I've been doing a lot of reading of systems admin books lately including:

Frisch, E. (1991). Essential System Administration (3rd edition is my fattest book other than Unabridged Shakespeare)
Hunter, B. H., & Hunter, K. B. (1991). UNIX Systems Advanced Administration and Management Handbook (Opinionated praxis)
Nemeth, E., Synder, G., & Seebass, S. (1989). UNIX System Administration Handbook (5th edition is another fatty)

Tons of other more recent drivel.

I have been working on my ancient and not so ancient Unix library for a while now, and it's kind of funny. It seems like once I read a book, be it new or old, I hardly need it anymore - most of them wind up back at half-price books. The exceptions are those that I find myself going back to over and over and over again and wow are those few and far between. An example of one of the gems is S. R. Bourne's The UNIX System, another is Kernighan and Pike's The UNIX Programming Environment, and a couple of newcomers for me are Volumes 3 and 8 of O'Reilly's The Definitive Guides to the X Window System. I've written in the margins so many times with these that there are sections where I can't fit any more notes. That's the kind of sys admin guide I'd like to hear about. So, my question for y'all is, what did y'all think about sys admin texts as they were coming out? Were they well received, were they water to a dying horse, were they paperweights, what? If you are of the camp, "we don't need no stinking admin guide", or "we did it all by muscle memory and didn't use books", don't reply. I'm curious about the experience of those of y'all who actually used them. Were there any early standouts and why did they stand out?

Anything from 1970 on is fair game.

Later,

Will

P.S. Can you believe that 2000 is fast becoming 'history' worth preserving? In 1997, we were rewriting our gas pump and credit card transaction systems, which were written in C, to deal with upcoming Y2K bugs. Oh, how the worm has turned :).