Overall rating: 5.5/10

To start off with, a better title for this book would probably be the Solaris 8 Network Administator's Guide, as it covers mainly a variety of networking topics associated with Solaris. Without close examination the cover suggests that this is a book for system administrators. If you're looking for something to give you a brief introduction to a vast array of Solaris networking topics, then you may find some use for this book, but that hardly qualifies for the target audience specified by the book as "experienced network administrators." If you're looking more for a reference covering system (or even network) administration tasks, you might find some useful tidbits here, but there are other books I'd recommend first.

I did, however, learn a few things from the book. The coverage on the Solaris pkg* commands for example was very helpful, as well as the instructions on configuring interfaces. The book does at least pass the most crucial of tests: have I, since reading it through, found use for opening it up again to refer to some bit of information? The answer to that for me is yes. So there is some useful material there among the fluff.

Another positive note for the book is its range of coverage. What it lacks in depth, it certainly makes up for in breadth. Chapter one introduces the Solaris ONE network concept, and chapter two follows with the basics of general networking concepts. The author chose an interesting range of topics to cover here: network topologies, FTP, inetd.conf, /etc/services, the obligatory diagram of the OSI network stack, and coverage of the packet-sniffing software snoop. I'll have to admit, though, that the screenshot of a calculator app being run over an X11 connection was definitely a high point in the chapter ;-). By this point in the book you wonder if this is really targeted towards "experienced network administrators" or is it just "for dummies?"

Chapter three provides very basic coverage of the installation procedure for both SPARC and x86 hardware. Although the author covers the procedure if you happen to be using the Web Start Wizard installation, he provides no screenshots of the procedure at all, which I thought would have been better use of space than the calculator screenshot. Chapter four then continues with basic network configuration. There is some useful material here covering how to configure one or more network interfaces, as well as coverage of various manners of using netstat to obtain interface statistics.

Chapter five covers the array of naming services available on Solaris, including discussions of DNS, NIS/NIS+ and LDAP. Again the fluff bug raises its head as the author provides reams of output from various invocations of the dig command, but without showing what command-line options were used to get that output, nor any real discussion about what is being shown. I suppose to be fair though, since the book is targeted at "experienced network administrators," this should be no problem. Experienced administrators would be familiar with all this, but I think better use of the space could have been made.

Chapter 10 finishes the book discussing network information systems. The author provides a simple, and very helpful example from the ground up of setting up an application server and realated applications (Java-based) as well as briefly touching installation and use of Postgresql as a database server.

Despite this broad coverage there are (obviously) several things about the book that turned me off. As I've mentioned, we often see reams of command output with sometimes little explanation as to what we are seeing. Also distracting are the numerous lists given, often with little information about what was listed. Finally, there were several glaring technical errors I discovered as I read the book.

To conclude, this book, although targeted at experienced network administrators, sometimes reads like it's written for beginners. It covers a very broad range of networking concepts providing a decent introduction into the field, but painfully lacks the depth that might have made it a much better book.