Good Book if you have to live in a multiple OS environment. If you don't get the solution at least you know what to do next.

There is a confused creature by the name of "Old Book Worm" who has been throwing light into some of my reviews. I wonder whether he/she is a street-person? Seems to me that he/she is frustrated, divorced, semi-educated (with deplorable knowledge of history), overweight and, I am afraid, is a mad old coot. Looks he/she is a member of Aryan Brotherhood or Motherhood or whatever of the same ilk and portfolio. Had his/her reviews been hilarious or made fun of me I wouldn't have bothered to reply, but this is a replay of intense racism that is supposed to have waned in USA. Wonder if this creature had been a part of a conspiracy to murder Obama. Really, Amazon should review into the kind of riff-raff they would allow to express their stupidities in a public forum. Pathetic!

The first thing to understand is that my 3 star rating isn't for the book itself, but for the edition. This book is well written and contains many good principles, but the material is dated and could use some touching up. For example, the network monitoring section still covers NetSaint.

I bought and read this book prior to starting my first job as a system administrator. I learned a bit, but as I wasn't a rank beginner, it wasn't really all that much. Besides the fact that the material is dated, I found the multi-vendor approach to be somewhat detrimental. As I was going to work for a Debian-based shop, the material for the commercial versions of Unix did me no good, resulting in what is essentially, wasted space.

For someone who is brand new to unix and is going to be thrown to the wolves as a system administrator, this book would be worth reading, and given that target audience, this is an excellent book. But if you're already somewhat familiar with the concepts of running and managing a unix based system, your time and money are better spent on other products

Used this book as a starter for Unix, already armed with basic knowledge and concepts this book helped me better understand the inner workings of UNIX.

I spend most of my time administering linux systems, but also the occasional Solaris machine. Having this book is great for times like when I just can't remember the equivalent Solaris command for examining a print queue. It's not the kind of book you're going to read from cover to cover, and I may never look at 600 of its 1100+ pages, but I still consider it a required book on my shelf, and I refer to it a 2-3 times a month. The information in it is consistently clear and accurate.

I recently bought this as a gift for a college graduate who was embarking on a sysadmin career, and it was very well-received.

Good writer. Easy to understand. Good examples. I also like the examples in Larry L. Smith's "Rosetta Stone Series for Programmers and Script-Writers" (3 books: Bash Shell, Korn Shell, and Perl). The examples in Randal K. Michael's "Mastering UNIX Shell Scripting" are also helpful for serious UNIX-LINUX users.

Good writer. Easy to understand. Good examples. I also like the examples in Larry L. Smith's "Rosetta Stone Series for Programmers and Script-Writers" (3 books: Bash Shell, Korn Shell, and Perl). The examples in Randal K. Michael's "Mastering UNIX Shell Scripting" are also helpful for serious UNIX-LINUX users.

I'll keep this short and to the point, since the numerous other reviews already speak to what this book has to offer: It's not cheap, but it is worth every penny. The book provides a thorough overview on administrating unix/unix-like systems, and will help you become a better sysadmin, period.

Power UNIX and Linux users will want to expand their skills. It's inevitable. Some will get frustrated and drop out and some will work their way through it.

For those who commit to make the transition from power user to system admin, then you will like this book. I don't believe this is the only book a system admin will read or need. But, this is the one you'll go back to over and over.

The author is a system admin herself. She's done the work and continues to do the work. She becomes a partner.

I found this book valuable. I like the publisher and I suggest you will like this book too.

At first glance, this book seems like a typical O'Reilly book: a narrow title, rich in material, and is beneficial to a much wider audience than the title reveals. It covers a wide range of system administration subjects and goes way beyond just the essentials.

Over the years, I have administered several multi-user UNIX, Linux, and FreeBSD servers. I believed that I knew the essentials, because if I did not, I would not have been able to do my job all these years. I wanted to see if the things that I learned by experience, often the hard way, are included in "Essential System Administration". Sure enough, they were all there. Not only that, but they are laid out simply, without much unnecessary technical details, and accompanied by numerous examples and anecdotal encounters by the author. If you read one section, you would be able to apply the knowledge and skills that it describes right away. For instance, you don't need to read the entire manual of procmail in order to write some effective mail filters; chapter 9 has a section on "Mail Filtering with procmail" that covers the essentials.

One impressive feature of this book is that it covers how to do things on a variety of operating system including various flavours of UNIX, Linux, and BSD. In the past, I often ran into a situation where I knew how to do something on FreeBSD, but did not know how to accomplish the same task on Solaris. With this book by my side, I will not have this problem again.

Another feature of the book is that it covers a very, VERY, very wide variety of administrative topics: from every day system management, to operating system internals, to various devices, to backing up, to scheduling, to rebuilding the kernel. I am yet to find a task, whether typical or atypical, that is not covered in "Essential System Administration".

But wait, are not most, if not all, of these topics encountered in a user's daily life? Are mail filters limited only to system administrators? Of course not! Many users organize their email by defining personal mail filters. And what about devices? Every user who uses a Linux-based desktop computer goes through the frustration of configuring devices at some point. "Essential System Administration" is really written to be useful for any UNIX/Linux/BSD user, not only system administrators.

On a second thought, any one who owns a computer running UNIX/Linux/BSD is the administrator of one's system. Not only that, but anyone who uses one of these system must still manage their own account and perform tasks such as scheduling tasks, emailing, and printing. "Essential System Administration" was not written for system administrators in the traditional sense -- someone who is paid to administer an expensive system with hundreds or thousands of users -- but for the administrator in the broad sense -- any user who wishes to perform some management tasks on their system.

"Essential System Administration" is an invaluable resource for anyone who wishes to become an expert in system administration, and is a useful resource for users of these systems. I give this book 4.5 out of 5.

At first glance, this book seems like a typical O'Reilly book: a narrow title, rich in material, and is beneficial to a much wider audience than the title reveals. It covers a wide range of system administration subjects and goes way beyond just the essentials.

Over the years, I have administered several multi-user UNIX, Linux, and FreeBSD servers. I believed that I knew the essentials, because if I did not, I would not have been able to do my job all these years. I wanted to see if the things that I learned by experience, often the hard way, are included in "Essential System Administration". Sure enough, they were all there. Not only that, but they are laid out simply, without much unnecessary technical details, and accompanied by numerous examples and anecdotal encounters by the author. If you read one section, you would be able to apply the knowledge and skills that it describes right away. For instance, you don't need to read the entire manual of procmail in order to write some effective mail filters; chapter 9 has a section on "Mail Filtering with procmail" that covers the essentials.

One impressive feature of this book is that it covers how to do things on a variety of operating system including various flavours of UNIX, Linux, and BSD. In the past, I often ran into a situation where I knew how to do something on FreeBSD, but did not know how to accomplish the same task on Solaris. With this book by my side, I will not have this problem again.

Another feature of the book is that it covers a very, VERY, very wide variety of administrative topics: from every day system management, to operating system internals, to various devices, to backing up, to scheduling, to rebuilding the kernel. I am yet to find a task, whether typical or atypical, that is not covered in "Essential System Administration".

But wait, are not most, if not all, of these topics encountered in a user's daily life? Are mail filters limited only to system administrators? Of course not! Many users organize their email by defining personal mail filters. And what about devices? Every user who uses a Linux-based desktop computer goes through the frustration of configuring devices at some point. "Essential System Administration" is really written to be useful for any UNIX/Linux/BSD user, not only system administrators.

On a second thought, any one who owns a computer running UNIX/Linux/BSD is the administrator of one's system. Not only that, but anyone who uses one of these system must still manage their own account and perform tasks such as scheduling tasks, emailing, and printing. "Essential System Administration" was not written for system administrators in the traditional sense -- someone who is paid to administer an expensive system with hundreds or thousands of users -- but for the administrator in the broad sense -- any user who wishes to perform some management tasks on their system.

"Essential System Administration" is an invaluable resource for anyone who wishes to become an expert in system administration, and is a useful resource for users of these systems. I give this book 4.5 out of 5.

This book is for the reader that wants to move beyond the basic, high level overview Unix book and truly understand the Unix system and why it invokes passion from it's fan base. This book could be used by the beginning user, but the novice or casual reader may find this book overwhelming in the sheer level of information it provides. If you are a system administrator, you will find this book is THE book you refer to the most, to the point you may end up keeping this book close to your Unix system at all times. Don't let the 2002 publication date think the book is out of date. The book covers the information that any system administrator will need, which do not change as frequently as the applications that run over the operating system.

I agree on the fact that it is a bit outdated, but one must understand that it must be a very tiedous task to update this kind of content. I agree that maybe too many flavours of Unix have been covered. Hopefully, some will be dropped for the next edition (AIX, and TRU64 especially). However, this book is very well written and covers all the basics of sysadmin.

It is very descriptive and well articulated and easy to read. I also have found here on Amazon training DVD "UNIX Essentials" that nobody knows about. It is very cool one, straight to the subject, very useful. I coupled this book with DVD and I believe I learned more then my friend who attended $2000 class.
This book is extremely useful provides plenty of relevant info.

I purchased the second edition of this book several years ago in order to improve my Linux knowledge of system administration tasks. (A valuable purchase.)

The new third edition is much better than the second edition and covers almost everything (except Web server administration), for example LDAP, PAM, DHCP, SNMP, NTP time servers, and security issues. Whereas the background of Kerberos tickets are covered, the Kerberos configuration is missing.

If you administer a greater UNIX network, you should consider this book. This is also the case if you are using different Linux distributions, because the author explains SuSE 8.x and Red Hat 7.x.

I use this book more than probably all my other reference materials put together. This book provides information across most UNIX platforms ie Linux,AIX, Solaris, HPUX etc. This is a must have for Sys Admins of all levels.

Your first book should be "UNIX System Administration Handbook" by Nemeth, Snyder, Seebass, & Hein. I always turn to that book first. I am not sure I would buy Frisch's "Essential System Administration" again. Definitly try to get it used if you do buy it. Looking in this book is often a last resort, and often if I haven't found the answer in my other two books, then it normally isn't in this one either.

It is a big book, much of which I feel is fluff, but if this was your only book on the topic, you would still be ok. The wording just isn't as clear as I'd prefer.

This book is hard to follow unless you already know about Unix. I think myself as intermediate user at least since I am using Unix since in engineering school. This book is still not quite easy to follow sometimes.

On page 80 (about find): "The specified permission mode is XORED with the file's permission setting" I do not know what the author means (I don't know if it is error. ). It seems to me her presentation is more hard to understand (I am foreigner and it makes more difficult to me!) This is just one example. There are many examples which is not clear (My feeling is the author does not think very carefully when she wrote or how to present the materials better). If you already know the stuffs, you will be fine. If not, then you spend ton of times to figure out what the auther really means.

So if I a file permission 777
find / -perm -777

So 777 XORed 777, I got 000. (The author said the specified permission mode is XORED with the file's permission setting). I don't follow what she means.

Unfortunately, there are not many choice for Unix books. Either I have to dig very deep into the Unix OS which I don't have time to do it right now (I mean to learn the Unix OS from the C structure and implementations)

This book is generalized, but in a good way (for once). Instead of a lot of fluff and only touching a little bit on various software and how to do the most basic stripped down installs of things that have little to do with Unix, other than it can "run" on a Unix system, it actually covers a lot of ground. It covers a lot of topics and aspects, like it should be expected. There's parts that could be improved and it's biased towards some platforms over others, but for general knowledge and insight, it can offer a lot.

This book should be called Indispensable and Complete System Administration. Ok, that's an exaggeration, but not by much. No book will ever be the complete book on Unix or Linux admin, but this one has so much material in it, it will be quite some time before I start looking for material not in the book. Every aspect of System Administration is covered in this book. The material goes into details as necessary, but the author does a good job of not getting bogged down in the details or overwhelming the reader with irrelevant or arcane knowledge that only a handful of people will use. What you will find is broad and thorough coverage of the material in an accessible, easy to read style.
One of the things I appreciate most about this book is the organization. Rather than listing out a bunch of technical information, each chapter deals with a specific task that a sysadmin needs to be able to do, and the information to carry out that task is contained within the chapter, rather than making references to other chapters or appendices, as is common practice.
This is another book that delivers the excellence I've come to expect from O'Reilly.