CentOS 6 Linux Server Cookbook

This book is helping me in getting my jobs done more than other books on CentOS. It is easy to follow with essential codes clearly illustrated. However, it is short on some details: for instance, it does not explain how to rewrite ifcfg-eth0 using a text editor to enable the ethernet port of your server which otherwise the minimum installation of CentOS disables by default, so you have to manually enable. Further, the location of .profile file in CentOS 6.5 is different from the one given in this book. It's forced me, albeit unintentionally, to investigate how network connectivity can be established and where .profile is on my own, which can become quite time-consuming tasks for beginners.

I have been doing Linux Administration for 3+ years; however, I have not taken any real training (self taught). I purchased this book to fill the gaps and there wasn't a lot that I did not know. This book is a good reference for those who are NEW to Cent OS; however, it is not useful for experienced SAs.

The book is ok. It covers most of the basic points and for a newbie it is good enough to get of the ground and running. however the book is quite repetitive. The recipe and the how it works section are almost the same, just that the latter has a little bit more of detail -not as much as one would like in order to truly understand why stuff works. For example the vfstpsd virtual user section doesn't bother to fully explain the permission requiered to the actual local roor directory and forces the reader to look someplace else for the explanation.

Jonathan has a knack for documenting in a clear fashion - some gory details of Linux Server Admin etc. that are valuable but not addressed in other books - as well as the common stuff. He clearly has great communication skills and a deep knowledge of RHEL / CentOS 6.

Reference this book everyday.

OH YEAH! Another book review, and one on one of my favorite Linux distributions too!Pakt Pub contacted me to do a review on their new CentOS 6 book, and boy was I excited at the chance. First of all, I generally like Pakt Pub`s books, and second I really dig CentOS! Even better is this is all about using CentOS as a server, and I just happen to use quite a lot of CentOS as my preferred home server platform. And why, you may ask? Well, it very closely mirrors another enterprise level Linux that I use heavily in my professional environment. It's good stuff.I found this book particularly reminiscent of a few books I studied from to get my RedHat certs. There is a good bit of material in there - most things that a budging server administrator would want to know how to do, and it is formatted in a "recipe" format, which makes it fairly easy for readers to piece mail through if they are looking to do something specific in a hurry. I really like that kind of format because, lets face it, most of us have precious little time these days and reading line by line though technical materials is not usually high on our lists of things to spend our time on. Thankfully, as I said before, it's easy to get to pertinent info here, and the writing is not really too dry or overly technical to begin with.The book starts right out where it should by helping you not only download CentOS (for free of course), but also gives you example and instruction on several different installation methods. This is particularly useful for more advanced users because there are significant time savers to be had by using minimal and text method installs that most Linux books leave out. From there we are off to recipes for basic configuration changes like changing SELinux, IP addresses, time zone settings and the like. This is followed by a bunch of basic administrative info like using cron, starting services, package management and helping to secure your environment, before really focusing on what I like to refer to as the big 5 applications: Samba, Bind, MySQL, Mail and Apache. These are all covered in their own chapters, giving them plenty of room to address common specific topics and options. The only thing I found at all out of place is the last chapter which deals with FTP. I might be a little jilted here but it has been my experience that ftp usage is being deprecated in most places. But for those of you who do actually use it, this book covers setting up and using VSFTP, which can be daunting to get going without a little well written help, which this chapter *does* provide.All in all, I find this a well written book covering what most system admins would really be looking for info on. In fact, this is one I really wish they had sent me in a paper edition so I could more easily loan it around to friends and coworkers whom, I am sure would find it helpful! At only $25.50 for the digital edition it would be silly for anyone new or unfamiliar with CentOS not to grab a copy before diving in. It will surely save you some time and aggravation and provide you with a good reference for future service additions and changes. It gets a nice thumbs up from me!CentOS 6 Linux Server Cookbook

I have been lucky enough to get my hands on this book at the right time, just a few weeks prior my RHCE course and exam. I have spent a fair bit of time on Chapter 9 - Mail Services and Chapter 10 - Apache CGI/SSL, areas in which I was pretty shaky prior the exam. I believe this book has actually helped me to understand these areas better & pass the exam.It is well sectioned and each time I thought "hmm this isn't there", I came to the "There's more" section at the end of chapter only to find what I was looking for!It's funny how everyone says "just Google it", unfortunately often it is quite difficult to get up to date and correct information about a whole topic - in one place. This great book accomplishes that for me and I would recommend it especially to all beginner to intermediate Linux users, who want to understand the whole topic thoroughly. Highly suggested to all aspiring RHCSA & RHCE students as this book pretty much covers all the RHCSA/RHCE topics even in more detail than the Red Hat courses themselves. CentOS 6 Linux Server Cookbook

In my 12 years working with Linux I find myself constantly taking notes on the quickest way to do something in order to save myself the hassle of retracing my research steps.Within the pages of the CentOS 6 Linux Server Cookbook I found many of the tips and tricks already listed and better explained than I ever could have come up with.This book has great foundational knowledge that acts as a simple launch pad that quickly builds to some more obscure and interesting topics. My personal favorite is the initial introduction and implementation of fail2ban. That is an utility that I have intended to delve into for some time, so I was quite pleased to find it listed in the table of contents, and I was even more pleased to with the recipe.I am definitely keeping this book in ready reach.

I like the workbook format. It leads you through the common topics to get your server up and running reasonably well. It seems to contain a lot of typos (mostly missing spaces in the actual commands to type) which was slightly annoying but forced me to read the man pages (which is actually no bad thing!) to check whether "hwclock-systohc" is an actual command or if "hwclock SPACE -systohc" would be better.What I didn't like was that it seemed to be padded out quite a lot. Following each lesson (commands and explanation to get something up and running ) was the "what we learnt" section. Whilst I'm all for the old adage for presentations/papers etc: "tell them what you are going to tell them (i.e the abstract ), tell them (the content) and tell them what you told them (the summary)".I found the "what we learnt" section added little to the understanding of the topic. It was neither a brief summary nor a useful addition to explain in more detail some of the parts of the lesson that were possibly 'glossed over' to help keep the lesson succinct.In many cases it seemed to be a complete copy of the actual lesson (almost word for word); adding little or no additional information and effectively just forcing me to read the lesson again. This was a shame as I invariably had questions as to why I had type certain commands but in the end I found myself skipping these sections and spending the time reading about certain commands online.

Excellent book and extremely well written, however these were not suitable for my web server purposes as very broad. Returned with no quibbles and wouldn't hesitate to buy again.