A solid document on the Solaris operating system, Solaris 8: The Complete Reference shows you what you need to understand if you want to make a living as an administrator of a modern Sun workstation.

Of course, this book is not absolutely complete--no technical book about a subject as large as Solaris 8 could hope to be--but it should be more than adequate for most readers' purposes. Whether you have experience with another enterprise operating system and have recently been charged with figuring out Solaris, or if you are a long-time Solaris jock and need a reference around to guide you through procedures you don't follow every day, this book fits the bill.

The book approaches each Solaris capability from a variety of angles. Most often, it takes a few pages to explain the "Solaris Way" of thinking about a problem, contrasting it with alternate approaches (such as those that might be used in Linux or Windows NT) where that's appropriate. Straight how-to material usually follows in sections with titles like "Testing Reachability", and those sections further break down into modules having to do with special cases, such as troubleshooting situations. Text and listings of input and output predominate--an effective format for an operating system that is largely driven by console activity. --David Wall