I had some experience with ssh prior to purchasing this book, but picked it up to learn about more advanced topics like key pair generation for unattended ssh tunnels.

The content of the book is ok, but the organization is horrible. The authors mix SSH1, SSH2 and OpenSSH and it is easy to get confused as to which files or commands belong to which. To add to the confusion, OpenSSH now appears to support SSH2 protocol so a lot of the file names don't match up. That makes the book a little out-of-date.

The biggest complaint is that there are no "cookbooks". I wanted to do something well-defined and relatively common. There was a section suited specifically to what I wanted. However to ACTUALLY IMPLEMENT the technique, I had to flip back and forth between 5 different sections, plus infer some information about file contents.

There are few complete configuration file examples. There are snips of files scattered throughout a section - again making for a lot of navigation through the book to assemble sufficient information to get the job done.

The index is marginal, which makes this poorly-suited for a reference manual.

In all, a real disappointment for a O'Reilly book. The editors must have been asleep at the wheel.

Ray Brown is such a tasty player. He gives a lot of latitude to the others in the trio and they do a wonderful job. Jeff Hamilton is one of the best jazz drummers I have ever heard. Benny Green is exciting to listen to. The final cut "Phineas Can Be" is a fitting homage to the great Phineas Newborn. This is a fine disk.