I just recently finished reading the Webmin Administrator’s Cookbook and thought I would share some of my thoughts and opinions about the book. While I don’t typically review books on the blog I thought this would be a good opportunity to discuss a nice book. This book is written by a very knowledgeable and credible author – Michal Karzynksi. His background includes over a decade of experience as a developer in various programming languages as well as a scientific research background.
This book isa good read for everyone from seasoned veterans and professionals all the way down to aspiring and freshly minted admins.
The book itself covers a broad, inclusive set of topics, including logging, user management, backups, web server administration and many others. The basic theme of the book uses the Webmin tool as a sort of framework to discuss and cover various administrative topics and tasks within the Webmin tool. From their website, Webmin is described as follows:
Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more.
This works out to be a perfect tool for aspiring sysadmins because it really does a nice job of cloaking a lot of the nitty gritty complexity and detail that can be overwhelming and confusing for new admins or users that are new or unfamiliar to the concepts and tooling that Webmin covers. By using Webmin, one can learn about a large number of interesting topics without having to worry about how to type in all of the commands or how to install/configure the tools that come bundled up in Webmin. This allows users to really increase their productivity. Couple the Webmin tool with a cookbook of nice concrete examples and you have a great recipe for learning how to use a powerful tool correctly.
Wrapping such a broad spectrum of topics and tools into a web based tool can be a complicated. But used as a reference material this book does a great job of making everything clear with good examples both of explaining how everything works together, as well as pictorial examples that really do a nice job of tying the written concepts together with concrete, real world usage. Now is also a good time to mention that this book follows a nice pattern of organizing topics. From the outset, the book starts with the more basic administrative topics and principles, covering each topic thoroughly with good description and solid examples. The book progresses quite nicely through the different topics and eventually gets into and covers some of the more obscure topics.
The Webmin Administrator’s Cookbook does a nice job of combining many complex system administration topics into a nice, easy to follow and read reference guide that can be utilized by all different levels of Linux and administrative experience. If you use Webmin in any capacity at all, this book would be a great reference and guide to help you be more productive in your day to day with this tool.
You can find more information about the book here. While you are at it, check out the author, Michal Karzynski’s blog for more interesting and useful tips – http://michal.karzynski.pl.
