Bill's Book Reviews:

Unix System Administration Handbook (3rd edition)

by: Nemeth, Snyder, Seebass & Hein

Prentice Hall - PTR- ISBN: 0-13-020601-6 US: $42.00(?) - copyright 2001

This book was originally published in 1988-1990, if I remember correctly, and was called "The Yellow Book" - it is the 'one and only' book on Unix Systems Administration you'll ever need, if you can buy only one book. Dr. Evi Nemeth is truly one of the Leaders of the Unix world, and she and her team at Colorado have managed to put a lot of useful information in an easy-to-use, productive & readable volume. There are a lot of books that may treat backup or DNS in more detail, but Evi's book "has it all" - and - Over the years she and her team have also done an excellent job of outlining the differences & idiosyncracies between Solaris (or SunOS as it was originally known) as the "plain vanilla" of Unix and all the other variants. Both the first edition (Yellow-Book) and the second edition (Red-Book) had their 'set' of alternative Unices. This book covers Solaris, HP-UX and Red-Hat-Linux. Apparently AIX & SGI have 'gone by the wayside' and the author team considers these three as holding the greatest market share.

In each section of the book they explain the details of history, install, management and configuration for whatever task at hand (backup, e-mail, DNS, kernel config) and they they outline the hows, whys & differences between the different flavours of Unix.

In any case this is still and excellent book and you still need it on your bookshelf - I was recently looking for something specific to Solaris 7, and found some fairly out-dated Solaris(2.5) books (would have had to buy 2) and this book (much more recent (covering Solaris 7 & some Solaris 8), and bought this - rather than the older Solaris books.

book review by: Bill Schell - 2 November 2000