux" by Mark Sobell. That book describes what a command accomplishes, shows you fully-formed commands that you can actually type in, then explains the effects of the most commonly used option switches. While somewhat larger (yet slightly cheaper) it actually gives you a practical, rudimentary primer on scripting technologies that you can begin to use right away for simple things, then acquire experience and in-depth references for more complicated tasks. It doesn't say "scripting is so very useful and powerful that it is too big a topic for this book - go check out these websites that I didn't contribute to and have no control over" (not a direct quote). The big listing of man pages is in an appendix where it belongs.