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Solaris Administration Books Reviews

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Introductory Reference Security System Administration Security Selected Sysadmin Topics Network administration
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Sobell1999 Freeland2000 Mauro2000 Softpanorama Exam Strategy History Humor Etc ( Stanistlav Lem Solaris)

Solaris is an open source operating system that can be used for free on computers with up to four CPUs (see Softpanorama Solaris Links and Solaris Security for more information).  Older versions Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 are pretty similar (Solaris 9 is more polished and has a better RBAC implementation among other improvements) and the books for Solaris 8 generally can be used for Solaris 9.  Solaris 10 is is an important improvement featuring such innovative features as zones and dtrace. Generally you need Solaris 10 specific books to study it. 

If you are browsing this page to get some info on Solaris certification related book there is a better page for the topic: Solaris Certification

Solaris 10 has much better documentation that in any other open source OS, the Sun folks have a structured, disciplined approach about documenting everything in a very definite and clear format. Linux has a long way to go in this area. Actually some Linux man pages are just horrible taking into account a huge amount of venture capital financing that Linux startups got. 

In addition to a better shell (ksh93 is installed as dtksh on all Solaris versions (starting from 2.0), the latest edition of Solaris (Solaris 9) also contains a large amount of GNU software on the additional disk of the Sun's distribution as well as a copy of Star Office 6.0.  Compilation of GNU software for Solaris still is not that easy but Sun is working on this. Also it promised to have a Linux zone on Solaris for Opteron that supposedly can help to use native Linux executables if recompilation run into serious difficulties.

Of course Solaris is more stable server OS than Linux. In some aspects it is also cleaner Unix implementation It has more commercial software available than FreeBSD. While usable of Opteron even UltraSparc entry level hardware is not expensive and might be the cheapest 64-bit architecture available ($999 for a pretty usable desktop system). Older systems like Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 are dirt cheat on Ebay and perfect for students to learn the OS.  Buying an old Ultra 10 or even Ultra 5 might also a useful (I would say necessary for most but the most talented folks,  preparation to certification), unless you have access to UltraSparc hardware at work.

This is a very scalable OS (on high end Sun successfully competes with IBM mainframes). For an enterprise users the main attraction is the possibility of using the same OS from low to the highest level. IBM cannot do that and that's why they now promote VM/Linux on mainframes and PowerPC architecture.

Solaris is also one of the best, if not the best OS for running large databases, especially  Oracle.  With T1 CPU it now can successfully complete with HP-UX and AIX.  Actually while UltraSparc hardware was slower then competition for a long time (since 1996 I think) Solaris has the best engineered kernel of all (more or less) free Unixes. Moreover the sad truth is that Red Hat really lacks quality control.

Despite the high quality of Solaris the number of good books about this OS can be counted on one hand. That means that sometimes you might be better off using a generic Unix book  than a Solaris book.

On this page I tried to help a reader to navigate Solaris-related books. It might help to avoid missteps in buying Solaris-specific books in case you cannot browse them yourself. I recommend also to visit my generic Unix books page in addition to this one. Many generic Unix books are OK for Solaris as it is probably the most "normal" Unix. Also some authors specifically address Solaris issues in their books.

IMHO as an introductory book Sobel's A Practical Guide to Solaris is probably the best. Solaris 8 for Managers and Administrators is currently probably the best introductory system administration book and might be used as "the second volume of Sobel". 

As a reference Sun documentation CD ROM is probably my first choice. I also have found the second part Sobel's "A Practical Guide to Solaris" to be a pretty decent reference. I am not impressed by O'Reilly Nutshell book on Solaris. IMHO it's weak and overpriced. I think that the second part of Sobel's book contains more examples than the O'Reilly Nutshell and comes at a fraction of price.

John Mulligun Solaris Essential Reference is another alternative. It's more Solaris specific, but as for the quality of examples it's not much better then O'Reilly Nutshell book.  Solaris: The Complete Reference books (two editions: one for Solaris 8 and Solaris 9) are something in between a pure reference and a tutorial. Both cover a lot of ground but beware that they are generally weak and not structured as a reference. See the reference section for more detailed recommendations.

The source code of Solaris 10 is available, therefore the internals are very interesting thing to study, although it is complex commercial operating system  and the volume is such that many things are difficult to understand. It should not be your first attempt to understand Unix OSes in any case. Simpler Unix style OSes exist including several specifically oriented for education like Minix. Very few books cover specifically Solaris internals; see  the Internals section of the page.

See also Solaris vs Linux,  Solaris vs Linux Security in Large Enterprise Environment,  Unix book page, Shells page,  Unix security page  and Os Design  that contain some additional relevant information.

Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov

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Reviews

NIIT Special Edition Using Solaris 9

Mark Sobell A Practical Guide to Solaris

Darrell Ambro Solaris 9 System Administrator Exam Cram

Old News ;-)

Solaris 10 System Administration Exam Prep 2 (Exam Prep 2 (Que Publishing)) Books Bill Calkins

Amazon Price: $37.79

by Bill Calkins

 

[Jan 9, 2005] Solaris 9 System Administrator Exam Cram Review was updated.

??? Sun Certified System Administrator for Solaris 10 Study Guide

  • Hardcover: 864 pages
  • Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media; 1 edition (May 4, 2005)
  • ISBN: 0072229594

??? Sun Certified Security Administrator for Solaris 10 Study Guide (Exam CX-XXX)

by John Chirillo, Edgar Danielyan

Don't expect much. Edgar Danielyan already published pretty much trash...

Solaris Management Console Tools

by Janice Winsor

Chapter 1, "SMC Introduction," introduces the Solaris Management Console packages, toolboxes, commands, components, and software developer's kit.

Part One, "SMC Overview," provides an overview of SMC in three chapters.

Chapter 2, "SMC Console," describes the elements of the graphical user interface, the SMC Console preferences, logging into a server, and opening a toolbox.

Chapter 3, "SMC Server," describes how to start and stop the SMC server.

Chapter 4, "SMC Toolbox Editor," describes how to start the SMC toolbox editor and how to use it to customize the SMC Console tools and create custom toolboxes.

Part Two, "System Status" contains two chapters describing the Processes and Log Viewer tools that are part of the System Status category.

Chapter 5, "Processes," describes how to use the Processes tool to search for a process, sort process information, suspend and resume a process, and delete a process.

Chapter 6, "Log Viewer," describes how to start the log viewer, view the details of a log entry, change log file settings, back up log files, open backed-up log files, and delete log files.

Part Three, "System Configuration," contains six chapters describing the tools that are part of the System Configuration category.

Chapter 7, "User Accounts," describes how to get started with user tools, set user policies, add single and multiple user accounts with either a wizard or with templates, assign rights to a user, copy a user account to a group or mailing list, edit user properties, and delete user accounts.

Chapter 8, "User Templates," describes how to create a new template, clone an existing template, change template properties, and set user policies.

Chapter 9, "Rights," describes how to add new rights, view and edit properties of existing rights, and delete rights.

Chapter 10, "Administrative Roles," describes how to create a role, assign an administrative role, assign rights to a role, edit the properties of a role, and edit a role.

Chapter 11, "Groups," provides information about groups and describes how to add new groups, how to paste user accounts into a group, how to modify groups, and how to delete a group.

Chapter 12, "Mailing Lists," provides information about mailing lists, e-mail recipient formats, and special mailing lists. It describes how to add a new mailing list and view or modify the contents of a mailing list.

Part Four, "Services," contains one chapter that describes the Scheduled Jobs tool.

Chapter 13, "Scheduled Jobs," describes how to start the Scheduled Jobs tool, add a scheduled job, set scheduled job policies, view and edit properties of a scheduled job, and delete a scheduled job.

Part Five, "Storage," contains two chapters that describe the Disks and Mounts and Shares tools.

Chapter 14, "Disks," provides information about disk formats and disk partitions and describes how to start the Disks tool, view disk partitions, view properties of disks, create Solaris disk partitions, copy disk layout, create fdisk partitions on an IA computer, and change active fdisk partitions on an IA computer.

Chapter 15, "Mounts and Shares," describes how to start the Mounts and Shares tool, how to make file systems available, display a list of mounted file systems, display or modify the properties of mounted file systems, add a new NFS mount, and unmount a mounted file system. It also describes how to share files from a server, display a list of shared directories, add a shared directory, display or modify the properties of shared directories, and unshare a directory

Part Six, "Devices and Hardware," contains one chapter that describes the Serial Ports tool.

Chapter 16, "Serial Ports," describes how to start the Serial Ports tool, view serial port properties, and set up modems and character terminals.

Appendix A, "SMC Commands," describes the commands available to supplement the SMC graphical user interface tools.

??? Sun Solaris 8 Certified Network Administration Study Guide

This study guide will help you to prepare for Sun exam 311-043, Solaris 8 Network Administration. Exam topics include LANs, Ethernet interface, ARP & RARP, Internet layer, routing, client-server, DHCP, NTP, IPv6 and troubleshooting.

CramSession Study Guides identify, capture and summarize essential topics IT professionals must know to pass their certification exams. With over 3 million downloaded, CramSession Study Guides are the industry standard in certification study material. PDF Download $9.50

Solaris Systems Programming

by Rich Teer

 

Not a substitute for Stevens' APUE, October 14, 2004

Reviewer: Gunnar Ritter "Open Source programmer" (Freiburg i. Br., Germany) - See all my reviews
 (REAL NAME)  

Despite the claim on the back cover, the book is far away from the tradition of Richard Stevens' "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment". In contrast to APUE, which truly enlightens the reader with all sorts of historical, portability, and background information, Teer's book is not much more than a Solaris API description.

Many of the examples in it will not work unmodified on Linux, BSD, or other platforms. It will thus not be of much help to a novice Unix programmer unless he actually wants to write Solaris-only programs - not a common scenario in the Unix/POSIX world. But a more experienced programmer can just use the Solaris manual pages to get most of the information contained in the book.

Also the book contains one of the most stupid code examples I have ever seen: an snprintf() emulation that works by calling vsprintf() first, then checking its return value to see if the buffer size was large enough, possibly exiting with an error message:

int snprintf (char *buf, size_t n, const char *fmt, ...) { [...]
len = vsprintf (buf, fmt, ap); [...]
if (len >= n)
err_quit ("snprintf: \"%s\" caused a buffer overflow", fmt);

But when such an overflow is actually exploited on the stack by an attacker, vsprintf() may not return at all, rendering the check useless. The code thus gives a false impression of security. This might be regarded even more dangerous than code that does not perform overflow checks at all, especially in the context of a book.

I have to admit that I did not look at too many examples, but I would recommend to be cautious with the book until somebody has verified that this is the only fundamental security error in its code.

**** Solaris 8 for Managers and Administrators by Curt Freeland, et al. Paperback (2001).
by Curt Freeland, Dwight McKay, Kent Parkinson
Our Price: $49.95
Paperback - 773 pages 3nd edition (July 14, 2000)
Delmar Publishers; ISBN: 0766821374
Prev edition (1997) was really good.

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Number of Reviews: 1
4 of 5 stars Great help to any Admin, August 2, 2000
Reviewer: A reader from Minneapolis, MN
This book was a great help to me. I had not used Solaris for around 2 years, and this book helped me to get a feel for where I was, and also helped me land a great job. I recommend that everyone currently in or thinking about entering into Solaris work get this book!

***+ UNIX CD Bookshelf, 3.0

This is an expensive CD. The Unix CD Bookshelf  packs six books: one excellent, two good and three semi-useless/obsolite.  Version 3 provides convenient online access to seven books. It also includes the hard copy of Unix in a Nutshell, Third Edition.

**** Unix Power Tools, 3rd Edition;

??? Learning the Unix Operating System, 5th Edition;

??? Learning the vi Editor, 6th Edition;

??? Mac OS X for Unix Geeks;

**** Learning the Korn Shell, 2nd Edition;

*** sed & awk, 2nd Edition;

*** Unix in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition.

Currently overpriced, but makes great sence at half price. The CD has a master index, a search engine, and all the HTML text is extensively hyperlinked, so you'll find what you're looking for quickly.

****+ A Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux 8
 
Mark G. Sobell
 

The title is misleading. This book is more or less usable as a generic Solaris introduction (if  you use Gnome and bash and can skip GNU/Linux ideology pages that the author added to this edition :-) and it is now dirt cheap on Amazon as Sobel wrote another (fedora-based) Linux book making this one obsolete.  The structure of the book is as follows:

IMHO this Mark Sobell's book (like his prev Solaris 8 book) is one of the best introductory Unix no matter what flavor of Unix you are using. It covers a lot of command line ground that are essentially common and might make sense for those Solaris users who use Gnome and bash. 

One remark: using pine as a newsreader as in Chapter 9 is fine if you are limited to the command line. If not, than Netscape Communicator (in its Mozilla incarnation) is much more user friendly and easier to use program, especially on Solaris.

I also strongly that Red Hat should be called GNU/Linux system  :-). Red Hat is too greedy company for that.
*** Solaris 9 Security
by Ashish Daniel Wilfred
Price:   $49.99

It's only 376 pages, so might be an brief introduction, not more... The author also co-wrote  PHP Professional Projects.  It might be dangerous to buy this book without browsing the content in the bookstore...

 Solaris 9 The Complete Reference
by Paul A. Watters
Price:   $34.99


Not a reference at all, this is more like certification level textbook. It might make sense at $10 on Amazon. Recently Paul Waters published one/two Solaris books a year (three in 2002, and already one in 2003, you get the idea ;-). I strongly doubt that one can write a decent quality book baking several books a year... 

General level of quality of his writing can be accesses by reading the following paper How Secure is Solaris 8 and reading a sample chapter from his older book Solaris 8 Administrator's Guide/Chapter 4 Network Configuration provided by O'Reilly. 

Actually his Solaris 8 Administrator's Guide published by O'Reilly got pretty low grades from readers and that extends to this book (O'Reilly books are often reviewed by professionals.) 

Please note that quitspam  review below: while it is valid it is identical to his previous review for Solaris 8 version of the book :-(.

5 out of 5 stars Vast improvement, June 27, 2002

  Reviewer: Daniel O'Riordan from New York City, New York

I bought the Solaris 8 version of this book. It was OK but did not contain sufficient material on the new technologies. I ordered the Solaris 9 version of the book because it's the only Solaris 9 book around. I am happy to report that this book covers new technologies like RBAC, LDAP and the resource manager. These are so much more important for the enterprise than GNOME.

Strong emphasis on disks - format, partition, volume management, backups - is good and logically ordered.

The only thing I would like to see is more coverage on application servers, databases, message queues and other uses of Solaris in large firms.

But that's probably an architecture book with a different focus.

 

1 out of 5 stars No stars- Definitely not complete, December 6, 2002
  Reviewer: quitspam (see more about me) from Dallas, TX United States

I bought this book to learn about Solaris 9, not Solaris 7. Another example of a book that was too quick to ship. How can a book be published in April 3 when the OS is released in late June? Here are the reasons I returned mine and suggest to the publisher (author) that they go back to the drawing board and do their homework:

  • Incomplete coverage of the Solaris Management Console- instead it covers the (soon to be) obsolete Admintool for setting up users, printers, loading software. Sun says to start migrating from Admintool in their Solaris 9 release notes.
  • Nothing on soft partioning, and worse yet, no covereage of how to use Solaris Volume Manager. Nothing on Projects when setting up user accounts.
  • Nothing on the SMC process tool.
  • Nothing on how to use SMC to manage disks and file systems.
  • Nothing on Print Manager.
  • One page on Jumpstart- should be a whole chapter.

I'm running out of space but, you get the point.

Please compare the review above with  quitspam Solaris 8 review:

1 of 5 stars Incomplete Reference! Rating- (no stars) April 26, 2001

I was looking for a good Solaris 8 reference, this is not it. I had the book 10 minutes, here's what I found.

The first things I tried to look up in my new complete reference were the new Solaris 8 commands prstat, psinfo, and sdtprocess - nothing about them.

How about a few words on the Solaris Product registry which is also new in Solaris 8 for managing software pkgs- nothing.

Page 253 shows a script that can be used for unmounting a busy file system- hey, what about the new Solaris 8 umount -f option for unmounting busy file systems- nothing about it.

I could go on and on about stuff missing in this book, but I think you get the point. Did they even look at Solaris 8 before writing this book.

It appears the publisher was more concerned with getting a book out first than a "real" complete Solaris 8 guide. Oh, and BTW- mine's falling apart too. Mine's going back.

Solaris and LDAP Naming Services Deploying LDAP in the Enterprise
by Tom Bialaski, Michael Haines
Our Price: $39.00
Paperback - 380 pages 1st edition (January 15, 2001)
Prentice Hall PTR/Sun Microsystems Press; ISBN: 0130306789

Amazon.com Sales Rank: 2,749
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

Number of Reviews: 1
 4 of 5 stars New to LDAP? Check this book out., January 29, 2001
Reviewer: vraptorz (see more about me) from Seattle, WA USA
This Solaris Blueprint will be of interest to anyone wishing to evaluate LDAP for use in their enterprise. The book focuses upon implementing the iPlanet Directory Services which come bundled with Solaris 8. If your main desire is to setup a working LDAP server using this software, this book is for you. Helpful chapters include setting up a secure server, integrating the Solaris native LDAP client with the iPlanet server, and some recommendations for server sizing and tuning. I was somewhat disappointed that the book did not go into greater depth about key issues, such as integrating with other LDAP-enabled products. Most of us have to deal with NT authentication, Exchange servers, and other heterogenous environments. This book only gives a single-product plug when discussing synchronization issues. If you're looking for non-product specific information, you'll need to keep looking elsewhere.

** Sun Certified System Administrator for Solaris 8 Study Guide

by Peter H. Gregory

Our Price: $27.99

Paperback - 448 pages Study Gd edition (October 12, 2001)
Prentice Hall PTR; ISBN: 0130409332

Amazon.com Sales Rank: 1,282

This is from the same author who published a real junk: Solaris Security .  Be careful !


Solaris 8 Network Administrator Certification Training Guide (310-043)
Hack Proofing Sun Solaris 8
by Randy Cook (Editor), et al (Paperback - August 2001)

??+ Solaris Administration- A Beginner's Guide

        by Paul A. Watters

Amazon Price:$27.99
McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing
Paperback - 407 pages
(February 15, 2001)  
** Solaris System Management
by John Philcox
Our Price: $27.99
Paperback - 320 pages 1 Ed edition (May 10, 2001)
New Riders Publishing; ISBN: 073571018X ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.70 x 9.02 x 6.98
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 469,315

Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars Based on 2 reviews.

Too short to be useful for such a complex topic.

**** Solaris Internals by  Jim Mauro, Richard McDougall $59.99 Hardcover - 800 pages 1 edition (October 15, 2000) Prentice Hall PTR; ISBN: 013022496
 great book !
**** Solaris 8 for Managers and Administrators by Curt Freeland, et al. Paperback (2001).
by Curt Freeland, Dwight McKay, Kent Parkinson
Our Price: $49.95
Paperback - 773 pages 3nd edition (July 14, 2000)
Delmar Publishers; ISBN: 0766821374
Prev edition (1997) was really good.

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Number of Reviews: 1
4 of 5 stars Great help to any Admin, August 2, 2000
Reviewer: A reader from Minneapolis, MN
This book was a great help to me. I had not used Solaris for around 2 years, and this book helped me to get a feel for where I was, and also helped me land a great job. I recommend that everyone currently in or thinking about entering into Solaris work get this book!
??? Solaris 8 System Administrator's Reference by Janice Winsor. Should be average or better.
*** UNIX System Administration Handbook, 3d edition -- prev edition was decent, but boring, This one is the same. For some reason it's considered a classic, but it's almost useless for Solaris; might have sense only for poor guys who need to manage Linux Aix, HP-UX and Solaris, which unfortunatly means most system admins in large companies :-(.
*** Unix Bible, 2-d edition -- might be better than the first edition

**** Unix User's Handbook by Martin Poniatowski -- nice introductory book, but HP-UX biased.

***+ The UNIX CD Bookshelf, 2nd Edition (w/ CD-ROM) by Arnold Robbins, et al. Paperback (February 2000)
 
***+ Solaris: The Complete Reference -- Actually incomplete and does not touch Solaris 8 ;-).
Average generic Solaris book, but still worth having.  Web site: Solaris 8 The Complete Reference -- nothing useful.
????? Solaris 7 System Administration Guide : System Management
by Thomas Handschuch.
Hardcover (August 2000) Not Yet Published -- On Order

See also

Amazon

Softpanorama

Recommended Introductory Books 

I used Sobell's book for teaching Solaris to students and have found it to be a pretty decent choice. But you do need to buy at least one  additional book that covers tools well -- Sobell's is rather weak in this respect and does not even mention Perl.  It also contains a large chapter on C-shell that is actually redundant for the introductory book -- it makes sense to concentrate of just one shell in such a book in order not to confuse students. That practically means teaching Born/Korn shell. See Shells books and Shells links for more information,

**** A Practical Guide to Solaris ~ Usually ships in 24 hours
Mark G. Sobell / Paperback / Published 1999
Amazon price: $26.95
Paperback - 1120 pages 1 edition (June 1999)
Addison-Wesley Pub Co; ISBN: 020189548X ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.62 x 9.62 x 7.39
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 388
Avg. Customer Review: *****
Number of Reviews: 3
 
A very good book, probably not only the best introductory Solaris book available but the best overall introductory Unix book. I used this book for an introductory Unix class at the university and can attest that students grasp most material very easily. Exercises given after each chapter can serve a basis of useful homework assignments.

This edition is a result of polishing the material in three previous editions and that shows. For example in the Chapter  2 (p.23 the author mentions the problem of using Ctrl-Z by the beginners who attempt to undo some command line changes. But this is not a Windows environment and that actually postpone the program -- a very puzzling situation for beginners for which very few Unix beginner books authors provide a helpful advice. Another example of attention to details is that this is one of the few intro Unix books that recommends a reasonable .profile file that make Solaris/Unix more user friendly. All-in-all tremendous amount of useful tips can be found in almost any chapter and this attention to details really make this book an outstanding example of the introductory Unix textbook. 

Another excellent feature of the book is that Solaris/Unix command line environment is studied along with X windows environment. such an approach is more modern that pure command line approach and it provides additional insights into how best use Solaris/Unix in a particular circumstances. For example I am convinced that the approach adopted in the book of using X-based editors first is an improvement over traditional methods of introducing students to vi from the beginning. In this case beginners can postpone struggling with vi until they get to speed with command line and that experience can simplify mastering vi features and permit to study vi in more depth. We should not forget than most people study Solaris/Unix after they learn Windows and  Sobell's book in one of the few that make necessary adjustments for this situation.

What I really like about Mark Sobell's Unix books is that all of them contain two parts:

As for shortcomings there are very few of them and they generally does not diminish the high value of the book. For some reason nawk and sed are covered not in the main chapters,  but only in the reference part. I would change this is a future edition. Grep and find probably also can be covered a small separate chapter after chapter 10 along with more material on regular expressions. Backup is also covered pretty superficially and this is another are were the book can be improved. I doubt about wisdom of covering two shells in an introductory book, but C shell is more user friendly and ksh is more widely used in commercial environment, so the author was definitely hard pressed to cover both. Perl is not mentioned at all but in proactive Perl killed shell scripting in all but simple and special purpose (startup) cases. And although the decision whether to include Perl chapter or not should probably be better left tot the author, I think that even if this is not the case it make sense to provide a supplement with Perl overview.
The author web site is www.sobell.com. You can read an Amazon interview with Mark G. Sobell.
**** Solaris Solutions for System Administrators : Time Saving Tips, Techniques, and Workarounds
Sandra Henry Stocker, et al / Paperback / Published 2000
Amazon price: $31.99
Paperback - 0496 pages 1 edition (February 2, 2000)
John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0471348104 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.15 x 9.21 x 7.53
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 1,263
Avg. Customer Review:
Number of Reviews: 6
Table of contents
5 out of 5 stars First satisfying Solaris admin book May 14, 2000
Reviewer: rev1 (see more about me) from Zurich, Switzerland, Europe
Finally they made a proper Solaris admin book, but of course not from Sun. It deals with nearly every topic (even shortly with NIS+, which all other authors avoid,), has a practical approach and really talks about real life problems and there solutions. Lately I had some printer problems which the book helped me to solve, and this is unusual. I cannot properly explain why the book is good, but from admin to admin I'd just say, it's the best book so far about this topic.

Unix User's Handbook

by Martin Poniatowski
Our Price: $47.99
Hardcover - 1402 pages Bk&Cd Rom edition (April 12, 2000)
Prentice Hall Computer Books; ISBN: 0130270199 ; Dimensions (in inches): 2.67 x 9.62 x 7.38
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 31,100
Avg. Customer Review: 5 out of 5 stars
Number of Reviews: 3

5 out of 5 stars Great For "Real World" Unix Admins, May 25, 2000
Reviewer: Jack P. Kern from Glastonbury, CT.
As a Sun Certified Solaris Instructor (Admin I, II, and TCP/IP) I think that  this book fills a nice gap - for Admins who are in the "real world" with heterogeneous networks (AIX, HP UX, Solaris, Linux, etc.) Provides good advice on what tasks you should be doing and how to do them on a variety of platforms. Good intro to many topics - Unix commands, shells, the GUI (CDE),performance tuning and inter-operability with PC-based server's and desktops.


5 out of 5 stars Wish I had this book when I first learned UNIX!, May 9, 2000
Reviewer: A reader from Tallahassee, Florida
This is a quality book! It provides a lot of great functional and fundamental information. I think both new and old UNIX users alike could benefit from this in-depth, easy to read book.

5 out of 5 stars Excellent book!, April 26, 2000
Reviewer: A reader from New York area
Excellent UNIX introduction of commands, file system, shells, and vi, and 200 page chapter on introduction to programming.

I especially like the man pages that appear at the end of many chapters and the vi Quick Reference card.

System Administration

For general books on system administration see Frish2002  (a good book to have, one of few O'Reilly books that were not spoiled completely in the second edition ;-). See also Performance and Security

??  Solaris 9 The Complete Reference
by Paul A. Watters
Price:   $34.99
**** Solaris 8 for Managers and Administrators
by Curt Freeland, at all
Amazon Price: $41.27
Paperback - 8003 pages 3-d edition (July 14, 2000)
Delmar Publishers; ISBN: 0766821374 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.60 x 9.09 x 7.35
 
This is probably the best introductory Solaris administration book available. The book is much smaller that one would assume from 800 pages -- due to wide margins it's probably no more than 400 "normal" pages long. But it contains a lot of sound practical information.
cromar@princeton.edu from Princeton, NJ, USA , May 24, 1999 ****
Good resource, especially for beginners
Most of the sections in the book were eminently readable, and the examples provided were to-the-point. I found that some of the sections lacked depth beyond what is available in the man pages or on docs.sun.com. (For example, the section on aset does not give a really adequate idea what setting security to "high" means in terms of functionality, nor does it point out that even the default "high" security setting leaves several critical directories and binaries group writable.) Still it is helpful to have a fairly comprehensive work in one place on your bookshelf.

Several valuable system administration tips are sprinkled throughout the book, such as the "tar-to-tar" method for copying directories to other filesystems. The section on device names was also a useful reference that is not usually included in system administration books.

The book had a couple of shortcomings that should have been resolved in the second edition. (eg, the section on the /.rhosts file (pp450-451) appears to confuse the roles of the /.rhosts and the ~/.rhosts files.) Overall, though, the exposition was clear, and there appear to be very few factual errors in this book.

In summary, this book is an excellent resource for Solaris administrators, especially those at a beginning/intermediate level of expertise.

A reader from California , February 10, 1999 *****
AWESOME BOOK!!!! (depends on what you need of course)
I teach Solaris Administration (both 2.x and System 7). I have also worked with System 8 - alpha. Let me tell you, I recommend this book to my students who are beginner admin. Of course this book does not go into too much detail if you want to learn how to set up NIS+, or DNS, but the basics are covered. It's a great intro book! I recommend it to all beginners, and new users of Solaris.

vstarr@vegasnet.net from Las Vegas, NV. , January 8, 1999 *****
Forget the reader below... THIS BOOK IS AWESOME!
This book is GREAT for Solaris Sparc AND x86! The reader below must be on something to only rate it two stars. The book DOESN'T EXPLAIN what makes OpenWindows work (notice the title: Managers and Administrators), but the book uses the CDE environment from front to back!! IT'S AWESOME!! How can you NOT love this book?

I just bought Solaris 7 for $9.95 (comes with x86 and Sparc versions) from Sun's web site and needed something to teach me. I have absolutely no experience with Solaris (better now than never!). This book has been totally awesome in explaining everything I need to know to plan, install, and manage/administrate the Solaris environment. I just finished my MCSE and want to certify in Solaris. I was a die-hard Microsoft NT person for a looooooooong time, but I'm now realizing the world of Unix and Solaris and what (superior) strengths it has over NT. This book will sit on my desk for many years to come..

Although the book says Solaris 2.x, it was written at the time 2.6 was released. The new Solaris 7 (which is really 2.7) still works perfect with this book - unlike Microsoft who changes their OS so often and makes you buy tons of new books all the time!

Another reader below rated this book good, but also said the information is a little dated. If you are new to Solaris (like me) then you won't even know the difference. If you are coming from the world of NT (and used to spending tons of money on books every week) then you won't know the difference!

My final analysis, BUY THIS BOOK! IT IS A SURE WINNER!

**** Solaris Solutions for System Administrators : Time Saving Tips, Techniques, and Workarounds

Sandra Henry Stocker, et al / Paperback / Published 2000
Amazon price: $31.99 ~ You Save: $8.00 (20%) 
Paperback - 0496 pages 1 edition (February 2, 2000)
John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0471348104 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.15 x 9.21 x 7.53
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 1,263
Avg. Customer Review:
Number of Reviews: 6
5 out of 5 stars First satisfying Solaris admin book May 14, 2000
Reviewer: rev1 (see more about me) from Zurich, Switzerland, Europe
Finally they made a proper Solaris admin book, but of course not from Sun. It deals with nearly every topic (even shortly with NIS+, which all other authors avoid,), has a practical approach and really talks about real life problems and there solutions. Lately I had some printer problems which the book helped me to solve, and this is unusual. I cannot properly explain why the book is good, but from admin to admin I'd just say, it's the best book so far about this topic.
 
UNIX System Administration Handbook, 3d edition
by Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Trent R. Hein, Scott Seebass
Paperback - 1200 pages 3 edition (August 14, 2000)
Prentice Hall PTR; ISBN: 0130206016
Other Editions: Textbook Binding

This is an overpriced generic sysadmin book. Some people like it. I don't (see my review in generic Unix books). I strongly prefer  Essential System Administration, Third Edition
 
 
***+ Unix Bible  No e-text
Yves Lepage, et al
Our Price: $31.99
Paperback - 900 pages 2nd Bk&cdr edition (July 2000)
IDG Books Worldwide; ISBN: 0764546872

I read the first edition of the book. It's impossible to cover everything about Unix in one book, so there can be no bible for Unix in this sense. And this book should not be you the first or the only Unix sysadmin book (I thing that book devoted to a particular flavor of Unix that one is using should be the first one). But this is a good general book it does contain information that other books often miss to cover. IMHO the book is slightly biased toward Solaris.  And the authors really know this stuff. A couple of chapters would be interesting for a professional of any level and that IMHO more than justify the cost of the book.  For example I especially like Ch.5 (TCP/IP networking),  Ch.7 (Administration Roles and Strategies) and Ch 19 (Setting up DNS server). Your mileage may vary.

I think the biggest success of the book is Chapter 7: Administration Roles and Strategies.  Other interesting part of the book is a very educating case study (a non-trivial POP client troubleshooting case) in the chapter 13. That chapter is a must for a novice sysadmin and is very useful for professionals too.
 
In no way I would call this book "Leisure Reading" as other Amazon reviewer did. I think he completely miss the value of the book. It's one of the best general book on Unix administration.
The table of contents also include:
Chapter 9: Managing Login Servers
Chapter 10: Database Engines
Part III: Getting and Managing Information
Chapter 11: Collecting Information
Chapter 12: Digesting and Summarizing Information
Chapter 13: Proactive Administration
Part IV: Systems Administration
Chapter 14: Managing Standard Services
Chapter 15: Forestalling Catastrophes
Chapter 16: Systems Integration
Chapter 17: UNIX Security
Part V: UNIX and the Internet
Chapter 18: Administering Internet Servers
Chapter 19: Setting Up and Maintaining a DNS Server (very good introduction is just 37 pages (430-467))
Chapter 20: E-mail Servers
Chapter 21: Transferring Files
Chapter 22: Web Servers
Chapter 23: News Servers
 
Solaris 7 System Administration Guide : System Management
Thomas Handschuch / Hardcover
Amazon price: $69.95 (Not Yet Published -- On Order)
 
*** Solaris 2.6 Administrator Certification Training Guide, Part 1 ~ Usually ships in 24 hours
Bill Calkins / Paperback / Published 1999
Amazon price: $40.00
Pretty average and now outdated...

** Solaris Security ~ Usually ships in 24 hours
Peter H. Gregory / Paperback / Published 1999
Amazon price: $39.99
A very weak book. See Security books section for review of this book. But it contains some information that can be useful for system novice administrators.
 
** Solaris : Advanced System Administrator's Guide
Janice Winsor / Paperback / Published 1998
Amazon price: $39.99
Paperback - 600 pages 2nd edition
Macmillan Technical Publishing; ISBN: 1578700396 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.47 x 9.10 x 7.38
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 15,022
Avg. Customer Review: **
Weak.
 
** Solaris System Administrator's Guide (MacMillan Technical Series)
Janice Winsor / Paperback / Published 1998
Amazon price: $34.99
 
Resource Management
Richard McDougall, et al / Paperback / Published 1999
Amazon price: $40.00 (Not Yet Published -- On Order)
 
Solaris Guide for Windows NT Administrators ~ Usually ships in 24 hours
Tom Bialaski / Textbook Binding / Published 1999
Amazon price: $28.00

Solaris Implementation : A Guide for System Administrators ~ Usually ships in 2-3 days
George Becker, et al / Paperback / Published 1995
Amazon price: $45.00

Selected Topics in System Administration

Guide to High Availability: Configuring boot/root/swap ~ Usually ships in 24 hours
Jeannie Johnstone Kobert / Textbook Binding / Published 1999
Amazon price: $24.00
Configuration and Capacity Planning for Solaris Servers
Brian L. Wong / Paperback / Published 1997
Amazon price: $44.99
 
Automating Solaris Installations : A Custom Jumpstart Guide/Book and Disk ~ Usually ships in 24 hours
Paul Anthony Kasper, et al / Paperback / Published 1995
Amazon price: $49.00

Tips

**** Solaris Solutions for System Administrators : Time Saving Tips, Techniques, and Workarounds
Sandra Henry Stocker, et al
 
Amazon price: $31.99
 Paperback - 0496 pages 1 edition (February 2, 2000)
John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0471348104 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.15 x 9.21 x 7.53
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 4,666
Avg. Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Number of Reviews: 10
Table of contents
5 out of 5 stars First sattisfying Solaris admin book, May 14, 2000
Reviewer: Per Kistler (see more about me) from Zurich, Switzerland, Europe
Finally they made a propper Solaris admin book, but of course not from Sun. It deals with nearly every topic (even shortly with NIS+, which all other authors avoid,), has a practical approach and realy talks about real life problems and there solutions. Lately I had some printer problems which the book helped me to solve, and this is unusal. I cannot propperly explain why the book is good, but from admin to admin I'd just say, it's the best book so far about this topic.

5 out of 5 stars Excellent book for rookies to the most experienced., May 8, 2000
Reviewer: A reader from Florida
As a mid-level member (6 yrs. experience)of a team that combines over 45 yrs. experience we found this book to be unique in that it's informative for both the rookies on the team and the senior members. Chapters 6 and 11, on JumpStart and Automation were awesome. The Diagnostic, and Backup and restore stuff as well... This book is useful to push the boundries of what we're doing and also as a reference book, and a get-acquinted book. Very well rounded.


5 out of 5 stars Solaris Admin Answers in a clear and concise format!, May 4, 2000
Reviewer: Kari-Lyn Manning from Hartford, Connecticut
Having limited development and no unix administration background I was thrown into the fire at a major Health Care Company with another rookie and one mid-level Unix dev/admin type. We hustled to the store and bought four different books. 'Solaris Solution for System Administrators' won out and became the administrative Bible for our project. Covering and providing answers for virtually every scenario we encountered!

After returning the other three books and picking up a second copy of this one we're ( ) richer and at the endgame of a very successful project, with a solid foundation to administrate going forward!

***+ Unix Hints & Hacks
by Kirk Waingrow
Paperback - 479 pages 1 edition (April 19, 1999)
Que; ISBN: 0789719274 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.23 x 9.14 x 7.40
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 3,298
Avg. Customer Review: *****
Number of Reviews: 7
Overpriced. Not very impressive

4 out of 5 stars Good overall book for new Sys Admins, August 1, 2000
Reviewer: azar92 (see more about me) from Utah
This is a great book. Its pages contain plenty of useful information for the aspiring Sys Admin. Experienced Unix administrators probably should look elsewhere, since a good majority of the material is stuff that they should already know. The book starts with hands-on "Hints and Hacks" and slowly gets more and more general (i.e. Handling Irate Users, Finding a job as a Unix System Administrator, Interviewing new Sys Admins, etc). Overall, I feel this book is well worth what you pay for it.

My only real complaint about the book is the sometimes annoying typos. Some of them can be easily overlooked and the authors desired meaning can be understood. But sometimes it gets a little ridiculous.

The author showing some hints on the VI editor:

"When you go into the command line mode, you can execute the command and write the results out to a file such as

:!date > /tmp/date.tmp

...Then position the cursor where you want the results of date command to go.

:r /temp/foo

Execute the read (r) command on /tmp/dat.tmp and the data is read..."

Errors like this can be annoying and detract from an overall great book. A couple of other similar errors, plus general typos, is why this book lost a star. Otherwise, grab this book!

rearls@kc.rr.com from Overland Park, Kansas , July 22, 1999 *****
Great all-round book for System Admins.
I caught this book on sale at Amazon.com and I decided to check it out. If you're a Junior/Intermediate system administrator this book is an excellent value! Waingrow's book isn't platform specific and it doesn't re-hash simple unix commands like other books. He expects that you are mildly experienced in UNIX and gives system administration examples based on real-world experience. It would take me years of trial-and-error to learn what Waingrow packs into this book. However, good Senior administrators would probably find the book less useful.

One of the best chapters is "System Administration: The Occupation". It covers everything from creating your resume and preparing for an interview to finding other experienced administrators. I've never read another book that put as much thought into the "career" of system administration rather than the day-to-day tasks.

The only problem I have with this book is that I can't keep my co-workers from stealing it off my desk! Well worth the money.

link2000@n-link.com from Tx, Usa , June 25, 1999 ******
Great Book
This is a great book. It has many tricks that are geared toward real world experenice that are not covered in any other book I have seen. I especially liked the section gearded toward getting your first job as an system admin. It is one book worth buying. For all kinds of information for less than 15 dollars how could you go wrong.

hunsolo@gmx.net Peter Barbera from Southern California , June 17, 1999 ******
You luckily don't always get, what you pay for.
There is no excuse for trying to save the $20 this would cost in the store. Seems to me, the owner of www.ugu.com put his life expertise to paper. Wow. Finally I was able to obtain a copy, took only 2 months. It is delayed, still. What a bargain, beats 90% of the $50+ books out there. Mainly geared towards advanced admins, has a few tricks for newbies, too A section on how to deal with lusers and job related tips.

It is really not geared towards a single flavour, but touches BSD and SVR4 /and Linux styles. (Solaris,SunOS,Linux2.x,IRIX,HP)

Lots of undocumented tricks and hints, that would normally cost the reader a fortune in consultant's fees to obtain. Finally a book that beats all the mediocre other stuff out.

Networking

Building Intranets on Nt, Netware, Solaris : An Administrator's Guide
Morgan Stern, Tom Rasmussen

Reference

  Solaris 9 The Complete Reference
by Paul A. Watters
Price:   $34.99


Not a reference at all, this is more like certification level textbook. It might make sense at $10 on Amazon. Recently Paul Waters published one/two Solaris books a year (three in 2002, and already one in 2003, you get the idea ;-). I strongly doubt that one can write a decent quality book baking several books a year... 

General level of quality of his writing can be accesses by reading the following paper How Secure is Solaris 8 and reading a sample chapter from his older book Solaris 8 Administrator's Guide/Chapter 4 Network Configuration provided by O'Reilly. 

Actually his Solaris 8 Administrator's Guide published by O'Reilly got pretty low grades from readers and that extends to this book (O'Reilly books are often reviewed by professionals.) 

Please note that quitspam  review below: while it is valid it is identical to his previous review for Solaris 8 version of the book :-(.

5 out of 5 stars Vast improvement, June 27, 2002

  Reviewer: Daniel O'Riordan from New York City, New York

I bought the Solaris 8 version of this book. It was OK but did not contain sufficient material on the new technologies. I ordered the Solaris 9 version of the book because it's the only Solaris 9 book around. I am happy to report that this book covers new technologies like RBAC, LDAP and the resource manager. These are so much more important for the enterprise than GNOME.

Strong emphasis on disks - format, partition, volume management, backups - is good and logically ordered.

The only thing I would like to see is more coverage on application servers, databases, message queues and other uses of Solaris in large firms.

But that's probably an architecture book with a different focus.

 

1 out of 5 stars No stars- Definitely not complete, December 6, 2002
  Reviewer: quitspam (see more about me) from Dallas, TX United States

I bought this book to learn about Solaris 9, not Solaris 7. Another example of a book that was too quick to ship. How can a book be published in April 3 when the OS is released in late June? Here are the reasons I returned mine and suggest to the publisher (author) that they go back to the drawing board and do their homework:

  • Incomplete coverage of the Solaris Management Console- instead it covers the (soon to be) obsolete Admintool for setting up users, printers, loading software. Sun says to start migrating from Admintool in their Solaris 9 release notes.
  • Nothing on soft partioning, and worse yet, no covereage of how to use Solaris Volume Manager. Nothing on Projects when setting up user accounts.
  • Nothing on the SMC process tool.
  • Nothing on how to use SMC to manage disks and file systems.
  • Nothing on Print Manager.
  • One page on Jumpstart- should be a whole chapter.

I'm running out of space but, you get the point.

Please compare the review above with  quitspam Solaris 8 review:

1 of 5 stars Incomplete Reference! Rating- (no stars) April 26, 2001

I was looking for a good Solaris 8 reference, this is not it. I had the book 10 minutes, here's what I found.

The first things I tried to look up in my new complete reference were the new Solaris 8 commands prstat, psinfo, and sdtprocess - nothing about them.

How about a few words on the Solaris Product registry which is also new in Solaris 8 for managing software pkgs- nothing.

Page 253 shows a script that can be used for unmounting a busy file system- hey, what about the new Solaris 8 umount -f option for unmounting busy file systems- nothing about it.

I could go on and on about stuff missing in this book, but I think you get the point. Did they even look at Solaris 8 before writing this book.

It appears the publisher was more concerned with getting a book out first than a "real" complete Solaris 8 guide. Oh, and BTW- mine's falling apart too. Mine's going back.

 
*** Solaris: The Complete Reference
Sriranga Veeraraghavan / Paperback / Published 2000
Our Price: $49.99
Paperback - 678 pages 1st edition (June 28, 2000)
McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing; ISBN: 0072121432
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 2,495
Avg. Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Number of Reviews: 5

Actually this is very incomplete reference: a strange mixture of tutorial with reference. It is not Solaris 8 oriented, the only important feature of Solaris 8 that is covered is IPv6. Average or weaker than average generic Solaris book. The index is particularly useless. References are outdated/useless. This book covers extras - like Samba - that Sun doesn't cover because they are third party tools.  Web site: Solaris 8 The Complete Reference contains nothing useful. Here are reviews from Amazon that I consider helpful in determining the value of the book: 
2 out of 5 stars The Profoundly Incomplete Reference, December 18, 2001
Reviewer: audioparagon from Nashua, NH, USA
This is a book may be OK for very, very basic use of Solaris, but otherwise it's almost absurdly incomplete. And the index