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By: Robert Uhl

I've just finished reading O'Reilly's latest GNU/Linux title, Linux System Administration (full disclosure: I was sent a reviewer's copy). Bottom line up front: it's a handy introduction for the beginner GNU/Linux sysadmin, and a useful addition to an experienced sysadmin's bookshelf.

This massive tome has just about anything you'd ever want to know about Ubuntu, including information on using this distro as a desktop, server, web host, programming tool and much, much more.

With 35 chapters and an appendix of online resources, you can bet this book covers a lot. You're not going to read it in a weekend but I sure have enjoyed having it next to my machines while I work away.

When I first obtained a copy, I opened it to several pages at random and found what I was looking at pretty useful right off the bat. This book is full of tidbits that can help any user or sysadmin along with their daily projects.

Pearson Education offers LOPSA members discounts ranging from 0-40% on titles from Que, Sams, Peachpit, Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, New Riders, Cisco Press, and more.

Members can visit the http://lopsa.org/MemberDiscounts page for this and other discount information. Logged in members will see the discount information.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

When first published in 1937, How to Win Friends launched an entire genre of self-improvement books that continues today as a multi-billion dollar publishing industry. For every System Administrator who wants to be treated as a professional, instead of as a computer janitor, this book should be #1 on your bookshelf.

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Reviewed by Tom Perrine

PGP and GnuPG (GPG) have been staples of the privacy, activist and crypto communities for years, yet have never really caught on outside the "geek" community. It's long been taken as an article of faith that both PGP and GnuPG have suffered from a lack of good, readable end-user documentation which has hindered their widespread adoption. The wait is over, PGP & GPG: Email for the Practical Paranoid from No Starch Press, is the book we all needed years ago and anyone who wants to correctly send encrypted email needs today.

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Review by Steven Alexander Jr.

This is the first of (hopefully) many book reviews that I'll be posting here on the LOPSA site. For this review, I've chosen a software book that I think many sysadmins will find useful. There are already other good books on the subject but my suspicion is that most sysadmins just don't have the time or inclination to read them. The most widely read alternatives, Building Secure Software and Writing Secure Code are, respectively, over five and six hundred pages each and deal with some topics that most code-writing sysadmins won't ever care about. 19 Deadly Sins is only about three hundred pages long and the chapters can be read out of order.