Solaris 8 Administrator's Guide

Rating:
Summary: Uninformative, superficial, harmful!
Review: This must be the worst O'Reilly book I have ever read and I have read atleast 20!The author reproduces much of the information from his other books "Solaris Complete Reference" which has much the same inforamtion as his "Solaris Administration -A Beginner's Guide".His coverage of important topics like E-mail consists of showing how to download sendmail through anonymous ftp.His discussion on the inetd super daemon consists of a three page listing of /etc/services file and so on.Incredible, really!I remember O'Reilly once withdrew a title on Beowulf Clusters stating that the quality was not upto reader expectations!I submit this as a definite candidate.

Rating:
Summary: Errors and sloppy writing
Review: When it talks about nfsstat (p.160), it says "low good call-to-bad call ratio" when it meant the other way around. OK. Just a little sloppiness. Then before it talks about "vmstat 1" output, it says running vmstat "with no options" displays data "at one-second intervals". OK. It's for that vmstat command followed by 1 as in the example. Then it says "r" means processes running. He doesn't make a distinction between running and runnable. Most people don't anyway. Then it says the first line shows the statistics during the first second. That statement triggered my book review here. You can find a lot of superficial discussion in this book. I'd like to see how it explains the Ref column of netstat -r, the system tuneable maxusers, swap vs. tmpfs, free under vmstat, and other topics inexperienced Solaris admins often misinterpret. I can't find any (BTW, I don't know what good there is by omitting module names for module-specific tuneables on p.35, and why on p.255 he's not willing to tell people to set shmsys:shminfo_shmmax to its theoretical maximum). Then you find the title "Disabling IP Ports" (p.204) which makes you think a port is the concept at the Network layer. Let's also not be picky here about the terms network engineers usually use (Ethernet frame, IP packet, TCP segment/UDP datagram). Overall, the book is ambitious but the author didn't make a good effort. Being a PhD myself, I sincerely wish he had devoted the same energy to writing this book as to his PhD thesis.