League of Professional System Administrators - Books

Book review: Linux System Administration

eadmund — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 17:34:31 -0700

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.

Ubuntu Unleashed - 800 pages of Ubuntu goodness

arsgeek — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 19:34:36 -0700

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.

Book Review: The Official Ubuntu Book

arsgeek — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 12:08:44 -0700

Buy it now

By Ben Gerber
The Official Ubuntu Book, brought to you by a number of folks who actively write or document Ubuntu and is a great book for those looking to move from OSX or Windows to Ubuntu. If you’re a novice or intermediate Ubuntu user then this book is for you. If you consider yourself an expert, you can still pick up a few things but most of what you’ll find here, you’ll already know.

The book starts with a an interesting introduction written by Mark Shuttleworth giving a light explanation of why he started the Ubuntu project and a few of his thoughts on the Open Source movement in general.

Book of The Month, September: Ubuntu Unleashed

spp — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 14:01:27 -0700

Buy it now

The Ubuntu Distribution, and associated spin-offs such as Kubuntu and Edubuntu, have developed quite a following in a fairly short period of time. Ubuntu's goal is to be the "linux for human beings" and focuses on (among other things) usability.

LOPSA is proud of the member benefits we are developing, and our relationships with the best book publishers in our industry. To support our new relationship with Pearson Education, the September Book of the Month is Ubuntu Unleashed by Paul and Andrew Hudson.

Pearson Discounts

doug — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 21:22:15 -0700

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

spp — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 17:23:21 -0700

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.

July Book of the Month

spp — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 17:08:21 -0700

Buy it now

It seems that no matter how much we plan, how logical our reasoning, sometimes projects just fail. The July Book of the Month can be seen as an example is multiple ways. The first way, is that although we've had a list of books ready for several months, we're still late in putting the monthly page together! The second way, is in the book, "The Logic of Failure", itself. In "The Logic of Failure", author Deitrich Dorner explains how to identify the logical decisions that can lead to failure, how to plan for failure, and how to avoid the consequences of failure.

The July Book of the Month is The Logic of Failure by Deitrich Dorner, translated by Rita and Robert Kimber.

Review: PGP and GPG: Email for the Practical Paranoid

tep — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 19:06:58 -0700

Buy it now

Review: PGP & GPG: Email for the Practical Paranoid

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.

June Book of the Month

spp — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 17:19:58 -0700

Buy it now

The Sys Admin of the Week for June 5, Neal Dias, lists CVS/Subversion as the "tool you can't live without". By coincidence, O'Reilly and Associates have released a new book on version control this week. The introduction to the book proclaims that version control can help developers become more efficient. But as Sys Admin in large facilities, like Neal, know version control can be essential to keep your environment from blowing up underneath you.

The June Book of the Month is *Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion, Second Edition by Mike Mason.

Review: 19 Deadly Sins of Software Security

unicityd — Wed, 17 May 2006 14:09:48 -0700

Buy it now

19 Deadly Sins of Software Security: Programming Flaws and How to Fix Them by Michael Howard, David LeBlanc and John Viega

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.

May Book of The Month

spp — Thu, 04 May 2006 08:48:54 -0700

Buy it now

The 1999 book, Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution was a watershed event in the history of Open Source. Since then, not a single aspect of the information technology industry has been unchanged by the power of open source. Our jobs and our profession has been particularly changed by it.

The May book is Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution by Chris DiBona, Mark Stone, and Danese Cooper.

LOPSA Book of the Month: Agile Web Development with Rails : A Pragmatic Guide (The Facets of Ruby Series)

spp — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 18:08:40 -0700

Buy it now

Ruby is a quick and easy, interpreted, object-oriented development language. One of the main advantages of Ruby is that it can be used to rapidly move from prototype to working application. Rails builds upon Ruby to provide a web framework to develop full applications in a fraction of the amount of code required with other languages.

The April book is Agile Web Development with Rails: A Pragmatic Guide (The Facets of Ruby Series) by Dave Thomas, David Hansson, Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, Thomas Fuchs, and Andrea Schwarz.

LOPSA Book Club: Time Management for System Administrators

dparter — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 11:33:45 -0800

Mark Lamourine (our first System Administrator of the Week) suggested a LOPSA Book Club.

At Mark's suggestion, the December book is Time Management for System Administrators by LOPSA member Tom Limoncelli.