League of Professional System Administrators - Book Reviews

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.

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.

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.