Book review:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Administration Unleashed

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Administration Unleashed
Author: Tammy Fox
Publisher: Sams
Publication date: April 20, 2007

Disclosure: Tammy Fox was the founding editor of Red Hat Magazine.

I’m a 32-year-old software engineer working for Red Hat. The last time I did a book review, I was reading The Great Gatsby when I really wanted to focus on the upcoming seventh grade spring dance. Fortunately I can now read (and review) books that I find interesting. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Administration Unleashed by Tammy Fox fits the bill. It is, as its name implies, an admin guide and reference guide. It provides useful information on a subject that I am perpetually interested in, is well written, and there are no subtle interactions between characters that the author uses to display his dissatisfaction with the behavior of the nouveau rich (or whatever it was The Great Gatsby was about). So when I was offered the opportunity to review Fox’s new admin guide, the “easy-A” opportunist in me jumped at the chance.

The first thing that I realized when I started making notes for this review is that none of my past book review techniques were useful here. I couldn’t talk about how hypothetical user A made me feel when he enabled his new targeted SELinux policy. What I quickly realized I could do was draw comparisons between this book and other high-level Linux system guides produced by Sams Publishing (several of which I own). I could ferret out what this book does well, and what it doesn’t do so well, and use that information to produce a recommendation. I think the results of my reading were rather interesting. Books from this publisher, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Administration Unleashed, did some things very well, but some things were not worthwhile. The positives for the books seemed to be unique, while the negatives seemed formulaic, almost as if the publisher has a template that requires boilerplate material for certain topics despite the fact that they are entirely unneeded.

So the obvious question is: What does the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Administration Unleashed do well? To summarize, it handles new technologies beautifully, and it handles technologies that are unique or otherwise predominantly used by Red Hat very well.

Open source software (in fact, all software) suffers from documentation lag. When technologies mature, the development cycle incorporates the documentation process, and administrators have access to guides that accurately match the software’s behavior. When a technology is new, accurate documentation is more of a moving target. For example, try finding an accurate set of documentation for the Red Hat kdump service implementation or its underlying kexec technology on the Internet today.

Thats where this book shines. While it’s almost impossible to keep up with so many rapidly developing technologies, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Administration Unleashed really delivers. New and newer technologies such as Kexec/kdump, Xen, Oprofile, and SystemTap really get a boost from books like this one. Sure, you can go out and scrape around the Internet searching for relevant information, and you might find a good amount, but consider the cost of the time spent sorting relevant bits of information versus the expected cost of this book. You’ll quickly find it’s a better value to spend your cash than your time.

Likewise, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Administration Unleashed provides some great depth on technologies that are used frequently or exclusively by Red Hat. The section on the installer in this guide is top-notch. Information on producing kickstart files is highly valuable to system administrators. And RPM–while not exclusive to Red Hat–is often associated with Fedora™ Core and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® and is not fully documented in the wild. Even in areas where it is well-documented, there are aspects that are distribution-specific. This book fills those gaps quite nicely.

This book also provides a great overview of how to provision a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system with Red Hat Network®–a task for which there is almost no openly available documentation. All of these Red Hat-oriented technologies have very little documentation in the community, and this book is a much needed bridge for system administrators seeking additional information.

The question then remains: What doesn’t this book do well? Though it excelled at handling new and Red Hat-specific technologies, it seems to fall short explaining ubiquitous and otherwise mature technologies. I hesitate to fault the author for this since the content of these sections are, in my opinion, well-written and technically accurate. The problem is the existence and pervasiveness of these sections in the first place. While a large portion of the book is dedicated to topics which are new and evolving, an equally large portion of the book addresses technologies which have existed in a fairly mature form for 10 or more years. I have a hard time understanding why these sections are included in these types of books (I say these, because it seems to me that this is a consistent problem throughout books of this variety). Sure I can understand–given the target audience of these books and their purchase patterns–that a little redundancy is needed. Explaining the file system layout, how to create users, how to use tar, gzip, and perform other very common tasks is in order. But I can almost see the notes on the first editorial review scrawled into the margin: “Where’s the section on sendmail?”

It seems that all of these types of books require sections on setting up major applications on your server, and I can understand the sentiment. But since the book is so good at keeping up with the evolution of technology, it seems to lack more detailed documentation (or at least pointers to it) available from a variety of sources.

Take Sendmail, for instance. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Administration Unleashed has 10 pages regarding the configuration and use of the Sendmail server. It’s good. It’s accurate. It’s useful. However, type ’sendmail howo’ into google and see how many hits you get. Theres nothing wrong with including information on sendmail in a book. But there is such a pervasiveness of information on this particular topic, both online and in print, that in my view the 10 pages used here would have been better spent as a 1-page summary in an appendix that referenced other books and online resources on the topic. The same applies to Apache web server, BIND and DHCP servers, etc. The information presented is well-written and informative, but unless you just need a quick overview of how the technology works, you won’t reach for this book first.

So, should you buy this book? In a nutshell, yes. Overall, this is a great book. I know I beat on some aspects of it, but truthfully, the parts that you won’t use out of this book are well outweighed by the parts that you will use, which are invaluable. This is a reference book for newer technologies in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. If you’re interested in learning more about those, you will find this book an excellent addition to your reference shelf.

This entry was posted by Neil Horman on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 11:43 am and is filed under review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.