This book should be in the library of any serious Solaris administrator. It is not a book for beginners, but it is well-organized and well-explained. The authors went to a great deal of trouble to clean up the parts of the original edition that were not as easily understood, and their effort shows.

The examples are clear and well-explained, and the information is indexed and cross-referenced in a way that makes it easy to follow threads across chapters.

The authors of this book have been extraordinarily generous with their time and energy.

System Administration as a Profession

"The Practice of System and Network Administration" is different from most of the other technical books on a professional SA's bookshelf. This book is about how to become a professional system administrator.

The profession is about more than knowning obscure options to different commands. To become a professional, a system administrator needs to change mindset from a straight-ahead techie to a member of the team who has specialized expertise.

System administration has not always been recognized as a profession.

Moving on from database, more world record performance, this time with Java. From the BestPerf blog:

Continuing on the performance theme: Oracle's SPARC T5-8 server is now the world's fastest single server for Oracl