Simple, Easy and Powerful | BSD Hacks

Mac-Centric Review for Darwin/OS X Hackers | BSD Hacks | Dru Lavigne

books:


	• BSD Hacks Dru Lavigne O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2004 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The best BSD book on the shelves, PERIOD.

Whether you are a beginner or an advanced user, you will find this book extremely practical. Dru's solutions make building a BSD server from start to finish a snap. Buy this book as a supplement at the very least. 5 stars!

Simple, Easy and Powerful

Although the name is scary, the ideas inside are simple to understand and implement, yet very powerful.

I especially like their way configuring terminals and backup solutions.

Mac-Centric Review for Darwin/OS X Hackers

Originally reviewied for the Lower East Side Mac Unix Users Group:
http://lesmuug.org/reviews.html

OVERVIEW
--
There is a type of information that I consider to be a gem, a kind of information that doesn't really fit anywhere formally. It's too small, or perhaps too esoteric, to fit in most places.
This makes it hard to find- though these info-gems can often can be the source of wild hacking inspiration, or solve my un-solvable problems in some elegant manner.

This kind of information sometimes gets collected and recorded, Some of us at LESMUUG have really enjoyed the Mac OSX Hints book, spawned from macosxhints.com website,

http://lesmuug.org/reviews.html#Anchor-Mac-49575

BUT, after plowing repeatedly it's one UNIX chapter in Mac OS X Hints, I found myself craving more...

A Problem with BSD books:
One of the quietly great things about the BSD family of UNIX Operating Systems, is the terrific documentation. The quality and consistency of the man pages, across every BSD I've ever touched, I painfully appreciate when I use man pages on other non-BSD systems.
The FreeBSD world has the FreeBSD Handbook project, a printed and free online resource which sets the bar for every fat FreeBSD book out there. OpenBSD and NetBSD both have amazing online tutorials and documentation projects as well. Even the fledgling DragonFly BSD project has a full-blown Handbook, modeled after its FreeBSD lineage.
In the OpenDarwin and OSX world we enjoy the legacy of solid man pages and solid HowTo's online from our BSD heritage, and of course free registrations to developer.apple.com to boot.

With all that great documentation, it's really tough to find a BSD book that's really valuable, especially for experienced users, and Dru Lavigne has made a valuable and fun resource with BSD Hacks. The book is an impressive compilation of BSD gems, and as it's written for newbies and hardcore hackers alike.

Dru is a Canadian BSD Rockstar, well known in the BSD world for her articles with O'Reilly online, including the FreeBSD Basics column for ONLamp,

http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/catalog/view/au/73

so who better to write a book that doesn't fit into traditional documentation?! Someone who KNOWS BSD.

ABOUT THIS BOOK
--
The Book is comprised of so many disparate yet complete ideas, It's hard to sum up exactly what's in there. From networking, to gems on system maintenance, and gems about basics that really get lost in man pages. There's information about things like keeping up-to-date, giving a tutorial-level big picture of what can be done to keep your UNIX system running smoothly, boot and Login gems, some good Security Hacks and hacks about system customization and shell tricks. There's even a tutorial for how to create YOUR OWN man pages.

For Mac/Darwin users, the majority of the book applies directly to Darwin UNIX! A section which by its nature is OS-specific, would be the hacks about various port and application-distribution systems. This includes a good how-to for DarwinPorts, right along with the usual ports systems for other platforms. The section on filesystems doesn't have anything on hfs+, but that can be excused, insomuch as many mac-centric texts do it the same injustice.

Check out the TOC online for a full description of the book contents:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/bsdhks/toc.html

CONCLUSION
--
If you are a UNIX user who loves info-gems like I do, or you're a Mac UNIX user who digs macosxhints.com, (and the books published from it), I feel BSD Hacks will provide many weekends, and workdays worth of BSD gems- all written by a great technical author. This book now sits next to my printed FreeBSD Handbook, and since much of these gems are fairly timeless, I believe it will stay with me for a long time to come.

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Great complementary material

Make this the FreeBSD book you buy after you've got a basic understanding of the operating system. In other words, this is a very useful "sidekick" BSD book. It's full of creative and practical hacks, and the price is right. Highly recommended.

In the world of Unix operating systems, the various BSDs come with a long heritage of high-quality software and well-designed solutions, making them a favorite OS of a wide range of users. Among budget-minded users who adopted BSD early on to developers of some of today's largest Internet sites, the popularity of BSD systems continues to grow. If you use the BSD operating system, then you know that the secret of its success is not just in its price tag: practical, reliable, extraordinarily stable and flexible, BSD also offers plenty of fertile ground for creative, time-saving tweaks and tricks, and yes, even the chance to have some fun. "Fun?" you ask. Perhaps "fun" wasn't covered in the manual that taught you to install BSD and administer it effectively. But BSD Hacks, the latest in O'Reilly's popular Hacks series, offers a unique set of practical tips, tricks, tools--and even fun--for administrators and power users of BSD systems. BSD Hacks takes a creative approach to saving time and getting more done, with fewer resources. You'll take advantage of the tools and concepts that make the world's top Unix users more productive. Rather than spending hours with a dry technical document learning what switches go with a command, you'll learn concrete, practical uses for that command. The book begins with hacks to customize the user environment. You'll learn how to be more productive in the command line, timesaving tips for setting user-defaults, how to automate long commands, and save long sessions for later review. Other hacks in the book are grouped in the following areas: Customizing the User Environment Dealing with Files and Filesystems The Boot and Login Environments Backing Up Networking Hacks Securing the System Going Beyond the Basics Keeping Up-to-Date Grokking BSD If you want more than your average BSD user--you want to explore and experiment, unearth shortcuts, create useful tools, and come up with fun things to try on your own--BSD Hacks is a must-have. This book will turn regular users into power users and system administrators into super system administrators.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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