(Part 3) Best linux & unix administration books according to redditors
We found 404 Reddit comments discussing the best linux & unix administration books. We ranked the 54 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 41-60. You can also go back to the previous section.
Here's my list of the classics:
General Computing
Computer Science
Software Development
Case Studies
Employment
Language-Specific
C
Python
C#
C++
Java
Linux Shell Scripts
Web Development
Ruby and Rails
Assembly
I will take a stab at this one.
Personally, I started by reading Ansible: Up and Running but I would also take a look at Ansible for DevOps: Server and configuration management for humans by /u/geerlingguy who is very active in the community and keeps the book up to date.
I don't think I ever actually finished even half of the book though. It pointed me in the right direction and Ansible was easy enough that I just started creating my first Playbooks and haven't turned back since.
If your company is willing to sponsor training take a look at the relatively new Automation with Ansible course (DO407) which is the official training for the Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Ansible Automation. I've been running through the Lab guide lately and have been really happy with it so far.
You can find the latest version in here: https://www.amazon.com/FreeBSD-Handbook-Versions-11-1-10-4/dp/1680921622/ref=mp_s_a_1_17?ie=UTF8&qid=1540142948&sr=8-17&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=freebsd&dpPl=1&dpID=417D7PXKfaL&ref=plSrch
Also check out their IRC channels, forums, and mailing lists.
Books that I find very useful:
Beginning Portable Shell Scripting: From Novice to Professional
From Bash to Z Shell: Conquering the Command Line
Unix Power Tools, Third Edition
The UNIX Programming Environment
Running Linux (mine is old, but still useful)
I have bought lots of other useful books from O'Reilly.
Anything written by Michael W Lucas.
I would simply look at getting a book like "Docker up and Running"....if you're going the Docker route I'd also look at something like an orchestration platform (Kubernetes, Mesos, etc). Personally I'd say go with Kubernetes, it's what Google's been using in-house for about a decade or so. Kelsey Hightower just released the "Kubernetes up and Running" book recently. If you don't know Docker at all though, start there first, b/c the foundation for almost all Kubernetes setups is still Docker.
https://www.amazon.com/Docker-Shipping-Reliable-Containers-Production/dp/1491917571/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1493307612&sr=8-1&keywords=docker+up+and+running
https://www.amazon.com/Kubernetes-Running-Dive-Future-Infrastructure/dp/1491935677/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1493307612&sr=8-2&keywords=docker+up+and+running
Some vids of Kelsey's talks about Kubernetes: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kelsey+hightower
Orchestration is big right now for Dockerized environments and webapp deployment, so getting to the point of being able to design a full CI pipeline around Github/CI (Jenkins, CircleCI, etc)/Kubernetes would give you a huge leg up in a job search right now.
Oh. In that case I'm not sure what the definitive ones are but any of *these should give you a good idea.
There are a couple things i'd recommend to start with. First, figure out how you learn best. For me it's physical books. I get bored and distracted with videos and pdf's get forgotten about. I'd definitely getting some decent reference material. Here are some of my favorites:
Kali on a raspberry pi is fine but i would not recommend starting with Kali. It's not a beginners Distro. If you can, i'd recommend picking up a cheap 2.5" hard drive for your laptop and swapping it with the Windows drive, or dual booting works too. Install a linux distro and eat your dogfood. Ubuntu and Linux Mint are great for beginners, with Mint and the cinnamon desktop being very similar to Windows 7.
Centos or Fedora are also good. Fedora is based on Red Hat Enterprise linux, so it's very similar to what you'd find in an business enterprise environment. Centos takes it further though. It's literally just RHEL without branding or paid support.
All of these (apart from RHEL) are free and all would be a good jumping off point. The only real difference between them all is the package manager and Desktop environment. Red Hat uses 'yum' while Debian uses 'apt'.
Once you find one you like start practicing. Nearly all utilities you'll find will have a graphical user interface but the command line is always going to be more extensible/powerful. If nothing else get the Linux and Bash pocket references and test administering your own system. Try using the command line for python instead of IDLE. Learn to reboot/shutdown, install/update/upgrade/search with your package manager, try to make your system faster and document everything you do. EVERYTHING.
You'll be a pro in no time.
(I'm serious about the documenting. It's important. If you don't believe me check out some of the stories u/patches765 posts in r/talesfromtechsupport. It's like documentation is his superpower.)
Do you know of any books worth picking up? This one seems relatively good.
My plan is to set up a 3 machine network in a virtual environment.
2 servers without any form of GUI (red hat and arch or debian, perhaps?) and a client.
I want to try my hand at configuring the most commonly used network services, break the servers, try to find solutions and just learn linux from the inside out.
If you're talking about pulling 1 drive and reading the content fully on that one particular drive, then no RAID/btrfs soft-raid/mdadm/ZFS/hardware RAID is going to provide that unless you do a RAID 1 on a compatible system.
If you want cross platform (BSD/Linux), the answer is soft RAID with ZFS, that will work anywhere and require the least spending in hardware to make operational and have a decent featureset.
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With that all said, no RAID of any kind is a backup, hard drives are mechanical devices and flash chips wear down, they will eventually die in some form or another. If you want a backup, then you need three copies of your data, one, the original, two, the local backup storage, three, off site in a non mountable fashion.
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Anyway, I do want to point out the way you started this topic was in a bashing manner along with showing how little time you've put into the research of ZFS. There are books that can teach you fundamentals like https://www.amazon.com/FreeBSD-Mastery-Advanced-ZFS/dp/0692688684 and https://www.amazon.com/FreeBSD-Mastery-ZFS-7/dp/0692452354 if you like reading.
Linux From Scratch is a little head first, trial by fire, but if you are willing to spend a lot of time getting your system to work, it could be cool. Another distribution to think about is Arch Linux and Gentoo. No matter which distribution you chose to learn on, read through all of the installation instructions, as these will explain why the defaults are as such. Don't just keep hitting enter, you have to read.
In addition, pick up a good Bash reference, like this one or this one (O'Rielly makes good books for this kind of stuff) and learn some Bash as the Bash shell is one of the most powerful aspects of linux.
Another thing that you may want to try is setting up a LAMP stack without following a step by step guide. LAMP meaning Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This is a common configuration for a Linux webserver.
Finally, once you have gotten comfortable with Arch or Gentoo, mix it up. Try debian, or fedora. See and learn how every distribution does things in a slightly different way. Keep trying new things, you will never be done learning.
There are some good books out there as well:
Dive into #salt on IRC too... tons of very knowledgable folks in that channel.
Setting up SSL with a self-signed cert is super easy with HAProxy. I can give you some pointers. Not to add a lot of self promotion, but I wrote a book about using HAProxy. I bring it up because I think the first few chapters are going to give you a good overview of what the shape of this tool is. And then you'll find that it all clicks in your mind pretty quickly. https://www.amazon.com/Load-Balancing-HAProxy-availability-infrastructure/dp/1519073844/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=haproxy&qid=1571323817&sr=8-1
I'd really recommend these two books for high-level administration of ZFS:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1642350001/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/164235001X/
And the other one I linked has one chapter that gets into the low-level workings of ZFS:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0321968972/