Book Review

[Barry Shein]

Just had a book show up in my mailbox I thought I would mention:

	Unix For Super-Users, Eric Foxley, International Computer
	Science Series, Addison-Wesley, 1985, ISBN 0 201 14228 7

It's a small book (210 pp) that attempts to cover a huge subject. My
first comment is that I hope A-W allows him to do a second edition
full of everything that might be missing in the first edition.

This is a fine book, I think I am going to put it in the hands of all
my operations people. He covers many topics of systems operation in a
chatty way that is quite pleasant (I read the book in essentially one
sitting.) He acknowledges the various differences between SYS/V,
4.2bsd etc and usually sticks to generalities common to all of them
with mixed in comments and footnotes about the differences. The book
will not make you a wizard, nor is it really for wizards (the title is
actually a bit misleading) but it does give a lot of information about
things like file security, backups (unfortunately he assumes that
dump/restor run on your system, not my SYS/V), new users, groups etc.
Again, he has a section on performance considerations but assumes for
analysis you have iostat (a bsd thing as far as I know.) I would
criticize the lack of tools like iostat more than the author presuming
you have them.

Another group I would try to get to read it are all those
non-super-users out there getting UNIX workstations, like our faculty.
He mentions all those annoying little things that they'll be a lot
happier (you too) if they can fix themselves (like disks filling up
and who the culprits usually are.) Also shutdown and startup and what
to be careful about.

I liked it, I found only one serious bug in the book (p61 he says
that 'kill -1 1' will bring the system down single-user, well, at
least he didn't get it wrong the other way around like one of my
operators did.) Again on page 62 in his hypothetical /etc/shutdown
command (he does suggest that most systems will have an /etc/shutdown
command and to use that, he uses shell scripts frequently to describe
skeletally how things work like going from init to getty thru login.)

	-Barry Shein, Boston University

Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with Addison-Wesley nor the author,
I just enjoyed the book and thought you might also.