The UNIX and Windows 2000 Handbook: Planning, Integration and Administration

Author: Lonnie Harvel, David Webb, Steven Flynn, Todd Whitehurst List Price: $59.00 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0130254932 Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR (04 May, 2000) Edition: Paperback Sales Rank: 282,294 Average Customer Rating: 5 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

Three of the four authors either teach or support Georgia Tech's computers, and that may account for the book's tendency to focus on teaching rather than simply providing how-to's. For example, rather than showering a book with screenshots and lists, it contains a chapter on system planning, another on backup methodologies, another on file systems and another on upgrades and change management. This is actually a book that you might actually enjoy bringing to the beach with you; it's something you can read straight through rather than referring to it merely as a reference guide. I have several guides on linux and windows, and can safely say that while this book doesn't always cover a subject in depth, it provides enough to get started. I especially found helpful, for instance, its discussion of amanda, a unix backup solution (which definitely justified the space they spent on it), setting up nfs, setting up wins (with windows or through samba) user administration and dns.

The danger of this kind of book is that in attempting to cover all the variants of UNIX and Windows, it instead delivers a shallow treatment of them all. Luckily, that is not the case. Probably 40% of the book was about Windows implementations, and of the remaining 60%, 20% covered Linux, 20% covered Solaris and 20% covered other flavors such as HP-Unix and BSD.

Probably the most helpful thing about the book is how it juxtaposes the Windows way of doing things with its Unix counterpart. For me, I had quite a bit of linux knowledge, so I actually was very curious about the Windows way of doing things. Often it helps to see how a task is done in both systems.

While I generally love this book, I wanted to mention another excellent book for Windows 2000, the Ultimate Windows 2000 System Administration Guide by Robert Williams and Mark Walla(there are probably several others by now). I also wanted to see other topics: an emphasis on production-ready open source applications rather than on commercial solutions. The email section should have discussed postfix rather than sendmail. Although there are already several excellent guides on samba out there, I would have like to seen a discussion of more complex scenarios here. Also, I would have liked to see a chapter on dual boot systems, windows emulation programs and things like vmware or wine. Apache wasn't covered too much in depth, and neither was IIS, but it was nice to read a short introduction in 10 or so pages. I would have enjoyed a comparison between platforms for performance and security and how they figure into deployment decisions. A future edition should also talk about UNIX web gui's like Webmin.

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