Linux Server Hacks by Rob Flickenger (O'Reilly)
This
book is awesome. I learned so much from it that I have placed it
second on my list of books every software engineer should read. There
are so many great topics covered in such a easy to read and understand
way that you can't help but want to try them out. And after trying a
few out, you start to wonder how on earth did you live without some of
these things.
There are a few books I have read that I really
got a lot out of, and this was one of them. I was familiar with a lot
of the things discussed in here, but not at any great detail (at least
with some of them). I even learned a thing or two with perl (imagine
that!).
Many of the basics are covered in the book, but not all. I don't pretend to think that this is meant to be indepth or span all needed sys admin knowledge. It is a list of some good tips and guides for day-to-day sesrver admin work. But there are things in here that I didn't know about and have come to really appreciate.
One thing- I have never really been a solid bash scriptor until I read this book. I felt much more comfortable in perl rather than bash. But there are a few hacks in here that show some very simple and elegant command line trickery that impressed me. Like the hack fo finding users on a system who are hogging up all the disk space. Also, the one about IP address failover from one machine to another was an impressive one.
If you are not using SSH public keys or aren't familiar with public keys, then you need this book. There is a whole chapter dedicated to SSH and all the lovely things you can do with public keys (automate just about anything, securly). Also, if you aren't familiar with CVS or other version control systems, there are some great summaries to get you started.
Don't plan on learning from scratch with this book. It is not for the novice. You need to be familiar with the command line and with some basic utilities. But this will help you move from intermediate to a more advanced systems administrator.
I was a little disappointed that they spent so many hacks talking about MySQL and no mention at all about Postgres. That is a real shame. Postgres really should be in more sys admin's set of tools for things. But I won't rant about that here. :-)
This book is well written and
covers a nice variety of topics. Not all of it will be new to you, but
there will be a nice gem to make your day if you look for it.
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