I purchased this book and Solaris 10 Security Essentials together, in part because they were authored by Sun's engineers, as the books state. I teach these topics, and I'm always on the lookout for better presentations or demonstrations that would improve my delivery and deepen my own understanding.
There are, alas, mostly off-putting elements in this book. I don't know what I had in mind for "Solaris System Engineers" as the authors, but it sure wasn't technical writers, who compose about half the group. Accordingly, some discussions seem re-phrased from a man page or [...] material, and not improved upon either. In other places, the technical information is laid out in about the least imaginative or helpful way I can conjure. Turning data structure elements into bullet points (see Chapter 6, "Managing System Processes"), then tabling a bunch of commands and showing one simple example of each...c'mon, man, you're the engineers. That's all you know?
Why this book devotes a chapter to Fault Management frankly escapes me. You can go a long way in Solaris 10 and not know or care about FMA. It's of course a very useful thing, but essential to a beginner? No. The Service Management Facility (SMF), on the other hand, fundamentally alters the administrative landscape for Solaris. Where is it? It's got about seven pages at the end of Chapter 2, "Boot, Service Management, and Shutdown." It's an architectural discussion of the sort I expected the FMA chapter to be, high-level and not intended for a lot of exploration at first. That's too bad. If anyone can figure out how to use SMF from this presentation, it's because you didn't need it.
Other elements I find bordering on silliness. Chapter 8, "Managing Disks," has an illustration of a hard drive that must be older than both my children, combined. Understanding storage technology today is well beyond mapping outdated disk anatomy to its logical view in Solaris. The authors don't seem to know: things have changed. A lot. And in Chapter 11, "Solaris User Management," eleven pages are devoted to no fewer than four key topics: managing users and groups, creating a NIS domain (??), and managing roles. Fifteen pages for fault management, eleven for the foundation to identifying users on a network of systems?
Patch management in Solaris can be a complicated exercise in hair-pulling. To that end, the book includes two tables, spanning six pages, that list and describe the patching tools and document the different patch types. The remainder of the chapter is a narrated if-then-else for patching; again, material you can find freely elsewhere. Of all the subjects where the reader might like more insight than information, patching is probably first on the list. No help here.
In summary, the engineering authors seem to have contributed brief architectural overviews, while the tech writers seem to have covered well-known territory not so well. It's a disappointing combination. You can't really experiment much with the former, or learn much from the latter that you couldn't teach yourself. If you've bought the initial books in these series, I recommend a careful look at subsequent titles before laying down real money. Seems to me the editorial standards may have taken a dive.
