A Practical Guide to Solaris

by Mark G. Sobell

Written by best-selling author Mark G. Sobell, A Practical Guide to Solaris enables both novice and experienced users to quickly learn Sun Microsystems popular Solaris operating system. Designed to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 020189548X
• ISBN13: 9780201895483
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Length: 1168 Pages
• Weight: 3.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.4" x 7.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Execellent for Sys-Admins down to the Apprentice!

I've been a UNIX programmer and a sys-admin for many years now, so it is not often that I find a book covering such a wide range of issues and concepts very helpful. A Practical Guide to Solaris is, however, a notable exception. The language is clear, and the narration is straight and to the point. I keep one copy for myself ready at hand, and I have given a copy to each of my assistants and apprentices.

Solaris made easy

I knew next to nothing about Solaris about 3 months ago. This book took me from that point to my current state which is preparing to become a Certified Solaris Administrator. You will find this book useful whether you are new to UNIX or are a knowlegeable Sys Admin who needs a reliable referrence.

From beginner to expert, a great book

Sobell has provided an invaluable Guide to Solaris.It is well written, clearly organized and as its title suggests has a wealth of practical information.For the newbie it covers things like logging in and out, changing your password, and commands like lst, rm, and and more.It covers the Solaris (and UNIX) utilities: things like cp, sort, diff, compress, tar.It discusses the Solaris Filesystem, mkdir and cd, etc.,It tells how to use the shell and do shell programming.It has information on using and configuring X Windows and CDE. I don't do this often and I find these sections indispensible.It has tutorial information on networking commands such as ping, finger, automount.It covers mail programs like pine, and editors including vi and emacs.It covers three shells, Bourne, C shell, and Korn shell.It has an invaluable chapter on programming tools: the C compiler and dbx as well as information about the arcane subject of building shared libraries.It has information on system administration, disk capacity planning/partitioning, scheduling tasks, administering network services, and many other administrative tasks.It has Appendices on Regular expressions, Help, Security, and the Posix Standards.It is a comprehensive book, useful for both tutorial and reference.

Great book for UNIX/Linux/Solaris beginners

I have read a few books on Linux and this is my first book on Unix and Solaris, so I am really new to the Linux/UNIX/Solaris world. This book is by far the best book in the category for Unix/Solaris beginners and even if you are using Linux, I would recommend using this book to learn the UNIX commands.I can't say anything bad about the book. It is clear, concise, easy to read, easy to understand, and after reading this book, I feel I know UNIX very well. I would buy any book from this author, and I highly recommend this book.

Great beginner book

This is a thick book (1.5 inches), and it covers a lot of ground, starting with very basic Unix commands (not Solaris specific) and progressing through shell programming and onto Solaris specific system administrative tasks. For example, I liked the section describing the 'mystery files' needed to configure Solaris networking. It is hard to find this information in one place.Another example would be the description of /home and how the automounter manages it. This topic generates frequent questions on the Solaris newsgroups.As you work your way into the book, Sobell explains things like the Solaris performance tools sar, mpstat, etc. as well as the boot process on both Sparc and Intel based systems.The second half of the book is versions of the most common manual pages but Sobell includes *examples*.All in all, this book is good for the beginner, and the advanced user will find it a useful reference, especially in the later chapters.