[TUHS] Re: Unix Systems Administration Texts

Adam Thornton <athornton(a)gmail.com> wrote: Having taught a system administration grad level class for many years now, I think there's an evolution of the profession whereby books that were previously practically useful are less so now. Nemeth et al was useful in a very practical sense (e.g., Pete's example of "fix printer spooler on HP-UX"), but Limoncelli's books were always stronger in principles. Taking it further up the layer of abstractions, I then found Mark Burgess's works more valuable, but that very much leaves the realm of vocation (which I maintain is hard to capture in books anyway) and goes towards the more theoretical side. The profession has evolved (or even splintered) dramatically, with DevOps, SRE, and cloud computing covering overlapping but different sets of work in this area. All that is very different from the early days of administering Unix systems. I still struggle with the balance of teaching students basic Unix skills, conveying (true) Unix multiuser system concepts, translating administrative principles into containerized, ephemeral environments, especially at large scale... -Jan