I know you've all been waiting with bated breath for this day: UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, 4th edition, is finally out! More than two years in the making, this edition covers six major operating systems in 1300 pages of fresh deliciousness. Plenty of new topics, including virtualization, green IT, scripting, and modern storage and security. Copies available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or from Pearson Education.
Writing a book of this magnitude is an intense process that I learned all about. The steps to produce the book, from inception to dead trees, include:
- Brainstorm and agree on full topic list
- Brainstorm and agree on contributing authors
- Assign chapters to authors and contributors
- Write chapter, distribute for review
- Integrate reviewed comments from all other authors, distribute to external reviewers
- Integrate external review comments
- Repeat for all 32 chapters
- Edit chapters
- Index chapters individually
- Engage artist (Lisa Haney) for new chapter cartoons, dividers and cover art
- Engage outside organizations (IBM, Sun, HP) for test equipment
- Regular (semi-weekly) meetings with authors, occasional meetings with publisher
- Read and revise page proofs, searching for any obvious errors or inconsistencies
- Deliver final manuscript to publisher and wait patiently
One of the biggest challenges in producing this edition was the distributed collaboration effort. We Skyped regularly to stay in sync. Evi was around for much of the development, but we also corresponded with her while she was sailing in the Caribbean and the Pacific. We used a subversion repository for the Adobe FrameMaker source files to avoid stomping on each other's work. I'd say this was met with mixed success; Frame's binary files are hard to merge, despite Garth's valiant efforts at a scripted solution.
Special thanks to our named and unnamed contributors whose efforts are highly appreciated and certainly worthy of recognition. This is the best edition yet!