Administration Book Reviews

Administration is the use of programs to create an environment where the system can be used effectively by the user base. Administration is an art form of juggling various priorities and making sense of a number of different paradigms. The administration books reviewed cover the main areas of IT administration, there is a bias towards the Unix and Linux based operating systems and applications, as well as to the TCP/IP stack for networking.

Administration Sections

Operating System: Operating Systems provide the high level tools that are necessary to interface with a computer system on a day to day level. The operating system comprises a kernel but the kernel is generally abstracted a fair amount, so that most administrators don't deal directly with the kernel but instead through application tools that speak to the kernel The Operating System books reviewed here tend to concentrate on the Unix and Linux based operating systems, though some of the more esoteric yet powerful elements of the Windows and DOS systems are present.
Network: Network books deal mainly with the TCP/IP protocol suite, which is the most pervasive form of networking in the world today. Books on CISCO network are present, though most of the networking books reviewed deal with the BSD or Linux TCP/IP stack. Cyber Security books and Operating Syustem books are also listed here, as they often have a lot of networking information contained within. DNS and BIND are also explored being the primary means by which people access networked computers.
Application: Application book reviews, mainly center round the larger services or daemons offered in an organisation, such as email server, web servers and remote access such as secure shell and ftp. Music studio creation and book on the more esoteric elements of the operating system such as termcap and terminfo can be found here. For other applications, in the main they are to be found in the systemm coding tools section.
Kernel: The Kernel is a central part to any computer system, and at time administration needs to affect the kernel, by either rebuilding or modifying certain elements. A lot of this information can be found in more depth in the coding system kernel section, and the operating system section. There are books dedicated to kernel administration and those are directly reviewed in this section.