Solaris 7 Performance Administration Tools

Rating:
Summary: Great for those searching for deeper Solaris understanding!
Review: I have been a Solaris administrator for 6+ years now and this book has truly taken me to a new level.

Frank does an excellent job of conveying internals information where many authors would have failed by either going far too deep or staying far too shallow. It is definitely not a good book for beginners, though. An understanding of how a CPU works seems to have helped me out a lot, since he frequently refers to things like hardware registers and program location counters when explaining how Solaris handles certain situations.

This one belongs on the desk of any serious Admin. Hopefully he updates it soon for Solaris 8 and/or 9!

Rating:
Summary: Helpful
Review: My friend at work bought this book. It proved to be a great investment. It explained how to fine tune your server to get the most out of it. Great buy for a sysadmin wanting performance.

Rating:
Summary: Not for the beginner...
Review: Solaris 7 Performance Administration Tools is by far one of the best books that I have found on performance tuning under Solaris. While it isn't as complete and readable as Accelerating AIX, it is the best book on the topic for Solaris. Frank Cervone spends a great deal of time discussing a number of important issues from capacity planning to optimizing RAID and hard drives. I have found the book indispensable for my job.

If you are a person who tends to read technical books from cover to cover you will find that a great deal of time is spent with theory. Mr. Cervone spends many pages discussing every topic theoretically, and even gives good descriptions of useful command flags and what things you should be tuning.

The big failure of the book, that I've found, is the lack of examples. For the most part, the books is devoid of this important tool. However, this book is not intended for the beginner. By the time that you get around to using this book you should be able to understand man pages and figuring out how to issue commands based on the archaic writings of Sun engineers (enough of my ranting on Sun man pages). So if you can read man pages you can figure out, based on the book, the commands you need to issue for maximum performance.

I highly recommend this book for any professional who uses Solaris daily for their livelihood, although I would hold off purchasing it if you are a novice Solaris admin.

Rating:
Summary: Not for the beginner...
Review: Solaris 7 Performance Administration Tools is by far one of the best books that I have found on performance tuning under Solaris. While it isn't as complete and readable as Accelerating AIX, it is the best book on the topic for Solaris. Frank Cervone spends a great deal of time discussing a number of important issues from capacity planning to optimizing RAID and hard drives. I have found the book indispensable for my job.

If you are a person who tends to read technical books from cover to cover you will find that a great deal of time is spent with theory. Mr. Cervone spends many pages discussing every topic theoretically, and even gives good descriptions of useful command flags and what things you should be tuning.

The big failure of the book, that I've found, is the lack of examples. For the most part, the books is devoid of this important tool. However, this book is not intended for the beginner. By the time that you get around to using this book you should be able to understand man pages and figuring out how to issue commands based on the archaic writings of Sun engineers (enough of my ranting on Sun man pages). So if you can read man pages you can figure out, based on the book, the commands you need to issue for maximum performance.

I highly recommend this book for any professional who uses Solaris daily for their livelihood, although I would hold off purchasing it if you are a novice Solaris admin.