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HP-UX 11i Systems Administration Handbook and Toolkit (2nd Edition) Review by Jeremy Smith
The best HP-UX book, but not well edited
There are dozens of good UNIX administration books; this is the only one that covers comprehensively the feature set of HP/UX 11i. For that reason, you should definitely pick it up if you have HP UNIX machines to manage. It covers specific HP stuff well: SAM, the boot process, the backup utilities, virtual partitions, etc. The information is accurate and the overall style is easy to read. I think it's the most complete books on a given operating system I can think of: most authors/publishers would have divided the information here into at least two or three books: one for the basic UNIX stuff, one for regular HP sysadmin, and one for advanced features found in high-end HP servers. This book has all three.
It does fall down on occasion in terms of its editing. Overall, I tend not to trust the editing quality of books published by the company that produces the software (they don't exercise the editorial scrutiny because they want more books about their products), and this book is no exception. Sometimes, it strangely talks about things that aren't HP/UX, for instance, the section on CDE contains a lot of superfluous information (like what Sun puts in what drawer on the front panel) and the section on Samba is a weird mix of discussion of Samba on HPUX and on Linux. I can only imagine those sections were slapped in there from other papers without tailoring them for this book. There are some other annoying things that a good editor could have taken care of, for instance, repetition in between sections of the same chapter and screenshots/console dumps that have confusing information in them. One boot screenshot shows leftover console garbage that should have been removed, for instance. There are also occasional omissions, like any mention of using LDAP services, but all the basics are covered. There are some nice additions, too, such as information on setting up PRM and a nice tear-out card with hardware commands.
I still give this book a 4/5, because none of its flaws prevent it from being very useful and informative. If a good technical editor put it under the knife, it would definitely deserve the status of best HPUX-specific book. Right now it holds that position, but mostly due to the lack of titles out there that concentrate on HP UNIX.