[TUHS] Re: Unix Systems Administration Texts

[Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com>]

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I liked the Frisch and Limoncelli/Hogan books.  Nemeth less so.

Adam

On Wed, Mar 1, 2023 at 3:59 PM Alan D. Salewski <ads@salewski.email> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Feb 28, 2023, at 21:34, Dan Cross wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 28, 2023 at 8:38 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> 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?
> >
> > This is not going to be popular, but...
> >
> >> Nemeth, E., Synder, G., & Seebass, S. (1989). UNIX System
> Administration Handbook (5th edition is another fatty)
> >
> > This book gave me some terrible advice when I was very young and
> impressionable.
> >
> > In there somewhere it says something about not doing something unless
> > you're prepared to do it right lest one spend more time working around
> > a work-around than one would have spent just doing it well in the
> > first place.
> >
> > The conclusion is, of course, true, but the admonition ignores all
> > sorts of externalities, like waiting users. And in some cases it could
> > really lead to paralysis
> [...]
>
> > Hopefully nowadays we have a better appreciation of the power of
> > incrementalism; those grand plans for the perfect system rarely come
> > to fruition. It's better to be flexible and make small, impactful
> > changes along the way towards a better system, always being mindful of
> > and tamping down encroaching entropy.
> >
> >         - Dan C.
>
> Yeah, good or bad advice at just the right time can have quite an
> impact.
>
> In the under-celebrated "Minimal Perl"[0], Tim Maher notes in the
> last paragraph of section 5.8:
> <quote>
>     In your own career, I'd advise you to develop an appreciation an
>     appreciation and an aptitude for both the /quick-and-dirty/ and
>     /elegant-and-formal/ styles of programming, and to cultivate the
>     ability to produce either kind on demand, as circumstances
>     warrant.
> </quote>
>
> Seems obvious, in retrospect -- but of course many things do with
> the benefit of hindsight. For me, that articulated something that I
> sensed was the right way to approach things, but was contrary to
> much of the one-dimensional advice I had received up to that
> point. It pairs well with one of the "lesser tenets" noted by
> Gancarz: "Look for the 90 percent solution"[1].
>
> In my own career, I've found I can often use the quick-and-dirty
> approach to buy myself time to afford the "detour to build the
> tools"[2] that could not be justified (to others) up-front. And
> nothing gets it done faster than a shell script. Five or ten scrappy
> N-line shell scripts that get the job done sub-optimally, and
> lacking any real thought toward usability or generality buy time to
> build better tools (usually more, better-written shell scripts). And
> sometimes a scrappy script is "good enough" (for years, even).
>
> -Al
>
>
> [0] Minimal Perl for Unix People and Linux People
>     by Tim Maher
>     Forward by Damian Conway
>     Manning 2007
>     p. 175
>     ISBN-10: 1-932394-50-8
>
> [1] The Unix Philosophy
>     by Mike Gancarz
>     Digital Press 1995
>     p. 117
>     ISBN-10: 1-55558-123-4
>
> [2] [McIlroy78] The Bell System Technical Journal. Bell Laboratories.
>     M. D. McIlroy, E. N. Pinson, and B. A. Tague.
>     "Unix Time-Sharing System Forward". 1978. 57 (6, part 2). p. 1902.
>     https://archive.org/details/bstj57-6-1899/page/n3/mode/2up
>
>     Also quoted in ESR's "The Art of Unix Programming"
>     Addison-Wesley 2004
>     p. 12
>     ISBN-13: 9-780131-429017
>     https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html
>
> --
> a l a n   d.   s a l e w s k i
> ads@salewski.email
> salewski@att.net
> https://github.com/salewski
>

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