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Python for Unix and Linux System Administration | 
 enlarge | Authors: Noah Gift, Jeremy Jones
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $49.99
Buy New: $17.51
You Save: $32.48 (65%)
New (36) Used (8) from $17.51
Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 439695
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 456
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 7 x 1.1
ISBN: 0596515820
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.133
EAN: 9780596515829
ASIN: 0596515820
Publication Date: September 2, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Python is an ideal language for solving problems, especially in Linux and Unix networks. With this pragmatic book, administrators can review various tasks that often occur in the management of these systems, and learn how Python can provide a more efficient and less painful way to handle them.
Each chapter in Python for Unix and Linux System Administration presents a particular administrative issue, such as concurrency or data backup, and presents Python solutions through hands-on examples. Once you finish this book, you'll be able to develop your own set of command-line utilities with Python to tackle a wide range of problems. Discover how this language can help you:
- Read text files and extract information
- Run tasks concurrently using the threading and forking options
- Get information from one process to another using network facilities
- Create clickable GUIs to handle large and complex utilities
- Monitor large clusters of machines by interacting with SNMP programmatically
- Master the IPython Interactive Python shell to replace or augment Bash, Korn, or Z-Shell
- Integrate Cloud Computing into your infrastructure, and learn to write a Google App Engine Application
- Solve unique data backup challenges with customized scripts
- Interact with MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, Postgres, Django ORM, and SQLAlchemy
With this book, you'll learn how to package and deploy your Python applications and libraries, and write code that runs equally well on multiple Unix platforms. You'll also learn about several Python-related technologies that will make your life much easier.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Not what I expected January 7, 2009
This book may work for some people but not for me.
I give it 2 stars for an enticing table of contents. Many topics of interest to UNIX administrators are covered.
I omit the 3rd star due to the reliance on IPython, which is at best not particularly relevant to this topic and at worst would not compile on my Slackware machine.
I omit the 4th and 5th stars for a writing style I find intensely irritating. The authors write in a chatty, even gushy first person style which reminds me of grade school. Two examples from the first chapter:
"... if you make this decision, it will change your life."
"Wow, that is pretty cool, right?"
Another sentence indicates a possible cause:
"Here is what it looks like when we do that on Noah's Macbook Pro laptop:"
Your mileage may vary. Aeleen Frisch, an excellent O'Reilly author, wrote a very nice forward. With a background in traditional UNIX (and later Linux) I just don't find this book up to O'Reilly's usual high standards. I'll give it to a friend who uses mostly Macintosh computers and hope it will help her more.
 Could be better, but still useful December 18, 2008
Flicking through the table of contents, there seems to be a lot of promise in Python for Unix and Linux System Administration. The book seems targeted specifically for Unix admins, touching on actual problems and providing actual solutions. On the face of it, it looks to be Programming Python with an OS-specific slant.
Unfortunately, the execution here just doesn't seem to be on a par with that of other O'Reilly books. There is useful information to be had in this text, to be sure, but it's at times difficult to extract.
Perhaps my view of this book is tainted by my recent experience with The Ruby Programming Language, one of the most enjoyable technical reference books I've ever encountered. I'll spare you the details (I have a full review on that product page), but rarely have I felt such joy in reading about code.
I do not feel such joy when slogging through Python for Unix and Linux System Administration. I get the impression, at times, that the author should have simply let the code speak for itself, and spared us his narration entirely.
For example, here is a snippet from Chapter 3, on text manipulation:
"The final file method that we will discuss for getting text out of a file is readlines(). Readlines() is not a typo, nor is it a cut-and-paste error from the previous example. Readlines() reads in all of the lines of a file. Well, that is almost true."
This text feels horribly labored to me. He's telling us what readlines() is not, and it takes him a while to tell us what it actually is. Also, note that Readlines() (with the capital "R") is not valid; despite its use in the beginning of a sentence, the author should always use the proper capitalization of the method to avoid confusion. Nitpick, perhaps, but this could catch somebody off guard.
Contrast this with the pydoc description of readlines():
"Call readline() repeatedly and return a list of the lines so read. The optional size argument, if given, is an approximate bound on the total number of bytes in the lines returned."
Clear, concise, and much more legible. When I want to know about readlines(), I want to know what it does and what it is, not what it *doesn't* do and *almost* is.
This is just an example. There are others, but I think you get the idea: it's not a book you'll want to curl up with in front of the fire for a pleasant read. Instead, this is a book that does have useful information in it, but you'll have to force yourself to dig it out.
The book does provide some useful examples for addressing specific problems, and if you have such a problem this might be exactly what you need. Do not mistake this for a cookbook, though; it's a lengthy tutorial with real world examples, not a tome of useful hacks that you will be constantly calling upon.
In short: a workable introduction to a variety of useful techniques, though lacking a bit in quality compared to other O'Reilly books. Unless you're really interested in some of the OS-specific topics covered in this book, the more general (and much more comprehensive) Programming Python will probably serve you better.
 Perfect for Unix and Linux programmers and collections catering to them December 15, 2008
Learn how to use the Python language to handle various tasks when managing Unix and Linux servers with the systems administrator's guide Python for Unix and Linux System Administration. It offers in-depth assessments of common administrative issues, from data backup to concurrence, and includes details on how to run various tasks and how to master the iPython shell. Perfect for Unix and Linux programmers and collections catering to them.
 Should be titled "IPython for Absolute Beginners" December 6, 2008
I agree with the previous reviewer in my disappointment in the lack of practical content for sysadmins. This book is mostly an introduction to python, but it uses ipython to accomplish this... too much... almost exclusively..
The title, along with the table of contents, led me to believe this book was going to be along the lines of "Perl for System Administration", only with python. It's anything but.
Title should be "Learning Python..." October 22, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
As a sysadmin and avid Python user I was looking forward to all the cool tricks/hacks I'd pick up from this book. Once I got it, I was a bit disappointed. The title should be "Learning Python for System Admins". It's very much an into to Python itself, and not anything close to a "cookbook" I was expecting. It covers a ton of topics, but all without much depth. It might be useful to some, but definitely not what I was looking for.
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