Comments about oreilly Python for Unix and Linux System Administration:

Buried within this book is a good introduction to the wide variety of fields that the target audience will need. A number of the scripts would be starting points for the read.

Many of the problems are identified in the reported errata:

- technically significant errors in the example scripts
- sentence structure leading to capitalisation errors in library & function names
- problems with cross-references.

The flow of the book is broken by putting an introduction to iPython as Chapter 2. This material is useful but should be in an appendix.

None of these problems is major but when combined they become annoying.

Comments about oreilly Python for Unix and Linux System Administration:

The book has no structure, is completely anecdotal, and no one has edited the wastefully dense rambling style. There are many typos and gross inaccuracies in both text and examples.

Half the book uses iPython, but often it is not clear that that shell is being used. Even a poor editor should have removed three fourths of the text which often wastes two paragraphs with warning statements. E.g.,"you will find this hard to understand" or "this will be confusing at first". A system manager will already know how to list files or directories. Most of the comparisons to bash or other languages are inept or inappropriate. The index is worse than useless.

I foolishly assumed that an O'reilly book would not be as sophomoric as this one is.

Comments about oreilly Python for Unix and Linux System Administration:

I recently got my hands on a copy of "Python for Unix and Linux System Administration". After reading it, I felt the time I've invested in reading it was well spent. The author introduced the reader to many different situations where python would help make their lives as system administrators easier, without confusing the reader with some complex forms or statements. My feeling is that this book is aimed at people who want to use Python to solve their problems quickly and efficiently, but only have a limited experience with the language - and the books fits that purpose well with its rather superficial approach that the reader can later extend later on with various available resources. It would only be fair that I too mention some of the shortcomings that I noticed while reading this book.

Pros:

* The author introduces the reader to ways that Python can be used.

* Most of the time there will be more than one way to accomplish a task. The author at times presents a scenario and showed the reader how to do the same task with different modules. This places the choice of which to use back where it belongs, with the reader.

* The book has a website (most do these days) where the code examples can be downloaded. http://py4sa.appspot.com/

Cons:

* More time was spent on iPython than was really needed.

* The case of a word is important in Python. For instance "import Sys" and "import sys" are two completely different things. There were quite a few occasions where a module name was used as the first word in the sentence and because of that it was capitalized.

* There was once instance that I saw where a script example had no indentation at all. Trying to run it would have resulted in complete failure.

* It would have been nice if the script examples were named instead of leaving it to the reader to figure it out based on the imports used in another example.

When all is said and done I think I would recommend the book to others if I knew that they had at least some background with Python. And I would highly recommend that they check the addendum and errata pages.

Comments about oreilly Python for Unix and Linux System Administration:

When I got this book, I was just starting to use Python as a solution to everyday problems as a Sys Admin.

Although it has some advanced sections, I was able to put in place a lot of the examples right away.

This is probably one of the best books I have used to solve system administration issues regarding a programming language (After the Bash Cookbook).

Log files, automated configuration updates, parsing for information and even a new shell (ipython), are some of the cool stuff these guys deliver.

I have even recommended the book to non system administrators as it doesn't assume you know the language inside out.