Great FreeBSD / UNIX books

PacketMan

PacketMan

Can any one suggest any books (that they feel are great books), readily available from Amazon, Chapters, etc., that are about FreeBSD or UNIX variants, that are very closely related to *BSD, kind of like a beginners book, yet also as you progress through it, it becomes a great all around administrators book, and a 'cook book'.

Thanks again in advance.

PM
 
You may also try to get hold of "The UNIX Haters Handbook". While not a book of praise (gee, who would have guessed from the title?) it includes a lot of anecdotical stuff and also good critisim. Also, it is fun to read.
 
As someone else has mentioned, Absolute FreeBSD by Michael W Lucas is a good read. It is about six or seven years old now and relates to FreeBSD 7.0, but a lot of its content is still relevant. There are rumours (put out by Lucas himself) that a new version may be available early next year.

  • BSD Hacks by Dru Lavigne is more cookbook-ish in style, but again is quite old (2004). Still worth a read but you'll have to work out what's still relevant. Dru also has another book out called The Best of FreeBSD Basics (2007) based on a series of articles written for O'Reilly. However, I haven't read this book so can't comment on its content or style.
  • The Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook by Evi Nemeth et al is more recent (2010). The UNIX variant used in the latest version is not FreeBSD per se, but it goes into a lot of detail about topics that are OS independent (networking etc.).
  • Finally, there will be a new version of The Design and Implemetation of the FreeBSD Operating System out shortly. This is probably more for background reading rather than day to day administration of a system, but interesting nonetheless.
Other highly recommended UNIX books include:
  • The Design of the UNIX Operating System
  • The UNIX Programming Environment
  • UNIX Power Tools
Hope this helps.
 
Crivens said:
You may also try to get hold of "The UNIX Haters Handbook". While not a book of praise (gee, who would have guessed from the title?) it includes a lot of anecdotical stuff and also good critisim. Also, it is fun to read.
Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix-Haters_Handbook

Links to full (legal) PDF downloads are at the bottom of the Wikipedia article. It raises some legit points, but also includes a pile of shit. I think DMR's "anti-foreword" summed it up more poetically:

Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite
observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains
enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But
it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy.
Click to expand...
 
Of course it includes envy and contempt. But both are useful, in a way. At least that is my view. With contempt, you may be made to re-evaluate your approach and check what is putting someone off so much. And with envy, you know you are doing something right :)

And for the anecdotal value, it contains some horror stories of the things that were, and which we have long left behind. Things like the busybox-like approach to X11 tools due to memory constraints. The foreword indeed sums it up pretty good, but in the end this book is entertainment. No more.

But if I were to recommend some reading for UNIX, I would point to some old version of the FreeBSD or NetBSD kernel sources. Those that are still small enough to be read and understood. It is very valuable to see how things were actually done, and maybe why. Learning from a current version is not easy as it, while being one of the best code bases I know, is not small enough to fit the working memory of most humans.
 
Regarding tracing of the older FreeBSD kernels - there is a new edition of The design and implementation of the FreeBSD operating system planned in August I think.

From Amazon's description:
The many new topics covered in this edition include:
  • Lightweight virtualization, enabling organizations to support hundreds of instances on one system
  • Fine-grained authority delegation, providing far more administrative flexibility
  • NFS V4 and OpenSolaris ZFS support
  • Improved volume management and new journaled soft updates
  • DTrace fine-grained process debugging/profiling
  • Major improvements to networking, wireless, and USB support
  • And much more
Click to expand...
 
Thank you for that tip, it will be on my shopping list as soon as it is available.
 
PacketMan said:
Can any one suggest any books (that they feel are great books), readily available from Amazon, Chapters, etc., that are about FreeBSD or UNIX variants, that are very closely related to *BSD, kind of like a beginners book, yet also as you progress through it, it becomes a great all around administrators book, and a 'cook book'.

Thanks again in advance.


PM
Click to expand...

The Unix Programming Environment by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike should always be the first book on the reading list for people who plan to use UNIX.
 
Thanks again everyone, birthday getting close, and Christmas is only 5 months away. (Arrrgghhh just enjoying summer too.)
 
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