Covering Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, AIX (woohoo) and HP-UX, this is a handy little pocket reference for most normal system administration tasks. Almost like a book full of manpages for each OS, this is something I tend to never be too far away from.

A coworkers turned me on to this book. He is an old school Unix admin from back when I was still grasping at DOS 3.2, so I tend to give him some credit. And you know what, he was right, this is an awesome book.

It covers Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, and FreeBSD. Topics include basic stuff like startup and shutdown, filesystems, user admin, security, kernel drivers and config, and networking. It also gets into more specific stuff like various servers (httpd, email, news, dns), printing, office politics, working with Windows, and intrusion detection and response.

Not to mention the authors have a great sense of humor, which is sorely lacking from most computer books today.

If you are doing any Linux kernel development you need this book. Frankly if you are just using Linux in general this is a good book to have. Certainly not something you want to rip through in one reading, this book covers a wide range of kernel design, interfaces, and internals. And it does so in quite a lot of depth.

This book is a seemingly random collection of various programming topics (all in C). However, it is also a very well written and useful random collection of various programming topics

By providing me with some basic (never very detailed) help and pointers on RCS, IPC, Socket Programming, Ncurses, and gdb, this book prevented me from having to go out and buy about six different books. In that regard it has turned out to be quite a useful reference to have around. Actually, for the help in creating Makefiles alone, it was worth the price.

This is an almost indispensable book to have when you are coming to OS X new, but with experience in Unix/Linux systems. OS X has a number of “quirks” that will immediately confuse anyone accustomed to a normal Unix system, and this book explains them quite well. The chapter on the boot process alone made this book worthwhile to me.