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Essential System Administration: Tools and Techniques for Linux and Unix Administration, 3rd Edition

Æleen Frisch · 3 HN comments
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Amazon Summary
Essential System Administration,3rd Edition is the definitive guide for Unix system administration, covering all the fundamental and essential tasks required to run such divergent Unix systems as AIX, FreeBSD, HP-UX, Linux, Solaris, Tru64 and more. Essential System Administration provides a clear, concise, practical guide to the real-world issues that anyone responsible for a Unix system faces daily.The new edition of this indispensable reference has been fully updated for all the latest operating systems. Even more importantly, it has been extensively revised and expanded to consider the current system administrative topics that administrators need most. Essential System Administration,3rd Edition covers: DHCP, USB devices, the latest automation tools, SNMP and network management, LDAP, PAM, and recent security tools and techniques. Essential System Administration is comprehensive. But what has made this book the guide system administrators turn to over and over again is not just the sheer volume of valuable information it provides, but the clear, useful way the information is presented. It discusses the underlying higher-level concepts, but it also provides the details of the procedures needed to carry them out. It is not organized around the features of the Unix operating system, but around the various facets of a system administrator's job. It describes all the usual administrative tools that Unix provides, but it also shows how to use them intelligently and efficiently.Whether you use a standalone Unix system, routinely provide administrative support for a larger shared system, or just want an understanding of basic administrative functions, Essential System Administration is for you. This comprehensive and invaluable book combines the author's years of practical experience with technical expertise to help you manage Unix systems as productively and painlessly as possible.
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I don't have any one complete book that I can recommend, and I don't even really have a great reading list for this. But I'll make an attempt to share what I think is useful as a starting point.

1. Systems Operations is first and foremost about understanding systems, in all of their complexity, which means understanding the internals of your OS primarily.

2. Performance and networking, in particular, are super important areas to focus on understanding when it comes to learning the topic to help with software development.

3. A lot of it is about understanding concepts in abstract and being able to extrapolate to other situations and apply these concepts, so there's actually quite a lot of useful information that can be learned on one OS and still applied to another OS (or on one game engine and applied to another, et al).

Here's a few books I think are worth reading, not in any particular order of prevalence, but loosely categorized

Databases:

High Performance MySQL: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1449314287/

SQL Queries for Mere Mortals: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321992474/

The Art of SQL: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596008945/

Networking:

TCP/IP Illustrated: https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0201633469/wrichards... (updates on author's site at http://www.kohala.com/start/tcpipiv1.html)

The TCP/IP Guide: https://www.amazon.com/TCP-Guide-Comprehensive-Illustrated-P...

UNIX Network Programming: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0131411551

Beej's Guide to Network Programming: http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/

Operating Systems:

Operating Systems Concepts: https://www.amazon.com/Operating-System-Concepts-Abraham-Sil... (various editions, I have the 7th edition... I recommend you find the latest)

Modern Operating Systems: https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Operating-Systems-Andrew-Tanen... (the "Tanenbaum Book")

Operating Systems Design and Implementation: https://www.amazon.com/Operating-Systems-Design-Implementat-... (the other one, the "MINIX Book")

Windows Internals:

Part 1: https://www.amazon.com/Windows-Internals-Part-architecture-m...

Part 2: https://www.amazon.com/Windows-Internals-Part-2-7th/dp/01354... (I had the pleasure of being taught from this book by Mark Russinovich and David Solomon at a previous employer, was an amazing class and these books are incredible resources even applied outside of Windows, we used 5th edition, I linked 7th, which has the 2nd part pending publication).

MacOS Internals:

Part 1: https://www.amazon.com/MacOS-iOS-Internals-User-Mode/dp/0991...

Part 2: https://www.amazon.com/MacOS-iOS-Internals-II-Kernel/dp/0991...

Part 3: https://www.amazon.com/MacOS-iOS-Internals-III-Insecurity/dp...

Linux Kernel Programming:

Part 1: https://www.amazon.com/Linux-Kernel-Development-Cookbook-pro...

Part 2: https://www.amazon.com/Linux-Kernel-Programming-Part-Synchro...

The Linux Programming Interface: https://www.amazon.com/Linux-Programming-Interface-System-Ha...

General Systems Administration:

Essential Systems Administration: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596003439/

UNIX and Linux Systems Administration Handbook: https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Linux-System-Administration-Hand...

The Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Bible: https://www.amazon.com/Linux-Command-Shell-Scripting-Bible/d...

UNIX Shell Programming: https://www.amazon.com/Unix-Shell-Programming-Stephen-Kochan...

BASH Hackers Wiki: https://wiki.bash-hackers.org/

TLDP Advanced BASH Scripting Guide: https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

The Debian Administrator's Handbook: https://debian-handbook.info/browse/stable/

TLDP Linux System Administrator's Guide: https://tldp.org/LDP/sag/html/index.html

Performance & Benchmarking:

Systems Performance: https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Performance-Brendan-Gregg-dp-... (this is Brendan Gregg's book where you learn about the magic of dtrace)

BPF Performance Tools: https://www.amazon.com/Performance-Tools-Addison-Wesley-Prof... (the newer Brendan Gregg book about BPF, stellar)

The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis: https://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jain/books/perfbook.htm (no longer available from Amazon, but is available direct from publisher. This is basically the one book you should read about creating and structuring benchmarks or performance tests)

I guess that's a "reading list", but this is just a small part of what you need to know to excel in systems operations.

I would say for the typical software developer writing web applications, the most important thing to know is how databases work and how networking works, since these are going to be the primary items affecting your application performance. But there's obviously topics not included in this list that are also worth understanding, such as browser/DOM internals, how caching and CDNs work, and web-specific optimizations that can be achievable with HTTP/2 or QUIC.

For the average software developer writing desktop applications, I'd say make sure you /really/ understand OS internals... at the base everything you do on a computer system is based on what the OS provides to you. Even though you are abstracted (possibly many layers) away from this, being able to peel back the layers and understand what's /really/ happening is essential to writing high-quality application code that is performant and secure, as well as making you a champ at debugging issues.

If you're trying to get into systems operations as a field, this is just a brush over the top surface and there's a lot deeper diving required.

planet-and-halo
Appreciate the recs. Thanks very much for taking the time to write a detailed response.
There are very few generally useful books about system administration. DNS and BIND just happens to cover a subject that touches everything we do on the Internet; and covers topics that are often poorly understood, and difficult for most folks to get right through intuition and dumb luck. It doesn't hurt that BIND is damned near universal in usage, so odds are extremely high it's the DNS server you use.

The Frisch book is probably a great start for general concepts, though:

http://www.amazon.com/Essential-System-Administration-Third-...

It's been ten or more years since I've read it, but it's been updated every few years, and is probably due for a new edition any day now actually. The concepts it covers (backups with standard UNIX tools, for example) are somewhat timeless. It's probably not required reading, though, if you don't actually want to be a system administrator.

Most books are just re-hashes of the documentation for a particular service, like Apache or Postfix or Sendmail or whatever, so I don't really have any strong opinions in that direction. When I had problems with Sendmail in the distant past, I found the O'Reilly book useful, but I've never needed third party docs for Postfix, which I've been using for the past eight years or so. Books about specific software are also often quickly dated by new versions of the software.

So, that's a long-winded way of saying, "Not really."

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