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

Author: AEleen Frisch
4.3
This Year Stack Overflow 2
This Month Stack Overflow 1

Comments

by Nigel Campbell   2017-08-20

I've wiki'd this post - could those with sufficient rep add in items to it.

System administration, general usage books

Programming:

Specific tools (e.g. Sendmail)

Various of the books from O'Reilly and other publishers cover specific topics. Some of the key ones are:

Some of these books have been in print for quite a while and are still relevant. Consequently they are also often available secondhand at much less than list price. Amazon marketplace is a good place to look for such items. It's quite a good way to do a shotgun approach to topics like this for not much money.

As an example, in New Zealand technical books are usurously expensive due to a weak kiwi peso (as the $NZ is affectionately known in expat circles) and a tortuously long supply chain. You could spend 20% of a week's after-tax pay for a starting graduate on a single book. When I was living there just out of university I used this type of market a lot, often buying books for 1/4 of their list price - including the cost of shipping to New Zealand. If you're not living in a location with tier-1 incomes I recommend this.

E-Books and on-line resources (thanks to israkir for reminding me):

  • The Linux Documentation project (www.tldp.org), has many specific topic guides known as HowTos that also often concern third party OSS tools and will be relevant to other Unix variants. It also has a series of FAQ's and guides.

  • Unix Guru's Universe is a collection of unix resources with a somewhat more old-school flavour.

  • Google. There are many, many unix and linux resources on the web. Search strings like unix commands or learn unix will turn up any amount of online resources.

  • Safari. This is a subscription service, but you can search the texts of quite a large number of books. I can recommend this as I've used it. They also do site licences for corporate customers.

Some of the philosophy of Unix:

  • The Art of UNIX Programming by E S Raymond (available online and in print).

  • The Practice of Programming by B W Kernighan and R Pike.