Rating: 
Summary: Very useful for beginning/intermediate sysadmins
Review: I'm a graduate student in chemistry who purchased this book when I was charged with assisting my department's system administrator. I had previous experience as an occasional Unix user, but certainly was no expert.This book was a very useful resource to me in my first few months on the job, and still provides me with answers to occasional problems I run into. The conversational tone and organization by subject matter made the book very readable when I wanted to sit down with it, but it also was modular enough so that I could skip to whatever topics I needed to learn about quickly. The author's descriptions of her own experiences as system administrator have an honest and practical feel to them. (For example, early in the book she gives a time breakdown of her typical day with tasks ranging from setting up new user accounts to moving around office furniture to accomodate new computer equipment.) For me, an added strength of this book is that it provides descriptions of how to accomplish the same task on different variants of Unix. This has been especially important for me since I deal with computers running Digital Unix, AIX, IRIX, and Linux. The book does a good job of taking a seemingly overwhelming amount of material and presenting it in a very manageable format. Clearly a Unix book can't contain every answer in the world, but I find that this book still is a place I go to first for answers unless I'm looking for a very specific piece of information. I think this book is excellent for the intermediate Unix user who suddenly finds himself or herself in the position of caring for a number of computers. This is the most useful general purpose Unix book that I have purchased, and I recommend it highly.
Rating:
Summary: THE UNIX System Admin. Book
Review: From the book--" This book is the foundation volume for O'Reilly & Associates' system administration series...provides you with the fundamental information needed by everyone who takes care of UNIX systems...consciously avoids trying to be all things to all people; the other books in the series treat individual topics in 'complete' detail." This book gives he reader a good understanding of what goes on under the hood of a UNIX system, without getting you bogged down in the details, and also points out the diff. and sim. b/w many variants of the OS(BSD,SCO,AIX,...). You need to know a little about scripts and a few tools to get the most of the book, it's not for complete beginners, but it is very clearly written. I had been using Linux for about 9 months before buying this book, and had worked with SCO and SunOS on the job for about 5 or so years(off and on). Almost every page had an answer to a question I have asked myself over that time. "UNIX Power Tools"(1-56592-260-3)works really well as a companion book to this one. tells the ins and outs of the commands and such.
Rating: 
Summary: poorly organized with essential information missing
Review: My web site book had more usable UNIX system admin information in it than this book. I suggest going with the standard "unix in a nutshell" and a copy of "how to setup and maintain a web site" by "stein".
Rating:
Summary: Must have book
Review: This one book has saved my "bacon" countless times. Many times running into situations that no one knew the answer to, I found in the pages of this book. Not perfect, but I have yet to find the perfect Unix book!
Rating:
Summary: The DEFINITIVE guide to learning about UNIX/Linux
Review: I am fairly new to Linux. After being repeatedly frustrated by books such as "Mastering Linux" which offer little in the way of any concrete Linux knowledge, I came across this book at a bookstore. I immediately bought it and was pleased to discover that it essentially answered almost every UNIX question that I had. This book goes in depth where other books fail, and describes how to do things via the command line, where books such as Mastering Linux only tend to tell you how to do things through KDE and GNOME. Don't miss this one; it reads like a novel. I could hardly put it down.
Rating:
Summary: the one to get
Review: the big advantage of this book is the clear writing. were ohters use pages for explanation this one just writes one clear sentences with a good example and evrything is clear (to me). it covers all topics i ever needed for my systemadministration. So get this one!
Rating:
Summary: A good book for part-time system administrators
Review: As an user of the UNIX systems(I am a DBA). I found this book extremely valuable. It's easy to read and helped me a lot by putting pieces togather. I recommend this book for anyone who knows UNIX in general but what to get into the system administration side of it.
Rating:
Summary: Like all of Or'eilly's books , THIS ONE IS GREAT !!!
Review: THis book is extremely comprehensive , this new version even deals with Linux ! (and all other well known Unix's). It's easy to read yet very accurate and precise. If you're a Unix Admin, BUY THIS BOOK!
Rating: 
Summary: Long on generalities, short on being thorough.
Review: I have been an NT admin and have found myself in the position of having to learn Unix administration. I chose this book based on the recommendations herein and was extremely disappointed with this book. While it gave a good general overview of how the many flavors of Unix are organized and structured, it lacked in its explanations as to how to manipulate the environment as an admin. Tons of examples and scripts are presented, without going through and expaining the entire script, or showing what its output would yield. It has wonderful advice on key elements of system administration and politics, but these are essentially the same as they are for NT. I was looking to learn, in detail, the Unix commands that need to be mastered fully, with all their parameters, in order to be a top notch admin, not just a few hand picked examples of commands in various arenas of the admin world. In order to fully understand the explanations given for the examples in this book, you already need to be quite proficient with Unix: and if that's the case, you shouldn't need this book.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: You'd have to be an absolute idiot to not buy this book. I've never found a resource this complete, from the very useful appendixes on the bourne shell to the fantastically complete index. (O'Reilly always has great indexes) It reads well enough that you could just sit down and absorb a chapter a day just for fun. Oh, I've never really praised a technical book before, but I couldn't help myself on this one.
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